Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France: Volume 2 - Studies (International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, 247) [1st ed. 2023] 3031393252, 9783031393259

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International Archives of the History of Ideas 247 Archives internationales d’histoire des idées

Kirill Chepurin Adi Efal-Lautenschläger Daniel Whistler Ayşe Yuva   Editors

Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France Volume 2 - Studies

International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées Founding Editors Paul Dibon Jeremy Popkin

Volume 247

Honorary Editor Sarah Hutton, Department of Philosophy, University of York, York, UK Editor-in-Chief Guido Giglioni, University of Macerata, Macerata, Italy Associate Editor John Christian Laursen, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA Editorial Board Members Jean-Robert Armogathe, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, France Stephen Clucas, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK Peter Harrison, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia John Henry, Science Studies Unit, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK Jose R. Maia Neto, University of Belo Horizonte, Belo Horizonte,  Minas Gerais, Brazil Martin Mulsow, Universität Erfurt, Gotha, Germany Gianni Paganini, University of Eastern Piedmont, Vercelli, Italy John Robertson, Clare College, Cambridge, UK Javier Fernández Sebastian, Universidad del País Vasco, Bilbao, Vizcaya, Spain Ann Thomson, European University Institute (EUI), Florence, Italy Theo Verbeek, Universiteit Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands Koen Vermeir, Paris Diderot University, Paris, France

International Archives of the History of Ideas/Archives internationales d’histoire des idées is a series which publishes scholarly works on the history of ideas in the widest sense of the word. It covers history of philosophy, science, political and religious thought and other areas in the domain of intellectual history. The chronological scope of the series extends from the Renaissance to the Post-­ Enlightenment. Founded in 1963 by R.H. Popkin and Paul Dibon, the International Archives of the History of Ideas/Archives internationales d’histoire des idées, edited by Guido Giglioni and John Christian Laursen, with assistance of Former Director Sarah Hutton, publishes, edits and translates sources that have been either unknown hitherto, or unavailable, and publishes new research in intellectual history, and new approaches within the field. The range of recent volumes in the series includes studies on skepticism, astrobiology in the early modern period, as well as translations and editions of original texts, such as the Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases (1730) by Bernard Mandeville. All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed before final acceptance.

Kirill Chepurin  •  Adi Efal-Lautenschläger Daniel Whistler  •  Ayşe Yuva Editors

Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France Volume 2 - Studies

Editors Kirill Chepurin University of Hamburg Hamburg, Germany

Adi Efal-Lautenschläger University of Tel Aviv Tel Aviv, Israel

Daniel Whistler Royal Holloway, University of London Egham, UK

Ayşe Yuva Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne Paris, France

ISSN 0066-6610     ISSN 2215-0307 (electronic) International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées ISBN 978-3-031-39325-9    ISBN 978-3-031-39326-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39326-6 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Editors’ Introduction

Abstract  A short orienting introductory note that sets out the structure of volume two of Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France. Keywords  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; Victor Cousin; Augusto Vera; Charles Bénard; Pierre Leroux; Henri Maret; Charles Renouvier; Félix Ravaisson The first volume of Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France aimed to provide the reader with the materials and resources necessary to gain an overall familiarity with the reception history of Hegel and Schelling in early nineteenth-­century France. It elaborated on the rationale, methodology and limitations of the two volumes, as well as sought to provide the textual summaries, biographical information and intellectual context necessary for orienting the reader through this thicket of half-known names and books. The present volume supplements this work with a series of extended studies on particular moments in this reception history. The two volumes are thus meant to complement each other in terms of their content and methodology. Instead of following a unified method, the present volume opens the space for a plurality of scholarly voices and themes, all of which, however, further the transnational vision of the history of nineteenth-century European philosophy advanced in Volume One. In combining a focus on transnational intellectual contexts with readings of individual texts and authors, as well as individual motifs and concepts that cut across national philosophical boundaries (such as “spiral”, “pantheism”, or “naturism”), the present volume seeks to demonstrate a range of interpretative approaches which let the nineteenth-century French reception of Hegel and Schelling emerge in its complexity, and which go beyond an all-too-simplistic dichotomy of what has been termed “internalist” and the “externalist” forms of the history of philosophy (Rorty et al. 1984; Laerke et al. 2013). To put this somewhat schematically, according to the “internalist” approach (along a line of influence running from Kant and Tennemann to Gueroult, via Bréhier), the contingent historical roots of a philosophical system or controversy do not prevent the history of philosophy from being practiced in an ahistorical, logical and autonomous space of the search for truth. This approach may be taken to culminate in the twentieth century in Gueroult’s v

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system-­centred method (1988: 2.367). This method at once admits the irreducible plurality of philosophical systems and orders the history of philosophy as a succession of and conflict between these systems, which in Gueroult remain bound to the national philosophical context. However, one crucial problem with such a systems-centred approach is that it fails to attend to the historical and transnational construction of the canon (Espagne and Werner 2004: 7). This problem is what, just like Volume One, Volume Two seeks to address, especially in the essays that illuminate the process of how the canonical picture of Hegel and Schelling was formed in nineteenth-century French thought—the picture that then stayed influential in France and beyond. In this respect, the present volume also employs an “externalist”, social history or science studies-inflected approach (Fabiani 1988, 2010; Lilti 2007; Khorasani 2009), which aims at understanding how the philosophical field concretely historically functions. Nevertheless, the volume seeks to avoid the neglect of close reading that is characteristic of this approach, while always keeping in mind the question: in what circumstances and based on what arguments did Hegel and Schelling appear to nineteenth-century French thinkers as philosophers whose thought responded to the demands and crises of the present, in both the philosophical and the political fields? In Volume Two (as well as Volume One), the history of philosophy we propose makes room for the historicity of intellectual exchanges without forgetting the centrality of textual analysis. What is more, for us, it is essential that, during the period in question, the history of philosophy itself becomes a privileged site of philosophizing and, especially in the Idealist framework, human spirit becomes historicized: philosophy makes the new claim that it can achieve knowledge of spirit through the study of its plural historical objectivations (see, e.g., Piaia 2022). Across the essays in Volume Two, one can see French thinkers grapple with the historicity of philosophy and of the human spirit more generally (as this historicity comes to be reflected through Hegel and Schelling), as well as, significantly, with the place of German Idealism itself in the historical movement of the present. Lucie Rey begins Volume Two with an introduction to Victor Cousin’s and Pierre Leroux’s understanding of Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophies, pointing out the ways in which so much of the French reception was in dialogue with Cousin’s eclecticism and often attempted to make use of heterodox interpretations, precisely in order to oppose such institutionally legitimated philosophising. Rey is clear that Leroux makes use of German Idealist resources to mark out a different trajectory in French philosophy. In Chap. 2, Daniel Whistler tarries with Cousin to provide an account of the resonances between Cousin’s and Hegel’s histories of philosophy and particularly the ways in which they understood the relation between philosophy and the history of philosophy. Whistler argues that this attention to the Hegel-­ parallels in Cousin’s evolution reveals some of the more interesting minoritarian positions the latter experiments with during the 1820s. Mark Sinclair then turns to perhaps the most discussed French philosopher of the nineteenth century, Félix Ravaisson, to interrogate the claims often made about his dependence on Schellingian ideas. In particular, he considers how the notorious conclusion on art and genius to Schelling’s System des transzendentalen Idealismus may have influenced the

Editors’ Introduction

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framing of De l’habitude. Ben Woodard then continues this conversation between Ravaisson and Schelling from the perspective of philosophy of nature. He brings to light the various scientific models that jointly underpin their philosophical imaginaries. In Chaps. 5, 6, 7 and 8, the contributors look to the role of German Idealism in various philosophical encounters with biology, politics and art. Laurent Clauzade turns to one of the areas of nineteenth-century French philosophy usually considered relatively immune from German Idealism—positivism. Continuing Woodard’s emphasis on the circulation of philosophies of nature, Clauzade shows that the Schelling-inspired philosophy of nature is surprisingly visible among positivist accounts of the organic world. Remnants of idealism live on in positivist biology. Kirill Chepurin focuses on “pantheism” as the central political-theological term capturing the perceived “dangers” of Hegelian thought in nineteenth-century France—dangers ranging from absolutism to communism to pan-Germanism. The term “pantheism”, Chepurin argues, points in French authors beyond any narrow historical-philosophical context to the widespread perception of the nineteenth century by its contemporaries as an age of pan-European crisis. Edward Castleton’s chapter shifts into the late 1830s and 1840s to solve one of the major puzzles of the French reception of German Idealism—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s turn to idealist categories in the 1840s. Refuting the Marxist prejudice that Proudhon learned to speak “Hegelese” from German émigrés like Marx himself, Castleton shows the ways in which these concepts were available to Proudhon through his (mostly critical) engagement with earlier French appropriations of German Idealism, particularly those of Cousin’s eclectic school. Chapter 8 continues to probe the transdisciplinary functions of the German Idealist reception by turning from political philosophy to aesthetics and, in particular, the role of Charles Bénard in transmitting Hegel’s aesthetics into France through translations and commentaries. In this chapter, Élisabeth Décultot demonstrates just how significant Bénard’s work was in cementing the discipline of aesthetics—itself a recent German import—within French intellectual life. The final two chapters consider the late 1840s reception-history with an eye on how the reception of Hegel was to transform over the coming decades. Andrea Bellantone provides a substantial study of the most important Hegelian in nineteenth-­ century France, Augusto Vera. Vera’s systematic translations of the Enzyklopädie, as well as his 1855 commentary, Introduction à la philosophie de Hegel, are monuments to a very different appreciation of Hegel beginning in the middle of the century, and Bellantone excavates how they emerged from Vera’s earlier engagements with eclecticism. In the concluding chapter, Jeremy Dunham turns to Charles Renouvier’s early work to argue that, even in the context of his nationalism, a Frenchified Hegel, i.e., a Hegel seen through the lens of Descartes, still plays a key formative role. Renouvier might wish to inaugurate a Kantian alternative to German Idealism, but, Dunham shows, he does so only through confronting Hegel (among others) first. The essays in Volume Two thus range over the fields of metaphysics and epistemology, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, philosophy of nature, historiography and

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political philosophy; they treat controversies from the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s involving figures from eclectic, positivist, spiritualist, neocritical and radical traditions inside and outside the academy. It is in these ways, moreover, that the present volume adds to the analyses of Volume One to provide both an overview and a series of detailed interventions aimed at giving the anglophone reader a new sense of Hegel’s and Schelling’s rich history in nineteenth-century francophone philosophy. University of Hamburg  Kirill Chepurin Hamburg, Germany University of Tel Aviv  Adi Efal-Lautenschläger Tel Aviv, Israel  Daniel Whistler Royal Holloway, University of London Egham, UK [email protected] Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne  Ayşe Yuva Paris, France [email protected]

Bibliography Espagne, Michel and Michael Werner. 2004. En-deça du Rhin: L’Allemagne des philosophes français au XIXe siècle. Paris: Cerf. Fabiani, Jean-Louis. 1988. Les Philosophes de la République. Paris: Minuit. ––––––. 2010. Qu’est-ce qu’un philosophe français? La vie sociale des concepts (1880–1980). Paris: Editions EHESS. Gueroult, Martial. 1988. Histoire de l’histoire de la philosophie, vol. 2. Paris: Aubier Khorasani, Manouchehr Mostagh. 2009. The Development of Controversies: From the Early Modern Period to Online Discussion Forums. Bern: Peter Lang. Laerke, Mogens, Eric Schliesser and Justin H. Smith (eds). 2013. Philosophy and its History: Aims and Methods in the Study of Early Modern Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lilti, Antoine. 2007. Querelles et controverses. Les formes du désaccord intellectuel à l’époque moderne. Mil neuf cent. Revue d’histoire intellectuelle 1.25: 13-28. Piaia, Gregorio. 2022. Historicism and Eclecticism: The Age of Victor Cousin. In Gregorio Piaia, Giuseppe Micheli and Giovanni Santinello (eds), Models of the History of Philosophy, vol. 4: The Hegelian Age, 341–434. Dordrecht: Springer. Rorty, Richard, Jerome B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (eds). 1984. Philosophy in History: Essays in the Hitoriography of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Contents

1

Cousin’s and Leroux’s Antagonistic Visions of German Idealism ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 Lucie Rey

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Becoming Cousin: Eclecticism, Spiritualism and Hegelianism Before 1833������������������������������������������������������������������   15 Daniel Whistler

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Ravaisson After Schelling: Purposiveness Without Purpose in Genius and Habit ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   43 Mark Sinclair

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Line, Vine, and Grace: Ravaisson’s Spiral and Schelling’s Vortex������������������������������������������������������������������������������   59 Ben Woodard

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“Naturism” in Place of Idealism: Henri Ducrotay de Blainville and Auguste Comte on Naturphilosophie ������������������������   75 Laurent Clauzade

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The Reception of German Philosophy in the Mind of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon���������������������������������������������������������������������   97 Edward Castleton

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Pantheism and the Dangers of Hegelianism in Nineteenth-Century France����������������������������������������������������������������  143 Kirill Chepurin

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Hegel’s Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century France: Charles Bénard’s Translation and Its Reception����������������������������������  171 Élisabeth Décultot

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Contents

 Augusto Vera’s Mystical Conception of Hegelianism ��������������������������  183 Andrea Bellantone

10 Charles  Renouvier, Modern French Philosophy, and the Great Learned Men of Germany����������������������������������������������  199 Jeremy Dunham Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  217

Editors and Contributors

Andrea Bellantone is Professeur ordinaire de philosophie moderne et contemporaine at the Institut Catholique de Toulouse, and the author of Hegel in Francia, 1817–1941, as well as La métaphysique possible: Philosophies de l'esprit et modernité.  

Edward Castleton is research affiliate of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme et de l’Environnement Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, at the Université de Franche-Comté, in Besançon, France. He is currently president of the Société P.-J. Proudhon.  

Kirill  Chepurin is postdoctoral fellow at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies, University of Hamburg. He is the co-editor (with Alex Dubilet) of Nothing Absolute: German Idealism and the Question of Political Theology.  

Laurent Clauzade is maître de conférences habilité in philosophy at the Université de Caen-­Normandie. He is the author of L'organe de la pensée: Biologie et philosophie chez Auguste Comte (2008), as well as editor of several new critical editions of Auguste Comte’s works. He recently published a critical edition of the first volume of Comte’s System of Positive Polity.  

Élisabeth  Décultot is Humboldt Professor at the Institute of German Studies, Martin-Luther-­Universität Halle-Wittenberg, where she publishes extensively on aesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in France and Germany. She also directs the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies there.  

Jeremy Dunham is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Durham and the author of several articles on early modern philosophy, idealism, and pragmatism for journals such as the Journal of the History of Philosophy, the British Journal of the History of Philosophy, and the Journal of Modern Philosophy.  

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Editors and Contributors

Adi Efal-Lautenschläger teaches at the University of Tel Aviv, Bar-Ilan University, and the Beit Berl Academic College. Efal is the author of Figural Philology and Habitus as Method, has translated Felix Ravaisson’s Essay on Stoicism, and is preparing a Hebrew translation of Ravaisson’s Of Habit as well as a monograph on Ravaisson’s philosophy of art.  

Lucie Rey is maitresse de conférences at the Université de Bretagne occidentale and the author of Les Enjeux de l’histoire de la philosophie au XIXe siècle en France. Pierre Leroux contre Victor Cousin.  

Mark Sinclair is Lecturer in Philosophy at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is translator of Ravaisson’s On Habit and Selected Essays and Maine de Biran’s Of Immediate Apperception, and is the author of Being Inclined: Felix Ravaisson's Philosophy of Habit.  

Daniel  Whistler is Professor of Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has written a series of monographs on late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century philosophy, is co-­editor of the Oxford Handbook of Modern French Philosophy, and is currently preparing an anthology of Victor’s Cousin’s shorter writings for Oxford University Press.  

Ben Woodard is currently a research fellow at the ICI Berlin. He recently completed a Habilitation on the analytic/continental divide in philosophy through the work of F. H. Bradley at Leuphana University.  

Ayşe  Yuva is maître de conférences at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, author of Tranformer le monde? L’efficace de la philosophie en temps de révolution, and co-editor of several books and articles on Franco-German philosophical transfers.  

Chapter 1

Cousin’s and Leroux’s Antagonistic Visions of German Idealism Lucie Rey

Abstract  This study focuses on the controversy that took place between Pierre Leroux and Victor Cousin during the first half of the nineteenth century and was played out, above all, in Leroux‘s Réfutation de l’éclectisme. Cousin and Leroux fundamentally disagree on the ways in which a new, post-revolutionary philosophy should deal with the past and the future, and this disagreement is motivated by their differing reactions to German Idealism. In particular, this study focuses on Leroux’s avowal, pace Cousin, of an alliance of reason and belief by means of a new philosophy that could also be considered a new religion for the nineteenth century—as well as his use of Schelling’s philosophy, in particular, to achieve this end. Keywords  Idealism · Eclecticism · History of philosophy · The future of philosophy · Philosophy of humanity The controversy between Pierre Leroux and Victor Cousin during the first half of the nineteenth century—as played out, above all, in Leroux‘s Réfutation de l’éclectisme (1839)—is for the most part neglected by contemporary historians of philosophy. Nevertheless, far from being a minor personal conflict, it illuminates some of the main issues that French philosophy had to face after the 1789 Revolution: Cousin and Leroux agree that the event of the French Revolution meant that renewing philosophy was a pressing demand, but they fundamentally disagree on the ways in which this new philosophy of the present should deal with the past and the future. In this controversy, there are two philosophical objects that play a decisive part: eighteenth-century French philosophy and German Idealism. This chapter focuses on the latter.

L. Rey (*) Université de Bretagne occidentale, Brest, France © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Chepurin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 247, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39326-6_1

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To begin, it is necessary to give some indicative details of the two figures involved in this controversy.1 Victor Cousin assumes the highest offices at a key moment in the institutionalization of the teaching of philosophy in France. From 1830, Cousin’s doctrine gradually becomes the official doctrine of the July Monarchy: he occupies every position of power in the major French institutions—Jury for the agrégation, Council of Public Instruction, Académie Française, the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, and is Minister of Public Instruction in 1840. He also gains the power to train and hire new teachers at lycées and universities, to control the content of their lessons and the progress of their careers. And, what is more, he is to be considered as one of the main conduits for the influx of German philosophy into France. On the other hand, Pierre Leroux founded and edited several major philosophical and political reviews of the time: Le Globe, La Revue encyclopédique, La Revue indépendante, La Revue sociale. After briefly flirting with Saint-Simonianism in 1830–31, Leroux and his friend Jean Reynaud orchestrate one of the major encyclopaedia projects of the nineteenth century, the Encyclopédie nouvelle: Dictionnaire philosophique, scientifique, littéraire et industriel, offrant le tableau des connaissances humaines au XIXe siècle. Composed of eight volumes published from 1834 to 1841, the project aimed to build a new synthesis, necessary to the nineteenth century after the collapse of the Christian synthesis which had dominated Western thought since the Middle Ages. The social philosophy they put forward in this project is motivated by a desire to properly realize the revolutionary motto: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. But this aim is articulated simultaneously in religious terms, for “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” is to be the dogma of a new religion or, what is ultimately the same thing for Leroux, a new philosophy. Indeed, for Leroux, it is time to put an end to the division of philosophy and religion and to unify them. This is one of the major points of opposition between Cousin and Leroux, and it ultimately concerns a question of philosophical audience: should this audience be an intellectual minority—with religion remaining the only possible language for the masses—or, instead, can philosophy be addressed to all the people? For Cousin on the one hand, religion should be a matter for the masses, whereas philosophy is a rational discourse reserved for an intellectual aristocracy. But for Leroux. philosophy and religion form one single discourse; indeed, he claims that every philosophy aims either to destroy an earlier religion or to establish a new one. According to Leroux, the division between religion and philosophy is very recent and was exacerbated in the eighteenth century; the time has now come, therefore, to bring about the alliance of reason and belief, two indivisible features of humanity, by means of a new philosophy that could also be considered a new religion for the nineteenth century. His aim is to establish a new faith—one that supersedes and integrates the eighteenth-century attacks on established religions. It is this point, in particular, that will play a central role in Cousin‘s and Leroux‘s very different relations to German Idealism.

 See further the “Landmarks” chapter in volume 1.

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Two further preliminary remarks are necessary before proceeding. First, my intention in what follows is less to systematically elaborate Cousin’s and Leroux’s interpretations of Schelling and Hegel than to underline the ways in which German philosophers functioned polemically in nineteenth-century France. Indeed, it is clear that German philosophers in themselves are far from being Leroux’s main concern: they do not appear as frequent references in his texts and he does not seem to read them very closely. Nevertheless, in the Réfutation, they happen to take an important role in Leroux’s argumentation.2 And Germany comes to take on such significance because Cousin was, at times, so widely considered to be the French representative of German philosophy and because Leroux’s main goal in that book is to attack his doctrine and his influence. Secondly, we must mention the fact that Hegel and Schelling are very often considered as constituting a whole that is named ‘German philosophy’, and thus the specificity of their philosophical thought is not always taken into account by these authors. To begin, then, I will present Cousin’s relationship to German philosophy, with particular reference to Leroux’s accusation that Cousin was nothing more than “Hegel’s ape”, before interrogating the complex relation between Leroux and German Idealism.

1.1 Cousin and German Idealism 1.1.1 Cousin and Hegel Before 1840, Cousin presents his doctrine as an eclecticism, a synthesis of all former philosophies. That is, his is a philosophy that collects ideas from many different philosophical traditions, and this initially includes—following Royer-Collard— Reid’s philosophy of common sense. However, in 1817, Cousin travelled to Germany, and this trip and those that follow greatly influence his thought, in line with Staël’s comment that the “German nation could be considered as the ultimate metaphysical nation” (1814: 3.96), as well as Hegel’s apocryphal remark that Cousin came to Germany to do his “philosophical shopping”. During Cousin’s first journey in 1817–18, he meets Hegel in Heidelberg; he makes another journey in 1824–25, during which he is imprisoned in Berlin, accused of belonging to the Carbonari; and later, as member of the Royal Council of Public Instruction, he surveys German education institutions. Cousin is extremely impressed with what he discovers of German philosophy, for, along with many contemporaries, he considers French philosophy to have sunk “into a hole” (Jouffroy 1842: 121) during the first years of the nineteenth century, limited by the empiricist principles of Condillac. The discovery of German

 See volume 1, §3.3.4.

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philosophers  – Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel  – greatly affects him; indeed, looking back on his 1828 lectures on the history of philosophy, he will later comment: “We were all a little German” (see Cotten 1994: 93). These lectures are indeed the most Hegelian of Cousin’s eclecticisms, even though Hegel’s name never explicitly appears, as Michel Espagne and Michael Werner point out in Lettres d’Allemagne (1990: 13). In addition to the world-historical style and spirit, two main ideas are clearly borrowed from Hegel: the identification of philosophy and history of philosophy, on the one hand, and the legitimation of constitutional monarchy, on the other hand. In 1868, Charles Secrétan would compare eclecticism to a “pantheism of history, an elegant and free reproduction of Hegel’s philosophy of history”, but one which is very simplified, not to say emptied of any content (1868: 35). Indeed, one might ask what Cousin in fact really knew of Hegel’s philosophy? He certainly did not read the texts in their original language—when it comes to the Enzyklopädie, Cousin will admit in his Souvenirs d’Allemagne (2011: 189–90) that he had not read the work directly. He has tried, he confesses, but the words resisted his understanding.3 In the Preface to his Fragments philosophiques of 1833, written 2 years after Hegel’s death, he relates his first meeting with Hegel: The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences was published by that time and I had had one of the first exemplars. It was a book full of scholastic formulas, written in a very difficult language, especially for me. Hegel did not know any more French than I knew German, and plunged into his studies, not sure yet of himself and of his reputation, he nearly saw nobody and, to say the truth, he was not very friendly. I don’t know how an unknown young man managed to interest him, but after an hour he was mine as I was his and since then our friendship has never stopped. From our first conversation, I recognised him, I understood all his value, I felt myself in the presence of a superior man. And when from Heidelberg I continued my travels in Germany, I announced him everywhere, I prophesied him to a certain extent; and on my return to France, I said to my friends: Gentlemen, I have met a man of genius. (1833: xxxvii–xxxviii)

Unable to read and understand Hegel’s book, Cousin only becomes familiar with the system through oral discussions, letters and also notes from Hegel’s 1822–23 lectures on the history of philosophy. Nevertheless, Pierre Macherey (2013) argues that such an admission of incomprehension needs to be placed in a wider context: German philosophy in general, particularly Kant, proved very difficult for all French readers of the time; the language, the form of exposition, the technicalities of argumentation and use of concepts seemed almost Scholastic, a product of a bygone era abandoned in France ever since Descartes chose a philosophical style that privileged clarity. This is why these German texts had such a peculiar effect on French readers: Cousin is simultaneously impressed, seduced and confused. This result is criticised by Eugène Lerminier in his Lettres philosophiques adressées à un Berlinois: Finally, reappointed to his chair in 1828, Cousin took pleasure in exciting surprise and admiration. In an eloquent introduction of thirteen lectures, he developed with his artistic

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 See volume 1, §3.2.1.

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imagination and his talent as an orator some principles of Hegel’s system which seemed to emerge out of his own head and belong to him. From the heights of a dogmatism of which he alone held the secret, he inspected history, philosophers, great men, war and laws, Providence and its decrees. He professed the legitimacy of a universal optimism and pronounced, in the name of philosophy, the absolutisation of history. I know, sir, that in Berlin you do not share the enthusiasm with which we welcomed these lectures; you could not understand how we could import a doctrine without naming its author. Hegel joked about this with a fairly satirical indulgence and you, sir, you uttered on this topic a harsh word that I can scarcely write—the word plagiarism. I do not think, Sir, that Cousin deliberately wanted to take for himself what did not belong to him; but, carried away by his imagination, he really did think that he had himself conceived what had been taught to him. In his enthusiastic improvisations, he naively forgot his loans, and it is with the best faith that amalgamating Kant and Hegel, he believed he had created something. (1832: 83–5)

Cousin presents his eclecticism as a regeneration of philosophical thinking: after the errors of the previous centuries—reliant on an exclusive principle from which only partial truths were derived—Cousin intends to now establish a global system, gathering all perspectives, all principles. He claims to show how these different points of view, far from excluding one another, can complete each other. This idea is Cousin’s interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of history: truth cannot be found in a single theory, but in all of them.

1.1.2 Cousin and Schelling I have insisted primarily on Hegel’s influence, because it is most obvious; however, this should not disguise the impact of Schelling’s work on Cousin. Schelling was far more famous than Hegel when Cousin first travelled to Germany in 1817–18. Cousin did not meet Schelling on this first trip, but rather did so during the second, on Hegel’s advice. Some lines of the 1833 edition of Cousin’s Fragments philosophiques explicitly refer to Schelling and conclude “This system is the true one” (1833: xl–xli), and yet Cousin does not seem to very clearly differentiate between Hegel and Schelling, and, in fact, in the 1820s he attempts to mediate between the two estranged friends.4 It is ultimately more a general spirit than precise ideas or arguments that Cousin appropriates from them both. It is also worth noting Schelling’s writings to Cousin and on Cousin as a means of getting a clearer idea of what differentiates them when it comes to the determination of the ‘true philosophical system’. Two texts are pertinent: Schelling’s letter to Cousin from 16th April 1826 (see Cousin and Schelling 1991) and Schelling’s 1834 Vorrede to Cousin’s Fragments philosophiques (in Schelling 1856–61: vol. 10). These texts are to be understood in the context of Schelling’s dispute with Hegel. Schelling’s correspondence with Cousin explicitly aims to settle accounts with Hegel and to make himself, Schelling, appear as the only philosopher able to assure the renewal needed in response to English and French empiricism. In this context,  See volume 1, §3.2.3.

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Schelling initially seems to support Cousin’s suspicions of empiricism; however, a recurrent criticism of Cousin remains focused on the latter’s preferred science— psychology. For Cousin, access to philosophical truth is only possible by means of psychological observation, making his position a mixture of empiricism in spirit and the critique of empiricism in practice. This inconsistency is stressed by Schelling, as it will be by Leroux in his Réfutation de l’éclectisme. In this vein, Schelling declares that Cousin can never obtain any objective truth by choosing the subjective path of psychology (1856–61: 10.219–20). The only role that psychology can ultimately play is a subjective preparation to philosophy; it can certainly not lead to ontology, understood as the objective science of things. Psychology does not permit the transition from subjectivity to objectivity. Indeed, when Schelling’s conflict with the Hegelians is most intense in Germany, he will further this critique in regard to Cousin’s 1828 lectures, unable to countenance the confusion of his own ideas with Hegel’s (Cousin and Schelling 1991: 209). In the end, Schelling tells Cousin that anything is better than Hegelianism, even empiricism.

1.1.3 Conclusions to this Section To conclude the first part of this study, I turn to the evolution of Cousin’s doctrine into the 1840s. At that moment in France, Cousin is accused by the Catholics of disseminating pantheism into educational institutions throughout France, as a follower of Schelling and Hegel, who are themselves, it is claimed, inspired by the most infamous of pantheist philosophers: Spinoza. From that moment onwards, in order to maintain his official position, Cousin is forced to abandon his former ideas, modify his texts, and suppress all references to German philosophy, replacing them with a reference which, in this national context, carries far less risk—that of Descartes. And yet he never officially acknowledges this change: every new edition of his former books is preceded by an Avant-propos that still insists on the constancy of his doctrine. As a result, Cousin will be accused of philosophical and political opportunism by several of his contemporaries; for example, we can cite once more Lerminier‘s earlier Lettres philosophiques adressées à un Berlinois: When M. Cousin took over Royer-Collard’s Chair, he had no other purpose than to develop the history of philosophical systems. As a literary spirit, [Cousin] turned towards the literature of philosophy; his is a mobile imagination and so he easily quit one beautiful theory for another he found more beautiful still; he is an ardent speaker and so he made flow in other souls an intelligence and enthusiasm for science. Such has been Cousin: it is his character to never be able to find and feel philosophical reality himself; he must do so translated, discovered, systematised; then he understands it, borrows it and presents it. I sense, Sir, that we are together reaching an inevitable conclusion; we are obliged to infer that Cousin is not, properly speaking, a philosopher; and I know that this has been your view for a long time;

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you have even said that in Germany they begin to smile if some Frenchman, freshly arrived, speaks of our compatriot as a genuine metaphysician. (1832: 75)5

Moreover, in addition to Lerminier‘s texts, we must pay special attention to Pierre Leroux in this context, for Leroux devotes a whole book to demonstrating the vacuity of Cousin’s doctrine and thereby underlining its philosophical and political dangers—the Réfutation de l’éclectisme. I turn now to Leroux’s interpretations of Schelling and Hegel in order to show their relation to this Lerouxian critique of Cousin.

1.2 Leroux and German Philosophy 1.2.1 Reasons for Leroux’s Interest in German Philosophy To begin, it is important to stress that Leroux is very aware of the fact that Cousin established his own philosophy by borrowing – not to say, stealing – from German philosophers that were, at that time, still little known in France: Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. For this reason, Leroux attaches great importance to correctly interpreting German philosophy and thereby revealing Cousin’s mistakes. Leroux’s strategy is daring, in fact: while he himself has read very little of these authors, he still intends to demonstrate that Cousin has not understood them and has produced nothing but confusion and distortion by introducing them into France. When it comes to Kant, Leroux insists that Cousin has misunderstood the critical philosophy and confused it with subsequent attempts to supersede it in the later German Idealism of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. When it comes to Hegel, Cousin fails to correctly understand his history of philosophy by reducing the idea of present philosophy to the cumulative addition of past doctrines. Nothing new is to be thought, according to Leroux’s Cousin: contemporary philosophers must be content with synthesizing past ideas. This leads to the death of philosophy and, indeed, of living thought in general. Cousin’s eclecticism, inspired by a misunderstanding of Hegel’s thought, is a dead philosophy for Leroux: it can produce nothing new. The second reason why Leroux values German philosophy has little to do with Cousin. As with all the modern authors he writes about, Leroux intends to bring to light their convergence; that is, his idea is to reveal the existence of a philosophical tradition which passes through all of modernity, but which has too often been buried under false interpretations. All these philosophical endeavours converge on what he calls “the doctrine of the Ideal” or “the doctrine of perfectibility”. In order to understand Leroux‘s argument, I must explain briefly what he understands by the ideal and idealism.

 See volume 1, §3.3.1.

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1.2.2 What Is Idealism for Leroux? In his article on Berkeley for the Encyclopédie nouvelle (1834–41), Leroux declares that his own philosophy is a true and genuine “Idealism”, as opposed to all the false senses of this term current since the seventeenth century and used to describe Berkeley’s, Malebranche’s, Kant’s, and Fichte’s philosophies. Leroux intends to rediscover the original sense of the concept, which is not to be derived from the term “Idea” but from the term “Ideal”. Thus, idealism does not refer to a philosophy of Ideas, which would rather be called “an Ideism”, but, to a philosophy of the Ideal (1836: 617). According to Leroux, this confusion is responsible for the lack of progress that has been made by philosophy in France since the beginning of the nineteenth century. And in response, he reaffirms the central idea that human history is the progressive achievement of an Ideal. He asks: “What is idealism?” And answers: It is the doctrine of the Spirit that embodies itself, of the Ideal that realizes itself. It is an ontology or a “science of life”, that is, a philosophy that explains life and historical development by thinking of them as the progressive realization of an Ideal. (1836: 616)

He explains that this theory can be traced in an uninterrupted tradition throughout human history, from ancient Egypt and Greece and into Christianity. However, he accuses the medieval Church of breaking the link between Christianity and idealism, separating the appearance of mysteries from their substance, which had been, in fact, nothing but idealism in Leroux’s sense. Focused solely on the lustre of mystery, the Church turned minds away from Christianity, thereby initiating the separation of religion and philosophy, which, for Leroux, is the central error of modernity: “Priests are now on one side, philosophers on the other. The former teach belief without understanding, whereas the latter quit the field of faith and focus their inquiry on other matters. The doctrine of Idealism is obscured and disappears” (1836: 616). What part does German Idealism play in this vision? First of all, it is important to recall Leroux’s overall philosophical project: his aim to integrate all philosophical endeavours into a general tendency towards progress, i.e., the progressive realization of an Ideal in history. The common thread of his thought is this understanding of human history, which, he claims, has been covered over by a prevalent tendency in modern philosophy to restrict doctrine to a theory of ideas or a psychology. However, no matter how powerful this mistake has proven, genuine philosophizing has still not disappeared. And to this end Leroux looks for convergences in European philosophy, particularly points of commonality between the eighteenth-century French philosophy of progress and the German philosophy of ideas. Secondly, in order to detail Leroux’s interpretation of German Idealism, reference needs to be made to a specific case, one alluded to by Miguel Abensour (1991) under the name of the “Schelling affair”. Indeed, at the very moment of the quarrel between Hegel and Schelling, Leroux explicitly takes Schelling’s side, and we need to understand why. Thus, to properly reconstruct Leroux’s interpretation of Schelling’s and Hegel’s contribution to his own distinctive notion of idealism, the context to this ‘affair’ needs to be briefly resumed.

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1.2.3 “The Schelling Affair”6 In 1840, Frederick William IV of Prussia appointed the elderly Schelling to the Chair of Philosophy at Berlin University—a chair previously occupied by Hegel and his disciple, Eduard Gans. This appointment was immediately seen by German intellectuals of the period, particularly Left Hegelians, as a return of retrograde forces. And yet, Leroux takes side in this controversy by welcoming the return of Schelling as a philosophical event and publishing the latter’s inaugural speech in the La Revue indépendante which he edits. How is this statement—which is far from politically obvious—to be understood? Indeed, Leroux’s position is politically very difficult to understand for German intellectuals across the Rhine: Leroux is an advocate of socialism, whereas Schelling represents retrograde political power. And so, many contemporaries initially interpret Leroux’s position as a mere misunderstanding of Schelling’s role in the German philosophical landscape, for, more generally, Leroux’s ideas seem much closer to Hegel’s than to Schelling’s. On this reading, he would be defending Schelling only because Hegel had been tainted by playing the role of the German double of Cousin. However, Leroux defends himself against this interpretation by publishing an article in 1842 in the La Revue indépendante entitled “Du Cours de philosophie de Schelling” (1982). It is this article which explains the reasons for his interest in Schelling’s philosophy, and demonstrates his expertise on the various doctrines in the air at the time—hence, whatever is going on here, it cannot be a matter of mere misunderstanding. That is, Leroux does not support Schelling blindly, but provides nuanced and well-evidenced support for some of his philosophical positions. Indeed, the reason why Leroux deems this event so important is not a question of the figures involved, but is due to the fact that this controversy appears to him as representative of a major philosophical problem, the central problem of nineteenth-century philosophy—that is, the relation between philosophy and religion. Leroux discerns in Hegel the German defender of the divorce between philosophy and religion and the initiator of an aristocratic conception of philosophy subsequently taken up by Cousin in France. This conception of philosophy reserves access to superior truths to the elite and maintains a simplified religion for the masses. In opposition to this thesis, Leroux considers Schelling an ally, particularly Schelling’s project of unifying philosophy and religion by means of the concept of “revelation” in his inaugural speech. First, Leroux is seduced by the prophetic spirit of Schelling’s text and the idea of the philosopher’s mission, i.e., Schelling presents himself as a saviour of all humanity here to fulfill a mission: he puts himself at the service of philosophy. These ideas resonate with Leroux’s conception of the philosopher-prophet. Indeed, the very concept of “revelation” refers, in Leroux’s philosophy, to the idea that the human being is not only led by reason, but that he has three inseparable attributes: sensation, feeling and reason. The second of these, feeling, had been neglected by  See volume 1, §3.5.2.

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philosophy; yet, according to Leroux, this faculty of feeling gives rise to inspiration in some. These few—whose reason is inspired by a living feeling—can be named prophets, and so the term “prophet” refers to specific individuals who have the ability to perceive an essential truth that is not yet visible to their contemporaries (see Rey 2013: 273–93). In that sense, Socrates is a prophet, Jesus is a prophet, but there are also modern prophets for Leroux, like Saint-Simon or Robert Owen, prophets of socialism. Nevertheless, if the importance he gives to revelation leads Leroux to support Schelling, he also fears that Schelling might be defending a revelation that belongs to the past, limited to a theological vision shared by traditional monotheisms (1982: 81–2). Leroux is thus ultimately ambivalent: he sees limits in Schelling’s belief of a new age of Christianity, since this is nothing else than idolatry for Leroux, a wish to revive the dead body of Christianity. Indeed, Leroux distinguishes between the soul of Christianity and its body (1982: 32–3): for him, the body of Christianity is nothing but a long-dead corpse, whereas what is essential to it, its soul, is a metaphysical content that existed long before Christianity itself and which needs reviving in the future by means of a new form. This spirit, which corresponds to the Ideal that progressively develops in history through different forms, which inspired Greek philosophy as well as Christianity, also inspired the French revolutionaries and the modern prophets of socialism. We again discover here Leroux’s theory of Idealism. Schelling’s idea of a possible new age for Christianity rests on a misunderstanding of the progress of humanity and finally leads Leroux to insist on Schelling’s limited superiority over Hegel. Indeed, Leroux is adamant that Schelling’s work fails to exhibit the necessary intuition of progress or perfectibility (1982: 82). To conclude these remarks on Leroux’s appreciation of Schelling’s philosophy, it is worth recalling that Schelling describes his return to the philosophical stage as a mission, putting himself at the service of philosophy: to free philosophy from the obstacles imposed by Hegelian domination.7 Leroux can do nothing but recognize his own situation in this configuration, even if, ultimately, he separates out two points in Schelling’s thinking: a positive point, on the one hand, i.e., the idea of a reconciliation of philosophy and religion through the concept of revelation; and a negative point, on the other hand, i.e., the return to traditional forms of revelation and a missing concept of progress or perfectibility.

1.2.4 Leroux’s Interpretation of Hegel I conclude with a very brief presentation of Leroux’s interpretation of Hegel—and here one cannot forget that his reading is mediated by Cousin. It is clear that Leroux is not impartial in the way that he minimizes Hegel’s influence on Schellingian philosophy, especially in the areas of history and evolution. This is partly a matter of anti-Cousinian prejudice; however, Leroux’s article on Schelling does still turn

 Leroux stresses this in his initial preface to Schelling’s inaugural Berlin lecture (1982: 13–16).

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on a genuine difference from Hegel, independently of Cousin. Indeed, in spite of the above, Leroux does seem to have understood very clearly what separates him from Hegel, which is their allocation of a role either to reason or feeling in philosophy, and thus the problem of the subordination of religion to philosophy. For Leroux, Hegel’s rational ambition leads to a radical depreciation of belief and feeling in philosophizing. However, despite this major point of disagreement, Leroux still recognizes that the Hegelian system has a great advantage, which rests on the intuition of a fundamental idea of a continued progress in humanity dear to Leroux and his contemporaries. Thus, Hegel too has faith in perfectibility; Hegel too lays claim to the idea of a progressive revelation in humanity, thereby preparing, without explicitly defending, the idea of a new revelation and a new faith-to-come for humanity. The following concluding passage ultimately shows Leroux’s complex position, recognizing in each of Schelling and Hegel both successes and failures: We wish that Schelling, as he was overthrowing Hegel’s false system, had also recognized that great law, glimpsed by Leibniz and Lessing, the Law of Constant Progress in Nature and in Humanity, and that he had clearly concluded [from it] to a future religion, greater than any of the past. If Schelling has denied Progress, he will maybe overthrow what he rightly calls a false system; but the spirit that enlivened Hegel and led him to conceive this false system will still dominate over Schelling himself, on the ruins of this wrong system. (1982: 71)

1.3 Conclusions In conclusion, I wish to warn the reader against one possible false impression: that Leroux’s Réfutation is nothing more than an ad hominem critique, and that his interpretation of German philosophy, following the logic of this polemic, is devoid of real interest for later readers. Leroux’s text in fact works against this first impression, and it is worth drawing attention to this labour. The difficulty of his work lies in the fact that he mixes the elaboration of a positive doctrine with the deconstruction of an official philosophy; nevertheless, the importance he attaches to revealing the concordance of contemporary German philosophy with his own theses must be understood within the general framework of his philosophy. His “doctrine of perfectibility” conceives truth as progressively and collectively revealing itself over the course of human history. In this theoretical setting, his own voice should not appear as the singular voice of a genius, disputing those of the contemporaries. On the contrary, the more he is able to bring out the link between his own ideas and those of other thinkers of the time, the more his ideas performatively become expressions of precisely this truth. This is also the reason why Leroux’s work always looks for continuities in human thinking and erases any ruptures. To give a couple of examples: he attempts to bring out the continuity that links ancient religions to Christianity in many articles of the Encyclopédie nouvelle, such as those on Buddhism, Christianity or equality, as well as in his 1841

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book De l’humanité (typically considered his major work). Similarly, he constantly underlines the links between Christianity and modern philosophy, both in the Réfutation itself and in his article, “Des Rapports du christianisme avec la doctrine du progrès” (1833a). And he refuses the idea of any rupture between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century in his article, “De la loi de continuité qui unit le XVIIIe siècle au XVIIe siècle” (1835). Such are the constants of Leroux’s work that illuminate the continuities of philosophy in human history. And it is precisely such continuity which is decisive for him: Indeed, if all the real discoveries that have been made, either in France, England or Germany, in the last two centuries and in ours, did not converge and agree; if it were not possible, in the end, to grasp a common thread in the metaphysical workshop, science should be despaired of and abandoned. But fortunately, this is not the case; and I hope that one day, better than I have been able to do here, I will be able to show the secret link that unites all the individual efforts of thinkers since Descartes, and how they have been providentially pushed towards a common goal, the discovery of the true concept of our nature and therefore the true mode of our knowledge. (1835: 189–90)

In this way, we can come to better understand why Leroux asserts in the Réfutation: “I attach great importance to this confirmation by Germany of the psychological truth I have stated” (1839: 189). Although his knowledge of German philosophy is limited, he still feels the considerable importance that it might have for his work, and so he categorically refuses to abandon it to someone who he considers to be the enemy of philosophy. The purpose of Réfutation is not only to show Cousin’s mistakes, but even more so to highlight the vast tradition and broad philosophical movement in which his own ideas are embedded, in order to emphasise a trend that, he is sure, will eventually prevail over Cousin’s inert and sterile state-philosophy.

Bibliography Abensour, Miguel. 1991. L’Affaire Schelling. Une controverse entre Pierre Leroux et les jeunes hégéliens. Corpus 18/19: 117–131. Cotten, Jean-Pierre. 1994. Victor Cousin et la ‘mauvaise métaphysique de l’Allemagne dégénérée. In La Réception de la philosophie allemande en France aux XIXe et XXe siècles, ed. Jean Quillien, 85–110. Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille. Cousin, Victor. 1833. Fragments philosophiques. 2nd ed. Paris: Ladrange. ———. 2011. Souvenirs d’Allemagne. Paris: CNRS. Cousin, Victor and F. W. J. Schelling. 1991. “Correspondance”, ed. Christiane Mauve and Patrice Vermeren, Corpus 18/19: 199–249. Staël, Germaine de. 1814. De l’Allemagne. Vol. 3 vols. Paris: Nicolle. Espagne, Michel, and Michael Werner. 1990. Lettres d’Allemagne, Victor Cousin et les hégéliens. Tusson: CNRS-Du Lérot. Jouffroy, Théodore. 1842. Nouveaux mélanges philosophiques. Paris. Lerminier, Eugène. 1832. Lettres philosophiques adressées à un Berlinois. Paris: Paulin. Leroux, Pierre. 1833a. Des Rapports du christianisme avec la doctrine du progrès. Revue encyclopédique. ———. 1833b. La philosophie éclectique, enseignée par M.  Jouffroy. Revue encyclopédique (June–August).

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———. 1835. De la loi de continuité qui unit le XVIIIe siècle au XVIIe siècle. Revue encyclopédique. ———. 1836. “Berkeley”. Encyclopédie nouvelle, vol. 2, 615–621. Paris: Gosselin. ———. 1838. “Éclectisme.” Encyclopédie nouvelle, vol. 4, 462–538. Paris: Gosselin. ———. 1982. Discours de Schelling à Berlin, Du cours de philosophie de Schelling, Du christianisme, ed. J.-F. Courtine. Paris: Vrin. ———. 1839. Réfutation de l’éclectisme, où se trouve exposée la vraie définition de la philosophie, et où l’on explique le sens, la suite, et l’enchaînement des divers philosophes depuis Descartes. Paris, Gosselin. Leroux, Pierre and Jean Reynaud (eds). 1834–41. Encyclopédie nouvelle, dictionnaire philosophique, scientifique, littéraire et industriel, offrant le tableau des connaissances humaines au XIXe siècle, 8 vols. Paris: Gosselin. Macherey, Pierre. 2013. Études de philosophie “française”. Paris: Sorbonne. Rey, Lucie. 2013. Les enjeux de l’histoire de la philosophie en France au XIXe siècle: Pierre Leroux contre Victor Cousin. Paris: L’Harmattan. Schelling, F. W. J. 1856–61. Werke, 14 vols. Edited by K. F. A. Schelling. Stuttgart: Cotta. Secrétan, Charles. 1868. La Philosophie de Victor Cousin. Paris: Grassart.

Chapter 2

Becoming Cousin: Eclecticism, Spiritualism and Hegelianism Before 1833 Daniel Whistler

Abstract  This study takes as its starting point Cousin’s Hegelian-sounding claim in his 1828 lectures that the history of philosophy is identical to philosophy itself— and it does so in order to interrogate the various resemblances and divergences between Cousin and Hegel when it comes to determining the relationship between philosophy and the history of philosophy. In particular, the study investigates the difference between the “official” position Cousin takes up in 1833 in which spiritualist philosophy grounds eclectic history of philosophy and his earlier more experimental and provisional positions, which map roughly onto Hegel’s own various ways of articulating the philosophy-history of philosophy relationship. Keywords  History of philosophy · Agrippan trilemma · Psychological method · System · Eclecticism · Syncretism

2.1 On Victor Cousin’s Hegelian Thesis of the Identity of Philosophy and the History of Philosophy The extent of Victor Cousin’s flirtation with Hegelianism remains contentious, not least because it is unclear to what extent he was familiar with G.  W. F.  Hegel’s works, read them closely or even understood them. Nevertheless, during the 1820s and 1830s, his contemporaries—from Lerminier and Leroux to Schelling and Maret—certainly identified the spectre of Hegelianism in Cousin’s publications; Lerminier goes so far as to accuse Cousin of plagiarising Hegel (1832: 85) and Janet is later insistent that Cousin’s thought was at bottom just a “torn-off branch of

D. Whistler (*) Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Chepurin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 247, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39326-6_2

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German philosophy” (1885: 153).1 These accusations were particularly directed at Cousin’s 1828 Introduction à l’histoire de la philosophie and its application in the 1829 Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie du XVIIIe siècle. Even though Hegel’s name is not mentioned once, their latent Hegelianism was so blatant that Cousin later both acknowledged this (“we were all a little German then”) and felt the need to apologise for it as a kind of speculative “joke” (see Cotten 1994: 93).2 Cousin was also in possession of manuscripts from Hegel’s lectures that may have informed his own courses, such as the 1822–3 lectures on the philosophy of history and, most pertinently for what follows, both the 1816 and the 1827–8 lectures on the history of philosophy.3 Moreover, during his “involuntary stay” in Berlin during 1824–5 (Carové, in Espagne and Werner 1990: 56), Cousin also had numerous opportunities to work through Hegel’s lectures with his students (especially Gans, Michelet and Hotho). As Bellantone concludes, in Berlin “Hegel was giving his lectures on philosophy of history and it would not be absurd to think that [Cousin in 1824–5] was able to follow these lectures, at least in part”, as well as reflect on them in private conversations (2011: 1.105). In addition to this broad-brush historical evidence, there have—on a more conceptual level—been roughly four “Hegelian” features identified in the 1828 and 1829 lecture courses: (a) Their schematising of human historical existence—including its politics, its arts, its sciences and its philosophies—into a series of triplicities; (b) Their positing of philosophical development as the highest form of historical existence and the index by which historical progress can best be measured; (c) Their thesis that progress in philosophy has come to an end in their own time; (d) Their thesis that the history of philosophy is identical to philosophy itself. This chapter concentrates exclusively on the fourth of these supposedly Hegelian features of Cousin’s 1828 and 1829 lecture courses. It is indeed hard not to be struck  For a detailed picture of Cousin’s overall relation (and failures to relate) to Hegel, see Rey’s chapter above, as well as (for example) Janicaud (1984). His own explicit engagements with Hegel’s influence are to be found in: Cousin (1833, xxxvii–xliv) and (2011: 53–6, 189–201); see volume 1, §3.2.1, §3.2.3. Of course, this is not to say, generally, that Cousin’s philosophy during the 1820s as a whole was fundamentally Hegelian—as Ragghianti stridently asserts, “beyond certain suggestions… Victor Cousin was never a Hegelian” (1997: 43; see Manns 1994: 63); it is merely to contend that the 1828–9 courses were often read in Hegelian terms and often for good reason. 2  Even if Cotten ultimately complicates the picture, his claim that “it is customary to consider that Cousin’s relations with Germany reached their acme around the period of the 1828 Cours” (1994: 2) is indicative. 3  Other than the 1822–3 lectures on the philosophy of history that remain in the Cousin-archives, the evidence for these manuscripts is fragmentary and can be gleaned from various letters from Cousin’s Hegelian correspondents, particularly H. G. Hotho, who seems to have copied, supplied and sometimes translated these texts for Cousin (e.g., Espagne and Werner 1990: 77, 95, 97–8). See further Cotten (1994: 5), Espagne and Werner (1986: 68), Janicaud (1984: 454) and Butler and Seiler (in Hegel 1985b: 640). It is important to stress for the argument below that Cousin seems to have possessed the manuscript of the 1816 lectures on the history of philosophy as early as 1818, and so may well have been reflecting on their arguments from this early date onwards. See volume 1, §3.2.2. 1

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(at first blush) by the conceptual similarities between Hegel and Cousin on the above fourth thesis. Thus, Hegel asserts in his Berlin lectures that “the history of philosophy is identical with the system of philosophy”, that history of philosophy “will present the same thing which is presented in philosophy, but with the addition of time” (1985a: 87–8), and that “the study of the history of philosophy is the study of philosophy itself; it cannot be anything else” (1985a: 22). In a similar vein, Cousin writes in 1828 that, in the history of philosophy, “after having begun with philosophy, we will finish once more with philosophy, and thus we will arrive at the identity of philosophy and history of philosophy” (1991: 103), and in 1829, he will refer back to this “principle that I indicated to you in last year’s introductory [lectures] and which is, as you know, the ultimate goal of all my efforts, the soul of my writing and of all my teaching, that is, the identity of philosophy and its history” (1829a: 171). Even if only on a superficial level, Cousin certainly looks like he was making use of Hegelianism for his own ends at this time.4 In this chapter, I want to further explore this affinity and put Cousin’s answers to the question of how philosophy relates to the history of philosophy into more fine-­ grained conversation with Hegel’s. On the basis of the fact that Cousin knew the details of Hegel’s relevant lectures and was reflecting on them in the 1820s, what I want to argue is that Cousin makes use of, and even radicalises, the various models for the philosophy—history of philosophy relation developed in Hegel’s lectures. In consequence, we can make sense of Cousin’s experiments in formulating this relation anew through a detailed comparison with Hegel’s own parallel evolution. My argument is that Cousin’s development during the 1820s is, in part, explainable by reference to this problem of the relation of the history of philosophy to philosophy shared with and partially determined by Hegel. However, rather than suggesting that there is some “Hegelian solution” to interpreting Cousin’s thinking, my argument is, rather, than Hegel’s influence legitimises Cousin’s opening up of this problematic to a series of radical experiments. Thus, the stakes of this chapter ultimately concern an accurate understanding of Cousin’s development during the late 1820s. In this vein, Delphine Antoine-Mahut has recently noted that one major reason for the scholarly neglect of Cousin’s philosophy is the frequent identification of Cousin with the explicit theses of his later texts, without any consideration for the possibilities opened up by his first courses and publications, which may subsequently have been abandoned or closed off in his later works. The absence of a genetic perspective thereby glides over what is, in reality, a series of adjustments and corrections … The most striking formulations of his maturity and old age are then taken as representative of his entire project and, in this sense, as a constant of his philosophical failure. (2019a: 682; see also Antoine-Mahut 2019b)

 Thus, Rey, for example, writes, “The lecture course on the Introduction à l’histoire de la philosophie is the most Hegelian formulation of eclecticism, even though Hegel’s name appears nowhere in it… One finds there an identity of philosophy with its history that conforms to the Hegelian idea: the history of philosophy is solely philosophy itself in its immanent and necessary development” (2013: 124, 127; see further Piaia 2022: 400–2). 4

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And, in order to rectify this situation, she begins to tell a story of Cousin’s development between 1826 and 1833. 1826 acts as a suitable point of departure since it is the date of the publication of the first edition of his Fragments philosophiques, which Antoine-Mahut herself describes as “the manifesto of a resistance figure” (2019a: 684) and Baptiste Mélès has also recently labelled a “long profession of faith in which all the basic elements of eclecticism are expressed” (2016: 134). Moreover, 1833 is an appropriate end point, since it marks the publication of the radically modified second edition of the Fragments philosophiques, which inaugurates Cousin’s quest for politico-philosophical legitimacy and implements his strategies of domination over the intellectual landscape of the age. It is during the 1830s that he begins to take on roles as President of the agrégation Jury, Director of the École Normale, leading member of the Académie Française and Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, Minister of Public Instruction, Counsellor of State and “Pair de France”. To chart Cousin’s development from 1826 to 1833 is, then, to understand how Cousin finally became “Cousin”, long after the formative years of the late 1810s—that is, the ways in which the experimentation of his “second becoming” of the late 1820s gradually metamorphosed into a pursuit of authority and legitimacy.5 Moreover, Antoine-Mahut is surely right to insist that this genetic approach provides a definite alternative to existing trends in Cousin scholarship. Much contemporary scholarship—from Patrice Vermeren’s founding monograph (1995) to the recent research of Lucie Rey (2013) and Mario Meliadò (2019)—has described the intertwining of philosophical legitimacy and political authority out of which the “hegemony of Cousinianism” was constituted (Rey 2013: 29).6 That is, it has interrogated the theoretical interventions by means of which, after the July Revolution, Cousin assumed the philosopher-king’s throne. Moreover, there is also a minor strand of Cousin-scholarship—exemplified in the works of Pierre Macherey (1991) and Jean-Pierre Cotten (e.g., 1995)—that has focused instead on Cousin’s juvenilia from the end of the 1810s as part of a constellation of early spiritualist research. What is missing, however, is any developmental approach that links together these two strands of scholarship, any narrative of how the young Cousin of the 1810s became philosopher-king during the 1830s—and this gap is precisely what Antoine-­ Mahut has begun to fill and to which I want to make a small contribution in what follows with reference to Hegel.7 As Cotten put it, “Cousin is always a student in development” and this is particularly true of the 1820s: his contemporaries certainly recognised the extent to which he successively “tried on for size” different

 See Michel Espagne’s claim: “Victor Cousin merits to be rehabilitated, at least in his work prior to 1830” (1985: 274)—the work of Vermeren, Antoine-Mahut, Rey, etc., can be seen as a following through of this exhortation. 6  Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 7  One reason why the following is just a “small contribution” is, of course, that, by beginning in 1826, I exclude the very early Cousin from the scope of this chapter. This is partly because 1826 marks the date Cousin began publishing his work in any significant fashion and partly because, prior to 1819, i.e., prior to his historical turn, Cousin had not been particularly interested in the philosophy—history of philosophy relation. 5

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philosophical materials—Scottish common sense philosophy, Platonism, Cartesianism, Proclus and the Alexandrian School; in fact, such experiments with past materials is the basic operation of eclecticism itself. It is for this reason Lerminier will criticise Cousin for “easily quitting one beautiful theory for another he found more beautiful still” (1832: 75). To paraphrase Hegel on Schelling: during the 1820s, Cousin carried out his philosophical education in public—his position was not static, but Protean, a series of distinct “improvisations” (Lerminier 1832: 85). Hence, following Antoine-Mahut, my topic in this essay is “Cousin before Cousin”, the “second becoming” of his philosophical trajectory before authority and legitimacy defined it. I excavate some of the features of Cousin’s project—in their relation to Hegelianism—prior to its consecration as the official, institutional brand of French spiritualism after 1830, and I do so again following Antoine-­ Mahut’s suggestion that, in order to make sense of Cousin’s formation, one should look to his development between 1826—the moment at which he first places his historiography under the master-concept of “eclecticism” in the Preface to the first edition of Fragments philosophiques—and 1833, the moment at which he philosophically legitimates his new-found institutional power in the Preface to the second edition of Fragments philosophiques.

2.2 The Problem of Beginning in the History of Philosophy The question of the relation of philosophy to the history of philosophy is, at bottom, one that concerns the positing of pre-established normative principles in the history of philosophy. That is, it turns on whether (and how) to establish the principles by which the historian of philosophy judges and selects what is valuable in the historical material she encounters: does the historian of philosophy have need of prior philosophical commitments in order to do the history of philosophy well? And, of course, lurking behind this question is another more fundamental one: does the history of philosophy need to be normative in this way (i.e., discriminate between what is true and what is false) at all? Both Cousin and Hegel are keenly interested in this issue and, for the most part, it motivates their discussion of the relation of philosophy to its history. Cousin’s clearest statement on the above comes in response to a criticism that had been immediately raised against his eclectic methodology of 1826 and 1828. In 1833, he replies to an anonymous “fourth objection” to eclecticism as follows: Fourth objection.—Eclecticism is the absence of all system. Response.—Eclecticism is not the absence of all system; for it is the application of a system: it presupposes a system, it begins from a system. Indeed, to recollect and reunite the scattered truths in different systems, it must first separate them from the error with which they are mixed; to do so, one must be able to discern them and recognise them; but, to recognise that such an opinion is true or false, one must know oneself where error is and where

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D. Whistler truth is; thus one must be or believe oneself to be already in possession of the truth, and one must have a system to judge all systems. Eclecticism presupposes an already formed system, which it enriches and which it further illuminates. Thus, it is not the absence of all system. (1833: lvi)

Or, as Cousin had put it a couple of pages earlier, “Eclecticism presupposes a system which it uses as a point of departure and principle to orient itself in history” (1833: liv). There are a number of issues at stake in Cousin’s response to which I will return. But it is important to note, to begin, that in the 1840s and beyond the prior system referenced in the above quotation—that system which eclectic historiography presupposes—comes to be named spiritualism. In 1833, therefore, Cousin establishes a relation between eclecticism (history of philosophy) and spiritualism (philosophy) in which the latter names a prior foundational system of truths that is to be historically applied in eclectic practice—and it is this model for their interrelation which will remain, for the most part, his official, stable position after 1833. Two heuristic definitions are required at this point—those of eclecticism and spiritualism themselves. Prior to the 1840s, Cousin rarely distinguishes between the two terms, and ultimately what he has to say about spiritualism comprises little more than an enumeration of basic topics like “the spirituality of the soul, the freedom and responsibility of human actions, moral obligation, disinterested virtue, the dignity of justice, the beauty of charity” and the doctrine of a personal God (1860: iii–iv): they are, in his eyes, the eternal truths of common sense. More generally still, he sees spiritualist practice as the use of analytic psychology applied not merely to sensation or the operations of the mind as receptive of external data, but also to active, speculative principles inherent to thinking itself. What emerges in spiritualism is both a more complete conception of the laws of the human mind and a set of truths that have ontological and theological implications. Whether or not many later French spiritualists would immediately recognise themselves in this picture,8 Cousin’s spiritualism denotes a body of philosophical truths guaranteed by a psychological method that takes up a twofold position in his work: (1) as a particular historical moment in the post-Kantian development of philosophy and (2) as the definitive content of good philosophy—a content indeed that, post 1833, provides the secure ground for a subsequent eclectic approach to history. Spiritualism is a particular philosophical tradition that transcends itself to become the universal material of philosophy as such.9  Indeed, commentators often have difficulty incorporating Cousin into a narrative of “French spiritualism”, both because the young Cousin avoids the term and also because so much of the spiritualist tradition (e.g., Ravaisson) is constituted via a reaction against Cousin’s “half-spiritualism” (Ravaisson 2023: 32). See Ragghianti (1997: 77), Janicaud (1969: passim). 9  It is worth emphasising that in his earliest work Cousin uses the label “eclecticism” indiscriminately to refer to both an eclectic body of doctrines obtained through psychological analysis (an eclecticism of reason or, in Cousin’s own words, “an impartial eclecticism applied to facts of consciousness” [1833: 47]) and an eclectic body of doctrines obtained through historiographical erudition (an eclecticism of history). In fact, Ragghianti and Vermeren have recently argued that the former eclecticism is etymologically prior in Cousin’s writings, stemming from the influence 8

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In comparison to his remarks on spiritualism, the early Cousin has much to say about historiographical eclecticism, defined as something like a plundering of materials from the history of philosophy in order to effectuate intellectual peace.10 Cousin speaks of a “tolerance” and “universal sympathy” that lifts philosophy out of “all exclusive preoccupations, to embrace all elements of thought” (1991: 179). In eclecticism, all philosophy is “reconciled and reunited” (1991: 283). To quote Cousin once more, the objective of eclecticism is “to make [past] diverse systems successively more and more perfect, without managing to destroy any of them, by means of searching out and abstracting the portion of truth that each of them encloses and by which each of them is brother to all and the legitimate offspring of the human spirit” (1829b: xviii). Following broadly in the footsteps of J. J. Brucker and his Historia Critica Philosophiae, eclectic historiography aims to gather together every past truth without omission. Cousin’s 1833 response to the fourth objection rehearsed above is, therefore, one attempt to solve the problem of the grounding of his history of philosophy, i.e., to answer the question of how, if eclecticism is to be a discrete intellectual enterprise, it can discover in advance the foundational principles that will orient its investigation into the history of philosophy: it posits a prior justificatory discourse (spiritualism) that permits the history of philosophy to get started. Prior to 1833, Hegel was also thinking about the very same issue of the relation between philosophy and the history of philosophy in Berlin and articulates it in terms of a comparison between the impartiality of the historian of philosophy and that of the pure historian. He admits that the practice of the historian of philosophy “should itself entail impartiality”, but he refuses the idea that this is the kind of impartiality practised by the pure historian—“the man possessed of purely historical facts and who understands nothing of the thing itself”. Historians sacrifice philosophical understanding for historical accuracy: they describe “actions and events… without adding anything of their own to them; they display the thing itself without dragging it before their tribunal and judging it”. It is at this point—i.e., the appeal to “judgment”, a “tribunal” of reason and so the need for normative principles in the history of philosophy—that similarities between Cousin’ problematic in the “fourth objection” and Hegel’s concerns are clearest. Hegel continues, Even if the history of philosophy has to relate deeds [as historians do], nevertheless the first question is what is a deed in philosophy, i.e., whether something is philosophical or not, and what place each deed occupies? This question shows up the difference [between philosophy and history]. In history… the deed is placed directly before our minds; it is a fact. In philosophy the opposite is the case: What a deed is and what place is to be ascribed to it, that is the question. Hence the history of philosophy cannot be written without judgment and without a system. (1985a: 189–90) of Biran’s “proto-eclectic” project of reconciling mind and body (2018: 17, 31). Nevertheless, this does not alter the conceptual relation at stake here—that is, how eclecticism as psychology and eclecticism as historiography relate in Cousin. 10  Cousin writes thus of his initial deployment of eclectic practice: “I proposed to [philosophers] a peace treaty on the basis of reciprocal concessions. I pronounced it from that moment with the word eclecticism” (1829b: xvi).

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Unlike in other domains of history, the nature, structure and role of philosophical “deeds” in history is not immediately clear: “judgment” is always required, a preestablished “system” that constitutes the very plane of history that presents itself self-evidently to other historical disciplines.11 Hegel demands “that the historian of philosophy be a judge and not merely a chronicler” (Walsh 1965: 77). Beginning the history of philosophy requires a prior justificatory discourse that generates the necessary norms—and this is the philosophical “system” that informs the historian of philosophy’s “judgment” in sifting out what is valuable in philosophical history from what is not. Unlike the historian in other disciplines, the historian of philosophy cannot be impartial in the sense of withholding judgment or abstracting any previously held philosophical commitments; rather, the practice of history of philosophy must be informed by precisely such a foundational philosophical system. Just as for Cousin in 1833, for the Hegel of the Berlin lectures too, the history of philosophy can only emerge from an external ground.12 The problem that both Hegel and Cousin are confronting in these passages is but an extension of the problem of the beginning faced by all systematic philosophies— that of justifying their own grounds. It was a problem that had, indeed, plagued German Idealist thought over the preceding 40 years, from Jacobi’s critique of first principles, through the foundationalism-controversy of mid-1790s Jena, and into the opening pages of Hegel’s own Logik. Moreover, as with all these instantiations of the problem of the beginning, Cousin’s and Hegel’s versions can be helpfully analysed in terms of the “the problem of escaping the Agrippan trilemma” (Franks 2005: 10). That is, the systematic establishment of first principles to which Cousin and Hegel aspire in the history of philosophy seems possible in one of only three ways, all of which are open to sceptical attack. First, a systematiser can establish the grounds of her history of philosophy through assuming first principles without providing any discursive justification of them, because they seem self-evident, or acceptable to common sense, etc. Secondly, a systematiser can ground it by undertaking to justify her first principles, but of course this preliminary justification will in turn make use of principles in need of justification, and so on ad  infinitum. Thirdly, a systematiser could make recourse to circularity, by which the system  Compare in this regard Cousin’s insistence that the plane of philosophical history that appears in his works is “natural and frank” in comparison to Degérando’s artificiality (1825: 437–8; see Whistler 2019). 12  The similarities with Cousin’s above position are even more palpable in Walsh’s reconstruction of this passage: “To engage in the history of philosophy is thus to philosophize. But even if this argument is granted the history of philosophy seems to remain an optional extra for the philosopher. We can see this if we ask the question: which comes first, philosophy or the history of philosophy? Hegel’s official answer to this is that philosophy comes first, since in order to obtain a knowledge of its progress as the development of the Idea in the empirical, external form in which philosophy appears in history, a corresponding knowledge of the Idea is absolutely essential. We could not begin to write the history of philosophy unless we knew what to look for in the works of previous philosophers, and we could not know what to look for without having independent philosophical knowledge” (1965: 74–5). 11

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proves itself. These are seemingly the only three options open to a philosopher beginning a system—circularity, infinite regress, or the positing of an ungrounded first principle—and all three can of course be subjected to persuasive sceptical criticism. According to this schema, then, Cousin and Hegel had three options when attempting to establish the criteria by which the history of philosophy discriminates between what is true and what is false in past philosophies: either by immediately positing these criteria, or by justifying them by means of an appeal to the results of the history of philosophy itself (i.e. by means of a circular argument) or by making recourse to a prior justificatory apparatus to prove them. In the passages above, Hegel and Cousin explicitly take up the third option: to use a pre-established philosophical system as a prior discourse through which to securely establish the selection criteria needed by the historian of philosophy.13 However, what it is crucial to note here—and the basis for the rest of this chapter—is that both Hegel and Cousin on occasion refuse this third option of grounding the history of philosophy in a prior philosophical system. There are moments in their writings—and particularly in Cousin’s pre-1833 publications— where they take a different path in attempting to make sense of the philosophy-history of philosophy relation. It is, moreover, precisely at this juncture we return to the Cousino-Hegelian thesis of the identity of philosophy and the history of philosophy. For all three of the above justificatory strategies for grounding the history of philosophy result in some kind of identity between philosophy and the history of philosophy. For example, a history of philosophy that generates its own philosophical principles through a virtuous circle evidently establishes truths in line with its own findings. But it is also the case that a history of philosophy practised on the basis of prior philosophical commitments shapes this history according to its own commitments, such that philosophical history ends up resembling the system with which one began. This is the nub of my argument: the identity of philosophy and the history of philosophy can be said in many ways, it can mean many different things, and when Cousin and Hegel propose this thesis, they do not necessarily mean the same thing each time. And it is important to bring to the surface the diversity—i.e., the alternatives—concealed beneath this general claim to the identity of philosophy and the history of philosophy.14 In the rest of the paper, therefore, I want to consider such alternatives as they appear, first, in Hegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy and then in Cousin’s pre-1833 work. Hegel’s responses to this issue illuminate, I argue, Cousin’s

 Of course, the later Cousin’s grounding strategy raises its own issues concerning how spiritualism will in turn ward off infinite regress by justifying its own first principles, but that need not detain us here (particularly as spiritualist Cartesianism has as good a claim as most philosophical positions to self-evident foundations). 14  Bellantone is the commentator on Cousin most alive to this difficulty (although he is quick to close down some of the more interesting alternatives I explore below): “We must attribute to Cousin the sense to not understand this identity in a purely theoretical and speculative sense. If he had, this identity would have merely been a vicious circle” (2011: 1.29). 13

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evolution. To put it another way, my ultimate concern is to get at—through comparison with Hegel—the prehistory to Cousin’s 1833 model described above for the eclecticism-spiritualism relation; that is, the various other ways Cousin comes to conceive of such a relation prior to this date. In so doing, I aim to describe more generally the various roles that Cousin assigns to history of philosophy (i.e., eclecticism) between the two initial editions of Fragments philosophiques (1826 and 1833), and to present thereby a taxonomy of different possible models for philosophy’s relation to its history that are still significant for contemporary debates concerning the role and value of history of philosophy.

