The

INCARNATE
SUBJECT

Also available in Contemporary Studies in Philosophy

and the Human Sciences
Series Editors: HughJ. Silverman

and Graeme

Nicholson

Before Ethics
Adriaan Peperzak

The Language of Difference,

Charles E. Scott

Beyond Metaphysics
John Llewelyn

Language and the Unconscious

Jacques Lacan's Hermeneutics
of Psychoanalysis
Hermann Lang

The Deconstruction of Time

David Wood
Dialectic and Difference:
Modern Thought and the
Sense of Human Limits
Jacques Taminiaux
Elucidations of Holderlin's Poetry
Martin Heidegger
Translated by Keith Hoeller
God and Being:
Heidegger's Relation to Theology
Jeff Owen Prudhomme
Heidegger and the Question of Time
Francoise Dastur
Translated by Francois Raffoul
and David Pettigrew
Heidegger and the Subject
Francois Raffoul
Translated by David Pettigrew
and Gregory Recco
History of Hermeneutics
Maurizio Ferraris
Illustrations of Being:
Drawing upon Heidegger
and upon Metaphysics
Graeme Nicholson
In the Presence of the Sensuous:
Essays in Aesthetics
Mikel Dufrenne
Edited by Mark S. Roberts
and Dennis Gallagher

Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking

Otto Poggeler
Michel Foucault's Force of Flight:
Toward an Ethics for Thought
James W Bernauer
The Paths of Heidegger's Life
and Thought
Otto Poggeler
Political Philosophy at the
Closure of Metaphysics
Bernard Flynn
The Question of Language in
Heidegger's History of Being
Robert Bemasconi
Rationalities, Historicities
Dominique Janicaud
Translated by Nina Belmonte
Sensation:
Intelligibility Is Sensibility
Alphonso Lingis
Structuralism:
A Philosophy for the Human Sciences
Peter Caws
Texts and Dialogues
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Utopics:
The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces
Louis Marin

CONTEMPORARY STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES

The

INCARNATE
SUBJECT
Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson
on the Union of Body and Soul

MAURICE
MERLEAU-PONTY
Preface by Jacques Taminiaux
Translation by Paul B. Milan
Edited by Andrew G. Bjelland Jr.
and Patrick Burke

an imprint of Prometheus Books

59 John Glenn Drive, M e r i t , New York 14228-2197

Originally published in French as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L Union de I'&me et du

corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson, Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin,
1968. Collected and edited by Jean Deprun. 1968 by Librairie Philosophique J.
Vrin.
English Translation 2001 by Paul B. Milan.
Published 2001 by Humanity Books, an imprint of Prometheus Books
The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson on the Union of Body
and Soul All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise or conveyed via the Internet or
a Web site without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Inquiries should be addressed to
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05 04 03 02 01

5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908-1961.
[Union de l'ame et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson. English]
The incarnate subject: Malebranche, Maine de Biran, and Bergson on the
union of body and soul / Maurice Merleau-Ponty ; English translation by Paul B.
Milan ; edited by Andrew G. Bjelland Jr. and Patrick Burke ; preface by Jacques
Taminiaux.
p. cm. (Contemporary studies in philosophy and the human sciences)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and indexes.
ISBN 1-57392-915-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Malebranche, Nicolas, 1638-1715. 2. Maine de Biran, Pierre, 1766-1824.
3. Bergson, Henri, 1859-1941. 4. Mind and body. 5. Monism. I. Bjelland, Andrew
G. II. Burke, Patrick. III. Title. IV Series.
B2430.M379U513 2001
128dc21

2001-0039210

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Preface to the English Translation
Jacques Taminiaux
Introduction
Patrick Burke

15

French Editor's Foreword

Jean Deprun

27

First Lecture:

Second Lecture:
Third Lecture:
Fourth Lecture:
Fifth Lecture:
Sixth Lecture:
Seventh Lecture:

Note on the History of Philosophy

in Relation to Malebranche,
Biran, and Bergson
The Union of the Soul
and the Body in Descartes
Consciousness of Self in Malebranche
Natural Judgments and Perception
Perceptible Extension and
Intelligible Extension
Causality in the Relationships between
the Soul and the Body
Theology and the Union of the
Soul and the Body

29
33
37
43
49
53
55

CONTENTS

Eighth Lecture:
Ninth Lecture:
Tenth Lecture:
Eleventh Lecture:

Twelfth Lecture:
Thirteenth Lecture:
Fourteenth Lecture:
Fifteenth Lecture:
Sixteenth Lecture:

From Malebranche to Maine de Biran

Biran and the Philosophers of the Cogito
Biran and the Philosophers of the Cogito
(Conclusion)
Matter and Memory:
The New and the Positive in the
Analysis of the First Chapter
The Second Chapter of
Matter and Memory
Commentary on Text: The Unconscious
Commentary on Text:
The Definition of Existence
Commentary on Text:
"Seek Experience at Its Source"
The Relationships between Intuition and
Construction in Bergson's Metaphysics

61
73
79

87
93
97
103
107
113

Complementary Note
Jean Deprun

119

Chapter Notes

125

Bibliography

137

Index ofAuthors Cited by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

139

Subject Index

141

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

^ie original idea for this project came from Mr. Andrew G. Bjelland Jr.
while studying Merleau-Ponty in a philosophy seminar conducted by
Professor Patrick Burke at Seattle University. From the outset we
were convinced of the significance of L union de I'dme et du corps chez
Malebrancbe, Biran et Bergson to the study of the overall development of
Merleau-Ponty's thought and of the value of making this work available in
English to Merleau-Ponty scholars. The project of producing a quality translation has, from the outset, been a collaborative endeavor.
We would like to express our thanks to the Librairie philosophique J.
Vrin, the original French publisher, for its kind permission to publish this
translation. We are particularly grateful to Professor Hugh Silverman, Series
Editor, Humanity Books Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and the
Human Sciences Series, who showed initial interest in and encouragement
for this project, and who has patiently followed it through to its completion.
Gestures of profound thanks are extended to Professor Jacques Taminiaux
for lending his name and support for this project by writing the preface. A
special debt of gratitude is owed to Professor R. Maxime Marinoni, Professor of French at Seattle University, whose careful reading of the manuscript provided many suggestions which enhanced the quality of the translation. We must also acknowledge the translators of the various standard
English editions to which we have referred throughout this text; their fine
work definitely made our task much easier.
Finally, we also wish to express our thanks to Seattle University for its

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

institutional support of this project, and in particular to Ms. JoAnne Heron,

Ms. Kate Reynolds, and Ms. Zan Deery for their assistance in preparing the
manuscript.
Andrew G. Bjellandjr.
Patrick Burke
Paul B. Milan

PREFACE TO THE
ENGLISH TRANSLATION

ince the beginning of the nineteenth century, there have been a

number of European philosophers who have published in book form
notes from certain of their lecture courses. Such was the case notably
for Hegel's famous Philosophy of Law, and more recently, for several of Heidegger's major works such as the Introduction to Metaphysics, What Is a
Thing? and What Is Thinking? And if the complete works of these thinkers,
posthumous by definition, attach such great significance to the lectures they
gave, even when the latter, in the absence of the author's manuscript, are
reconstituted only on the basis of the participants' notes, this can be readily
explained. These philosophers' oral teaching was normally not only based on
a completely written text avoiding improvisation, but also presented clearly
the state of their most cogent thought in regards to a question which they had
deliberately undertaken to examine and which called them to respond at a
given moment along their philosophical itinerary. This is why, for example,
the study of Hegel cannot dispense with his Lectures on Esthetics or on the
Philosophy of History, and the study of Heidegger can no longer avoid
dealing with lectures such as The Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology
or Plato's The Sophist.
We should not expect from the Merleau-Ponty lectures translated in this
volume what we legitimately expect from the German lectures cited above.
For one who has read and meditated on the books which Merleau-Ponty had
already published by this time in his career, it cannot be said that the
1947-48 series of lectures devoted to Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson constitute a decisive and indispensable contribution to the study of what was at