2.3 Hegel on the Identity of Philosophy and the History of Philosophy Before looking in detail at the various ways in which Cousin describes the identity of philosophy and the history of philosophy, I want to provide a brief sketch of Hegel’s elucidations of it. Like Cousin, Hegel supplies a number of models for making sense of such an identity.15 Hegel’s initial 1816 Heidelberg lectures on the history of philosophy are the most radical in this regard. The very introduction to the lecture course is motivated by the question of “the relation of history to philosophy itself” (1985a: 5), and Hegel goes on to emphasise how important this introductory task is, for it “premise[s] the conception of philosophy” and “in no science is it so necessary as in the history of philosophy to provide an introduction and first to lay down what the topic is… To proceed without knowing what it is would be to have no other guidance” (1985a: 7). This allusion to presupposing a foundational conception of philosophy that will “guide” the historian of philosophy looks as if Hegel is here offering another version of the model for the philosophy-history of philosophy relation described in the previous section. However, “the conception of philosophy” he here sketches is not one imported from a pre-established system, but one that is constituted out of the very practice of history of philosophy itself. Hegel continues, If the true conception of philosophy is to be established in a scientific, and not in an arbitrary, way, then its historical treatment is philosophy itself, since… it is only its entire [historical] treatment which is the proof, and, we may say indeed, the discovery, of that conception [of philosophy] which is essentially a result of that whole course of [historical] treatment… What can be said in this introduction is not so much something to be made out in advance but rather something which can be justified and proved solely by the treatment of the history itself. (1985a: 7–8)

 In this cursory section, I focus solely on Hegel’s various lecture courses on the history of philosophy, and so leave aside their relationship to the final sections of the Enzyklopädie—as well as, more generally, to the controversial question of the “place for the history of philosophy within the Hegelian system” (Thompson 2012; see Beiser 1995: xxii). As a result, it is far beyond the scope of this chapter to investigate how Hegelian philosophy as a whole reconciles historicity with systematicity. 15

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Hegel goes on to note that his “preliminary explanations” of philosophical concepts “are essentially results” of the entire investigation (1985a: 8). He therefore gestures towards a virtuous circle by which the normative principles that orient the historian philosophy are proven by the history itself. The historian of philosophy only justifies her philosophical commitments through the history of philosophy she constructs. This is a very different way of establishing the identity of philosophy and the history of philosophy from those examined in the previous section. Hegel’s later Berlin courses on the history of philosophy, delivered during the 1820s, row back on this early affirmation of circularity.16 Again, Hegel stresses the importance of a philosophical introduction (“We could not begin without an introduction” [1985a: 53]) to “adduce a series of definitions [and] premise a few entirely universal and abstract conceptions” that will orient and shape the philosophical history of the lectures. He is equally clear that the introduction can merely “presuppose” these conceptions without their being “proved or treated here logically, philosophically or speculatively”. Thus, the question once more arises as to whence the justification for these preliminary principles comes, and the later Hegel provides a slightly different set of answers to the one he had given in Heidelberg.

2.3.1 Application The most common way the later Hegel justifies the preliminary principles that shape the history of philosophy is by referencing other parts of his system, particularly the Logic. These are principles borrowed from elsewhere where they have already received their proper philosophical justification. The history of philosophy thus function as an application of a pre-established system. For example, Hegel writes that his lectures can only “hint” at a justification of its principles, but lack the “logical strictness” found elsewhere in his philosophy (1985a: 108).

2.3.2 Mirroring A related way in which Hegel articulates the philosophy-history of philosophy relation in his Berlin lectures is in terms of a logic of manifestation, in which pure philosophical concepts are represented, mirrored or revealed in history. The history of philosophy “display[s] philosophy in the shape of time” (1985a: 25)—and so Hegel establishes a contrast between, on the one hand, “the fundamental concepts… treated purely as what they are in themselves” in the Logik and, on the other hand, the concepts as they appear as “historical facts” (1985a: 22). The history of philosophy is “a picture” of such categories (1985a: 78), “a mirror of philosophy” (1985a: 108). And so, the task of the historian of philosophy is “to discern these pure concepts within the historical form” (1985a: 22). 16

 For some of the reasons why Hegel retreats from circularity, see Nuzzo (2012: 24).

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2.3.3 External Justification According to the later Hegel, the history of philosophy also serves as an external proof of the truths established philosophically elsewhere in his system. They constitute an “empirical proof” or an “example” of what is demonstrated logically in the Enzyklopädie (for example) (1985a: 87–8, 94). The history of philosophy is rendered subordinate to philosophy proper: it provides an empirical supplement which can lay claim to an additional, weaker kind of demonstrative certainty than the speculative proofs found elsewhere in Hegel’s system.

2.3.4 Correlation Finally, Hegel also speaks of the philosophy-history of philosophy relation in terms of a double method, i.e., as two independent but correlated ways of approaching the same truths. In particular, history of philosophy and philosophical logic both have something distinctive to say about the truth of “emergence”: while demonstrating emergence is “the task and business of Logic”, “the other method”—the one which considers emergence “in time, as happening at these particular places, in this or that people, under these political circumstances and under these complications thence arising, in short in this empirical form”—is valuable too (1985a: 22). In this vein, Thompson reads Hegel as establishing a parallelism between logical proof and the “experimental proof” of the history of philosophy which functions as “a testing and validation of the systematicity of reason precisely in the domain of representation, in the order of time” (2012: 179–80). There are two ways to get at this truth: the way of logic which “works through the concept of the thing” and the ways of history of philosophy which shows that truth “appears and is proved in the real world too” (1985a: 22). Nuzzo dubs it “the parallelism principle” at work in the lectures (2003: 26–7).17 My point is not to suggest that Hegel’s various models are somehow inconsistent or irreconcilable; they are evidently closely related. Rather, my point is that Hegel’s various (minimally different) models allow for a number of ways to articulate philosophy’s relationship to its history. Whatever their ultimate unity, they still talk about this relationship in (at least, superficially) different ways, and what is crucial for my purposes is that, despite their differences, each of these models ultimately establishes the identity of philosophy and history of philosophy. No matter whether the history of philosophy is an application, mirror-image, empirical proof or (as in the Heidelberg lectures) generator of philosophical truth, some kind of identity is established. To speak of an identity between philosophy and history of philosophy is therefore not to say very much; it is to underdetermine their exact relationship. And Cousin appears to learn this lesson from Hegel, for we will discover the same proliferation of ways of articulating this identity in Cousin’s early work too.

17

 Jaeschke similarly speaks of the “logico-historical parallelism” of the lectures (2013: 195).

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2.4 Cousin’s “Official” Position To begin to see how Cousin’s claims converge with Hegel’s, I want to return to Cousin’s response to the “fourth objection” to eclecticism excerpted above. Here Cousin bluntly proposes what will become his official model for the eclecticism-­spiritualism relation: “Eclecticism… is the application of a system: it presupposes a system and begins from a system” (1833: lvi). The official status of this position is clearest in Cousin’s 1853 “manual”, the rewritten Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien, where the role of spiritualism in grounding, guiding and controlling eclecticism is laid out clearly: There is something which we place still higher than the history of philosophy—philosophy itself. The history of philosophy does not carry its clarity within itself, and it is not its own end. It is true, of course, that it is highly useful and good to discern in each system what is true and what is false… But it is evident that it must already know what the truth is to be able to recognise it elsewhere and to distinguish it from the error mixed up with it. And from this it follows that the critique of systems almost demands a system, and that the history of philosophy is forced to borrow its illumination from philosophy.

Cousin concludes that philosophy is therefore “the torch of the history of philosophy” and, conversely, history of philosophy is but “an instrument” of philosophy (1860: 14–15)—or, as he puts it a few pages earlier, “Eclecticism is one of the most important and most useful applications of the philosophy we profess”, but the name for this philosophy itself—“our true doctrine”—is “spiritualism” (1860: iii). Eclecticism (as history of philosophy) is neither absolute nor self-sufficient, but rather requires the supplement of spiritualism (as philosophy itself). Presumably Cousin’s point is that a truth generated through spiritualist introspective insight (e.g., that the contents of consciousness that pertain to volition are irreducible to sense data) orients any judgment about past philosophies: insofar as a past philosophy reaffirms such an already-justified truth, it is to be valued; insofar as it does not, it is to be discarded as error on the rubbish pile of history. According to the post-1833 position, then, eclectic historiography is ultimately superfluous in securing philosophical truth, a secondary enterprise. As Rey puts it, at this period, truths of reason “are presented apart, before the historical chapters, which indicates the possibility of deducing them without any reference to history” (2013: 116). Indeed, she continues, “Psychology… alone permits the decryption of the labyrinth of the history of philosophy” (2013: 121). While Cousin does perhaps not go that far in the 1833 Preface itself, he does insist that spiritualist psychology constitutes “the first part of philosophy” (1833: ix) and results in “a system which, by patient and profound observation, and induction both vast and scrupulous, embrace[s] all elements of consciousness and of reality”. Thus, “when [spiritualism] turns its gaze to history, wherever it looks it will not meet with one system of any importance in which it does not find some element of itself” (1833: liii). The philosopher is already “in possession of the truth” when she begins, belatedly, to start examining philosophy’s own history—and such historiography will merely “rediscover fragments” of these already-known truths “here and there in every system” (1833: liv). As Cousin continues, “Eclecticism starts from a philosophy and it tends, by way of history [of philosophy], to the living demonstration of this philosophy” (1833: liv).

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There are many reasons why Cousin is brought to insist so explicitly on the spiritualist foundations of eclecticism in 1833. For example, it is a way of countering the charges of “Germanism” being made against him, i.e. the criticism that, as he himself puts it earlier in the Preface, “all of [my philosophy] is only an importation of German philosophy… as if I had introduced a foreigner into the heart of my country” (1833: xxx)—the criticism that he had betrayed French philosophical traditions by importing Idealist models of speculation from Germany. One of his responses to this charge of Germanism is to showcase his allegiance to a particularly French brand of philosophising, which, when properly practiced, goes under the name of “spiritualism”. Cousin’s insistence on the priority of spiritualism—and eclecticism’s utter dependence on it—occurs, then, as part of a defence of the properly French essence of his thinking: he positions himself as heir to the spiritualist philosophies of Maine de Biran and ultimately Descartes. To ground eclecticism on a spiritualist system is therefore to be a philosophical patriot.18 However, more importantly for present purposes, there is also a conceptual reason why Cousin argues for the priority of the spiritualist system over eclecticism. And this is the very argument he provides in his 1833 response to the “fourth objection”: if history of philosophy is to value some elements of the past more highly than others—for whatever reason—then some criteria for determining what is to be selected as valuable are required. This, in turn, means that some prior discourse is necessary to determine and justify these criteria: to repeat Cousin’s words, “To recollect and reunite the scattered truths in different systems… one must be able to discern them and recognise them”, i.e., “one must know oneself where error is and where truth is; thus one must be or believe oneself to be already in possession of the truth, and one must have a system to judge all systems”. Hence, eclectic historiography necessarily presupposes a prior determination of what is valuable—and, for Cousin in 1833, this presupposition is cashed out as a foundational adherence to the spiritualist system: “Eclecticism presupposes an already formed system”—spiritualist truths of reason provide the criteria that guide eclecticism’s discovery of truths in history. There is, then, seemingly good philosophical reason for Cousin’s relegation of eclecticism to a derivative, applied science. Vermeren paraphrases the argument thus, “The pure eclectic position is untenable since it supplies no criteria to distinguish between the true and the false in past philosophies” (1995: 25). Criteria are needed to begin eclectic historiography, and so a spiritualist ground is necessary to justify them in advance. Rey reconstructs the argument in more detail: The idea that eclecticism is a kind of pure recollection and that it rests on no prior principle is certainly not ever-present [in Cousin’s oeuvre]. We must begin by remarking that Cousin’s texts are not absolutely univocal on this subject… That is, if, in [some early] texts, Cousin seems to affirm the strictly compositional character of this doctrine, this quickly changes. In other words, the reduction of philosophy to the history of philosophy, articulated very clearly in [some early] texts, is not a constant motif in Cousin’s work, and does not appear

 Closely related is a biographical reason for Cousin’s adherence to this “official” position: Cousin understands his own career as beginning with psychological investigations in 1816–17, before casting out to find historical proofs of them later in the decade. 18

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as an absolute principle of his philosophy. Besides, simple good sense should make us interrogate the possibility of such a reduction of philosophy to the history of philosophy as soon as it is a question not only of rereading the philosophies of the past, but of producing a new synthesis out of past doctrines. That is, eclecticism is not the totality of past philosophies placed end to end: it supposes a conciliation of contrary principles founded on a selection. In this sense, eclecticism does not merely consist in a report, but emerges out of a certain number of philosophical choices, contrary to what Cousin sometimes affirms. Yet, to choose, there must be a criterion. And such a criterion can be found only in a doctrine prior to eclecticism which makes it possible. (2013: 140–1)

Rey’s paraphrase is central to my purposes, since it introduces the suggestion (that I will be pursuing in what follows) of a split between Cousin’s “official” post-1833 position (with its argument for the necessary relegation of eclecticism to a derivative science) and earlier claims about eclecticism that hint at alternative models. According to Rey, Cousin’s earlier writings provide glimpses of an eclecticism untethered from its moorings in spiritualist psychological analysis—an eclecticism without spiritualism. I return to this idea of an eclectic system liberated entirely from spiritualism later in the chapter. For now, it is worth analysing more carefully the arguments given above for Cousin’s “official” position—that is, the argument that seemingly compels Cousin to ground eclecticism in a more fundamental system (spiritualism). Once more, the argument proceeds as follows: eclecticism needs to distinguish those elements of past philosophies that it accepts as true from those that it excludes from the system as false. This is the very meaning of the term eklektikos, he who chooses. And to make such choices and distinctions, criteria or norms are needed.19 Eclecticism is therefore a normative enterprise. However, if eclecticism has no prior ground, if—to speak in a slightly different idiom—this eclectic history of philosophy is conceived as “first philosophy”, then there seems to be no means of generating the norms necessary for eclecticism to get started. To put it bluntly: a normative history of philosophy needs to get its norms from somewhere else (i.e., from spiritualism).20  Much like Collingwood’s “criterion of historical truth” (1994: 238).  It might be felt that Cousin’s emphasis on method solves the problem, for his sole prior commitment is a methodological one, i.e., the experimental method of observation. On this line of argument, there is no distinction between a spiritualist system and eclectic historiography, but merely Cousinian method applied successively in distinct domains. Of course, Cousin does indeed premise his philosophical project on an overarching methodological commitment; he writes, for example, in the 1826 Preface to Fragments philosophiques that “my first concern was method. A system is scarcely more than a method applied to certain objects. Nothing is more important than recognising straightaway and determining the method one wants to use… The method of observation is good in itself” (1833: 1–2, 8). And he continues in 1833, “Here as elsewhere, as everywhere, as always, I pronounce myself for that method which places the point of departure of all healthy philosophy in the study of human nature and therefore in observation” (1833: vi). Likewise, he does sometimes speak of the eclecticism-spiritualism relation in terms of a successive application of method, i.e., “observation applied first to human nature and then transported into history” (1829a: 170). Nevertheless, this line of argument less solves the problem than defers it, for the question still arises as to the sequence by which method is applied—put bluntly: why is observation necessarily “applied first to human nature” and only “then transported into history”? 19 20

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So, the argument for Cousin’s “official” position turns on the consideration of two claims that it supposes cannot both be true on pain of incoherence: 1 . History of philosophy is a normative enterprise; 2. History of philosophy is first philosophy, i.e., has no prior doctrinal ground. Moreover, the implication of Rey’s reconstruction is that, prior to 1833, the early Cousin may sometimes be committed to both these claims and that this is a problem. He thus needs to give up on one of them, and his salvation is to be found in the assertion made from 1833 onwards that eclecticism is merely an application of spiritualism. With it, Cousin rejects the second claim (that history of philosophy is first philosophy) and so frees himself from the incoherence that had plagued his earlier thinking. For, from 1833 onwards, spiritualist psychology first determines what is true, and the eclectic investigation into the history of philosophy subsequently makes use of these pre-established truths as a guide to sift out what is valuable and what is not from past philosophies. There is, however, something hasty going on here, especially when it comes to the above argument’s dismissal of Cousin’s work prior to 1833 as incoherent. For example, it is not clear that the early Cousin is committed to both the claims rehearsed above, particularly the first claim (this is precisely what Rey is hinting at in her above characterisation of the pre-1833 Cousin). Sometimes, it seems, Cousin envisages eclecticism as a purely descriptive enterprise, accepting everything into the system without discrimination or criticism, i.e., without norms. Moreover (and, this time, pace Rey), it is also not immediately clear that commitment to both these claims necessarily leads to incoherence. This is precisely what the above analysis of the Agrippan trilemma in the historiography of philosophy demonstrated. The point is that, if Cousin were ever (i.e., before 1833) to choose another strategy for grounding the foundational norms of eclecticism, this would not necessarily make his position incoherent. Or to put it differently: it is not necessarily the case that Cousin’s 1833 solution to the problem of the eclectic—spiritualism relation is a step forward or mark of progress in his thinking; instead, it should be interpreted as just another way of responding to the sceptical Agrippan trilemma that threatens all attempts to establish systematic grounds.

2.5 A Provisional Taxonomy of the Eclecticism-­Spiritualism Relation There are many ways in which the identity of philosophy and the history of philosophy is modelled in Cousin’s writings during the 1820s, and, in this section, I want to mirror my description of the various models proposed in Hegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy with a corresponding treatment of Cousin’s writings of the

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period. That is, it is by turning more explicitly to the various ways in which the eclecticism—spiritualism relation is described in Cousin’s writings between 1826 and 1833 that the experimental variety gestured at above becomes truly manifest. In what follows, I provide an indicative sketch of some of the many ways of constituting the identity of philosophy and the history of philosophy that Cousin flirts with during these years.

2.5.1 Application It is important to make clear that the “official” position—that eclecticism is an unsystematic application of prior spiritualist truths of reason—can be found in Cousin’s earlier work, alongside a range of other options. It does not appear in many of the major publications of the period but does dominate an 1830 review of a rival eclectic work by the Louvain professor, Frédéric de Reiffenberg. This review will go on to be included in the 1838 “fragment”, De la philosophie en Belgique, and will prove a particularly significant articulation of the “official” position for Cousin, cited in later reprintings of the Preface to the second edition of Fragments philosophiques as well as the 1853 rewrite of Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien. As such, one here finds Cousin setting out in detail his argument for the “official” position: One must distinguish truths from the errors that surround them; one must be able to recognise that these truths are truths and not errors; and one cannot do this without a measure of appreciation, a principle of critique, without knowing what is true and what is false in itself; and one can know this only inasmuch as one has oneself made a sufficient study of the philosophical problems of human nature, the basis of its faculties and their laws. It is when a scientific, patient and profound analysis has put us in possession of the real elements and all the real elements of humanity, that, addressing ourselves to philosophical systems, and studying them with the same care that we have put to study philosophical questions, we can recognise what these systems possess and what they lack. (1830: 232–3; 1838: 2.37–8)

Cousin becomes even more explicit as the passage continues: “The historical analyses of systems” are to be “preceded by scientific [i.e., psychological] analysis”, for without such a prior “guide and flame”, “they [would] lose themselves in shadows” (1830: 233; 1838: 2.38). The discovery of truths of history presupposes principles already justified by an initial psychological system. In other words, eclecticism has an external ground in spiritualism. The “official” position also appears fleetingly in Cousin’s 1829 lecture course on the history of eighteenth-century philosophy. Indeed, he is, briefly, quite explicit, “It is impossible to orient oneself in the history of philosophy if one is not more or less a philosopher, and philosophy is the true light of history of philosophy” (1829a: 170). That is, philosophical analysis of psychological facts is the presupposition of any investigation into the history of philosophy, for it alone can provide orientation.

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2.5.2 Mirroring In line with Hegel’s lectures, another model for articulating the identity of philosophy and the history of philosophy is that which sees in philosophical analysis an original truth subsequently made manifest in historical time. This position is clearest in Cousin’s 1829 lectures on the history of eighteenth-century philosophy which treat philosophical history as a “living image of thinking”. He thereby contrasts “the soul” of philosophy to its embodiment in history (1829a: 47–8), i.e., on the one hand, there are philosophy’s “immortal elements which belong to the human spirit and are in conformity with all countries and all centuries” and, on the other, there are the external forms they take on at specific moments in history (1829a: 4). And this model informs the very structure of the lecture course itself: each of the early lectures begins with a “principle” generated out of psychological analysis of “the human mind” (1829a: 170), and then discerns this principle in the development of philosophical systems in history. For instance, Lecture Three takes the operations of analysis and synthesis as a guiding principle for making sense of modern philosophical history and Lecture Four identifies “the roots of philosophical systems… in the very nature of the human mind”—as innate tendencies of thinking—before then, in subsequent lectures, structuring the entire field of the history of philosophy in terms of their successive appearance as perennial philosophical constants.21 Cousin therefore claims to have “derive[d] the history of philosophy from its highest and most certain source” (1829a: 136). In other words, the results of spiritualist introspection here function as templates for eclectic investigation into history.22

2.5.3 External Justification A related but ultimately distinct model is given in the Preface to the first edition of Fragments philosophiques. Here, as in the 1833 Preface, Cousin does conceive of spiritualism as prior and external to the practice of eclectic historiography; however, what is different is that, in the earlier text, eclecticism does not relate to this prior system as its application, but rather as its confirmation—its “empirical proof”, in Hegel’s phrase. The difference is significant: rather than applying an already fully justified body of truths to history, eclecticism is now envisaged as itself providing  He writes, “Such are basically the most general operations of reflections. Developed in time and centuries, they engender four elementary systems which represent and contain the entire history of philosophy” (1829a: 164). 22  A similar position is set out at the opening to Cousin’s “Essai d’une classification des questions et des écoles philosophiques”, where “a very few general problems” accessed through metaphysical analysis are made manifest in the multitude of books the philosopher encounters (1833: 313–4). 21

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some of the requisite justification for these truths. In other words, spiritualism requires eclecticism as a necessary supplement in order to become a fully cogent system. As in 1833, it is the case that “psychology is the condition and vestibule of philosophy” and that what matters is the “system” emergent out of thorough application of the psychological method (1833: 12, 47); but, in the apologia sua vita by which Cousin structures the Preface of 1826, the truth of this system was confirmed by means of the historiographical research he undertook after terminating his psychological investigations in 1818. From 1819 onwards, “I quitted speculation for some time, or rather I pursued and realised it by applying more specifically what I had already done to the history of philosophy”. However, Cousin continues, the historiographical research he has undertaken has ended up as something more than just the application of earlier speculation; its ultimate purpose now consists in “demonstrating this system by the entire history of philosophy” (1833: 48). The system that Cousin propounds is therefore not merely a psychological one, but is instead “a genuine historical, universal and precisely all-encompassing system” (1833: 48): eclecticism is not merely the application of the system, but itself forms part of it. The system has become historical—or at the very least, it now possesses a historical justification.

2.5.4 Internal Justification The “external justification” model is further radicalised in Cousin’s 1828 lecture course. Here eclectic history of philosophy is no longer understood as a secondary, distinct enterprise to spiritualist “philosophy proper”, but rather as an intrinsic part of philosophy. Spiritualism explicitly requires eclecticism as an internal component of its justificatory procedure in order to complete itself. The former “is the sole possible point of departure”, but it is only “renewed” by virtue of mediation through the latter (1991: 146, 349). Hence, the complete description of philosophical history elaborates psychological principles: “The theatre of history produces on a grand scale what has occurred in miniature in the limited theatre of individual consciousness” (1991: 139–40, 144). History possesses the proofs for principles discovered in the mind. And this results in Cousin’s famed remarks on the identity of philosophy and the history of philosophy: Once everything is developed in history in a reasonable manner, then it follows that after having begun with philosophy, we will finish once more with philosophy, and thus we will arrive at the identity of philosophy and history of philosophy. The history of human reason […] this will be […] philosophy in its interior development. (1991: 103–4)

In other words, philosophy must pass through an essential moment of historiography in order to perfect itself. Eclecticism is thereby absorbed into dialectical identity with philosophy itself. Contra the “official” position, eclecticism is, on this model, both a part of “first philosophy” and also a normative enterprise.

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2.5.5 Correlation At times during the 1828 lecture course this identity is presented even more strongly as the correlation of two co-primary and equally well-grounded enterprises—as, that is, something like Hegel’s “double method” described above. Spiritualist philosophy and eclectic history of philosophy uncover the same truths independently of one another—one through psychological analysis, the other through historiographical erudition. However, the correspondences between these two sets of truths mutually reinforce the certainty of the whole. Each half of philosophy achieves full validity through the other. Something like this is indicated when Cousin speaks of his method as “the identity of psychology and history” (1991: 70), or when he writes of his “realised system” as “the alliance of the ideal and the real” (1991: 103). In Gueroult’s words, “There is no longer rigid deduction of history from a definitively established system, but a reciprocal correction of two investigations in view of a common approximation” (1984: 718).23 Once again, in contrast to the “official” position, eclectic history of philosophy here becomes both first philosophy and normative.24

2.5.6 First Principles Elsewhere in Cousin’s work of the period, numerous criteria for good eclectic historiography are introduced without obvious grounding in any prior spiritualist reasoning. To take one more example from the 1828 lecture course, Cousin asserts in passing that what is true in the history of philosophy is what has lasted, whereas the false is what has disappeared from view (“It belongs only to what is true to subsist”

 This is very different from Bellantone’s interpretation which encloses Cousin’s thesis exclusively within some variant of the official position: “What Cousin sought in the history of philosophy was nothing but a confirmation of his theoretical positions”, such that it “takes a secondary, propaedeutic role” (2011: 1.99–100). Pertinently for my project in this chapter, Bellantone explicitly contrasts this closed Cousinian conclusion to the diversity of ways in which the Hegelian identity can be interpreted: “In general, one can say that if one reads the Vorlesungen on the history of philosophy and on the philosophy of history from the Hegel of the Logik, it will be a matter of recognising in history solely a manifestation of an ordo idearum already established; but, on the contrary, if one reads Hegel’s theory of historicity from the Phänomenologie, the priority could be reversed and then history, including its categories, will become the fruit of an internal movement of becoming, a self-movement. Cousin, faithful to his reading of Hegel from Plato and Neoplatonism, offers us a reading of the first type” (2011: 1.97). I am in the process of arguing, on the contrary, that Cousin’s stance on the identity of philosophy and the history of philosophy shares—and even radicalises—this Hegelian ambivalence. 24  It is interesting to contrast this parallelism position set out in the 1828 lectures with Cousin’s critique of Degérando for separating historical narrative and rational evaluation into parallel tasks (1825: 436)—Degérando pulls apart the historical and the philosophical in a way that Cousin flirts with but ultimately recoils from. 23

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[1991: 44]). There is no obvious reason to think that such a norm has been derived from prior psychological analysis; indeed, justification through analytic psychology seems implausible. Instead, Cousin’s determination of this principle seems better explained in terms of the two other options on the Agrippan trilemma—that is, in lieu of external preliminary justification through a spiritualist system, he seems to be either immediately asserting this principle as self-evident or deriving it retroactively (in some kind of virtuous circle) from eclectic practice itself (e.g., history of philosophy should talk about what it has talked about most). Whichever option lies behind Cousin’s stipulation of this criterion (and others like it), the point is that there emerges here an explicit alternative on the Agrippan schema to the “official” position’s reliance on a preliminary justification for the determination of norms; indeed, criteria like the above seem to be produced completely independently of any spiritualist system. The latter three models in the above taxonomy belie—in related, if distinct ways—the “official” position’s insistence that it is incoherent to claim both that eclecticism is first philosophy and that it is normative. On the latter three models (“internal justification”, “correlation” and “first principles”), eclecticism is both normative and—in part, at least—first philosophy. In the next section, I turn to one final model for the eclecticism—spiritualism relation in Cousin’s early work, one that is indeed more radical than any of the above in its outright rejection of the normative nature of eclectic historiography and thus of any relation of eclecticism to spiritualism whatsoever. Such descriptive eclecticism—an eclecticism without spiritualism—is first philosophy without being normative. This is a way of grounding history of philosophy that is not to be found in Hegel’s lectures and so fleetingly goes beyond any obvious Hegelian influence on the thesis of the identity of philosophy and the history of philosophy.

2.6 Descriptive Eclecticism The above taxonomy puts into question the idea that the pre-1833 Cousin’s frequent attempts to establish a normative history of philosophy as first philosophy are necessarily incoherent. There is also, though, reason to believe that the early Cousin is in fact not always attempting to establish such a normative history of philosophy as first philosophy. On the contrary, he sometimes seems to be intending a historiography of philosophy without norms. Rey indicates this when, as we saw, she claims that, in Cousin’s pre-1833 work, there is present an “idea that eclecticism is a kind of pure recollection and that it rests on no prior principle”, an idea that eclecticism has a “strictly compositional character”, such that it ends up being “the totality of past philosophies placed end to end”. Hence, Cousin himself claims that, in “true philosophy”, “nothing is excluded, everything is accepted, everything is comprehended” (1991: 38), and that his “only aim is to […] accept everything and reconcile everything” (1991: 345). This is a philosophy of absolute reconciliation.

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And yet, although he hints at an eclecticism without norms during this period, Cousin is also quick to condemn such a project of descriptive eclecticism under the name of “syncretism”. Syncretism denotes an indiscriminate eclectic practice, one that appropriates everything without any regard for its value. Indeed, Cousin often legitimises his own eclecticism by distinguishing it from a supposedly absurd syncretic extreme, from which discrimination, judgment and thus value are evacuated. For example, in the 1833 Preface itself, he writes in response to “the first objection” (i.e., the objection that “eclecticism is a syncretism which mixes together all systems”): “Eclecticism is not syncretism; the one is even the opposite of the other” (1833: lv). Indeed, Cousin asks rhetorically, Is it even possible to have seen in eclecticism just a blind syncretism, mixing all systems together, approving of everything and confounding the true and the false, the good and the bad—a new fatalism, the dream of a sick mind who asks for a system from history, instead of being able to produce one from it? (1833: liv-lv)

Even in earlier texts, Cousin still rejects syncretism’s “impartiality [as] weakness and impotence” and its “arbitrary juxtaposition” of materials (1830: 233). Nevertheless, descriptive eclecticism still provides an ideal in Cousin’s early work: an infinitely-extended acceptance of all truths into a reconciled whole, a becoming-­ absolute of the history of philosophy. Thus, while Cousin can be critical of syncretism, there is also at the same time a syncretic impulse in his philosophising. He is both attracted and repulsed by this “hallucinatory double” (Mélès 2016: 162). Such a syncretic eclecticism would indiscriminately discover truth everywhere, and so would be indifferent to the value of what is appropriated. No criteria or norms would be required at any point. In other words, this eclecticism-without-­ spiritualism would lay claim to be a truly absolute historical system, one that encompasses everything, absorbing all traditions, all forms from all epochs. There is nothing that would escape the absolute eclectic gaze; nothing that might not potentially be appropriated into the system. The eclectic would no longer have to worry about selection and discrimination; instead, descriptive eclecticism would be a practice of universality without limit. As Cousin puts it in 1826: Each [historical] system is not false but incomplete; hence, it follows that in reuniting all the incomplete systems one would have a complete philosophy, adequate to the totality of consciousness. This would be a genuine historical system that is both universal and precise. […] It would encompass everything and reach infinity. (1833: 48)

It is this idea of “reaching infinity” through maximal systematic extensity that would motivate such an eclecticism-without-spiritualism, absorbing everything into the system, such that it engulfs all past philosophies without exception and without remainder. Moreover, such a purely descriptive eclecticism—however hard it might be to implement—would do away with the problems of the Agrippan trilemma rehearsed earlier, problems that are due to the supposed normative nature of Cousinian eclecticism. In so doing, any difficulty with considering history of philosophy as first philosophy would also evaporate.

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2.7 Conclusions Hegel’s example is a helpful one for thinking about Cousin’s various experiments with the eclecticism—spiritualism relationship. Unsurprisingly considering Cousin’s purported reliance on Hegel, both of them perform a similar gesture: they might consistently affirm the identity of philosophy and the history of philosophy, but they do so in various ways. Indeed, the similarity found between their various models suggests, once more, that Cousin had read Hegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy carefully: both Hegel and Cousin make use of the concepts and images of application, proof, representation and “double method” to think about the ways in which philosophical argument and introspection orient the practices of the historian of philosophy. One model not found in Hegel, however, is that of a history of philosophy that does away with preliminary normative principles altogether. Cousin’s early writings seem, on occasion, to point fleetingly in the direction of such a descriptive eclecticism, and, when they do, they are not necessarily to be written off as aberrations from the path to the true Cousinian position in which spiritualism acts as guarantor, ground and guide for all eclectic investigation. This is especially true since such descriptive eclecticism does away with many of the sceptical problems that beset the determination of norms within an eclectic system. Indeed, one of the key claims informing my whole investigation is that it is too easy to read Cousin teleologically—as moving, by the force of his own conceptual apparatus, towards the “official” 1833 position, as if to a stable, coherent endpoint where much of the incoherence governing the relation between eclecticism and spiritualism in his philosophy has been ironed out. The pre-1833 Cousin does, it is true, frequently change his mind over how the eclectic system is to be grounded—or over whether eclecticism even results in a system (see below)—but this restlessness allows for a proliferation of interesting, if undeveloped ideas. And we do his eclecticisms a disservice if we relegate them to a mere appendage of the spiritualist tradition. Hence, while the late Cousin is very explicit that his eclecticism does indeed presuppose a prior spiritualist system, things are not quite so simple for the pre-1833 Cousin, for the Cousin who is still in the process of becoming “Cousin”. Before 1833—even more radically than Hegel—a whole panoply of different models for the interrelation of spiritualism and eclecticism put paid to any one stable Cousinian solution. There are, that is, many diverse ways in which both he and Hegel model the role of the history of philosophy, and for those of us who remain unconvinced by subsequent attempts to drive a wedge between philosophy and the study of its history (or even by those attempts that naively identify the two), Cousin’s and, to a lesser extent, Hegel’s restlessness when it comes to determining the place of history of philosophy in relation to philosophy, may not, it is true, offer us any definitive solutions, but still does show the value of ceaselessly experimenting with philosophy’s relation to its own history.

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2.8 Coda: On the Possibility of an Eclectic System Victor Cousin’s 1833 response to the “fourth objection” to eclecticism foregrounds one further issue that is worth exploring in conclusion—the question of the systematicity of the history of philosophy. Here the parallel with Hegel breaks down to some extent, for, while Cousin struggles with this question during the 1820s, Hegel is forever adamant that the history of philosophy (when done properly) constitutes “an organic system” or “a system in development” (1985a: 20–1). A contrast thus emerges between the stable Hegelian answer and Cousin’s inability to settle on a definitive answer to the question of whether eclectic historiography results in a system between 1826 and 1833. The fourth objection turns on the impossibility of an eclectic system. It objects that eclecticism cannot coherently be attributed systematicity, that it is necessarily “the absence of all system”. And, in 1833, Cousin concedes the point: systematicity is not achievable in the history of philosophy; rather, a systematic ground must be identified outside of eclectic practice itself. His response thus takes the following form: yes, eclecticism itself is the absence of all system, but this does not preclude it from depending on a prior, distinct system. Cousin’s concession forms part of a long-standing debate in the history of modern philosophy over the possibility of reconciling eclecticism and systematicity.25 Diderot’s intervention in the Encyclopédie is the starting point: he bifurcates the existing eclectic tradition that had culminated in Brucker’s Historia Critica Philosophiae into two forms, “experimental” and “systematic”. The latter is conceived as a philosophising that “compares known truths and combines given facts, so as to draw from them either an explanation of a phenomenon or the idea of an experience”. The systematic eclectic “form[s] a solid whole, which is genuinely one’s own work, out of a great number of collected parts that belong to others” (2018: 270–1, 283–4). Nevertheless, in Diderot’s wake, there followed a series of critiques of any systematic pretensions on eclecticism’s part—indeed, an entire tradition grew up for which eclecticism was, in Schneider’s words, “a philosophical idea that never really worked” (1998: 175). In Germany, for instance, K. L. Reinhold26 insisted in the 1790s that eclecticism has “no system… no foundational principles… Under the name of eclecticism, a false, syncretic and cobbled-together aggregate of indeterminate, ambiguous propositions boasts of profundity”. And, similarly, a few years later W. T. Krug laments “the philosophical inconsistency with which propositions from completely different systems are mixed together by the eclectic”. Even Friedrich Schlegel comments, “The eclectic must hate the system as a restriction” (1958–2006: 18.12).

 For detailed accounts of this history, see Albrecht (1994), three essays by Schneider (1991, 1998, 2016), as well as Barroux (2019). Elsewhere (Whistler 2018), I have explored some of the general conceptual issues facing any attempt to reconcile eclecticism and systematicity; in the following, I focus far more narrowly on Cousin’s arguments between 1826 and 1833. 26  Quotations below from Reinhold and Krug are taken from Albrecht (1994: 599–601). 25

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By 1833, Cousin has partly appropriated these criticisms from German philosophy into his own version of eclectic practice. Despite his affirmation of eclecticism, he too refuses to countenance an eclectic system—hence, his 1853 axiom: “Philosophical systems are not philosophy” (1860: 274). One implication of this position is that, at this period, Cousin seems to have come to understand the concept of a system along the same lines as many of the German Idealists as a self-­grounding totality, independent and absolute, and rejected it for these very reasons. He understands the system along the lines of what Franks has dubbed “the Holistic requirement”27 and “the Monistic requirement”.28 Indeed, Macherey’s comment in “Les débuts philosophiques de Victor Cousin” (1991: 38) that “the general idea of a philosophical system” is “the one essential element” the very early Cousin takes from German Idealism is actually truer of the post-1833 Cousin.29 Prior to 1833, Cousin is far more ambivalent. At times, he suggests that systems are ineluctably incomplete philosophies. Radicalising the Condillacian tradition of the critique of system-building, Cousin implies that genuine eclecticism—when practiced properly—cannot result in a system, because systems are, by definition, partial, whereas eclecticism—as an absolutely conciliatory enterprise—aims at completeness and impartiality. He writes, “Philosophy belongs to no system in particular, but to all of them, that is to say, to the common spirit which dominates all of them” (1991: 365). Or, more fully, systematisers “preoccupied with a certain principle, impose it on the natural givens of common sense, admit only those which conform to this principle, bend any others artificially to it or openly deny them; [and] this is what we will call: making a system” (1836: 288–9). It is in this vein that other historians of philosophy are criticised for having a system: Tennemann’s failing, for example, is to discern “a genuine system, a whole philosophy in history” (1991: 333). On the basis of this critique of the system as incomplete and partial philosophy, Cousin often refuses to dub eclecticism systematic; for example, in the 1826 edition of Philosophical Fragments: “In reuniting all the incomplete systems one would have a complete philosophy” (1833: 48; my emphases). Indeed, Cousin goes so far as to claim, “The perpetual destruction of systems is life, movement, progresses, the very history of philosophy” (1991: 276).

 This is the requirement “that, in an adequate philosophical system, empirical items must be such that all their properties are determinable only within the context of a totality composed of other items and their properties” (Franks 2005: 85). 28  This is the requirement “that, in an adequate philosophical system, the absolute first principle must be immanent within the aforementioned totality, as its principle of unity” (Franks 2005: 85–6). 29  It is worth noting that the term “system” has two fields of application in Cousin’s writings: first, as a formal description of the way his own philosophical ideas cohere into a whole and, secondly, as a taxonomical concept for delineating past manifestations of philosophy. Leo Catana, for one, considers these two uses of system utterly distinct, insisting that “the general methodological sense and the historiographical sense of the concept” need to be separated (2008: 5). However, for present purposes, it seems unnecessary to follow him. A more difficult question concerning Cousin’s system-concept is, instead, whether he, in fact, makes any serious use of it at all. Mélès, for example, has recently criticised Cousin’s history of philosophy precisely on the basis of its failure to classify past philosophies as systems: when undertaking the history of philosophy, Cousin “does not class systems as much as philosophical theses” (2016: 148). 27

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Nevertheless, between 1826 and 1833 Cousin also explicitly describes the product of eclectic historiography as a system. For instance, he writes, “Philosophy finds all exclusive ideas false on one side and true on another; it accepts them all, combines them and reconciles them in the heart of a vast system where each finds its place” (1991: 234; my emphasis). On this evidence, Cousin aims at the construction of an eclectic system, the “re-composition” of all truths “in a unique system which is the complete representation of consciousness in history” (1833: liv; my emphasis). The point is that, unlike the post-1833 “official” position, Cousin’s earlier responses to the “fourth objection” (i.e., eclecticism is the absence of all system) are more fluid. Sometimes he seems to agree entirely with this objection—because all systems are partial and incomplete, whereas eclecticism aims at the opposite. At other times, he is adamant—in stark opposition to his settled “official” position— that his eclectic practice is oriented towards the production of a system, and so eclecticism is neither the absence of all system nor even unsystematic by virtue of its dependence on a prior system. In short, again we see evidence of Cousin’s vacillation during the 1820s: his thinking on the eclecticism—spiritualism relation prior to 1833 is unsettled and, frankly, messy. What is thereby revealed is, once more, a less staid and dogmatic Cousin and, instead, a more experimental and restless one.

Bibliography Albrecht, Michael. 1994. Eklektik: eine Begriffsgeschichte mit Hinweisen auf die Philosophie- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog. Antoine-Mahut, Delphine. 2019a. Experimental Method and the Spiritualist Soul: The Case of Victor Cousin. Trans. Daniel Whistler. Perspectives on Science 27.5: 680–703. ———. 2019b. Une philosophie française sans philosophie française. L’éclectisme de Victor Cousin. In The Territory of Philosophy in Modern Historiography, ed. Catherine Pralong-­ König, Mario Meliado, and Zornitsa Radeva, 149–168. Bari: Pagina. Barroux, Gilles. 2019. Le XVIIIe siècle: moment d’une renaissance de l’éclectisme philosophique. In Une arme philosophique: L’éclectisme de Victor Cousin, ed. Delphine Antoine-Mahut and Daniel Whistler, 3–18. Paris: EAC. Beiser, Frederick C. 1995. Introduction. In G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 1. Trans. E. S. Haldane. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Bellantone, Andrea. 2011. Hegel en France, 1817–1941, 2 vols. Trans. Virginie Gaugey. Paris: Hermann. Catana, Leo. 2008. The Historiographical Concept “System of Philosophy”: Its Origin, Nature, Influence and Legitimacy. Leiden: Brill. Collingwood, R. G. 1994. The Idea of History, rev. ed., ed. Jan van der Dussen. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cotten, Jean-Pierre. 1994. Victor Cousin et la ‘mauvaise métaphysique de l’Allemagne dégénérée’. In La réception de la philosophie allemande en France aux XIXe et XXe siècles, ed. Jean Quillien, 85–107. Villeneuve d‘Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion. ———. 1995. Victor Cousin et la ‘philosophie de la nature’ (1818–1820). Romantisme 88: 35–48. Cousin, Victor. 1825. A propos de l‘ouvrage de M. Degerando, Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie (1823). Journal des Savans (July): 434–439. ———. 1829a. Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie: Histoire de la philosophie du XVIIIe siècle, vol. 1. Paris: Pichon and Didier.

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———. 1829b. Préface. In W.G. Tennemann, Manuel de l’histoire de la philosophie. Translated by Victor Cousin. Paris: Pichon. ———. 1830. Revue de De l’éclectisme par M. de Reiffenberg. Journal des Savans (April): 225–233. ———. 1833. Fragments philosophiques. 2nd ed. Paris: Ladrange. ———. 1836. Cours de philosophie sur le fondement des idées absolues du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien. Paris: Didier. ———. 1838. Fragments philosophiques. 2 vols. 3rd ed. Paris: Ladrange. ———. 1860. Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien. 8th ed. Paris: Didier. ———. 1991. Cours de philosophie (1828): Introduction à l’histoire de la philosophie, ed. Patrice Vermeren. Paris: Fayard. ———. 2011. Souvenirs d‘Allemagne, ed. Dominique Bourel. Paris: CNRS. Diderot, Denis. 2018. Eclectisme. In Diderot and D’Alembert (eds), Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc. Vol. 5. http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/, last accessed 19 Dec 2018. Espagne, Michel. 1985. Le nouveau langage: Introduction de la philosophie allemande en France de 1815 à 1830. In De Lessing à Heine. Un siѐcle de relations littéraires et intellectuelles entre la France et l’Allemagne, ed. Jean-Marie Valentin et al., 263–276. Paris: Didier. Espagne, Michel, and Michael Werner. 1986. Les correspondants allemands de Victor Cousin. Hegel-Studien 21: 65–85. ———. 1990. Lettres d‘Allemagne. Victor Cousin et les hégéliens. Tusson: Du Lérot. Franks, Paul. 2005. All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments and Skepticism in German Idealism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gueroult, Martial. 1984. Histoire de l’histoire de la philosophie. Paris: Flammarion. Hegel, G. W. F. 1985a. Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Trans. T. M. Knox and A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1985b. The Letters, ed. and trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jaeschke, Walter. 2013. Absolute Spirit: Art, Religion and Philosophy. In The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel, ed. A. de Laurentis and J. Edwards, 179–204. London: Bloomsbury. Janet, Paul. 1885. Victor Cousin et son œuvre. Paris: Calmann. Janicaud, Dominique. 1969. Une généalogie du spiritualisme français. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 1984. Cousin et Ravaisson, lecteurs de Schelling et Hegel. Les Études philosophiques 4: 451–466. Lerminier, Eugène. 1832. Lettres philosophiques addressés à un Berlinois. Paris. Macherey, Pierre. 1991. Les débuts philosophiques de Victor Cousin. Corpus 18/19: 29–50. Manns, James W. 1994. Reid and his French Disciples: Aesthetics and Metaphysics. Leiden: Brill. Mélès, Baptiste. 2016. Les classifications des systèmes philosophiques. Paris: Vrin. Meliadò, Mario. 2019. Géopolitique de la raison. Sur la pratique de l’histoire de la philosophie à l’école de Victor Cousin. In The Territory of Philosophy in Modern Historiography, ed. Catherine König-Pralong, Mario Meliadò, and Zornitsa Radeva, 169–186. Bari: Pagina. Nuzzo, Angelica. 2012. Hegel’s Method for a History of Philosophy: The Berlin Introductions to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1819–1831). In Hegel’s History of Philosophy: New Interpretations, ed. David A. Duquette, 19–34. Albany: SUNY Press. Piaia, Gregorio. 2022. Historicism and Eclecticism: The Age of Victor Cousin. In Models of the History of Philosophy, vol. 4, The Hegelian Age, ed. Gregorio Piaia, Giuseppe Micheli, and Giovanni Santinello, 341–434. Dordrecht: Springer. Ragghianti, Renzo. 1997. La tentazione del presente. Victor Cousin tra filosofie della storia e teorie della memoria. Naples: Bibliopolis. Ragghianti, Renzo, and Patrice Vermeren. 2018. Introduction. In Philosophie morale (1820), ed. Victor Cousin, 3–53. Paris: Garnier. Ravaisson, Félix. 2023. French Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, ed. and trans. Mark Sinclair. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Rey, Lucie. 2013. Les enjeux de l’histoire de la philosophie en France au XIXe siècle. Pierre Leroux contre Victor Cousin. Paris: L’Harmattan. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1958–2006. Kritische Ausgabe. 35 vols. Edited by Ernst Behler. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh. Schneider, Ulrich Johannes. 1991. L’éclectisme avant Cousin. La tradition allemande. Corpus 18/19: 15–28. ———. 1998. Eclecticism Rediscovered: A Review Essay. Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1): 173–182. ———. 2016. The Problem of Eclecticism in the History of Philosophy. Intellectual History Review 26 (1): 117–129. Thompson, Kevin. 2012. Systematicity and Experience: Hegel and the Function of the History of Philosophy. In Hegel’s History of Philosophy: New Interpretations, ed. David A. Duquette, 167–184. Albany: SUNY Press. Vermeren, Patrice. 1995. Victor Cousin: Le jeu de la philosophie et de l’Etat. Paris: L’Harmattan. Walsh, W. H. 1965. Hegel on the History of Philosophy. History and Theory 5 (Beiheft 5): 67–82. Whistler, Daniel. 2018. The Eclectic System in Cousin and Schelling. The Journal of the North American Schelling Society 1: 115–136. ———. 2019. Le musée philosophique: Cousin et Malraux. In Une arme philosophique: L’éclectisme de Victor Cousin, ed. Delphine Antoine-Mahut and Daniel Whistler, 212–232. Paris: EAC.

Chapter 3

Ravaisson After Schelling: Purposiveness Without Purpose in Genius and Habit Mark Sinclair

Abstract This study investigates Félix Ravaisson’s ambiguous relation to F. W. J. Schelling by homing in on the specific relation that holds between habit as a means of demonstrating an underlying identity of mind and world in Ravaisson’s De l’habitude and Schelling’s use of aesthetic intuition as a philosophical method in his 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism. I argue that what Schelling found in fine art—the work of genius—Ravaisson finds in habit, and from this conclude that Ravaisson offers what we might describe as a romantic conception of habit that brings it into the domain of the pre-rational, pre-reflective spontaneity that Schelling describes in artistic production. Keywords  Habit · Aesthetic intuition · Genius · Identity philosophy · Art Félix Ravaisson’s ambiguous relation to F. W. J. Schelling is already signalled in his 1834 prize-winning essay, De la métaphysique d’Aristote, written when he was 21  years old.1 Submissions to the competition organised by Victor Cousin at the Académie des sciences morales et politiques were supposed to analyse the content and structure of the Metaphysics, but also to account for its history and its influence on later systems in Antiquity and Modernity. The task therefore involved relating Aristotle’s work to contemporary philosophical concerns, an issue which in the concluding paragraphs of his essay Ravaisson addresses thus: [w]e do not want to profess here Schelling’s system: this system has not been formulated. Still less do we want to adopt Hegel’s absolute idealism: he conceived being as pure spirit, while the higher principle of force contains in a higher unity: thought, will, love. Our approach is based, without accepting its monadological hypotheses, solely on a Leibnizian

 See volume 1, §5.3.2.

1

M. Sinclair (*) Queen’s University, Belfast, Belfast, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Chepurin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 247, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39326-6_3

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In describing his approach in relation to the tradition of German idealism, Ravaisson rejects Hegel’s absolute idealism, which, allegedly, has not grasped that will and, more profoundly, love precede thought as its condition. This rejection of Hegel will be a constant throughout Ravaisson’s later work (see Dopp 1933, Janicaud 1984). In underlining the primacy of an idea of love, Ravaisson points back to pre-Hegelian, Romantic ideas; assertions of the primacy of love as the principle of all existence can be found in the work of, for example, Schiller and Hölderlin before the turn of the nineteenth century (see, e.g., Beiser 2002: 382). However, rather than refer positively to this tradition, Ravaisson may seem concerned to assert his distance from the philosopher many would have considered as its greatest philosophical exponent at the turn of the century, namely Schelling. Ravaisson’s point is that due to the protean nature of the German philosopher’s thinking in its development, and because the older Schelling had not managed to arrive at a definitive formulation of the positive philosophy that he was professing, it is not possible to expound his doctrine and to write as his disciple. In Germany, however, Schelling had admitted as much since at least 1809 (see Dopp 1933: 114), and thus Ravaisson’s disavowal can be understood as a certain kind of statement of allegiance. There is, to be sure, no doctrinal disagreement expressed in these remarks, but only the observation that Schelling— in obvious contrast to Hegel—does not yet have a fully-formed philosophical system. Hence there is no contradiction in the fact that what Ravaisson does go on to affirm at the end of the passage goes back to Schelling, to his work at the turn of the century: the idea of an ‘idealist-realism’ as a philosophy that would borrow from Leibniz’s philosophy of active, living force while rejecting its monadological framework, points back to Schelling’s attempts to discover, in and after his 1800 System des transzendentalen Idealismus [System of Transcendental Idealism], an underlying unity of mind and world, of the real and the ideal (see Dopp 1933: 111). In 1834, Ravaisson evidently had some familiarity with at least the outlines of Schelling’s thought, even if Schelling’s later philosophy was known in France only in outline from some extracts of his teaching and by the works of some of his students.2 The following year, in 1835, Ravaisson had the opportunity to gain some direct knowledge of Schelling’s later work, since Cousin tasked him with translating the German philosopher’s preface to a collection of Cousin’s own work. In the brief preface to this first ever French translation of Schelling, Ravaisson described him as “a powerful and tireless genius” (1835: 4), and as “Germany’s greatest living philosopher” (1835: 3). After this, we might detect a certain reticence towards Schelling in Ravaisson’s work, in that neither the first published volume of his Essai sur la métaphysique d’Aristote in 1837 nor his 1838 doctoral thesis De l’habitude refer to Schelling directly, not even while, in the case of the latter text, attempting to

 See Ravaisson (1835: 3): “We know Schelling’s new doctrine or at least the new form he will give his system only by ways of extracts from his lectures on mythology and by the work of some of his more distinguished students”. 2

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discover “in the deepest heart of nature, the mystery of the identification of the ideal and the real, of the thing and thought, and of all the contraries that the understanding separates” (2008: 63). This reticence to acknowledge Schelling’s influence may have expressed an understandable desire on Ravaisson’s part to formulate his own views independently of other contemporary philosophers. It may also have been a prudent response to the criticism to which Cousin had been subject for ‘Germanising’ French philosophy.3 Whatever the case may be, Schelling sent Ravaisson flattering letters after receiving from their author the 1837 Essai on Aristotle and then, some months later, De l’habitude together with his secondary doctoral thesis on Speusippus. Although Schelling admitted that he had not yet had the time to study the 1838 texts in detail, one look at De l’habitude led him to write: “I can foresee a day when we will agree on the essential points of philosophy, and I hope you will surmise that I will always regard with the greatest interest whatever you send me” (Schuhl 1936: 506). At that time, Schelling accepted enthusiastically Cousin’s proposal that Ravaisson translate his Philosophy of Mythology (a project that never came to fruition). Then, in the autumn of 1839, with the freedom offered by his new post as Inspecteur général des bibliothèques, the 26-year-old Ravaisson decided to spend some time in Germany and make the journey to Munich in order to consult with Schelling. On one of his accounts, Ravaisson suggested that communication with Schelling was not straightforward because of a language barrier (the suggestion being that Schelling’s French was not much better than Ravaisson’s German),4 but this did not prevent him from celebrating Schelling the following year in an essay (‘Contemporary Philosophy’) surveying the European philosophical scene, for having apprehended ‘in action, in personality, in freedom, the base of any future metaphysics’ (2016: 77). Any reticence in relation to Schelling seems to have disappeared at this point. Ravaisson knew enough of Schelling’s work in the 1830s, then, to invoke, paraphrase and celebrate it, and to desire to learn directly from its author. Moreover, one of Ravaisson’s key German sources for the monistic philosophy of nature and mind in De l’habitude, namely Herder’s Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–1791), was also crucial in Schelling’s intellectual development.5 Still, there is no documentary evidence indicating what of Schelling’s work Ravaisson had read in the 1830s and when he had read it. We know that, much later, he read Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology and his Philosophy of Revelation, and most of the volumes  As Dopp put it: “In 1837, it was no longer the done thing [plus bien porté du tout] to draw one’s philosophical inspirations from Germany” (1933: 155). 4  On this point, see Bergson (1959: 1458) and Ravaisson’s letter to his former teacher, Hector Poret in Dopp (1933: 292). But Ravaisson wrote a much more enthusiastic and positive letter, which was found much later, to Edgar Quinet about his time with Schelling: “J’ai trouvé ici Schelling dans toute la force et la jeunesse de son grand esprit et j’ai pu étudier de près cette phase nouvelle et vraiment importante de la philosophie allemande” (cited in Mauve 1996). 5  Ravaisson refers to Herder’s text in a footnote of De l’habitude (Ravaisson 2008: 127); on the significance of this reference, see Sinclair (2019: 110–11). For the importance of Herder’s text in Schelling’s intellectual trajectory, see Bréhier (1912: 24). The French translator of Herder’s text in 1828 was Edgar Quinet, who would become Ravaisson’s friend. 3

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of Schelling’s collected works edited by his son after his death are included in the catalogue of Ravaisson’s library, but among his notes from the 1840s on Kant, Hegel or Fichte there are none to be found on Schelling. It is even possible, as Joseph Dopp has suggested, that in the 1830s and 1840s Ravaisson did not read Schelling’s work directly (apart from the short text he had translated) and knew of his Identitätsphilosophie only by means of the German manuals and histories of philosophy through which he had approached Aristotle (see Dopp 1933: 82). This has led some commentators, following Henri Bergson in his 1904 homage to Ravaisson, to speak of an intellectual affinity, a community of spirit and inspiration, that bound Schelling and Ravaisson together, rather than a direct influence of the German on the Frenchman. Determining to what extent there is an influence or rather a community of inspiration is, as Jean Baruzi put it, a “un beau problème”, a nice problem, “in the history of ideas” (Baruzi 1933: 1). In what follows, I aim to shed some more light on this problem by showing how Schelling’s influence is more deeply rooted in Ravaisson’s De l’habitude than its footnotes might suggest. Certainly, it is not difficult to discern “in the background of Ravaisson’s project a few central intuitions of the philosophy of identity” (Courtine 1994: 121), but here I examine how Ravaisson’s 1838 emphasis on habit as the “only real method” (Ravaisson 2008: 59) for demonstrating an underlying identity of mind and world, spirit and nature, takes up and transforms Schelling’s Romantic promotion of art as such a philosophical method in his 1800 System des transzendentalen Idealismus. What Schelling found in fine art, the work of genius, Ravaisson finds in habit, but the French philosopher is able to develop the German’s philosopher’s thinking in this direction, I argue, because he implicitly understands habit as a principle akin to the purposiveness without purpose that System des transzendentalen Idealismus, after Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft, found in genius. The close parallel that Ravaisson implicitly draws between habit and genius, two principles that we might ordinarily think to be diametrically opposed, may be surprising,6 but I show that Ravaisson offers what we might describe as a Romantic conception of habit that brings it into the domain of the pre-rational, pre-reflective spontaneity that Schelling finds in fine art production.

3.1 Fine Art as the Organon and Document of Absolute Identity In the introduction to the System des transzendentalen Idealismus, Schelling addresses the problem of the relation of mind to world, of the ideal to the real, from two contrasting perspectives inherited from the work of Immanuel Kant. From a

 That said, in this paper I merely develop Dominique Janicaud’s remark that the “immediating mediation of habit recalls somewhat the free production of artistic genius that ‘reflects conscious activity as if it was unconscious’” (1984: 462). 6

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theoretical perspective, the problem is one of how mind can grasp the world that it purports to know, a problem which Schelling poses here in terms of how the mind can accommodate itself to a world that it knows as determinate and determined. Knowledge somehow requires an identity underlying the knower and the known.7 From a practical perspective, the problem concerns human freedom and our ability to effect change in that determinate and determined world on the basis of our intentions and volitions. Free action requires the distinction of mind and world, since the mind has to be free from the world in order to act on it, but if mind is opposed to the world, as freedom is opposed to necessity, it is difficult to see how that freedom can be instantiated in a determined, mechanical realm wherein every event finds its sufficient reason in the physical events that preceded it. As Schelling puts it, this practical problem is one of how the natural world can accommodate itself to our representations. In order to respond to this double-problem, that is to say, in order to account for the possibility of knowledge and action, it is necessary, Schelling argues, to posit a certain identity underlying the opposed principles of the ideal and the real: How both the objective world accommodates to representations in us, and representations in us to the objective world, is unintelligible unless between the two worlds, the ideal and the real, there exists a predetermined harmony. But this latter is itself unthinkable unless the activity, whereby the objective world is produced, is at bottom identical with that which expresses itself in volition, and vice versa. (1978: 12)

The two apparently opposed principles of mind and world must somehow be united in order for knowledge and free action to be possible, and Schelling here appeals to a principle of harmony that recalls Leibniz’s principle of pre-established harmony. To be sure, what is to be harmonised here is not an infinite number of individual substances (as Leibniz argues in his Monadology), but (in a more Spinozist sense) the two principles of the ideal and the real. Such a harmony supposes, he argues, that: a) there is activity throughout the natural world; b) there is activity in the mind, an activity that is will; and c) the activity in both domains is, in truth, one and the same principle. In this way, Schelling aims to unite the philosophy of nature—of nature as a dynamic, productive principle manifest in the variety of its products— that he had developed earlier in the 1790s with a Fichtean “transcendental philosophy” concerned with the constitutive activity of mind. According to this harmonic unity, it can be said that what appear to be the “dead and unconscious products of nature” in the lower reaches of the natural world, in what we call the inanimate and vegetal realms, are really “abortive attempts that she [nature] makes to reflect herself” in which “the still unwitting character of intelligence is already peeping through” (Schelling 1978: 6). From this perspective, in its progress, nature ultimately gives rise to spirit and humanity, the real to the ideal, but it can do so because the ideal always implicitly inhabited the real, from the ground up. This also means

 On the fate of this issue throughout the German idealist tradition from Kant onwards, see Beiser (2002). 7

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that the mind knows itself adequately only when it can reveal its own origins in the dynamism of the natural world. Such are the broad outlines and motivations of Schelling’s project in his 1800 System, but this assertion of harmony, which seems to presuppose the prior distinction and separateness of that which it harmonises, is provisional. In the course of the text, Schelling will come to discover the ground of the harmony in a prior principle of “complete identity” or “absolute union” (1978: 221), and this will lead to the (various formulations of) the Identitätsphilosophie in the early years of the century (see Whistler 2023). It is clear, in any case, that when Ravaisson in 1834 distances himself from Schelling’s thought because he does not yet, in the 1830s, advance a philosophical system, he does so only to gesture towards his earlier position in the System des transzendentalen Idealismus. The idea of a Leibnizian idealist-­realism that rejects Leibniz’s own monadological hypotheses is already, that is, a faithful description of Schelling’s project in 1800. If Ravaisson had not read the System before 1834, he seems to have at least a good second-hand knowledge of it. According to Schelling’s project, the highest task of philosophy is to show the unconscious and the conscious principles, mind and nature, in an original unity. This will serve, at one and the same time, to ground Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and to reintegrate sprit into the realm of nature. Left to its own devices, however, philosophy cannot access the identity of these two principles, for philosophy begins from reflection, from a position where the identity of the subjective and the objective, of the ideal and the real, has already been lost in the emergence of consciousness. Philosophy therefore is in need of an organ, an implement with which it can fulfil its highest task, something without which it remains incomplete and unsystematic. This organon is fine art. Schelling borrows from the early Romantics the idea that art is a means of understanding that which cannot be an object of reflective knowledge: art can show what philosophy cannot say. Schelling’s systematic concern with the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit thus reaches its zenith with the philosophy of art, as the introduction to the book announces: “the universal organon of philosophy—and the keystone of its entire arch—is the philosophy of art” (Schelling 1978: 12). The final, sixth part of the System des transzendentalen Idealismus, entitled “Deduction of a Universal Organ [eines allgemeinen Organs] of Philosophy, or: Essentials of the Philosophy of Art according to the Principles of Transcendental Idealism”, lays this keystone and completes the arch of the book. Its fundamental claim is that the work of fine art can make present an original unity of the conscious and unconscious principles insofar as it is, in a broadly Kantian sense, the work of genius. Genius, as Kant had famously claimed in the Kritik der Urteilskraft, is that through which ‘nature gives the rule to art’, since fine art production, as distinct from craft production, does not consist in the realisation of a conceptual intention. Within art in general (i.e. within craft) what is to be produced must first be “represented as possible” (2007: 136) in the producer’s mind, after which the physical process of production makes this representation actual. The design and build of the product occur according to a process of rational, conceptual deliberation, according to ‘rules’ which can be learnt and applied in different cases. Fine art, in contrast,

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“does not permit of the judgment of the beauty of its product being derived from any rule that has a concept for its determining ground, and that depends, consequently, on a concept of the way in which the product is possible” (2007: 137). Fine art production, although it is still art, and thus although it involves the work of thought, does not consist in the actualisation of a pre-given conceptual possibility; it does not consist in the externalisation of a clear and distinct thought. It rather consists in the irruption of a pre-conceptual talent and impetus that produces original works whose sense cannot be grasped conceptually, even though these works exercise one’s faculties and, in in a sense, make one think. In the production of fine art, by means of genius, the natural talent of the artist co-operates with taste, tradition and technique and gives the rule to art. Schelling takes up this account of genius, but understands nature in a broader sense as denominating the principle of the natural world as a whole, rather than just the talent of the artist. He takes production of fine art, in fact, to be the mirror image of natural production: “whereas the unconscious (blind) activity is reflected out of the organic product as a conscious one, the conscious activity will conversely be reflected out of the product here under consideration as an unconscious (objective) one” (1978: 219). Within natural production, as in biological life, the principle of nature begins unconsciously, since we cannot ascribe to it a reflective, deliberate intention to produce, but the product of nature, as Kant had already said in the Kritik der Urteilskraft, looks “as though it were consciously brought about” (Schelling 1978: 215) and thus resembles the intentional products of craft. Conversely, on Schelling’s account, the production of the artwork begins consciously, with an intention to create, but the element of conscious thought in the finished work of art is accompanied by an unconscious principle that is nature; here “the I is conscious according to the production, unconscious with regard to the product” (1978: 219). Schelling’s view is that the artist stands at, say, the easel deliberately, rather than by accident, but in the process of creation an active, productive principle escapes – but also harmonises with – the clarity of her reflective thought. We might question this view, following Schiller, and wonder whether art-production begins by unconscious inspiration, unconscious drives that precede and evoke the conscious decision to express them. On Schiller’s view, it is more in its origins than in its completion that art-production is unconscious.8 However, even if Schelling were forced to accept this critique, the parallel he establishes between natural and genial production would still stand: both forms of production are made possible by a certain purposiveness without purpose. In nature, “the process of production is not purposive, but the product certainly is” (1978: 219), the natural product is “purposive without being purposely brought about” (1978: 214), whereas in art production the production is to some degree purposive while the product cannot be reduced to a definite purpose. In this way, both natural and fine art production involve a principle of production that is pre-rational but not unintelligent.

 See Bréhier (1912: 77) who cites Schiller’s letters to Goethe.

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Schelling emphasises, in contrast to Kant, that genius is the unity of the unconscious and conscious principles operative in fine art production; rather than being a principle opposed to reason, tradition and technique, genius is the union and identity of the latter with a natural principle of production. These principles cannot be clearly separated, even conceptually, in the finished work—the two appear united. Otherwise, we are left either with craft-production posing as fine art, i.e., with derivative work, or with the production of more or less meaningless novelty devoid of taste, technique and any relation to history. To express the same point in a different way, genius does not represent the victory of necessity over freedom, but is rather where “freedom and necessity are absolutely united” (1978: 220). In genius, the intelligence has not been usurped; on the contrary, “the intelligence will feel itself astonished and blessed by this union, will regard it, that is, in the light of a bounty freely granted by a higher nature, by means of which the impossible has been made possible” (1978: 221). What, in its radical novelty, was previously inconceivable, and to that extent impossible, has now, in reality, become possible and conceivable, even if its meaning cannot be reduced entirely to conceptuality. The work of genius thereby makes manifest “the absolute which contains the common ground of the pre-established harmony between the conscious and the unconscious” (1978: 221). In the experience of the production of the work of art, for the philosophically trained eye of the mind at least, there is “identity of the conscious and the unconscious in the self, and consciousness of this identity” (1978: 231). The self is conscious of the production, but the production “ends in unconsciousness”, and thus there is a “point at which the two merge into one” (1978: 220). Hence: Art is at once the only true and external organon and document of philosophy, which ever and again continues to speak to us of what philosophy cannot depict in external form, namely the unconscious element in acting and producing, and its original identity with the conscious. Art is paramount to the philosopher precisely because it opens to him, as it were, the holy of holies, where burns in eternal and original unity, as if in a single flame, that which in nature and history is rent asunder, and in life and action, no less than in thought, must forever fly apart. (1978: 231)

The work of fine art offers, not the intellectual intuition through which the self-­ posits and apprehends itself in inner sense, in abstraction from nature, but rather a real intuition, or an ideal-real intuition as Schelling will later say, that here is an “aesthetic intuition” (1978: 231).