10

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION

that time the innovative thought of the French philosopher, taken in the
dynamic context of his research. This can be explained by the fact that these
lectures stem from a well-defined genre which has no equivalent, either in
the German tradition or in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, namely the explication
of texts from authors who are part of the annual program for the competitive examination for the agregation in philosophy The very fact that such a
program of studies, differing from year to year, is imposed administratively
at the national level for future lycee professors requires that those responsible for preparing the candidates for this competitive examination accept
obvious constraints. These limitations essentially force the lecturer to stress
pedagogy rather than personal research and to emphasize the study of these
required authors over the study of works which might otherwise stimulate
original thought. No academic program of studies ever required Hegel to
teach the philosophy of history: he invented it. No university program of
studies ever required Husserl to present the idea of phenomenology: he discovered it. On the contrary, Merleau-Ponty had to deal with a required program of studies when, having been recently promoted to docteur d'Etat, he
undertook, at the Faculte des Lettres in Lyon and at the Ecole Normale
Superieure in Paris, to give a series of lectures for the agregation devoted
to three of the great names in the French philosophical tradition, with all
these lectures centering around a classic problem: the union of the soul and
the body. Undoubtedly, it is because this required structure seemed to Merleau-Ponty to confer on these lectures the appearance of an obligatory professional duty that he neglected to keep his notes. In a more general sense,
it is because this situation, at the stage where his research had developed,
seemed to him to be an impediment, indeed to be a rigid constraint, that he
submitted several years later to the tedious tasks which were going to assure
him a chair at the College de France, thus allowing him finally to bring
together, in complete freedom, his teaching and research.
Unfortunately these lectures delivered at the College de France remain
unpublished, and at this point in time, we have only resumes of them. We
can only hope that one day someone will undertake to reconstitute them
even if they are based only on listeners' notes, since Merleau-Ponty, whose
gifts of oratory and improvisation were remarkable, based his lectures on
schematic notes, relying on the spoken word to give them life.*
Despite their limitations, we should not underestimate the importance
and value of the 1947-48 lectures. In the years preceding these lectures,
*Professor Taminiaux submitted this preface prior to the publication of notes from these
courses. These publications include: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Nature. Notes. Cours du College
de France, ed. D. Seglard (Paris: Seuil, 1995); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Notes du cours au College
de France 1958-1959 et 1960-1961, ed. S. Menase (Paris: Gallimard, 1996); Maurice MerleauPonty, Notes de cours sur I'origine de la g6omtrie de Husserl, in Recherches sur la phenomeyiologie de Merleau-Ponty, ed. R. Barbaras (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998).

Preface to the English Translation

11

Merleau-Ponty published two books which attracted critical attention: The

Structure of Behavior (1941) and Phenomenology of Perception (1945).
With the same standing as Sartre, he had gained recognition because of
these works as the major representative figure of a way of philosophizing
unknown in France until that time, namely phenomenology, made famous
in Germany by Husserl and later by Heidegger. According to Merleau-Ponty,
this kind of philosophical investigation deals with a privileged field of
inquiry which is perception, or more precisely, the incarnated belonging to
the perceived world. The recognition of the fundamental nature of this field
leads to important philosophical consequences: the very ones he outlined
in essence for his colleagues in 1946 at a meeting of the French Philosophical Society in a work published at the beginning of the 1947-48 academic
year: "The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences."
These consequences, which Merleau-Ponty had summed up on this occasion for his peers, are going to be emphasized by him during the course of
this same academic year; the various developments of these ideas will
appear in a collection of essays aimed at a well-educated audience: Sense
and Non-Sense. It is these same philosophical consequences from the primacy of perception which provide the thread for the 1947-48 lectures
which we shall review briefly. The perceived is a synthesis of the visible and
the invisible which transcends the theoretical distinction between pure sensory experience and representation in ideas. This spontaneous synthesis
gives me meanings which are not of the conceptual order and which I do
not have to conjecture, infer, or deduce mediately on the basis of certain
signs. It is not an intellectual synthesis which would impose from the outside on a pure diverse matter the unity of an ideal form, but rather as
Husserl said, it is a "synthesis of transition" or better yet a "synthesis of
horizon" which clouds the classic alternative of immanencepresence to
myselfand transcendencethat which is beyond my sphere of presence.
Because perception makes these seeming antitheses encroach on one
another, there is in perception a paradox of immanence and transcendence,
in the sense that the perceived is present to me and that it is, however,
always beyond what is currently given to me, a presence mixed with
absence. The same kind of paradox characterizes the relationship that my
perceived experience continually develops with others' perceived experience. My perceptions are neither strictly private experiences nor intellectual inspections of ideal entities in theory identical for everyone. Right away
the perceived imposes itself on me as real, not for every intelligence, but
for all those who share my incarnated situation.
This description, according to Merleau-Ponty, contains nothing sectorial; it is not limited to the small realm of experience which concerns psychology. It possesses rather a general ontological significance. Otherwise
stated, the constitutive paradoxes of perception are in no way subjective

12

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION

appearances which would dissipate as obscurities and confusion in the view

of the objective world of science. On the contrary, they define the very condition of consciousness, the initial and constant status from which it cannot
extricate itself.
Such are the themes which underpin Merleau-Ponty's reading of French
philosophical texts which, from Descartes on, dealt with the relationship
between the soul and the body. If this relationship is intrinsically paradoxical, we can generally state, Merleau-Ponty seems to say, that the philosophers who wrote these texts could not avoid stumbling on this paradox and
recognizing it, at least obliquely, perhaps even in opposition to their stated
theses. It is not a question, then, in these lectures to reduce each corpus of
texts to be considered to the consistency of a logical common denominator
supposed to define the fundamental thesis of the philosopher in question.
But rather quite the opposite, the purpose is to play these texts off one
against the other, to uncover the underlying tensions they conceal, and in so
doing, to contrast the implicit with the explicit. As I have already stated
above, this is in no way a research course. We cannot claim here that Merleau-Ponty is searching for his own thought in the midst of inherited texts, in
the same way that Heidegger was searching for himself while debating an
Aristotle, a Plato, a Kant, and later a Nietzsche. Merleau-Ponty's philosophical itinerary had been traced much earlier; he had conquered it in The Structure of Behavior and solidified it in the Phenomenology of Perception. What
was important for him, faced with a demanding and particularly wellinformed audience, was to show the richness of this line of thought in the
history of philosophy. To show, in other words, as he suggests from the very
first lecture, that there is no better way to understand a system than to interrogate it philosophically, as he says, "to ask of it the questions with which we
ourselves are concerned" (31).*
The fact that these lectures exploit, at every step of the way, a line of
reasoning that had already been traced did not escape the French editor,
who was himself an attentive listener to these lectures. Jean Deprun was
fully aware of this, and this is why his "Complementary Note" multiplies,
very appropriately, the references to a certain number of pages from The
Structure of Behavior and from the Phenomenology of Perception. The
readers of the English translation of these lectures will benefit greatly by
referring to these texts.
However, this path, even though Merleau-Ponty was certain of its significance, was indeed a path of thought arrived at by innovative philosophical inquiry. So that despite the fact that these lectures were limited in a
sense to applying, in a manner of speaking, a philosophy that is already
mature, these lectures, precisely because they emanate from a philosopher,
"Unless otherwise indicated, all page numbers in parentheses refer to the present volume.