3.2 Habit as a Method for the Revelation of Identity How, then, does Ravaisson transform this aesthetic intuition into what we might call a habitual intuition, an intuition given through the experience of habit? And what sort of philosophy of identity does this transformation deliver? The basic outlines of Ravaisson’s metaphysics in De l’habitude were already, it should be noted, present in his 1834 Aristotle dissertation, and then in the first volume of the reworked and

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published Aristotle essay. In these texts, Ravaisson had: (1) privileged an ontology of activity and movement over traditional doctrines of substance; (2) found in Aristotle the doctrine that that there is continuity underlying the whole of the natural world; and (3) argued in a panpsychic sense that this continuum of activity is mind, which is manifest by degrees all the way down into matter.9 In reflection on habit, however, Ravaisson found a means of grounding in his own terms all these theses. In the French tradition, Maine de Biran and Xavier Bichat had reflected on habit to establish dualist positions (see Sinclair 2019: Chap. 1)—the former used habit to distinguish activity and passivity in mental life, while for the latter, in a comparable sense, it served to distinguish animal from vegetal life—but much of Ravaisson’s originality consisted in showing how, on the contrary, habit makes manifest continuity, unity and identity rather than distinction and opposition. Expressed in more dialectical, Schellingian terms, on Ravaisson’s account the acquisition of habit amounts to a negation of distinction and opposition in raising us to a higher stage of the unity that was the prior condition of that opposition. Even the basic structure of Ravaisson’s text recalls that of Schelling’s project in 1800. After initial, lapidary and Aristotelian definitions of habit, Part I of the 1838 text traces the degrees to which habit emerges in nature as a whole, in and across the inorganic, vegetal and animal realms. This part moves from the inorganic realm on which habit apparently has no purchase to the animal realm and then to the psychological realm where, Ravaisson argues, it affects all the basic functions of life; but if habit does not exist in the inorganic realm, part of Ravaisson’s project is to show that an analogue of habit, namely a “tendency to persist” (Ravaisson 2008: 27), exists in all matter. This first part of De l’habitude occupies the site of the philosophy of nature whose principles Schelling presents in Part V of the System des transzendentalen Idealismus, just before the section on fine art. In this part, rather than provide any kind of “proof from experience” (Schelling 1978: 215) of life or, more broadly, a teleological principle in nature, Schelling deduces natural teleology, a specific kind of purposiveness in nature, as the prior condition of a possible harmony between mind and world: nature must already be the unity of conscious and unconscious principles if it is to stand in harmony with, rather than be absolutely opposed to, mind. Ravaisson offers no such deduction, but he recognises the limits of any purported proof based on experience. The conclusion of Part I observes that its philosophical task consisted only in recording the results or the effects of the power of habit, since only these effects, and not the power itself, are accessible to us in the objects of experience: “[w]e see only the exteriority of the actuality of things; we do not see their dispositions or powers” (2008: 39). This epistemological scepticism is, however, allied to a metaphysical realism grounded in a philosophy of mind: it is possible to stipulate—be it merely by analogy, as Ravaisson will state in Part II—that the power of habit, and thus life, exists in things, on the basis of what he takes to be a direct, immediate experience of powers, and of the power of habit,

 On the development of Ravaisson’s thinking concerning substance between 1834 and 1837, see Chap. 4 of Sinclair (2019). 9

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in consciousness. In the same concluding passage of Part I, the project of Part II is announced thus: “it is only in consciousness that we can aspire not just to establish” the “apparent law” of habit “but to learn its how and its why, to illuminate its generation and, finally, to understand its cause” (2008: 39). De l’habitude thus addresses the effects of habit in nature before it elucidates the nature of habit; but everything it says about the latter is intended to confirm and justify what it says about the former. The ‘subjective’ analysis of habit in Part II is supposed to justify the ‘objective’ analysis of habit in Part I, even though, in Ravaisson’s account of the history or odyssey of consciousness, reflective subjectivity derives from nature, from nature understood as nascent or sleeping spirit. Schelling turned to fine art production because it presents the identity of conscious and unconscious principles in consciousness, and because, as he argues, fine art production begins consciously but ends unconsciously. For the very same reasons, Ravaisson appeals to habit: In reflection and will, the end of movement is an idea, an ideal to be accomplished: something that should be, that can be and which is not yet. It is a possibility to be realized. But as the end becomes fused with the movement, and the movement with the tendency, possibility, the ideal, is realized in it. The idea becomes being, the very being of the movement and of the tendency that it determines. Habit becomes more and more a substantial idea. The obscure intelligence that through habit comes to replace reflection, this immediate intelligence where subject and object are confounded, is a real intuition, in which the real and the ideal, being and thought are fused together. (2008: 57)

Consider a motor habit, such as learning to play a piece of music on the piano: originally voluntary and consciously controlled action becomes more and more spontaneous, more and more prompt and precise, more and more a tendency that can come into operation independently of the will and reflective consciousness. This is the phenomenological datum that Ravaisson seeks to explain in rejecting both mechanical and intellectualist explanations of it: the increasing facility in the action, and then the developing tendency to carry out that action, cannot be convincingly explained either by supposed mechanical changes in the body, or by supposing an increased proficiency in mental operations, such that I would now be thinking and willing without even noticing it. Instead, we have to recognise that the original, consciously determined purpose is in some sense incorporated into, substantiated in the body; the end or purpose is no longer contrasted with the means by which it is achieved, but rather becomes ‘fused with’ the body, which is no longer a mere means. In being thus incorporated, my intentions do not disappear or simply move on to more lofty concerns: reflective, voluntary action is not replaced by mechanical action, but the now habitual action is rather moved by an obscure intelligence— obscure because pre-reflective—that follows on from repeated deliberation. By means of such fusion and incorporation, according to Ravaisson’s Schellingian terms, habit illuminates “in the deepest heart of nature, the mystery of the identification of the ideal and the real, of the thing and thought, and of all the contraries that the understanding separates, which are fused in an inexplicable actuality of intelligence and desire” (2008: 63).

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In the acquisition of habit, then, it can be said, following Schelling, that the I is conscious according to the production, unconscious with regard to the product. The production of a motor habit is conscious, whereas its product, the acquired habit, is more or less automatic and unconscious. The parallel between Schelling’s conception of genius and Ravaisson’s conception of habit can be drawn further in noting that an acquired habit also presents a certain purposiveness without purpose, something like the form of purposiveness without any definite or clear purpose: an acquired habit is still clearly purposive, in a sense, but it is no longer guided by any explicit, reflective purpose in the present. This is not because, as Bergson put it in his otherwise admirable discourse on Ravaisson’s life and work, habit is the “fossilised residue of a spiritual activity” (Bergson 1946: 277), but rather because in the acquisition of a habit voluntary activity is taken over by tendency and inclination, which is a non-mechanical principle or force that is not goalless, but which nevertheless does not have its goal before itself as an ideal to be realised. We might question Ravaisson’s apparently rather intellectualist conception of habit just as Schiller questioned Schelling’s conception of genial art production. Is it really the case that all motor habit acquisition begins from deliberate intellectual intention? The acquisition of bad habits, such as that of slouching or filling one’s speech with the word ‘like’, gives the lie to that idea. Some habits, often bad ones, are clearly acquired prior to the intervention of reflective thought, and we “contract” them (contracter une habitude is a common French phrase) as we might contract an illness. Ravaisson, however, does not say that motor habit acquisition has to begin thus, and the whole point of his reflection on habit is to show that a continuum of consciousness precedes reflective thought, a continuum which allows for sub-­ reflective degrees of consciousness through which a habit can be acquired. Not only is Ravaisson’s discovery that in an acquired motor habit there is an obscure or immediate intelligence, a ‘real intuition’, or a ‘real-ideal’ intuition in which the ‘real and the ideal’ are ‘fused together’, not dependent on an intellectualist construal of habit acquisition, but the discovery makes possible non-intellectualist conceptions of habit acquisition. Habit, then, can serve as the organon or document of philosophy, as what can show that which philosophy otherwise cannot say. On Ravaisson’s account, it is not just a method of philosophy, but the only real method: Habit is thus, so to speak, the infinitesimal differential, or, the dynamic fluxion from Will to Nature. Nature is the limit of the regressive movement proper to habit. Consequently, habit can be considered as a method – as the only real method – for the estimation, by a convergent infinite series, of the relation, real in itself but incommensurable in the understanding, of Nature and Will. (2008: 59)

The signature phrases of his thinking in De l’habitude are de plus en plus, de moins en moins; it is in an acquired motor habit’s becoming more and more automatic, less and less conscious that we have direct experience of a convergent infinite series, i.e., a continuum, underlying traditional oppositions between nature and will. With such signature phrases, however, Ravaisson’s appeal to a quite different organon and

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document of philosophy, produces a rather different philosophy of identity.10 Ravaisson’s continuism, that is, differs markedly from Schelling’s more Manichean metaphysical position in the System (see Dopp 1933: 241). Prior to the opposition of nature and will, there is not an ‘absolute identity’: there is not, in Hegel’s famous words, a night in which all cows are black, but a kind of half-light that follows from the light of consciousness, a half-light in which all shades into grey. In this world, for us, there is only ever an ‘imperfect identity’ of nature and will, as Ravaisson writes in the penultimate paragraph of his text: Habit is enclosed within the region of opposition and movement. It remains beneath pure activity, simple apperception, unity and the divine identity of thought and being; and it has for a limit and final end the imperfect identity of the ideal and the real, of being and thought, in the spontaneity of nature. The history of Habit represents the return of Freedom to Nature, or rather the invasion of the domain of freedom by natural spontaneity (2008: 77).

In the divine, which resides above and beyond this world, there is a pure identity of thought and being, but here below, there is merely an ever-increasing proximity, by means of the acquisition of a habit, to the spontaneity of primary nature. In contrasting Ravaisson’s position to that of Schelling in this regard, however, it is important to recognise that the System des transzendentalen Idealismus describes the odyssey of consciousness as “a graduated sequence of impressions, whereby the self raises itself to the highest power of consciousness” (1978: 2),11 which suggests that he had at least entertained the continuist position that Ravaisson advocates. One reason why he did not develop it explicitly in 1800 is perhaps the promotion of fine art as a method: genius does not help us to perceive this continuity, for it does not present to us, as does habit, its product becoming more and more independent of the will and consciousness and thus less and less consciously directed. Certainly, Schelling describes the work of genius as a process where an unconscious principle comes to harmonise with a conscious one—“the production is to end in unconsciousness; so there must be a point at which the two merge into one” (1978: 217)— but this does not seem to be gradual in the way that an acquisition of habit is. Moreover, Schelling claims here that the process of fine production ends up with an absolute identity, which habit in its acquisition, precisely because it graduated all the way down, can never reach. Unconsciousness and wholly natural spontaneity, on Ravaisson’s account, can only be limit ideas unattainable in experience. The ‘divine identity of thought and being’ is the most that Ravaisson says about absolute identity in De l’habitude, but his later reflections on the divine, it should be noted, bear the mark of Schelling’s own concern, from the 1804 ‘Philosophy and Religion’, with the finite as a ‘fall’ from the absolute and with the worldview of Christian theology.12 The basic thought, which seems to motivate Ravaisson’s

 One that expresses, it is important to note, a concern for the body and the embodiment of mind that will characterize French philosophy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 11  This gradualist accent reappears in Schelling’s 1801 ‘On the True Concept of Philosophy of Nature and the Correct Way of Solving its Problems’ (in Berger and Whistler 2021: 46–65). 12  On Schelling’s philosophy of religion, see Vater (2014). 10

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explicit interest in the history and philosophy of religion from the 1840s, is described in the clearest fashion in the 1867 report: [w]e can understand the origin of an existence inferior to absolute existence only as the result of a voluntary determination, by which this high existence has from itself moderated, deadened, extinguished, so to speak, something of its all-powerful activity. Can we not say that what the first cause concentrates of existence in its immutable eternity is unfolded, so to speak, by it, relaxed and diffused in the elementary conditions of materiality that are time and space; that it establishes thus, in some way, the base of material existence, a basis on which, by this continuous progress which is the order of nature, from degree to degree, species to species, everything returns from material dispersion to the unity of spirit. (1889: 279)

We can understand the relation of the finite world to a divine principle only as the result of a kind of relaxation of divine activity. For Ravaisson, however, it is habit, once again, that serves to interpret this relation, and thus to understand the Christian mystery of creation. The acquisition of habit—even if Ravaisson does not say this explicitly here—serves as a kind of schema of creation. Pascal Engel put it nicely: “every time we contract a habit, we renew in us something of God’s act of creation” (1988: 187). This analogy of habit with divine creation, has a double aspect, in that habit not only naturalizes or realizes spirit in matter but also allows spirit to pursue more elevated goals. Habit allows spirit to descend, but also, indirectly, climb the scale of existence. Correspondingly, Ravaisson’s later doctrine of kenotic creation has two aspects, as Denise Leduc-Lafayette has underlined: the ‘ontological kenosis’, which is God’s original act of creation, is doubled by a ‘historical kenosis’, in which, as Ravaisson puts it in 1887, the divine principle lowers itself into the world so that He can lead “humanity back, reborn, to the extremity of perfection for which it was made” (2016: 272).

3.3 Genius, Habit and Grace In De l’habitude, as we have seen, Ravaisson appropriates and transforms Schelling’s position in the System des transzendentalen Idealismus. Consequently, it can be said that Ravaisson presents something of a Romantic conception of habit in 1838, after Schelling’s Romantic conception of genius in 1800. This, of course, may be hard to grasp. It is hard to see the possibility of a Romantic conception of such a prosaic principle as habit, a principle which might strike us as fundamentally unromantic. How can a principle of novelty and creativity be replaced with a principle of repetition and routine? In order to see how, it is crucial to recognise that habit on Ravaisson’s account is not a dead, mindless principle opposed to the spontaneity of life. On the contrary, “if the characteristic of nature, which constitutes life, is the predominance of spontaneity over receptivity, then habit does not simply presuppose nature, but develops in the very direction of nature, and concurs with it” (2008: 31). Habit, like genius, returns us to the natural spontaneity, the purposiveness without purpose, characteristic of nature; “the history of Habit represents the return of Freedom to Nature, or rather the invasion of the domain of freedom by natural

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spontaneity” (2008: 77). In this sense, repetition and routine are not necessarily deadly, and they can be understood as the ground and the condition of novelty itself. Ravaisson seems to say as much when he discusses Aristotle’s conception of habit in his 1837 Essai sur la métaphysique d’Aristote: we can “discover in habit the very pleasure of novelty [retrouver dans la coutume le plaisir même de la nouveauté]” (1837: 450). Genius, creativity and novelty emerge from and are an intensification of the natural spontaneity in an acquired habit. Both habit and genius, in fact, can be conceived as belonging to the spiral that Ravaisson pictures in concluding De l’habitude: Between the ultimate depths of nature and the highest point of reflective freedom, there are an infinite number of degrees measuring the development of one and the same power, and as one rises through them, extension  – the condition of knowledge  – increases with the distinction and the interval of the opposites. This is like a spiral whose principle resides in the depths of nature, and yet which ultimately flourishes in consciousness. Habit comes back down this spiral, teaching us of its origin and genesis. (2008: 77)

Habit comes back down this spiral, certainly, but it also enables to rise up it, given that once a habit is acquired we are free, according to a contrasting impulse, to acquire new, higher skills and habits. In this sense, habit and genius could be conceived not as two opposed principles of action, but as two tendencies moving in opposed directions across a monistic spectrum, across one and the same power. If one looks closely, as I have argued elsewhere, this is precisely the conception of the relation of habit to genius that Bergson articulates in 1907 within the third chapter of L’évolution créatrice (see Sinclair 2020). That Ravaisson promoted habit as the organon and document of philosophy in 1838 by no means entails, we should note, that he turned his back on the virtues of fine art. He exhibited his own paintings at the Paris Salon under the name of Laché, and he had a lifelong theoretical and practical interest in aesthetics, particularly in drawing and how it should be taught. In the 1950s, as a senior civil servant, he was responsible for national educational policy resisting the encroachments of technical drawing (see Canales 2006 and Viola 2012). In his posthumous Testament philosophique, Ravaisson even writes, in a Romantic mode, of art as “the torch of science [le flambeau de la science]” (2016: 309). Bergson exaggerates when he writes that “[t]he whole of Ravaisson’s philosophy derives from the idea that art is a figurative metaphysics, that metaphysics is a reflection on art, and that it is the same intuition, applied differently, which makes the profound philosopher and the great artist” (Bergson 1946: 274), but the point certainly applies to his work after De l’habitude. The concept linking his account of habit, his aesthetics and his theology, however, a concept which is thus the most pivotal and fundamental concept in his work as a whole, is grace: if grace, in the most minimal sense, describes a certain unconscious effortlessness in voluntary movement, a certain purposiveness without purpose in action, in an aesthetic sense it also describes a principle that is ‘more beautiful than beauty’, that is beauty in movement, as Schelling, and Schiller before him, had already argued prior to Ravaisson (see Schelling 1845). But the inspiration that divines grace in this sense comes from above, from a higher nature, from the divine itself, rather than from a supposedly isolated, self-constituting subject, and is itself

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a gift of grace. Ravaisson does not state this yet in De l’habitude, but he will come to suppose, in effect, that in fine art production, and not just in habit, nature operates as a “prevenient grace” and as “God within us” (2008: 71). To conclude, the influence of Schelling, as we have seen, is present in almost every aspect of Ravaisson’s intellectual career: it is evident in the metaphysical framework of his doctoral dissertation on habit, in his later attempts to account for the relation of the divine to the finite world, and in his later reflection on art. There is evidently an influence of Schelling on Ravaisson, as Courtine has underlined (1994: 34). At no stage, however, is Ravaisson’s inheritance of Schelling’s ideas a servile reproduction of them. The elaboration of an identity philosophy by means of the particularly French question of habit singularises, from the beginning to the end of his career, Ravaisson’s engagement with Schelling. Hence it seems exaggerated to speak of the French philosopher as Schelling’s “disciple”, as the “only important disciple that Schelling ever had” (Cerutti 2019: 30). Ravaisson’s relation to Schelling is much freer than that, and it is for this reason that Bergson was not wrong to prefer the idea of a community of inspiration uniting the two thinkers.

Bibliography Baruzi, Jean. 1933. Introduction. In Félix Ravaisson, De l’habitude. Paris: Alcan. Beiser, Frederick C. 2002. German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bergson, Henri. 1946. The Creative Mind. Trans. M. Andison. New York: Philosophical Library. ———. 1959. Œuvres. Paris: PUF. Berger, Benjamin, and Daniel Whistler. 2021. The Schelling Reader. London: Bloomsbury. Bréhier, Emile. 1912. Schelling. Paris: Alcan. Canales, Jimena. 2006. Movement before Cinematography: The High-Speed Qualities of Sentiment. Journal of Visual Culture 5 (3): 275–294. Cerutti, Patrick. 2019. La philosophie de Schelling. Paris: Vrin. Courtine, Jean-François. 1994. Les relations de Ravaisson et de Schelling. In La réception de la philosophie allemande en France au xixè et au xxè siècles, ed. Jean Quillien, 111–134. Lille: Presses du Septentrion. Dopp, Joseph. 1933. Félix Ravaisson: la formation de sa pensée d’après des documents inédits. Louvain: Éditions de l’Institut Supérieur de la Philosophie. Engel, Pascal. 1988. Plenitude and Contingency: Modal Concepts in Nineteenth Century French Philosophy. In Modern Modalities: Studies of the History of Modal Theories from Medieval Nominalism to Logical Positivism, ed. S. Knuuttila, 179–238. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Janicaud, Dominique. 1984. Cousin et Ravaisson, lecteurs de Schelling et Hegel. Les Études Philosophiques 4: 451–466. Kant, Immanuel. 2007. Critique of Judgment. Trans. N. Walker. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Madinier, Gabriel. 1938. Conscience et movement. Paris: Alcan. Mauve, Christiane. 1996. Ravaisson lecteur et interpète de Schelling. Romantisme 88: 65–74. Ravaisson, Félix. 1835. Jugement de Schelling sur la philosophie de Cousin et sur l’état de la philosophie française en général. La revue germanique (October): 3–24. ———. 1889. La philosophie en France au XIXème siècle. Paris: Hachette. ———. 2001. De la nature à l’esprit, ed. R. Belay and C. Marin. Paris: ENS Éditions. ———. 2008. Of Habit, ed. and trans. C. Carlisle and M. Sinclair. London: Bloomsbury.

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———. 2016. Selected Essays, ed. M. Sinclair. London: Bloomsbury. Schelling, F. W. J. 1845. The Philosophy of Art: an Oration on the Relation between the Plastic Arts and Nature, Trans. A. Johnson. London: John Chapman. ———. 1978. System of Transcendental Idealism. Trans. P.  Heath. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Schuhl, P. M. (ed.). 1936. Ravaisson, Quinet, Schelling – Lettres. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 111 (4): 487–498. Sinclair, Mark. 2019. Being Inclined: Félix Ravaisson’s Philosophy of Habit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2020. Bergson. London: Routledge. Vater, Michael. 2014. Friedrich Schelling. In Nineteenth-Century Philosophy of Religion, ed. G. Oppy and N. Trakakis, 61–80. London: Routledge. Viola, Tullio. 2012. The Serpentine Life of Félix Ravaisson: Art, Drawing, Scholarship and Philosophy. In Et in imagine ego: Facetten von Bildakt und Verkörperung, ed. U.  Feist and M. Rath, 155–174. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Whistler, Daniel. 2023. Identity Philosophy. In The Palgrave Schelling Handbook, ed. K. Bruff et al. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Chapter 4

Line, Vine, and Grace: Ravaisson’s Spiral and Schelling’s Vortex Ben Woodard

Abstract  This study addresses the conceptual affinities between F. W. J. Schelling and Félix Ravaisson by focusing on the genesis of the link between nature and thought in their respective philosophies. To achieve this, it considers the role of diagrammatic representation in depicting this link—particularly in the figure of the spiral. I argue that, for Schelling, the spiral is a real pattern that suggests the polarity of the mental and the physical whereas, for Ravaisson, it is a memory of the condition of action and a condition of grace. I cash out this argument by considering not only Schelling’s philosophy of nature, where the spiral is manifest in the vortex of the First Outline of the System of the Philosophy of Nature, and Ravaisson’s Of Habit, but also Ravaisson’s essays on fine art, Leonardo da Vinci and the serpentine line. Keywords  Grace · Diagram · Ontographic gesture · Habit · Nature The following study attempts to address the conceptual affinities between F. W. J. Schelling and Félix Ravaisson by focusing on the genesis and role of the link between nature and thought. To do this I wish to focus on the diagrammatic representation of this link in the figure of the spiral. Provisionally it can be stated that for Schelling the spiral is a real pattern that suggests the polarity of the mental and the physical whereas, for Ravaisson, it is a memory of the condition of action and the seed of earthly grace. Much work has been done recently (and historically) on whether, how, and to what degree Ravaisson and Schelling directly affected one another (see, e.g., Sinclair’s chapter above). Likewise, the connection between French Spiritualism and Schelling’s thought (however broadly or narrowly both are articulated) has been famously denied. In the case of Ravaisson, Bergson famously declared that we should not overestimate the connection (and even cites dubious linguistic limitations). He writes, B. Woodard (*) ICI Berlin, Berlin, Germany © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Chepurin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 247, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39326-6_4

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B. Woodard We must also mention a few weeks spent by Ravaisson in Germany where he visited Schelling in Munich. There is more than one page in Ravaisson’s works which might be compared, for the direction of its thought as well as for its style, to the best writings of the German philosopher. Schelling’s influence must not on that account be exaggerated. Perhaps it was not so much a matter of influence as of natural affinity, community of inspiration and, if one may say so, pre-established harmony between two minds both of which were traveling on a lofty plane, and met each other on certain peaks. Conversation, furthermore, was rather difficult between the two philosophers as the one knew very little French and the other scarcely any more German. (2007: 194).

And yet it is very hard not to see Schelling’s ideas (especially from the System des transzendentalen Idealismus) slithering within the pages of Ravaisson’s De l’habitude (see Sinclair’s chapter above). If we wish to say that there is a connection—and a connection that is to be thought in terms of the spiral that goes from the depths of nature to the unfolding of consciousness above it—one is faced with the task of answering ‘which’ Schelling should be used to make this connection: the post-Fichtean idealist, the Naturphilosoph, or the later positive-philosopher of religion and myth. Or should one rather stick to conceptual registers such as psychology or history or nature, or more specific ones such as potentiality, action, or habit? The very question of influence is a psycho-historical one concerning where the weight of history vis-à-vis concepts hatched in a single mind should be positioned, especially if we want to either depart from standard pictures of history or attempt a productive betrayal of ideas of a thinker that cannot in fact be lived up to by that thinker. We can relate this to Bergson’s claim above that the lofty peaks on which Schelling and Ravaisson purportedly met suggest a mixture of historical context and ahistorical conceptual similarity, rather than influence (although it appears odd what exactly ‘influence’ might in fact mean if not a conversation and exchange of texts, as we know occurred in this case). It seems that Bergson’s anxiety of influence (as a transitory movement from idealism to spiritualism to his own work) is to advocate for the third way of his own ideas, which refuse to be caused by any pre-­ existing ground. Things are made even worse when considering the above by the philosophical treatment of history—and whether philosophy itself can have a clear history—and this leads us back to the question of which manifestation of Schelling is here at stake. If we accept the (rather outdated) periodization of Schelling, then it would seem that the Schelling with which Ravaisson engages must be that of the transcendental philosopher who denies (on lines similar to Hegel) that philosophy has a history in the standard sense. But if we see the roots of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie (and the very notion of the spiral as segmenting the connection between mind and nature) at work, then philosophy becomes the natural history of the mind and the non-historical character of philosophy is put into question—that is, following Schelling, nature can have a history (pace Kant) and the history of philosophy becomes the history of natural histories of the mind. This, in turn, seems to suggest that the history of the natural histories of the mind requires a rational or formal tool

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to view the conceptual content of shifts over time as conceptual yet also historical: concepts seem to justify their existence retroactively yet are not solidified until they receive a particular name and are championed by a particular figure. Using ‘mind’ (at least its various articulations as human mind) to analyse the history of nature also foregrounds formal, structural, or other rational means which emphasize patterns and forms—hence, the relevance of the diagrammatic spiral as the focus of this chapter. This is further complicated or twisted in the German-­ French connection (where the term ‘mind’ itself refers to a series of equivalents from Geist to Verstand and from l’esprit to la raison), and this is because historically the systematic trappings of German thought are often rejected or translated into a structuralism of mind or a formalism of sense (whether in the psychological rendering of Hegelianism or the reception of Husserl’s belated renovation of Cartesian rationalism). But is this also the case with French Spiritualism and the French philosophy of the concept (e.g., Cavaillès, Lautman, Canguilhem)? These minoritarian branches of twentieth-century French thought are those where Schelling’s influence is divided between transcendental thought and his naturephilosophical thought, but where the former is reconnected to Schelling’s later positive philosophy of the 1830s and 1840s (in parallel to one moment in the spiritualist tradition in France). The relation between German Romantic science and French structuralism and rationalism is important, and it is this link which is often concealed (often owing to the influence of Bergson). In addition, this link also leads one to notions of vitalism or at least to notions of philosophies of life more critical and complex than Bergson’s (or Canguilhem’s). Nevertheless, when it comes to the Bergson passage above, we should be cautious about his motivation, and there are, in fact, other texts from the period that seem to contradict Bergson’s account, such as handbooks by Thadda Rixner and Tennemann, as well as the work of Paul Grimblot (1842: lvii) which connects Schelling to Maine de Biran.1 In these texts we find traces of a connection between Ravaisson and Schelling deeper than Bergson suggests—a connection further evidenced by the fact that Ravaisson possessed unpublished texts of Schelling’s in his library and had considered translating the latter’s works on mythology (Janicaud 1969: 98).2 These traces of a connection also leave ambiguous the status of what it means to ‘reconnect’ nature and mind, since such a project would, on the one hand, allude to Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, and yet, on this view, the two would never be disconnected and the connection would only be obfuscated. This complication was no doubt seen by Merleau-Ponty (with direct reference to Schelling’s Naturphilosophie) in his attempt to find or rediscover the bond between human experience and nature (2003:  51–52). This is also, perhaps, why in his preface to Cousin’s Fragments philosophiques, Schelling is wary of the role of psychology in Cousin’s work (1842: 82), especially if conceived as a rational alternative to Kant’s philosophy.

 See volume 1, §4.1.8.  I thank Louis Morelle for sharing this reference with me.

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However, this is of course too close for comfort for Bergson and no doubt it motivates his rejection of any affiliation between Schelling’s idealism and the legacy of French Spiritualism—as two related philosophical attempts to enrich experience and sense while going beyond the usual sources of empiricism (an empiricism increasingly aligned with Newtonian mechanism or at least with Newtonian experimentalism).3 Here, the figure of the spiral, which even in Ravaisson seems transcendental-naturephilosophical, begs not only the question of the conceptual inter-translation between French and German, but also the naturephilosophical status of ‘positive philosophy’ in its broadest sense (of the fact that one must treat experience itself as material for thought). Ultimately, the goal here is to ask after the conceptual space in which Ravaisson’s habitual spiral resides and to interrogate whether this is the space also populated by Schelling’s dynamic whirlpools from the Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie [First Outline of a Philosophy of Nature]. That is, is there an instructive link to be found (or made) between the grace of Ravaisson’s serpentine line and the living dynamics of Schelling’s liquid vortex? And again, what does this in turn mean for understanding the history of nature and the history of philosophy as histories of natural cognition done in a transcendental key, but one which determines the body to act freely? Another way of thinking this is to ask how the making of the diagram can serve either as a function of the ideal type or as a provisional tool.

4.1 Ravaisson’s Spiral First, it is important to determine the provenance of Ravaisson’s spiral image and whether it is merely a rhetorical flourish to end De l’habitude or bears substantial argumentative or structural weight. Ravaisson writes, Between the ultimate depths of nature and the highest point of reflective freedom, there are an infinite number of degrees of measuring the development of one and the same power, and as one rises through them, extension  – the condition of knowledge  – increases with the distinction and the interval of the opposites. This is like a spiral whose principle resides in the depths of nature, and yet which ultimately flourishes in consciousness.

A few lines further down, he continues: “The history of Habit represents the return of Freedom to Nature, or rather the invasion of the domain of freedom by natural spontaneity” (2008: 77). Here it appears near impossible to avoid Schellingian resonances. In the First Outline for a Philosophy of Nature, Schelling had written, “Now, it would certainly be impossible to get a glimpse of the internal construction of Nature if an invasion of Nature were not possible through freedom” (2004: 196). If habit is the spatio-temporal realization of action, it is also an attempt to desubstantialize without destabilizing the Aristotelian account of action. In this sense,

 I am here referencing Zammito’s distinction (2017: 38–47) between experimental and law-based Newtonianism, especially in the French reception of his work. 3

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habit is second nature not in the way meant by the recent analytic appropriation of German Idealism (à la Pittsburgh School), but as the recodification of natural actions into terms differently understood by humans. One way of viewing this is as the invasion of nature by freedom in the guise of the formal or, in Ravaisson’s terms, the learning of the motion of a disciplined body in the form of habit. However, the question remains: if second nature has come to mean the normative or ethical character enacted by rational beings, is this something that begins only with organic life? Or put otherwise, if habit is a secondary substantialisation of the action of living beings, it is uncertain how we might wish to think its ground without grounding the ethical in a dubious manner, i.e., without claiming that organic nature as such is moral and ethical (healthy and harmonious). Such a position also needs to be differentiated from an Aristotelian position which would import soul, and hence the moral and the ethical, as the pilot of the actions of the body (as arguably Stahl also does, as Ravaisson points out) (2016: 303).4 In two essays which engage with not only his adaptation of the Aristotelian paradigm but also emphasize the structures of metaphysics vis-a-vis moral concerns, Ravaisson indexes the work of the mathematician Girard Desargues in connection to Pascal (one of Ravaisson’s great influences). In “Métaphysique et morale” (2016: 288–9), Ravaisson discusses Desargues extensively by demonstrating how the latter’s work on perspective transforms such perspective into a discourse on intensities that cannot be equated to a calculable infinity. That is, the vanishing point in an image is where parallel intensities (as magnitudes) approach zero (as opposed to functioning as a bad regress). Ravaisson quotes Desargues at length on this problem. There is a parallel here between the line as intensity (or magnitude) and its never-to-be-completed approach towards an impossible point that mirrors moral progression. But the very drawing of this line is also made possible through a simple mechanical action that wavers between the construction of a figure or the tracing of action’s possibility—or, in terms of perspective, between the image as the snapshot of a view or as the condition of seeing itself. Desargues’ legacy is complicated, since very little of his work was written down and what was written was distributed to just a small circle of fellow scholars. His work was then forgotten or (as Deleuze and Guattari have it) actively rejected by the Paris Academy. Deleuze and Guattari go even further in connecting Desargues to their notion of nomadic science, to a radically different notion of geometry then what was accepted and fostered by the molar powers of the apparatus of state science (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 363). Yet in so doing, Deleuze omits Desargues connection to both Pascal as well as to Descartes (the former connection being central to Ravaisson). Deleuze’s treatment also tends to overlook that much of Desargues’ practical work was in engineering and also in the design of architectural objects for minor royals across France.  There is of course a huge amount of literature on how rational or materially grounded Aristotle’s notion of action is and how this falls between the gap of the Metaphysics and De Anima. Many of the difficulties of this relation between the living and the non-living via the rationality of the soul (nous) and its activity are dramatized in Negarestani (2008). 4

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In terms of being forgotten in mathematics, it is worth noting (to take one example) that Desargues’ language was criticized for being too whimsical or strange. Yet, these ‘odd’ terms are simply his means of connecting (analogically) the various fields of knowledge which, at the time, were of course not separated into disciplines as we understand them today. Retroactively then, such analogical terms may seem “poetic” or obsfucatory even, when the point was in fact the opposite: Desargues’ botanical language is prevalent in the life sciences and even in Descartes. For example, his apparently poetic description of a parabola as a burning mirror refers to the focus of the parabola as the hottest point (in turn calling to mind the myth of Archimedes and the burning of the Roman fleet) (1987:129). Furthermore—and this points back to Ravaisson—Desargues was embroiled in controversy through his self-proclaimed acolyte, Abraham Bosse, on the question of the degree to which and the form in which mathematics should be taught to painters in the academy. Is it possible that Ravaisson is sympathetic to Desargues—that is, sympathetic to a life properly geometrized, rather than one which attempts to smooth out its curves? Switching the focus to grace raises the question of both the line carved out or generated by action and the curved line of the living body—two moments that seem to sit at opposite ends of the spiral of habit. The fact that the line on the page retains, or must exemplify, its active component (i.e., that it was drawn by a hand and that its end is not its necessary end) again returns us to Desargues’ treatment of the vanishing point as non-naive, as the burning point of two colliding intensities, or also as the navel (1987:129). The organic language of the navel is not simply fanciful, but foregrounds the idea of a point of disconnection between (life) lines. However, the degree to which Ravaisson is willing to follow mathematics in general and Desargues in particular is always in question. In his essay, “La Philosophie contemporaine”, Ravaisson makes clear that it was a mistake for seventeenth-century philosophy to have mirrored the methods of mathematics and that Descartes and Leibniz are to be lauded for separating the capacities of mind or thought from those of mathematics or science. That is, while both thinkers were deeply involved in mathematics, Leibniz’s interest was an expression of the metaphysics resultant from the skilled constructions of the divine and Descartes of course renders reason the pilot of everything else, including mathematics, and hence the privileged tool of the analysis of extension which is categorically separated from the god-gifted mind that wields it. Desargues is important for understanding the role of the spiral in Ravaisson (and how it links to similar ideas in Schelling), since Desargues’ geometry of the living world was also expressed in his architectural projects (namely, the construction of various famous spiral staircases). In Architectural Representation and the Perspectival Hinge, Alberto Gamez and Louise Pelletier emphasize that Desargues assumed an infinite space of creation in order not to hinder the resolution of pragmatic problems of engineering (he was not interested in the ideal perspective) (Pelletier and Pérez-Gómez 2000: 168). Furthermore, like Ravaisson, Desargues is connected not only to Pascal (who also wrote on conic sections and perspective), but also to Bosse (who is today most famous perhaps for drawing the front piece to

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Hobbes’ Leviathan)—and Bosse in turn linked Desargues’ projective geometry to painting. As Field and Gray argue in their long introduction to Desargues’ work on conics, it became particularly controversial with the appearance of a new translation of Leonardo’s work on ‘aerial perspective’ in contradistinction to linear perspective (1987: 33–34). And, to complicate matters further, Bosse was imitated by William Hogarth, who is one of the exemplary practitioners of the serpentine line (the undulating line of beauty). The serpentine line can be traced from Hogarth back to Lomazzo, Michelangelo and ultimately to the Laocoon statue. The statue’s effect as an ideal of art has been well documented. For example, in The Veil of Isis, Pierre Hadot charts this trajectory (but connects it to Goethe’s aesthetics)5: he emphasizes the ebb, flow, and undulation of nature fundamental to the visual and plastic arts—movements which, following Goethe (and the romantics more generally as well as the Naturphilosophen), involve the play of intensity and polarization (2008: 222). Commenting on Hogarth’s serpentine line (or line of grace), Hadot notes the invasion of a third dimension into a plane—the movement of a curling line around a cone which suggests movement that (as in Châtelet’s corkscrew) (1999: 184–185) must be understood in three. Hadot quotes Ravaisson at length on the cardiac motion of the heart described by Da Vinci (which also has an afterlife in Schelling’s understanding of motion)—the systole and diastole (2008: 224). Thus, the line of grace is simultaneously the method and motion of nature, since it is a border that is proof of movement, rather than a line or membrane of containment. If, as Mark Sinclair (2019: 122) suggests following Ravaisson (pace Bergson), grace requires habit (the dancer requires habit as a constructive constraint), then Ravaisson’s statements about Desargues make far more sense. Part of the difficultly, it would seem, stems from Desargues’ universalist perspective and whether his thought should be understood as entirely rejecting linear perspective. Is Desargues’ work simply a different way of doing geometry, or is it a radically different geometry? Ian Hacking, for instance, in his Why is There Philosophy of Mathematics at All?, follows Manders in describing Desargues’ approach as a radical shift in how we understand space, rather than a different interpretation of the same stable axioms (2014: 10). The difficulty here can be located between the rational construction of space against its ‘reality’ (often defined in terms of an unbounded empiricism) and a radical yet still phenomenological spatial motion posited against the space of the engineer or of practical life. In this context, we can ask why Ravaisson would utilize Desargues when discussing metaphysical frameworks and also why he would attempt to render his new universal space of perspective (composed in small steps towards infinity) amenable to a Christian notion of infinity, to the kind of grace that Ravaisson sees in Da Vinci’s works (2016: 145–154)? One is tempted to turn to the work of Pavel Florensky on reverse perspective (2002: 201–272), in which he skilfully demolishes the myth that the medievals were incapable of fixed perspective. Instead, he argues,

 In reference to spirals in particular, see Mainberger (2010).

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they created frescoes and other images in an apparently flattened and fragmented style in order to try to create a semblance of a god’s eye view (something similar in motivation, yet different in effect from Da Vinci’s aerial perspective). Florensky in fact uses Da Vinci to point out that those who mastered mathematical perspective immediately flouted it deliberately for the sake of the qualities of the subjects they were painting. At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that for Schelling the spiral is a real pattern that communicates the polarity of the mental and the physical, whereas, for Ravaisson, it is a memory of the condition of action and the seed of grace. To take one example from many: Da Vinci’s The Last Supper embodies both of these aspects in a twisted perspective. Moreover, Da Vinci is well aware, in line with a tradition of Italian painting from Brunelleschi onwards, that mathematical perspective makes the field of painting look more realistic (in the sense of approximating distances to our vision), but he also understands that a break which alters that natural frame by reference to the divine will differentiate the divine from the natural, while nevertheless still conserving the field of ‘natural’ vision. And this brings us back to the figure of the serpentine line which appears bound to the action of the drawing hand (to the ontographic nature of thought or even of being itself) and to the material. It is a particular shape which suggests or implies movement—a movement which is both physical and physiological—as in Laocoon’s face. Laocoon’s anguish, and its ethical implications for a freedom that only functions because of its living ground, lead us to Schelling and to the question of the fundamentality of a dynamics founded on the whirlpool.

4.2 Schelling’s Whirlpool Schelling’s passage on the whirlpool from the Erster Entwurf acts as a kind of metonymy for how he views all of nature, or at least, all the so-called products of nature: A stream flows in a straight line forward as long as it encounters no resistance. Where there is resistance—a whirlpool forms. Every original product of nature is such a whirlpool, every organism. The whirlpool is not something immobilized, it is rather something constantly trans-forming—but reproduced anew at each moment. Thus, no product in nature is fixed, but it is reproduced at each instant through the force of nature entire. (We do not really see the subsistence of Nature’s products, just their continual being-reproduced.) Nature as a whole co-operates in every product. Certain points of inhibition in Nature are originally set up—consequently, perhaps there is only one point of inhibition from which the whole of Nature develops itself—first of all, however, we can think infinitely many points of inhibition—at each such point, the stream of Nature’s activity will be broken, as it were, its productivity annihilated. But at each moment comes a new impulse, as it were, a new wave, which fills this sphere afresh. In short, Nature is originally pure identity— nothing to be distinguished in it. Now, points of inhibition appear, against which, as limitations to its productivity, Nature constantly struggles. While it struggles against them, however, it fills this sphere again with its productivity. (2004: 18)

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Schelling is here alluding to the work of Daniel Bernoulli whom he discusses elsewhere in Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur [Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature] with particular reference to his prize-winning essay on magnetic fields published in 1748, Nouveaux principes de mécanique  et de  physique, tendans à expliquer la nature & les propriétés de l’aiman.6 In his earlier Ideen, Schelling appears to defend Bernoulli (albeit not staunchly) from Pierre Prevost’s critique of the ultimate inner motivator of vortexes and the movement of elastic fluid. Schelling considers any atomistic attempt at explaining the turbulence of a fluid as begging the question, for it presupposes that the impact of substances explains the flow and change of a liquid. While Schelling does admit that mechanical explanation possesses some use (and this explains his appeal to Bernoulli), he also believes that only a general notion of dynamics can explain or even think the elasticity of a fluid, i.e., only a contradiction in the direction of forces can explain the emergence of a phenomenon such as a whirlpool. In present terms, the theories with which Schelling engages appear to minimize the difference between smooth (or laminar) flow and turbulent flow (the two are distinguished insofar as the former can be adequately predicted by particle density, whereas the latter is measured as the interactions of two forces, inertial and viscous)—and this remains a stubborn problem in physics.7 It should be noted that the problem of localizing action within a world that is seen as generally dynamic is a problem that Bergson shares with Schelling. It is exactly such a case that will lead Merleau-Ponty to compare the two thinkers in his lecture notes on nature (2003: 39–40). Two not strictly complementary issues overlap—one concerning the opposition of atomistic and dynamic theories and another concerning the appropriate levels of description. While we can of course describe the molecular or atomistic characteristics of water, it is not going to give us what we need to explain turbulence at a macro level. This is different from saying that a dynamic account or an atomistic account is metaphysically or structurally more correct or valid, i.e., a schema of universality and individuality does not correspond perfectly to levels of efficacious description. This also offers a way back into the above discussion of the complications of perspective. Mathematical perspective in the hands of Da Vinci is presented as a mode of projecting a three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional surface. In the artistic mode (however we might wish to define that), Da Vinci still, as I mentioned, breaks the laws of perspective to emphasize the interior characteristics of a

 Gideon Freudenthal (2006) suggests that Maimon’s critique of Kant’s use of construction in geometry takes a similar approach to Daniel Bernoulli in the discussion of how motion is compounded. Freudenthal claims that Kant had knowledge of the prize-winning paper and discussed it in On the True Estimation of the Living Forces (2012), but it appears that Kant instead discusses Johan Bernoulli, rather than Daniel. Kant does mention Daniel Bernoulli, but all of the substantive references in On the True Estimation are to Johan. 7  One simplistic way of imaging the relation of these forces is to picture the difference between milk being poured slowly into tea (where the turbulence emerges in the form of whirls) and honey (which due to its high viscosity folds back onto itself in a predictable manner). 6

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person or angelic entity by enlarging or otherwise emphasizing their shape and stature. To be somewhat crude: we could see this as freedom (of the creative sort) invading nature in its re-presentation via an artistic artifact (the paper and pigment). To put it another way, the skills of painting at the physical level (brushwork and eye for detail) are habits in Ravaisson’s strong sense. But unlike the competing (or, we might better say, complimentary) scientific theories which are applied to the whirlpool, the work of art tries to present multiple ways of seeing at once in order to elicit an effect. In the case of mechanics or dynamics, the researcher is trying to find the best explanation of a given effect, i.e., the existence and motion of the whirlpool. Depending on how the motion is understood, it can be modelled and extracted for the sake of comparative analysis or analogy, which gives us the diagram of the motion as its ontographic expression, and hence functions diagrammatically in a way similar to how the artifact is attempting to function via the sign or representation. Or as Iain Hamilton Grant writes in his preface to Thomas Moynihan’s Spinal Catastrophism: “A mark’s being made renders any actual beginnings of directionality into referents for subsequent movements, but nothing dictates that such later movements merely continue or issue from their precursor states; later advents may reorient earlier, with morphogenetic vortices repeatedly refashioning or even revoking the axes of antecedent forms” (2019: xiii). In the Ideen, Schelling not only emphasizes the importance of a general dynamics (perhaps without physical ground), but he also insists that the dynamic of forces ‘seen’ in the whirlpool can be idealistically or perhaps transcendentally extracted. Schelling’s comment is not that far from those who will apply his doctrine of forces to an ideal space without friction, so as to understand the possibilities of fields and lines of force (Châtelet 1999, 150–160). However, Ravaisson’s spiral is both an image we can create and a path on which we find ourselves moving, or acting, depending on the level at which the spiral is acting upon us (i.e., depending on how habit is at work in us). The naturephilosophical line is ontographic, but perhaps not in the same manner as Ravaisson’s serpentine line. And yet both seem to have an Aristotelian provenance, especially following in the lineage of a desubstantialised Aristotle (who holds together soul and animation in an unstable formal cocktail). If physical and mental actions are both diagrammatic, then such actions (depending on the traces they make) can be viewed as ontographic—that is, the trace of the action is the ongoing creative outline of any particular individuated being. This idea motivates a whole tradition of thinking—not only Ravaisson’s, but also Schelling’s, Deleuze’s, Laruelle’s, and others.8 It envelops the whole problem of immanence vis-à-vis the problem of freedom—or, in less anthropocentric terms, we could say that this idea sets up a relation between action (as evidence of immanence or emergence attempting to break free from a ground or cause) and the world (affecting or conditioning all forms of action as an expression of its underlying heterogenous

 For the connection to Laruelle, see Mullarkey (2006) and Le (2018).

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continuity). Or to put it bluntly: is ‘my’ potential expressed in all my actions that seem free or is potentiality as such being tested through me? While this can be seen as one more repetition of the Aristotle/Plato debate, the emphasis in fact tends in the opposite direction with respect to the ontographic: it is an Aristotelian model of action that tends towards building continuity with the world. And this is opposed to a realist account of Platonic action in individuation, in which the form acts as a proof only to the degree that it cuts into the world, as the forgotten Platonic realist Constantin Ritter put it. In an ontographic understanding of drawing, it is the line as a repetition of the action of the hand that exhibits the trace and so suspends any claim that the line is merely a dead version of the hand’s motion. This entails seeing the line as neither a simple repetition of static actions (or singular points) nor an object seen after the fact. The problematic of intuition is particularly significant here, especially as discussed in Ravaisson’s “L’Enseignement du dessin”. It focuses on the problem of drawing action, as well as on the action of drawing. Here Ravaisson discusses flexuous lines (2016: 174) which are equated (or imperfectly overlap) with the serpentine line. If the serpentine line is an artful imitation of the sinuous motion of the snake, the flexuous line is its biological and often botanical counterpart, used most often to describe the wavering patterns of growth, particularly in Darwin (1865: 35).9 Da Vinci uses the two terms together in describing the various states of the veins of the heart that change shape with age, and it is worth further remarking that Da Vinci (in ways similar to Desargues) describes forms of the human body in botanical terms, e.g., the circular system is referred to as the tree of the vessels (see Keele 2014: 321–2). This takes us back to the cardiac oscillations of the systole and diastole (contraction and expansion) mentioned by Hadot above. Moreover, in Schelling, this cardiac rhythm becomes the motions of contraction and expansion in a semi-­ stable system, but also the self-destructive and ablative nature of such motion articulated in Die Weltalter. The motion of the divine appears as a mad self-sundering—an inverted form of grace (in Ravaisson’s sense), for the graceful motion is only possible here as a much-delayed motion of a charged piece of flesh emanating from an exploded godhead. As is the case with the whirlpool, all entities for Schelling are imperfect articulations of spatio-temporally bound events: just as whirlpools are dynamic interruptions of the flow of current, so are living creatures meta-stable chemical reactions, e.g., a bird is a bag of chemical reactions trying to cheat gravity. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Ravaisson’s and Bergson’s distrust of the quantificational nature of modern science (and especially measurement) seems at odds with articulations of grace (however self-destructive or ablative they may be). That is, nature must issue a sequence of grounds as first nature in order for second nature to have a territory to invade (if not serve as a ground for its own genesis).

 The term’s use seems to have peaked in the mid-1800s and is used freely, for instance, in Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in Animal and Man when describing what happens to a dog’s comportment when he greets his master. 9

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4.3 Bisecting the Spiral Our earlier discussion of the status of space returns here in the attempt to understand not only the space of the spiral (whether it is a mental space, a non-Euclidean space or a Euclidean space), but also what it means to move up and down its lines—from the Urgrund or primal ground (or even better, Ungrund, groundless ground) of nature to the highest peaks of thought. It is worth, once more, summarizing Ravaisson’s image of the spiral in relation to his notes on drawing, Schelling’s dynamics, and Desargues’ comments on infinity and the point. If we were possessed of divine hands and could straighten the curve of being, would it be viewed as anything other than a perspectival line with a vanishing point at each end? However, such a hypothetical scenario would entail encountering the line from either the end point of mind or the end point (or vanishing point) of nature. The spiral—as expressing a problem of the lateral—expressly denies any such absolute perspective. The movement up or down the spiral that stretches from nature to reflection (or from naturephilosophical methods to those of transcendental philosophy) always involves a twist or lateral shift—that is, the line of the spiral as action, as activity, as time, or as creation, etc., involves some form of errancy. That is, the tension between height and depth or between polarization only registers as something to the degree that it ‘goes wrong’, it only registers insofar as turbulence occurs in some domain. In his Lines, the anthropologist Tim Ingold articulates a different relation between the spiral and the line (in the context of writing and speech outside of standard Western understandings). Ingold takes up the paleo-anthropological research of Leroi-Gourhan which positions the emergence of linear writing as a move away from the diagrammatic transmissions of early peoples that resembled spirals and the whirl of narrative: Every graph, for Leroi-Gourhan, is the trace of a dexterous movement of the hand and as such embodies the rhythmicity characteristic of all movements of this kind. The earliest forms of graphism would have accompanied, and in turn commented upon, performances of storytelling, song and dance.

Since these performative contexts have now been irretrievably lost, we cannot know what the original significance of the traced lines might have been. However, one striking feature that Leroi-Gourhan claims to find in prehistoric graphisms is a fundamental radial geometry, “like the body of the sea urchin or the starfish”. Gourhan argues that written language constituted a straightening out of the spiral into a line of written language, although Ingold himself remains sceptical of the implicit narrative of Western progress in such a statement (Ingold 2007: 150–151). The curled line thus avoids being either an infinite magnitude where the vanishing point is simply an unknown (i.e., a bad infinity) or a circular infinite of structurally stable repetitions guaranteed by the powers of consciousness and/or nature. For Ravaisson, it seems necessary for the action of grace to appear as free. To imagine the practiced dancer in a pirouette is to ‘see’ their training (the sedimentation of habit) as the ground of grace: it allows grace to emerge as a seemingly organic

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motion (practiced effortlessness). However, once again, we find ourselves questioning the role reflective, intuitive or creative consciousness has in such an act of grace, particularly when we think of it in terms of a mere movement of the body. While Pascal (following Augustine) articulates grace predominantly in terms of a gift from God which we choose to accept and thus be moral, Ravaisson’s appropriates the term in a more immanent form. Some light is shed on this by Lars Spuybroek in “The Grace Machine” who shows how the secularization of grace results from a return to ancient traditions that categorically separate it from beauty. For the Greeks, grace attends to beauty but is not synonymous with it, but for Schiller, for example, grace is beauty in motion (Spuybroek 2018: 14). Spuybroek also mentions Bergson who defines beauty as arrested grace (hence reversing the emphasis) and attributes it to a non-existent quotation by Da Vinci (2018: 16). And, in line with the above discussion of Da Vinci, it is also worth emphasizing that the secularization of grace functions in a way that leaves open a space for human freedom (or Ravaisson’s action), because one does not have to act in accordance with grace, i.e., one does not have to choose to discipline oneself in an act. In other words, lack of action here appears as aesthetic freedom—as an artistic pose rather than an action (in Da Vinci’s case). And yet, contra Hadot’s close alignment of the serpentine and the flexuous discussed above, Spuybroek argues that the flexuous line is that of the horizontal or the wave, while the serpentine is that of the vertical figure, the living body. We once more return to the troubling relation between descriptions of a dynamic yet inorganic nature (the whirlpool) and the ‘freer’ motions of a living body. One way of resolving this is by way of the ontographic dimensions of these positions, for, from an ontographic perspective, each can be seen in its opposite: the accidental dynamics of a whirlpool seem less concrete than the ‘free’ motion of the hand, the purported horizontality of the flexuous line (of the wave) can possess a living movement less susceptible to the fossilization of the vertical figure, as biologically modelled in the spinal root of human beings. Grace becomes a vector of motion (whether of thought or of body) oriented vertically upwards, whereas the depths of nature are horizontal and emit attractive forces, pulling downwards and outwards. However, this once more makes clear the necessity of a spiral deformation of the polarization of tendencies—with habit acting as one means of recognizing such curves, twists, and bends. If there is any affinity between Schelling and Ravaisson when it comes to the spiral, it must be thought in these terms, i.e., how the diagrammatic works as an oscillation between ascent into mind and descent into nature. Alberto Toscano (2006) makes reference to precisely this structure in Ravaisson, but uses it to criticize what he sees as a reaction against nature as determined by the physical sciences. That is, Toscano’s Ravaisson posits spontaneity and activity against such a conception of nature. At several points in his discussion, Toscano claims that nature is a dead material for Ravaisson; however, this would only seem possible if Ravaisson’s treatment of Aristotle was one of a materialism of lifeless matter (pace Sinclair). Toscano’s mistake comes, I suggest, from focusing exclusively on Ravaisson’s De l’habitude without considering how his views on action and its ground in nature change in his later writings. In fact, Ravaisson’s notion of

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nature as ‘empty’ is to be understood through the mathematics of Desargues as the continuity of mathematical action and inorganic material. This is not a model of the flow of matter but of the canalization of forces (a view with which Toscano credits Peirce, thereby passing over Ravaisson’s contribution). This also suggests that mathematics can no longer be understood as alien to inorganic forces, but as continuous with them. The beautiful or the graceful, on Ravaisson’s terms, cannot be extricated from levels of sedimented action or nature, if habit is to be a second nature which grounds future acts of grace. The mathematization of the perspectival in Desargues’ work functions as a graceful utilization of mathematics, because it posits an irreconcilable infinity in the vanishing point (or the navel or ‘burning zero’)—the point at which the intensive expression of that zero is recognizable as actual activity and more than ‘mere’ measure. It may also be, in the end, that Ravaisson is channelling, at some level, the relation between grace and nature in Schelling’s own philosophy of art. As Devin Zane Shaw argues, Schelling’s concept of grace marks the moment where soul and nature find their kinship with one another (2012: 122). However, a trap awaits: this privileging of grace might amount to an abandonment of epistemological authority or even the over-magnification of a particular figure at the cost of all others. It is here that we find that the necessary lateral action of the spiral is deployed to avoid exactly this trap, i.e., the trap of seeing the vertical merely as a progression without ground or the horizontal as a pluralism without formal purchase. It is helpful to again refer back to Châtelet at this point: The horizon makes it possible to venture into the turbulent space where science, art and philosophy brush against one another without merging. This space is naturally much fought over and the obliquity and cohesion of a field of intensities are at once won against the density of the figural and its lateral pressures and against the discrete sequences of the discursive. The horizon of a landscape or of a domain of knowledge leads to an articulated contemplation of the field that reveals that what hollows out the degrees of discernment is also what joins up the standard measures of length or the units of signification. The horizon opens the field of all that, virtually, is within reach, capable of being deduced, filled, but that evades all these gestures that it nonetheless sustains. One cannot extract the horizon from the ‘projective’ without mutilating the field-fan’s capacity of unfolding. The horizon is not ‘accessible’, but adheres no less to the grasp that it inaugurates and controls: it is as unremitting as Bluebeard’s key. (2000: 53-54).

Both Ravaisson and Schelling (with overlapping, if non-identical motivations) refuse to choose between Aristotle or Plato, between the natural and the transcendental. And this is perhaps why Schelling notes towards the end of his life that the study of philosophy should begin with Plato and end with Aristotle: we must recognise that experience carves out concepts before we recognise those concepts as such. We must also recognise, Schelling implies, that seeing through such experiences to the forms is never an annihilation of one by the other, but rather an asymmetrical swerving dialectic of the spiral—one that is as naturalistic as it is eclectic—the skin-sheathed bones of a graceful limb drawing a form that has yet to find flesh.

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Bibliography Bergson, Henri. 2012. The Creative Mind. Trans. Mabelle Andison. New York: Dover Publications. Châtelet, Gilles. 1999. Figuring Space. Trans. Robert Shore and Muriel Zagha. New  York: Springer. Darwin, Charles R. 1865. On the movements and habits of climbing plants. Journal of the Linnean Society of London (Botany) 9: 1–118. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Field, Judith V., and Jeremy Gray. 1987. The Geometrical Work of Girard Desargues. New York: Springer Verlag. Florensky, Pavel 2002. Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art. Trans. Wendy Salmond. London: Reaktion Books. Freudenthal, Gideon. 2006. Definition and Construction: Salomon Maimon’s Philosophy of Geometry. Berlin: Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Grant, Iain. 2019. Preface. In Thomas Moynihan, Spinal Catastrophism. Falmouth: Urbanomic. Grimblot, Paul. 1842. Preface. In Système de l’idéalisme transcendental, ed. F. W .J. Schelling. Paris: Ladrange. Hacking, Ian. 2014. Why is there Philosophy of Mathematics at All? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hadot, Pierre. 2008. The Veil of Isis. Trans. Michael Chase. New York: Harvard University Press. Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge. Janicaud, Dominique. 1969. Une Généalogie du spiritualisme français. Aux sources du bergsonisme. Dordrecht: Springer. Kant, Immanuel. 2012. Natural Science, ed. E. Watkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keele, Kenneth D. 2014. Leonardo Da Vinci’s Elements of the Sciences of Man. London: Academic. Le, Vincent. 2018. The Origins of Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy in Ravaisson’s Understanding of Metaphysics. Labyrinthe 20: 1. (Summer). Mainberger, Sabine. 2010. In the vortex of the spiral tendency: Questions of aesthetics, literature and natural sciences in the work of Goethe. Estudios 24: 69. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2003. Nature: Course notes from the Collège de France. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Mullarkey, John. 2006. Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline. London: Bloomsbury. Negarestani, Reza. 2008. The Corpse’s Bride: Thinking with Nigredo. Collapse 4: 129–161. Pelletier, Louis, and Alberto Pérez-Gómez. 2000. Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge. Boston: MIT Press. Ravaisson, Félix. 2008. Of Habit. Trans. Clare Carlisle and Mark Sinclair. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2016. Selected Essays, ed. Mark Sinclair. London: Bloomsbury. Schelling, F.  W. J. 1842. Système de l’idéalisme transcendental. Trans. Paul Grimblot. Paris: Ladrange. ———. 1988. Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature. Trans. Errol Harris and Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature. Trans. Keith Petersen. Albany: State University of New York Press. Shaw, Devin Zane. 2012. Freedom and Nature in Schelling’s Philosophy of Art. London: Bloomsbury. Sinclair, Mark. 2019. Being Inclined:  Félix Ravaisson's Philosophy of Habit.  Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spuybroek, Lars. 2018. The Grace Machine: Of Turns, Wheels and Limbs. Exploring Architectural Form: A Configurative Triad (Spring/Summer): 7–32. Toscano, Alberto. 2006. The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zammito, J.H. 2017. The Gestation of German Biology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 5

“Naturism” in Place of Idealism: Henri Ducrotay de Blainville and Auguste Comte on Naturphilosophie Laurent Clauzade

Abstract  This study argues that the most significant impact of German absolute idealism on French positivism is felt via the tradition of philosophy of nature. While the philosophy of nature was inaugurated by Schelling, it is in fact through the work of his successor, Lorenz Oken, that it enters into the positivist corpus. It was out of an attempt to understand Oken’s significance for nineteenth-century biology that Auguste Comte and also Henri-Marie Ducrotay de Blainville took an interest in the idealist tradition out of which Oken emerged. In this study, therefore, I detail Oken’s reception in Blainville’s and Comte’s comments on the scale of beings and on organic life. In the appendix, I give a summary of the chapter on Oken written by Magdeleine de Saint-Agy and included in Georges Cuvier’s Histoire des sciences naturelles. Keywords  Philosophy of nature · Positivism · Organism · Lorenz Oken · Biology · Organic monad Few points of contact can exist between those philosophies interested in how we access knowledge of the absolute and a philosophy which rejects every kind of absolute knowledge as theological or metaphysical. This is why German Idealist philosophy is largely absent from Comte’s work, which, in its problems and language, forms part of a completely different tradition to that of metaphysical philosophies. Certainly, there are frequent points of similarity, for example between the Hegelian philosophy of history and Comte’s, or between the positivist fiction of a planet (the earth) endowed with intelligence and Schelling’s statements on the “organic, free and living” nature of the spheres.1 But these similarities are merely  Compare Comte (1856: 10–11) and Schelling (1845: 130).

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L. Clauzade (*) Université de Caen-Normandie, Caen, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Chepurin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 247, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39326-6_5

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superficial: what can exist in common between a history based on the biological model of preformationism and a history understood as a process of unfolding Spirit, between a fiction responding to the lacunae of Newtonian science and properties derived from a deduction of the idea of the absolute? Idealism as a philosophy—that is, as a system of absolute knowledge—could not therefore interest the positivists but could only reinforce its rejection and neglect of all metaphysics. However, the situation is quite different when this idealist philosophy, under Schelling’s impetus, is translated into a “philosophy of nature”, with the ambition to rethink the natural order and to reorganize scientific knowledge. Auguste Comte did not completely avoid this project of Naturphilosophie, for it was both very close to the positivist encyclopedia in its totalizing ambition and in some of its theses (especially in biology) and also far removed from its methods and foundations. Consequently, it is not the idealist philosopher whom Comte addresses, but what we would today call a “scientist”. And, ultimately, the only figure of Naturphilosophie really present in the positivist corpus is the naturalist Lorenz Oken2—an ambivalent figure since he was both honoured as one of the fathers of biological hierarchy, and very strongly criticized as the representative of a metaphysical pantheism that claimed to be scientific. It was in an attempt to understand this paradoxical figure that Auguste Comte and also Henri-Marie Ducrotay de Blainville (1777–1850), his biologist friend who held a chair at the Natural History Museum, took an interest in the idealist tradition out of which Oken emerged. In this chapter, my interest is thus primarily in Oken’s reception in Blainville and then Comte.

5.1 Blainville Blainville’s overall appraisal of Oken’s biological philosophy dates to 1845, in the third volume of his Histoire des sciences de l’organisation (1845).3 However, the French naturalist had long known of Oken’s work. Not only was Blainville (because he had co-edited the Journal de physique, de chimie, d’histoire naturelle et des arts

 Lorenz Oken (born Lorenz Okenfuss), 1779–1851. He was an enthusiast for Schelling’s system from his years of study in Freiburg in 1802. In 1804 he attended Schelling’s lectures at Würzburg, and befriended him. It was thanks to the intervention of Schelling and Goethe that he obtained his first university position at Jena. His thinking was inspired “very generously” by that of Schelling (Schmitt in Oken 2017: 26), and he was the “type specimen of the Naturphilosoph biologist” (Breidbach and Ghiselin 2002: 219). 3  It should be noted that in the same year was published the last volume of the Histoire des sciences naturelles. This history, which was initiated by Cuvier and completed by Magdeleine de SaintAgy, also contained a long chapter on Oken (see below the Appendix at the end of this chapter). Tulk (in Oken 1847: vi) mentions these two books in the preface to his translation of Oken’s Elements of Physiophilosophy. Finally, these two historical studies may also conform to a certain interest in Schelling’s philosophy in the 1840s: I have quoted the translation of Bruno of 1845; we can also recall that of the Système de l’idéalisme dating from 1842 (Schelling 1842). However, neither Blainville nor Saint-Agy seems to have benefited from either. 2

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from 1813 to 1823) extensively informed on the state of the sciences across Europe, but he also seems to have been particularly aware of what was happening in Germany. For instance, he ascribes the invention of the term “biology” to the Germans, and therefore implicitly to Treviranus, even though he shows no marked hostility towards Lamarck.4 In a way, it can be said that Oken’s works—whether his own or those published in Isis—were appreciated by Blainville as part of his normal scientific research in natural history.5 Blainville then tries to appreciate Oken as a scientist, and his normal research allows him to have good overall knowledge of Oken’s scientific work. However, the chapter on Oken and his school given in the Histoire is of a quite different nature, and the references are also quite different: they are theological and philosophical, not just scientific. For instance, regarding the strictly philosophical aspect of this chapter, the appraisal of idealism and Naturphilosophie is standard for the time, and follows, especially when it comes to Schelling, the Tennemann Manual translated by Victor Cousin.6 What renders the historical appreciation set out in the Histoire des sciences de l’organisation difficult is that it was written in collaboration with Abbé Maupied, with the aim of advocating for a Catholic approach to biological science and especially the hierarchy of animals. It is therefore necessary to ignore the development of religious doctrine in this book, in order to grasp the general line of thought it contains.7 For there is indeed a general line that is distinct from this Catholic apologetics and, despite the fact that such apologetics had aroused Comte’s profound disapproval, ultimately similarities exist between Comte’s own analyses and those of these authors.8 This Histoire des sciences de l’organisation defends a simplified scholastic thesis: biology must return to theology, that is, to an Aristotelianism essentially characterized as a doctrine of the final causes. Modern biology, mainly through Lamarck and Oken, will achieve this result in spite of itself through a process described as “demonstration by the absurd”.9 The works of Lamarck and Oken are indeed complementary for Blainville, and, beyond their differences, lead to the same  See Blainville (1833: 1.18). It is indeed to Lamarck to whom, in the French tradition, is ascribed the invention of the term “biology”. 5  There are many references to Oken in the Manuel d’actinologie ou de zoophytologie (1834), and his Lehrbuch der Naturgeschichte appears in the general bibliography (1834: 613). Similarly, Oken is often cited in the reports of scientific activity published in the first issue of each year’s Journal de physique. 6  See Tennemann (1829: 294–312). For example, Tennemann gives a representation of Schelling’s system in the form of tables (1829: 303) that Maupied and Blainville copy verbatim. 7  François Louis Michel Maupied (1814–1898) was a professor at the Sorbonne’s Faculty of Theology. In addition to many works of Catholic theology, it seems that in his more theoretical works he was keen to reconcile positive sciences and theology. See, for example, Maupied (1842). His incursion into the history of biology is consistent with this orientation. On Maupied’s contribution to the Histoire, see Canguilhem (1979) and Shuster-Aziza (1972). 8  In the rest of the text, we will refer to writers of the Histoire by using either the expression “the authors” or the name of Blainville 9  For an explanation of this phrase, see Blainville (1845: 17). 4

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fundamental conception—the demonstration of the strictly serial order of the living world. According to Blainville, this result had been obtained by Lamarck by means of a materialistic philosophy and by Oken by means of a pantheist philosophy, and can now be much better interpreted by a philosophy of final causes. The distinct role of the two biologists, each of which is the subject of a separate chapter, is as follows. Lamarck demonstrated this serial order starting from “biological considerations”, i.e., from the idea that it is the inclination determined by needs stemming from circumstances, which had led to organizational changes, animal species and, as a result, the series of animals. (Blainville 1845: 473)

But the series had yet to be demonstrated from organizational considerations, by which Blainville means the study of forms and organs and their metamorphoses. Hence, the German school, dominated by the research of Goethe and Oken, had to demonstrate the series in a dynamic way, taking into account the succession of forms, studying “the parallelism between the degrees of development of the organs of a species and the degrees of the series” (1845: 495): The thesis had to be supported by the metamorphosis of the organs, so that the whole organism could be embraced; he [i.e., Oken] was led to this result by the philosophy of nature due to Schelling. (1845: 473)

The authors then sketch a kind of history of idealism to make sense of the “system of naturism in Germany” (1845: 474). The term “naturism” was used in France at the time to generally designate a philosophical system based on the concept of nature. It had, for example, been applied to Hippocrates in the medical field, or, in philosophy, to Spinoza and materialism. In Auguste Comte’s and Blainville’s works, it particularly refers to the philosophy of nature that originated in Germany. Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Goethe, and Oken are mentioned in this brief history of idealism given in the Histoire. The parts devoted to the three philosophers are rather obscure and succinct (five pages for Kant, two for Fichte and three for Schelling). The distribution of roles is, however, relatively clear, and follows a rather classic scenario: Kant, with his conception of the transcendental, opened the way to idealism. Fichte then developed a “pure idealism”, which became a “pantheistic idealism” with Schelling. Thus, these three authors, beyond their differences, each develop a version of “transcendental idealism” (1845: 495). Kant is by far the most understood of the three, and this reflects the burgeoning familiarity with his ideas in France at the time. He initiated the movement that led to idealism, and then to the philosophy of the absolute. If, by insisting on the idea that “our knowledge of real objects is reduced to experience” (1845: 475), Kant “obviously approaches the theory of Locke and Condillac”, he nevertheless leaves “the positive” to “enter idealism” (1845: 478) with his theory of the forms of sensitivity and understanding. Indeed, his conception “of theoretical reason […] leads directly to idealism, since there is no possible reality except in the forms of sensitivity and intelligence” (1845: 476). This idealism will be fully developed by Fichte, who is presented as having established “pure idealism” (1845:478). The section on Fichte is certainly the least useful for understanding Oken’s project.

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5.1.1 Schelling It is only with Schelling that the philosophical principles that will characterize Oken’s work will be established. The authors refer to what they call the System of Absolute Identity, and indeed they implicitly refer to formalizations dating back to the period of Schelling’s identity philosophy. We find in particular the schema of the ternary generation of powers: gravity/light/organism, which the authors characterize as “the principle of identity in triplicity”. Three points are highlighted here: pantheism, the principle of a deduction “of the ideas of things from the fundamental thought of the absolute”, and the thesis that the march of nature corresponds to “the succession of forms it successively takes” (1845: 481). According to the authors, Schelling’s attempt to combine Kant and Fichte leads to a system that can be described as the “combination of Plato and Spinoza”: His idea was to give a general form to philosophy, because he claims to attain knowledge of the absolute and intelligence of the laws that constitute the entire order of finite things. Its aim was to introduce into science an ideal construction of the universe, related not to how it may appear to us, but to what it is in itself. This philosophy blurs the line between empirical and rational notions, and embraces the entire circle of speculative knowledge. It unites all beings in nature within a single idea. It identifies God with nature, and necessarily falls into pantheism. (1845: 481)10

This extremely rapid description—at no time do the authors enter precisely into the Schellingian conception of the absolute or explain their implicit assimilation of the absolute to God—brings Schelling’s and Spinoza’s systems closer together, and thus makes the philosophy of the absolute a pantheism in the most classical sense of the term: identification of God (or the absolute) with nature. This is the main feature of “naturisms”, whether Schelling’s or Oken’s: they are pantheistic constructions— and condemned as such by Blainville. The second feature highlighted is the idea that Schellingian philosophy consists of a deduction from a single conception, in this case “the fundamental thought of the absolute”. Such a feature, as we will see with Goethe and Oken, is received by Blainville in an ambivalent way. On the one hand, it is to the credit of Naturphilosophie, insofar as this deduction guarantees the unity and coherence of the animal series, and more broadly of the science of organization. But on the other hand, it is also a negative feature, because this approach turns its back on the inductive method, and gives results that experience does not systematically support. Finally, a last idea is treated by the authors: the march of nature proceeds by the succession of forms. This formula encompasses both the idea of metamorphosis and what Blainville characterizes in Oken as the principle of his rational classification: the succession of beings is the manifestation or repetition of the whole in the parts. However, even with Schelling, we are still far from the purpose of the book’s chapter, namely the way in which naturism, whose principles have just been  In his interleaved copy Blainville noted in front of the second paragraph quoted: “It is the opposite of idealism”, as if for him the only possible idealism was Platonism. 10

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partially defined, conceives the animal series and more generally the questions of biology. It is only with Goethe and Oken that these problems will be fully addressed.