Preface to the English Translation

13

also introduced a breath of fresh air into this scholarly and highly codified
genre that is in France the "explication of texts." Merleau-Ponty taught, after
all, that this genre could not be abandoned only to the erudition of historians of philosophy. It is this breath of fresh air that impressed the small
group of students in this course. It is this breath of fresh air which explains
why they kept notes which had been taken fleetingly. In this regard, I hope
the reader will allow me a personal remembrance. Having been admitted to
the Ecole Normale as a foreign student in 1950, I was preparing my doctoral
thesis for my alma mater, the University of Louvain. This thesis was to be a
critical rereading of Bergson in the light of phenomenology, and more precisely, in light of the version set forth by Merleau-Ponty. I shared my project
with a friend on the same floor who was older than I and who was studying
for the agregation in philosophy. He told me that he had attended, three
years earlier, this course on Maiebranche, Biran, and Bergson, and that he
had been very impressed by the course which he said had a direct relation
to my project. As his notes were imprecise and not very legible, he strongly
recommended I consult those meticulously taken by another student at the
Ecole Normale who was also studying for the agregation in philosophy. The
student in question was none other than Michel Foucault whom I sought
out and who very graciously loaned me his notebook of lecture notes which
were indeed very clear and detailed. I read them and reread them for several months without, unfortunately, taking the time to recopy them. They
helped me immensely in my critical study of Matter and Memory, I came
to realize how important and inspiring these lectures were for him when, at
the end of the academic year, the young Foucault, already an archivist and
archeologist of knowledge, made it a point to come himself to retrieve his
notes, and I would not swear that I was not harboring a secret desire to
keep them for myself.
We can see, then, that there are many good reasons to be thankful to
the current editors and to the translator of these lectures.
Jacques Taminiaux
Translated by Paul Milan

INTRODUCTION

uring the academic year 1947-48, Maurice Merleau-Ponty offered at

the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and at the University of Lyon
a series of lectures to prepare students for the qualifying examination for the agregation in philosophy From among the classics included in
the required curriculum, Merleau-Ponty focused his lectures on selected
works of Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson relative to the problem of the
union of the soul and the body, a problem to which he had already devoted
considerable attention in his first two major works and which would concern him even to his last writings. Jean Deprun, wfto attended the Paris
course, collated, edited, and published in 1968 the students'notes of these
lectures, which are now presented here for the first time in English.
In his preface to this translation, Professor Taminiaux describes the constraints placed upon Merleau-Ponty by the program for the agregation
which required explication of texts rather than a fresh and provocative
reading. The impression that Merleau-Ponty's own creative voice is absent
from these lectures is evidenced by the often repeated claim (as reported to
me by Hugh J. Silverman) that James M. Edie, editor of the Northwestern
University Press distinguished "Studies in Phenomenology and Existential
Philosophy" and devoted scholar of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, could not
justify publishing a translation of Deprun's volume due to the less than
explicit Merleau-Pontean style of the work. Yet Taminiaux writes a promissory note to the readers of this edition when he points out that MerleauPonty, because he was a philosopher, could not but help to introduce a

15

16

INTRODUCTION

"breath of fresh air" into these lectures, air fresh enough that his students,
including Michel Foucault, wanted to keep their notes.
This "breath of fresh air" becomes evident early on in the lecture course
when Merleau-Ponty reveals how he reads the history of philosophy and his
own method as a historian of philosophy. He calls into question the "purely
objective method" which, lacking a principle of selection, would produce no
more than a catalogue or concatenation of theories or points of view, a mere
chronicle but not a real history. In a highly subtle manner, he is hereby calling
into question the very program of the agr^gation. For Merleau-Ponty "the objectivity of the history of philosophy is only found in the practice of subjectivity"
(31). His principle of selection, he tells us, is a question or a problem with
which he is personally concerned relative to which the classical texts reveal
themselves by differentiation, by their respective manner of posing, taking up,
and resolving the question, which places them in tension with each other and
with the contemporary standpoint from which the historian poses the problem.
With the specific needs of the agregation students in mind, Merleau-Ponty summarizes, analyzes, and explicates the texts of Malebranche, Biran, andBergson
from the perspective opened by his privileged question, but then goes beyond
the kind of explication required by the program, or that exercised by a traditional historian of philosophy, by including a critique of contemporary readings of these classical thinkers by Leon Brunschvicg, Jean Laporte, and Emile
Brehier, whose texts were the standard university fare of his time.
In addition he inaugurates another subjective practice, a certain way of
inviting the students to interrogatively inhabit with him the margins of these
texts, of looking at what their authors overlooked because of methodological strictures, and thereby yielding the intuition of a truth which these masters sought but were unable to express: "the historical situation of a philosopher delimits what he can think about with certitude, but not what he can
try to think about" (47). This is the method Merleau-Ponty employs a decade
later in his homage to Husserl, namely, "to evoke the unthought of element
Q'impense) in Husserl's thought in the margin of some old pages" (Signs,
160), a "never yet thought of," at least in the formal sense, which we can
think only by attending to the emerging outlaw subtexts of a different
history with its yet-to-be-expressed horizons. We see these subtexts and
horizons come to life through Merleau-Ponty's use of the conditional and
subjunctive cases, for example when he says of Biran that "he would have
abandoned psychology only if he had discovered corporeality . . ." (75). The
poignant demonstration of Merleau-Ponty's method of reading the history of
philosophy at once accounts for the importance of these lectures in their
own right as well as for an understanding of the development of his
thought. On this basis alone, not only the serious student of Merleau-Ponty,
but also of the history of philosophy, will be rewarded by giving these lectures the careful attention they deserve.

Introduction

17

The works of Malebranche and Biran had long been considered classics
of French philosophy, and were still the subjects of many commentaries at
the time Merleau-Ponty was a student and then a new teacher at various
lycees. For example, such notable scholars as Henri Gouhier, Victor Delbos,
and Leon Brunschvicg brought out, during the 1920s, widely read books on
both Malebranche and Biran; in 1934, George Le Roy published an influential work on Biran, and in 1939 Martial Gueroult's highly respected text on
Malebranche appeared. Bergson, who died in 1941, was already considered
among the greatest philosophers of France. So important was Bergson that
in 1946, his Matter and Memory, which is the subject of five of MerleauPonty's lectures here, was in its sixty-second edition. It is thus evident why
the program for the agregation should have included the names of these
thinkers. And that Merleau-Ponty should read them in terms of the problem
of the union of the soul and the body is a testament to the importance of
that problem in the history of French philosophy. Bergson explicitly devotes
Matter and Memory to this problem. He says that it has not been sufficiently addressed by philosophers who state the union of soul and body
either in terms of psycho-physical parallelism (an obvious reference to Malebranche) or as an irreducible and inexplicable fact (an obvious reference to
Biran). The significance of the problem for Merleau-Ponty's work is evident
in the title of the last chapter of The Structure of Behavior (1939), "The
Relation of the Soul to the Body and the Problein of Perceptual Consciousness," a title which could well serve to mark the major focus of MerleauPonty's entire philosophical itinerary.
In the first lecture, Merleau-Ponty points to two traditions within
French philosophy relative to this problem, the Cartesian tradition within
which the soul's relation to the body is clarified by its relation to God, and
the Pascalian tradition within which the soul's relation to God is clarified by
its relation to the body (29). Merleau-Ponty puts Malebranche in the Cartesian tradition, while Biran and Bergson belong to that of Pascal. Neither tradition can be articulated, however, without first taking up the thought of
Descartes, and this forms the substance of the second lecture. Here Merleau-Ponty points out that for Descartes the union of soul and body cannot
be thought, that it is a mythical concept (35) in the Platonic sense of the
word, leaving us nothing to say about it philosophically. At most it is a "confused thought" given only prereflectively through the experience of natural
inclinations as described in the Sixth Meditation (35). Merleau-Ponty credits
Descartes for having introduced the notion of the "unreflective subject" (35)
which will focus his own reading of the resolutions to the problem of the
union of the soul and the body provided by Malebranche, Biran, and
Bergson, and which will partially explain his interest in offering this lecture
course. Through this lens the reader can see how Merleau-Ponty's own
thought was subtly shaped by these masters.