5.1.2 Goethe The importance given to Goethe in their presentation may come as a surprise, but for the authors he is an essential reference point: It will be [Goethe] who will mark the transition from the philosophy of nature to its application to natural bodies, and who, consequently, will lead us to Oken, or to the latest results of the pantheist thesis. (1845: 484)

No comments are made about Goethe’s reservations regarding Schellingian method. But his somewhat surprising presence in this genealogy is suggested by the fact that the authors, on several occasions, insist on the idea that he “was more a poet or artist than a naturalist” (1845: 484). Nevertheless, their chapter bears witness to the misinterpretation of Goethe’s work in France: his work as a naturalist has long been received in the tradition of Naturphilosophie, masking the originality of his research, which, as Stéphane Schmitt (2001: 496) pertinently puts it, “rests on the balance between romanticism and classicism”. Their presentation, which is based on a French  edition of Goethe’s works on natural history (Goethe 1837), focuses on the complementary notions of metamorphosis and ideal type, since the theory of metamorphoses can only be based on “the conception of an ideal type” (Blainville 1845: 495). The authors are fully aware of the epistemological status of the type: This type, according to Goethe, is not a measure; because a measure is something real, while the type is something ideal. […] It must be formulated by abstraction. It cannot exist as a living being, the part cannot be the image of the whole. (1845: 490)

Such an approach, based on an idea, also implies a methodology that gives priority to “a priori meditation” and to “the eyes of the mind” over observation and experience (1845: 485, 487). From this point of view, the authors clearly place Goethe on the side of a synthetic and idealistic method, and are not sensitive to his efforts to give a role to experience and observation in scientific thinking. Regarding Goethe’s conclusions, Blainville praises his work on the metamorphosis of plants, but remains sceptical about the theses on the metamorphosis of animals. As for his osteological works, which the authors describe in some detail – it is in this field that Goethe tries to formulate his animal type – they note both the interest of the research, but also its incompleteness. Thus, on the deduction of the bones of the skull from the vertebra, to which they give great importance, they write: “It is therefore [Goethe] who has pointed us towards the cephalic vertebrae, although he has not understood its value or direction” (1845: 493).

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5.1.3 Oken The long section devoted to Oken, who is the central topic of their chapter, is relatively disconcerting: it mainly consists of a summary of the book that Oken published in French during his stay in Paris,11 the Esquisse du système d’anatomie, de physiologie et d’histoire naturelle (1821).12 This Esquisse is absolutely fundamental to understanding the reception of naturism in the corpus we are studying. It is important for Comte who did not read German, just as it is for Blainville, not only in his normal scientific work but also when, in the 1840s, he begins to give a global critique of the Oken system. The Esquisse is a rather short book (61 pages), which presents itself as a kind of commentary on the systematic tables that end each of the three sections, dealing respectively with the elements, plants and animals. Each of the sections devoted to plants and animals contains, in addition to the systematic table, two subsections, one on the parts of plants or animals, the other explaining the method used to classify them. The authors comment on two points: first, the description of the series in its three parts (elements, plants, animals), and secondly, the study of osteology, i.e., the part dealing with bones in the section on animal parts. The description of the series begins by quoting the first lines of the Esquisse: Nature, as a whole, must be considered as an organic body, whose parts would be the development, or rather the repetition of a single principle. […] Animals being posterior to plants, plants posterior to minerals, minerals posterior to elements, it follows that the elements are, at least for minerals, plants, animals, the principle from which these bodies emanate, from which they are the development or better the repetition. (Oken 1821: 1; Blainville 1845: 497)

This slightly shortened quotation is interrupted by the authors in order to comment on the idea that the parts of nature are the repetition of a single principle: “this is Schelling’s idea”. It is therefore under the patronage of the philosopher that they place Oken’s project, even though his name is not mentioned in the Esquisse. But this opening is also important because it is received, by Blainville as well as by Comte, as a pantheist statement, although relating to a different kind of pantheism than the classical version already mentioned. Pantheism here consists in conceiving nature as an organic being. As Blainville points out, this pantheism “teaches that the world is a complete being, reproducing itself through its parts” (1845:

 Little is known about this three-month stay in Paris. He studied the collections of the Muséum, and met the major naturalists, not only Cuvier, but above all Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, with whom he became friends. 12  Note another writing (more precisely an excerpt from a book) available in French, but this time translated: Oken, Lorenz. Système de la philosophie de la nature par Oken (2e édition.) Extrait détaillé par Emile Jacquemin. This detailed excerpt is from the first issue of a short-lived journal that seems to have only had two issues: Minerve, ou choix des mémoires les plus importants qui paraissent sur les sciences naturelles dans les pays étrangers, publié par Emile Jacquemin, et plusieurs savans français et étrangers (1834). We have not found any work that uses this translation, which seems to have gone largely unnoticed. 11

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341).13 It is essentially this last meaning that will be operative in the Comtian analyses. The three levels of the series (elements, plants and animals) are reviewed with little comment. The system of the elements is said to be “completely wrong”, a judgment that is not surprising from a scientist who adhered to Lavoisier’s pneumatic chemistry. But even then, Blainville does not hesitate to emphasize “the rigorously logical application of its principle [of repetition]” (1845: 499). As regards plants, the authors underline in a rather elliptical way the conjunction of Schelling’s conceptions with Goethe’s metamorphoses (1845: 500). Finally, concerning animals, the authors note, here again, both the rigorous application of the principles and the “proliferation” of errors, taking as an example the genus of pachyderms (1845: 503). As for osteology, Blainville focuses on the vertebral conception of the head. The judgment is laudatory, and this time without nuance: As a result, when it comes to the skeleton, Oken has perfectly complied with his principle. […] This principle of pantheistic idealism, that everything is in everything, that the parties represent the whole, a principle which is not admissible a posteriori, has nevertheless led Oken a priori to remarkable discoveries, such as that, for example, of the vertebrae and appendages of the head, etc. (1845: 505–6)

However favourable Blainville may be to this osteology—and indeed in the 1840s he regularly repeated the thesis attributed to Oken, according to which “an animal is composed of two opposite cones base to base” (Foville 1844: 126)—it is not this part of Oken’s system that is their main concern. Rather, it is the question of the animal series. Now, on this point, as we have just seen, Blainville’s position is ambiguous. First of all, he undoubtedly strongly approves: Oken has succeeded in establishing the existence of the animal series. The summary of Oken’s system set out in the Principes de zooclassie (1847), a work slightly later than the Histoire, clearly indicates, by its conciseness, the value of this system: In this system, the world is a living being, a whole, an organized body, composed of parts that represent its development or that repeat its principle. The elements being fire, air, water and earth, the bodies they produced by their mutual influence could only constitute four kingdoms in the whole world or in the whole nature, depending on whether they are composed of one, two, three, or four of these elements. The highest is that of animals, which unites them all, and that Mr. Oken defines as a vegetable body that joins the organs of the first three elements with the parts of the fourth, that is, fire. This kingdom is necessarily subdivided into four degrees, then into as many classes as there are organs, and each of them into as many orders as the system of organs they represent has parts. The number of kinds of each order is also determined in a fixed manner in each of them, as well as that of its genera; so that in this system the animal series is rigorously determined by the same principle from one end to the other, without interruption and without it being possible otherwise. (1847: 40)

 In the same passage, Blainville and Maupied contrast pantheism with Catholicism “which teaches that a creator God is the author of this world and all its parts”. 13

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A preliminary remark should be made about this judgment. First of all, it may be surprising that Blainville is not more cautious concerning the serial nature of Oken’s classification. The Esquisse, which serves as a reference point for this judgment, by its extremely descriptive and concise approach (which makes it appear like a succession of systematic tables that are all-too-briefly explained) is certainly a major factor in this assessment. Yet it is worth noting that Oken’s adherence to a linear serial pattern, such as the one Blainville advocates, is far from obvious. As Stéphane Schmitt notes, commenting on Oken’s texts of 1804 and 1805, the German naturalist describes the many analogies that connect the different parts of the world and form the basis of a vision of systematics opposite to the linear model of the scale of beings: “[Nature] did not order the animals according to a simple scale, nor according to a planar network, but according to a stereo network [stereotisches Netz], a scale whose base is a network”. (Schmitt 2006: 74, quoting Oken 1805: 203)

Admittedly, it cannot be denied that there is an upward movement in Oken’s system. Such a movement is reflected, in particular, in the idea that the animal kingdom culminates in man, who represents the union of all animal characteristics: animals being reciprocally particular and individualised developments of every particular character of man. Nevertheless, such an upward movement does not involve a strictly linear conception of the animal hierarchy. There is therefore a kind of bias in the reception we are studying in favour of Oken’s adherence to a linear scale model such as that promoted by Blainville and Comte. In any case, the fact remains that Oken, according to these authors, demonstrated a priori the animal series. And the fact that the two main systems of biological philosophy, Lamarck’s (materialist and atheist) and Oken’s (pantheist),14 converge with Aristotelian theism, and that they all admit a priori the animal series, is in itself a strong argument in favour of the existence of this series. This is, to use Whewell’s term, a kind of ideological “consilience”. Nevertheless, unlike the Aristotelian version of the theism defended by the authors, such systems, and in particular Oken’s, cannot consolidate this series a posteriori, and transform it into what Blainville calls in the Principes a “System of the Animal Kingdom” (1847: 45). Hence the ambiguity of the authors’ attitude towards Oken: praise of the a priori demonstration is always accompanied by the observation of an empirical deficiency. This results in the positing of fragility in the system as a whole, whose fundamental tendency is to fall into idealism, understood here, in a non-technical way, as the forgetting of reality and empirical facts: However, realism seemed to rise to idealism through higher and higher abstractions, that is, further and further away from the real or material point […]. But those naturalists who wanted to follow Oken, or even develop his principles, were no longer retained by material facts and entered on the path of the annihilation of science, replacing it with an ideal conception, which they had not even been able to appropriate fully. (1845: 512)

 Blainville repeatedly points out the proximity of Lamarck and Oken’s classifications: see (1845: 512) and (1834: 44–45). 14

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As important as Lamarck is for the history of the animal series, Oken deserved a chapter that sheds light, at least for the French public, on the philosophical genealogy from which his work originated. But, beyond its informative aspect, this brief history of German idealism was also intended as a polemic, for it was necessary to highlight such a history, because it led to pantheism, an ideological impasse, and methodological limitations.

5.2 Comte It can be said without exaggeration that German idealism, in its strictly philosophical form, is absent from Comte’s works.15 Neither Fichte nor Schelling, nor even Hegel, are explicitly mentioned in the Cours de philosophie positive or in the Système de politique positive. Idealism is only really present in the form of “naturism”, that is, the philosophy of nature, and “its illustrious leader, Mr. Oken” (1830–42: 3.82). This means, as I claimed in the introduction, that it is only as far as it makes it possible to conceive and organize the natural order, and as far as it is transposed into a “philosophy of nature”, that this idealist philosophy interests Comte. On the other hand, the fields in which Oken is mentioned are quite varied, ranging from chemistry to the theory of the earth, even if most of the questions are centred around one main point: the point of articulation between the inorganic and the organic worlds. There are many analogies with Blainville’s analyses: the most important being the idea that, along with Lamarck and Blainville, Oken is one of the fathers of “the great hierarchical construction that forms the general basis of biology”, namely “the organic series” (Comte 1851–4: 1.568–9; see Comte 1875: 460). Such an achievement is Oken’s greatest glory, and allows him to enter into the positivist pantheon, that “Calendar” that celebrates great men. Oken’s displacements are indeed worth noting: in the first edition of this Calendar, in 1849, he appears in the month of “Modern Science”, as a secondary name alongside Lamarck. In the second edition, in 1850, his place next to Lamarck is taken by Blainville and so he is definitively moved to the month of “modern philosophy” and becomes the secondary name on Buffon’s day. That is, repeated here are the two main features of Blainville’s reading: Oken must be associated with Lamarck as the founder of the animal series, and must be considered as a naturalist representing a specific philosophical current. Regarding the second aspect, Comte will adopt a different tactic from that of the authors of the Histoire. He will not attempt to reconstruct the idealistic tradition in which Oken is involved, but will rather sketch out in a short note, and perhaps in a more “sociological” style, the characteristics of the German genius: The twofold faculty of generalizing and systematizing, which is such a precious element of the true philosophical spirit, belongs undoubtedly, in a more special way, to the German

15

 I note, in passing, two important studies on this subject: Fedi (2014) and Braunstein (2000).

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genius, whose eminent value, appreciable even in its shortcomings, we are too willing to ignore in France. As far as I am concerned, I will always attach extreme importance to everything that can tend to bring about the intimate combination of this fundamental quality with the no less essential ability to clarity and positivity, which characterizes, just as highly, our French genius. (1830–42: 3.87)

Here again, Comte’s analysis is quite similar to what we found in Blainville: in naturism, this ability to generalize functions without regard for reality or for the “positivity”—here the terms have the same meaning—of phenomena. Thus, as we will see below, “the so-called principle of the economy and the necessary simplicity of nature” which led Oken to limit the number of chemical elements to four, is only valid if it is taken, on the one hand, not as a law of the outside world, but as a methodological requirement in our systematic constructions  (we must “endeavour to conceive of nature under the simplest aspect possible”) and if it is also submitted to the reality of phenomena (1830–42: 3.82–3; see Comte 1858: 264–5).16 Concerning the first aspect, it is as “one of the main founders of true biological philosophy”, despite any “vicious metaphysical inspirations” (1830–42: 6.462), that Oken is to be celebrated, and deserves to be included in the Calendar. Comte even goes so far as to deplore the fact that the Academy of Sciences did not deign to grant him the status of foreign correspondent, a “subordinate affiliation” that it generally grants so easily (1830–42: 6.462). This regret, however sincere it may have been, is part of a constellation that reproduces, at the institutional level, the opposition between the non-linear conception of the animal scale (Cuvier’s embranchement system, which is imagined as blocking Oken’s acceptance to the Academy) and the linear conception advocated by Blainville (who argued for Oken’s nomination). In a way, this shows the importance—and perhaps also the “ideological” character—of Oken’s integration into the founding trilogy of Lamarck— Oken—Blainville, of which he remains, however, as we shall see, the most fragile element. One of the manifestations of this ideological character is the disturbing fact that in no part of the Comtian corpus are Oken’s theses on the animal series in fact elaborated, let alone discussed. If the animal series remains a blind spot, the same cannot be said for questions relating to the system of nature as a whole, and in particular to the articulation between the inorganic and organic worlds. These questions can be reduced to the global problem of pantheism understood as the reduction of nature to an organic body. Indeed, among the two meanings we have been able to distinguish in Blainville’s analyses, the first meaning of the term “pantheism”, the most classical one, identifies God and nature, and this meaning is unproblematic for Comte. Not only does this identification of God and nature not lead to the moral and theological disapproval that it could provoke in a Catholic like Blainville; it also, in fact, confirms the Comtian analyses of the proximity of the theological state and the metaphysical state, as well as of the metaphysical character of the concept of nature.  The English translation of the Cours de philosophie positive (Comte 1858) is cited as far as possible in what follows, despite the fact it is an abridged edition and the passages referenced are often only partial translations of Comte (1830–42). 16

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Comte thus understands eighteenth-century atheism as a kind of “ontological pantheism” that consists in substituting “a goddess” (nature) for “a god” (1830–42: 5.716; 1858: 673–4). This ontological pantheism is only an extreme modification of primitive philosophy, that is, theological philosophy, since it retains “the same absolute spirit, and the same tendency to handle questions that sound philosophy discards as inaccessible to human reason” (1830–42: 5.713–4; 1858: 674). In short, the fact that the naturism of the German metaphysical school is an “obscure systematic pantheism” (1830–42: 5.716; 1858: 674) does not pose a problem and only confirms the relevance of the law of the three states and of his narrative of the history of philosophy. On the other hand, the second meaning of the term pantheism, which consists in assimilating nature to an organic body, to use the terms of the 1821 Esquisse, raises a series of problems concerning the organization of the encyclopaedia and the general system of positive knowledge. This second meaning does not indeed characterize a type of philosophy so much as it implies a series of scientific positions, in chemistry and biology, that question the positivist conception of nature and the distribution of phenomena. And it can be said that, apart from the remarks relating to the number of chemical elements and the vertebral conception of the skull,17 all the subjects developed by Oken which Comte criticizes revolve around this differentiation of the inorganic from the organic. This problem is repeated on at least three levels. From the point of view of encyclopaedic organization, that is, from the point of view of the organization of the scientific system, the division between “inorganic matter” and “living bodies” is the first to occur, and it separates natural philosophy into two large parts between which there is a lack of continuity (1830–42: 1.90; 1858: 44). As Comte will point out in the System, this is an “irreducible dualism” that precludes continuism. This first level has repercussions on a second level, which places it in a sort of mise en abyme: the definition of life as harmony between an “appropriate organism” and a “suitable environment”. This is indeed an anti-vitalist definition of life, in the precise sense that the organism alone does not carry life and is not in antagonism but in a harmonic relationship with the environment. However, the fact remains that this harmonic relationship combines two types of nature irreducible to each other, “inorganic nature” and “living nature”. In other words, there is no phenomenal reality that could make the transition and overcome dualism. Finally, the last level consists in determining the degree of complexity at which we can speak of organization and life, ideas that for Comte involve each other. This issue, which is fundamental for the contrast between the organic and the inorganic

 In the lesson on brain physiology, Comte mentions “the anatomical decision that the skull is simply a prolongation of the vertebral column, which is the primitive centre of the nervous system” (1830–42: 3.799; 1858: 388). No author is named here, and the assumption that Comte refers to Oken is perhaps a little forced: it seems to echo a tradition more than a person. As Pietro Corsi showed (2001: 291–4), even if this thesis is generally attached to Oken (as Blainville does), many people at the time had formulated it. 17

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worlds, ultimately raises the question of the type of totality that can be defined as an organism. We will address successively the specific points of disagreement between Comte and Oken. We will begin with the question of the elements, which, although it does not immediately affect the distinction between organic and inorganic, has undeniable architectural importance.

5.2.1 The Elements This architectural role is all the more pronounced if we make the plausible assumption that Comte refers to the Esquisse, which lists on its first page the four elements on which the system of nature is based: fire, air, water and earth (i.e., the Aristotelian elements, although Oken does not allude to the Greek philosopher). It is on the occasion of this critique that Comte first mentions Oken and sets out the general flaws of the German metaphysical tradition. These shortcomings, as we have seen, lie in the abuse of systematization and in the neglect of the positivity of phenomena: it is not the inclinations of our mind that decide the number of elements, but rather “the entire set of our chemical investigations” (1830–42: 3.83; 1858: 264). When it comes to the specifics of the elements, Comte makes two criticisms of Oken which highlight the opposition between a spirit of the absolute, which characterizes the metaphysical approach, and a spirit of relativity which characterizes positivity. First of all, in modern chemistry, the very notion of element is provisional and relative: But we are nonetheless bound to assume all substances which have never in any way been decomposed into their simple elements, even though we should not pronounce them to be forever undecomposable. (1830–42: 3.84; 1858: 264–5)

In this respect, a system of nature cannot be definitively based on a supposedly fixed number of elements. The second point on which the spirit of the absolute is contested concerns the reference to Aristotle. Comte implicitly assumes that Oken’s model is that of Aristotle: by returning to the four elements, he would renew an Aristotelian operation. But, according to Comte, this is a hermeneutic error on Oken’s part, for Oken interprets this return to four fundamental elements as a return to a certain simplicity that allows for a more coherent system, whereas Aristotle, in his time, was intent on quite the opposite process: opposing his predecessors, who, like Heraclitus, derived everything from a single element, “he did not hesitate to complicate the abstract idea that one had previously had of matter, only to make it more real” (1830–42: 3.86; 1858: 265). What a history of science that is attentive to historical context teaches us is that the Aristotelian operation of complication stands opposed to the spirit of simplification that motivates Oken.

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5.2.2 Air and Water as Intermediate Organic Media The question of the importance of air and water, considered no longer as elements but as fluids exerting an action “in the general economy of terrestrial nature, either dead or alive” (1830–42: 3.122; 1858: 273), concerns both chemistry and biology.18 Comte attributes to “the German [naturist] philosophers of our day […] the notion of an intermediate realm—of air and water—uniting the inorganic and organic worlds” (1830–42: 3.308; 1858: 308). It is rather difficult to see precisely which theory Comte is referring to. There is, perhaps, an echo of the Urschleim, that “primitive jelly” from which, according to Oken, infusoria would be formed. In any case, Comte’s criticisms are still clear: he points out that the idea of an intermediate kingdom is undoubtedly an exaggeration and a mistaken thesis, but that it nevertheless reflects “a confused but irrefutable feeling” (1830–42: 3.308) of the importance of these two fluids, both in chemistry and in biology. In abstract chemistry, the hypothesis that air and water constitute an intermediate realm between the inorganic and organic kingdoms is groundless and refuted by natural history. It is nonetheless true that the study of these two fluids is indeed of great methodological importance in chemistry. Since all chemical phenomena occur in the air and most of the time require the intervention of water, no chemical reaction can be “rationally studied” (1830–42: 3.123) without a thorough knowledge of both fluids. In biology, this hypothesis reflects a valid feeling of the importance of the “general theory of organic media” (1830–42: 3.308; 1858: 308). This theory is not, however, a description of an intermediate kingdom, but the enumeration of the physico-chemical conditions necessary for life. Harmony between the two elements of vital dualism, the organism and the environment, cannot be hypostasized into an intermediate phenomenal reality. Yet it would be a misinterpretation to understand these developments concerning the elements, air and water, as indicating a refusal on the part of Comte to conceive of the chemical nature of living phenomena. On the contrary, Comte, following Blainville, was attentive to the chemical elements involved in biological processes. Comte’s own thesis is only that these chemical explanations alone are not enough to explain the living world, and that it is necessary to add a specific biological concept, that of organization. For this reason, Comte could not subscribe either to the idea that air and water give rise to a kingdom capable of producing life, or to the theses, suggested by Oken in the Esquisse, that plants (tri-elementary kingdom) and animals (quadri-elementary kingdom) are generated by an iterative process already operative in the generation of the mineral world (two-elementary kingdom). The notion of organization, and the determination of the type of totality for which it is relevant to speak of life and organization, will be more explicitly at the heart of the

 Here are the loci where the question is addressed: for chemistry, 1830–42: 3.122–3; 1858: 273; for biology (theory of mediums), 1830–42: 3.307–8/3.638; 1858: 308. 18

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problems raised by cell theory and by a pantheism that assimilates nature to an organism.

5.2.3 The Organic Monads In the critique of cell theory presented in Lesson 41 of the Cours, Oken is not directly named: resulting “from an essentially metaphysical system of general philosophy” (1830–42: 3.531) and thought of as an element of “transcendent anatomy” (1830–42: 3.532), this theory is attributed to “eminent intelligences”, who, in Germany, “pursue […] higher speculations of biological science” (1830–42: 3.530). However, commentators agree that this 1835 criticism is directed at Oken and his famous thesis that living beings are made up of a multitude of infusories or primordial vesicles. That said, Comte’s characterization of cell theory is very cursory: Unsatisfied with having conceived all organic tissues as reducible to a single one, these ambitious minds tried to penetrate beyond the natural limit of anatomical analogy, by striving to form the generating tissue itself through the chimeric and unintelligible assemblage of a kind of organic monad, which would then become the true primordial elements of any living body. (1830–42: 3.531–2)

The term “organic monad” should not be misinterpreted: it does not imply a specular relationship where everything would be recapitulated in the part; it refers here only to the idea of simplicity and the absence of parts. Yet for Comte, life is incompatible with such simplicity: There can be no life or organization, according to fundamental definitions alone, without a certain indissoluble system of more or less heterogeneous parts contributing to a common goal. What could either the organization or the life of a simple monad really consist of? (1830–42: 3.532–3)

An organism, from an anatomical point of view, is composed of a set of anatomical structures, of which the tissues, in accordance with Bichat’s paradigm, are the ultimate elements. But an organism is also “necessarily indivisible as a whole” (1830–42: 534) that can only be divided up by thought, in an abstract way. These two requisites imply, on the one hand, that a monad, because of its simplicity, cannot be considered as an organism, and therefore as capable of life; and, on the other hand, that the idea of an organism is incompatible with that of a real composition based on potentially independent animalcules.19 Comte ultimately claims this theory is the result of a confusion between the inorganic and organic worlds. The theory of organic monads consists first of all in  Georges Canguilhem (1985: 65) notes that it is paradoxical that Comte did not discern that Oken and his school represented the living being in the image of a community that is not equivalent to the simple sum of particular lives. From a sociological point of view, Comte indeed assumed similar views: he advocated an organic society and not an association of individuals. This remark is perfectly legitimate, in abstracto. But it seems to me that, given the rudimentary nature of his description of cell theory, Comte was not in a position to see the paradox. 19

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transposing into anatomy the concept of “indivisible molecule” (1830–42: 3.533; 1858: 342) from inorganic philosophy. Since material existence is essentially homogeneous, it is not contradictory to attribute the same properties to material bodies and the molecules of which they are composed. However, this is not the case in biology where the concept of organization ruins the idea of a molecule homogeneous to the organic system. But this confusion has a physiological counterpart “which consists in considering life as universally widespread in nature, without a distinction of organic or inorganic, and residing eminently in molecules” (1830–42: 3.532).

5.2.4 Pantheism With this last “aberration”, we enter directly into the theme of pantheism understood in the second sense. Just before setting out his own definition of life as harmony between the organism and the environment, Comte had already denounced an “abusive extension of language” on the part of several contemporary philosophers, “especially in Germany”, which involved “making the idea of life exactly equivalent to that of spontaneous activity” (1830–42: 3.294; 1858: 305; see 1851–4: 1.87–8; 1876: 73). Such a view is considered to be a return to a kind of fetishism, insofar as it consists in “attributing life to all bodies” (1830–42: 3.294; 1858: 305). Hence, once again, there is a need to restrict the term “life” to only the appropriate wholes: organized beings. Neither the infinitesimal level of the molecule nor the macroscopic level of the world as a whole is suitable. However, pantheism, by considering the earth as a living being, is not only interested in the macroscopic level: it also assumes that all parts of the planet, being part of this organism, “live”. The line between the organic and the inorganic is thus completely blurred. When questioning the division of the encyclopaedia into cosmology (inorganic sciences) and biology (organic sciences), Comte notices in the Fundamental Introduction of the Système that pantheism does not only attribute life to inappropriate wholes, it also renders problematic the very possibility of positive knowledge: Consequently, the pantheism of the metaphysicians is even more antagonistic to our reason than pure fetishism, of which, in fact, it is a mere parody clothed in abstruse language. Fetishism at least provided some training for our nascent powers of thought; Pantheism would drive reason back into the nebulous obscurity from which it has long since issued. If Life were universal, the existence of any natural law would be impossible. For the tendency to vary which is inherent in the spontaneity of every living organism has in reality no limits except those imposed by the constant and irresistible pressure of the environment. Remove this pressure, and the relations and variations would become indefinite, so that all notion of Law would at once disappear; the essential characteristic of a Law being constancy of relations. Those thinkers who put forward the conception that the Earth was an immense animal, could have had no proper idea of what the word animal implied: or they would have felt that such a hypothesis was utterly incoherent. The simplest physical laws, even the laws of gravity, would be incompatible with the vitality of the Earth: not to mention that projectiles would themselves share this vitality. Prediction of future events, whether founded on

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reason or experience, would similarly be impossible; even supposing the possibility, on this absurd hypothesis, of our own existence. (1851–4: 1.440-1; 1875: 357)20

Pantheism is therefore not only a learned and parodic version of fetishism, centring on the positing of a collective being (the earth) and neglecting purely individual beings; it is not only a theory that attributes life to a totality that does not involve organization as such, and therefore confuses life and activity: it is also a thesis that makes any attempt at positive knowledge unsuccessful and contradictory. By hindering recognition of any empirical regularity, it renders impossible the making of laws and predictions. German pantheist idealism, the most radical figure in metaphysics, is treated as the very inverse of positivity.

5.3 Conclusions As in Blainville’s Histoire, the most surprising feature of the preceding analyses is undoubtedly the extreme instability of these judgments made about Oken. His systematic approach, derived from Schelling, allowed him to develop a system of comparative anatomy which earned him the honour of appearing, alongside Lamarck, as one of the founders of the “organic series” (1851–4: 1.568–9). But this same fundamentally pantheistic philosophical orientation threatens the irreducible dualism between the organic and the inorganic, and even the possibility of positive knowledge. However, it can also be said that, beyond idealism and pantheism, this ambivalence illustrates Comte’s own ambiguity to metaphysics in biology. Condemned as a system of philosophy, the metaphysical school is nevertheless valued in biology because of its synthetic nature (1830–42: 3.646–7; 1858: 361). Thus, it is usefully opposed to the dispersion and specialization of the physico-chemical school, making it possible to preserve an overall perspective for understanding the living world. Oken was able to build a hierarchical system that embraces the entire organic world, but this construction remains fragile as long as it depends on a fundamentally pantheist system and is not supported by the philosophical discipline that positivism must establish—a discipline that must both preserve this perspective on the whole, and also abandon the search for the absolute in favour of empirical laws. Ultimately, Comte’s ambivalence to Oken is a manifestation of the urgency by which he is trying to establish positivity.

 In lesson 52 of the Cours (1830–42: 5.42; 1858: 547) Comte had already qualified, “the modern notion that the earth is a vast living animal” as a “fetishism, generalized and made systematic, throwing a cloud of learned words as dust into the eyes of the vulgar”. In both cases, it is clear that he refers to the beginning of Oken’s Esquisse. 20

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Appendix: A Note on the Fifth-Complementary Volume of the Histoire des sciences naturelles by Magdeleine de Saint-Agy One of the sources of knowledge of the biological tradition of Naturphilosophie in France is the last volume of the Histoire des sciences naturelles (1845) begun under the authority of Georges Cuvier and completed by Magdeleine de Saint-Agy. The latter is the author of the volume dedicated to the early nineteenth century, in which Oken’s work is discussed. It was published in 1845, the same year as the Histoire of Blainville and Maupied and so was not consulted by them. It is also almost certain that Comte did not read it. This book is therefore unrelated to the positivist reception of Naturphilosophie. Nevertheless, it is a very serious and comprehensive work which still deserves to be briefly mentioned. The chapter we are interested in (“On the philosophy of nature in Germany and France” [Cuvier and Saint-Agy 1845: 313]) has three sections: one on Schelling (8 pages), one on Oken (46 pages) and one on “the philosophical study of the bone system” (56 pages). Concerning the first section, Saint-Agy’s originality is to insist on the importance of Goethe and especially Kielmeyer for Schelling’s system. Two ideas of Goethe are seen as particularly relevant: the idea of metamorphosis, successfully applied to plants, and the idea of compensation of the parts, which, according to the author, orients the study of animals less successfully (1845: 315–9).21 From Kielmeyer, whom Saint-Agy presents a little inaccurately as one of Schelling’s “masters” (Cuvier and Saint-Agy 1845: 324), two theses are mentioned. The first is the recapitulation theory, according to which the animal, during its embryonic development, passes through states “corresponding to those of the lower classes” (1845: 319). The second thesis is the principle of polarity, which will play an important structural role in both Schelling and Oken. In the second section, Saint-Agy gives a rather exhaustive account of Oken‘s philosophy. This survey is mainly based on the Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie of 1809 (Oken 1809-11), as well as on the revised version of 1831 (Oken 1831). It also uses the Esquisse for describing Oken’s classification of animals. Saint-Agy follows the development of the system, from the fundamental eq. (0 = +A – A) to Man, the most perfect animal. With some detail, he goes through, without naming them, the fundamental parts of the philosophy of nature: what Oken calls Theosophy and Hylogeny, then Cosmogeny as well as the study of the Elements (Stochiogeny and Stochiology) and the earth (Geology and Geogeny) (1845: 332–48). In comparison, the part corresponding to the general theory of the organism (Organosophy) and plants is relatively short, although the theory of infusoria is noted (1845: 348–55). Finally, the part on the animal kingdom, on which he focuses, is perhaps a little confusing, if only because at the end of the presentation, he refers both to the third section of the third volume of the Lehrbuch (Zoosophy) and to the Esquisse.

21

 Blainville (1845: 491–2) had also criticized the principle of compensation.

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The last section, which ends the book, is entirely devoted to osteogeny. Saint-­ Agy’s thesis is that it is particularly in the field of osteology that Oken‘s philosophy has been fruitful and has given a strong impetus to further investigation (1845: 362, 376, 377). So, this section, in a strictly chronological order and in a very neutral manner (i.e., the debates between Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier are barely mentioned) presents the progress of osteology up until 1828, the date of Carus’ book on the bone system (1845: 427–33). The exposition mentions both German biologists (Kielmeyer, Autenrieth, Oken, Spix, Bojanus, and Carus) and French biologists (Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Serres, and Audouin), and the description of Carus’s system, which is the only significant development related to Naturphilosophie in these pages, concludes this relatively technical section. In presenting the systems of philosophy of nature, Saint Agy insists on the rigorous and repeated application of several structural features: the principle of repetition, the principle of polarity, and the figure of the trinity. The last two traits are present, for example, in the fundamental equation +A - A = 0, and Saint-Agy analyses them with explicit reference to the Christian Trinity (1845: 335–6, 342). The systematic nature of philosophies of nature, whether Schelling’s, Oken’s or Carus’s, is condemned by the author, who repeatedly denounces false reasonings, petitio principii and paralogisms. For example, one of the most frequent paralogisms to be criticised is shifts in meaning and misuse of metaphors.22 Saint-Agy thus states with regard to the orbit of the planets: I will not refute the author's paralogisms; but I cannot overlook what he calls the elucubrations of his mind without noting that he uses the term sometimes metaphorically and sometimes in the literal sense. We will almost always see philosophers of nature using in a literal sense terms or propositions that should be used in a metaphorical sense, and vice versa. (1845: 342–3)

Despite this negative judgment, Saint-Agy nevertheless acknowledges some positive aspects within Naturphilosophie. Unlike Comte and Blainville, he does not celebrate the scale of beings, for, as Cuvier’s collaborator, he could only defend the embranchement system.23 Rather, according to Saint-Agy, the first merit of Oken’s work is that it is adapted to the German mentality, and has precipitated a renewal of natural history in Germany: But this set of singular ideas was designed to arouse the minds of people, especially in Germany, where this kind of speculation is generally sought after, and where it is even in the nature of the people: so, from the first moments when Goethe uncovered the germs of his system, as soon as Schelling applied it to physics and astronomy, and most especially when Oken applied it to physiology, anatomy, pathology and the most detailed phenomena of natural history, this system set all minds in motion. (1845: 375–6)

In addition to its suitability for the German spirit, Naturphilosophie has also engendered insights, revelations and fortunate rapports, “whose truth is independent of the systems that have caused them” (1845: 377). Osteology is not the only field that 22 23

 For Schelling, see (1845: 328); for Oken, see (1845: 342, 368); for Carus, see (1845: 433).  That is why he keeps stressing the arbitrariness of Oken’s classification (1845: 371–5).

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has been influenced by this philosophy: it is because of Naturphilosophie that progress is again possible in the field of geology, as well as on questions of the unity of composition, of development and on the pertinence of the principle of repetition.

Bibliography Braunstein, J.-F. 2000. Comte, de la nature à l'humanité. In Philosophie de la nature, ed. Olivier Bloch, 259–269. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Breidbach, Olaf, and Micheal T. Ghiselin. 2002. Lorenz Oken and Naturphilosophie in Jena, Paris and London. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 24: 2. Canguilhem, Georges. 1979. L’Histoire des sciences de l’organisation de Blainville et l’abbé Maupied. Revue d’histoire des sciences. 32: 73–91. ———. 1985. La théorie cellulaire. In La connaissance de la vie. Paris: Vrin. Comte, Auguste. 1830–42. Cours de philosophie positive, 6 vols. Paris: Rouen puis Bachelier. ———. 1851–4. Système de politique positive, 4 vols. Paris: Carilian-Goeury et Vor Dalmont. ———. 1856. Synthèse subjective. Paris: Vor Dalmont. ———. 1858. The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte: Freely Translated and Condensed by Harriet Martineau. New York: Calvin Blanchard. ———. 1875. System of Positive Polity, vol.1. Trans. John H.  Bridges. London: Longmans, Green and Co. ———. 1876. System of Positive Polity, vol. 3. Trans. E.  S. Beesly. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Corsi, Pietro. 2001. Lamarck, genèse et enjeux du transformisme. Paris: CNRS éditions. Cuvier, Georges, and T. Magdeleine de Saint-Agy. 1845. Histoire des sciences naturelles depuis leur origine jusqu’à nos jours chez tous les peuples connus; Troisième partie contenant la fin de la deuxième moitié du 18e siècle et une partie du 19e; Tome cinquième et complémentaire. Paris: Fortin, Masson et Cie. Blainville, Henri Marie Ducrotay de. 1833. Cours de physiologie générale et comparée. Paris: Germer Baillière. ———. 1834. Manuel d’actinologie ou de zoophytologie. Paris: Levrault. ———. 1845. Histoire des sciences de l’organisation et de leur progrès, comme base de la philosophie, 3 vols. Paris: Librairie classique de Perisse frères. ———. 1847. Principes de zooclassie ou de la classification des animaux. Paris. Fedi, Laurent. 2014. La représentation de l'élément germanique dans la philosophie d'Auguste Comte. Les Cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg 35: 37–84. Foville, Achille-Louis. 1844. Traité complet de l’anatomie, de la physiologie et de la pathologie du système nerveux cérébro-spinal. 1re partie, Anatomie. Paris: Fortin, Masson et Cie. Goethe, J. W. 1837. Œuvres d’histoire naturelle de Goethe. Trans. C. Martins. Paris: Cherbuliez. Maupied, F.L.M. 1842. Prodrome d’ethnographie, or Essai sur l’origine des principaux peuples anciens. Paris: Debécourt. Oken, Lorenz. 1805. Abriß der Naturphilosophie. Göttingen: Vandenhoek et Ruprecht. ———. 1809–11. Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie. 3 vols. Jena: Friedrich Frommann. ———. 1821. Esquisse du système d’anatomie, de physiologie et d’histoire naturelle par Oken. Paris: Béchet jeune. ———. 1831. Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie. 2nd ed. Jena: Friedrich Frommann. ———. 1834. “Système de la philosophie de la nature par Oken (2e édition.) Extrait détaillé par Emile Jacquemin". Minerve, ou choix des mémoires les plus importants qui paraissent sur les sciences naturelles dans les pays étrangers, vol. 1. Paris: Librairie médicale et scientifique de Crochard. ———. 1847. Elements of Physiophilosophy. Trans. A. Tulk. London: Ray Society.

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———. 2017. La génération (1805), ed. Stéphane Schmitt. Paris: Honoré Champion. Schelling, F. W. J. 1842. Système de l’idéalisme. Trans. Paul Grimblot. Paris: Ladrange. ———. 1845. Bruno ou du principe naturel et divin des choses. Trans. C. Husson. Paris: Ladrange. Schmitt, Stéphane. 2001. Type et métamorphose dans la morphologie de Goethe, entre classicisme et romantisme. Revue d’Histoire des sciences 54 (4): 496. ———. 2006. Les forces vitales et leur distribution dans la nature: un essai de « systématique physiologique »: textes de C.F.  Kielmeyer, 1765–1844, H.F.  Link, 1767–1851 et L.  Oken, 1779–1851. Turnhout: Brepols. Shuster-Aziza, Eveline. 1972. Note sur H. de Blainville, historien de la biologie. Revue d’histoire des sciences 25 (2): 191–200. Tennemann, W.  G. 1829. Manuel de l’histoire de la philosophie. Trans. Victor Cousin, 2 vols. Paris: Sautelet et Cie.

Chapter 6

The Reception of German Philosophy in the Mind of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Edward Castleton

Abstract  In opposition to Marx’s polemical criticism of Proudhon’s abuse of Hegelian thought, this study shows—on the basis of a number of unpublished manuscript sources—how the different ways in which Proudhon’s preoccupation with certain themes of post-Kantian idealism, particularly the man-God distinction, antedated his meetings with various German exiles in the four years preceding the 1848 Revolution. As Proudhon learned more and more about German thought from second-­hand Francophone works of vulgarization and the philosophical writings of the French eclectics like Victor Cousin and his associates and disciples, Proudhon’s filtered encounters with idealism served as fodder for developing claims and arguments which he had been elaborating since at least 1839. To this extent, the question of how well Proudhon understood the ideas of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel is largely irrelevant. Examining the particular lens of prejudices and preoccupations through which Proudhon encountered their ideas is far more pertinent to understanding how German philosophy might have impacted his work. Keywords  Antinomies, conceptual and Kantian · Eclecticism, French philosophical school of · God, existence of, relation to man · Hegelianism, reception of · History, philosophy of · Political economy, relation to philosophy

6.1 The “Clumsy Repugnant Show of Erudition of the Self-­Taught”: Was Proudhon a “Parvenu of Science”? When it comes to discussing how Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s thought might have been influenced by German philosophy in general, and by Hegelianism in particular, the way in which this question of influence is addressed has invariably been shaped by Karl Marx’s commentary. In a letter dated 24 January 1865, written to E. Castleton (*) MSHE, Université de Franche-Comté, Besançon, France © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Chepurin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 247, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39326-6_6

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Johann-Baptist von Schweitzer just days after Proudhon’s death on the 19th of the same month, Marx immodestly, and with some bad faith, blamed himself for the “SOPHISTICATION” of Proudhon’s thought and its adulteration by the language of German post-Kantian philosophy (Marx and Engels 1975–2004: 20.28). According to Marx, it was his private conversations with Proudhon in the fall and winter of 1844–45—before Marx was expelled from Paris in February 1845—which corrupted Proudhon’s mind with German ideas he could not possibly understand: In the course of lengthy debates often lasting all night, I infected him very much to his detriment with Hegelianism, which, owing to his lack of German, he could not study properly. After my expulsion from Paris, Herr Karl Grün continued what I had begun. As a teacher of German philosophy he also had the advantage over me that he understood nothing about it. (1975–2004: 20.28)

Marx additionally claimed that he was originally responsible for Proudhon substituting Hegelian “contradictions” for Kantian “antinomies” in the 1846 Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la Misère (1975–2004: 20.27). This idiomatic shift did not, prevent Proudhon from erroneously treating economic categories as “pre-existing eternal ideas”, thereby prompting Marx to write his 1847 polemic against Proudhon, Misère de la philosophie (1975–2004: 20.29). The trouble for Marx was that Proudhon, like many other contemporary socialists (Marx being the  self-professed exception), were looking for an a priori solution to the social question “instead of deriving their science from a critical knowledge of the historical movement, a movement which itself produces the material conditions of emancipation” (1975–2004: 20.29). The result was, in the famously damning phrasing from Misère which Marx repeated in his letter to Schweitzer, that Proudhon remained “merely the petty bourgeois, continually tossed back and forth between capital and labour, political economy and communism” (1975–2004: 20.30; see 1975–2004: 6.178). Precisely because of the pernicious influence of German thought with which first Marx, then Grün contaminated Proudhon, “[h]igh-­sounding speculative jargon, supposed to be German-philosophical, appears regularly on the scene [in Proudhon’s 1846 Système] when his Gallic acuteness of understanding fails him” (1975–2004: 20.30). Proudhon’s usage of German ideas, as Marx contemptuously put it in his 1865 letter, revealed “the clumsy repugnant erudition of the self-taught”, that of “a parvenu of science”, who “feels it necessary to give himself airs with what he neither is nor has” (1975–2004: 20.30–1). These disdainful claims built upon Marx’s 1847 Misère, notably its second part in which Marx mocked Proudhon’s use of German philosophy and what he took to be Proudhon’s attempts to frighten his Francophone audience “by flinging quasi-­ Hegelian phrases” at his readers (1975–2004: 6.162). According to Marx in his Misère, Proudhon had treated the laws of political economy independently of real social relations as if they existed within “the movement of pure reason” (1975–2004: 6.162). Marx quoted a passage from Hegel’s Logik about how reason can find itself in every object in order to claim that “[w]hat Hegel has done for religion, law, etc., M. Proudhon seeks to do for political economy” (1975–2004: 6.164). Asserting that the circumscribed treatment of economic  thought cuts one off from reality since

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ideas are continuously determined by transitory social relations of production, Marx concluded that Proudhon, victim of a penchant for ratiocination exacerbated by his contact with German philosophy, “thinks he is constructing the movement of thought, whereas he is merely reconstructing systematically and classifying by the absolute method the thoughts which are in the minds of all” (1975–2004: 6.165). This criticism (that a bad understanding of Hegel caused Proudhon to become a bad Hegelian) led Marx to make his famous observation, meant as a counterclaim to Proudhon’s supposedly more ideational critique of political economy, that “[t]he hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist” (1975–2004: 6.166). It also inspired Marx to assert that methodologically Proudhon’s misconception of Hegelian dialectics could be reduced to not much more than “the dogmatic distinction between good and bad”, one in which there were two sides to every economic category, one positive, the other negative, and for which there was only a need to retain the former and eliminate the latter to rectify the conceptual vicissitudes of liberal political economy (1975–2004: 6.168). In his Misère, Marx insisted on Proudhon’s treatment of economic categories in a non-linear, logical fashion probably because, by thus caricaturing Proudhon’s ideas, he could better distinguish what he took to be novel about his own intellectual development (notably as embodied in his insight into the world-historical significance of hand-mills and steam-mills). This move conveniently allowed him, as he phrased it in a 28 December 1846 letter to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, to write off Proudhon’s Système as “Hegelian trash”, “not profane history—a history of man— but sacred history—a history of ideas”, since, according to Marx, by resorting “to feeble Hegelianism to give himself the appearance of a bold thinker”, Proudhon treated man as “only the instrument of which the idea or the eternal reason makes use in order to unfold itself” (1975–2004: 38.95, 38.97). As his marginal annotations to his copy of Misère attest, Proudhon did not understand the point to Marx’s acerbic criticisms, which he took to be wholly disingenuous.1 He had never pretended that the representation of ideas in economic discourse was the same thing as their history, nor that the sequencing of ideas, as he portrayed them in his Système, was identical with any linear history of their manifestation in the human mind. As for Marx’s own supposedly innovative historical arguments, Proudhon claimed that he had argued just as much in his 1846 work and that Marx was even plagiarizing him, recycling his arguments when he feigned to be criticizing them. Marx had been unfair in accusing him of not recognizing that social relations were the product of men themselves, since Proudhon had always maintained that society produces its own laws and materials from its experience. Marx seemed wilfully to miss what Proudhon was arguing in his Système: that the principles of political economy were attempts to represent intellectually certain observed practical phenomena, not their cause. This, Proudhon noted, was precisely why he had never treated economic concepts or ‘categories’—despite Marx’s assertions to the

 The best edition of these annotations can be found in the facsimile reproduction of Marx’s Misère contained in Proudhon (1983, vol. 3). 1

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contrary—in terms of their successive historical manifestation. The implication of Proudhon’s marginal remarks was that Marx was confusing political economy, a relative new field of social inquiry containing its own particular conceptual idiom (one which Marx, himself, had only recently discovered), with economic history. This became clear to Proudhon in the only sections of Marx’s Misère he did not find to be pure ad hominem calumny but which he thought, despite their author’s malicious intentions, contained some intellectual interest: the section of Marx’s polemic devoted to criticizing Proudhon both for having separated the division of labour from the use of machines and technological innovations in industrial production and for claiming that the negative effects of the latter negated the positive effects of the former (Castleton 2020). Although, judging from his marginal annotations, Proudhon does not seem to have especially cared about Marx’s criticisms of the accuracy of his interpretation of Hegelian or German thought, its impact on his own intellectual development has often been emphasized by scholars writing in the wake of Marx’s assertions. The scholarly emphasis on measuring the intellectual impact of German thought on Proudhon’s development, notably with regards to his ideas about religion, might not be entirely unwarranted, especially since Marx was not the only foreigner in Paris well-versed in Hegelianism with whom Proudhon was in personal contact. There was the aforementioned Grün, Marx’s rival, Proudhon’s translator and admirer, and the principal exponent of “true socialism”, a humanist doctrine derivative of the work of Ludwig Feuerbach and other radical Hegelians which Marx mocked repeatedly in a number of youthful works up through the Communist Manifesto.2 But there were also the (rather liberal) translator into French of Feuerbach and other Hegelian exponents of religious criticism, Hermann Ewerbeck; the German exiled cabinetmaker and ally of Grün’s, “Papa” Eisermann; and Mikhail Bakunin, during his 1844–47 stay in Paris.3 In many respects, all of these figures, Marx included, courted Proudhon in the mid-1840s, looking for something in him which might embody those progressive down-to-earth virtues of French socialism which Hegelianism was supposed to complement on a higher theoretical level. Indeed, Grün had even gone so far as to proclaim Proudhon the “French Feuerbach” shortly after the publication of the latter’s 1843 work, De la Création de l’ordre dans l’humanité, because his critique of property supposedly mirrored on a practical level Feuerbach’s more abstract critique of religion, and, much to Marx’s possibly jealous ire, Grün had translated Proudhon’s Système into German shortly after its publication (Grün 1845: 404; Proudhon 1847).4 To this extent, it is perhaps logical enough that many scholars, first and foremost Proudhon’s biographer, Pierre Haubtmann (1981, 1982), prioritized re-examining the Marx-Proudhon relationship via a more expansive examination of the impact of German ideas on Proudhon. Because the

 On Grün, see Grün (2005). On Grün’s relations with Proudhon, see Haubtmann (1982, 1981).  On Ewerbeck, see Catel (2019). On Proudhon’s relations with Ewerbeck, Eisermann, and Bakunin, see Haubtmann (1981). 4  See Haubtmann (1982: 456–75, 1981: 59–70). For Grün’s translation, see Proudhon (1847). 2 3

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influence of Hegelianism seemed most obvious in Chapter Eight of Proudhon’s Système, “The Responsibility of Man and God under the Law of Contradiction, or Solution to the Problem of Providence”, a chapter entirely devoted to the topic of religious belief and human perfectibility, this focus appeared all the more pertinent to scholars who were also important clerics concerned with accelerated secularisation and the modernisation of the Roman Catholic Church like Haubtmann, or, before him, the theologian Henri de Lubac (1945). Chapter Eight was not the only chapter of Système in which both religion and German philosophical ideas were evoked. In the bizarre and equally incongruous prologue to what was otherwise nominally a work of political economy, Proudhon began his Système with a discussion of what he called the “hypothesis of a God”, “a necessary dialectical instrument” which he claimed seemed to govern the providential movement of societies and to be at the root of different philosophies of history running from the time of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and Giambattista Vico to that of J.  G. Herder and Hegel (Proudhon 1846: 1.i-iii). “God”, insofar as expressed on earth in the form of “Providence”, appeared synonymous with “universal reason”, something which was at once impersonal, unconscious, general, instinctive and immanent, and yet which gave meaning to social transformations (1846: 1.vi). Thus, humans seemed cognitively to need God in order to understand their history, just as God would logically seem to need God’s Creation in order to exist as God. A second related “hypothesis” Proudhon then posed, that of the immortality of the soul, would, in turn, seem to contradict this idea of God by making certain imagined ontological features of human existence (notably those pertaining to the afterlife and the souls which experience it) appear immortal and godlike. From these two religious ideas, Proudhon claimed, sprang numerous related philosophical antinomies, notably those separating the self from the not-self, mind from matter, the soul from the body, the subject of thought from its object, and free intelligent life from necessity. Some modern philosophers whom Proudhon cryptically associated with “humanism” and “atheism” (by which he meant the sort of Hegelianism which flourished around the work of Feuerbach as described to him viva voce by Ewerbeck, Grün, and others) had concluded that the universe could be thought to be the realm of the not-self objectified by the self and personified in thought. But this was not a satisfactory cosmological or ontological explanation and failed to resolve that tension between God and man which nevertheless seemed intellectually necessary to explain human perfectibility and development. Proudhon began Chapter Eight, the middle chapter of his Système and in many ways a direct continuation of the prologue, by asserting that the Bible suggests that evil comes from man in the form of original sin, whereas writers since Jean-Jacques Rousseau implied that evil comes from society and that individual man is innocent. If the latter account had the advantage of suggesting that society needed to be reformed, it did not go far enough in recognizing that if human beings were intelligent and free, unlike other species, then their perfectibility was linked precisely to the same character trait the biblical narrative had underscored, their fallibility. The flipside of this truth was that as man seeks to improve himself, sensing his own imperfections, the destiny of societies

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seemed to be their continuous education, progress, and improvement. To this extent, the traditional Christian idiom of prevarication, damnation, and redemption could be reconciled with a more secular conception of perfectibility through greater levels of justice. However, insofar as God was radically and existentially distinct from God’s Creation and might be imagined, by virtue of this separation, as not merely an impersonal and ill-defined synonym for “universal reason” but something more personal and capable of volition, an imperfect humanity appeared bereft of direction, wayward, and abandoned to its fate, left to make its own history without God’s help or the succour of divine intervention. This had important implications for how one might understand the workings of any theodicy or providence in human affairs. If anything, in light of the Creator’s abandonment of Creation, God seemed more like “the executioner of my reason, the spectre of my conscience”, at once “stupidity and cowardice”, “hypocrisy and lies”, “tyranny and poverty” (1846: 1.416). Seen this way, “God is evil” (1846: 1.416). But in rejecting the “supremacy of God and his providential government” over humanity, a conclusion which Proudhon argued was logical enough, he did not mean that man was all that he had previously taken God to be (1846: 1.416). In the closing pages of his chapter, Proudhon preceded to elaborate a critique of those whom he called “humanists”, like Feuerbach (1846: 1.423–34). By making God “evil”, Proudhon was ultimately attempting to prevent having God be replaced by man, as philosophers like Feuerbach (not cited by name) had done. There was thus an anti-humanist argument implicit to Proudhon’s anti-­theist one, since being antiGod was also a way of not deifying mankind, just as insisting on human perfectibility was also a way of insisting on human fallibility and imperfection. Because God was, by definition, not perfectible whereas humanity was, the latter’s rational progress necessarily distinguished the human from the divine. Thus, what once was called “providence” and associated with the workings of theodicy was really a human concept insofar as God existed outside of time and the successive and imperfect events of human history. On the one hand, Proudhon was making an argument about the relationship between free will (or liberty) and necessity (or fatality)— analogous to that pitting either man against God or materialism against theism— and how these two opposing conceptual poles could conceivably be reconciled in a theory of progress and the perfectibility of imperfect creatures through the exercise of their reason. On the other hand, preserving humanity’s perfectibilian status paradoxically necessitated maintaining the concept of an un-progressive God as the ultimate antithesis of what it meant to be human, a point the Hegelian humanists missed in their hostility to religion. As for whether God and man could ever be reconciled, Proudhon suggested enigmatically (but it would appear in utter earnestness) that any confirmation of this prospect would have to be reserved for the afterlife. In seeking to distinguish himself from the Hegelians by insisting on the conceptual intractability of man-God hostility, Proudhon was positing a radical form of diremption (to use a Hegelian term he did not employ) without intimating the possibility of sublated Aufhebung. But, too obsessed by the question of how much Proudhon might have been responding to German thought in developing this argument, scholars in the wake of Haubtmann have failed to notice that Proudhon had

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been attempting to separate the human from the divine in a philosophy of history long prior to his encounters with different non-French Hegelians in 1844–45. This is a point strangely not emphasized by the otherwise reliable Haubtmann: Proudhon had been trying to theorize this conceptual interrelation between the man-God distinction and historicity ever since he had begun to reflect critically on the intellectual limitations of the French philosophical school of eclecticism, whose principal representatives were also the gatekeepers of German thought in France during the July Monarchy. Indeed, even as his arguments evolved between 1839 and 1846, Proudhon regularly asserted that the tension between the human and the divine could be resolved through a theory of human perfectibility. Herein Proudhon was also indebted to his Catholic education and his early interest in the relation between epistemology, “revelation”, and the semiotic aspect to thought, and it was through the lens of these issues that Proudhon first encountered German thought in its refraction via the works of eclectic philosophers. The originality of the present chapter lies in showing, on the basis of a number of unpublished manuscript sources relatively unexploited by Haubtmann, the different ways in which Proudhon’s preoccupation with the man-God distinction preceded his meetings with various German exiles in the four years before the 1848 Revolution. As Proudhon learned more and more about post-Kantian philosophical discussions from mostly second-hand Francophone works of vulgarization, reference to German philosophy served as fodder for developing claims and arguments which he had been elaborating since at least 1839, if not long before. To this extent, the question of how well Proudhon understood the ideas of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel in 1846 (to say nothing of those of Feuerbach, Grün, Ewerbeck, or Marx), is largely irrelevant. Examining the particular lens of prejudices and preoccupations through which Proudhon encountered their ideas is far more pertinent to understanding how German philosophy might have impacted his work. Because Proudhon’s initial encounter with German idealism was entirely shaped by the French intellectual context, it is necessary to explore at some length the sorts of conceptual issues which overshadowed his thought when he seriously began to read works of philosophy for the first time. This must be done irrespectively of any examination of his subsequent successive encounters with German ideas. In his 1865 letter to Schweitzer, Marx claimed that Proudhon could be situated within a genealogy of ideas as a socialist directly descended from Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier much the same way Feuerbach was from Hegel (1975–2004: 20.26). In reality, this chapter will begin by showing how it might be more appropriate to argue that Proudhon’s philosophical thought was more derivative in its initial development from his critical engagement with the ideas of post-revolutionary French philosophers like Victor Cousin, Théodore Jouffroy, and their disciples and associates than it was indebted to the ideas of prior French socialists. To this degree, philosophical eclecticism stands in relation to Proudhon’s thought in its early evolution much the same way that Hegelianism does to Marx’s thought. This is not something which is immediately obvious from anything Proudhon himself wrote in his published writings.

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The editor of Proudhon’s correspondence, Jérôme-Amédée Langlois, claimed that Proudhon once stated, in August 1848, that although he might have read Fourier’s writings in his youth with genuine interest, the “true masters” who had intellectually influenced him were “the Bible first, Adam Smith next, and finally Hegel” (1875: 1.xxii). Although Proudhon read, reread, and extensively annotated throughout his life the Bible in the Vulgate edition he had helped publish when he was a printer and corrector in the 1830s, he never seriously read Hegel in translation, and his knowledge of the latter was essentially second-hand, coming first via Francophone works of vulgarization, then via his foreign contacts in Paris like Marx, Ewerbeck, Grün, and Bakunin.5 One must assume then, if the quote is not apocryphal, that “Hegel” was a metonym for German philosophy, if not philosophy tout court, much the same way “Adam Smith” stood for political economy. Understanding the influence of “Hegel” on Proudhon then requires understanding how Proudhon discovered German philosophical ideas through a set of larger philosophical pursuits.

6.2 Before God Was Evil: Proudhon’s Early Readings in Philosophy, 1837–1841 Proudhon’s early intellectual interests were partly an expression of the city he grew up in, Besançon, the capital of the eastern provincial region of Franche-Comté. Since the eighteenth century under the leadership of the abbés Jean-Baptiste Bullet and Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier, the city’s diocese had a reputation for producing rigorous Roman Catholic apologetics, and, during the Bourbon Restoration, it was a post-revolutionary hotbed for the sort of ultramontanism associated with Félicité de Lamennais.6 After Proudhon was forced to quit schooling prematurely to become a printer, he worked for the diocese publishing different editions of the writings of the early Church Fathers and the Vulgate, taught himself Hebrew to complement his mastery of Greek and Latin, and, from the evidence of his earliest reading notebooks from the 1826–32 period, read principally Francophone Catholic writers. To judge from the evidence of those readings, his principal thematic preoccupation was the relation of morality to the workings of the human mind and to what Christians had long called “revelation”. In 1837, Proudhon republished at his own publishing house Bergier’s 1764 Les  Élémens primitifs des langues, to which he appended anonymously an Essai de grammaire générale  (Bergier 1837). In the Essai, Proudhon examined the psychogenesis of grammatical categories common to Hebrew, Greek, and Latin in order to develop a rather orthodox Christian argument,

 The only work to be found by Hegel in Proudhon’s library held at the Bibliothèque d’Étude et de Conservation in Besançon is Hegel (1854). Proudhon does not appear to have read any other work by Hegel before or after its publication. 6  On the immensely influential Bergier in particular, see Albertan-Coppola (2010). 5

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not even an original one when made by Bergier in the eighteenth century, insisting on the monophyletic origins of different languages in a single primitive Ur-language of divine inspiration (see Jacques  Bourquin’s introductory remarks in Proudhon 1999: 12–55; Bourquin’s commentary in Leopold 1999: 812–42; Castleton 2007). In this first published work, Proudhon believed that the primitive revelation at the origins of both thought and language was identical with natural law (obviously not understood in the morally minimalist jusnaturalist sense). When he presented himself as a candidate for a three-year scholarship in Paris offered by the Academy of Besançon, he claimed that he wanted to expand outwards from his Essai to show how the imperishable and authentic truth content of revelation could be found in the ancient Hebrew religion, notably in an idiom of apodictic certainty which characterized Mosaic legislation in the Pentateuch and whose hidden rationality, subsequently confirmed by the Gospels, Proudhon proposed examining during his studies in Paris. There appears to have been in Proudhon’s mind a political dimension to this philological project, since he wrote in his notebooks essentially devoted to linguistics around this time: “Bossuet wrote a treatise on politics to be used by kings, I am going to write a treatise on politics to be used by the people”.7 The provincial notables who were deciding Proudhon’s fate were oblivious to the subversive potential of this intellectual project, and they awarded him the scholarship. To judge from the contents of the early reading notebooks of his scholarship, which were drafted prior to the publication of Qu’est-ce que la propriété? in 1840, Proudhon was initially preoccupied with the generation and “communication” of ideas and their relation to the origins of conscience and consciousness (the word for the two, “conscience”, being the same in French). The connection between these epistemological questions and his intellectual formation in Besançon and its relation to questions of comparative linguistics seems fairly obvious in a Francophone intellectual context in which Rousseau’s paradox about the origins of language and Condillac’s statue were widely evoked in a variety of different discussions from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. What is relatively unknown is just how much Proudhon was engrossed in thinking about these precise issues between roughly 1838 and 1840, a period in which they largely predominate his reading notebooks, quickly displacing his prior interest in linguistics. Unnoticed by scholars, the vast majority of Proudhon’s readings during most of his scholarship were in philosophy, a fact which is not obvious if one examines only the contents of his published works during this time, yet one which is critical to explaining his intellectual development.8 When Proudhon arrived in Paris in December 1838, he was nominally to be supervised by Joseph Droz, an academician from Besançon who had been on friendly terms with Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis and Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard  Bibliothèque d’Étude et de Conservation, Besançon, MS. 2840, f. 50 recto (reproduced in Proudhon 1999: 53). 8  Proudhon’s 1838–44 reading notebooks are held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), Nouvelles Acquisitions Françaises (NAF) 18256–61. A complete inventory of their contents can be found in Haubtmann (1982: 1079–92). 7

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and who had written on a number of different topics ranging from moral and aesthetic theory and how to be happy to political economy and the history of the reign of Louis XVI during the revolutionary era. As his supervisor, Droz advised Proudhon for his research purposes to meet with the eclectic philosopher, Théodore Jouffroy, a fellow franc-comtois and the translator and commentator of Thomas Reid. Jouffroy had recently presented a study on the difference between “psychologie” and physiology before the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences—one which echoed his famous article from Le Globe a decade earlier on the differences between “spiritualism” and “materialism” (Jouffroy 2003: 261–88). Jouffroy was also very much grappling with how to frame the institutional role of philosophy now that Victor Cousin’s philosophical eclecticism had become institutionally hegemonic during the July Monarchy and that Cousin and Jouffroy had positioned themselves (and, in the case of Cousin, his students) as the official gatekeepers for the reception and interpretation of non-Francophone philosophy (see Vermeren 1995). That Proudhon would have intensively read Jouffroy, Cousin, and Cousin’s disciple, Jean-Philibert Damiron, within the first years of his scholarship is not in itself surprising since these were the three names which dominated academic philosophy during the first decade of the July Monarchy.9 What one needs to bear in mind, however, is just how much Proudhon read those authors through the lens of his even earlier epistemological concerns, colouring his interpretation of them with his prior youthful interest in ultramontane thought and different Catholic theories of “revelation” with post-­ Cartesian implications. When he arrived in Paris for his scholarship, Proudhon wanted to explore how it might be that, although ideas can be inspired within the self by sensorial occasions which contact with the external not-self inspires, sensations alone cannot explain the generation of certain ideas associated with morality or religion. For Proudhon, indebted to his prior traditionalist education and readings, there would seem to have

 During the first years of his scholarship, Proudhon read Jouffroy’s long “preface” to his translation of the collected works of Thomas Reid in December 1838 (BNF, NAF 18256, Cahier 1, p. 1–9); his essay on the distinction between psychology and physiology in late December 1838early January 1839 (NAF 18256, Cahier 1, pp.  9–13); his Esquisses de philosophie morale de Dugald Stewart in early 1839 (NAF 18257, Cahier 3, pp. 19–22); more of his edition of Reid’s collected works in spring-summer 1839 (NAF 18257, Cahier 5, pp. 7–11) and in December 1839 (NAF 18257, Cahier 9, pp. 10–42); and his Cours de droit naturel in November 1840 (NAF 18258, Cahier 16, pp. 1–5). He would later read Jouffroy’s Nouveaux Mélanges in November 1841 (NAF 18259, Cahier 24, pp. 44–47). He read Damiron’s Histoire de la philosophie moderne au 19e siècle in the first half of 1839 (NAF 18257, Cahier 3, pp. 2–17); his Cours de philosophie and his Cours de morale in spring-summer 1839 (respectively NAF 18257, Cahier 5, pp. 45–59 and pp. 61–64). He would later read Damiron’s Essai sur la philosophie in January 1842 (NAF 18259, Cahier 25, pp. 1–15). Finally, he read Cousin’s Cours d’histoire de la philosophie morale au XVIIIe siècle, his Cours d’histoire de la philosophie: histoire de la philosophie du XVIIIe siècle, and some of his Fragments philosophiques in July–August 1839 (NAF 18257, Cahier 6, pp. 3–9 and pp. 18–47, and NAF 18256, Cahier 1, pp.  24–43). He returned to Cousin’s Fragments philosophiques in January 1840 (NAF 18258, Cahier 11, pp.  16–18), and read Cousin’s Cours de philosophie: Introduction à l’histoire de la philosophie in January–February 1840 (NAF 18258, Cahier 11, pp. 45–64 and Cahier 13, pp. 1–3). 9

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to be another form of intelligent life outside of oneself for this process of ideational generation to work within the self. He believed that the vehicle for stimulating this process was language insofar as advanced semiotic communication was what chiefly distinguished humans from animals and was the spark which stimulated the operation of the “categories of understanding” (Proudhon had begun to use the idiom of Kantian-influenced philosophy in its Francophone incarnation). And yet, obviously influenced by the way in which Francophone counter-revolutionary and Catholic writers like Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Lamennais had used Rousseau’s famous paradox about the origins of language (that it is difficult to imagine how humans could ever invent language without already having one in the first place), Proudhon was reluctant to embrace wholeheartedly what were then orthodox Christian claims about the semiotic nature of thought and insist that language and the particular grammars which shaped it were entirely identical with thought and its logical expression. Through such equivocation, Proudhon displaced the problem of Rousseau’s paradox of the origins of language, shifting the conundrum from speech acts to prior acts of thought (since even if thought preceded speech, it still remained difficult to imagine how there could be intelligent life constituting a self without there being another intelligent life to stimulate it). What was nevertheless clear to Proudhon was that human history, once seen through the lens of the development of thought, became a narrative of how human beings processed and interpreted the stimuli coming from outside of them. For a philologist sensitive to these epistemological insights, this meant—with regards to linguistics—that the formal properties of language were intellectual expressions of an attempt to process external information. If one wanted to understand the ideas of a people, for example, one needed to study those ideas in terms of the words that people used to express them. This insight had already been the source of Proudhon’s original philological project of examining the Old Testament; it also inspired the contents of his 1839 prize essay entry at the Academy of Besançon on the utility of the celebration of the Sabbath in Mosaic law (Proudhon 1839). Proudhon progressively shed his interest in comparative linguistics and philology for philosophy, as theories of progress and human perfectibility became even more prominent in his thinking. When Proudhon decided to rework his earlier Essai de grammaire générale for the Volney Prize competition held in 1839 by the Institut de France, he significantly dropped his earlier traditionalist insistence on a monogenetic and divine origin of language (see Proudhon in Leopold 1999: 846–941). Highly revelatory of the sorts of conceptual issues with which Proudhon was grappling, an entry in his reading notebooks from this period consisted of an extensive juxtaposition between Cabanis’s 1805 Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme and Jouffroy’s 1835 essay on the distinction between psychology and physiology.10 Jouffroy comes off in Proudhon’s assessment as a more watered-down  Proudhon extensively read Cabanis’s Rapports in spring 1839, around the same time he had been reading Jouffroy and Damiron (NAF 18257, Cahier 3, pp. 34–37 and pp. 42–47), and he juxtaposed this work with Jouffroy’s essay which he had already read shortly upon his arrival in Paris, likely around the same time (NAF 18256, Cahier 3, pp. 10–22). 10

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and cautious post-Christian version of the counter-revolutionary Bonald, who had famously claimed, against Cabanis’s assertion that the brain was an organ which “secretes” thought, that man was an intelligence serviced by his organs, themselves mere instruments of the “soul”. Proudhon’s takeaway from the Jouffroy-Cabanis juxtaposition was that it was necessary now to develop more seriously than Jouffroy had done an inductive science of the mind. Although Jouffroy had been keen on induction to insist upon the autonomy of the mind from sensation and physical sensation and thereby affirm a distinction between body and soul, he remained content only to carve out a parallel niche for “psychology” alongside physiology. He did not think it was necessary to study more than individual consciousness in order to describe the process of human psychogenesis. In Proudhon’s opinion, a better inductive approach would necessarily have to focus on the semiotic processing of information external to the self, which linked thought directly to an intersubjective account of mutating modes of human sociability. If it was impossible to say anything precise or concrete about whatever might be the primitive intelligence originally responsible for the progressive revelation of man’s intellectual and moral faculties (Proudhon was clearly beginning to distance himself from his youthful readings in Catholic traditionalist thought), it was possible, courtesy of the new philosophical field of “psychologie”—as enriched by both Reid and Kant—to say something about the way the human mind and its different “categories” worked. Proudhon felt there were undeniably “categories of understanding”, awakened within the self by external stimuli, and responsible for different intellectual faculties like reflection, comparison, judgement, calculation, observation, and deduction. But he also was equally, if not more interested in those “categories of morality and religion” which did not seem rational but appeared to be almost instinctive and involuntary in human beings.11 These expressed themselves in various spontaneous sentiments humans had, like sexual modesty; recognition of the virtues of chastity, continence, and temperance; a sense of justice; a desire for liberty or equality; a disinterested capacity to recognize candour, honesty, authenticity, and truth; or various religious beliefs in the afterlife and the immortality of the soul, or in a God presiding over a final judgement of one’s terrestrial actions. As Proudhon read more and more works of philosophy, his theory of human psychology took on greater coherence. He continued to maintain in his reading notebooks that experience of the world outside the self inspires the generation of concepts and a level of intellectual understanding within the self utterly dependent on that experience of the outside world. Just as human rationality develops through such experience, morality reveals itself within the self after the awakening of the mind’s rational faculties. But this subsequent revelation takes human thought well beyond whatever materialists like Cabanis and the Ideologues might have claimed pertained to the purely physiological composition of humans and their intellectual  This theory is developed most explicitly in his various attempts to systematize his psychological reflections in NAF 18262, ff. 1 recto-3 verso, followed by Bibliothèque d’Étude et de Conservation, Besançon, MS. 2839, f. 74 recto-75 verso. 11

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capabilities. Even if Proudhon’s starting point was the claim that those “categories” which were operational in the human mind could only be processed through experience of a world outside of the self, he did so in order better to chart the awakening of certain key elements of consciousness which allowed humans to conceive of things outside of and independent from the senses. Thus, those aspects of the categories of sensation and understanding like notions of space, time and number, stimulate faculties of analysis and abstraction like notions of cause, substance, and relation, which then stimulate those of language (nouns, verbs, and their relations and attributes) and aesthetics (unity, variety, harmony). The use and misuse of these faculties inspire, in turn, what Proudhon called the “categories of concupiscence”, insofar as egotism, theft, cunning, and a desire for pleasure and an inclination towards lust were directly related to mankind’s lack of autonomy from the sensory world and insofar as the exercise of purely speculative reason could lead human beings to behave badly.12 Fortuitously, the use of “practical reason” within a social context also awakened the aforementioned “categories of morality and religion” as a counterweight to the human penchant to be selfish. Inspired by human sociability, mankind’s spontaneous and regularly awakened moral sense was described by Proudhon as “a divine instinct, a celestial voice, the dictamen of conscience, the categorical imperative of practical reason”.13 In this psychological process, the concept of “God” appeared as a final cause implying all the ideas which preceded its conceptualization. What was important to Proudhon was not whatever “God” was but how humanity got around to conceiving of “God”, understood by him at the time to be the ultimate expression of harmonious social relations between humans, more or less a synonym for what justice and society ultimately were for humans in the last instance. Reflecting in his reading notebooks on what was distinctive about his own thought, Proudhon wrote of his peculiarly “extra-worldly socialism [socialisme ultra-mondain]”, and he wrote elsewhere, in his notes juxtaposing Cabanis and Jouffroy, that it was precisely his orientation towards thinking about the soul, the afterlife, and how they were related to the psychological importance of religion and morality which distinguished himself from the Saint-Simonians and Fourierists who would base social organization on the physiological structures of organic life.14 Proudhon clearly thought his much less materialistic approach to thinking about how the mind worked and developed its ideas within a social context was distinct from other socialist rivals more preoccupied with straightforward questions about the division of labour and social organisation.

 This theme appears repeatedly in Proudhon’s notebooks and would appear to have been inspired initially by Proudhon’s rereading of Rousseau’s Émile in spring 1839 (NAF 18256, Cahier 3, pp.  22–26). See NAF 18256, Cahier 3, pp.  25–26, and later, in Proudhon’s reading of Tissot’s translation of Kant, Principes de métaphysiques et de morale, NAF 18258, Cahier 12, p. 41. But it is expressed most clearly in Proudhon’s outline of his psychological theory cited in footnote 11. 13  NAF 18258, Cahier 11, p. 60 14  NAF 18257, Cahier 9, p. 23 and NAF 18256 Cahier 3, p. 12. 12

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Critical of pantheism and weary of being accused by Catholic critics of it, eclectic philosophers like Cousin had insisted on a firm distinction between human intelligence and divine intelligence. Proudhon did not have a problem with this distinction. For him, God appeared in the works of the eclectics like something conceptually identical with “absolute” and “impersonal” reason, an infinite intelligence which could be deduced by a priori arguments. He essentially agreed with the eclectics’ definition of God and shared their professed dislike of pantheism.15 But for Proudhon, one did not need to use a priori arguments to theorize a harmonious relation between human and divine intelligence which was not pantheistic. Instead, a philosophy of history could easily provide a narrative of human perfectibility describing how man’s experience of trial and error over time intimated and affirmed this harmony as the ultimate end for humanity as a species. Fresh from reading Vico’s Scienza Nuova in Jules Michelet’s 1828 translation more or less simultaneously with Hugo Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis, Proudhon believed that this could readily be seen by examining the progressive course of juridical consciousness and evolving conceptions of right and wrong in different human societies.16 Finding many of his own anti-jusnaturalist hunches confirmed when he read Vico, Proudhon believed that man’s moral sense was susceptible to perfectibility and could take on more rational forms (minus the Neapolitan thinker’s insistence on the cyclical corsi et ricorsi of history) as human consciousness developed. Inspired by his complementary reading of some scientific writings by the Cuvier brothers and Pierre Flourens, Proudhon concluded that a key feature of human nature which distinguished humans from animals was that humans were regularly stimulated by an inner moral sense, which allowed them to use reason to correct their more egotistical instincts and impulses, to overcome the unreflective burden of established habits, and to develop more enlightened degrees of consciousness through their sociability. Thus, there was the latent potential for there to be a positive and mutually reinforcing interplay between rationality and morality present in the sui generis species of humanity.17 Understood in light of this larger narrative of human perfectibility, property rights—a topic which took on more and more importance in Proudhon’s notebooks to the point where he decided to publish a series of three essays on them between 1840 and 1841—could be recast as something not intrinsic to human personality, as Cousin, borrowing from Hegel without acknowledging

 Proudhon also shared Catholic writers’ distaste for pantheism. Before seriously studying Cousin’s writings in depth, he largely concurred with many of the criticisms of contemporary philosophical thought made by Louis Bautain. See his reading notes on Bautain’s Philosophie du Christianisme, in BNF, NAF 18257, Cahier 3, pp. 28–32, and Cahier 4, pp. 29–38. 16  Proudhon read Vico in mid-January 1840 (NAF 18256, Cahier 2, pp. 33–48) and Grotius around the same time (NAF 18256, Cahier 2, pp. 54–67). 17  These arguments can be found in his winter 1839 notes on an article by Frederic Cuvier on instinct (NAF 18257, Cahier 7, pp. 26–28) and on Georges Cuvier’s Introduction au règne animal (NAF 18257, Cahier 7, pp. 17–26), and his January 1840 notes on an article by Flourens on Cuvier (NAF 18258, Cahier 11, pp. 18–24). 15

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him, had claimed.18 Rather, property rights were an erroneous legal fiction, one legitimating egotism, violating changing social needs, interdependence in the division of labour, and a relative equality of conditions necessary for that interdependence maximally to flourish and improve individual morality in the process. One of Proudhon’s chief grievances against eclecticism was the refusal of philosophers like Cousin to recognize that humanity was fallible and could make mistakes in its collective behaviour much the same way individuals could. To this extent, private property rights and a liberal constitutional monarchy identical with Louis-Philippe’s regime did not necessarily  mark the end of history as Cousin claimed, for example. This was very much the project which Proudhon set himself in Qu’est-ce que la propriété?: to show that the contradictory arguments used by different jurists and political economists to legitimate private property rights were erroneous and incoherent. In his unpublished reading notebooks, this critique’s relation to Proudhon’s copious readings in philosophy is more obvious than in his published writings.19 Proudhon’s intensive study of the works of the major philosophers associated with eclecticism, Victor Cousin first and foremost, left him convinced that philosophy should not serve the status quo of the juste-milieu social and political order of the July Monarchy. At the same time, human progress in its longue durée, measured on the collective scale of different manifestations of social evolution over time, could be understood as different from the more ephemeral efforts of individuals to improve their lives. The study of the former could even illuminate, through the a posteriori revelation of significant historical developments and their relation to the mutations of human consciousness, the teleological purpose of life on earth. But “God”, whether an “eternal substance”, an “infinite intelligence”, a supreme being, idea, law, or abstraction, remained unknowable and distinct from  In his Cours d’histoire de la philosophie morale au dix-huitième siècle, which Proudhon read attentively, Cousin had refuted Hobbes (in his mind inextricably linked to Rousseau) by insisting upon an absolute and natural right to private property linked to the need for the human personality to exert its will and intelligence on the material world outside the self. In this theory, seemingly borrowed from Hegel’s claims about the interrelation between property and personality in his Philosophie des Rechts, the exclusive occupation and appropriation of things was necessary for the self to fully experience liberty through the exercise of its will. Cousin’s was one of the first contemporary attempts to legitimate private property which Proudhon encountered in his readings during his scholarship in Paris. Proudhon thought Cousin had done little more, in formulating this argument, than unconvincingly attempt to legitimate the will of egotists. See NAF 18257, Cahier 6, p. 6. This reading of Cousin would significantly influence his other readings of legal arguments justifying property rights, since Proudhon would thereafter, during the 1839–41 period in which he drafted his three polemical essays on property, read all such arguments as if they were attempts to legitimate “absolute” rights to exclusive ownership, even when they explicitly were not and were based on arguments of relative utility or qualified by those circumscribed constraints enumerated in the Napoleonic Civil Code. For a critique of the misplaced absolutism of Proudhon’s understanding of the juridical definition of private property (albeit one which ignores the extent to which this biased understanding was largely shaped by certain philosophical concerns overshadowing his 1840–41 critique of rights to private property), see Xifaras (2004: 229–282). 19  It is no surprise that commentators on Qu’est-ce que la propriété? have chosen to focus on Proudhon’s critique of law and political economy. I have tried to correct this understandable misconception of the origins of this work in Castleton (2009: 43–108). 18

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that main field of inquiry to which philosophers should devote themselves: what Proudhon called the “science of God”, which pertained to the study of human ends on earth in relation to their potentially providential purpose.20 It would appear that Proudhon even intended this distinction to be the centrepiece of his contribution to contemporary philosophical discussions, a feature intrinsic to what he called the “Besançonian philosophy [philosophie bisontine]” bound, in his hands, to surpass the accomplishments of Cousin and his acolytes.21 After the publication of Qu’est-ce que la propriété? and prior to the publication of his second essay on property in 1841, Lettre à Blanqui (1841a), Proudhon would continue to reflect on many of these same issues when he read other philosophical works. He took particular interest in epistemological discussions of a supposed “criterium of certitude”, as discussed by contemporary writers—often Catholic like Philippe Buchez or Lamennais, or highly sensitive to religious language like Pierre Leroux—interested in reconciling philosophy and religion by rationalizing the expression and content of traditional Christian beliefs.22 For Proudhon, ever the linguist, certainty existed in language (because it revealed how the human mind worked) but also in the passage of time (since the history of language was also identical with the history of consciousness). But thinking about certainty invariably led Proudhon back to thinking about the philosophy of history and the question which had already puzzled him of how one might be able to anticipate the production of mistakes, errors, and falsehoods once one understood the true teleological ends of human existence. This question seemed pertinent since, if such anticipation and foresight were intellectually possible, then one might conceivably skip the a posteriori confirmation of truth in history and thereby develop a moral and social theory in sync with the genuine telos of mankind’s progress. Grasping the implications of such a theory had the potential to help contemporaries avoid present and future suffering and harm while accelerating human perfectibility at the same time. Proudhon had already thought about these questions when he intensively read the works of eclectic philosophers like Damiron, who sought to reconcile the idea of prescience— the foreknowledge necessary to anticipate future developments—with the exercise of free will.23 Indeed, this was a very nineteenth-century problem found in the works of innumerable contemporary thinkers concerned with social and political thought: that of solving the riddle of how to read the tea leaves of the future in an age of revolution and uncertainty.

 For some of these definitions of God, see NAF 18258, Cahier 11, p. 56.  Expression used in his notes on Cousin in NAF 18258, Cahier 11, p. 56, and in NAF 18258, Cahier 13, p. 1. 22  Proudhon read Buchez’s Traité complet de philosophie in late November 1840 (NAF 18258, Cahier 16, pp. 6–52) and December of the same year (NAF 18259, Cahier 17, pp. 15–18). He read Lamennais’s Esquisse d’une philosophie during exactly the same period (NAF 18256, Cahier 6, pp.  41–80), and Leroux’s De l’Humanité in December 1840 after having finished Buchez and Lamennais (NAF 18256, Cahier 5, pp. 62–79). 23  In Proudhon’s notes on Damiron’s Histoire de la philosophie au dix-neuvième siècle in NAF 18257, Cahier 3, p. 14. 20 21

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On the whole, however, Proudhon was disappointed with the state of philosophy in France. Shortly after reading a number of Jouffroy’s writings, his translations of Reid, and rereading Rousseau’s Émile, Proudhon, exasperated, wrote in his reading notebooks with characteristic vitriol, grandiosely imagining himself endowed with all the censorious powers of Louis-Philippe: If I were king, I would abolish all the chairs of philosophy: but I would demand of each professor in all the sciences to remind [his audience] again and again in his lessons of the existence of God, in such a manner that the entire class was only a demonstration of it. The physicist will begin his lessons on movement with the demonstration of this principle: that matter is inert and passive; the chemistry professor, the same; the professor of medicine, the same; 2° that movement and life are communicated, that their laws are full of intelligence; etc. It is truly dishonourable to see the manner in which are conducted our public courses. The preacher, in the teaching of morality, will show how it is not of human invention. As for philosophy, it is nothing, knows nothing, does nothing, leads to nothing; it is a windbag, who spews about just almost everything. Logic and dialectics will limit themselves to instruction [which can be printed] in 50 pages […]. Finally, psychology would [be] reduced to the exposition of some psychic phenomena: the birth of thought through communication; moral ideas; abstractions on the operations of the soul, sensation, attention, judgement, memory, imagination: can all of that be a science?24

He expressed similar contempt for institutional philosophers in other passages of his reading notebooks. For example, in a paragraph preceding his notes on the translation of Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft by Claude-Joseph Tissot, Proudhon wrote: Philosophy. The first discovery that I made in occupying myself with this science which is called Philosophy is that this science exists absolutely in name alone; that those who exert the public profession of philosophy are, in reality, charlatans who arrogate to themselves by this [their institutional position] the right to know nothing about anything else. The wretches! They will be the cause that I will know nothing myself.25

In reality, Proudhon believed that all the different sciences, in spite of their specialized nature, were sciences of the mind. A parasitic new discipline, philosophy, was dependent on these other more established sciences to be able to say anything consequential about anything. In short: “Philosophy has the pretention to gossip about, prattle about, and chat about generalities [found] in each of the sciences without going into depth about any: after which it steps back; when it has spoken, one wonders what it said: and that’s it”.26 If philosophy in France was found to be wanting, what did Proudhon think of those influential ideas coming from Germany which shaped so many of the French authors he read?

 NAF 18256, Cahier 3, p. 23.  NAF 18256, Cahier 5, p. 1. 26  Ibid. 24 25

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6.3 “I Call a Cat a Cat”: Early German Encounters, 1839–1843 It was in the context of his immersion in the writings of different members of the eclectic school like Cousin, Jouffroy and Damiron between 1839 and 1840 that Proudhon first encountered German philosophy, notably via Tissot’s translations of Kant.27 As the quote cited above about philosophy suggests, Proudhon’s reactions to Kant were refracted not just through the lens of eclecticism, the source of most what he learned about German Idealism in its post-Kantian forms during this period; they were also shaped by Catholic traditionalist attempts to refute materialist arguments in the conceptual idiom of post-Cartesian epistemological arguments (e.g., the muchdiscussed problem of the “criterium of certitude” fashionable, since the early writings of Lamennais, amongst neo-Catholic writers like Buchez). Perhaps for this reason, it is not accidental that Proudhon gave many definitions of “God” in the course of commenting in his reading notebooks on either the eclectics or Kant. Dissatisfied with both, Proudhon especially condemned Kant and Tissot for seeming to argue—and here Proudhon’s interpretation reveals just how much his pre-­existing biases could lead him to misread authors—that all knowledge ultimately had an a priori foundation preceding experience, whereas, for him, the opposite was really the case. As for other German thinkers working in Kant’s wake, Proudhon never properly read them, constrained in his knowledge by the limited number of French translations then available. What he learned about them was principally through different Francophone works of vulgarization. Yet irrespective of the accuracy of what he knew or did not know about German philosophy, his criticisms of them were similar and in perfect keeping with his larger philosophical reflections during the same period. For example, Proudhon’s first reference to Hegel in his reading notebooks was in his notes on Jouffroy’s introduction to volume 3 of the latter’s “translation” of Reid, a volume nominally devoted to Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard’s fragmentary writings. Preoccupied at the time by the chasm separating Locke/Condillac from Reid/Jouffroy, Proudhon made a note about the classic schematic enumeration of the course of German philosophical systems of nature, having learned that there was first “subjective idealism” (Kant), followed by “objective idealism” (Schelling) and “absolute idealism” (Hegel).28 Vaguely aware that these various systems consisted in the identity of principles, he observed on the basis of reading Auguste Barchou de Penhoën’s Histoire de la philosophie allemande that Hegel’s philosophy ­consisted in the identity of existence and thought and reason and reality in a  Proudhon first read Kant in Tissot’s translation, Critique de la raison pure, in summer 1839 around the same time he was reading Cousin’s philosophical works (NAF 18256, Cahier 5, pp. 1–4). He would then read Tissot’s translation, Principes métaphysiques de morale in February 1840 around the time he was reading Jouffroy’s translation of Reid (NAF 18258, Cahier 12, pp. 35–42). Finally, he read Tissot’s translation, Logique, in December 1840 (NAF 18256, Cahier 5, pp.  41–48) and returned to it again in September–October 1841 (NAF 18259, Cahier 21, pp. 1–26). 28  NAF 18257, Cahier 9, p. 33. 27

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dialectical movement from “thesis” to “antithesis” to “synthesis”.29 But, however innovative such insights might be, Proudhon did not think that German philosophers were genuinely interested in serious observation of the world going beyond the self and its faculties. Hegel, for instance, seemed to Proudhon to have been more interested in constructing a system of thought than in observing what actually happened outside the self in the phenomenal world. Relying on intuition and guesswork, he was more of a poet than a philosopher, one who never fully abandoned a deductive approach for a more inductive one. This had led Hegel to explain away legitimate and illegitimate falsehoods like property, since he did not examine principles in terms of their concrete application. Otherwise, he would have noted inconstancies like the fact that property rights were supposed to express legal equality in distinguishing mine from thine but only wound up exacerbating inequality in the name of the same such equality.30 In many respects, Proudhon’s judgement regarding the state of post-­revolutionary German philosophy, made in early August 1839 in his reading notebooks, anticipated in more garbled form Marx’s posthumously famous pithy 1845 dictum that “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”. As Proudhon wrote: I found in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel many things which coincide with my views; but, in general, there is little to take from them. One of the successors of Schelling, Schleiermacher, struck me as coming close to my ideas. But the mistake of all of them is to take human matters as they are, and to seek to incorporate them by force into philosophy: none of them seems to doubt that humanity can still be today on the path of error. This seems to be the case for everything related to practical philosophy, especially when it comes to property (Hegel).31

Regardless of the reference to Schleiermacher (whom Proudhon knew even less about than Kant, Schelling, or Hegel), it is important to bear in mind just how much Proudhon’s encounter with German philosophy was shaped by his preoccupation with critically surpassing the institutionally dominant form of philosophy in France at the time, eclecticism. In the same set of notes, Proudhon observed with approval how Barchou de Penhoën underscored the extent to which much of Cousin’s philosophy was simply borrowed from Hegel in an incomprehensible marriage of Scottish common-sense and German post-Kantian philosophies.32 This interested Proudhon because he was convinced that not only did most of the eclectics hide behind foreign philosophies to express their beliefs, but they did not have the courage of their already considerably attenuated juste-milieu convictions. This was equally the case for someone like Jouffroy, who, Proudhon felt, hid his true beliefs behind the works of Reid and Dugald Stewart. A symptom of decadent times,  Proudhon read Barchou, first around the same time he was first discovering the works of Cousin in late July 1839 (NAF 18257, Cahier 6, pp. 9–16), and then returned to his Histoire in January 1840 (NAF 18258, Cahier 11, pp. 39–45). See NAF 18258, Cahier 11, p. 41–42. 30  NAF 18258, Cahier 11, p. 43. 31  NAF 18257, Cahier 6, p. 16. 32  NAF 18258, Cahier 11, p. 45. 29

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French philosophers just did not seem to have the capacity to formulate their own indigenous beliefs without relying on foreigners to back them up. Nor did Proudhon’s reception of those ideas associated with German philosophy change much after the publication of Qu’est-ce que la propriété?. Conscious of how his knowledge was circumscribed by the filter of the French language, he wrote to the Alsatian philologist Frédéric-Guillaume Bergmann in November 1840, asking for his personal opinion about the interest of German philosophical ideas: I would like to know, in a few words, your opinion about German philosophy, notably that of Schelling and Kant, but principally Kant, whom I read every day. I have put it in my head to remake metaphysics; I have already told you about it. But, because here I also feel totally eccentric, I would like to be fortified by some bold opinions, which could give me courage. I find Kant of a sublimity which frightens me; I have trouble following him; however, I believe he took the wrong road, that there is a simpler and shorter one. I would not at all like an eclecticism which reassembled, for better and for worse, Kant and his three famous continuators, but I am persuaded that one day, philosophy, having become an exact science, will prove that these four Germans came closer to a true system of things than we did. But, at the same time, I think that one should no longer begin [a] philosophy with high abstractions, that one must, on the contrary, finish with these abstractions. […] To say it all in short, Kant, as well as the others [to which Proudhon included not just German thinkers but Aristotle as well], in his logic, in his practical reason and in his pure reason, seems to me to have started where I would like to finish. (1875: 1.248–9)

Despite such reservations, Proudhon appears to have preferred Kant to Hegel at this time, partly because the former was more directly preoccupied with the same sorts of epistemological issues filling the pages of his reading notebooks. In his notes on Eugène Lerminier’s Philosophie du droit, one finds Proudhon returning to his favourite themes (ones which often had little to do with the actual contents of Lerminier’s work): that ideas and thought in the mind are generated through stimulation coming from the world outside the self, such that nature can be said to influence the mind and not to be the mere creation of mind and the exercise of reason, and, thus, that truth should be recognized as something external to the self. Learning from Lerminier about legal debates in Germany in the wake of codification and their relation to the conflict between Hegelians and the historical school of law associated with Friedrich Carl von Savigny, Proudhon was surprised that Lerminier’s friend, the Hegelian law professor Eduard Gans, had not attempted to synthesize the ideas of Hegel and Savigny.33 Although it is obvious how such an observation might relate to his own theory of evolving juridical consciousness and the theme of human

 Proudhon read many works by Lerminier between summer 1839 and January 1841. He took notes on Lerminier’s Introduction générale à l’histoire du droit in late July-early August 1839 (NAF 18257, Cahier 6, pp. 47–56); Lerminier’s Cours d’histoire des législations comparées, his Lettres philosophiques, his Influence de la philosophie du 18e siècle, and his Philosophie du droit, in late December 1840-early January 1841 (NAF 18259, Cahier 17, pp. 25–35); and he returned to reread Lerminier’s Introduction générale à l’histoire du droit in mid-January 1841 (NAF 18259, Cahier 18, pp. 21–27). For the reference to Savigny, see NAF 18259, Cahier 18, p. 25. For a much more expansive reading of Proudhon’s legal thought with regards to the German historical school of law than that given here, see Chambost (2004: 159–84). 33

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p­ erfectibility, Proudhon did not elaborate upon it, and he generally seems only to have been interested in German discussions insofar as they echoed French ones.34 Proudhon frequently noted that part of the problem of German philosophy might have something to do with the particularities of the German language in which it was easy to create abstract nouns. Then there was the related penchant of German thinkers for creating metaphysical systems, which in Hegel’s case was also marred by a monomaniacal desire to develop them in accordance with some sort of trinitarian logic, always dividing his various categories into threes. This trait reminded Proudhon of Fourier’s obsessive pursuit of serial classification schemes bound by the ordered proportionality of their different elements. Like Fourier, Hegel might have started from a few sound principles, but in his unrelenting attempt to systematize the history of the mind’s reasoning process in trichotomatic patterns, he drifted away from the reality of lived experience and into the realm of arbitrary speculation.35 This compulsion for enumerating tripartite patterns seemed to have contaminated contemporary French philosophers whom Proudhon felt were keen to import foreign thought in order better to obfuscate whatever might be their true opinions, notably eclectics like Cousin (who wrote of the Beautiful, the True, and the Good; or of Justice, Charity, and Truth), Damiron (who wrote of the Self, the Not-Self, and the Absolute), or both simultaneously (when they wrote about Sensibility, Activity, and Reason, or Activity, Unity, and Identity). But even critics of the eclectics suffered from the same obsession with threes, a case in point being Leroux (Sensation, Sentiment, Knowledge). Proudhon, himself, was not exempt from the triune contagion, if one is to judge by his various attempts during this period to enumerate how human psychology could be mapped out in a coherent epistemological theory (for example, in one of his “psychological” sketches, Body, Life, and Mind were mirrored by another tripartite set, Sensation, Action, and Understanding).36 As he continued to immerse himself in reading diverse works of philosophy, Proudhon began to express growing hostility to organized religion, particularly its institutional expression in the Roman Catholic Church. Such newfound animosity differentiated this stage of his evolution from his previous reflections on Buchez, Lamennais, Leroux et al. between the publications of the first two essays on property. It had an impact on the orientation of his epistemological theories and how he would perceive the accomplishments of German philosophical thought. Religion, he now believed, represented a stage of thought reflecting primitive attempts to understand the natural world: there was no such thing as some primitive esoteric wisdom, and

 On the relevance of German legal debates to post-revolutionary French discussions, see Kelley (1984). 35  NAF 18258, Cahier 11, pp. 40–41. 36  Proudhon’s own trichotomatical classificatory reasoning is particularly on display in his psychological outline found in NAF 18262, ff. 1 recto-3 verso and Bibliothèque d’Étude et de Conservation, Besançon, MS. 2839, f. 74 recto-75 verso. Rereading his summer 1839 notes on Cousin’s Fragments philosophiques in March 23 1842, he observed that his earlier trinitarian fixation was “Socinian”, a feature of his thought which he had thankfully since shaken. See NAF 18256, Cahier 1, p. 27. 34

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Proudhon rejected traditionalist thinking outright, even when it took post-Christian humanitarian forms like in Leroux’s writings. This provoked the emergence of a certain paradox in the evolution of Proudhon’s thought after the publication of his second essay on property, which can be put the following way. If God is perfect and man is imperfect, then perfectibility brings humanity closer to God. Thus, God’s imperfect creation becomes an object of its own self-creation as it approximates the divine while struggling to improve itself. But as a consequence of this anthropocentric shift of focus, the Creator of the Creation, an unknowable God, thereby became secondary for Proudhon to any genuine understanding of the purely human self-creative process. This anthropocentric change in focus from God’s legacy to human perfectibility, already suggested in Proudhon’s earlier philosophical readings and his remarks about the novelty of his “Besançonian philosophy”, had a subtle but profound impact on his philosophical readings. At this particular stage in his intellectual evolution, in late 1841-early 1842, Proudhon had become more preoccupied with the soul than with proving the existence of God. After the publication of the second essay on property, he returned to reading about the spiritualist vs. materialist discussions which had preoccupied him during his first year in Paris, notably with regards to the theme of how different complex compositions could form unitary organisms and the singular and the multiple could coexist at the same time. The materialists (Proudhon was stimulated by his recent readings of François Broussais, Louis-­ Francisque Lélut, and Xavier Bichat, all of whom more or less took the role previously played by Cabanis) might very well have been empirically correct in their purely physiological treatment of organic life.37 Nevertheless, they could not account for those non-empirical aspects of the experience of human selfhood like the spontaneous intuition that there existed a “soul” distinct from the body and its various component parts. They also could not account for how this same “soul” actually creates reality by observing and reflecting consciously upon the phenomenal world. To this extent, thought was not merely occasioned by contact with the phenomenal world (as Proudhon had previously believed and as he thought Kant argued). This insight had implications for thinking about religion and morality too, since the perception of an invisible, non-sensorially existing world outside the individual self, transformed the self’s perception of the visible world. For Proudhon, the laws of understanding were imprinted in the mind of the self by the realm of the not-self, since humans were not “introspective” but “extrospective”, and since ideas did not exist outside of society, truths to which Kant did not pay enough attention.38 Thus, notions of justice and morality cannot be deduced from pure theory but had to have their origins in the real experience of social life. Once again, Proudhon ­maintained that one of the best ways to measure this experience was through the  Proudhon read Broussais’s famous De l’Irritation et de la folie in November 1840 (NAF 18256, Cahier 6, pp. 1–5); Lélut’s Du démon de Socrate in spring-summer 1839 (NAF 18257, Cahier 5, pp. 59–61) and his Qu’est-ce que la phrénologie? in 1840, either in February or fall-winter of the same year (NAF 18258, Cahier 13, pp. 27–32); and he read Xavier Bichat’s Anatomie Générale during the first half of 1842 (NAF 18259, Cahier 25, pp. 31–37). 38  NAF 18259, Cahier 21, p. 18. 37

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formulation (via induction, obviously) of a philosophy of history which would also be the “psychology of the species”.39 In a similar vein, Proudhon’s notes on Tissot’s Cours élémentaire de philosophie echoed many of the things he had already thought about while reading Tissot’s translation of Kant’s Logik, notably how philosophy, concerned with ideas and their subjective production within the mind, could better be connected to the external phenomenal world through more attentive observation of intersubjective experience (since, in keeping with Proudhon’s earlier fascination with semiotic “revelation”, intelligent life required communication with other kindred forms of intelligent life for its initial and regular stimulation), the ultimate goal in philosophical inquiry being to elaborate a theory of justice and morality.40 By the same token, such arid, abstract philosophical fields of investigation like logic or metaphysics should merely serve as methodological aids for developing a more compelling theory of politics and law. Yet by the first half of 1842, Proudhon seems to have become less hopeful about philosophy’s potential to renovate scientific inquiry. Reading Leroux’s articles in La Revue Indépendante, “Du Cours de philosophie de Schelling” (May 1842) and “Du Christianisme” (June 1842), Proudhon became disdainful of Leroux’s obsessive insistence, pace Cousin among other French thinkers influenced by Hegelian thought, that philosophy and religion be thought of as one since, in his opinion, both had exhausted whatever they had to contribute to the movement of the human mind.41 None of these philosophical preoccupations took centre stage in his published writings, however. In the first essay on property, Qu’est-ce que la propriété?, the closing chapter does hint at the psycho-social epistemological theory Proudhon was trying to work out in his reading notebooks and its relation to a philosophy of history which was also a history of human consciousness.42 Proudhon did give some mention in this chapter to its sources (the Cuviers, Flourens, Grotius, Vico). But even if this theory occupied a much larger place in his reading notebooks than his specific criticisms of legal and economic attempts to legitimate private property rights, it was only evoked in Qu’est-ce que la propriété? with regards to theories of human sociability in their particular relation to the nominal topic of Proudhon’s polemic: the criticism of property rights. The impact of his reading of the eclectics is barely present in Qu’est-ce que, apart from a short chapter mentioning Cousin’s theory of  NAF 18259, Cahier 24, p. 46.  Proudhon read Tissot’s Cours élémentaire in September–October 1841 (NAF 18259, Cahier 21, pp. 27–46). For this criticism of Kant, see NAF 18259, Cahier 21, p. 42. 41  NAF 18259, Cahier 25, pp. 37–39 and pp. 40–42. Nonetheless, Proudhon suggested that religion, which in its most evolved form was Christianity, was fundamentally sentimental and not interested in knowledge but only belief. Consequently, it was necessarily more archaic than philosophy. Attempting to turn back the clock and bring philosophy back to religion like the mature Schelling tried in his vain attempt to correct Hegel had, understandably enough, been rejected by his German contemporaries and had proven itself to be no more convincing, in Proudhon’s opinion, than did Leroux’s insistence in his articles on the perennial truth content of some primitive true and absolute religion which needed to be better understood and appreciated. 42  Chapter 5, “Exposition psychologique de l’idée de juste et de l’injuste, et détermination du principe du gouvernement”, in Proudhon (1840: 184–244). 39 40

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property with regards to theories legitimating private property rights based on occupation (1840: 47–52). In the final chapter, Proudhon vaguely hinted, fresh from whatever he had learned from Barchou de Penhoën and others, at the need to find an alternative “third social form” of ownership between the “thesis” of “community” (sometimes translated into English as “communism”) and the “antithesis” of property—a process which he deemed a “Hegelian” synthesis (1840: 217). And the closing paragraph of Qu’est-ce que consisted of a long panegyric to the “God of liberty and equality”, but no scholars have read this passage as the sincere and completely unfacetious elegy to monotheistic belief which, on the basis of what one can gather from the contents of Proudhon’s reading notebooks, it seems to have been (1840: 244). The presence of either German or French philosophy was not explicitly central to the other two essays on property published in 1841, apart from in a brief discussion, in the course of criticizing Lamennais, of the “criterium of certitude” in the second essay (Proudhon 1841a: 166). Only with the publication of De la Création de l’ordre dans l’humanité in 1843 would Proudhon openly criticize at length both the eclectics and German philosophy, notably Kant. But De la Création was itself a bizarre work, in large part shaped by a polemic, in his third essay on property, with different Fourierists led by Victor Considerant (Proudhon 1841b). Proudhon’s intention, already hinted at in this latter work, was to use the ideas of Fourier against the Fourierists. The impact of Fourier’s ideas on Proudhon in his pre-scholarship days when he was a printer responsible for overseeing the publication of Fourier’s Nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire in 1829 has been highlighted by many scholars, often in the context of enumerating genealogies of French socialist thought more or less along the lines of Marx’s (see above). This structuring has typically had the consequence of causing those same scholars to miss not only other more significant intellectual sources for Proudhon’s thought but also what Proudhon appears to have found ultimately attractive about Fourier’s ideas: his methodological use of the “série” or serial classification in developing a theory of social organisation (see Castleton 2008). De la Création represented Proudhon’s ephemeral attempt to use Fourier’s method to articulate a theory of the development of human consciousness. As treated in this work, religion represented a first attempt made by man to give order and meaning to the universe. Philosophy then took hold of enthusiastic human minds, trying to take the place formerly occupied by religion through the use of deductive reasoning and syllogisms in fruitless attempts to discuss causality and substance. In Proudhon’s own era, “metaphysics” was taking philosophy’s place, through the use of a superior “serial dialectic” capable of reconciling multiplicity (differentiation, division, gradation, etc. of different component parts within a group) with unity (composition, coordination, articulation, etc., constitutive of a group). With often obscure and downright turgid uses of Fourier’s idea of the “series”, Proudhon suggested that the study of the relations between things could replace that of things in themselves, since knowledge of the latter could never be either conclusive or satisfactory. Kant and Hegel might have intuited how ideas could be induced from other ideas, how the categories of understanding could be interrelated, and how consciousness could be dynamic. Nonetheless, if German philosophers succeeded in masterfully inverting traditional understandings of the

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objective and the subjective, they got stuck on the intractable difficulty of reconciling the noumenal with the phenomenal and perception with reality. Having identified this weakness, Proudhon devoted many pages of De la Création to criticizing Kant for not having followed, when discussing the generation of ideas and concepts, a serial classificatory approach (i.e., Kant could have learned more from reading Fourier’s works of social theory) (Proudhon 1843: 234–7, 240–2, 254ff). But these criticisms generally took the form of criticizing the way in which ideas were expressed logically, and Proudhon rarely directly expressed his own convictions as they had evolved from 1838 up until that point.43 Proudhon was perhaps most explicit about his attitude towards German thought at this time in a 23 May 1842 letter to Paul Ackermann. Obviously written while he was at some stage of drafting the philosophical sections of De la Création, Proudhon explained: “I deny purely and simply all of the psychology and metaphysics of Kant” (1875: 2.46). The Germans were no better when it came to the study of physiology, regularly mistaking “their tireless erudition for scientific profundity” (1875: 2.46). Suffering from a cultural trait exemplified in works like D. F. Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu which Proudhon claimed to have read in Émile Littré’s translation, the Germans seemed compelled to write at excessive length, often about an encyclopaedic variety of subjects, while believing it was necessary to systematize all forms of knowledge. The result, despite considerable mental ballast, was far from convincing, Proudhon concluded: I am not going to let myself be fooled by the metaphysics of Hegel; I call a cat a cat and don’t think myself more advanced for saying that this animal is a differentiation from the Great Everything [Grand Tout], and that God achieves self-consciousness in my brain. If one strengthened a bit this metaphysics, one would easily arrive at this conclusion, that intelligence, latent in inorganic matter, attains its maximum of power and activity in man; [a metaphysics] which can accommodate indifferently pantheism and materialism. […] Rather, who will dare tell me that Hegel’s system is something other than the formula thesis, antithesis, synthesis, taken as a law of differentiation of the absolute, and successively applied, within a big structure and with a lot of noise, to all questions of philosophy, art, law, etc.? Well, that, for me, my dear, is puerility; it is not science. […] I am going to repeat to you: Messieurs the Germans, in their categorical and subjective pedantry, despise us; but let them know well enough that as soon as their systems of which they are so proud, and which we only know through M. Cousin’s plagiarisms and the boasts of a few dupes, will have passed through the French muslin, there will be nothing left. (1875: 2.47–8)44

 Thus, Proudhon gave a brief account in §106 of De la Création of discussions about the origins of evil, citing Rousseau’s famous opening line from Émile and suggesting that evil might be inherent to nature and creation and that it was man’s destiny to improve everything. But this account was given in the context of examining different syllogisms and their sophistical demerits. See Proudhon (1843: 78–9). 44  Judging from his correspondence from around the same time with Tissot, Proudhon seems to have been particularly incensed by how Cousin’s influence was responsible for the popularization of Kant’s thought in France. After Tissot refused to have a chapter of De la Création dedicated to him, Proudhon even accused Tissot in a 31 July 1842 letter of owing his university position in Dijon to Cousin for having rendered the latter the service of translating Kant, whereas his influen43

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6.4 The Antinomy of God and Man Revisited: More Reflections on German Philosophy; New Hegelian Relations and Influences, 1844–1846 After the publication of De la Création de l’Ordre in 1843, Proudhon’s appreciation of German philosophy changed and his assessment of its accomplishments became more favourable. This is readily attested by a number of manuscript reading notes pertaining to philosophy from 1844 which Proudhon wrote and which represent the genesis of the work which would eventually become his 1846 Système.45 These notes on philosophical matters appear to date partly prior to his encounters and discussions with German exiles like Marx, Grün, or Ewerbeck, or to have been written only in the early stages of his relations with them. One discovers in his notes from this period that before Proudhon became fully engrossed in his discovery of radical Hegelian thought, he first returned to thinking about the mind-body problem, concluding, as in his earlier writings, that it could be resolved in a theory of “movement”, progress, or what elsewhere he called a “philosophy of history”. In this context, probably in 1844, he read Jouffroy’s youthful 1825 essay on spiritualism and materialism and found its attempt to show what was false in both to be unsatisfying insofar as its author made no attempt at providing a “synthesis” of the various contradictions separating both competing schools of thought.46 Jouffroy, Proudhon concluded, would have been better off making more use of German philosophy. At the same time, he observed elsewhere that, in many respects, post-­Kantian German philosophers like Fichte, Schelling and Hegel had failed because they had become too obsessed with establishing different identities in their metaphysical systems, notably with reconciling thought and being or subject and object in the “absolute”. Despite the best efforts of Schelling and Hegel, German idealism was thus bound to lead to atheism. Instead of breaking with Kant in vain attempts to supersede him, German philosophers would have been better off sticking to building a theory out of his notion of antinomies retaining subject and object in a constant tension which could not be resolved conceptually.47 One could imagine, intuit, or conceive of a possible synthesis of subject and object, but it was impossible to attain, describe, or enumerate in any precise fashion what that exact synthesis might look like. The same could be said of other antinomies awaiting synthesis not unrelated to the one separating subject from object, or mind from nature, notably those pertaining to the question of God, humanity’s relation to God, and that of immortality (since, for Proudhon, proving the existence of God was directly related to any parallel theory tial benefactor was a hypocrite and an opportunist corrupting the interest of philosophical inquiry in France and making the philosophical efforts of Tissot, as Cousin’s retainer, suspect. See Proudhon 1875: 2.61. 45  Notably those notes found in Bibliothèque d’Étude et de Conservation, Besançon, MS. 2827 and MS. 2844. 46  MS. 2844, f. 19 recto-f. 29 verso. 47  MS. 2844, f. 26 recto-f. 27 verso.

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of the immortality of the soul).48 At this moment in the evolution of his intellectual development, Proudhon still believed that the only things which could be stated with any certainty about such matters were to be derived from the study of the serial interrelation of ideas which he had insisted upon in De la Création de l’ordre (although, oddly, Proudhon now vacillated in his methodological preferences between referring to Kant’s theories of conceptual antinomies and Fourier’s ideas about serial classification, whereas in the 1843 work, Kant had been criticized for not adopting the “serial dialectic”). According to Proudhon, one could conceive of certain topics rationally (the existence of God, for example) without being able to explain or prove them. Instead of wild and unwarranted conceptual speculation, one should confine philosophical research to the recognition of the existence of antinomies wherein the identity of subject and object can only be said to exist relationally through the rational juxtaposition of its two component parts. Like many contemporary philosophers grappling with the epistemological legacy of Kant’s response to Humean scepticism (albeit as seen through the lens of Francophone debates pitting spiritualists and “psychologists” against materialists and “sensualists”), Proudhon disliked the separation of the objective from the subjective origins of ideas, and he wanted the two to be confounded, even if he did not think this should be attempted in the same manner that the post-Kantian German philosophers had done, since that could only lead, through a series of identities, to pantheism and atheism. Yet he believed that without ever being able to know either the essence of the self or that of the not-self, human reason could most productively grapple with their interrelation by circumscribing itself to the study of this interrelation as an antinomy. During this period, Proudhon reiterated many of his earlier criticisms of German philosophy, albeit minus those which had previously been directed at Kant. Proudhon concluded that the Germans lacked a key ability which the French now possessed because of the legacy of the French Revolution: a ready capacity to use the insights of German thought to develop a social theory adequate to contemporary needs.49 He also revealed how much the little he knew about German thought was coloured by his critical engagement with eclecticism when he asserted that Hegel’s efforts to build a philosophical system had largely failed because he had mistakenly not treated his triune structures in terms of their movement instead of their ­simultaneity. Had Hegel done so, Proudhon claimed, he would have discovered that the philosophy of nature leads to the philosophy of mind which leads to a philosophy of society, each one generating the next on the neither transcendental nor a  MS. 2844, f. 28 verso.  By the French, Proudhon presumably meant most especially himself, and not institutionally established philosophers like the eclectics. Indeed, Proudhon continued during this period to deplore the state of French philosophy under the institutional hegemony of eclecticism. Inspired by his dissatisfaction with Tissot’s work, he even fantasized about writing something analogous to Pascal’s Lettres provinciales profiling the inanity of the writings of Cousin, Damiron, Jouffroy, and those younger disciples or protégés who owed their academic employment to them like Félix Ravaisson, Émile Saisset, Jules Simon, Étienne Vacherot, and (although he obviously preferred him to the others enumerated herein since he knew him personally and corresponded with him irregularly). See Tissot. MS. 2827, f. 181 recto. 48 49

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priori basis of empirical observation such that experience determines reason.50 Furthermore, even if it were possible to conceive of the “absolute” as a concept much the same way one could conceive of subjectivity or the relative, there was no compelling reason to develop a philosophy of the “absolute”, which could ultimately only be a fiction or an abstraction. Antinomies like unity and multiplicity, self and not-self, subject and object, necessity and contingency, time and space, or less philosophical ones like property and community or monarchy and democracy (Proudhon did not enumerate them but he might have also added, since they were implied, other related pairs like liberty and equality or the individual and society) could be studied without attempting their resolution as “contradictions”.51 By this point in his intellectual evolution, Proudhon wanted to make the study of political economy central to philosophical discussions, and his emphasis on its pursuit made him, in his eyes, superior to Hegel, since he was convinced it could even lead to a proper proof of the existence of God. As he wrote in his notes on Tissot’s two-volume 1843 Anthropologie spéculative générale, he was certain that he had found a way to overcome those artificial dualistic oppositions which German thinkers like Hegel regularly posited in order to overcome them dialectically through ternary synthetic terms: THAT WHICH HEGEL WANTED TO DO, and WHICH HE DID NOT DO, because he reasoned a priori, or transcendentally, which is to say outside of experience, I DID, precisely because I followed an empirical method, and because I reasoned from observation. That which he left in an impenetrable obscurity, I made clear and palpable, by concretising it and dramatizing it.—Thus proceeds Nature: it concretises and particularises everything, its most general laws like its most particular properties.—To make it intelligible, there is only one secret: to know how to show it. […] I did more than clarify Hegel, I boldly treated the terrain which he had neglected, and which only could offer him solid results: Political Economy. It is there where operates the law of contradictions from which he only spun spider webs and which he did not have the merit to perceive the first, if one is to believe Krause, from whom he borrowed many of his ideas without quoting him[52]. But what would be these meaningless word games, if one did not get to the heart of the matter?—One needed to let the social antinomies play themselves out; to show them in their activated, deep, angry, and correlated reality, personified in property and the p­ roletariat, Labour and Capital, Royalty and Democracy, Philosophy, itself the object of so much love, and Religion. But how could philosophers have the courage to abdicate?… If Hegel had followed the route of experience, instead of arriving at atheism, he would have arrived at God: but who could believe that experience leads to God?

 MS. 2844, f. 43 recto-verso and f. 49 recto-verso. Ironically, this is more or less what Hegel had done in his Enzyklopädie. 51  MS. 2844, f. 46 recto-verso and f. 49 recto. 52  Proudhon never read Karl Christian Friedrich Krause and only knew about him through French vulgarizers of German thought like Tissot or Proudhon’s later journalistic collaborator during the Second Republic, Alfred Darimon. See Chambost 2021; Castleton 2021a. 50

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The strange thing is that experience was considered so horrible for Philosophy and Religion, that both one and the other, wanting to find God, always began by turning away from experience, and by enclosing themselves within the self, from which they both consulted and followed their fantasies. It is to the self, consciousness, pure reason, that they turned for justifications for believing in God: and always the self, pure reason, responded by saying that they know nothing on the matter. The scandal of philosophy! Tired by such babble, man turns to materialist studies: he thinks about Labour, Exchange, Value, Money, Credit, Interest, the Division of Labour, association and property, commerce and solidarity, and he concludes by affirming the Supreme Being without having looked for it, led [to it] by the singular necessity of mankind’s logical and social progress. My readers should think about it: they will see that in this unforeseen conclusion, there are more reasons, more probabilities than in all the arguments of philosophers … Nothing reveals the impotence, the nothingness of philosophy better than this system of Hegel, which coexists with reality without ever descending to its level.—Certainly, philosophers have raised a number of questions; they have sometimes identified problems; because, in the last instance, they are men, more or less knowledgeable and erudite. But precisely because they have reasoned as philosophers, they have not known how to clarify anything; and, if some of them have served science, it has been in stopping to be philosophers.53

Proudhon reiterated his suspicion that the danger of a lot of German philosophy was its difficulty distinguishing itself, in its general conceptual tendencies, from pantheism. To the extent he had some second-hand knowledge of the Pantheismusstreit (itself largely shaped by French debates during the July Monarchy about the legitimacy of eclecticism’s cultural status as quasi-official academic philosophy and Cousin’s immense intellectual and institutional influence in this regard), contemporary German philosophical thought seemed stuck on a road leading inevitably towards atheism. Proudhon again restated his conviction—in many ways at the core of the “Besançonian philosophy” he felt he had invented when critically reading Cousin back in 1839–40—that it was important to identify humanity as the antithesis of God, ontologically distinct from and opposed to divine essence (since creation was antithetical to the creator). Seen in light of this opposition, God was separate from the natural world but necessarily correlative to it.54 In Proudhon’s understanding, post-Kantian German idealist philosophers had argued that God had consciousness of himself as man (this was what the story of Jesus’s incarnation revealed on an allegorical level) and that the concept of God was inherent to humanity. By the same token, it would also seem logically true that, if humanity comes from God, then, in turn, it could possibly one day be absorbed back within God in an identity between the two.55 This attempt to grapple with and resolve the seemingly insurmountable dualism separating man from God could be intuited, but nothing definitive could be said about its future as an antinomy. Likewise, much as

 MS. 2844, f. 49 recto-50 verso. Proudhon’s notes on Tissot’s Anthropologie are found in MS. 2827, ff. 178 recto-f. 185 recto, and MS. 2844, f. 44 recto-62 verso. 54  MS. 2844, f. 60 recto-verso. 55  MS. 2844, f. 60 verso. 53

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Proudhon had recognized in his reading notebooks a few years earlier, the origins of “evil” (and the theories surrounding it like the Fall, original sin, etc.) could be understood within the framework of this antinomy between God and God’s imperfect but perfectible creation. To the extent to which Proudhon remained convinced that interrelated instinctive notions of justice, expiation, punishment and rehabilitation, themselves moral beliefs intrinsically interrelated, in primitive minds, with religious concepts, suggested and implied human perfectibility, he wanted to use insights drawn from exploration of the psychological and successive (or diachronic) revelation of these instinctive notions to finish the work of German philosophers and demonstrate how man was, through his capacity for progress, the very same supreme being he worshipped, since perfectibility brought humanity ever closer to his ideal of God. But this position was not the same thing as advocating either pantheism or atheism since it maintained a firm distinction between God and man at its foundation. Indeed, Proudhon believed the conceptual originality of the way in which he presented this antinomy was what made his own theories superior to the different philosophical systems of the German Idealists. One thing is clear about Proudhon’s attitudes towards contemporary philosophy at this point in his intellectual development. Possibly under the heady sway of his foreign contacts in Paris and in a pronounced change from his opinions in 1842–43, he clearly considered German ideas to be of far greater interest than those of the French eclectics who parroted and corrupted them. In a passage of his notes on Tissot’s Anthropologie, Proudhon summarized how he believed his own ideas improved upon those of German philosophy without floundering in the vapid equivocations of French eclecticism: Thus, we finish the work of the Germans. We give to Schelling the God he needlessly pursues; we keep for Hegel his God-Humanity; for Fichte his I [moi]; and we can say without blasphemy: Oh Man, this Supreme Being you adore, it’s you, yourself, united in an ineffable hypothesis with another yourself. I do not know of any objection which can remove this high conception. But what becomes of the eclecticism of Cousin at the foot of this monument? What is it? Is it pantheist, idealist, or atheist? It is nothing; it is clownish [harlequin]; less than anything which one can imagine as worthless, stupid, puerile, grotesque, bourgeois, and phantasmagorical: it is a parrot.56

In the summer of 1844, Proudhon wanted to use these philosophical insights regarding the virtues of antinomical thinking which he had arrived at prior to his contact with the various German exiles in Paris to write a series of responses to four prize essay competitions proposed by the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. These competitions concerned the respective topics of the relation of profits to wages; the nature of insurance contracts; the potential effects changes in the desire for greater material well-being would have on social morality; and the origins of

 MS. 2844, f. 60 recto-61 verso. This last zoological metaphor was likely inspired by Fourier’s analogical definition of a false scholar. 56

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poverty.57 Although he realized he did not have time to submit essays on these topics for the September deadline, he planned to write about them anyway. He also wanted to pen an additional study devoted to the subject of constitutional monarchy in France, which he had already begun writing immediately after the publication of De la Création de l’Ordre.58 Proudhon intended to integrate discussions of all of these topics within a much more ambitious work drawing on his epistemological conclusions about the antinomical nature of thought. In keeping with the inductive approach which he had attempted to theorize since the late 1830s, Proudhon aimed to show in this projected work how the study of social relations in economic facts could lead to an understanding of justice, morality, and religion. The overlapping and interrelated “social antinomies” which Proudhon planned on discussing were labour and privilege (also the same as that of wages and profits); social interest and property rights (more or less analogous to that pitting community against property which Proudhon had already discussed in his 1840–41 essays); monarchy and democracy (discussion of this antinomy would treat the question of post-­ revolutionary constitutional monarchy in France); and more philosophical topics like spiritualism and “sensualism” (by which he meant the sort of materialism associated with Condillac, Cabanis, Broussais, and countless others) and inneity and reflection.59 Proudhon’s general thesis was that the way these different “antinomies” played themselves out conceptually in social life was the genuine  motor driving human progress. Proudhon sometimes used the word “contradictions”, but—at least not in 1844—there is no evidence, contrary to what Marx claimed in his letter to Schweitzer, that Proudhon had been Hegelianised by him, nor that the “contradictions” Proudhon wrote about were any less Kantian for him than the synonymous “antinomies” about which he interchangeably wrote. In his plan for this projected work, he intended, in keeping with his predilection for an inductive method, to move from the exoteric to the esoteric. What really was his starting point for thinking about antinomies, if one is to judge from the contents of his reading notebooks going back to late 1838, was now to be his concluding point: a discussion of how human minds, in order to understand the world outside of themselves, were always working around what in metaphorical form was the primal contradiction separating God from the world God created, much the same way in the logical process the infinite needed the finite to exist and vice versa, and God, like the afterlife, could not be known but could not be denied either.60 Thus, Proudhon planned on ending his work on an upbeat note with a discussion of the

 For evidence of these intentions, see Proudhon’s notes from June–July 1844 in BNF, NAF 18261, Cahier A, pp. 1–14; MS. 2827, f. 92, 93, and 94; as well as his 15 August 1844 and 24 October 1844 letters in Proudhon (1875: 2.138–40, 165–9). 58  Echoing the title of his first essay on property, this latter project was to be entitled Qu’est-ce que la royauté?. On the topic of Proudhon’s attitude towards constitutional monarchy in general, and the July Monarchy in particular, see Castleton (forthcoming). 59  MS. 2827, f. 87. 60  MS. 2827, f. 91. 57

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logical probability of the immortality of the soul and the existence of God.61 In a mental process reflecting evolving understandings of the relation between the Creator and the Creation, God was “absolute reason” intuited first instinctively— this could be described in Hegelian terms as the “thesis”—then through reflection— this could be described as the “antithesis”. “Synthesis”, in the form of the harmonious reconciliation between a personal man and an impersonal God (itself analogous to the reconciliation of individuality with social existence in the mundane world), could only occur between these two terms in the afterlife, about which one could say very little, apart from affirming its logical conceptual necessity.62 The God-man antinomy was the ultimate one Proudhon planned on describing in his projected work. This antinomy was meant to mirror and echo the earlier concrete problems posed by the more straightforward contradictions posed by political economy and public and administrative law. At the same time, as framed, it remained thematically consistent with his attempts since the late 1830s to grapple with conceptual tensions he thought persisted in contemporary philosophical discussions. Thus, it expressed not merely the tension between God and man, but also a series of other interrelated and overlapping antinomies: those of religion and philosophy, the dogmatic and the analytic, the infallible and the fallible, the impersonal and the personal, the unconscious and the self-conscious, and the objective and the subjective.63 Political economy, which Proudhon described as “the most spiritualist of sciences, that which best captures the moral and intellectual capabilities of man”, and which was “metaphysics in action”, was to save the day in this mess of intractable oppositions by pointing out how such contradictory pairs existed in multiple prosaic forms whose internal tensions could be reconciled by balancing what was good and bad in the poles of each antinomy vis-à-vis the other.64 Convinced of the intellectual uselessness of Cousin’s eclecticism, Proudhon had become adamant that what actually drove progress in philosophical inquiry was the work of scholars and researchers in more specialized fields dealing with circumscribed problems like mathematicians, scientists, doctors, philologists and linguists, historians, and political economists. As he put it in a 24 October 1844 letter to Bergmann, reiterating much of the substance of the criticism made in his 1842 letter to Ackermann already quoted, German thinkers would have been better off not prioritizing abstract system-­ building and turning towards the concrete world of everyday life: “If German philosophers, too much in a hurry to arrive at a theological or transcendental conclusion, had been more attached to studying carefully the antinomies which were right in front of their eyes and to giving good solutions to them, they would have perhaps rendered greater services than by [drafting] the premature scaffolding of their systems” (1875: 2.167). In an 4 October 1844 letter to Ackermann from earlier that month, Proudhon revealed just how much his assessment of German philosophy had

 MS. 2827, f. 185, f. 221–22, and 223.  MS. 2827, f. 226 and f. 228. 63  See, for example, Proudhon’s notes on philosophy in MS. 2827, f. 211. 64  MS. 2827, f. 86, f. 88, and f. 214. 61 62

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become more favourable. Upset with “the backwardness of the French public relative to philosophical studies” and “the retrograde and intolerant monopoly exerted by the university coterie” (by which he clearly meant Cousin et al.), feeling he was “right [to be] against everyone at once” (particularly his left-wing rivals and critics), he declared that he was attempting “what Kant had formally declared impossible”: “I am working on popularising metaphysics by putting it into action. For that I am employing the most profound dialectic, that of Hegel, because this is my unhappy luck, that, to triumph over indomitable aversions, I must use methods most disagreeable to common sense. But to great evils [come] great remedies […]” (1875: 2.157–8). Proudhon’s newfound preference for Hegel over Kant would become even more pronounced in the months which followed. In a 19 January 1845 letter to Bergmann, by now thoroughly “infected” with Hegelianism (through the personal influence of Marx, Ewerbeck, Grün et al.), he wrote: “[…] According to some new acquaintances I made this winter, I was very well understood by a large number of Germans, who admired the work that I did, arriving by myself at that which they believed only existed in their country”. To which he added: “I can’t yet judge the parenthood which there is between my metaphysics and Hegel’s logic, for example, since I have never read Hegel; but I am persuaded that it is his logic which I will be employing in my next work; rather, this logic is only a particular case, or, if you prefer, the simplest version of my own” (1875: 2.176). As Haubtmann has shown, Proudhon’s contact and conversations with foreigners residing in Paris capable—while flattering him with their attention—of explaining the ideas of Feuerbach, Strauss, the Bauer brothers, Wilhelm Weitling, Marx, and Friedrich Engels, among others (Ewerbeck even provided Proudhon with translations of their works which the latter commented upon) partially reshaped the orientation and tone of his book.65 Proudhon’s carnets and other scattered writings from 1845–46 also testify to his anti-theistic radicalisation. When Système was finally published in 1846, not only had Hegelian “contradictions” replaced Kantian “antinomies” in the title, but, perhaps more intellectually revealing of the precise nature of Proudhon’s Hegelian infection, the God-man distinction did not come at the end of this ambitious work, as Proudhon had long planned. Instead, it appeared in the prologue and in the middle, in Chap. 8 of Système. Moreover, God was treated in the latter, unlike in his reflections running from 1838 to 1844, as “evil”. This was a definite shift from Proudhon’s earlier project of proving the existence of God after having first inductively examined purely human affairs. Yet even if this meant that Proudhon had become an avowed anti-theist, something he certainly was not when he came to Paris on his scholarship a few years earlier, his insistence on a perfectibilian philosophy of human history derived from a reflection on the God-man distinction was not new. As has been abundantly shown above, it had already largely been shaped by his critical engagement with French eclectic philosophers like Cousin and Jouffroy, an engagement itself partially predetermined by his post-­Catholic and  Because the manuscript originals of Ewerbeck’s translations for Proudhon have disappeared and are not conserved at the municipal library in Besançon, one is left to accept Haubtmann’s account of their contents (1982: 524–38; 1981: 86–96). 65

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post-Cartesian preoccupation with epistemologically reconciling spiritualism and materialism, or mind and matter.

6.5 After God Became Evil: A Humanist Coda? 1847–1864 From the publication of his Système in 1846 until the outbreak of the February 1848 Revolution in France, Proudhon dropped much of his earlier criticism of German thought, and insisted in his carnets and manuscripts on a growing identity between trends in German philosophy, economic thought, and politics since the French Revolution.66 Accordingly, Kant’s “kingdom of ends” which was to realize teleologically his categorical imperative, was also identical, in a different idiom, with Jean-Baptiste Say’s law of supply and demand, notably Say’s explicit claim that for markets to work most efficiently, products could only ever be exchanged for other products, and the implicit one which Proudhon derived from it that all producers were equally consumers and vice versa. These parallel conceptual convergences in philosophy and economics, accelerated by political developments in Europe since 1789, were underscored by Proudhon to emphasize what he took to be the much larger trend of the secularization of human consciousness. Religion, Proudhon insisted, was bound to be replaced by “science” as the supernatural was revealed to be human. This, he argued in an unpublished manuscript sequel to his 1846 Système, required a transformation in the very way individuals thought and a general purging of wayward abstractions in conceptual language. Proudhon claimed the problem of resolving contradictory ideas could be accomplished by circumscribing them to their proper scope and making concepts correspond better to their content by giving them a practical dimension allowing for a better identity between ideas and facts. This was the heuristic role that political economy would play, one which linked Say’s law to Kant’s categorical imperative by offering a practical idiom capable of attenuating conceptual antinomies the language of philosophy could not resolve. As the movement for electoral reform took on momentum in what would unexpectedly prove to be the final months of the July Monarchy, Proudhon found himself compelled also to reflect upon how to interpret “the People” who nominally rule society in post-revolutionary constitutional regimes based on the principle of popular sovereignty.67 As he formulated the matter, this was a problem not dissimilar to that of finding a way to a be a populist Bossuet, which he had set out to Paris in 1838 trying to resolve. It would preoccupy Proudhon from roughly 1847 to 1853, as he repeatedly attempted, in his manuscripts, to come up with a theory of what he sometimes called (anticipating twentieth-century philosophers as different from  Bibliothèque d’Étude et de Conservation, Besançon, MS. 2817, f. 112 recto and MS. 2881, f. 37 recto. See also Proudhon (2004: 547–9). 67  For a summary of the dilemma Proudhon faced in the run-up to the unexpected revolution of February 1848 as well as for a discussion of his successive attempts to grapple with the democratization of French political life between 1847 and 1852, see Castleton (2018, 2023). 66

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one another as György Lukács and John Searle) “social ontology”. In this theory, societies and humanity at large had their own ontological status as “collective” beings with their own “collective reason” distinct from those of individuals. Switching from the man-God distinction to the individual-society one, Proudhon argued that those antinomies which exist for the individual collapse when seen from the standpoint of the collective, whose meaning could only be understood a posteriori, in a teleological process whose temporal and historical course suggested that the ultimate end of human perfectibility (what once had been traditionally called “providence”) was the quasi-Kantian identification of the individual with humanity. While in prison between 1849 and 1852, Proudhon took to calling this theory one of “revolutionary practice” (Castleton 2012). His new starting point was no longer that of the reform of language and thought through the use of the idiom of political economy (although he appears to have still believed the latter had that potential), but instead the perpetual mobility of human ideas and interests combined with the innate human desire to find an ideal giving meaning to the movement and oscillations of those same ideas and interests. In his manuscripts and carnets, Proudhon argued that this ideal was initially called “God”, but with humanity’s progressive intellectual development, it had been revealed to be “society”. In this manner, Proudhon sought to come up with a theory of social reality which allowed him to overcome many of those longstanding antinomies whose resolution he had wrestled with since the late 1830s: those separating unity from multiplicity, the general from the particular, the mind from matter, the soul from the body, the collective from the individual, or cause from effect. Proudhon’s new solution to these antinomies— again a philosophy of history just like in his prior solutions to the various dualistic impasses of contemporary philosophy which he had identified during the July Monarchy in the works of the eclectics and their critics—was also a history of the secularization of human consciousness, what he called the “psychology of humanity”, one in which “revolutions” could be understood and explained through a narrative of the development of this “psychology” such that its teleological unfolding might even be anticipated through the study of history. In this manner, a pre-1848 theory of progress and human perfectibility morphed into a theory of “revolution” understood as the a posteriori revelation of “collective reason” (as opposed to individual rationality) as exercised by a “collective being’ or “collective man”, whose ambivalent ontological status could be either limited to a single society, composed of all its members but existentially distinct from constitutive parts (in which case it was generally called “the People”), or as capacious as “Humanity” taken in its entirety. One thing is certain about this stage of Proudhon’s intellectual development. If there remained a similar emphasis on antinomies and their attenuation in a philosophy of history, it was no longer marshalled in the service of proving the rational truth content of certain religious beliefs. Searching for proof of the existence of God had been replaced by searching for proof of the existence of society. Likewise, examining “universal reason”’s relation to individual human beings morphed into that of examining “collective reason”’s relation to the same.