18

INTRODUCTION

Like that of Bergson, but unlike that of Biran, the name of Malebranche
is to be found, either as a foil or an influence, in all of the major works of
Merleau-Ponty, from The Structure of Behavior to The Visible and the Invisible, and in the recently published Notes de cours 1959-1961 (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). Without doubt, Malebranche was, for Merleau-Ponty, the
most important of the seventeenth-century rationalists, the one to whom
Merleau-Ponty returned throughout his life because, as he writes in the
fourth lecture, "we see today's problems are already there in Malebranche"
(47). Here Merleau-Ponty is pointing to the problem of rigorously elaborating an alternative between or beyond idealism and realism, of achieving
a mediation between or beyond the pure For-Itself and the In-Itself, of mind
and body, self and world by beginning with perception. More than 250
years earlier, Malebranche, through his theory of natural judgment, was
attempting, according to Merleau-Ponty, such a mediation. In these lectures, Merleau-Ponty, again inhabiting the margins of some old texts,
focuses, among other things, on the impense of Malebranche, on what he
was trying to think about.
In the five lectures devoted to Malebranche, Merleau-Ponty demonstrates how this master approaches the problem of the union of the soul and
the body from the perspective of both philosophy and Christian theology,
giving primacy, however, to the latter. Merleau-Ponty does not eschew this
emphasis, since he finds it makes room within Cartesian rationalism, and
even contrary to it, for human experience as it is primordially lived, in
desire, freedom, and dignity. Malebranche accounts for the obscurity and
ambiguity of the sense of self and world by appealing to the theological doctrine of the Fall by Adam and Eve. Adamic nature was characterized by the
harmonious union of soul and body, but in fallen human nature this union
has been reduced to dependence of soul on body (57), with the consequence that, unlike Descartes, "I do not grasp my thought in its constituent
tracings and in its origin" (38). Although I have an inner feeling of self, I do
not have a clear and distinct idea of the soul (38) and thus, in this fallen
state, consider my body as part of myself (40), at the same time both mine
and other (44).
The reader of these lectures will not let go unnoticed Merleau-Ponty's
interpretation of all of this as a deliberate intention on the part of Malebranche "to introduce the unreflected into philosophy" (40). This shows up
in Malebranche's description of the primordial directedness of inner feeling
toward the world, and of a time which unfolds in me and which the mind
does not dominate and unfold, and of how ideas are grasped, like perceptual
objects, only in terms of their horizons. Merleau-Ponty finds these themes,
which he himself had vigorously articulated in Phenomenology of Perception, pointing Malebranche toward "a philosophy which would not at all be
his own, to a philosophy in which it would be impossible to distinguish soul