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To measure just how far Proudhon had evolved from late 1838 to the early 1850s, one need only examine how he reacted to the republication without his consent of his anonymous 1837 Essai de grammaire générale in 1853. When Proudhon lost a lawsuit to prevent its republication, this time with his name on the cover page as its author (the editor wanted to insist on what an orthodox Catholic linguist Proudhon had once been and needle the famous revolutionary for his spectacular apostasy), he was inspired to return to the ideas of his youth. Proudhon wanted to expand upon the polygenetic arguments about semiotic development that he had made in his 1839 submission for the Volney Prize on comparative linguistics in light of his new theory of “social ontology” and a parallel project he had been working on since the final months of the Second Republic with some underemployed friends, a chronological history of the human race, which he sometimes called Chronos (in conscious reference to Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos) (see Castleton 2019: 86–9). Proudhon additionally  projected writing a related  series of philological studies, most of which revolved around reinterpreting the Old Testament (Proudhon 1999: 70–218). These would also examine the role played by various epistemological “categories” of the mind in the formation of languages, notably Hebrew. Proudhon planned to argue that languages were the product of human spontaneity as man created himself progressively in a mental shift from instinct to intelligence. Unlike in his early notebooks in which Proudhon seemed to sidestep Rousseau’s paradox of the origins of language by arguing that the origins of thought were of more importance than the origins of the words, Proudhon now argued that there was no thought prior to language, since thought requires language and language requires thought. The linguistic faculty shared by human beings embodied their sui generis capacity for perfectibility. But this had important epistemological consequences, since no ideas or concepts, Proudhon now claimed, could pre-exist the semiotic exercise of the perfectible human mind, because mankind’s capacity for abstraction was utterly limited and determined by its experience in the world. Certain faculties like the use of language might be innate to human beings, but their modes of expression were not. “Categories of reason” of the sort philosophers like Kant and Tissot had tried to enumerate could not be said to pre-exist in the understanding but were slowly discovered (in the past, Proudhon might have written “revealed”) by the semiotic efforts of the mind. This meant that ideas about substance, space, God, or the soul were of purely human invention and necessarily had to be historicized within a larger narrative of progress. Identifying those “psychological” categories pre-­ existing in the individual human mind was a quixotic task since they were always mutating with the development of humanity as a species, the latter’s constant transformation also being identical in Proudhon’s mind with a much larger history of the secularisation of human consciousness (again understood as the product of an ontologically “collective being”, whether one called that being “humanity” or “society”). In both the Chronos project and Proudhon’s various philological ones dating from the early 1850s, the history of the human race was resolutely humanist. For him, understanding man had decidedly replaced that of understanding God as the

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ultimate end of his thought.68 He no longer made significant mention, like in the late 1830s, of the afterlife. Similarly, his return to the intensive philological study of Old Testament Judaism during this period, for example, seemed to be strongly influenced now by a quasi-Feuerbachian humanism. He enthusiastically (albeit critically) devoured Ewerbeck’s recent translations of Feuerbach, Georg Friedrich Dauber, Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany, and Bruno Bauer,69 and he reread Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu in Littré’s translation.70 As Proudhon wrote in his manuscript notes for the Chronos project, reiterating the aims of his initial research project from the late 1830s with explicit reference to the impact of radical Hegelianism on his thought: “What Bossuet tried to do for the first time for history from the limited

 This is also the case in Proudhon’s published work from this period, Philosophie du progrès (1853).  For Ewerbeck’s embellished “translations”, see Ewerbeck (1850a, b). On these editions and their contemporary reception in France, see Catel (2019). Proudhon’s annotated copies of both are held at the municipal library in Besançon. 70  Judging from his marginal commentaries in his copy of Littré’s translation conserved at the Bibliothèque d’Étude et de Conservation, Besançon, and occasional periodic references in his manuscripts, Proudhon begrudgingly appreciated much of Strauss’s work, even if he disagreed with many of his more technical philological observations. Rereading Littré’s translation after the 2 December 1851 coup d’État convinced Proudhon that there was no need to look for a personified revelator like Jesus since whatever revelation there might have been would have been the product of the “collective man” (i.e., society) responsible for making God exist in different peoples’ imaginations in the first place. God was an ideal (so by definition could not be seen, experienced, or grasped as a material reality), which allowed man to have certain experiences, because the human mind seemed to require on a metaphysical level the idea of God to understand the world. By the same token, religion (and Christianity was herein no exception) seemed to require miracles in order for there to appear to be some terrestrial manifestation of the absolute. See BNF, NAF 14275, p. 447. This reading contrasts sharply with Proudhon’s first encounter with Strauss’s work, when, shortly after his arrival in Paris in December 1838, he read a book review published in the Revue des Deux Mondes written by Edgar Quinet. At that time, fresh to Paris, unfamiliar with German ideas, and only beginning to read works of philosophy, Proudhon fully concurred with Quinet that German scholarship in Spinoza’s influential wake (ranging from Lessing, Kant, and Hegel to Wilhelm Martin Leberecht De Wette, Johann Karl Wilhelm Vatke, Peter von Bohlen, and Cäsar von Lengerke for Old Testament criticism and Bruno Bauer and Strauss for New Testament criticism) inappropriately treated Jesus as just another mythological figure, largely ignored whatever distinct charismatic personality Christ might have had, and reduced the Gospels to the allegorical status of mere moral chronicles and the messianic ideal special to Jesus Christ to a posthumous creation by a church seeking congregants. By confusing rational with revealed truth and confusing the divine with the human through endless naturalistic explanation, German scholars, Proudhon thought at the time, were paving the way towards the importation of pantheism in France, which he already felt was present in works like Benjamin Constant’s De la Religion considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements (1824–31). Proudhon was especially sensitive to the charge of pantheism because of the criticisms levelled against Cousin and the eclectics and their insufficient responses to these criticisms. For Proudhon’s reading notes on Quinet’s review of Strauss and for his notes on Constant, see respectively BNF, NAF 18256, Cahier 2, p.  3 (f. 51 verso) and BNF, NAF 18257, Cahier 3, p. 6–20 (f. 57 verso-64 verso). By the time Proudhon wrote De la Création, however, his opinion seems to have evolved somewhat, and he remarked, not uncritically in this 1843 work, that the effects of Strauss’s erudition were more powerful in undermining Christian orthodoxy than the subversive incredulity of either Voltaire or Rousseau. See Proudhon (1843: 40). 68 69

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viewpoint of his Gallican Catholicism, I am trying to redo from the standpoint of humanism and its encyclopaedic and ethnological conditions”.71 If Proudhon left a note in his annotated copy of Ewerbeck’s translation of Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christenthums restating his position that his “anti-theism” was different from Hegelian “humanism” insofar as he treated man as a perfectible but thus imperfect being, his annotations were for the most part appreciative and far from hostile.72 Moreover, what he was trying to do and what Feuerbach and other German thinkers had been trying to do more or less simultaneously seemed to Proudhon to be part of a general post-revolutionary intellectual trend at once anticipating and describing the teleological unfolding of changes in human consciousness. Reading Auguste Comte’s Système de politique positive in the wake of the 2 December 1851 coup d’état, Proudhon noted how much Comte’s conception of a “great”  or “supreme being”  synonymous with “Humanity”  was similar to the ideas of Hegel and Feuerbach.73 But however much there might have been a convergence in nineteenth-­ century social and religious thought, there did remain a major conceptual problem for Proudhon, one which was increasingly acute after the collapse of the Second Republic, the coup d’état, and the subsequent declaration of the Second Empire: that of how to resolve the tension between “collective reason”  and the perverse morality of “collective being”. How was a theorist and partisan of “revolution” like Proudhon to imagine a society organized to meet the needs of individuals if the individuals who composed that society did not understand their needs the same way Proudhon did? In other words, what was one to do if a perfectible humanity did not exactly seem to be perfecting itself in accordance with its supposed teleological ends? After this preoccupation, central to his philosophical preoccupations between 1847–1853, with the profound ontological differences at work separating the exercise of the “collective reason”  of “collective being”  from that of the individual reason of the different members of society, Proudhon also briefly, during the early years of the Second Empire, tried to write another work of political economy

 Bibliothèque d’étude et de conservation, Besançon, MS. 2822, f. 1 recto.  Folded note inserted between pages 210 and 211 of Qu’est-ce que la Religion (Ewerbeck 1850a). After having read Feuerbach’s use of a quote by Hegel describing how man invented the story of the Fall and original sin out of his feeling of separation from God, Proudhon noted on p. 92 of his copy of the same work how Hegel was also an anti-theist in making this analysis. Proudhon wrote “Très bien” and “oui” in the margins of numerous passages of Ewerbeck’s translation, suggesting that he approved of most of Feuerbach’s arguments, which he clearly read attentively. 73  BNF, NAF 14273, Carnet 9, pp. 448–49. Proudhon characteristically noted in a different passage of the same carnet, pp. 366–67, how Spinoza’s ethics had first destroyed much of theology, then Kant and Hegel had finished the job in theory, and now it was for political economy to complete the task of destruction in practice. Proudhon was not the only person who appreciated the similarities between Comte and Feuerbach, and it is perhaps no coincidence that Ewerbeck was attracted to aspects of Comtean positivism and even toyed with the idea of translating Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive in the 1850s. He would not be the only one to make this shift if one thinks of Littré in France and George Eliot in Britain. 71 72

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(Castleton 2015). In his various attempts to sketch out a methodology for this treatise  which he eventually abandoned, he replaced the binary metaphysics of Kantian antinomies with the actuarial implications of double-entry bookkeeping, and planned to argue that political economy’s intellectual superiority as a discipline of thought lay in not needing a religion for its starting point.74 Methodologically, political economy worked outwards from indefinable concepts by setting them in juxtaposition as “antinomies”. By this latter term, Proudhon no longer meant anything having to do with German philosophy. As he wrote in a manuscript draft of this unfinished ambitious work: The antinomy is as old as the syllogism; it belongs neither to Hegel nor to Aristotle [...] [T]hose of all times who have made the most use of it, who have transformed it into an art, and who have spread it amongst all peoples as a method as simple as it is infallible, were not German metaphysicians; they were good Phoenician, Greek, Marseillais shopkeepers; good farmers of the fecund Cato; in a word, perfect economists. It is possible that philosophers from the other side of the Rhine, whom I only know through hearsay, unable to read them in their language, and their works not yet having been translated, somewhat confused  the method used from time immemorial by all businesspeople; that only concerns these philosophers: but I can say that such misfortune would not have befallen  them if, instead of imagining that they were the first to find the principle and practice [of antinomies], they had studied, like I did myself, at the school of traders. Every accountant who knows his profession is a Hegelian without knowing it; he has the stuff of a philosopher, and the genius of metaphysics.75

According to Proudhon, double-entry bookkeeping taught that one could not conceive of debt without credit and vice versa: the two were inseparable and proportionally equal to one another in their correlative  relation even if they were not identical. Having finally read Hegel — highly abridged excerpts from Hegel's Logik in Sloman and Wallon's  recent translation which he annotated (Hegel 1854)  — Proudhon was convinced that the difficulties of using general ideas to represent particular things and reconciling the general and the particular (or being and nothingness, subject and object, etc.) could be attenuated once one recognized that the correlation of antinomical terms was not the same thing as their identity.76 In his opinion, the modelling of inputs and outputs found in basic accounting could be generalized outwards to build a social philosophy on a more solid foundation than anything offered by post-Kantian idealism. Proudhon’s 1858 anticlerical work, De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église, substantially revised for its Belgian reedition in 1860-61, also revolved thematically around a central antinomy: that separating immanent conceptions of justice from transcendent ones. In his introduction to the Belgian reedition,  One of the epigraphs he planned to use for this work was a quote from the polymath, PierreSimon Laplace: “Je n’ai pas besoin de Dieu pour expliquer le système du monde; il ne faut que de la matière et du mouvement”. One could argue that this was a more radical restatement of those positions regarding providence which Proudhon had formulated in his 1846 Système, insofar as it suggested that the “hypothesis of God” no longer needed even be addressed. 75  Bibliothèque d’Étude et de Conservation, Besançon, MS. 2863, f. 92 verso. 76  MS. 2863, f. 93 recto. 74

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Proudhon admitted to the dualist character of the philosophy put forward in De la Justice, one stemming from the separation of self from not-self. This was clearly a longstanding theme in Proudhon’s writings, one whose epistemological ramifications preoccupied him since the late 1830s and whose treatment did not require any Hegelian “synthesis” (Proudhon 1860: 1. xxxi–xxxvi, xv, xxxix). In the first edition of this same work, Proudhon more or less restated his anti-theist position that God had effectively been excommunicated from human affairs in modern times, retaining a quasi-permanent conceptual existence in the human mind, but one which was metaphysically distinct, separate, and exiled from God’s creation (Proudhon 1858: 1. 169–70). According to Proudhon, “the Revolution” needed neither the hypothesis of God, nor original sin to work its wonders on earth. Proudhon would write about numerous other subjects before his death: war and peace; the principle of nationalities and the relation between ethnicity, state-­ building, and geopolitical borders; the post-1815 interstate balance of power in Europe; literary and artistic property; property and the state; the antinomies of liberty and authority at work in both the principles of taxation and federalism; and the virtues of positively abstaining from imperial political elections by casting blank ballots, even when there were working-class candidates. He would return one last time to the topics of religion and its relation to human psychology and Feuerbachian humanism shortly before his death, in 1863–64, in the course of writing two posthumously published manuscripts: one about Gustave Courbet’s “realism” and the attempts of artists and writers to represent different aesthetic ideals; the other about Ernest Renan’s bestselling Vie de Jésus and the controversy its publication in 1863 had generated (Proudhon 1865, 1896; see Castleton 2021b). It was in the summer of 1864 that he read Joseph Roy’s translations of Feuerbach, designed in part to supersede Ewerbeck’s earlier truncated and bowdlerised translations (notably of Das Wesen des Christenthums) and in part to offer a Germanic corrective to the Renan controversy (Feuerbach 1864a, b).77 Unlike when he read Feuerbach in the 1850s, Proudhon was more critical of the radical Hegelian thinker in his copious marginal annotations this time around. Disgusted by the amorality of the elites of the Second Empire, Proudhon returned to the psychological reflections of his youth, affirming his belief that there was an indestructible religious faculty engrained in man’s consciousness such that to reject religion outright was to reject what it meant to be human. Far from being a longstanding source of existential alienation, the religious creativity at work in man’s imaginative attempts to attain the sublime and the infinite was an honourable testimony to man’s intellectual freedom, Proudhon maintained, and Feuerbach’s work could thus even be read, contrary to its author’s intentions, as a justification for and even celebration of religious belief. God was once again described by Proudhon as mankind’s “alter ego”, the “Eternal Father” of

 Both annotated copies of these works are held at the municipal library in Besançon. Haubtmann has published some of the marginal annotations found in Roy (1980a: 247–58; 1980b: 213–21). On the Renan controversy, see Priest (2015) and Richard (2015). Although both these studies are richly informative, neither discusses Hegelian reactions to Renan’s Vie de Jésus. 77

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“the Word made flesh” which was humanity.78 It might be that God, as the Supreme Being, was identical with human reason, particularly since humans were, in accordance with a certain anthropocentric narcissism, at the top of a great chain of being whose hierarchy was measured by Proudhon in terms of rationality. Nevertheless, if God existed in the human mind, then God could be said to exist in reality, since human belief and divine existence, Proudhon suggested, were synonymous. Despite repeated criticisms of Feuerbach in his marginal annotations (criticisms one does not find in his annotations to Ewerbeck’s translations from the early 1850s), Proudhon did make several references to “anti-theism” in his copies of Roy’s editions, intimating that Feuerbach ultimately did not appear to be claiming anything different from his own arguments, developed from the mid-1840s onwards, about the instinctive psychological need for man to posit a form of radical alterity in the opaque but perfect form of God in order to exist as man. Proudhon strongly disagreed, nonetheless, with Feuerbach’s claim that Christian art (and Catholic art in particular) was an oxymoronic contradiction in terms, incompatible with the higher mission of aesthetics in human consciousness. For Proudhon, there was an intimate relation between art and religion, since both encouraged the pursuit of an ideal. If anything, the religious faculty permanently inscribed in mankind’s psychology was perhaps even more important than the related aesthetic one, the latter being a mere “auxiliary” aiding man’s access to both truth and justice.79  Annotation made to Proudhon’s copy of Roy’s translation of Feuerbach, Essence du christianisme, p. 36. 79  The theme of the interrelation between art and religion is evoked recurrently and sporadically in Proudhon’s writing, and it related directly to his epistemological concerns dating back to the early years of his 1838–41 scholarship in Paris, themselves not unrelated to his interest in German philosophical thought. In Chap. 8 of Proudhon’s Système, one finds a reference to Raphael’s famous claim, in many ways anticipating Marx’s posthumously now more famous one about philosophers in his “theses on Feuerbach”, that artists should represent the world not as it is but as it should be (1846: 1.400). At the same time, earlier in his reading notebooks from his scholarship in Paris, while preoccupied with “psychologie”, studying Kant and Tissot, and thinking about how to relate both the noumenal to the phenomenal world and subject and object, Proudhon also seems to have believed that aesthetics had for its principal object works of art, artificially created by man, but whose interest stemmed from their relation to the existing world (since the formal execution of a work of art was less interesting than the intellectual intentions of the artist). See BNF, NAF 18259, Cahier 21, p. 42. When, subsequent to the publication of Système, Proudhon read the section of volume 2 of Joseph Willm’s Histoire de la philosophie allemande, depuis Kant jusqu’à Hegel (1847  of Willm 1846–1849), devoted to explaining the ideas of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Proudhon noted in a manuscript that the “ideal” pertained to claims about that which had no real existence in material reality and which could not be demonstrated or explained by empirical experience in the mundane world: notably those concepts and themes such as the infinite, the perfect, the beautiful, the absolute, God, or immortality which could be readily found in religious and moral discourse. “Ideals”, he concluded, have only subjective value, since they stem directly from the use of “aesthetic reason” (also more or less identical with religious reason), in which the object follows the ideal (unlike in “speculative reason”, in which the object anticipates the idea). Thus, in religion, the supernatural is created by man much the same way works of art are; it has no genuine objective existence since, in its conceptual domain, the infinite lies entirely in the finite of the human mind which imagines it. See Bibliothèque d’Étude et de Conservation, Besançon, MS. 2818, ff. 114 recto-15 verso. These claims were buttressed by others, obviously confirmed in part by 78

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If such mature comments on the “idealism” at work in both religion and art possibly reveal the extent to which Proudhon remained faithful to the Catholic culture which intellectually informed his youth to the very end of his life, it is hard not to conclude from such mature marginalia that when Karl Grün described Proudhon as the “French Feuerbach”, his judgement might have been premature. But then Grün, too, was reading Proudhon through the lens of his own cultural biases and those particular intellectual aspirations related to them. This appears to be the fate of all ideas when they are received in a foreign context. The qualitative accuracy of how ideas are interpreted in their transnational circulation might be less important than those native prejudices which shape how they are interpreted on a case-by-case basis. The example of Proudhon’s encounter with German philosophy is no exception to this almost platitudinous rule, particularly since, contrary to what Marx claimed, how well Proudhon understood Hegel or even Marx himself (but also Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel’s progeny, whether legitimate or bastard) seems secondary to understanding why Proudhon, himself, thought what he did. Indeed, the same insight could be turned around and applied to Marx’s particular understanding of British political economy or French socialism as Marx sought to free himself from German thought and its Hegelian hangover in the 1840s (an intellectual hangover ultimately at the root of the very same Marxist hangover which has coloured how Proudhon’s pre-1848 philosophical and religious ideas have often been interpreted in Marx’s wake).80 In Proudhon’s case, the French gatekeepers of philosophical thought during the July Monarchy, the eclectics, certainly inflected how he understood the significance of German philosophy. But this understanding was also always shaped by Proudhon’s own evolving idiosyncratic preoccupations and personal obsessions, such that, if the point is to understand why Proudhon argued what he did, merely limiting oneself to questioning the accuracy of those aspects of his philosophical thought which built upon the work of other thinkers great and small could be impertinent. This might be a surprising conclusion for one to make in an essay so devoted to the larger intellectual context and those particular sources which shaped the development of Proudhon’s thought. Certainly, it does suggest the limits to too contextualist an approach when treating a particular thinker who, in many respects, regardless of whatever the relative impact German philosophy might have had on the dynamic course of his thought, remained throughout his

Proudhon’s earlier 1844–45 encounter with Feuerbachian “humanism” and developed during the early 1850s, notably that God is created progressively over time, and that immortality, to the extent to which it can be thought to exist, lies in the longevity of the species on earth and not in any extramundane afterlife (the latter claim being an obvious departure from Proudhon’s earlier beliefs from the late 1830s). During the Second Empire, Proudhon became preoccupied with the inevitable secularization of aesthetic representation accompanying human progress. For this reason, Raphael was repeatedly judged to be inferior to Rembrandt or the much later Courbet. But at the end of his life, Proudhon seems to have believed that the case for secularisation made by many of his contemporaries had been put too crudely and to the detriment of the moral fibre of society as his final reading of Feuerbach in 1864 readily attests. On this, see Castelton (2021/22). 80  For this point with regards to Marx, see Tribe (2016).

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life a lapsed French Catholic attempting to reconcile his perception of a post-­ Christian reality with the ideas which might be used to describe it.

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———. 2023. Les Palinodies révolutionnaires de Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1847–1849). In Révolutions et relectures du passé, XVIIIe-XXe siècle, ed. Sylvie Aprile and Hervé Leuwers, 301–17. Villeneuve d’Asq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion. ———. (forthcoming). An Anarchist Take on Royalty: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Assessment of Post-Revolutionary Monarchy, 1839–64. History of European Ideas. Catel, Amaury. 2019. Le Traducteur et le Démiurge, Hermann Ewerbeck, un communiste allemande à Paris (1841–1860). Nancy: Arbre bleu éditions. Chambost, Anne-Sophie. 2004. Proudhon et la norme: Pensée juridique d’un anarchiste. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. ———. 2021. Proudhon, lecteur de Krause? In Krausisme juridique et politique en Europe, ed. Oscar Ferreira, 343–364. Paris: Garnier. Lubac, Henri de. 1945. Proudhon et le Christianisme. Paris: Seuil. Ewerbeck, Hermann, ed. 1850a. Qu’est-ce que la religion, d’après la nouvelle philosophie allemande. Trans. H. Ewerbeck. Paris: Ladrange. ———, ed. 1850b. Qu’est-ce que la Bible, d’après la nouvelle philosophie allemande. Trans. H. Ewerbeck. Paris: Ladrange. Feuerbach, Louis. 1864a. Essence du christianisme. Trans. Joseph Roy. Paris/Brussels: Librairie internationale/A. Lacroix. ———. 1864b. La Religion: mort, immortalité, religion. Trans. Joseph Roy. Paris/Brussels: Librairie internationale/A. Lacroix. Grün, Karl. 1845. Die soziale Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien. Brief und Studien. Darmstadt: Carl Wilhelm Leske. ———. 2005. Ausgewählte Schriften in zwei Bänden, ed. Manuela Köppe. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Haubtmann, Pierre. 1980a. P.-J. Proudhon, genèse d’un antithéiste. n.p.: Mame. ———. 1980b. La Philosophie sociale de P.-J.  Proudhon. Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble. ———. 1981. Proudhon, Marx et la pensée allemande. Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble. ———. 1982. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, sa vie et sa pensée (1809–1849). Paris: Beauchesne. Hegel, G. W. F. 1854. La Logique subjective. Trans. H. Sloman and J. Wallon. Paris: Ladrange. Jouffroy, Théodore. 2003. La Psychologie de Théodore Jouffroy, ed. Serge Nicolas. Paris: L’Harmattan. Kelley, Donald R. 1984. Historians and the Law in Postrevolutionary France. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Leopold, Joan, ed. 1999. The Prix Volney: Its History and Significance for the Development of Linguistic Research, vol. 1b. Dordecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1975–2004. Collected Works. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Priest, Robert D. 2015. The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Proudhon, P.-J. 1839. De l’utilité de la célébration du dimanche, considérée sous les rapports de l’hygiène publique, de la morale, des relations de famille et de cité. Besançon: Bintot. ———. 1840. Qu’est-ce que la propriété? ou Recherches sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement. Paris: Brocard. ———. 1841a. Lettre à M. Blanqui professeur d’économie politique au conservatoire des arts et métiers sur la propriété. Paris: Prévot. ———. 1841b. Avertissement aux propriétaires, ou Lettre à M.  Considerant rédacteur de la Phalange, sur une Défense de la propriété. Paris: Prévot. ———. 1843. De la Création de l’ordre dans l’humanité. Besançon: Bintot. ———. 1846. Système des Contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la Misère. 2 vols. Paris: Guillaumin. ———. 1847. Philosophie der Staatsökonomie oder Nothwendigkeit des Elends. Trans. K. Grün. Darmstadt: Carl Wilhelm Leske. ———. 1853. Philosophie du progrès, Programme. Brussels: Alphonse Lebègue.

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———. 1858. De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église. 3 vols. Paris: Garnier frères. ———. 1860. Esquisses de philosophie populaire, n. 1. De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église, première étude. Brussels: Office de publicité. ———. 1865. Du Principe de l’art et de sa destination sociale. Paris: Garnier frères. ———. 1875. Correspondance. 14 vols. Paris: A. Lacroix. ———. 1896. Jésus et les origines du christianisme. Paris: G. Havard. ———. 1983. Système des Contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la Misère,  3 vols. Paris: les Imprimeurs libres. ———. 1999. Écrits linguistiques et philologiques. Besançon: Presses universitaires franc-comtoises. ———. 2004. Carnets. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel. Richard, Nathalie. 2015. La Vie de Jésus de Renan. La fabrique d’un best-seller. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Tribe, Keith. 2016. Karl Marx’s ‘Critique of Political Economy’: A Critique. In The Economy of the Word: Language, History and Economics, 171–254. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vermeren, Patrice. 1995. Victor Cousin: le jeu de la philosophie et de l’État. Paris: L’Harmattan. Willm, Joseph. 1846-1849. Histoire de la philosophie allemande, depuis Kant jusqu’à Hegel. 4 vols. Paris: Ladrange. Xifaras, Mikhaïl. 2004. Y a-t-il une théorie de la propriété chez Pierre-Joseph Proudhon? Corpus, revue de philosophie 47: 229–282.

Chapter 7

Pantheism and the Dangers of Hegelianism in Nineteenth-Century France Kirill Chepurin

“Absolute communism is the politics of pantheism” —Louis Dupré (Théophile Thoré) “Pantheism is not poison, it is indifference to poison” —Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil.

Abstract  This study rethinks the critical reception of Hegelianism in nineteenth-­ century France, arguing that this reception orbits around “pantheism” as the central political-theological threat. It is Hegel’s alleged pantheism that French authors often take to be the root cause of the other dangers that become associated with Hegelianism over the course of the century, ranging from the defence of the status quo to radical socialism to pangermanism. Moreover, the widespread fixation on the term “pantheism” as the enemy of all that is true, and as the term that defines the age, is symptomatic of the perception of the nineteenth century by its contemporaries as a period of crisis and turmoil, in which heretical energies are let loose that threaten to unground all authority and all transcendence. More speculatively, I suggest in the conclusion that it is the same energies that the term “communism” comes to capture, too. Keywords  Pantheism · System · Socialism · Communism · Disorder · Heresy In this essay, I seek to rethink the critical reception of Hegelianism in nineteenth-­ century France, arguing that this reception orbits around “pantheism” as the central political-theological threat. It is, I argue, Hegel’s alleged pantheism that French authors often take to be the root cause of the other dangers that become associated with Hegelianism over the course of the century, ranging from the defence of the status quo to radical socialism to pangermanism. Moreover, as we will see, the widespread fixation on the term “pantheism” as the enemy of all that is true, and as K. Chepurin (*) University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Chepurin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 247, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39326-6_7

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the term that defines the age, is symptomatic of the perception of the nineteenth century by its contemporaries as a period of crisis and turmoil, in which heretical energies are let loose that threaten to unground all authority and all transcendence. More speculatively, I suggest in the conclusion that it is the same energies that the term “communism” comes to capture, too.

7.1 An Age of Pantheism In his 1840 Essai sur le panthéisme dans les sociétés modernes, Catholic theologian Henri Maret observes what he calls the “double character” of the post-­Enlightenment age (1840: v). Religious sentiment and enthusiasm for religion have returned; yet, this has not led to what Maret views as the desirable outcome: the revival of Christian orthodoxy. Instead, the mind of the age finds itself in doubt, confusion, and crisis. “The mind oscillates between truth and error, good and evil”, Maret notes, “[and] its ideas are confused” (1840: v-vi). This crisis extends beyond the merely religious or political: it is “a general disease” that leads to a “weakened reason” and “enervated will” (1840: vi), to “our confused science” and “a prodigious confusion, a veritable chaos” in the entire “intellectual world” (1840: x–xi). It is, so to speak, a general disordering: “the disorder that reigns in thought” but also in the “impotence and division” within society at large (1840: xi, vii). The mind dwells in indifference and indecision: a purely negative state. “We no longer dare to affirm” (1840: v).1 The whole of society becomes, in Maret’s account, a disjointed association of spectres: a ghost-like existence without vigour, individuality, or community (virtues which are identified by Maret in their true form with Christianity as the positive religion). “Because we carry death in our womb”, his indictment goes, “we want Christianity likewise to die and be extinguished”. This results in an unhealthy divide erected between present and future, in which the obsession with utopian visions of a hoped-for future is the obverse of a hopeless present and the diseased mind that inhabits it—a sign of all-encompassing alienation. “It is”, Maret notes, “in this future that they place light, peace, freedom, happiness”, while “the present stays disenchanted, empty, and cold”, given over to egoism, “practical materialism”, “the slavery of the senses”, and mere “vegetative life” (1840: vi). Since this present cannot in truth lead to a blissful future, such utopian futurity is diagnosed by Maret as but a hallucination, a phantasm of a sickened mind, a spectral reflection of a diseased and incapacitated age: Just as, under the sway of feverish hallucinations, the patient becomes convinced that he is regaining health, and that he has his entire life in front of him, so, too, enfeebled minds feed on chimeras, soaring towards an unknown future... (Maret 1840: vi)

Disorder is at once pathologized and absolutized by Maret to such an extent that it grows truly cosmic, merging with the chaos preceding creation or, rather, the chaos on which the divine order of creation is imposed, and which constantly threatens to  See also volume 1, §3.4.4.

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undo this order. “If celestial bodies ceased to obey the laws of gravitation”, Maret analogizes, “the world would soon revert into chaos”—and this is precisely what has happened in “the moral world” whose “living law” is the transcendent God (1840: vii). It is thus, to continue Maret’s analogy, the world itself, as a lawful and coherent whole, that is undone by chaos and the absence of law. Feverish investment in the future reveals the groundlessness and worldlessness of the present. The removal of the order of transcendence, within whose bounds the ante-worldly chaos is enclosed and suppressed, lets this chaos loose in a kind of de-creation. What Maret seeks is a Christian theodicy of creation; yet what he finds is a reality in which disorders of all kinds run free, and in which no world can be “divinely” re-­ instated. It is the threat of this disorder that lies at the root of Maret’s anxiety about, and critique of, the post-Enlightenment condition. Maret’s name for this threat is pantheism. Pantheism constitutes “the unity of a century that has none”: a “false unity that rises up against the divine and catholic unity” (Maret 1840: ix). For Maret, it is the spectre of pantheism that is haunting Europe in 1840. At this point, Maret himself starts to hallucinate pantheism everywhere, so that “pantheism” becomes synonymous with the hallucinatory condition of the age. All contemporary theories, he claims, are pantheistic at their core, and it is only from this vantage of an all-pervasive pantheism that “all the intellectual, moral, and literary phenomena of the century become comprehensible” (1840: ix; emphasis added). Pantheism reigns equally, if in different forms, in France, Britain, and Germany—and Romantic poetry in particular draws Maret’s ire for its pantheistic nature (1840: xi).2 “Pantheism thus explains the age”; it is, Maret adds with a reference to fellow Catholic thinker Louis Bautain, “the true heresy of the nineteenth century” (1840: xii-xiii). To say that God is all and all is God amounts to saying there is no God; and in the resulting emptiness, the finite subject takes God’s place: the human becomes the demiurge. “Wasn’t the human the one who created the past? Isn’t it up to the human to establish the future?”, Maret asks rhetorically, criticizing this demiurgic conception of humanness (1840: vi). Pantheism is the “science and wisdom” of a human being stripped of what is divine, and reduced to passions and egoism (1840: viii). It coincides, one might say, with the perverse “wisdom” of original sin. As such, however, pantheism is more than a heresy. It is the embodiment of the transhistorical spirit of uprising against transcendent truth. As Maret dramatizes it, “Christianity, at its birth, saw pantheism rise up against it... Most of the great heresies of the first centuries were, to a lesser or greater extent, inspired by pantheistic doctrines”—and “even today”, he continues, “this old enemy raises its head; it once again declares war on Christianity” (1840: xii; cf. 174 on the persistence of pantheistic heresy in the Middle Ages). Among philosophers of the present age, Hegel is  Romantic philosophy, too. Maret’s question—“Is [pantheism] not the whole substance of the philosophies that have been taught in Europe for the past 50 years?” (1840: vi)—places the origin of contemporary pantheism in the 1790s, this quintessential Romantic decade. This is also the decade in which post-Kantian German Idealism begins, so that Maret’s question is directed likewise at Fichte, Schelling, and, of course, Hegel. 2

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singled out by Maret as one “of whose pantheism there is no doubt” (1840: 20). Hegel’s system is a system of all-unity and all-identity (1840: 163) that seeks to “embrace the universe” with logical formulas (1840: 170), so that his (as well as Schelling’s) invocation of the divine strips God of all personality and all “quality” (1840: 193).3 (Note the joint critique of “pantheism” and “system”—as we will see, a central motif of nineteenth-century French Hegel reception.) The spirit of pantheism at work in Hegel is, however, for Maret the same as the spirit of the earliest heretical uprising against Christianity, one that bears the name “Gnosticism”. “The logical emanations of Hegel”, he asserts, “bear striking resemblance to the emanations of the Gnostics”. In both Hegelianism and Gnosticism, “the absolute produces and absorbs everything; it is the essence of all things” (1840: 165). For Hegelianism to succeed, Maret maintains, would spell the end of Christianity. However, the latter has God and truth on its side, and just as the Gnostic heresy was overcome by Christianity, so too Hegelianism will be defeated (1840: 429). It is as though whenever Christianity is in crisis, its enemy—the dominant heresy of whatever age— must bear the name “pantheism”. If heresy is one attribute of pantheism, indifference is another. According to Maret, by collapsing transcendence, pantheism collapses any higher criterion for distinguishing truth from error. On the one hand, this leads to the oscillation and doubt that permeate the contemporary mind: indifference as the impossibility to affirm or to decide. On the other, this means that, if all things are divine, and thus whatever happens is justified as divine, then the present—the way things are—is the way things should be. Whatever form of spirit presently dominates is “highest” and “divine”: such is Maret’s critique of the Hegelian theodicy of history. As Maret puts it, for pantheism, “all forms [that the human spirit takes] are legitimate—all your errors are holy” (1840: xii). Unlike the Christian theodicy of divine order, pantheistic theodicy is a theodicy of indifference qua all-legitimation, in which “the past is amnestied” (and original sin, too) simply because it leads to the present in the course of “material progress” (1840: xiii).4 Where there is no transcendent truth, there is only “anarchy”; and where the present is automatically legitimated, history is decided by “force” (1840: 256). For Maret, the example of Hegel demonstrates that pantheistic rationalism sans transcendence leads to nihilism. “Anarchy”, “despotism”, and a materialism of progress are equally products of pantheism. “Industry, machines”, Maret proclaims, “are for the pantheist the true agents of civilization” (1840: xiii).5 Thereby, a line is drawn, as it were, from Hegel to Krupp. Where

 On this point, Maret may be reductively reading both Schelling and Hegel through the lens of Schelling’s identity-philosophical doctrine of “potencies” as purely quantitative, non-essential or formal relationalities. 4  It is significant in this regard that German Idealism from Kant to Schelling and Hegel justifies the Fall of Adam as necessary for launching the progress of autonomous human rationality and knowledge—a point Maret probably has in mind here, even as he reduces it to a materialistic vision of progress. 5  Maret’s critique is here inflected by Saint-Simonianism, this (in Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve’s 1831 formulation) “Gnosticism weighted with industrialism” (quoted in de Lubac 1948: 82). 3

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humans are disoriented ghosts that possess no vigour and no truth, and carry death in their womb, it is the machine that reigns. A desolate, hallucinatory landscape of the present is where demonic spectres of original sin take brutal, solid, material shapes, as though to better withstand what is divine and true. Industrial modernity thus appears in Maret as the true hell—one created by the omnicidal imposition of indifference that he identifies with pantheism, and with the name “Hegel”.

7.2 Hegelianism’s Dangers: A Nineteenth-Century French Trajectory In Maret’s striking chain of associations that leads, in his critique of Hegel, from pantheism via Gnosticism to materialism, atheism, nihilism, despotism, industrialism, and rationalism, one can see that the so-called “pantheism debate”, launched by Friedrich Jacobi in the 1780s, did not remain a purely German affair. Especially as the influence of German philosophy continued to increase in the nineteenth century, and as the German-French intellectual exchange grew more volatile vis-à-vis traditional authorities, i.e., both church and state, an indictment of German rationalist philosophy as pantheism and atheism—Jacobian in spirit if not necessarily influenced by Jacobi directly—grew increasingly common among French thinkers and scholars, merging with local debate around Saint-Simonianism and Fourierism, and with the local querelle du panthéisme of the 1840s.6 Unsurprisingly, the divisive name of Hegel often stood at the centre of these polemics. For Jacobi in his original argument, the immanence of reason, once it becomes all-encompassing and takes the place of God, forecloses transcendence and leads necessarily to atheism and fatalism—and, in the nineteenth century, Hegel would emerge as a particularly apt target for this kind of critique. As Maret puts it in a highly Jacobian manner, “rationalism has always gravitated toward pantheism” in its desire to rationally “embrace everything, explain everything”, leaving no room for God or for true freedom and unity, and ending up being only “atheism in disguise” (1840: viii-x), with Hegel but the contemporary culmination of this tendency. As Félicité Robert de Lamennais expresses it in his letter from 1830, Hegel is “the Antichrist’s Plato” (quoted in D’Hondt 1972: 165): an impressive characterization demonstrating, if negatively, the extent of Hegel’s influence and philosophical reputation. In the rest of this chapter, I want to provide an overview of the perceived dangers of Hegelianism in nineteenth-century France as growing out of the philosophical and political-theological question of pantheism. Placed in this broader context, Maret’s critique appears, despite its seeming strangeness, as relatively

 For an account of this querelle, see Ragghianti (2001). It should be noted that the French debate of the 1840s was already inflected by the question of German Idealism’s influence on French philosophers such as, most centrally, Victor Cousin. 6

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run-of-the-­mill, and as shared to various extent by thinkers outside the conservative Catholic circles. In this way, I seek to foreground and speculatively unravel a still-­ underappreciated dimension in the genealogy of the French Hegel reception.7 I call the question of pantheism “political-theological” because, over the course of the nineteenth century, it concerned the relation of immanence and transcendence (a binary that formed precisely in the wake of Kant, Jacobi, and German Idealism8) and, as we have seen in Maret, the problem of legitimating or delegitimating the status quo in a way that cut across the (often unclear) boundary between “religious” and “secular” authority.9 In a manner that reflected the highly charged nineteenth-century political and intellectual landscape, and the conflict-laden relation between France and Germany, Hegelianism-qua-pantheism also tended to acquire remarkably different associations—from conservatism to socialism to Bismarckism—and often reflected the inner differentiation of Hegelianism into Left and Right. As a result of this inner differentiation, Hegelianism could be easily presented as leading “naturally” to socialism or to the ideology of the Prussian state. However, what is significant for my argument in this essay is that both of these Hegelian camps shared, according to their critics, the underlying pantheistic impulse inherent in Hegel’s own thought— and it is this impulse that appeared as a (spiritual and political) threat. And although Hegel’s later French reception will not concern me here, I would suggest that the connotations that Hegel’s name started to carry in France over the course of the pantheism polemics in the nineteenth century played a key part in the formation of the standard French image of Hegel which survived into the twentieth century. Methodologically, it is crucial to distinguish Hegel’s actual texts, concepts, and arguments from the names “Hegel” and “Hegelianism” as they were used in France in the nineteenth century. In Jacques D’Hondt’s turn of phrase, “Hegel’s thought only entered France as though by contraband” (1972: 164). Hegel’s texts were only very gradually becoming accessible to the French audience, and I will not concern myself here, for instance, with the history of Augusto Vera’s translations of Hegel or their accuracy.10 Arguably, it is precisely the unfamiliarity, and then distorted or partial familiarity of French authors with Hegel’s writings that was, as it often happens, a prerequisite for the uses of the names “Hegel” and “Hegelianism” in nineteenth-­century France. At the centre of such usage, I argue, stood the nexus of pantheism and system—a nexus that was already political(−theological) and partisan, even in the more academic or scholarly reception.  For an earlier discussion of this dimension, see D’Hondt (1972). See also volume 1, §3.4.4, which further complements and contextualises the analysis of the present essay. 8   For a brief overview of the formation of the immanence/transcendence binary, see Zachhuber (2017). 9  Significantly, the binary of “religious” and “secular”, to which we are no less (often uncritically) accustomed as to that of “transcendence” and “immanence”, was still forming in the nineteenth century. Hence, it is not my goal to restage these binaries; rather, what may be glimpsed from the readings I offer is how the question of pantheism cuts across such binary logics. 10  On Vera and his Hegelianism, see Andrea Bellantone’s essay in this volume; on nineteenth-century French Hegel translations including Vera’s, see volume 1, §4.2. 7

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Although I focus here solely on French authors, it is important to keep in mind that these authors were influenced by the German debate, including German critiques of Hegel.11 For my purposes here, what matters the most is not whether the French image of Hegel was original but the very fact that it was French—which could not but put it in a different political and religious context. One can see, for example, how the question of Catholicism comes to the fore in some of these critiques, as well as the question of the French national-philosophical identity, or of how this identity could, perhaps, complement the German philosophical character so that the two might be brought together into a more universal philosophical unity (as may be seen in the Cousin-Schelling connection or in the work of Joseph Willm). This kind of unity, too, could not help but be political—and in fact, the idea of such a unity could itself, for instance in Louis Blanc’s 1843 article on the project of an intellectual alliance between France and Germany, be turned against Hegel and German Idealism, with their “atheism” and “pantheism”, from a distinctly Catholic French context (see Blanc 1843).12 As the example of Maret demonstrates, by 1843, Blanc’s accusations of “atheism” and “pantheism” against Hegel were already commonplace in the French context. In fact, to reiterate, I would identify pantheism as the conceptual focal point of all Hegelian dangers for nineteenth-century French authors—so that, first, the accusation of pantheism was flexible enough to allow for both Right and Left Hegelianism, both Hegel the conservative and Hegel the radical, depending on the political moment and the political inclinations of the polemicist in question; and so that, second, the more narrowly philosophical dangers of Hegelianism remained inextricably bound up with the political-religious context. As Maret formulated it, pantheism is the “error which sums up and absorbs all the others” (1840: 174); and as we will see, he was not alone in thinking that. In all the critiques, pantheism was a core element, and other ills—be it atheism, nihilism, scepticism, fatalism, conservatism, communism, despotism, or Bismarckism—tended to constitute, to a lesser or greater extent, pantheism’s various offshoots and inflections. It is possible to trace the spread of the above amalgam back at least to the late 1820s and early 1830s. Already then, Hegel was associated in France with pantheism and system, understood politically to imply conservatism and a philosophical justification of the Prussian state or monarchy as such. In the 1830s, a more moderate and progressive reading of Hegel appeared (Willm is an important name here). As Hegelianism in Germany bifurcated into Left and Right and the Left made themselves strongly visible, this doubling was reflected in French reception, too, but it

 The influence went in the opposite direction, too. As D’Hondt (1972: 178) points out, Marx’s 1843 comment on Hegel’s “logical, pantheistic mysticism” from Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie was informed by the French socialist discourse at the time. See Marx (1970: 7). Relatedly, D’Hondt (1972: 186–7) notes a broad Saint-Simonian influence on the pre-1848 German revolutionary mindset. On this influence, see further Breckman (1999: 151–76). 12  See volume 1, §3.4.2. 11

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was the politically extreme consequences of Hegelianism and the spread of radical Hegelian ideas that scared critics the most.13 It should be noted that pre-1848 socialism in France was associated with the names of Henri Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier—so that the term socialistes appeared in the 1830s as a label for Saint-Simonians and Fourierians, or those broadly associated with their political-religious radicalism, and became widespread in the 1840s (Strube 2016: 42). This pre-1848 socialism—as one can see in the case of Pierre Leroux, who is often credited as the inventor of the term “socialism”, using this term in his writings starting from 1826 (D’Hondt 1972: 173)—does not fit neatly the Left versus Right binary as it is typically construed. In particular, the simultaneous emphasis that one finds in pre-1848 socialism on religion and science or community and progress is ambivalent vis-à-vis the legacy of the French Revolution, perceived to have led to the triumph of bourgeois individualism and egoism. Pre-1848 socialism confounds the later secularist historiographies of the Left which tend to regard the religious dimension of early socialism as archaic or absurd (cf. Strube 2016: 41–2). It is on this pre-existing French socialism that the reception of Hegelianism was imposed. As D’Hondt points out, “the resemblances [between Saint-Simonianism and Hegelianism] were obvious in the eyes of the contemporaries”, even if opinions differed as to the extent of their respective pantheism (1972: 179). Adolphe Lèbre suggested in 1838 that France and Germany had developed pantheistic doctrines simultaneously: “In France, after the eighteenth century, came Saint-Simon and Fourier; in Germany, after Kant and Fichte, came Schelling and Hegel. Everywhere pantheism is presently invading thought” (1838: 325).14 Leroux, on his part, blamed Hegelian pantheism for leading the current generation of French Saint-Simonians, and most centrally Prosper Enfantin, astray (1842b: 332). However, distinctions between various degrees and kinds of pantheism were often too subtle for critics.15 As Maret summed this up from the perspective of the Catholic camp, “the doctrines of Spinoza, Hegel, Saint-Simonians, and eclectics seem to us fundamentally identical; the differences lie only in form and expression” (1840: 220; cf. Lèbre 1838: 297). It is in this context that Théophile Thoré, writing under the pseudonym Louis

 For example, Edgar Quinet’s important 1838 review of David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu associates the entire latest development of German philosophy (in “Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher”), culminating in Strauss’s book, with a resurgence of Spinozism and therefore pantheism. See Quinet 1838: 590. 14  Moses Hess likewise speaks in his 1837 Die heilige Geschichte der Menschheit of the simultaneous development of pantheistic doctrines in Germany and France: “[After Babeuf and Fichte] we see in Germany the emergence of Schelling and Hegel and in France of Saint-Simon and Fourier. The principle of the new age—the absolute unity of all life—which manifested itself in Germany as an abstract idealism and in France as an abstract communism begins now to develop from within itself its own concrete content” (2004: 102; note also the pantheism–communism connection). 15  For more details of Leroux’s critique of Enfantin as influenced by Hegel, and on the French “mediators” of this influence, see D’Hondt (1972: 180–4). 13

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Dupré, and outside the narrow trajectory of German Idealism reception, put forward his 1841 formula: “absolute communism is the politics of pantheism” (1841: 338).16 In this way, via Hegel, French and German radicalism converged, even while (as Leroux’s case attests) remaining in tension. Hegelian radicalism was likewise perceived as a consequence of pantheism, so that not only Maret but other French critics, too, focused on explicating how pantheism and system led to nihilism, scepticism, atheism, and generally to ruin—or, in a more nuanced way, as in Leroux, how Hegelian pantheism could lead to either radicalism or a complacency towards the status quo. Significantly, however, it is pantheism that could lead to both, or at least what Leroux considered to be the false kind of pantheism. By the 1850s, an association between Hegelianism and a vaguely defined revolutionary socialism was firmly in place, leading popular writer Valérie de Gasparin in 1858 to sketch the portrait of “a Hegelian” as someone who, as Eric Puisais summarizes it, is “a dreamer, melancholic, sometimes a bit utopian, certainly a pantheist, an agnostic no doubt, a naive but convinced revolutionary, burning to bring about, arms in hand, an ideal of fraternity and equality” (Puisais 2005: 20). The spectre of pantheism haunts Gasparin’s portrait, too, as her Hegelian protagonist proclaims: I am God! My thought is a ray of the divine thought, my will is a fragment of the supreme will; the great heart that throbs up above beats in me, in you, in everyone. ... God! God is the world! God vibrates in the plant, in the butterfly, in the fire of the sun, in these raindrops! (de Gasparin 1858: 125)17

At the same time, after 1848, things became problematic for Hegelianism because of the triumph of a liberal point of view that identified socialism, revolution, and despotism.18 The pantheism connection persisted, too, as in Alphonse Gratry’s religious critique that continued to exploit the identification of Hegelianism with pantheism and atheism. This led to Hegel’s name becoming outright scandalous in the 1850–60s; in 1851, Étienne Vacherot even had to leave his academic position at the École Normale Supérieure on the suspicion of Hegelianism.19 Then, around the time of the Franco-Prussian War, the Prussian angle returned in full force—made possible precisely by the pantheism-fatalism-despotism angle—so that the war, on the one hand, and the fall of the Paris Commune, on the other, marked also the fall of French Hegelianism as an “engaged” political-philosophical standpoint. Through its association with everything pan- and everything despotic and hostile to freedom, the pantheism connection morphed into the identification of Hegelianism with Bismarckism and pangermanism—and such was the final political-theological mutation of the dangers of Hegelianism in nineteenth-century France. In 1871,

 I will return to this formula in the concluding section. I owe the identification of “Louis Dupré” as Thoré’s pseudonym to Strube (2016: 92). 17  Following this, de Gasparin’s protagonist speaks of a “rejuvenated humanity” and a new “golden age” in a manner that is reminiscent at once of the German Romantic and the French socialistutopian tradition (1858: 125). 18  For the complex nexus of ideas behind this identification, see Losurdo (2004). 19  See D’Hondt (2007: 22) as well as volume 1, §3.6. 16

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Elme-Marie Caro put forward his famous theory of “two Germanies”, that of “Kant, Goethe and Beethoven” versus that of “Friedrich II, Bismarck and Hegel”,20 whereas Émile Beaussire in his “The Anniversary of Hegel” spoke of Bismarck as a practical Hegelian.21 Following that, the Hegelianism-pangermanism connection remained influential and persisted well into the twentieth century.22 Over the course of this entire trajectory, Hegel remained the ultimate thinker of the system and the most perfect embodiment of panlogicism-qua-pantheism. In the end, all the dimensions of the pantheism-Hegelianism nexus—the religious (pantheism-atheism-fatalism), the political (socialism-despotism-Bismarckism), and the philosophical (panlogicism and system-above-all)—were bequeathed to the twentieth century as a peculiar amalgam that, arguably, continued to underlie the standard French image of Hegel.

7.3 Hegel the Spinozist: Schweighäuser to Lerminier Interestingly, the first mention of Hegel in a French article—in 1804 (by Johann Gottfried Schweighäuser on the contemporary state of philosophy in Germany)— identifies him as a disciple of Schelling, who is in turn identified as a follower of Spinoza, a thinker whose philosophy “almost approaches atheism”.23 Schweighäuser does not explicitly voice the pantheism-atheism connection. Rather, he tries to steer his account more towards “Catholic mysticism”, calling Schellingian idealism a strange “sectarian” religious-philosophical movement in which extremes meet, and which worships simultaneously Spinoza, Dante, and the Virgin Mary, all within one philosophical system. And while not using the term “pantheism” or directly accusing German Idealism of atheism, the article positively mentions Jacobi’s critique of idealism (Schweighäuser 1804: 203). Explicit political judgment may be absent in Schweighäuser’s text, but in the post-Enlightenment context where the religious and the political at once clashed and were entangled, the near-accusation of atheism and sectarian heresy  carried political overtones—and one did not have to wait long until the religious critique became explicitly political. In particular, the political forcefully asserted itself during the so-called “Cousin affair” in the 1820s, when Victor Cousin was arrested in Dresden on suspicion of being a political subversive and handed over to Prussia, with Hegel having to intervene on his behalf to have Cousin released from prison.24 This episode resonates in a characteristic way in the later French reception of Hegel.

 See Caro (1872), collecting his earlier articles in Revue des deux mondes.  See Beaussire (1871: 153): “...the plan that Hegel sketched and Bismarck took upon himself to execute”. 22  One may recall here the names of Edmond Vermeil, Victor Delbos, and Charles Andler. 23  See also volume 1, §3.1.1. 24  For an account of this episode, see Pinkard (2000: 524–7). Cf. D’Hondt (1972: 166). 20 21

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Thus, even though it was Cousin’s perceived radicalism that got him into trouble in Germany, in an ironic twist, in Eugène Lerminier’s 1832 Lettres philosophiques adressées à un Berlinois, it is the influence of Hegel, and of Hegelianism more broadly (of such Hegelians as Eduard Gans and Karl Ludwig Michelet), that is retroactively identified as what enabled Cousin’s conservative politics. His daily conversations with members of the Hegelian school, Lerminier claims, infused Cousin with “an eclectic, optimistic realism that boasted to be capable of explaining everything, of understanding everything, and of accepting everything”—i.e., of justifying the status quo and the way of the world. From this day onwards, “Cousin was no longer an oppositional and revolutionary philosopher”, but someone in agreement with the powers that be (Lerminier 1832: 82–3). For our purposes here, it does not matter whether Lerminier is correct, or whether Cousin’s conservative turn coincides rather with his turn away from Hegel (as D’Hondt and Puisais suggest in contrast). What matters is that Lerminier is able to make the above move because, for him (a young French philosopher of progressive sympathies), Hegel is first and foremost an apologist of the Prussian state, and someone in good enough standing with that state to get Cousin out of prison. Lerminier was not alone in this opinion. In fact, in French journal articles from this period, Hegel was considered to be utterly, even metaphysically conservative— based, as has often been the case, on the famous Doppelsatz from the Preface to the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, which identifies the actual and the rational. For an example, one may turn to a review, signed “B.”, of a German-language book on Hegel, which appeared in Nouvelle revue germanique in 1829. This review associates Hegel and Schelling with two different varieties of pantheism, and explicitly presents Hegel as the official philosopher of the Prussian state. Another article in the Nouvelle revue germanique from the same year likewise connects Hegel’s thought to political reaction, “absolute political stability”, and “absolute monarchy” (“W.” 1829).25 To adduce one more example, Edgar Quinet’s 1831 article in Revue des deux mondes, entitled “De la Révolution et de la philosophie”, associates Schelling with pantheism and, politically, with the Napoleonic Empire based on the “natural” and “Eastern” principle of force, and Hegel with the Holy Alliance (of the monarchist Russia, Austria and Prussia) (see Quinet 1831). While there is, in Quinet’s text, no direct identification of Hegel with pantheism, pantheism nevertheless forms the background against which German Idealist (political and metaphysical) conservatism appears in Quinet, and in other French writings from this time. Reading such articles, one gets a distinct picture of Hegel as a conservative pantheist, or as someone whose system identifies what is with what is rational and divine. In his own 1831 Philosophie du droit, Lerminier likewise calls Hegel’s doctrine pantheistic and powerfully draws the Hegel-Spinoza connection. In this work, Lerminier devotes a separate chapter to Schelling and Hegel. Significantly, he seeks to provide an overview of Hegel’s system precisely as a comprehensive system, and  “W.” here stands for Willm, who edited Nouvelle revue germanique starting from 1829 and until at least 1834. On the journal’s history, including in the context of Hegel reception, see Rowe (2000). On the attribution of this article to Willm, see Rowe (2000: 244). 25

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as a pantheism of reason. I will quote from Lerminier’s text at length, since his formulations are characteristic of the way Hegel was perceived at the time: What is the consequence of this idealist identity of abstract reason which serves to constitute God, the world, and history? Just as Spinoza introduced divine necessity everywhere, so Hegel introduces reason everywhere; he cloaks all facts in philosophical legitimacy; he elevates history to the sacrality of a pure manifestation of the absolute; and he advances the following axiom: All that is rational is real, and all that is real is rational. (Lerminier 1831: 215–6)

It is, Lerminier maintains, the very ambition to rationally or logically re-mediate the entirety of reality—the dialectical method itself—that leads to the iron grip of necessity, and to a justification of the way the world is, which leaves no room for freedom or futurity: It is time to characterize this dialectic without limits and without shores, which encloses within its vast monotony God, man, the world, societies and history, which departs from abstraction to arrive at abstraction, departs from a dialectical point to return to a dialectical point, departs from the one to come back to the one, and finds the identity of substance [to consist] in the identity of the abstraction and the formula. Undoubtedly, the thought of the German philosopher is powerful... He displays a rare skilfulness in the mechanism of thinking. But where are the positive discoveries for social philosophy? ... Where is the liberal [liberal] spirit which always ought to animate the thinker, the spirit which frees one from the present and leads one towards the future? And how could he have a free spirit [l’esprit libre] in the first place, this slave of logic? (Lerminier 1831: 214–5)

Lerminier’s invocation of “free spirit” here is ironic, denying to Hegel precisely the freier Geist that he proclaimed to be the highest and explicated throughout his system. For Lerminier, dialectics cannot explain or encompass freedom. Dialectics is expansionist, and its expansion is mechanical in character. It cannot break through to newness and futurity, it can only reproduce the same (“the present”), from which Hegel cannot free himself—“swept away as he is in this dialectical turmoil, in these swirling formulas that envelop and imprison him” (Lerminier  1831: 215). As a result, Hegel ends up endorsing a “scholastic pantheism” (1831: 323). It is crucial to observe the political dimension of Lerminier’s critique: the emphasis on liberty as that which Hegel cannot think, and of which his method strips society and history. Moreover, this political dimension immediately turns political-­ theological, as Lerminier brings together pantheism, pan-systematicity, political illiberalism qua justification of the status quo, and the absence of true Christian transcendence in Hegel, who, according to Lerminier, reduces Christianity to a mere schema: Thus, with such a philosophy, even though one may logically recognize Christianity as an advancement and as the final expression of humanity, I maintain that one fails to understand its spirit, that one does not sense this inexhaustible spirituality which is so free and so innovative, and which is always ready to aid humankind and emancipate it... With such a philosophy, one constantly absolves power, amnesties despotism, tolerates the evils of humanity, [including] human ignorance and human suffering; with such a philosophy, one fails to understand revolutions, even finding metaphysical reasons to condemn them, even going so far as to blame the efforts that a people undertakes within the confines of the law to reform its constitution. (Lerminier 1831: 216)

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What Lerminier takes issue with, politically-theologically, is that Hegel’s philosophy is a theodicy. It “amnesties” the evil and negativity of history instead of refusing the oppressive present via an opening onto a genuinely novel future: a vision of futurity that Lerminier identifies with Christianity understood in the spirit of emancipation and humaneness. For Lerminier, Hegel’s philosophy takes the side of despotism—of the oppressors and not the oppressed—and this hinges on his reading of Hegelian Aufhebung as mere repeated affirmation of “the one”, a return to and of the same, which makes Lerminier conclude that, metaphysically, Hegel cannot but absolutize the world as it is. “The detours are complicated”, Lerminier writes, “but the result is known” (1831: 209). Hegel’s logic is an articulation of pantheism (he is “the logician of modern pantheism”; Lerminier 1831: 105), and therefore it can only justify what exists. Things are philosophically legitimated simply by virtue of being the way they are: such is the message of Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel emerges from Lerminier’s critique as a thinker of repetition and (political-theological) tautology.26 In all of the above, Lerminier builds on the general identification of Hegel’s thought with systematicity, pantheism, and conservatism that had already been formed in France by that time—but he is the first to elaborate it in such detail.

7.4 Hegel, the Thinker of Freedom: Willm In the 1830s, a more “liberal” or “progressive”—although rather moderate and academic—French reading of Hegel appears in Joseph Willm. Willm emphasizes the role of the French Revolution and the motif of universality in Hegel’s philosophy of history, which he reads politically as pointing to an intellectual union of French and German thought (a motif which, as mentioned, Louis Blanc in his verdict on atheism and pantheism would later turn against Hegel). Willm puts forward this idea in the 1835 introduction to his translation of Schelling’s judgment on Cousin—an introduction entitled “Essai sur la nationalité des philosophies”, in which Willm advances the idea of a more universal philosophy that would reconcile individual national traditions (see Willm 1835). In contrast to Lerminier, Willm turns to Hegel’s philosophy of history not as regressive, but as claiming that spirit in its progressive education must overcome national differences. Thus, for Willm too, Hegel’s philosophy has clear political significance—and it is against the backdrop of this conviction that, I would suggest, we should read Willm’s more scholarly works: his 1836 Essai sur la philosophie de Hegel and his 1846–7 Histoire de la philosophie allemande depuis Kant jusqu’à Hegel. In the Essai, Willm affirms his goal of promoting the advancement of a “universal philosophy” (1836: 4), and so, again, the project of an intellectual alliance between France and Germany. In an academic tone, he reiterates the importance of Hegel to this project, emphasizing the progressive and even revolutionary nature of Hegelian

26

 See also volume 1, §3.3.1.

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philosophy.27 This reveals the political stakes of this first scholarly monograph on Hegel in French, and of the very scholarly objectivity that Willm professes—an objectivity that, in the context of the time, itself carries a polemical tone, pushing against the all-too-quick identification of Hegelianism with a defence of the status quo. Although Willm was aware of the question of pantheism, he cautiously avoids discussing this question in the 1836 Essai.28 However, in the 1846–7 Histoire, he allows himself to offer some thoughts on pantheism. Willm may be taken to mount here a defence of pantheism as progressive thought of freedom, at least as far as German Idealist pantheism is concerned. First, he partially defends Schelling’s pantheism by distinguishing it from what he calls materialistic-atheistic pantheism— which, in tune with the prevalent French attitude of the time, he condemns. This by itself is a polemical and rhetorical strategy: to condemn the “bad” kind of pantheism so as then to claim that Schelling and Hegel’s pantheism is of a different kind. Second, after characterizing Hegel’s philosophy of history as concerned with the progress of freedom, Willm proceeds to discuss the relationship between (Hegelian) pantheism and freedom. Willm notes that “it has not been demonstrated that there is a necessary causal relationship between pantheistic idealism and universal freedom” (1847: 448). However, he also firmly—and, I believe, polemically—establishes this relationship in one direction: from pantheism to freedom. “Doubtless”, he continues, “a mind [esprit] that possesses the consciousness of itself as the absolute must bear any yoke with impatience and recognize the sovereignty of all”. An idealist pantheist cannot but be a defender of universal freedom, even though a defender of freedom does not have to be a pantheist. “In order to arrive at freedom”, Willm writes, “to desire it for oneself and for others, it is not necessary to be a pantheist—it is enough to recognize the dignity of the human being in general and to be animated by the love of justice and humanity” (1847: 448–9). It is “under the rule of sensualism”, in the tradition of “Locke and Condillac”, that “the regime of freedom was born”, and not in German Idealism. Furthermore, Willm notes, it is wrong for Hegel to claim that his philosophy alone attains to true universal freedom, given that this freedom was not only practically affirmed already by the French Revolution but, as Willm’s appeal to Locke shows, precedes the Revolution theoretically, too. “Madame de Staël”, he emphasizes, “said that it was freedom that was old, and not servitude”— i.e., the Revolution enacted the ideal of freedom that had existed earlier. “Thus”, Willm concludes, “the final period of the universal spirit’s work in the history of humankind does not coincide with that of the philosophical development reaching its perfection in the systems of Schelling and Hegel” (1847: 448).

 For an overview of Willm’s reading of Hegel in the Essai, see Rowe (2000: 247–54). See also volume 1, §3.2.5. 28  At the same time, Willm points out in passing that it is easy to “see how this [i.e., Hegel’s] doctrine could be accused of pantheism, despite the formal protestations of its author” (Willm 1836: 70). Even here, then, Willm’s discussion of Hegel is informed by the polemic around pantheism. 27

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It is clear that for Willm the stakes of Hegelian pantheism are not merely academic, and he places Hegel on the side of freedom even as he denies to Hegel the role of the sole representative of the true idea of freedom, affirming a more pan-­ European trajectory of modern freedom that is as British and French as it is German. Willm wants, moreover, to move at least somewhat beyond the Eurocentrism of Hegel’s philosophy, and of the movement of spirit towards freedom in global history as Hegel depicts it. Willm presents his critiques as a series of rhetorical questions serving to expose the limits of Hegel’s abstract historicism: Why does civilization begin from the Orient and not the Occident? Why does spirit, instead of continuing its development in the Orient, set out on a voyage to Europe, and why does its evolution terminate solely here? ... If history is the necessary development of the universal spirit in time, if reason dominates everything and invariably tends towards a predetermined end, why does not the same progress involve humanity in its entirety, why do so many nations remain outside this movement? Why does Europe alone participate in this heritage while the peoples of the Orient remain stationary? (Willm 1847: 447)

Hegel applies too rigidly “the general principles of his philosophy to the course of history”, and because of this rigidity his account of the trajectory of spirit’s global movement does not even make sense on its own terms: he chooses simply “to disregard certain facts”, as well as “all the variety of morals and institutions... and movements both progressive and retrograde that really constitute history” (Willm 1847: 447). Finally—and on these two points Willm may be taken to agree with Lerminier— Hegel seems all too happy to theodically sacrifice actual human beings to the abstract movement of the absolute spirit. Furthermore, as someone who is not attuned to the real dynamics of history, he seems incapable of thinking futurity in a way that would not be empty: Will humankind have existed on Earth only for the universal spirit to give to itself, by means of so many generations and sacrifices, the consciousness of itself? And once it has been realized entirely, what will be the outcome of this drama, this immense epic? Once freedom has triumphed everywhere, and the golden age of which poets dreamt in the past has been realized in the future, what will become of humankind? To all these questions, the system of absolute science has no answer. (Willm 1847: 447)

In the end, two things matter the most about Willm’s account and make it ambivalent vis-à-vis the “mainstream” trajectory of French Hegel reception. First, Willm undertakes a defence of pantheism with regard to the problem of freedom—a defence that, nevertheless, in the end proves less influential than the dominant political-­religious critique of pantheism. Second, one may observe in Willm’s account of Hegel the nexus which serves ultimately to reinforce the emerging standard French picture of Hegel: the political-theological nexus of pantheism and system, or abstract rationalism as opposed to actual history and true futurity. On Willm’s example, we see confirmed the thesis that French academic reception contributed to this picture, and also carried a political or political-theological character.

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7.5 Leroux’s Schellingian Critique Socialist Pierre Leroux was arguably the most prominent champion of the late Schelling on the Left. Unsurprisingly for someone aligned with Schelling, he was also a critic of Hegel. Leroux is an important and complex figure; here, I will turn solely to his two articles in La revue indépendante from 1842: on the concept of God and on Schelling’s philosophy (1842a, b). Significantly, Leroux stages the essential disagreement between Schelling and Hegel in terms of pantheism and the question of God’s relation to the world—a question that he considers to be central to philosophy as, for him, identical with religion. Not Schelling but Hegel, Leroux claims, was pantheistic in the sense that deserves criticism. For Leroux too, there is a “good” and a “bad” pantheism, where Hegel represents the latter. Seeing as Leroux himself diagnoses the fact that the accusation of pantheism has, by 1842, become so widespread that people “speak of it [i.e., pantheism] without knowing what they are saying”,29 it seems necessary to him, as earlier to Willm, to distinguish between different kinds of pantheism in order to redirect this accusation away from the thinker he defends (in this case from Schelling). Leroux traces Hegel’s thought from Schelling’s, yet claims that Hegel blew some of the central Schellingian intuitions out of proportion, inflating them into an all-encompassing rationalist and pantheistic system (1842a: 22–3; one may note here the “bad” pantheism-system connection again). I will not present in detail Leroux’s speculative genealogy of true Christian pantheism, which he traces from Moses via Jesus, St. John, and St. Paul. In contrast to this pantheism, Leroux claims, the pantheisms of Spinoza and Hegel are untrue. In Spinoza, the particular disappears in the universal. In Hegel, the universal becomes fully identical with the particular and disappears in particular beings (Leroux 1842a: 28). Hegel “absurdly makes each individual being into the universal life” (1842a: 44) as part of one “eternal creation” (1842b: 308). Moreover, Hegel goes so far as to “annihilate universal Being” as such, i.e., God, by dispersing it among particular beings—which, however, results in their loss of all divinity (1842a: 28). Taken to its logical conclusion, Leroux’s critique reads Hegelian pantheism as making a radically anti-religious move. All that is left in Hegel is the “absolute fatum”, “a fatalistic ideism” (idéisme; 1842a: 28). At this point, we can see the fatalism-nihilism-pantheism-atheism nexus resurface. “Divinity and life” vanish in Hegel; no wonder that his followers, says Leroux, attempt to explain Christianity as merely a product of human spirit. (But now, thank God, Schelling has returned!) “The master’s pantheism”, Leroux writes of Hegel, “produced scepticism and indifferentism in his disciples” (1842a: 30). Scepticism is thus, too, added to Leroux’s list of Hegelian dangers as growing out of Hegel’s ostensible pantheism.

 Cf. Maret (1840: xi), who makes the same point—showing that this was a widespread perception. Cf. additionally Lèbre (1838: 296): “Pantheism is extremely in vogue today; everyone talks about it and judges it; many speak out in favour of it without knowing what it is... great is the confusion around it”. 29

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Politically, too, the current situation in Germany is seen by Leroux as a direct consequence of Hegelian philosophy, so that Schelling appears, against this background, as a quasi-messianic figure.30 Schelling has finally broken his silence, says Leroux, and claims to possess the truth, and to usher in the true unity of philosophy and religion. “Will Schelling fulfil his promises? Will he stop philosophy from sliding down the slope on which Hegel launched it? What will happen in Germany to this [Hegelian] movement of incredulity, at once scholarly and Voltairean, that is fermenting at universities?” (1842b: 290). Leroux’s attitude to Schelling is more complex than mere acceptance, which has to do, inter alia, with his socialist appreciation of the revolutionary side of history, and of the genealogy of protest from Luther to Voltaire. But what is important for us here is that the entire present political-­ theological condition of Germany is blamed by Leroux on Hegelian pantheism. Feeling the need to explain the popularity of Hegel on the Left and the Right alike, Leroux notes that, ultimately, the pantheism at the heart of Hegelianism can adapt itself to various political leanings. It is “a vague pantheism, which lends itself to all kinds of presumptions”. “This uncertainty in Hegel’s thought”, he continues, “is revealed today by the state of his school. Ask the Hegelians: Is God independent of creatures? The Right Hegelian says weakly ‘yes’, the Left Hegelian says ‘no’, whereas the one at the centre attempts to say neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’” (1842b: 309). Still, it seems that the “extreme Hegelian Left”, as Leroux puts it (1842b: 315), are close for him to grasping the essence of Hegel’s philosophy of religion, since statements such as “God is only conscious of himself in the human”, indeed, verge on atheism: What happened is this. Hegel’s philosophy turned God himself into a product of creation. So how could Hegel’s disciples have avoided the following consequence—namely, that Christianity is a natural product of the human mind? Then, from this consequence, should not they proceed to the next consequence, namely, that Christianity is a historical product of the human mind? … In the [Hegelian] system, it is the human who has priority over God. Without the human, God would never have existed… Such is the ultimate formula of Hegelianism. (Leroux 1842b: 320–1)

Those Hegelians who, like Michelet, attempt (more conservatively) to provide an addendum to the above, saying that it does not mean that God is fully reducible to the human, are for Leroux no better. This kind of addendum serves, for him, only to obfuscate things—to cover up the underlying Hegelian vagueness, nihilism, and in the end nothing but vanity or arrogance. In a way that echoes Schelling’s Christian  It should be noted that the late Schelling himself presents himself as a quasi-messianic figure whose philosophy proclaims a new age, foreclosed by Hegelianism. This is evident, for instance, in his “Preface to Cousin” (Schelling 1861: 201–24), which was translated into French by Willm. Elsewhere, Schelling blames the political state of the German nation, and the “unblissful unproductivity” of this state, on the purely negative (read: Hegelian) preoccupation with thought over being, or with the concept (the Was)—including “the Was of a constitution”—over the sheer being (the Daß) that Schelling identifies with divine being (1856: 589). For a new epoch to become possible, this false order of priority must be inverted—an inversion (Umkehrung) taught by Schelling’s own philosophy. 30

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critique of prideful selfhood as the cause of the Fall, arrogance is for Leroux one of the consequences (and dangers) of Hegelianism, which he contrasts with religious piety (piété; 1842b: 320). This arrogance, as self-complacency, is likewise so abstract and vague that it can lead to the (abstract) revolutionary negation of everything as well as to (abstract) complacency with regard to the status quo. On the one hand, “the end result of Hegel’s philosophy”, Leroux satirizes, “is summed up in what we heard one day after dinner from one of the most spiritual writers in Germany, a direct disciple of Hegel: ‘My friends, we are all gods who have dined well’” (1842b: 308).31 For Leroux, Cousin’s conservatism is a prime example of this, too—and is also the consequence of Hegelian pantheism-qua-fatalism: “Accept everything, explain everything, respect everything. Such was the motto of the fatalism of Berlin and the eclecticism of Paris” (1842b: 321). On the other hand, “Hegel’s royal and aristocratic philosophy” has today, for the most part, “become revolutionary” (1842b: 322–3)—and that happened via theology, or due to the destructive consequences of Hegel’s doctrine of God for theology. “Hegel’s disciples have become theologians”, writes Leroux, referring in this regard to David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (1835–6). “What is”, he asks, “the conclusion of Strauss’s book? In the final instance, there is nothing philosophical in this book that is not already there in Hegel. The premises of the master, adopted by the disciple, circle back to the master’s conclusions” (1842b: 323). From this perspective, Hegel’s method becomes just as abstractly all-destructive as, in the case of the Hegelian Right, it can be abstractly all-accepting—and in fact, it seems that for Leroux this all-­destructiveness, again, gets closer to the true essence of Hegel’s thought. “Hegel’s philosophy”, Leroux asserts, “is like the philosophy of Voltaire: it is a critique, and nothing else. It is not a solid construction, it is a destruction” (1842b: 324)—and although Leroux does see the spirit of truth dwelling within the spirit of critique, and affirms Hegel as a thinker worthy of respect (1842a: 28), truth decidedly cannot for Leroux dwell in the “dogmatic” form of the system (1842b: 324). To sum it up, for Leroux as for others, Hegel’s system is a pantheism that is, furthermore, sufficiently flexible to be both conservatively and radically inflected.

7.6 Pantheism as Confusion and as Poison: Ott and de Careil After Maret, Auguste Ott and Alphonse Gratry were among those who took up the banner of Catholic critique of Hegelian pantheism.32 In a typical manner, Ott’s Hegel et la philosophie allemande takes Hegel’s system to be “a systematization of  The writer in question is Heinrich Heine. Cf. D’Hondt (1972: 175–6).  I will not talk about Gratry’s critique at length, but it is worth mentioning briefly. In his presentation of Hegel’s logic as a logic of modern pantheism par excellence, Gratry reduces Hegelian dialectic to a sophistry of absolute identity that perverts and forecloses the principle of transcendence. Modern pantheism appears to Gratry as the enemy of truth, and Hegel’s abstract logical 31 32

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pantheism” (1844: 4), as well as the pinnacle—and dying breath—of Protestant rationalism. “Protestant philosophy”, Ott writes, “is done; Hegel has given it the last word”.33 Where Ott’s critique, however, becomes more interesting is where, like Maret’s, it touches on the character of the age. The result of Hegel’s complete rationalism has been, in the German intellectual world, “universal confusion”. In this pantheistic vortex, in the absence of transcendent divine guarantee, “ideas have lost their value, words have lost their meaning”, and “all things are being called into question” (Ott 1844: 526). “Everywhere”, Ott writes of contemporary Germany, “there are discussions and controversies, and innumerable pamphlets keep feeding this ardour of dispute that consumes everyone”, and in which, he adds with horror, “one so often forgets even the simplest rules of politeness and decorum” (1844: 527). In France, Ott observes, there is “confusion and intellectual anarchy” too, but here “it is the kind of confusion that precedes new formulas, and that engenders fruitful and durable doctrines”—due, one presumes, to the Catholic spirit. The German Protestant “disorder” is, however, one “born from false and insufficient doctrines” (1844: 528). The German confusion is presented by Ott as a remarkably abstract chaos, as though the German mind could not but dwell in formulas which envelop and suffocate it: Without having studied [Hegel’s system], it is absolutely impossible to understand a single word of all the philosophical writings that flood Germany, all the books, pamphlets, and newspaper articles that emerge and die every day. As a lay reader, one would seek in vain to orient oneself in this indecipherable algebra, this obscure language, these dark controversies that bring together being, nonbeing, substrate, powers, relation-to-oneself, for-oneself, as-such, before-oneself, outside-oneself, etc. German philosophy has been reduced to these futile categories, these arid abstractions. (Ott 1844: 528)

Ott’s verdict is clear: born from dead and false doctrines, and dwelling in pantheistic abstraction, “German philosophy carries death in its bosom” (1844: 528). As such, French Catholic thought must disentangle itself from German pantheism.34 As Ott puts it, “Catholicism must break absolutely with the philosophy of Protestantism” (1844: 531). It would seem that, in Ott, “pantheism” stands in for the abyss of confusion engendered by the post-Enlightenment age as, for him, an age of intellectual heresy and crisis35—something that Ott cannot arrange into orthodox categories, and thus reduces to “anarchy”, and to the lack of decorum on the part of those young Hegelian radicals whom he berates as “superficial” and “arrogant” (1844: 537). It is not that Ott is unsympathetic to the ideas of equality and fraternity, but he wants to provide system as the quintessence of this pantheism. An abstract God, an abstract idea of the infinite, Gratry asserts, “is nothing. It is the God of Hegel, who is an atheist” (1855: 2.180). Gratry thus reasserts the system–pantheism–atheism connection. 33  See also volume 1, §3.4.4. 34  The split between Hegelians and Schellingians, too, is presented by Ott as a “bitter battle” of two pantheisms (1844: 533). 35  In Lèbre, pantheism is likewise associated with both “confusion” and “a gaping abyss that surrounds all of our paths”, causing “vertigo” in those climbing to the truth (1838: 296, 326).

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them with their Catholic foundation (cf. 1844: 539–40) so that the world might cohere again. He senses, in other words, that novel, destructive forces are at play, which refuse and confound old hierarchies, and he labels these forces as demonic and death-bearing—or, not unlike Maret, as the forces of original sin and “incredible pride” (Ott 1844: 537) in a new guise, the same forces that have always been at work in pantheism as the enemy of Christianity. The claims that pantheism is a kind of poison, or a death of the mind, and that it characterizes the age, likewise appear in Louis-Alexandre Foucher de Careil’s Hegel et Schopenhauer—a work from 1862 which shows that, during this time, Hegelianism and pantheism continue to be heated topics. De Careil’s work speaks in a striking manner of the “ruins” that Hegel, this “intellectual Gargantua”, left behind—dark ruins through which pantheism spreads like poison (1862: 53). “Kant”, de Careil writes, offering a diagnosis that goes beyond the history of philosophy, “truly inaugurated the new world crisis that is still ongoing” (1862: ix). German philosophy has left ruin in its wake, and the trajectory from Kant to Hegel to Schopenhauer proves this tendency. It is as though, after Kant, we have been dealing with a process of continuing explosion. As part of this process, in Germany “critique degenerate[d] into criticism, philosophy of art into Romanticism”—which de Careil blames for dealing in illusion—“and pure science into the abstract idealism that has been the greatest pitfall of modern speculative thought” (1862: xii). Hegel’s pantheism stands at the centre of this process; and de Careil thereby reiterates the abstraction-pantheism-nihilism nexus. “Hegel’s error, which he has in common with all pantheists”, de Careil asserts, “is to overthrow the very process of reason, to mistake pathological signs for the healthy state, to deny evil, to mistake death for life and vice versa” (1862: xxxvii). In the viscous reality that pantheism creates by collapsing what is solid and what is phantasmatic, illusions and vapours are indistinguishable from truth, and “dark phantoms of the mind” claim “omniscience” (1862: xiv-xv). With German Idealism, thus, “the ultimate illusion arrives” (de Careil 1862: xv), totalizing due to the all-encompassing rationalism of Hegel’s system—an illusion from which, one surmises, the world must cleanse itself if the present crisis is to come to an end.36 This illusion, which makes it impossible to tell truth and falsehood apart, “leads inevitably to scepticism” (1862: xv): it is as though de Careil were intent on compiling a list of all the dangerous “-isms” that Hegel’s philosophy was thought to engender. While calling pantheism and atheism two conjoined types of poison, de Careil further clarifies—in a passage that may be viewed at once as a culmination and singular transformation of the omnipresence of pantheism in the French intellectual debate of the time—that pantheism is even worse than poison, since it prevents one from being able to distinguish poison from cure:

36

 See also de Careil (1862: xvi) on Hegel’s thought as creating “la grande illusion totale”.

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Pantheism is not poison, it is indifference to poison: it develops an unhealthy tolerance for error and truth, and the kind of absolute indifference which ends up killing the soul by enervating it. (de Careil 1862: xxxiv)37

If de Careil’s somewhat Gothic presentation of pantheism seems itself at once medical and fantastic, then this is due to the fact that “pantheism”—a vaguely constructed “-ism” mistaken for a real explanatory principle—appears, in the intellectual debate of the time, as one of the central concepts carrying in itself the swirling energies of the period that de Careil identifies both as “a scientific century” (1862: xv) and a century of the ongoing crisis of reality and truth. When surveying the vehement nineteenth-century French polemic around idealism-qua-pantheism, one cannot shake off the impression that the concept of pantheism itself becomes a kind of poisonous or phantom presence, lurking in the minds of post-Enlightenment thinkers of various leanings as a more-or-less obscure embodiment of threat—a very real threat of a world in crisis, which exhausts (“enervates”) the scientific and the religious mind alike in their longing for clear-cut categories. “Pantheism”, as we have seen, spectrally doubles and evades categorial capture, indexing the confusion and disorder at the heart of an allegedly secular or secularizing age—a confusion that cannot itself be categorized as either “religious” or “secular”. It may be that the actual explanatory power of “pantheism” as a term during this period lies not in the way it supposedly applies (or fails to apply) to Schelling or Hegel, but precisely in the way it discloses the above confusion: the turbulence and turmoil or, to use Schellingian terms, the Umtrieb and Verwirrung of the ongoing crisis. This is, in fact, precisely what is revealed by another characteristic equation which grows common by the mid-century, and with which I would like to conclude: the equation between “pantheism” and “communism”, as two equally disorderly and heretical terms. While going beyond the context of Hegel reception narrowly understood, this equation is essential for comprehending the intellectual movement of the age.

7.7 Pantheism, or Communism: A Coda “Pantheism” is not the only concept carrying the explosive forces or energies of the early-nineteenth-century crisis. In Thoré’s dictum, “absolute communism is the politics of pantheism” (Dupré 1841: 338), “pantheism” further doubles as “communism”, which is developed as that political concept which captures the same forces and same confusion. The copula (“is”) in Thoré’s formula indexes an identity that must be thought of as preceding the division into what is religious (“pantheism”) and what is political (“communism”),38 pointing to post-Enlightenment and

 Cf. Leroux above on pantheism as leading to “scepticism and indifferentism”.  As Thoré explains, he thinks of the religious and the political by way of a broadly Spinozistic parallelism of “an endless generation” within which one cannot distinguish between the two even retroactively (“when the fruit falls ripe from the tree, it is not always clear from which branch it 37 38

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post-Revolutionary confusion as a state of absolute identity: as the crisis of hierarchy, distinction, and felt community that, in communism as he depicts it, leads for Thoré most radically to their full absence. By “absolute communism”, Thoré understands the kind of radical socialism that abolishes even residual hierarchy, instead “preach[ing] absolute and mathematical equality” and proclaiming “abolition of property and inheritance, abolition of family and marriage, abolition of fatherland”— a total abolition that is unrelenting in its indifferent abstraction (Dupré 1841: 340).39 Thoré admits that “there are very different sects among the communists” (Dupré 1841: 341), yet it is this distilled logic of communism that fascinates him the most. For Thoré, speaking at once as a republican journalist and Romantic art critic, pantheism and communism alike go too much in the direction of oneness, painting reality grey on grey: the “canvas of pantheism and communism” presents a total confusion of colours (“omnicolour”) that equals lifeless absence of colour, a monochrome (“one-colour”) picture in which no real individuality or, for that matter, real community can be distinguished (Dupré 1841: 338). Taken too far, abstract equality and oneness are indistinguishable from total indifference and confusion, all (“pan”) from nothing. (“Nothingness in politics can only correspond to nothingness in religion”; Dupré 1841: 341.) For Thoré, communism, like any confusion and crisis, while necessary, can only be a transitional state that destroys the old regime so that something vibrant and new could arise from the indifferent canvas of reality: When the old form of a religion is to be destroyed for the sake of eternal and progressive religion, we return to the confused oneness, which is the negation of the old distinctions in God, i.e., of dogma. Then, having passed through this pantheism, philosophy discerns new distinctions within this oneness, and we see new dogma emerge on the immutable foundation of religious feeling. ... Similarly, communism claims to destroy the old form of political society... It comes to deny old social distinctions, old privileges of individuality by confusing all individualities with each other. Human persons fade away, like divine persons in pantheism. (Dupré 1841: 338)

This is, however, but a “temporary confusion”, which Thoré compares to winter as necessary in the change of seasons, and as the period in which “the desolate nature loses its colour [and] a grey veil spreads over the landscape and fills the air”—yet which is followed by spring, when “fresh green grass emerges from the ground, ... life is reborn everywhere, and the abundant light lovingly caresses all the renewed forms” (Dupré 1841: 338–9). We are used to thinking of revolution as a singular event within a progressive temporality; however, it can also be thought of as a (historical and cosmic) movement of restoration, return, or renewal: of Justice, Love, Community.40 For Thoré, originated”; Dupré 1841: 340). In this way, Thoré’s notion of identity resists the secularist construction of the religious/secular binary. 39  Babeuf and Sylvain Maréchal are named by Thoré as the originators of this tendency (Dupré 1841: 341). 40  Cf. de Lubac (1948: 169) on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s iterative understanding of revolution, across history, as renewed “access to Justice”. The revolution that the late Schelling proclaims, too, as the overarching movement of Umwendung or Umkehrung, is a cosmic revolution as the restoration of justice (Gerechtigkeit). I hope to discuss this in more detail in my future work on Schelling.

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pantheism and communism form but a stage in the overarching revolutionary cycle of rejuvenation (“history has seasons like nature” [Dupré 1841: 339]), and the political-­religious movement of revolution is modelled for him upon the revolution of the Earth as a celestial body. Thoré identifies the French Revolution with the stage of destruction and “immense ruination” as necessarily leading to “an even grander construction”, to new religion and new dogma (1841: 348). Furthermore, this ruination for him continues, since the old regime still persists, transformed, in the widespread egoism and fragmentation (1841: 342), which preclude the true religious and communal sentiment.41 Such is the way in which crisis and confusion are, for him and others, entangled with the incomplete post-Revolutionary now. Not unlike de Careil in 1862, Thoré speaks in 1841 of phantoms haunting this ongoing confusion and crisis. Communism comes politically to exorcize the “vain ghosts” of the past (1841: 337), and this remains the nature of its true task. It must “wipe clean” the canvas so that “the painting [can] be started over” (1841: 339). However, this means that, for Thoré, communism is not the end goal; and to persist in communism is to persist “in negation, in doubt or darkness” (1841: 348), without moving on to the constructive stage, and thus to perpetuate the confusion that communism at once indexes and further engenders.42 In Thoré’s text, the confusion of pantheism, distilled politically in communism, becomes truly all-pervasive. Pantheism not only doubles as communism, it triples and further multiplies as Thoré goes on to identify it with “philosophical and social materialism” (Dupré 1841: 348)—implying, one surmises, an embrace of the confusion of mere matter, of the disorder and chaos preceding (new) creation, a reduction to the material substrate without distinction or order. Materialism is, in turn, associated with “liberalism”, so that liberals, too, emerge as covert pantheists, as well as with “atheism”. Thoré writes:

 Cf. Strube (2016: 93): “Various socialist theories prior to 1848 are distinguished, first and foremost, by the striving for the regeneration of a post-Revolutionary society with its perceived fragmentation”. This is not, however, to be mistaken for the desire to return to the pre-modern period. Thus, Thoré explicitly calls upon communism to destroy the last vestiges of the feudal Catholic order, adding: “The principle of the Middle Ages has not yet been destroyed, it will fully disappear only in the face of a new religion. [...] So, let communism do its thing, and do not fear for the future. [...] After the [communist] ruins, there will be new construction”, and this construction will “no longer [be] the Catholic and feudal affirmation” (Dupré 1841: 343, 348). 42  Interestingly, Thoré in 1841 identifies communism qua pantheism with the same spirit of alldestroying critique, exemplified by Voltaire (see Dupré 1841: 342), with which Leroux identifies Hegelianism in 1842. In keeping with his cyclical vision of history (“history”, he writes, “is like a stringless rosary” [1841: 339]), Thoré sees pantheism and communism periodically reborn together since at least early Christianity—joining Maret, but speaking not of “heresy” but of the recurrence of crisis. “It would be easy to show historically”, he notes, “that communism and pantheism are always reborn together, time after time”. This happens during periods of “separation” when something new is struggling to be born, and when a reduction to “elements” occurs, a chaotic elemental turbulence giving rise to new, “unforeseen” combinations (1841: 339–40). Cf. Dupré 1841: 344: “Here are fishermen, like at Christ’s time, abandoning their nets to become fishers of men, and to announce the good news: the news of the emancipation of workers”. 41

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Liberals are another variety of materialists. They deny all authority, all rules, just as atheists deny God. They go at random, letting things happen without any notion of political right or duty, just as atheists no longer have any notion of good and evil. They separate church and state, that is, thought and action. They claim that the law should be atheistic, that is, indifferent to justice and to truth. (Dupré 1841: 348)

In this way, like later in de Careil, pantheism comes in Thoré to constitute an indifference to all poison or evil, and thus the highest poison itself. It seeps everywhere and warps everything, so that everything that is bad, perverted, or disorderly turns out to be pantheism, explicitly or in disguise. As Thoré puts it in a formulation that may be read as paranoid: communism, and thus pantheism, “is everywhere” (Dupré 1841: 340). The same sentiment, not coincidentally, is given voice by Maret in the spirit of Catholic paranoia and desire for an apocalyptic battle: “Today pantheism is everywhere, but everywhere it hides; it does not want to confess; it conceals itself. We must therefore first tear down the mask with which it covers itself, and expose the face of this monster in all its hideousness”—so as to “combat this evil” (1840: xiv-xv).43 Pantheism thus emerges as an absolute spirit turned absolute poison, whose vapours make one hallucinate it everywhere—a toxic all or pan, indeed. It is in the context of this omnipresent confusion indexed by “pantheism” that the (likewise rather confused) French reception of Hegelianism-qua-pantheism should be placed. All of the nebulous, poorly outlined “-isms” that branch off from the cardinal sin of “pantheism” are themselves but phantoms that roam this confusion, and that haunt the mind as the collective embodiment of an ill-comprehended yet real threat. This epochal threat is that, I would suggest, to which Karl Marx also seeks to give shape, or whose shape he seeks to discern. Marx wants to concretize the utopian socialist notion of humanity or the vague idea of the emancipated worker, which underlies Thoré’s understanding of communism, into the (theoretically elaborated and practically organized) material figure of the proletariat. He seeks thereby, as if to ward off Thoré’s critique of communism as incapable of distinction, to differentiate and mobilize the spectral energies of the ongoing post-Revolutionary vortex.44 To mobilize, however, is not the same as to exorcize; it is not to clear ­reality  Proudhon’s confession that, when reading Abbé Pluquet’s Dictionnaire des hérésies, des erreurs et des schismes, he found himself to “profess all the heresies” recorded there, illustrates well the heretical pantheistic spirit that both Thoré and Maret perceive in communism and socialism. This included for Proudhon those heresies through which pantheism or Gnosticism persisted starting from early Christianity throughout the Middle Ages (a fact likewise mentioned in Maret’s Essai): the “Millenarian Gnostics”, the “Circumcellions”, the “Donatists”, the “Albigensians”, and “the Beguins and the Turlupins”. See de Lubac (1948: 107). 44  For Thoré, importantly, this is precisely the task that follows upon “communism” qua total negation: “Their work is to re-differentiate anew, with greater precision, this political pantheism” (Dupré 1841: 340–1). In this sense, Marx can be read as aligned with Thoré. As the latter puts it, “the vast majority of communists do not know what their community should be”, and especially the “social economy” of the social-order-to-be is yet to be elaborated (1841: 344–5)—so that Marx may be taken to discover the solution to this problem in the figure of the proletariat, seeking to provide the broad yet vague appeal of communism to the worker that Thoré mentions (1841: 344) with concrete socio-economic foundations. “It is communism”, Thoré proclaims, “however absurd its theories may be at this moment, that will nevertheless have brought about a new economic society” (1841: 345). 43

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of all ghosts, but to discern a form of life, or non-life, at once material and ghostly, on the verge of absolute exhaustion, that is capable of “emerg[ing] from the ground” not unlike in Thoré’s depiction of spring. The proletarian subject as it takes shape in Marx’s writings from the 1840s—as one who is sapped of one’s life-force and turned into a shadow of one’s own true nature, and who constitutes but a dispossessed, alienated, dislocated fragment of an old communal life that continues to haunt the present—is this form of spectral non-life. If, in the general nineteenth-­ century atmosphere of confusion, it is phantoms that gain omniscience (as de Careil puts it), and if Marx himself depicts bourgeois modernity as an age of all-confusion, dissolution, and spectrality,45 then communism, as seeking to be the spectre haunting Europe, must self-reflectively unite into itself all the dark spectral energies that are exploited and obscured by the bourgeois world of day—the same energies that, to Catholic thinkers, appear as demonic. It is as though the nineteenth century is a century of spectres, solidifying, to the extent that spectres can amass and attain to solidity, in the Marxian spectre of communism that programmatically takes it upon itself to haunt and to confuse—the spectre of all those pushed below, into the dark, turned into ghosts inhabiting the hell of mines and factories, dwelling precisely (to recall an above-quoted expression from Thoré) “in negation, in doubt or darkness” (Dupré 1841: 348). To conclude, what is particularly heretical about pantheism and communism is that both of them refuse the hierarchy of what is above and what is below, and are aligned, as Thoré’s accusation goes, with what is “coarse, bestial, nonhuman” (Dupré 1841: 341), and thus with all those made less than human and put endlessly to work.46 At its most heretical, communism-qua-pantheism persists in and with chaos and disorder, mobilizing them into the force of upheaval rising from below, from the material substrate (subiectum) impossibly turned the subject of history, and erupting against the imposition of a divine order from above (be it in the form of God or Capital). This upheaval is what is perceived by Thoré as the levelling of all reality, the razing of the entire world-construction, and the refusal to proceed to the work of new creation—work that leads to new dogmas which, in turn, become new mottos under which to put to work. Perhaps, indeed, the goal of communism-qua-­ pantheism is not to perpetuate but to abolish this “natural” cycle: a goal towards which the Marxian embrace of the maximization of free time asymptotically tends. The impossibility of this goal does not make it any less of a real threat to the hierarchies and categories through which the world is reproduced—and it is ultimately the same threat, the threat of the abolition of transcendence, that underlies the vexed association of Hegelianism with pantheism in nineteenth-century France.47

 See on this, most famously, Berman (1988).  The proletariat, Marx writes, equals “the complete loss of humanity [der völlige Verlust des Menschen]”, and as such embodies “the dissolution of the existing order of things” (1970: 141–2). 47  I would like to thank Kyra Sutton, Daniel Whistler, and Ayşe Yuva for their comments on an earlier version of this essay. 45 46

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Strube, Julian. 2016. Sozialismus, Katholizismus und Okkultismus im Frankreich des 19. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. W. 1829. L’Allemagne en 1829. Nouvelle Revue Germanique 3.10: 115–117 [an abridged translation by “W.” from Wilhelm Schulz, Almanach für Geschichte des Zeitgeistes. Darmstadt: Leske, 1829.] Willm, Joseph. 1835. “Essai sur la nationalité des philosophies.” In Jugement de M. de Schelling sur la philosophie de M. Cousin. Trans. J. Willm. Paris-Strasbourg: Levrault. v–xliii. ———. 1836. Essai sur la philosophie de Hegel. Paris-Strasbourg: Levrault. ———. 1847. Histoire de la philosophie allemande depuis Kant jusqu’à Hegel, vol. 3. Paris: Ladrange. Zachhuber, Johannes. 2017. Transcendence and Immanence. In The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Christian Theology, ed. Daniel Whistler, 164–181. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Chapter 8

Hegel’s Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century France: Charles Bénard’s Translation and Its Reception Élisabeth Décultot

Abstract  Between 1840 and 1851 Charles Bénard published a four-volume translation of Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik entitled Cours d’esthétique, which he supplemented with a detailed commentary in 1852. In this study, I explore the significance of this publication in the French intellectual landscape of the mid-­ nineteenth century, particularly in regard to the formation of the discipline of philosophical aesthetics. I do so by asking two questions: First, in view of Hegel’s diverse body of works, why were his Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik the first to be translated into French? And secondly, how did French intellectual circles react to a text whose title alone established its relationship to a genre of philosophical aesthetics already viewed with scepticism? Keywords  Art · Idealism · Speculation · Obscurity · Ecole Normale Supérieure · Académie des sciences Morales et politiques Between 1840 and 1851 Charles Bénard (1807–1898) published a four-volume translation of Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik entitled Cours d’esthétique which he supplemented with a detailed commentary in 1852. Bénard was a secondary school teacher of philosophy who had been accepted to the École Normale Supérieure in 1827 and passed his agrégation in 1831. With this translation, he produced a work which deserves recognition in terms of the history of Hegel’s reception in France and of nineteeth-century French philosophical aesthetics. It is worth emphasising that it was the very first French translation of Hegelian philosophy available to the French public. It would take another 9 years for Augusto Vera to publish Hegel’s Logique which kicked off a series of further Hegel translations in the following decades—from the Philosophie de la nature to the Philosophie de l’Esprit to the Philosophie de la religion (Hegel 1859, 1863–6, 1867–9, 1876–8; see also Hegel 1854). Beyond the scope of the French reception of Hegel, Bénard’s É. Décultot (*) Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Chepurin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 247, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39326-6_8

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translation marks a milestone in the French history of philosophical aesthetics too. Following the publication of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica, the study of aesthetics spread rapidly throughout Germany from the mid-eighteenth century. In France, however, it was met with stiff resistance which remained pervasive until the middle of the nineteenth century.1 This rejection was not only rooted in the frequently expressed aversion to the word ‘esthétique’ prior to 1850, causing heated debate as to the necessity of importing the German term into French, but also in the history of the translations themselves. For example, Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft was translated into French for the first time in 1846—more than 50 years after its original publication in Germany (Kant 1846). With Bénard’s translation of Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, however, the import of German philosophical aesthetics was recognised far quicker: Bénard managed to publish his own Hegel translation just 5 years after obtaining Heinich Gustav Hotho’s edition of the first volume of Hegel’s Vorlesungen in Berlin (Hegel 1832–45). In the following, we shall examine the French publication of the Cours d’esthétique with attention to two aspects: First, in view of Hegel’s diverse body of works, why were his Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik the first to be translated into French? And secondly, how did French intellectual circles react to a text whose title alone established its relationship to a genre of philosophical aesthetics already viewed with scepticism?

8.1 The First French Translation of Hegel in Context To answer these questions, we must first analyse Bénard’s work against the background of French intellectual life of his times. Between 1840 and 1850 German philosophy became the object of new interest in France. A harbinger of this growing interest came in 1836 when the Académie des sciences morales et politiques issued a prize on German philosophy after Kant. The members of the academy, which together with four other academies (Académie française, Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, Académie des beaux-arts and the Académie des sciences) constituted the Institut de France, had been rather dissatisfied with the submissions for a long time. Among the six manuscripts submitted in 1838, none were approved, which forced the academy to re-issue the prize. Again in 1840, not one of the seven submissions received enough votes for approval. Finally in 1844, following another extension, the academy conferred its prize to Joseph Willm’s Histoire de la philosophie allemande (1846–9; see Espagne 2004), which only had to outshine two other essays. Despite all the difficulties in the selection process, the repeated calls for papers signalled a growing interest in German philosophy, which was also emphasised by Willm’s assessor Charles de Rémusat. “We are strongly attached to French philosophy. We were born in its womb and fed on its milk”, Rémusat writes  Several aspects of the French adoption of German aesthetics between 1750 and 1840 have been investigated in Décultot (2002, 2013). 1

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in his commentary. “But it must be bolder if it is to measure itself against the great problem, the problem of the nature of things. It is in this respect that the example of German philosophy can be good for it” (1845: cxlviii–cl). A few years later, the same institute provided another example of its unabated interest in contemporary works of German philosophy; in 1852, the academy bestowed its prize on Bénard’s translation of Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, on which this paper shall focus in the following. The fact that the Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik was the first of Hegel’s works to be translated into French has much to do with the early French reception of Hegel. Prior to 1840 little evidence exists of any direct or precise knowledge of Hegel’s texts in French intellectual circles. Nonetheless, Hegel’s name was certainly well known, due in part to the young Victor Cousin. On his first trip to Germany in 1817, Cousin had met Hegel twice, and in his subsequent travel story referred to Hegel whenever the occasion presented itself (1865–6: 5.190–4). Cousin’s arrest by the Prussian authorities in 1824 resulted in further bringing together the names of the two philosophers. Cousin, who was accused of liberalist, conspiratorial activities, was released from Prussian prison thanks to Hegel’s personal intervention. All of these events might well explain the questionable reputation that conservative circles in France had attributed to the German philosopher. We can sense these political reservations in the words of Abel-François Villemain, who in 1852 read aloud the assessment by the Institut de France of Bénard’s translation of Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. Although the prize was ultimately awarded to Bénard, the assessment was not without a critical tone. In his statement, Villemain accused Bénard of not always denouncing forcefully enough everything he disapproved of in Hegel. Furthermore, he explicitly pointed out that the political-theological allegations which weighed upon Hegel’s entire oeuvre in France had negatively influenced the academy members’ attitude toward Hegel’s aesthetics. Hegel’s philosophy [La philosophie d’Hégel [sic]] aroused distrust and fear, either because of the founder himself, or at least because of a few disciples who are suspected of exaggeration, like all imitators, or, finally, because of the appearance and fame of this philosophy […]. Many people wondered if it was a good and appropriate example to admit, even into discussion, such a theory of the arts inaugurated under the auspices of a philosophy which had the reputation of having disturbed morality and ignored the Deity. It was no longer, as it was thirty years ago, a classic scruple; it was almost a conscientious scruple that repelled the Hegelian. (1857: 103)

However, a closer reading of the Cours d’esthétique—according to Villemain— invalidated any such political-theological allegations: Although honouring such motives, the Academy did not believe that they were be applicable at this time. On the contrary, it seemed invaluable and instructive to the Academy to note, in many ways, the happy and necessary inconsistency of the bold innovator, and to take into consideration the often ingenuous imagination of Hegel, in contradiction to his own system, and the salutary power of the beautiful, the purifying idea of the great and the sublime constantly bringing him back in his Aesthetics to the divine presence, this great poetry of the universe, and to spiritualism, this immortal reality of the soul that he had both too much forgotten, or too much veiled, in his dogmatic philosophy. (1857: 103-4)

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In other words, as Villemain argues, the Cours d’esthétique deserved the favour of the academy, for it rectified the sundry errors in Hegel’s “system” and thus assumed a very special and rather uncharacteristic place in his general philosophy. Villemain claims it was only because Hegel, “in contradiction to his own system”, avowed a “spiritualist” belief in the “divine” nature of art in his aesthetic considerations that its translation also deserved recognition. It is worth noting that Bénard himself had offered similar arguments to justify his decision to translate Hegel’s Vorlesungen. In his 1852 commentary on Cours d’esthétique, he discusses the case of one of Hegel’s German ‘adversaries’, the theologian Franz Anton Staudenmaier, who was forced to condemn Hegel’s philosophy from a Catholic standpoint, yet felt compelled to embrace his aesthetics: “We recognize with pleasure that Hegel’s Aesthetics”, as Staudenmaier is quoted in Bénard’s translation, “contains many things that are not only true, deep, beautiful, excellent, but even classic, which, as such, may never be surpassed. But we do not give this praise to the ideas he develops in general” (Staudenmaier 1844: 665; Bénard 1852: 266–7). Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the academy viewed Hegel’s Cours d’esthétique as a very singular work in the Hegelian system, one that deserved by exception favourable consideration by the French public.

8.2 The Translator, Charles Bénard Politically, Charles Benard himself would not cause any further anxiety to the Academy.2 The secondary school teacher, who had spent years working in a French provincial town before receiving a teaching appointment to a Parisian high school in 1848, demonstrated a certain capacity for politically flexibility in those tumultuous years between 1848 and 1851. Following the coup of 1851, he pledged his allegiance to Emperor Napoleon III in contrast to colleagues like the Kant translator and philosophy teacher Jules Barni, who refused to do so and was consequently forced to resign from his teaching position (see Kant 1848, 1869; Barni 1850, 1851). In the Second Empire, Bénard enjoyed a smooth career path. In 1851 he was appointed member of the ‘agrégation’ examination committee, in 1854 he received a teaching position at the École Normale Supérieure and in 1856 he was distinguished with the title ‘chevalier de la légion d’honneur’. Since his early publications, he philosophically aligned himself with ‘spiritualism’ which he generally tied to the cutting criticism of the ‘sensualistic’ tradition of the eighteenth century. Although he never belonged to Cousin’s closest circle, he often advanced concepts which seemed to be directly borrowed from Cousin’s philosophy. Among the philosophers of his time, Bénard was a decisive proponent of German philosophical aesthetics in France. His career as a philosophy teacher continued well into the second half of the nineteenth century with translations and

 For a brief biography of Bénard, see Poucet (1999).

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commentaries on German aesthetics. He was not content with having translated and commented on Hegel’s Cours d’esthétique; he also translated some of Schelling’s treatises on art, which he published in 1847 with additional excerpts from Schelling’s works (Schelling 1847). No other French writer had ever devoted such effort to promoting aesthetics as a ‘German science’. It is no wonder Bénard was commissioned to write an article on ‘Aesthetics’ for Adolphe Franck’s 1845 Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques.3 Bénard’s commitment to aesthetics appears to be rooted in a sense of something lacking in French philosophy. He incessantly brings up the fact that this branch of science which had been intensively cultivated in Germany since the eighteenth century was still largely neglected in France. Of all the sciences of which philosophy is composed, none ought to excite a higher and more lively interest than that which deals with beauty, and which studies its manifestations in art. And yet there is none that has been less cultivated among us. Its name in France is hardly known. […]. In Germany, first-rate minds, artists, poets and philosophers have discussed all these problems. From their research and their meditations came books that deserve to be known in France, and translated into our language. (1840–1851: 1.i–iv)4

The intellectual deficit that Bénard laments in the passage above did in fact exist at the institutional level. While lectures on aesthetics had been a fixture of German university curricula since the last decades of the eighteenth century, they were only seldom offered in France prior to 1850. Though Cousin’s lectures on beauty, truth and goodness at the Sorbonne in 1817–1818 (Cousin 2000; see also Cousin 1853) were famous in their own right, they failed to spark any notable academic pursuit in this direction. Only one of his students, Théodore Jouffroy, chose the subject as a lecture topic again in 1826. But because the École Normale Supérieure, where he held a lectureship, had been closed down by the authorities several years earlier, Jouffroy was forced to hold these lectures in an non-institutional setting, namely his own Parisian flat. This Cours d’esthétique (1843) was presented to a small, exclusive audience and was only published in 1843 after his death.5 It is not surprising, therefore, that Charles Lévêque opened his introduction to his 1857 lecture on Plato’s aesthetics at the Collège de France, published in 1861 (in Science du beau which had three awards bestowed on it by the Institut de France), with the following lamentation: “Problems of aesthetics have not been discussed for thirty years in our university Chairs” (1857: 9).

 He writes, “Aesthetics. This is the name given to the science of beauty and the philosophy of the fine arts. This word, derived from Greek (aisthesis, sensation), would no doubt better suit a theory of sensibility; but today it is consecrated by usage. In spite of the importance and the interest of the questions with which it deals, aesthetics only belatedly gained independence and the rank due to it among the philosophical sciences. It has been cultivated with ardour in Germany for half a century, its name in France is just beginning to be known. We propose, in this article, to fight first against some prejudices that it still meets in many minds” (1845: 293). 4  See the similar remark in the previous footnote. 5  Jouffroy no longer held an official teaching post following the government’s closure of the École Normale Supérieure. 3

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8.3 A “German” Science Bénard attempted to improve this seemingly antiquated outlook by importing German writings. In so doing, he never failed to point out the national character of aesthetics. In numerous introductions, commentaries and dictionary articles which accompanied his translations, he portrayed aesthetics as a distinctly ‘German science’.6 In a similar way to Barni who asserted that Germany was the true home of aesthetics in his translation of Kant’s Critique of Judgment,7 Bénard presented a genealogy of aesthetic theories in his historical overviews which almost exclusively consisted of German names. Among the 20 publications listed in the bibliography of his “Esthétique” article in the Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques, only two French authors were cited.8 If aesthetics was to be classified as ‘German’ science, it was—in Bénard‘s opinion—primarily because of the rise of idealism which characterized the history of German philosophy since the end of the eighteenth century. In Bénard’s portrayals of the history of German aesthetics, Baumgarten’s work Æsthetica plays a secondary role. Indeed, the true cornerstone of aesthetics had been laid by Kant. But, in line with Cousin, Bénard chose not to embrace the Kritik der Urteilskraft without reservation; Kant’s ‘subjectivism’ preemptively threatened to make the “science of the beautiful” appear impossible. [Kant] brings the sublime and the beautiful back to the subjective point of view, he denies any objective reality. Beauty is relative to the faculties of the mind, to sensibility, to the imagination, to taste […]. Therefore, strictly speaking, there is no science of beauty either. Aesthetics becomes one of the branches of psychology and logic. As for art, its nature is also unknown. (1852: 271)

It was Schelling’s “objective or absolute idealism” which finally surmounted the danger of ‘subjectivism’. Schelling was the first to assign art a central role in philosophical thinking—a role comparable to that of religion. Yet Schelling’s identity philosophy also threatened to merely equate art with religion which, in turn, provided the philosophical basis for a detrimental mysticism of art. In Bénard’s view, only Hegel could rectify this mistake and elevate aesthetics to its pinnacle. Naturally such a historical rendering was not free from critical polemic. Bénard directed his criticism particulary toward English and French philosophy of the eighteenth century whose “sensualistic” orientation had obstructed the path to aesthetics: In England, the sensualist school, in the eighteenth century, produced several more or less remarkable writings on the theory of beauty: Shaftesbury, Hogarth, Hutcheson, Burke. But a system as narrow as sensualism was not able to discover the true principles of art. […] In France, Diderot and the encyclopaedists elucidated nearly the same ideas. (1845: 301)

 Bénard writes, for instance, “In Germany, at the end of the eighteenth century, began a new era for aesthetics. This science was finally taken seriously, it became the object of scholarly and thorough research” (1845: 301). 7  “It is especially to Germany that philosophy is indebted [for the idea of aesthetics]” (Barni 1850: 123). 8  These French works are Crousaz (1715) and Jouffroy (1843). 6

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Not only did he castigate the direction of eighteenth-century discourse, but also that of contemporary French philosophy: We do not want to present a lawsuit against the French philosophy of our time; it has rendered some rather eminent services, today too little known, for us to be tempted to join our detractors. Not only has it supported a victorious struggle against the theoretical sensualism of the last century, it has also distinguished itself by works which were useful to science: it has put in the spotlight the study of the soul and enlightened many sides of its innermost core. […] It has also entered the path of history. […] One point nonetheless remains incontestable: the part it has most neglected, or which remained the weakest in its hands, is precisely the theory of beauty in art and literature […]. There is nothing there that looks like a body of doctrine, a real treatise on such a huge and interesting branch of human knowledge. (Bénard in Hegel 1855: 1.vi–vii)

That Bénard introduced a national genealogy of aesthetics might surprise a mid-­ nineteenth century scholar. Cousin had already offered several arguments against this portrayal of aesthetics as an explicitly ‘German’ science. Granted, in his lectures of 1817–1818 on beauty, truth and goodness, first published in 1836, he praised the notable achievements of German philosophers in this area (2000: 195; see Helmreich 2002). However, he also concealed the fact that some of his ideas were taken from German philosophy—most prominently from Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft. His pointed references to French art theorists of the eighteenth century clearly indicate his belief that the French tradition played an important role in the history of aesthetics. As Cousin points out, in the undeservedly forgotten Essai sur le beau of 1741, the Jesuit priest Yves-Marie André had presented a study that was not lacking in “stringency”, and Diderot’s many “brilliant insights” into the essence of art—despite their erratic nature—were quite useful for understanding it too (Cousin 2000: 194–5; see André 1741). And in the heavily revised 1853 edition of these lectures, Cousin indirectly portrays himself as the torchbearer and culminator of this French tradition. This rather implicit claim to a specific French line of aesthetic tradition was expressed far more openly by some of Cousin’s successors. In the introduction to his Science du beau, Charles Levêque, who confesses that, although his age does not make him a “direct student” of Cousin, he can certainly be called an admirer, outlines a distinctly ‘French’ history of aesthetics: Research on the principles of beauty and art is not new in France. In the eighteenth century, Fr. André and Diderot inaugurated them here almost at the very same time as Hutcheson in Scotland and Baumgarten in Germany. At the beginning of the present century, it took on a decidedly speculative and methodical character in our country. Forty-three years ago, the young successor of Mr. Royer-Collard [= Victor Cousin], full of the communicative ardour and driving power that made him a promoter and leader of a philosophical school, posed the problem of the beautiful in his lectures at the École normale, in the presence of those pupils who were first his friends, then his illustrious collaborators. That was in 1817. A year later, in 1818, he was dealing with the same question before his auditors at the Faculty of Letters of Paris. These lectures, in which aesthetics found its strongest foundation, printed several times since then, and each time improved and enriched, now form the most brilliant part of his book on Du vrai, du beau et du bien, eight editions of which have not exhausted its immense and legitimate success. (1861: 1.v–vi)

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In his subsequent exposition, he insistently points out that Jouffroy’s aethetics lectures of 1826, which Lévêque himself had so effusively praised, owed nothing to Hegel’s lectures, for the purely factual reason that, although Hegel’s lectures in Berlin were held between 1820 and 1829, they were only compiled and published at a later time (1861: 1.vii–viii). Lévêque’s intention to legitimise a primarily French geneaology of philosophical aesthetics culminates in him challenging the assumption that Baumgarten was indeed the father of aesthetics. As Lévêque argues, chronologically speaking, the true founder of aesthetics in the eighteenth century would have to be the French Jesuit priest André mentioned above; his Essai sur le beau had been published in 1741, i.e. “9 years” before “Germany addressed the problem of aesthetics” thanks to Baumgarten, who “introduced it into his own country” (1861: 2.481). Lévêque asserts that Baumgarten’s attempt “to make the study of the beautiful a distinct science” had utterly failed which, incidentally, was easy to demonstrate. Only for the sake of fully illustrating “the meagre value of [Baumgarten’s] theory” did Lévêque dedicate a few pages to him in his lengthy exposition.9 Other prominent figures in German aesthetics were not spared from Lévêque’s scathing criticism either. He accuses Kant of failing to capture the essence of beauty in his reflections on the subjective feeling of beauty—an objective concept in Lévêque’s view. (1861: 2.506–12) He concedes that Schelling does attempt to shift the philosophy of art onto the better path of ‘spiritualism’ (1861: 2.522–31). Yet despite its many merits, Schelling’s theory falls into an ‘idealistic pantheism’ which Hegel later wholeheartedly advocated. The crucial mistake in Hegel’s aesthetics is rooted in the principles of an “inscrutable ontology” (1861: 2.543): According to Hegel, beauty in nature is the unity of life, as this living unity is the first form of the idea, that is, the first degree of God’s evolution in the world. We absolutely reject this explanation of natural beauty for two reasons: first, because God is infinite and every sensible form is finite, so there is no sensible form of God; secondly, God is eternally all himself: there are no degrees, no progression of his existence. (1861: 2.543)

In Lévêque’s opinion, Hegel’s system explains neither divine nor human beauty. The Institut de France responded to Lévêque’s Science du beau with extraordinary enthusiasm. Shortly after the treatise was lauded by the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1859, it also received awards by the Académie française and the Académie des beaux-arts. Contemporary reports show that nationalist sentiment played no small part in its extremely positive response. In the assessment presented before the Académie des Sciences morales, Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire made the following concluding remark: “It seems that aesthetics belongs to philosophers from across the Rhine, and that after having created it more than a century ago, they are still the ones who study it and deepen it” (Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire 1861: 398).  “[Baumgarten] tried to make the study of the beautiful a distinct science, but it cannot be said that he really succeeded in this enterprise. I would not want to belittle the work of a worthy thinker who has attached his name to a great question. It is important to point out a new way to follow; yet a careful reading of Baumgarten’s volume does not reveal any of those results which science collects after having verified them; and if I discuss here the propositions in which Baumgarten‘s aesthetics is summed up, it is in order to put beyond doubt the meagre value of his theory” (1861: 2.481). 9

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Lévêque’s work, however, proved to the academicians that French philosophy was also capable of producing outstanding works in the area of aesthetics.

8.4 A Limited Reception It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Charles Bénard’s efforts to promote Hegelian aesthetics were met with some measure of resistance in mid-nineteenth century France. Indeed, his translation of the Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik in the 1840s and 1850s garnered little attention. “Hegel’s Aesthetics drew no attention. Not a newspaper, not a magazine, as far as I know, said a word about it”, noted Alfred Michiels, a perceptive analyst of French intellectual life, in 1842 (1842: 2.495). Although the translation of Hegel’s aesthetics was mentioned that same year in the Revue des Deux Mondes, the author of the rather elliptical review, Jules Simon, criticised the absence of Plotinian references in Hegel’s texts. He defends Bénard’s decision to produce an “analytical” translation, i.e., one that occasionally strays from a word-­ for-­word rendering with an argument that doesn’t necessarily bespeak much respect for Hegel: “Although Hegel’s Aesthetics is a beautiful work, it is not one of those books that cannot be touched without sacrilege” (1842: 58–9). In other words, it is permissible to translate Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics a bit more freely as they by no means belong to the class of classical, sacrosanct monuments of philosophy. There are various reasons why Bénard’s translation of Hegelian aesthetics was met with relative disinterest in France in the mid-nineteenth century. First, the legitimacy of aesthetics as a philosophical science was still the subject of heated debate around 1850. In his 1844 book Hegel et la philosophie allemande, Auguste Ott argues it would be superfluous to give a detailed description of Hegel’s Cours d’esthétique as it contained numerous passages “which do not belong per se to the area of philosophy and are rather ill-suited for analysis” (1844: 447). In addition to such academic doubts, some scholars expressed strong reservations regarding linguistic style. In the prefaces to his own translations, Bénard himself lamented the “merciless conciseness” of Hegel’s language and his “heavy style, embarrassed, loaded with metaphorical expressions” (in Hegel 1840–52: 1.vi)—incidentally similar to Jules Barni’s complaint about Kant’s style in the Kritik der Urteilskraft around the same time (see Barni in Kant 1846: 1.vii, x). Such stylistic ‘deficiencies’ explain Bénard’s recourse to an analytical translation, i.e., producing a careful interpretation of the original. He claimed that such a method was absolutely essential so that the French reader could gain access to Hegel’s text in the first place. Indeed, the criticism of the German philosopher’s rather dry presentation style was nothing new in France. The stigma had already become topical at the end of the eighteenth century when the echo of Kantian philosophy had finally reached Paris. It is worth noting, however, that this critique was applied to aesthetics with particular vehemence in the middle of the nineteenth century. It appears that clarity and salience were inherent features of every discourse on art in France at the time, and ‘German’ aesthetics didn’t fit the mould. Scholars reiterated the same accusations Madame de

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Staël had leveled against Schiller around 1800 when she contrasted the model of an inductive, sensitive and elegant art criticism of French origin with the dry abstraction of German aesthetics (1968: 2.69). Bénard himself was somewhat sceptical of his chances of success in stylistically acclimatising Hegel’s works. Like Kant’s and Schelling’s philosophy, Hegel’s too “runs counter to our intellectual conventions and our linguistic brilliance”, he concludes in 1847: “It must be admitted, despite the efforts that have been made to make us aware of some of these systems, we are still unfamiliar with abstract constructions, with the language and terminology of these philosophers” (in Schelling 1847: xlvii).

Bibliography André, Yves. 1741. Essai sur le Beau. Paris. Barni, Jules. 1850. Philosophie de Kant. Examen de la Critique du jugement. Paris. ———. 1851. Philosophie de Kant. Examen des Fondements de la métaphysique des mœurs et de la Critique de la raison pratique. Paris. Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, Jules. 1861. Extraits du rapport présenté au nom de la section de philosophie à l’Académie des Sciences morales et politiques sur le concours relatif à la question du beau. In C. Lévêque, La science du beau, vol. 1, 369–400. Paris. Bénard, Charles. 1845. Esthétique. In Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques, vol. 2, ed. A. Franck, 293–306. Paris. ———. 1852. Hegel. Philosophie de l’art. Essai analytique et critique. Paris. Cousin, Victor. 1853. Du vrai, du beau, du bien. Paris. ———. 1865–1866. Souvenirs d’Allemagne. Notes d’un journal de voyage en l’année 1817. In Fragments philosophiques pour servir à l’histoire de la philosophie, vol. 5. Paris. ———. 2000. Cours de philosophie professé à la faculté des lettres pendant l’année 1818, sur le fondement des idées absolues du vrai, du beau et du bien, ed. A. Garnier. Geneva. Crousaz, Jean-Pierre de. 1715. Traité du beau. Amsterdam. Rémusat, Charles de. 1845. De la philosophie allemande. Rapport à l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques, précédé d’une introduction sur les doctrines de Kant, de Fichte, de Schelling et de Hegel. Paris. Staël, Germaine de. 1968. De l’Allemagne, ed. S. Balayé, vol. 2. Paris. Décultot, Élisabeth. 2002. Ästhetik/esthétique. Étapes d’une naturalisation (1750–1840). Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 2 (April/June): 7–28. ———. 2013. A-t-on besoin de l’esthétique? Enquête sur la réception française d’une nouvelle science allemande entre 1750 et 1815. In Penser l’art dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle: théorie, critique, philosophie, histoire, ed. C. Michel and C. Magnusson, 439–454. Rome. Espagne, Michel. 2004. En deçà du Rhin. L’Allemagne des philosophes français au XIXe siècle. Paris. Hegel, G. W. F. 1832–1845. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, ed. H. G. Hotho. In Werke, Association of Friends of the Immortalised, vol. 10. Berlin. ———. 1840–52. Cours d’esthétique, 4 vols, trans. C. Bénard. Paris and Nancy. ———. 1854. La logique subjective. Trans. Jean Gustave Wallon and H. Sloman. Paris. ———. 1855. La poétique. Trans. C. Bénard, 2 vols. Paris. ———. 1859. Logique. Trans. A. Vera, 2 vols. Paris. ———. 1863–1866. Philosophie de la nature. Trans. A. Vera, 3 vols. Paris. ———. 1867–1869. Philosophie de l’esprit. Trans. A. Vera, 2 vols. Paris. ———. 1876–1878. Philosophie de la religion. Trans. A. Vera, 2 vols. Paris.

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Helmreich, Christian. 2002. La réception cousinienne de la philosophie esthétique de Kant. Contribution à une histoire de la philosophie française au XIXe siècle. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 2 (April/June): 43–60. Jouffroy, Théodor. 1843. Cours d’esthétique, ed. P. Damiron. Paris. Kant, Immanuel. 1846. Critique du jugement/Observations sur le sentiment du beau et du sublime. Trans. J. Barni, 2 vols. Paris. ———. 1848. Critique de la raison pratique/Fondements de la métaphysique des mœurs. Trans. J. Barni. Paris. ———. 1869. Critique de la raison pure. Trans. J. Barni, 3 vols. Paris. Lévêque, Charles. 1857. Platon considéré comme fondateur de l’esthétique. Leçon d’ouverture du cours de philosophie grecque et latine faite le 12 février 1857. Paris. ———. 1861. La science du beau étudiée dans ses principes, dans ses applications et dans son histoire, 2 vols. Paris. Michiels, Alfred. 1842. Histoire des idées littéraires en France au dix-neuvième siècle, 2 vols. Paris. Ott, Auguste. 1844. Hegel et la philosophie allemande. Paris. Poucet, Bruno. 1999. De l’enseignement de la philosophie. Charles Bénard philosophe et pédagogue. Paris. Schelling, F. W. J. 1847. Écrits philosophiques et morceaux propres à donner une idée générale de son système. Trans. C. Bénard. Paris. Simon, Jules. 1842. Du mouvement philosophique en province. Revue des deux mondes 30 (4th series; April/June): 51–83. Staudenmaier, F.A. 1844. Darstellung und Kritik des Hegelschen Systems, aus dem Standpunkte der christlichen Philosophie. Mainz. Villemain, F. 1857. Rapport sur les concours de 1852 (19 août 1852). In Choix d’études sur la littérature contemporaine, 97–123. Paris. Willm, Joseph. 1846–9. Histoire de la philosophie allemande, 4 vols. Paris.

Chapter 9

Augusto Vera’s Mystical Conception of Hegelianism Andrea Bellantone

Abstract This study reconstructs Augusto Vera’s systematic interpretation of Hegel. Its fundamental thesis runs, “Philosophical knowledge is essentially systematic”, and on this basis I argue that it is by way of the category of totality that Vera discovers, discusses and ultimately adopts Hegel’s philosophy: all of his work is to be understood from the perspective of the question of accessing the absolute—or absolute knowledge. If his reading of Hegel is systematic, it is because, by way of identifying himself with Hegelian thought, he seeks to respond to a demand for totality and perfect a kind of knowledge. I show this by narrating the early Vera’s development through the 1840s into the 1850s and beyond. Keywords  System · Totality · The absolute · Absolute knowledge · Certainty When analysing what he termed “the French Hegelian school” in 1864, Eugène Poitou wrote: “The so-called system of Hegel has long been ruined: the gigantic scaffolding of its abstractions has collapsed under its own weight, those who were trying to introduce his ideas into France could not [...] and never took into account the work of criticism and of time” (1864: 133–4).1 Nevertheless, the ruin of Hegelianism as a system certainly did not prevent the diffusion of its ideas. Poitou remarked that these ideas had made significant inroads “into criticism, into history, into literature, even into the novel” (1864: 134). In short, according to Poitou, Hegelian philosophy gained a foothold in France at the price of sacrificing its systematic goal.

 The members of the Hegelian school are, according to Poitou: Taine, Renan and Vacherot. On this history of references to Hegel, see Bellantone (2011: 297–452). 1

A. Bellantone (*) Institut Catholique de Toulouse, Toulouse, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Chepurin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 247, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39326-6_9

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It is not my aim here to discuss the historical relevance of Poitou’s views. It is enough to say that these views corresponded to a sentiment widespread throughout Europe concerning the credibility of Hegelianism as a system. This text of 1864 allows me, rather, to assess Augusto Vera’s position within the assimilation of Hegelian thinking. Far from thinking that “the system, properly speaking [...] has long been ruined”, Vera instead bases his introduction to Hegelianism on the opposite thesis. In his view, one of the indisputable merits of Hegel is the claim that “philosophical knowledge is [...] essentially systematic” (2010: 54).2 There is no question of accepting a “modified, diminished, transformed Hegelianism”, precisely because this variant of Hegelianism, devoid of those “grandiose conceptions” of which Poitou spoke, would be deprived of its principal virtue—namely, to be a “science of principles and their relations [...], that is, a totality encapsulating a beginning, a middle, and an end, which embraces in its constitution the totality of beings, assigning to each of them its place and its own proper function” (2010: 55). It is with reference to this requirement for totality that Vera—in a personal journey whose various stations will be reconstructed below—discovers, discusses and ultimately adopts Hegel’s philosophy. To begin, I must stress that such a requirement was not without consequences for the adventure of Hegelianism in France, in Europe, and beyond. On the contrary, it was decisive in orienting the reception of Hegel’s thought, thanks, specifically, to Vera’s role as “the greatest apostle of Hegelianism, its Apostolus gentium” (Mariano 1868: 158).3 He took on this role owing to his tireless work of mediation and diffusion, translating from German into French the Encyclopédie and the Leçons de philosophie de la religion, along with an apparatus of introductions and commentaries whose magnitude has often puzzled critics (e.g. Hegel 1859, 1863, 1867–9, 1876).4 If this work of translation—that has been dubbed “colossal” (Jarczyk and Labarrière 1996: 201)5—accords Vera the role of mediator par excellence, we must nevertheless not forget that it is preceded and, so to speak, framed by the 1855 publication of the Introduction à la philosophie de Hegel, whose function was to “present the Hegelian doctrine as a whole, and lead the reader, by degrees and successive initiations, to its rational or historical sources” (2010: 213). In fact, the 1855 book was much more than a mere “presentation of Hegel’s doctrine”. It represented the crystallization of an encounter, the history of which is to be traced back to 1843, when Vera wrote an article for the Revue du Lyonnais, entitled

 The book was originally published in 1855. This re-edition takes into account the second edition of 1864, which, according to Vera himself, did not undergo any significant modifications. 3  Mariano was a close disciple of Vera. Vera went on to enjoy international prestige, due to his affiliation with several scientific societies (the Philosophische Gesellschaft in Berlin and the Philosophical Society of St Louis in the United States of America). On Vera’s milieu, see Rosenkranz (1868). 4  On the importance and questionable quality of these translations, see Oldrini (1994: 35–51). 5  Regarding the importance of Vera, Gentile wrote that “Hegel and Vera were for many years two inseparable names “. See Gentile (1957: 266). 2

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“Philosophie allemande: doctrine de Hegel” (1843: 379–404).6 In order to appreciate Vera’s interpretive choices, and measure their importance as well as their limits, we must first understand how Vera arrives at Hegel—that is, what kind of metaphysical problem constituted the starting-point from which he encountered Hegel’s philosophy. It is Vera himself who provides the key to understanding such origins. In the 1872 introduction to his Le problème de l’absolu, Vera writes: “I would like to clarify that this is not the first time I have examined this problem. I can even affirm without hesitation that all of my writings have referred to this [problem], directly or indirectly, from the first to the last, from those I published in 1845 to this [work] from last year” (1872: vii). Following Vera’s self-interpretation on this point, we must recognize that all of his work is to be understood from the perspective of the question of accessing the absolute—or absolute knowledge. If, as I observed above, his reading of Hegel is systematic, it is because, by way of identifying himself with Hegelian thought, he seeks to respond to a demand for totality and perfect a kind of knowledge which precedes and, in some respects, goes beyond such Hegelianism. But who is Augusto Vera? Vera was born in Italy, in Amelia (near Perugia, in the Papal State), in 1813. He travelled to France for the first time between 1835 and 1837 and then became a professor of Greek and Latin in Switzerland (in 1837, at Hofwyl College) and, during this period, learned German and developed an interest in Idealist philosophy.7 In 1839, Vera returned to France, supported by the eclectic school, and, from this moment on, drew up his own research plan and identified himself with French philosophical culture.8 The article of 1843 for the Revue Lyonnaise is a first glimpse; but so too are his two doctoral theses of 1844 (published in 1845), as well as an article “Idealism” for the Dictionnaire of Adolphe Franck (1810–1893)—all of these early publications reveal his intellectual project.9 As the two theses demonstrate, Vera’s project was to position himself in relation to Victor Cousin’s eclecticism in a way that either enhanced it or showed up its weaknesses by confronting it continually with German idealist thought.10 Thus, Vera defines himself in relation to the eclectic milieu, into which he had hoped to be integrated. However, his attempt will prove to be a double failure: first of all, from an institutional point of view, as his attempts to obtain a post in the French university system were in vain; secondly, from a cultural

 This is not Vera’s first publication. On Vera’s publications, see Savorelli (1986: 1279–1306).  On Vera’s biography, see Mariano (1905). 8  Vera formed part of the “colony” of Italian intellectuals in France, who were protected by Charles de Rémusat. He taught at Mont-de-Marsan, Toulon, Lille, and also for a short time in Paris. In 1844, he passed the “agrégation”. On the Italians in Paris, see Mastellone (1955) and Gioberti (1927–1930: II.53). 9  The two theses were defended in 1844 and published in 1845 (see Vera 1845a, b). The entry on Idealism was published in Vera (1847). 10  On the hegemony of eclecticism, see Vermeren (1995) and Ragghianti (1997). 6 7

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perspective, as the eclectic school itself was about to turn its back on German sources and so take up the opposite position.11 It is in this context that we must interpret Vera’s departure for England (he moved to London in 1852), where he directed a review of emigrants, without giving up on  the idea of eventually returning to France to resume his teaching career.12 Moreover, it is during this English era that the bulk of his work as an interpreter and translator of Hegel was undertaken, including the Introduction as well as his translation of the first volume of Hegel’s Encyclopédie, which appear respectively in 1855 and 1859 in French. This shows, if nothing else, that while Vera might have changed his place of residence, it is still in French that he thinks of his work and the horizon of his cultural activity. Nevertheless, Vera’s project of returning to France did not succeed, because, in the wake of the formation of the Italian state and its universities, he is called to teach in Milan (1859) and finally in Naples (1861). It is from Italy that Vera will continue to work on publishing translations of other parts of the Encyclopédie, on disseminating his own work (both in Italian and in French), and on defending Hegelianism in the face of the increasingly numerous controversies erupting in France (see Vera 1861, 1862, 1864). Indeed, if there is a consistent character to Vera’s writings, it is his perennial polemic against the eclectic school—especially with respect to its shift away from Hegel. Any reader of Vera’s work encounters the bitter tone with which he notes, already in 1855, the change in the eclectics’ attitudes: A few years ago, Hegel was declared in France to be an extraordinary apparition, to be one of those sovereign intelligences which the world witnesses only at great intervals, leaving in science and in history those luminous traces which throw light both on the past and the future of humanity [...]. However, a sort of metamorphosis seems to have occurred in recent times when it comes to this philosopher. We still pronounce his name with respect [...], but we do not feel the same enthusiasm, we express reservations (which are understandable and admissible), but furthermore we strive to diminish [Hegel], and to even sometimes present Hegelianism as a kind of accident in the history of the human spirit, as a philosophy without value and without future, and occasionally as a monster [...] destined to devour all the truths the world possesses. (2010: 5)

Of course, Vera refers here to the accusations that were mounting in French culture against Hegel, but he was thinking particularly of Cousin’s change of opinion—as well as that of his closest students—with whom he continues to cross swords in very violent polemics.13 This explains the fact that Vera’s entire production on Hegel is defensive, aimed at rectifying the common critical standpoints, as well as to show

 On the anti-German direction in eclecticism, see Cotten (1996: 105).  The journal was entitled, Emporio italian, published in Italian, English and French. see Vera (1883: 225). 13  The new preface (1864) to the Introduction, as well as the essays contained in L’hégélianisme et la philosophie testify most evidently to this. 11 12

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the superiority of the Hegelian point of view vis-à-vis the positions assumed by French philosophy.14 Nonetheless, Vera’s distance from the eclectic milieu ultimately emerges out of common ground shared with the eclectics—the meaning and scope of which must now be clarified. Indeed, Vera’s very philosophical problem, i.e., the requirement that will lead to his adoption of Hegelian thought in about 1848, is born out of the aporias left by Cousin. A reading of the 1844 theses easily demonstrates that eclecticism serves as Vera’s “general perspective of orientation” (Oldrini 2001: 102). That is, at stake is the question, inherited from Cousin, of the transition from psychology to ontology: how is it possible for the analysis of consciousness to lead to the discovery of universally valid principles? This is the problem of the “linkage of the psychological problem and the metaphysical problem of ideas, and the transition from one to the other” (2010: 32). Indeed, Cousin’s thought affirms this passage as self-evident, because, as he writes in the Fragments philosophiques (1833: 286), “Observation immediately grasps the principles which, as soon as they appear, appear to it as anterior, posterior to itself, and independent of itself [...] because they are true in themselves, i.e., truths of an absolute truth”. However, Vera’s theses pose a question where Cousin saw only one simple fact: they seek a foundation for that which is justified by “observation” or “immediate grasp”.15 The challenge is that of the impersonality of reason, and of our capacity to grasp the absolute, for if “our reason is impersonal”, then “what forms the basis of our reason” is at the same time what “constitutes the basis of eternal reason” (1853: 15).16 It is clear that if this passage between “our reason” and “eternal reason” is unfounded, a sceptical conclusion becomes necessary, because, as Vera writes, “between dogmatism and scepticism there can be no [...] intermediate doctrines” (1845a: 1). From this point of view, the conclusions given by the 1844 theses are not reassuring. Since they cannot demonstrate “dogmatism”, they can only profess scepticism—that is, can only note the irrevocable and irremediable distinction between consciousness and truth. As Vera writes, it is the transparency of the idea insofar as it is thought by consciousness that is to be reinserted into the discussion, because, between the idea (as a subjective representation) and the essence of the thing (as an an sich), there is no identity. In fact, this split between our intellect, insofar as it “can know nothing except under the conditions of consciousness and of reflection”, and the essence, “which is a simple and indivisible principle”, forces us to conclude “that we cannot know the essence of things” (1845a: 165–7). It thus becomes clear that “the unity of the idea outruns that unity of being and the knowledge that one  In short, the circulation of Hegel’s thought in France encountered anti-Hegelian tendencies, which in turn led to a rapid eclipse of this thought. See Bellantone (2011: 157–161). 15  This will be one of the most contested points: either in spiritualist terms by Ravaisson (1840: 396–427) or in neo-critical terms by Lachelier (1992: 91–94). 16  On the question of non-personal reason, see Bouiller (1844). 14

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claims to obtain” (1845a: 136)17 Vera both inherits the ‘conclusion’ to Cousin’s metaphysics and, at the same time, declares it to be insufficient. From our point of view, the theses make clear several important elements. First, we can take for granted that, despite their sceptical conclusion, these 1844 texts move within the grammar (and the aporia) of eclecticism. Secondly, they manifest—as Vera will say in 1872—the unity of his philosophical questioning which is animated by the problem of absolute mediation, for which it will obviously be necessary to find the appropriate means (which are still lacking in 1844). Thirdly (and I will return to this point), the theses demonstrate that access to the absolute depends on one’s conception of ‘idea’, since, when the idea is conceived as a subjective representation, it remains a factor of distortion—and this is the case in criticism, which “contains the negation of knowledge” (1845a: 59). Finally, what is very interesting for present purposes is that the theses show that, at least during this period, Vera is not Hegelian: certainly, he knows of the Hegelian solution to the problem of the absolute (or of mediation), but still he does not accept it.18 I conclude from this that, at the time of writing his doctoral theses, Vera “expresses his reservations” with regard to Hegelian thought, and so that he is far from affirming—as he will from 1848 onwards—the capacity to “rise to absolute knowledge, to grasp the intimate nature of things, and to grasp it with the help of the idea and in the idea” (2010: 22). The question of Vera’s ‘change of heart’ did not fail to attract the attention of his interpreters, especially when it came to explaining the shift from scepticism to dogmatic idealism. If the ideological interpretations are to be rejected—because a reference to the “instinctive requirements of class” explains nothing—the most sensible position remains Gentile’s, who, because he lacked documents that explained this change, merely asked his readers “just to observe [...] this new direction”.19 Indeed, three articles written for La Liberté de pensée in 1848 testify that Vera found in Hegelianism a solution to the problem of mediation that remained valid for him throughout the rest of his career.20 This is not to say that he discovers anything new at that moment: his interpretation of Hegel does not change, but he reverses his value judgment. That is, from 1848 onwards, he adheres to a position which had—at least until the article, “Idealism” (1847)—seemed unacceptable to him: that reason grasps “the absolute essence of the infinite and the finite”, by showing “how the infinite begets the finite [...], and how the substances communicate with each other” (Vera in Franck 1844–52: 3.187). The passage from scepticism to “dogmatism” is therefore achieved by means of a leap, whose trajectory we can follow and analyse with the help of the texts we have at our disposal.

 Vera arrives at the same conclusion in his Latin thesis (1845b: 84).  On the theses and their anti-Hegelian inspiration, see Gentile (1957: 274). 19  The Marxist explanation of this change is given by Guido Oldrini, evoking an “instinctive exigence of class” in order to justify the “ideological position in withdrawal” taken by Vera. See Oldrini (1964: 118). Cf. Gentile (1957: 291). 20  The three articles are republished in Vera (1862). 17 18

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In order to specify the significance of this transformation, it is helpful to allude to a controversial text written in English in 1856, entitled Inquiry into Speculative and Experimental Science, in which Vera attempts to defend speculative knowledge against the empiricists. In this pamphlet, we read that “the entire strength of speculation consists in the apprehension of ideas, in the grasping of ideas by the intellect, quite independent of the experimental element, and by diving into their eternal, immutable, and universal nature” (1856: 44). This echoes Cousin, who had proclaimed in 1828 that ideas are the “only proper objects of philosophy, the world of the philosopher” (1853: 26). But it is precisely the notion of this “direct apprehension of ideas” that shows us that an astonishing modification has taken place— almost as if the doubts of the theses had been forgotten. That is, is it not necessary to now accept the very practice of observation of which Cousin spoke under the name of apprehension? Of course. Once we are sure of the absolute, speculative mediation becomes possible. But the question remains: how did we get there? In this manner, by retreating from the critique of 1844, Vera now assumes as a fact what then needed to be demonstrated. It is clear, therefore, that it is the dogma of the absolute beginning of the absolute that founds Vera’s turning point and, because of it, he will no longer call into question the fact that “the life and the eternal movement of thought” are “the life and the eternal movement of reality” (1848: 59). Evidence for this fideist assumption is Vera’s passing-over, almost without exception, of the problem of a phenomenology of mind—that is, of an experience through which consciousness rises from finitude to the absolute, or—to put it in the language of Hegel—which shows the “path of natural consciousness [...] towards true knowledge” (2006a: 121). Although it may surprise the contemporary reader, the 1855 Introduction does not analyse the Phänomenologie, which Vera omits as if it were a minor text.21 This devaluation of the work is evidence of the fact that the problem is not grasped, because such an idealism knows (or believes) itself to be already “immersed in the eternal and immutable nature” of ideas. A kind of noetic intuition has taken the place of the phenomenological process, and ideas are declared as immediately available, because, as Vera observes, they “are either innate, or not at all” (Vera 1856: 13). This absence of phenomenological anxiety is a symptom of a belief in the immediate transparency of the real in relation to thought. But, if Vera makes this claim using the terminology of innateness, it is precisely because he hopes thereby to avoid any critique or scrutiny as to its conditions of possibility. This dogmatic character is evident in the preface to the second edition (1864) of the Introduction: Vera conceives of himself as an apologist for Hegelianism, precisely because the legitimacy of this philosophy has been called into question by the rise of criticism. And yet he does not attempt to find arguments to prove the validity of idealist philosophy: with a surprising gesture, he declares it impossible to prove, because “strictly speaking [...], Hegelianism can only be Hegelian” (2010: 219).22 Such a claim

 Many commentators have been astonished by this omission, e.g., Janet (1861: 320).  See also Oldrini (1964: 101).

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should be expected to the extent that it is coherent with the presuppositions of his own “dogmatic” idealism: one cannot enter the absolute by way of mediation (or demonstration); rather, it is a matter of faith. The impossibility of showing how the absolute is accessed indicates—in a negative sense—the fact that this path is a leap or, to use Vera’s language, a “direct apprehension”. In light of this presupposition, the Enzyklopädie is the text Vera chooses as the sole way-in to Hegelian thought: “Since I wanted to make Hegel known in, I dare not say a complete, but [at least] a sufficient manner, I had to choose the one of his works which contains all the parts of his system, that is to say his Encyclopedia” (2010: 16). However, behind this seemingly didactic argument lies a strong metaphysical motive: in looking for the point of view of the absolute, i.e. an eternally guaranteed mediation, in Hegelianism, Vera came upon the Enzyklopädie as a reference text. Given that his faith in the identity of reality and idea renders futile the question of the itinerary of the finite to the infinite (phenomenology), Vera need simply set out the explicatio of the system’s contents, which is always, in the absolute, a matter of mechanical unfolding. The encyclopaedic system, whose movement is interpreted as a descending syllogism of logic to spirit by way of nature, seems perfectly adapted to this goal.23 This, furthermore, clarifies a second aspect: the privilege he accords the logical plan, understood fundamentally as an a priori of all of reality (see Moschini in Vera 2004: vii–li). As Vera puts it, “Logic is only one part of Hegel’s system, but it is the most important part […] [as it] furnishes the key to the entire system” (in Hegel 1859: 1). The object of knowledge, in the proper sense of the term, is nothing but “the science of the Idea considered in its absolute existence, i.e., in all the degrees of its relative existence and of its relationships” (2010: 89). A science so extended consists in the study of this “absolute Logos, according to which things are rationally and absolutely made and thought”. And this, in turn, makes manifest that “all that is or that can be, all that moves in the sky and lives on the earth, the sun and the stars, as well as the plants the animals, man, all is submitted to the laws of logic” (Vera in Hegel 1859: 62). This is the reason why the study of logic constitutes the essence of all knowledge. The different spheres are nothing but mere representations; the science of the idea encloses all particular sciences, because “there is only one science and one sole intelligence, and the particular sciences are nothing but degrees, diverse spheres of absolute science” (Vera in Hegel 1859: 53). This logical infrastructure dominates Vera’s Hegelianism; hence, the profundity of being is now to be understood in a manner contrary to what Vera had argued in 1844—that is, contrary to his claim that “above the idea, [there is] a higher and more profound existence, of which the idea will be only a form. [It is] a force whose intimate nature escapes us” (Vera in Hegel 1859: 74).  It is certain that Vera’s conception of the encyclopaedic movement relies solely on the first figure discussed in §575 of the Enzyklopädie, according to which “logic becomes nature, and nature becomes spirit”. In this unilateral form, the systematic movement must appear necessary, because mediation itself was not mediated a priori. See Hegel (2006b: 3.373–374). 23

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Notwithstanding the above, Vera now believes that “the more one penetrates into the nature of the idea, the more we have a complete and adequate knowledge of the object” (Vera in Hegel 1859: 74). Logic becomes the substance of being, without any remove. Hence, with the help of Hegel’s systematic apparatus, Vera repeats what Cousin had said regarding the ideas—that is, they constitute “the world of the philosopher” (Vera in Hegel 1859: 73).24 This reference to Cousin is not adventitious, since we can now see how Vera, once liberated from sceptical worry, adopts Hegelianism according to the presuppositions dictated by the grammar of eclecticism—at least the most “rationalist” variant of this eclecticism.25 It was already Cousin who had suggested a conception of the idea as independent and marked by self-reference: “You must not believe that ideas represent something, and that it is by their resemblance with that which they are destined to represent, that we believe in them. Ideas […] do not represent anything, absolutely nothing but themselves” (1853: 2.26–7). As such, according to Cousin, if the idea is conceivable in itself, and it constitutes by itself the substance of the real, without requiring anything beyond the idea, then accessing the realm of ideas, and working there philosophically, is essential to the “primary science, […] the science of science, the science of that which, in all science, pertains exclusively to science”. The study of ideas is hence sufficient for the philosopher, because these ideas “constitute a separate world, dominating the visible world, presiding over its movement, sustaining and carrying it, independent from it. It is this intelligible world, this sphere of ideas […] that Plato envisaged” (1833: 23).26 Vera recovers this “Platonic” moment, but grounds it with the help of the metaphysical apparatus of Hegelianism. And yet, his Hegelianism is totally dominated by a unilateral tendency, which he accentuates to the extreme, and which at bottom can be dubbed a panlogism. Vera’s commitment to the fundamental tendencies of eclecticism is demonstrated by the fact that he identifies himself with the same historico-philosophical tradition that Cousin recognised as having accomplished what “Plato [first] glimpsed”. In this tradition, “Truth in itself is independent from reason in its actual state, to the same extent that reason is independent from the man in which it appears”. This is, Cousin continues, “the theory of Plato and Leibniz that I adopted” (1853: 5.12). Vera similarly inscribes himself in the tradition of “Platonic” idealism, refusing to see “any line of demarcation between Plato and Hegel” (1861: 103–4).27 This synthesis of Hegelianism and Platonism was already anticipated by Cousin himself—as, for example, in a rather astonishing text from 1833, in which the  Oldrini speaks of a “fetishism of categories” in Vera (1964: 144–147).  See also Bellantone (2011: 32–128). In light of these declaration, one cannot but agree with Oldrini when he talks about a “fetishism of categories” in Vera (see previous note). 26  On Cousin and Plato, see Cousin (2016). On the identification, at least early on, of Cousin and the idealist tradition, see Ragghianti (1997: 77, 147). 27  Vera here criticizes the use of Platonism against Hegel, as in Paul Janet’s Études sur la dialectique dans Platon et dans Hegel. On this book, see Bellantone (2011: 415–438). 24 25

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science of truth in itself is identified with the “science of logic taken in the sense of Plato, as the science of the Ideas in themselves” (1833: xliii). This text shows how the Hegelian lexicon (“science of logic”) is utilized in order to define the Platonic theory of ideas, with a play of hermeneutic retroaction that sketches out the foundations on which Vera’s interpretation is built. Moreover, this insistence on the continuity between Hegelianism and an “eternal” Platonism, traversing the history of philosophy makes clear the rationalist choice made by Vera’s Idealism. The chain that links Plato’s to Hegel’s thought passes through, surprisingly, modern rationalism: “Malebranche and Leibniz develop the germs of Descartes’ philosophy, returning Cartesianism to Platonism, by reproducing, by modifying the theory of ideas […]. In the end, idealism is that of which all the science of our later times and all the movement of German philosophy is […] but a development, a transformation” (2010: 24). Evidently, in this story Spinoza plays a fundamental role “because he assumes, in principle with Plato, that a perfect correspondence exists between ideas and things” (2010: 37). This “Platonic” choice—a rationalist and dogmatic one—also explains Vera’s blunt opposition to the critical tradition. This theme is already present in the theses, in which Kant’s philosophy is specified as “the negation of knowing” (1845a: 59).28 All that is missing in the theses is commitment to an alternative model, since these early works had refused the leap into the absolute. This position is very different from that of 1855, which holds that “Kantian philosophy imprisons thought in a web of forms—categories, concepts, ideas—which it cannot exit from” (2010: 34), and the step to German idealism “gradually transforms the idea […] binding it to its purely formal and subjective existence” (2010: 38). As such, only with Hegel is it definitively the case that “idealism and philosophy are fused” (2010: 26). But what kind of idealism is at play here? We have seen that it is a dogmatic and objective idealism in which the idea is thought as “a structure, something intelligible, comprehended as an eternal thing, without life or thinking activity”.29 While this perfect identification between the idea and reality has been determined, the question of manifestations still remains—that is, the natural and historical effectivity of the idea. What is the other in relation to the Logos? Vera’s position could not have been more classic: “The form of things is nothing but an image and an imperfect manifestation of the eternal and immovable form of the ideas” (Vera in Hegel 1859: 62). As such, actualisation is nothing but a representation of true reality. Between the idea and its realities exist a relation, but this relation must be thought of as a deduction of actualisation on the basis of its eternal principle. Philosophy must “directly grasp the idea itself, in its purity and in its absolute existence, and determine successively its intrinsic and essential characters, in order  The eclectic influence is again decisive, as Cousin also identified in Kant a “negative and critical genius” having begun with “a little idealism” only in order to finish in scepticism (1828: ii; 1853: 5.17). 29  With remarkable lucidity, Spaventa (1856) understood that Cousin’s idealism could not lead to an adequate, modern conception of the idea, and the same is true regarding Vera’s idealism. 28

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to release the opposed idea from it, as by an internal impulsion and necessity, [and then philosophy] will operate on the latter as we operated on the former, by finally drawing the two together, as if to make flow from their friction a third idea that must reconcile and fuse them” (2010: 106). The images used here (“friction”, “flow from”) are proof of a conceptual lack, an incapacity to think the dialectic as a creative becoming, in order to justify the sense of the difference between the idea and actualisation. Vera’s mere assertation that reason is antinomic in Kant does not compensate for the lack of a truly developed conception of dialectics. Instead, his dialectics remains an abstract model, one of reason.30 For this reason, Vera views dialectics as a deduction based on principles, an order flowing onwards according to a sequence of syllogisms that make explicit what has already been given a priori: “The development of science, and of reality is […] a series of deductions and of syllogisms” (2010: 104). Dialectics is reduced to a “containing-relation […] internal and consubstantial, by which one idea is founded and continued […] in another” (2010: 87). However, such a “containing-relation” is nothing but a relation in which what comes first contains what follows; it is an analytic relation that fails to synthesise what is different. This conception of dialectics is then defined as “the form by which the activity of the notion is realized” (2010: 110). The idea is thus endowed with self-­movement, whose origin does not concern Vera, since he takes it as evident that every “notion” is equally active. But where does the movement come from? Again, one has to return to a Cousinian model, which suggests that “the idea does not rest at all and cannot stay in an absolute state in the bosom of eternal intelligence” as “it enters by its own force and energy—the action and movement with which it is endowed—and passes onwards into humanity and into nature” (1828: 162). The problem is that such an identification between idea, force and energy is affirmed without this dynamization of the idea being clarified from a metaphysical point of view. In effect, the movement of this idea can merely be but a deductive, mechanical explication, to which the concepts of force and energy are adapted in an uncomfortable manner. Vera is not concerned with this problem of the justification of the dialectical movement of the idea, because the question, again, is to be resolved in a dogmatic manner, as the paragraph cited above demonstrates. Here, echoing Cousin, Vera declares that the idea moves “by internal necessity and impulsion”. This assumption is particularly striking, notably in view of the fact that the question of the self-­ moving idea was at the heart of debates around Hegel between 1840 and 1870. However, Vera passes over all these controversies, as exemplified by the treatment he reserves for Trendelenburg and his “reform of dialectics”, replacing the first triad of logic (being, non-being, becoming) with the triad being, thought, movement. As Bertrando Spaventa saw (1864), what was at stake in Trendelenburg’s substitution was how to explain the movement of the idea through the negating force of

 On the antinomies in Kant, see Vera (2010: 51–52). On the connection between dialectics and system in light of the notion of totality, see Vera (2010: 89–116). 30

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thought, because “Difference […] is thought itself”. Without this thinking activity, it would effectively be impossible to justify movement, because, all alone in its identity, it could not pass into an other, other than itself. Without getting into the details of this reform of dialectics, it is interesting to recall that, while Vera does acknowledge Trendelenburg as being a “serious and grave spirit” (2010: 246), he still does not accord any value to his critical thinking. In his eyes, the very question is illegitimate, for the simple reason that he does not recognise the problem. The question of the self-movement of the idea is, for him, already resolved in the implicit reduction of the transition to logical deduction. But this inability to see the problem still manifests itself in his dogmatic presupposition of idealism. It is not without some truth that Gentile—also inspired, via Spaventa, by a very different idealism—will remark that Vera had a “mystical concept of Hegelianism” (1957: 3.345). It is a “mystical conception” because it assumes the identity between reality and logic as faith. And this mysticism of the idea appears most evidently when applied to history. In the inaugural lecture in Naples (1861), Vera writes that “Philosophy of history is entirely […] founded on certain primary and absolute truths, that is to say on metaphysics” (1864: 128). This metaphysics which founds all branches of special philosophy (i.e., the philosophy of the nature of history) cannot be anything else but the “science of the idea of history”—that is, a reduction of historical becoming to “the logical, eternal relations that rule it” (1864: 134). As such, the essence of history, its idea, is “as eternal as the ideas of the triangle, the square, the good, the beautiful, the plant, the animal […] eternal and absolute […] it encloses in itself all that constitutes its special nature, as the triangle encloses all that makes it a triangle” (1864: 166). The fact that Vera decided to explain history by evoking a geometrical model is itself symptomatic of the entirely intellectual conception he has of the idea and of its relation to actualisation. Comprehending history is thus reduced to the capturing of logical laws: “The work of philosophical investigation consists precisely in finding reality below appearance, the law below the phenomenon, and necessity below the accident: it consists in capturing and bringing to light, through the variable and multiple events of which the world is a theatre, […] the eternal thought that generates them, that lives in them and is manifested in them” (2010: 57).31 Vera conceives of a history whose essence is not temporal, one which is reducible only to a theatre—that is, a representation. This is a truth already given in its deployment. In some passages, Vera does, on the contrary, seem to give to history a role in the verification of logical affirmations; for example, when he affirms the need “to reconcile science and history […] to verify them one by the other, to demonstrate the intimate reason of their difference and of their relation”. However, this demand is only accomplished by reconciling history with logic—and putting the former under logic’s control. (2010: 19) This history without time is the only

31

 See also Cousin (1853: 6.39–40).

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thinkable history on the basis of the presuppositions of dogmatic idealism—but it is ultimately precisely the opposite of any real history, This shows the unilateral character of Vera’s reduction of all knowing to the knowing of the idea. To conclude this presentation of Vera’s interpretation of Hegel—its generation and its crystallization—we can summarise its fundamental traits as follows. Although grounded on the grammar and aporias of eclecticism, particularly on the question of the transition from the psychological to the ontological, Vera’s philosophy is not satisfied with Cousin’s solutions. The theses of 1844 are an initial experiment in improving on them that ended in failure—that is, in the (provisional) confession of metaphysical scepticism. It is the question of the idea as mediator that attracts Vera’s attention, because this is a condition of intelligence, allowing access to beings only at the price of their reduction to the limits of consciousness. From the moment that the absolute communicates itself, it is lost ipso facto. As such, even if Vera was already aware of a Hegelian solution in the theses, he is still far from adopting it (at least until 1847)—even his article, “Idealism”, still explicitly refuses Hegel’s philosophy. The turning-point comes only in 1848 and is fully manifest in 1855 when Vera publishes his Introduction to the Philosophy of Hegel. It is at this moment that he fully adopts Hegelian thought—a philosophy to which he, for the most part, gives a dogmatic interpretation, founded on objective idealism, because it considers logic, or the collection of ideas, as the a priori and eternal structure of truth. Dialectics itself is reduced to mediation in the sense of syllogistic deduction. The relation between the logical sphere and the other spheres is one of mere representation, which becomes perfectly visible—and perfectly impossible to support—in regard to history. As a result of this dogmatic interpretation, in which the dramatic, concrete element of Hegel’s thought has lost all its force, Vera ultimately contributed, despite himself, to France’s (and indeed Europe’s) estrangement from Hegelian philosophy, as well as to its panlogical image.32

Bibliography Bellantone, Andrea. 2011. Hegel en France, vol I: De Cousin à Vera. Paris: Hermann. Bouiller, Francisque. 1844. Théorie de la raison impersonnelle. Paris: Joubert. Cotten, Jean-Pierre. 1996. Victor Cousin et la ‘mauvaise métaphysique de l’Allemagne dégénérée. In La réception de la philosophie allemande en France aux XIXème et XXème siècles, ed. J. Quillien, 85-110. Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion. Cousin, Victor. 1828. Nouveaux fragments philosophiques. Paris: Pichon et Didier.

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 Translated by Adi Efal-Lautenschläger.

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———. 1833. Fragments philosophiques, 2nd ed. Paris: Ladrange. ———. 1853. Cours de philosophie sur le fondement des idées absolues du vrai, du beau, du bien (1818). Paris: Ladrange. ———. 2016. Platon, ed. Christiane Mauve et al. Vrin: Paris. Franck, Adolphe. (ed.) 1844–52. Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques. Paris: Hachette. Gentile, Giovanni. 1957. Le origini della filosofia contemporanea in Italia, vol. III/1. Firenze: Sansoni. Gioberti, V. 1927–30. Epistolario. Firenze: Vallecchi. Hegel, G. W. F. 1859. Logique de Hegel. Trans. A. Vera, 2 vols. Paris: Ladrange. ———. 1863. Philosophie de la nature de Hegel. Trans. A. Vera, 3 vols. Paris: Ladrange. ———. 1867–9. Philosophie de l’esprit de Hegel. Trans. A. Vera, 2 vols. Paris: Baillière. ———. 1876–8. Philosophie de la religion de Hegel. Trans. A. Vera. 3 vols. Paris, Ballière. ———. 2006a. Phénoménologie de l’esprit. Trans. B. Bourgeois. Paris: Vrin. ———. 2006b. Encyclopédie des sciences philosophiques en abrégé, III, Philosophie de l’esprit. Trans. B. Bourgeois. Paris: Vrin. Janet, Paul. 1861. Etudes sur la dialectique dans Platon et Hegel. Paris: Ladrange. Jarczyk, G., and P.-J. Labarrière. 1996. De Kojève à Hegel. Cent cinquante ans de réception hégélienne en France. Paris: Albin Michel. Lachelier, Jules. 1992. Du fondement de l’induction et d’autres textes. Paris: Fayard. Mariano, Raphael. 1868. La philosophie contemporaine en Italie. Essai de philosophie hégélienne. Paris: Baillière. ———. 1905. Augusto Vera. In Uomini e idee. Firenze: Barbera editore. Mastellone, Salvo. 1955. Victor Cousin e il Risorgimento italiano. Firenze: Le Monnier. Oldrini, Guido. 1964. Gli hegeliani di Napoli. In Augusto Vera e la corrente ortodossa. Milano: Feltrinelli. ———. 1994. Augusto Vera et le sens de la vulgarisation hégélienne en Europe. Revue de métaphysique et de morale (January–March): 35–51. ———. 2001. Hegel e l’hegelismo nella Francia dell’Ottocento. Milano: Guerini. Poitou, Eugè. 1864. Les philosophes français contemporains et leurs systèmes religieux. Paris: Charpentier. Ragghianti, Renzo. 1997. La tentazione del presente. Victor Cousin tra filosofie della storia e teorie della memoria. Napoli: Bibliopolis. Ravaisson, Félix. 1840. Philosophie contemporaine. Revue des Deux Mondes (November): 396–427. Rosenkranz, Karl. 1868. Hegels Naturphilosophie und die Bearbeitung derselben durch den italienischen Philosophen A. Vera. Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung. Savorelli, A. 1986. Bibliografia delle opere di Augusto Vera. Annali della Scuola normale superiore di Pisa, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, 3rd series, 16.4: 1279–1306. Spaventa, Bertrando. 1856. Il sensualismo del secolo XVIII e V. Cousin. Rivista contemporanea 5 (7): 454–464. ———. 1900. Le prime categorie della logica di Hegel (1864). In Scritti filosofici, ed. G. Gentile. Napoli: Morano. Vera, Augusto. 1843. Philosophie allemande: doctrine de Hegel. Revue du lyonnais 17: 379–404. ———. 1845a. Le problème de la certitude. Paris: Joubert. ———. 1845b. Platonis, Aristotelis et Hegelii de medio termino doctrina. Paris: Joubert. ———. 1847. Coup d’oeil historique et critique sur l’idéalisme. Paris: Pankoncke. ———. 1848. “Philosophie de la religion de Hegel” / “Un mot sur la philosophie et la Révolution française” / “La Religion et l’Etat”. La Liberté de penser 1/2: 142-164, 391–397. ———. 1856. An Inquiry into speculative and experimental science, with special reference to Mr Calderwood and Professor Ferrier’s recent publications, and to Hegel’s doctrine. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans.

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———. 1861. L’hégélianisme et la philosophie. Paris: Ladrange. ———. 1862. Mélanges philosophiques. Paris: Ladrange. ———. 1864. Essais de philosophie hégélienne. Paris: Baillière. ———. 1872. Il problema dell’assoluto, vol. I. Napoli: Detken & Rochol. ———. 1883. Saggi filosofici. Napoli: Morano. ———. 2004. Introduzione alla Logica di Hegel. Perugia: Fabbri Editore. ———. 2010. Introduction à la philosophie de Hegel. Paris: L’Harmattan. Vermeren, Patrice. 1995. Victor Cousin: Le jeu de la philosophie et de l’Etat. Paris: L’Harmattan.

Chapter 10

Charles Renouvier, Modern French Philosophy, and the Great Learned Men of Germany Jeremy Dunham

Abstract  This study focuses on Charles Renouvier’s  Manuel de philosophie moderne, in which he first sketches a philosophical system in dialogue with the “great men of learned Germany” presented as “Descartes’s disciples”. I argue that, although Renouvier aims to present France as the “mother of all philosophies”, these great German men do have a significant and unique influence on the development of his early thought. Ultimately, in fact, although Renouvier wishes to claim that he later turns his back on his early Hegelianism because of his rejection of “philosophies of the infinite”, this rejection in fact only reinforces the Fichtean and Hegelian influences on his philosophy. Keywords  Cartesianism · Nationalism · The infinite · Neocriticism · Dialectic · Eclecticism Charles Renouvier’s first attempt to sketch a philosophical system is found in the second section of his 1842 Manuel de philosophie moderne. He develops it through an engagement with the “great men of learned Germany” who he presents as “Descartes’s disciples” (1842: 442). These great men are Fichte, Hegel, and Leibniz, and understanding their proper contributions to philosophy, according to Renouvier, requires us to view their developments of philosophy in precisely that order. In this chapter, I shall argue that, although Renouvier’s aim to present France as the “mother of all philosophies” in this Manuel is clearly motivated by nationalism, these great German men do have a significant and unique influence on the development of his early thought. There are fundamental differences between Renouvier’s system first sketched in 1842 and his mature system presented in his Essais de critique générale (the first volume of which was published in 1854). Perhaps most crucially, by that point he has lost the nationalist impulse and the key starting point

J. Dunham (*) University of Durham, Durham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Chepurin et al. (eds.), Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 247, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39326-6_10

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of philosophy is no longer Descartes, but Kant. However, this movement through post-Kantian philosophy back to Leibniz remains central and a study of this influence sheds light on both eras of his philosophical thought. In §I of this chapter, I present the context of Renouvier’s 1842 Manuel. In §§2–3, I discuss the philosophical methodology that he develops in this work. In §II, I discuss his method of “belief” and argue that it is developed through his engagement with Fichte, and, in §III, I explain his defence of the “reconciliation of opposites” and show its debt to Hegel. In §IV, I show how he develops, by means of this new methodology influenced by Fichte and Hegel, a new eclectic philosophy that differs in important ways from the eclecticism of Victor Cousin. The final result of this new eclecticism is a new realist version of Leibniz’s monadology. In §V, I conclude that although Renouvier would claim to turn his back on his early Hegelianism because of his rejection of “philosophies of the infinite”, this rejection in fact only reinforces the Fichtean and Hegelian influence.

10.1  Who was Charles Renouvier? Charles Renouvier (1815–1903) is one of nineteenth-century French philosophy’s most prolific and influential thinkers. Despite that, few philosophers—or even historians of nineteenth-century philosophy—have even heard of him, let alone read his work. Of course, as this volume aims to rectify, nineteenth-century French philosophy is something of a void in most philosophers’ knowledge anyway, but Renouvier is perhaps even more unknown than many of his contemporaries due to the fact that he spent most of his life working on the fringes of the tradition. Renouvier was firmly opposed to Cousin’s school of philosophy and to spiritualism more broadly. Therefore, he spent most of the 1850s developing his philosophy in isolation. However, in 1867, the year of Cousin’s death, Félix Ravaisson brought Renouvier’s works to attention in his widely read Rapport sur la philosophie en France au XIXème siècle. Perhaps most crucially, this Rapport brought Renouvier’s work to the attention of a young William James and it would have a huge impact on the American philosopher and psychologist’s work. In fact, there is an argument to be made that James’s 1896 article “The Will to Believe”, perhaps American philosophy’s single most famous article, is at its core a popularisation of Renouvier’s philosophy and is only properly understood within that context.1 Psychology and philosophy weren’t the only fields on which Renouvier’s work had a significant influence. Émile Durkheim’s Les Règles de la méthode sociologique owes a great deal to the method set out in the first of Renouvier’s Essais de critique générale (see Stedman Jones 1995). So, even though Renouvier spent many years outside of the traditional academy, his career didn’t end that way. In fact, one of his

 I make this argument in Dunham (2015a).

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very last works, his La nouvelle Monadologie, co-written with Louis Prat, received an Académie des sciences morales et politiques prize (Gunn 1932: 52). His career in philosophy didn’t begin that way either. It began with an entry to a competition announced by the same Academie on the subject of “Cartesianism”. The competition was looking for entries that would discuss the character of Descartes’s revolution, the consequent developments of his philosophy, and, in particular, Leibniz’s role in this development (Foucher 1927: 35). In 1840, he submitted his 340-page entry and, although he didn’t win, he received a mention honorable, and the work would form the foundation of his first major publication in philosophy—and the main focus of this chapter—his 1842 Manuel de philosophie moderne. As Louis Foucher (1927: 43) has noted, Renouvier’s Manuel is not a textbook on early modern philosophy or even a straightforward historical analysis of philosophy from Descartes to Leibniz. Rather, it is an attempt to identify the philosophical truths that we can discover through a close examination of this history. It is for this reason that the book is split into two sections, “History” and “Doctrine”, and that in the latter section Renouvier is happy to abandon strict chronology and argue that the philosophical system that best represents the truth is Leibniz’s monadology. Yet, this monadology must be reformulated and redefended in a new way that requires a methodology developed by means of a journey through the work of Fichte and Hegel.

10.2  Renouvier’s Fichte Renouvier opens the “Doctrine” section of the Manuel with two chapters on philosophical method. These were not part of his original academy prize entry manuscript. It is in them that we find the clear influence of Fichte and Hegel. The first chapter is called “The Foundation of Knowledge” and is heavily influenced by Fichte. The second is called “The Principle of Contradiction” and shows how important the first movement of Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik was to the development of the young Renouvier’s thought. Renouvier did not know German well, so he relied on translations into French. The Fichte he knew came from Barchou de Penhoen’s translation of Fichte’s Die Bestimmung des Menschen,2 published in France in 1832 as Destination de l’homme. This was Fichte’s attempt to write a popular text akin to Descartes’s Meditations. It starts from common experience and the necessity to doubt what we think we know in order to critically examine such knowledge. As several commentators have noted, although the Bestimmung is a popular work and, on the one hand, the easiest of Fichte’s texts to read, it is, on the other, one of the most difficult to interpret (see Radrizzani 2002: 318; Breazale 2013b: 17). However, we need not worry too much about current debates concerning the most accurate interpretation for this chapter,  The title has been translated into English as both Destination of Man and, more recently, Vocation of Man. This highlights the fact that Bestimmung has multiple meanings including both ‘purpose’ or ‘end goal’ and ‘distinctive character’ or ‘calling’. 2

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because Renouvier would not have been worried about that. For the Renouvier of the Manuel, it was a source of philosophical inspiration alone; useful insofar as it guides us towards philosophical truth.3 You can see the influence of this text on Renouvier jump from the page from very early on in the Manuel de philosophie moderne’s section on “Doctrine”. In principle, the section starts with Descartes and his success in showing that the method of philosophy cannot but start with just the theatre of our own phenomena. However, as soon as the discussion gets into any technical detail, it immediately shifts to Fichte’s philosophy as presented in the Bestimmung. Fichte’s work begins, like Descartes’s Meditations, with the acknowledgement that it is important to start to doubt our knowledge in order to make sure that it stands on a firm foundation. It then moves on, in a section called “Knowledge”, to a dialogue between the I and Spirit, where the latter convinces the I of the purely subjective origin of its knowledge. For Renouvier, the explicit avowal that we must start from the subject is evidence of the German tradition’s debt to Descartes.4 Whether or not Renouvier is right to see Descartes as the father of the tradition Fichte is part of, it is clear that in the Bestimmung Fichte’s “Spirit” is starting from Kant. Spirit begins the dialogue by convincing the I of the analytic unity of apperception, i.e., that any conscious representation, or subjective determination, must also be accompanied by the “I think”. I am not conscious of something unless I know that I am conscious of it. My self-consciousness is a necessary condition for me to be conscious of any subjective determination, such as a felt sensation. Then, Spirit makes the I admit that the sensations I have of an object, such as a chair, and that it is red, hard, or whatever, do not put us in direct contact with such an object but rather exist merely within ourselves. The representation that I have is merely a subjective determination of which I am conscious. So, can we legitimately infer from such sensations to the existence of an external world? Spirit asks the I to consider what they are doing when they touch a surface. The I assumes that when they rub their hand across a surface, they are experiencing lots of different adjacent points on that surface. However, Spirit argues that the I has no reason to infer that these sensations are of adjacent points at all. Rather, since the experience of these points always happens merely within the I, it could just as easily be the case that the I is experiencing the same mathematical point over and over again successively and it is the same mathematical point that is changing. So why assume that we are really  Renouvier tries to present an accurate philosophical presentation of Fichte’s philosophy in a later 1843 encyclopaedia entry on Fichte. This relies on the aforementioned translation of the Bestimmumg and a translation of the Wissenschaftslehre by Paul Grimblot that appeared the year after Renouvier’s Manuel (see Fichte 1843). 4  In his article on Fichte in the Encylopédie nouvelle, he denies that this story of the history of philosophy emerges due to a nationalist impulse: “The German school is the very legitimate daughter of the great French school of the seventeenth century. And it is not that we obey the impulsion from a false national amour-propre; but the history of the philosophy and of ideas, which has no homeland, obliges us to glorify a man of our language and our name [Descartes], who displayed three centuries ago a subtle and powerful comprehension of the truth that we still profess” (1843: 202). 3

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in contact with an external world at all? Because something must cause this change in sensation? But even this principle of causality assumes knowledge of something with which we can never have direct empirical contact. Even to assume that we require an external cause for the changes in our sensations is to go beyond what is strictly revealed by the phenomena. Finally, Spirit convinces the I that: [A]ll knowledge is only knowledge of yourself, that your consciousness never goes beyond yourself, and that what you take to be a consciousness of the object is nothing but a consciousness of your positing of an object which, in accordance with an inner law of your thought, you necessarily engage in together with sensation (1987: 45).

This passage is interesting because of how strictly Renouvier sticks to it, not only in the philosophy of the Manuel, but also in his whole philosophical career. In the Manuel he is clear that the primitive fact, the starting point of knowledge, is the I in relation to an object. This I is “something that is and is posited, and that plays a double role: that of not being you, and yet being in you, before you” (1842: 369–340). In Renouvier’s mature work, starting with his 1854 first Essai, it is precisely the view of phenomena sketched here that Renouvier defends and that he claims distances his view from the more basic empiricism of philosophers like Comte and Hume. For Renouvier, phenomenism is interested in both what is revealed by an individual phenomenon, but also in the inner laws of the mind that relate phenomena to phenomena. Much of Renouvier’s first essay is a deduction and exposition of such laws. Nonetheless, perhaps the most crucial influence of Fichte on Renouvier is neither this account of scepticism nor phenomenism, but rather the route to a form of realism that we find in the final section of the Bestimmung des Menschen on “Glaube”. The German word Glaube can be translated into English as either ‘faith’ or ‘belief’ and in the Kantian context in which it appears in the Bestimmung it clearly has connotations of both. However, English translators of the text have chosen to go with ‘faith’, while French translators have gone with ‘croyance’, which would be translated into English as ‘belief’. The influence of Fichte’s philosophy on Renouvier is, I think, an interesting instance of the effect translations and the particular choices that translators make can have on the development of philosophy. The crucial passage from the French translation reads as follows5: C’est la croyance qui, donnant aux choses la réalité, les empêche de n’être que dévalués illusions; elle est la sanction de la science. Peut-être pourrait-on même dire qu’à proprement parler il n’y a réellement pas de science, mais seulement certaines déterminations de la volonté qui se donnent pour la science, parce que la croyance les constitue telles. (1836: 228).6

 We get further evidence that this passage was important for Renouvier in his article on Fichte where he cites it in full—see (1843: 294). 6  This is quite a free but not totally unfaithful translation of the original German, which reads: “Der Glaube ist es; dieses freiwillige Beruhen bei der sich uns natürlich darbietenden Ansicht, weil wir nur bei dieser Ansicht unsere Bestimmung erfüllen können; er ist es, der dem Wissen erst Beifall gibt, und das, was ohne ihn bloße Täuschung sein Könnte, zur Gewissheit, und Überzeugung erhebt. Er ist kein Wissen, sondern ein Entschluss des Willens, das Wissen gelten zu lassen” 5

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Here is my attempt to translate this French translation as literally as possible into English: Belief gives reality to things and prevents them from being reduced to illusions; it is the approval of knowledge. Perhaps it could even be said that strictly speaking there really is no knowledge, but only certain decisions of the will that are presented as knowledge, because they are constituted as such by belief.

In the context of Fichte’s Bestimmung, this passage occurs after the I has decided that the only way to escape idealism is to have faith in our own practical power. Fichte’s I chooses to have faith that it can act in a purposeful way and cause real beneficial change in the world. Unless the I has faith in such action, it believes that its “life will be purged of all seriousness and interest… it will be transformed, just like my thought, into a mere game which comes from nowhere and goes nowhere” (1987: 71). In Renouvier’s view, the problem with Fichte’s philosophy is that he limited this doctrine of faith to practical matters alone, to rights, obligations, and the existence of other minds (1842: 409).7 In fact, the argument from belief should be used for the basis of theoretical knowledge. It is true that scepticism in science is irrefutable, but nonetheless in order to avoid the way of despair we must choose to believe. Renouvier takes the passage above very seriously. Let’s take it step by step. [i] “Belief gives reality to things and prevents them from being reduced to illusions”. By means of belief, idealism becomes realism, we choose to take our ideas as reality rather than illusions. [ii] “It is the approval of knowledge”. By means of belief, we avoid scepticism and take knowledge seriously. [iii] “Perhaps it could even be said that strictly speaking there really is no knowledge, but only certain decisions of the will that are presented as knowledge, because they are constituted as such by belief”. Ultimately, idealism, “the only true philosophy”, Renouvier claims, is “fertilized at its base by belief”. We can have knowledge, but only from the perspective of idealism, and that perspective entails that we start from choosing to believe that our ideas represent reality. It is, as is clearer in the German, “a decision of the will to accept knowledge”.

(Fichte 1979: 89–90). I translate that, as literally as I can, as follows: “It is faith; this voluntary settling down on the view that naturally presents itself to us, because only with this view can we fulfil our destiny; it is this faith that first gives approval to knowledge, and raises to certainty and conviction that which could be mere deception without it. It is not knowledge, but a decision of the will to accept knowledge”. 7  Renouvier likely underestimated the scope of Fichte’s argument. As Daniel Breazeale (2013b) has shown, Fichte’s argument from belief acting as the basis for a quasi-transcendental argument that then showed that we needed also to believe in a series of things that would make practical action possible. This includes the reality of the sensible and supersensible worlds (2013b: 218). Nonetheless, Günter Zöller has argued that we should be very careful about how seriously we take Fichte’s use of this argument in the Bestimmung. “The concept of faith/belief [Glauben] thus only comes to the fore with Fichte in a very specific context and at no time advances to a basic concept of the WL [Wissenschaftslehre] as such. Rather it functions in the metaphysical, propaedeutic and popular philosophical environment of the WL, as well as in its application to the field of religion. At no time did Fichte think of developing transcendental philosophy as a doctrine of faith/belief [Glauben]” (1998: 36).

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For Renouvier, to understand the method of belief in action, we only need to look at the history of modern philosophy. We will then see that Fichte provides the key, Renouvier argues, for a proper understanding of Descartes. In the Fourth Set of Objections to Descartes’s Meditations, Antoine Arnauld asked if Descartes was guilty of reasoning in a circle. He seemed to claim that we can be certain a good God exists because we have a clear and distinct idea of him, yet we can only be sure that whatever we have a clear and distinct idea of is true if we already believe in the existence of a good God (CSM II 150/AT VII 214). Renouvier’s rather heterodox response to this is to claim that what Descartes in fact shows is that there are certain ideas in which we must simply have faith, i.e., choose to believe, in order to begin to develop science. Starting from reflection on our own thought—the proof of which is established through cogito ergo sum—we must then have faith in the ideas contained within it insofar as they are intelligible (1842: 401. Cf. 1885: 359–362). The ideas included within thought from which we must begin in faith include the idea of God, the idea of causality and the idea of a rationally ordered world. Descartes is not guilty of reasoning in a circle, therefore, but rather he starts from faith. Only by means of this faith do we step over the gap between idealism and realism and in this way Fichte’s version of Descartes’s Meditations provides the key to interpret the original. Although the 1842 Manuel provides only an initial sketch of an argument for belief, Renouvier never strays from it. He regards it as a fundamental part of his philosophical methodology for his entire career. This sketch, therefore, provides the basis for the much more detailed and worked out version that is established in his later 1859 Traité de psychologie rationnelle d’après les principes du criticisme.8

10.3  Renouvier’s Hegel The second chapter on method in Renouvier’s Manuel is entitled “Of the Principle of Contradiction”. It is at this point that Renouvier moves from Fichte to Hegel. Again, I doubt that Renouvier could be regarded in any sense a reliable scholar of Hegel’s philosophy. Nonetheless, I shall show that, even though he doesn’t explicitly refer to Hegel at this point in the Manuel, it is obvious that he had some knowledge (whether first- or second-hand) of at least the opening sections of his Wissenschaft der Logik and that they exerted a clear influence on his early philosophy.9 Furthermore, contrary to the existing scholarship on Renouvier, I shall argue that the same aspects of Hegel had a lasting influence on his mature system. The Wissenschaft der Logik is an attempt to deduce the basic and most general categories of our thought. Kant had attempted to provide a metaphysical deduction  On this later version of the argument from belief and William James’s debt to it, see Dunham (2015a). 9  Renouvier does state that he was under the influence of Hegel at this time in a later work—see (1885: 368). 8

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of exactly these forms of thought in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. In that deduction, Kant claimed that the “guiding thread” or “clue” for our deduction of the categories is the table of judgments. Hegel is not satisfied with the list of categories that Kant derives from this table for two reasons. Firstly, because he believes that Kant simply takes the forms of judgement that he finds in formal logic without showing their necessity, i.e., Kant has not done enough to convince us that we should accept the table of judgments. Secondly, because Kant has not fully shown that judgment is the basic activity of thought (see Houlgate 2006: 15). In contrast to Kant, Hegel attempted to derive the basic categories of thought without any prior presuppositions. But what do we get if we try to think thought without any prior presuppositions? Hegel’s answer is: “Being, pure being” (2010: 59), sheer indeterminate immediacy. All we get is “is”. However, if this pure being is sheer indeterminate immediacy that means that it is entirely empty, it has no content. It means that “the indeterminate immediate is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing” (2010: 59). When thought reflects on itself thinking and attempts to think the completely “indeterminate, simple immediate” (1991: 136), the first result is being. However, it cannot stop there. It’s immediately forced, by the necessity of its own nature, from being to nothingness. This is because when it tries to get a grip of being as a concept, there’s nothing there. No content. However, this nothingness is nothingness and insofar as this immediate nothingness is, it is indistinguishable from indeterminate immediate being. When we try to grasp nothingness, we go back to pure being, and when we try to grasp pure being, we return to nothingness again. Whenever we try to think one, we generate the other and the endless back and forth is inescapable. The result of this is the discovery of the first real concrete concept, i.e. the first truth, in the Wissenschaft der Logik: becoming. Being and nothingness have their reality not as self-subsistent, but as “vanishing moments”. This is because being and nothing cannot be thought in isolation. They must be thought together and this thinking them together leads us to becoming. Unlike being and nothing, Becoming is a determinate concept with contents (being and nothing). It is the concrete living unity of being and nothing. Renouvier does not follow Hegel’s method exactly; yet, it is clear enough that his reasoning follows the general pattern of his thought. Renouvier starts by objecting to theories that attempt to explain non-being in terms of deprivation. According to this theory, non-being is a kind of deprivation of being or imperfection (in contrast to perfection). So, the human being is finite or imperfect (in contrast to God). However, Renouvier, argues even this idea of deprivation or imperfection already requires an idea of non-being. “How could he know that he was finite, imperfect, dependent if he did not have the faculty to deny being and to think of non-being?” (1842: 380). Renouvier claims that as the basis of affirmation, being must be our first idea, but “not-being arrives immediately”. We cannot think being without thinking non-being. Like Hegel, Renouvier understands being and not-being as the content of becoming. The movement back and forth between being and nothing is the basis of all action, movement, and change, such that Renouvier is able to say that “Nothingness is the essence of life: without it we would not live… let us therefore rise up and bless God, who from being and nothingness, has made the magnificent

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developments of life”. Furthermore, he tells us that, “contradiction is the essence of thought, and if we could not contradict and deny, we would not think” (1842: 381). Once we understand that becoming and the principle of opposites (becoming as the unity of being and nothing) is the very foundation of thought, we see the shallowness of traditional logic. The importance of the shift from classical logic to the new (Hegelian) logic is that it suggests to Renouvier what he calls the principle of “the reconciliation of opposites” (1842: 388). This allows apparently contradictory propositions to be reconciled in a higher synthesis—just as being and nothing are reconciled in becoming. The necessity for such a logic emerges, Renouvier argues, before Hegel, in Descartes’s philosophy. This is because Descartes proves the truth of several opposites in his philosophy. He proves, on the one hand, that we have free will to choose in accordance with our knowledge and, on the other, that God is the prescient cause of all thought and motion. He proves that there are multiple real finite substances, one the one hand, but that all is one given the existence of an infinite God, on the other.

10.4  Renouvier’s Monadology Although Renouvier will later be keen to distance himself from Victor Cousin’s school of eclecticism, in the Manuel he cheerfully refers to himself as an adherent of eclecticism (1842: 411–413). He was, at this time, he later reflected, a “naïve” disciple (1885: 369). What we see in this reconciliation of opposites in Descartes’s and Hegel’s logic is, according to Renouvier, the foundation for eclecticism. Victor Cousin summed up the principle of eclecticism as that “which judging with equity, and even with benevolence, all schools, borrows from them what they possess of the true, and neglects what in them is false” (1854: 33). On its own this statement risks sounding as sensible as it is trite. What is crucial to eclecticism is the method by which the process proceeds. Cousin’s method of eclecticism proceeded according to the analysis of experience or what he also calls the “psychological” method. He was thus not averse to writing off certain contrary methodological approaches as downright false. Of Spinoza’s “geometrical” method, he said, “no one has made less use of the psychological method”, and so, “this is the principle and the condemnation of his system” (1854: 28). The method that Renouvier has developed through Fichte and Hegel is a revised version of Cousin’s psychological method, which, as it does for Cousin, has its roots in Descartes’s philosophy. The key difference, however, is that while Cousin believed that the psychological method put us into direct contact with certain indubitable truths, Renouvier insisted that we can never beat the sceptic, but must always start from the foundation of belief. The Renouvier of 1842 claimed that he was living in a “profoundly eclectic century”. Eclecticism’s work was not over. It was just beginning. The methodological principles that Renouvier finds made explicit in Fichte and Hegel, but which, he argues, were already implicit in Descartes, are the foundation for eclecticism proper.

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Most crucially, by using these methodological principles as our launchpad, we are able to defend and correct the system of Leibniz who was a “great eclectic, in the noblest sense of this word” (1842: 419). While other disciples of the Cartesian philosophy had pushed too far either in the direction of idealism (Malebranche and Fichte) or materialism (Spinoza and Schelling), “thanks to the monads”, Leibniz was able “to give the most complete notion of the universe that has ever been proposed” (1842: 419).10 Why did Renouvier think this? As we have seen, he believed that eclecticism is a reconciliatory philosophy. It brings together opposites into a unified single conception of being. The monad, he claimed, was the only true philosophical conception of being as a unity. As Leibniz states in a famous passage from a letter to Arnauld from 30th April 1687, “I hold as axiomatic the identical proposition which varies only in emphasis: that which is not truly one being is not truly one being either” (1967: 97).11 As Foucher has pointed out, the importance of this link between being and unity is that Leibniz sees this indivisible unity as an activity. It is unified being as becoming. Furthermore, the monad—as unified and active—is a conception of being that is suitable for God, the self, and all of the rest of God’s creations. It supports an understanding of God as ‘active and almighty’ and the ultimate support and creator of an infinity of beings that operate in universal harmony. However, he has created the monads so that they execute all of their actions freely in accordance with this harmony: Every being is a monad… The monads are in relation with each other and in a state of mutual dependence; these relations are the basis of compounds, and these compounds form an indefinite scale from the infinitely small up to the infinite. Each of them is in solidarity with every other… God… is at once the sum of the monads and the central monad, cause, nature and end of all the monads. (Renouvier 1842: 421).

As Renouvier sees it, the most major adjustment required by the Leibnizian system concerns the reality of extended matter. Every monad, he says, “is endowed with perception, extension, and force” (1842: 421). In many of Leibniz’s writings, he appears to reduce matter to appearance. In a famous passage, he writes: “[I]t is not necessary to say that matter is nothing, but it is sufficient to say that it is a phenomenon, like the rainbow” (AG 307). The rainbow analogy is crucial because as an appearance it is an appearance of something, but that something is indivisible immaterial monads rather than anything actually extended in a physical world.12 However,

 The attempt to “correct” Leibniz’s metaphysics by starting from a new methodological foundation was a surprisingly common feature of nineteenth-century French philosophy. See Dunham (2015b) and (2016). 11  Contemporary Leibniz scholars will no doubt be rather shocked to see a passage from 1687 used to described Leibniz’s understanding of the ‘monad’—a concept that he did not introduce until many years later. However, Renouvier was not privy to the ‘genetic’ turn in Leibniz studies spearheaded by Michel Fichant and Daniel Garber. He treats Leibniz’s philosophical corpus as providing a unified philosophy. 12  Although this is in line with the most common readings of Leibniz, there are some impressive scholarly works that argue that Leibniz does not deny the existence of real physical bodies. See Phemister (2005) and Smith (2011). 10

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Renouvier objects to this for several reasons. First, extension is of such a radically different nature to thought that it “does not seem to be any more containable in thought than the thought in it” (1842: 420). As a metaphysical argument this claim should hold very little sway. Leibniz does not claim that extended bodies exist in thought, he claims that what we believe to be extended bodies are in fact merely a phenomenon grounded by immaterial substances. However, Renouvier’s stronger objections rest on his eclectic and Fichtean methodology. As we have seen, Renouvier’s eclecticism is supposed to reconcile opposites, and here it is an attempt to reconcile materialism and idealism. Leibniz denied the existence of extended matter, Renouvier claims, as an attempt to distance himself from Spinoza. However, eclecticism takes what is true from both positions. Here, it is the real reality of individuals (from Leibniz) and the existence of an extended world (from Spinoza). Finally, the Fichtean foundation of this defence follows from the will to believe in an external world. Our ideas seem to represent to us the existence of an external physical world. Of course, we can introduce all sorts of sceptical scenarios, but to advance in our scientific inquiries, we must bracket such concerns and resist doubting our faith that our ideas can represent reality (see 1885: 364). Renouvier’s faith in the extended world allowed him to develop a philosophy of nature that didn’t exclude life and mind. He wrote that “in this way, we give Descartes’s dead extension the life that Spinoza asked for it” (1842: 437). The influence of Leibniz’s 1714 Monadology is especially clear here. Leibniz claimed that “it is evident that there is a world of created beings—living things, animals, entelechies, and souls—in the least part of matter” (1973: 190; §66). Furthermore, “[e]ach part of matter may be conceived as a garden full of plants” but in which every plant “is itself likewise a similar garden” (1973: 190; §67). In agreement, Renouvier claims that animals are constituted by sets of monads, which form their organs, and “each organ is an animal whose parts themselves are animals whose own organs eventually escape us, and this kind of vital decomposition goes on to infinity” (1842: 25). Nevertheless, while animals are composed of monads, the laws that define their interactions as extended beings can be explained “through the mechanism of Descartes” and his hypothesis of endless circulation. Yet, instead of proposing inertia of God’s continuous re-creation, motion itself is the product of the pre-­established harmony of active monads.

10.5  The Development of Renouvier’s Mature Philosophy Renouvier’s sketch of a philosophy of nature earned him the attention of the French Schellingian Charles Secrétan (1815–1895). In one of the only reviews of the Manuel, Secrétan praised the “sketch” of a philosophy of nature as being worthy of “great merit”. He claims that Renouvier’s presentation of a Hegelian reconciliation of opposites could, if studied attentively, lead to a great step forward in the methodology of French philosophy (Foucher 1927: 84–87). However, Renouvier would soon come to revise his view of the reconciliation of opposites. There are several

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contributing reasons why. First, he had become more interested in Auguste Comte’s work and wanted to develop a philosophy that would act as a foundation for science. Second, he became increasingly more knowledgeable of Kant’s philosophy and was especially taken by the importance of the antinomies. However, the most important reason is that he became increasingly certain that an actual numerical infinite involves a contradiction. He believed that it is opposed to the principle of number: all things must be numerable.13 He later reflected that: The progress of the method of union of the contradictories had not yet gone so far as to allow those practicing it to believe that number, the only possible definition of which implies the inexhaustible, is nevertheless exhausted by an act of the same understanding that defined it, and that the numbering of the innumerable is a numbering done. (1885: 372).

There cannot be an “actual numerical infinite” because for any actual number there is always a greater number. If infinity were an actual number, therefore, there would be another number greater than it. As he writes in his First Essay, “infinity in number means a greater number than any de facto assignable number, a number that is not determinable, a number that is not determinate in itself, a number that is not a number, so that the thesis he [the defender of the ‘actual numerical infinite’] adopts is contradictory, even in its own terms” (1854: 24). Armed with the ‘principle of number’, Renouvier believed that philosophical hypotheses that involved postulating the infinite could be dismissed out of hand.14 Take, for example, the question of whether the universe had a beginning. To suppose that it did not would mean the postulation of an actual infinite—a number without a number—which is, he claims, absurd. “Eternity, properly speaking”, Renouvier writes, “which is only the actual infinite preferred in past times, is contradictory in itself” (1885: 377). Furthermore, a conception of God as an eternal being is the underpinning of most pantheist and early modern philosophies, and yet, for the same reasons, it cannot be defended. This meant that in one stroke many of the opposites Renouvier’s early method aimed to reconcile were eliminated from the logical space of possibility. Any form of metaphysics that was grounded on an infinite and eternal One had to be rejected in favour of those that started from the finite  In his Third Essay from 1864, he claimed a precursor in the mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789–1857). Apparently l’abbé Moigno (who would publish Cauchy’s lectures in 1868) had shown him a draft manuscript of a lecture from 1833. See Renouvier (1892: 28, fn.2) and Foucher (1927: 187). 14  Renouvier’s ‘principle of number’ did not gain approval from many otherwise sympathetic readers. Speaking of Renouvier and his co-author Louis Pratt, C.S. Peirce wrote: 13

They parade a pretended demonstration that a contradiction is involved in supposing a substance to be infinitely divisible, or, what is precisely the same thing (though they do not so treat it), in supposing an infinite multitude of substances. We will not stop to point out the glaring fallacy of that “demonstration”. Modern logic enables us to show that it is absurd to say there is a contradiction in supposing an infinite multitude of substances. There is certainly an infinite multitude of finite whole numbers. True, these are only possibilities, not substances. But according to the principle of haecceity, admitted by the authors, mere substantial existence is no general character and cannot create a contradiction. In other words, what is possibly possible is possibly actual. (1899: 98)

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Many. To Hegel, whose Absolute, Renouvier believed, was the philosophy of the reconciliation of the one and many par excellence, he asked: “how can we avoid this dilemma: Either the numerical whole of phenomena is determinate, or it is not; either the given things form a number or do not form a number?” (1854: 412). Renouvier’s principle of number is perhaps the most controversial, and perhaps even the weakest, part of his work. Fortunately, his mature system did not entirely rest on it. But the principle did, however, eliminate a whole host of possibilities from his mind and this elimination persuaded him to focus on what is revealed to us through experience and to not go beyond that which is revealed to us through experience. We might be tempted to think that, after Renouvier’s shift towards a philosophy of finitude, the Hegelian influence counted for naught in his mature system. Most scholars of Renouvier suggest that the period where he was “Hegelian, pantheist, [and] sacrificed the logic of the schools” was relatively brief (Séailles 1905: 13. Cf. Dumas 1971: 33), if they in fact accept that Hegel truly influenced his work at this period at all (see Hamelin 1927: 9). Certainly, there are plenty anti-Hegelian statements in his later works to choose from. Hegel comes to stand for all of the positions to which Renouvier is opposed (regardless of whether or not Hegel actually held the position opposed at all): the actual infinite, monism, pantheism, substance realism, and the rejection of the principle of non-contradiction (see Dumas 1971). In the introduction of the first (1854) volume of his magnum opus, the Essais de critique générale, called Analyse générale de la connaissance, he professes to continue Kant’s project in France since it has been led astray in Germany. Yet despite all of this, there are some pronounced parallels with Hegel’s project in the Wissenschaft der Logik in this work. Significantly, Renouvier’s aim is to provide an account of the fundamental categories of thought and being in such a way that logic turns out to be metaphysics; and, furthermore, the shape of his deduction contains some of the same parallels to, and echoes of, the opening of the Wissenschaft der Logik that we found in his Manuel. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a full explanation of Renouvier’s understanding of the categories. However, I will briefly outline its Hegelian characteristics. The first echo of the Wissenschaft der Logik is seen in the first category that Renouvier deduces: relation. He argues that relation is the master category—the genus of which every other category is a species. Although he doesn’t explicitly refer to the influence of Fichte in his mature work, his presentation of his categorial a priori starts from one of the key lessons learned from him in the Manuel. This is, as the Spirit convinces the I, that all our knowledge starts from our phenomena in accordance with the mind’s inner laws. The categories are these laws, the “first and irreducible laws of knowledge” that “make experience possible” (1854: 99–100). Renouvier argues that by starting at “relation” he is essentially starting at what is more vulgarly called “being” (1854: 68). This is because if we attempt to think being without relation—and here is the first echo of the Wissenschaft der Logik— then we are in a pure state of indeterminacy. “It has”, Renouvier says, “nothing left to distinguish it from the idea of nothingness” (1854: 38). We can say nothing of qualities, quantities, modes, or forces except by means of relations. Kant’s main

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error, he claims, is that he failed to see that relation is the common form of all judgments and thus should be regarded as the principal category. The Hegelian echo turns into a parallel at the point where Renouvier explains the content of each category is a certain reconciliation of opposites. The category of relation is a synthesis, which he calls “determination”, of two opposing terms: “identification” and “distinction” (1854: 104–5). This is because the determination of a given object is, on the one hand, the unification of all the related phenomena that make up the particular object, and, on the other, the distinction of these related phenomena from those unrelated phenomena that surround it. So, for example, when I identify a tree before me, I relate all of its parts (its branches, trunk, and leaves) together as one single entity, whilst distinguishing it from the sky, the earth, and the rest of the woods. We can only identify by distinguishing (identification and distinction cannot be performed in separation). Therefore, a relation, Renouvier claims, is “a synthesis of other and the same” (1854: 107). Subordinate to the category of relation, there are eight further categories. Four of them  are static (Number, Position, Succession, and Quality) whilst the rest are dynamic (Becoming, Causality, Finality, and Personality). The continued influence of Hegel’s logic on Renouvier is at its clearest for the category of becoming. Again, this category is a synthesis (a reconciliation of opposites), which he calls “change”, of “relation” and “non-relation”. When we keep in mind the fact that Renouvier regards “being” as merely the vulgar name for “relation”, it’s clear that he’s sticking as closely to Hegel here as he was in his Manuel. He writes that “we must define it [the category of becoming] as a synthesis of the same and other than itself or of being and non-being, remembering that being is the sign assigned to any mention of any given relation. The itself here marks all the phenomena that are modified by becoming” (1854: 202). However, one crucial difference is that the Renouvier of 1854 has undergone an about-face regarding the principle of non-contradiction. “The principle that prohibits contradiction”, he tells us, “has the virtue of being impossible to oppose without being presupposed” (1854: 112). This means, he infers, that strictly speaking what is is and does not change. As I move from place a to place b, there is no point at which I am both in place a and place b, but rather Jeremy at place a is replaced by Jeremy at place b. Each moment has a determinate duration which is so immensely small that they are not separated in experience. Becoming is a synthesis of these two determinations. Similarly, Renouvier thinks that he escapes the violation of the principle of non-contradiction in the primary category of relation because, although it is a synthesis of same and other, it uses these terms in different respects. However, this merely shows that he is not as far from Hegel as he thinks. When Renouvier says that we can’t identify without distinguishing, and thus are led to determination as the synthesis of both, or when he shows that we can’t think of relation without non-relation, and thus are led to becoming, he is merely emphasising the same point as Hegel. Even though he would not want to borrow Hegel’s terminology, he is proving that each category must be a living unity with determinate contents. When he calls the unity of identity and distinction determination, he, in fact, gets Hegel exactly right. With the category of relation, we have a determination because we have the living unity of same and

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other. They cannot be thought except in relation to each other. So, without that unity, there is nothing determinate. For all Renouvier’s talk of categories, however, he tries to walk a rather uneasy tightrope between the empirical and the transcendental (see Verneaux 1945: 124). Rather than committing himself to the claim that by means of the categories we have thought in an immanent relation with its own necessary forms (or, indeed, in immanent relation with itself such that the act of thinking and the act of understanding are the same act), he argues that we can only become aware of these forms as phenomena. The categories are general phenomena or the most general laws of phenomena. Renouvier has an awkward picture of experience where our thought is external to itself. It verifies its own acts of thinking second-hand, so to speak, through phenomena. Consequently he denies that there can be a strict a priori deduction in the sense of Kant or Hegel. If we want to know whether a philosopher’s categorial system is “a painting of the human mind or the product of an individual fantasy”, we should “let the judge investigate, deliberate, pronounce. Every man is a judge, every well-documented fact is a judge. General truths are not proven: they are verified” (1854: 380). This suggests that his presentation of the laws of the mind is closer to Hume’s presentation of the laws of association than the attempt to show the necessity of the categorical system that we find in Kant and Hegel. We are only in touch with these laws through their particular instances, and thus make an inductive inference to their universality. For Hegel, this is just a mistake. In thinking, we understand the nature of thought and we cannot think except in accordance with its universal nature. This is the universal nature that is the form of its particularity. Because there is this direct inner relation between what is thought and the act of thought, as Sebastian Rödl points out, there is no denying what is known in thought, such that what is known in thought must be necessary and indubitable. “She who pretends to deny it therein pretends to think… and pretending to think is knowing what it is to think and thus knowing what one pretends to deny” (2018: 4). For Renouvier, on the other hand, even the acceptance of the categories is a belief. It depends on an act of faith. Despite this crucial difference, Renouvier and Hegel end up agreeing on another key point regarding the categories. This is that the logic of thought is the logic of being, i.e. the same categories that determine our thought determine the world. As Hegel puts it “the true objectivity of thinking consists in this: that thoughts are not merely our thoughts, but at the same time the In-itself of things and of whatever else is objective” (1991: 83). However, for Hegel then, because of the internal relation between thought and the categories, it follows that there is also an internal relation between thought and the categories of being. It must do since they are the same categories. Therefore, there is no denying what metaphysics says, just because there is no denying what thought says. The categories of being are necessary and indubitable. Yet, since for Renouvier, the categories are only known inferentially through their particular instances, we do not have this same necessity. As Verneaux puts it, we have “a kind of conviction that the categories will always be verified by experience” (1945: 120). The possibility of doubt for Renouvier still stands and this means that he must base his philosophy on the doctrine of belief drawn from Fichte. We

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choose to believe that these categories will always be verified by experience. Furthermore, Renouvier argues that since such categories determine the way we think, we can only know the world by means of them. Therefore, the possibility of real knowledge of the external world depends on the assumption that they hold not only for our thought, but for being in general. The possibility of science depends on us making the choice to believe in this assumption. Renouvier says that to make this choice is to place oneself at “the point of view of knowledge” as opposed to the “point of view without knowledge” (1854: 14). It is to believe in the possibility of knowledge in the face of scepticism. Renouvier’s mature methodology, therefore, ends up still looking very much like a strange mishmash of the Hegelian, Fichtean, and Kantian philosophies. If Renouvier is able to distance himself from Hegel, he only does so by means of the doctrine of belief that he took from Fichte’s Bestimmung.

10.6 Conclusion In this chapter, I have shown that the methodology Renouvier developed in his 1842 Manuel de philosophie moderne should be understood through his engagement with Fichte and Hegel. Contrary to the existing scholarship on Renouvier, and some of his own statements, I have argued that the influence of these German idealists did not fade in his mature work. Rather it remains strong in the very foundations of the philosophical structure developed in his Essais de critique générale. The influence of Hegel is clear in the way that Renouvier arranges his system of categories in the 1854 first essay, and the influence of Fichte shines through in his defence of belief in the 1859 second essay. The Renouvier of 1854 claimed that French philosophy must form a new path from starting from Kant’s critical project without treading on the one made by the German idealists. However, if he thought that his own path avoided all of the steps taken by them, he was mistaken.

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———. 2015b. From Habit to Monads: Félix Ravaisson’s Theory of Substance. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (6): 1085–1110. ———. 2016. A Universal and Absolute Spiritualism: Maine de Biran’s Leibniz. In The Relationship between the Physical and the Moral in Man, ed. D. Meacham and J. Spadola. London: Bloomsbury. Fichte, J. G. 1836. Destination de l’homme. Trans. Barchou de Penhoën. Paris: Paulin. ———. 1843. Science de la connaissance. Trans. Paul Grimblot. Paris: Ladrange. ———. 1979. Die Bestimmung des Menschen. Hamburg: Meiner Verlag. Fichte, J. G. 1987. The Vocation of Man. Trans. Peter Preuss. Indianapolis: Hackett. Foucher, Louis. 1927. La Jeunesse de Renouvier et sa première philosophie. Paris: Vrin. Gunn, J. Alexander. 1932. Renouvier: The Man and His Work (I). Philosophy 7 (2): 42–53. Hamelin, Octave. 1927. Le Système de Renouvier. Paris: Vrin. Hegel, G. W. F. 1991. Encyclopaedia Logic. Trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. 2010. The Science of Logic, Trans. George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Houlgate, Stephen. 2006. The Opening of Hegel’s Logic. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Leibniz, G.  W. 1967. The Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence. Trans. H.T.  Mason. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 1973. Leibniz: Philosophical Writings, ed. and Trans. G. H. R. Parkinson. Surrey: Dent. Peirce, C.S. 1899. Review of Latta’s The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings. The Nation 68: 210. Phemister, Pauline. 2005. Leibniz and the Natural World: Activity, Passivity, and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz’s Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer. Radrizzani, Ives. 2002. The Place of the Vocation of Man in Fichte’s Work. In New Essays on Fichte’s later Jena Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore, 317–345. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Renouvier, Charles. 1842. Manuel de philosophie moderne. Paris: Paulin. ———. 1843. Fichte. In Encyclopédie nouvelle. Tome cinquième, ed. Pierre Leroux and Jean Reynaud, 288–296. Paris: Gosselin. ———. 1854. Essais de critique générale. Premier essai. Analyse générale de la connaissance. Bornes de la connaissance. Paris: Ladrange. ———. 1859. Essais de critique générale. Deuxième essai. L’homme. Paris: Ladrange. ———. 1885. Esquisse d’une classification systématique des doctrines philosophiques. 2 vols. Paris: Au Bureau de la critique philosophique. ———. 1892. Les Principes de la nature. Paris: Félix Alcan. Rödl, Sebastian. 2018. Logic, Being and Nothing. Hegel Bulletin. 40 (1): 1–29. Séailles, Gabriel. 1905. La Philosophie de Charles Renouvier. Paris: Félix Alcan. Smith, Justin. 2011. Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stedman Jones, S.G. 1995. Charles Renouvier and Émile Durkheim: ‘Les Règles De La Méthode Sociologique’. Sociological Perspectives 38 (1): 27–40. Verneaux, Roger. 1945. L’Idéalisme de Renouvier. Paris: Vrin. Zöller, Günter. 1998. Das Element aller Gewißheit: Jacobi, Kant und Fichte über den Glauben. Fichte-Studien 14: 21–41.

Index

A Absolute, 27, 29, 35, 36, 39, 43, 44, 48, 50, 54, 55, 70, 75, 76, 78, 79, 86, 87, 91, 99, 110, 111, 114, 119, 121, 122, 124, 128, 133, 137, 146, 150, 151, 153, 154, 156–158, 160, 163, 164, 166, 167, 176, 185, 187–191, 193–195 Ackermann, P., 121, 128 Aesthetics, 171–180 Anarchy, 146, 161 Antinomies, 98, 101, 122–124, 127–129, 131, 136, 193, 210 Aristotle, 43–46, 50, 56, 63, 68, 69, 71, 72, 77, 87, 116 B Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, J., 178 Baumgarten, A.G., 172, 176–178 Bénard, C., v, vii, 171–180 Bergson, H., 45, 46, 53, 56, 57, 59–62, 65, 67, 69, 71 Berkeley, G., 8 Bernoulli, D., 67 Blainville, H.M.D. de, 75–94 Blanc, L., 149, 155 Bonald, L. de, 107, 108 Bouiller, F., 187 Bréhier, É., v, 45, 49 Brucker, J.J., 21, 38 C Cabanis, P.-J.-G., 105, 107–109, 118, 127 Careil, A.F. de, 143, 160–163, 165–167

Caro, E.-M., 152 Cartesianism, 19, 23, 192, 201 Catholicism, 77, 85, 101, 103, 104, 106–108, 110, 112, 114, 117, 129, 132, 137–139, 144, 145, 148–150, 152, 160–162, 165–167, 174 Communism, vii, 98, 120, 143, 144, 149–151, 163–167 Comte, A., xi, 75–94, 203, 210 Condillac, É.B. de, 3, 78, 105, 114, 127, 156 Cousin, V., v–viii, xii, 1–12, 15–40, 43–45, 61, 77, 103, 106, 110–112, 114, 115, 117, 119, 121–123, 125, 126, 128, 129, 133, 147, 149, 152, 153, 155, 159, 160, 173–177, 185, 187–189, 191–195, 200, 207 Cuvier, G., 76, 81, 85, 92, 93, 110 D Darwin, C., 69 Da Vinci, L., 65–67, 69, 71 Desargues, G., 63–65, 69, 70, 72 Descartes, R., vii, 4, 6, 12, 28, 63, 64, 192, 199–202, 205, 207, 209 Dialectics, 99, 113, 154, 193, 194 Diderot, D., 38, 176, 177 E Eclecticism, vi–viii, 3–5, 7, 15–40, 103, 106, 111, 114–116, 123, 125, 126, 128, 160, 185–188, 191, 192, 195, 200, 207–209 Empiricism, 5, 6, 62, 65, 203

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218 F Fatalism, 36, 102, 147, 149, 151, 152, 158, 160 Feuerbach, L., 100–103, 129, 133, 134, 136–138 Fichte, J.G., 4, 7, 8, 46, 47, 60, 78, 79, 84, 103, 115, 122, 126, 138, 145, 150, 199–205, 207–209, 211, 213, 214 Fourier, C., 103, 104, 117, 120, 121, 123, 126, 150 Franck, A., 175, 185, 188 Freedom, 20, 45, 47, 50, 54–56, 62, 63, 66, 68, 71, 136, 144, 147, 151, 154, 156, 157 G Gans, E., 9, 16, 116, 153 Geist, 61, 154 Gentile, G., 184, 188, 194 Gnosticism, 146, 147, 166 God, 20, 55, 57, 71, 79, 82, 85, 101–103, 108–114, 118, 120–122, 124–139, 145–147, 151, 154, 158–161, 164, 166, 167, 178, 205–210 Goethe, J.W. von, 49, 65, 76, 78–80, 82, 92, 93, 150, 152 Gratry, A., 151, 160, 161 Gueroult, M., v, vi, viii, 34 H Habit, xii, 43–57, 62 Historiography, vii, 19–21, 27–30, 32–35, 38, 40 Holism, 39 Hotho, H.G., 16, 172 Hutcheson, F., 176, 177

Index K Kant, I., v, 4, 5, 7, 8, 46–50, 60, 61, 67, 78, 79, 103, 108, 109, 113–116, 118–123, 129, 130, 132, 133, 137, 138, 146, 148, 150, 152, 155, 162, 172, 174, 176–180, 193, 200, 202, 205, 206, 210, 211, 213, 214 Krug, W.T., 38 L Lamennais, F.R. de, 104, 107, 112, 114, 117, 120, 147 Lèbre, A., 150, 158, 161 Leibniz, G.W., 11, 44, 47, 48, 64, 192, 199–201, 208, 209 Lerminier, E., 4, 6, 7, 15, 19, 116, 152–155, 157 Leroux, P., v, vi, xii, 1–12, 15, 112, 117–119, 150, 151, 158–160, 163, 165 Lévêque, J.C., 175, 178, 179 Logic, 11, 25, 26, 116, 117, 119, 129, 154, 155, 160, 164, 176, 190–195, 206, 207, 210–213 M Malebranche, N., 8, 192, 208 Maret, H., v, 15, 144–151, 158, 160–162, 165, 166 Marx, K., vii, 97–100, 103, 104, 115, 120, 122, 127, 129, 137, 138, 149, 166, 167 Michelet, J., 16, 110, 153, 159 Monism, 39 N Naturphilosophie, 48, 60–62, 75–94

I Ideal, 7, 34, 36, 44–48, 50, 52–54, 62, 64, 65, 68, 79, 80, 83, 126, 133, 137, 151, 156 Intuition, 10, 11, 50, 52, 53, 56, 69, 115, 118, 189

O Oken, L., 76–89, 91–93 Organicism, vii, 38, 49, 63, 64, 70, 75, 81, 84–91, 109, 118 Ott, A., 160–163, 179

J James, W., 200, 205 Janet, P., 15, 189, 191 Jouffroy, T.S., 3, 103, 106–109, 113–115, 122, 123, 129, 175, 176, 178

P Pangermanism, 143, 151, 152 Pantheism, v, vii, 4, 6, 76, 79, 81, 82, 84–86, 89–91, 110, 121, 123, 125, 126, 133, 143–167, 178, 211

Index Pascal, B., 55, 63, 64, 71, 123 Plato, 34, 69, 72, 79, 147, 175, 192 Platonism, 19, 79, 192 Poitou, E., 183, 184 Positivism, vii, viii, 75, 76, 84, 86, 92 Protestantism, 161 Proudhon, P.-J., v, vii, xi, 97–139, 164, 166 Psychology, 6, 8, 20, 21, 27, 30, 33–35, 60, 61, 106–108, 113, 117, 119, 121, 136, 137, 176, 187 Q Quinet, E., 45, 133, 150, 153 R Ravaisson-Mollien, F., v–vii, xii, 20, 43–57, 59–72, 123, 187, 200 Reality, 6, 17, 27, 50, 65, 78, 83, 85, 86, 88, 90, 98, 103, 113, 114, 117, 118, 121, 124, 125, 133, 137, 139, 145, 154, 162–164, 166, 167, 173, 176, 189–190, 192–194, 204, 206, 208, 209 Reid, T., 3, 106, 108, 113–115 Reiffenberg, F. de, 31 Reinhold, K.L., 38 Rémusat, C. de, 172, 185 Renouvier, C., v, vii, 199–214 Romanticism, 44, 46, 55, 56, 61, 145, 151, 164 Rosenkranz, K., 184 Royer-Collard, P.P., 3, 6, 114, 177 S Saint-Agy, M. de, 76, 92–94 Saint-Simonianism, 2, 109, 146, 147, 150 Scepticism, 51, 123, 149, 151, 158, 162, 163, 172, 187–188, 192, 195, 203, 204, 214 Schiller, F., 44, 49, 53, 56, 71, 180

219 Schleiermacher, F., 115, 150 Secrétan, C., 4, 209 Socialism, 9, 10, 100, 109, 138, 143, 148, 150–152, 164, 166 Socrates, 10 Spinoza, B., 6, 78, 79, 133, 150, 152–154, 158, 192, 207–209 Spiritualism, viii, 15–40, 59, 61, 62, 118, 128, 174, 187 Staël, G. de, 3, 180 Syncretism, 36 Synthesis, 2, 3, 29, 32, 115, 120–122, 191, 207, 212 System, v, vi, 4, 5, 11, 17, 19–40, 43, 44, 48, 69, 76–79, 81–83, 85–87, 89–93, 115, 116, 121, 123, 125, 128, 146, 148, 149, 151–154, 157–162, 173, 174, 176, 178, 183, 184, 185, 190, 193, 199, 201, 205, 207, 208, 211, 213, 214 T Teleology, 51 Tennemann, W.G., v, 39, 61, 77 Theology, 54, 56, 77, 160 Thoré, T., 143, 150, 151, 163–167 Totality, 29, 35, 36, 39, 87, 88, 91, 184, 185, 193 Trendelenburg, F.A., 194 V Vacherot, E., 123, 151, 183 Vera, A., v, vii, 148, 171, 183–195 Vico, G., 101, 110, 119 Villemain, A.-F., 173, 174 W Willm, J., 137, 149, 153, 155–159, 172