Introduction

19

from body, to a sort of simple open thought" (41). Malebranche, immersed

as he is in the rationalist tradition of the seventeenth century, must extricate
himself from this existential tendency, this "impasse" as he would see it, by
situating in God "the conditions of rationality, the clear relationships by
virtue of which nature and the human person become analyzable" (41). In
The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty criticizes Malebranche for his
emphasis on the passivity of thought, "which like perception loses every efficacy of its own and has to await its light from a causality that functions in it
without it" (The Visible and the Invisible, 42). Here is the theoretical origin
of MaLebmnche's occasionalism. For Malebranche, ideas are not mine, they
do not originate within me, they are given to me: "there must therefore be
an intelligible principle by and through itself, appearing behind ideas: this
intelligible principle is God" (39).
In the last analysis Malebranche gives us, according to Merleau-Ponty, a
profound philosophical analysis, in fact a phenomenology, of the human
condition without God, only to distort it by a rationalism that depends on a
mysticism of the beatific vision.
Turning now to Merleau-Ponty's lectures on Maine de Biran, we confront
there an enigma, namely the absence in the major works of Merleau-Ponty of
any serious mention or analysis of this post-Cartesian philosopher in the
French tradition who anticipated some of the major insights of MerleauPonty's philosophy in both its earlier and later phases. Maine de Biran was
the subject of some important books which appeared in the 1920s and the
30s in France, for example Le Raisonnement selon Maine de Biran (Paris,
1925) by Jacques Paliard, or Euthyme Robef's work Leibniz et Maine de
Biran (Paris, 1927), Victor Delbos's study Maine de Biran et son oeuvre
pbilosophique (Paris, 1931), and the Bersonian reading of Maine de Biran by
George Le Roy in Experience de Veffort et de la grdce chez Maine de Biran
(Paris, 1934). In 1942, three years before the publication of Phenomenology
of Perception, a primary source work appeared, Maine de Biran: CEuvres
Choisis, with an "Introduction" by Henri Gouhier whose Les Conversations
de Maine de Biran later appeared in Paris bookshops in 1947, about the
time these lectures were given. So, unlike Hegel's works which needed
Alexander Kojeve to draw them from obscurity and signal their importance,
the thought of Maine de Biran was already well in circulation in Parisian intellectual life as it continues to be today in the work of Antoinette Drevet,
Maine de Biran (Paris: P.U.F., 1968), or Michel Henry, Philosopbie et
ph&nomenologie du corps: essai sur Vontologie biranienne (Paris: P.U.F.,
1987), and in essays by XavierTilliette and Jan Patocka. In view of this, Merleau-Ponty's silence is all the more enigmatic.
The scholar whose first introduction to the thought of Biran occurs in
his or her reading of these pages will be astonished to find how Biran had
anticipated, more than one hundred years earlier, the central project and

20

INTRODUCTION

related thematics of the Phenomenology of Perception. In confronting the

problem of the union of the soul and the body, Biran, like Merleau-Ponty
after him, tried to stake out a "new territory" between empiricism and rationalism, a third philosophy, a third position, a third solution as it were, at
once more dialectical and integrative, resolving the antinomies between
mind and body, subject and world. Biran and Merleau-Ponty both understand philosophy as perpetual and active inquiry, methodic doubt as awe or
astonishment, and the philosophizing self as fundamentally contingent.
They share a similar point of departure for their philosophy, namely the
body's experience and its motility, and a similar primitive fact (fait primitif), namely the irreducible, creative, coformative and dialectical tension
between subject and object, consciousness and body, self and world, the
interior and the exterior, the within and the without; in a similar fashion,
they both articulate a movement toward an original notion of thought,
namely a prereflective, prepersonal operative or motor thought from which
reflective life stems by means of the self-differentiating process of a consciousness perpetually struggling against various formative points of resistance to become itself; each discloses a similar rooting of reflection in its
organic base, the body doubling back upon itself in hearing and touching
and seeing, engendering thereby the interiority of the voice, the hand and
the eye, and thus a primitive reflection which is the first step and symbol of
higher-order reflection; in addition, each provides a similar analysis of how
lived time is inaugurated in the voluntary and involuntary motor efforts of
the subject, and each delineates a similar notion of a corporeal spatiality, of
one's own body Qe corps propre) relative to which the objective spatial
world is built-up. Furthermore, Biran appears to have also foreshadowed
Merleau-Ponty's notion of the primordial unconscious as wild, permissive
feeling, as dispossession of the self in favor of what is felt, as "an opening
toward that which we do not have to think in order that we may recognize
it" (Themes from the Lectures, 131): in this respect, Biran speaks of prepersonal apperceptions/feelings reverberating in the motor activity of the body
and subtending and surrounding reflective life.
With these similarities in mind, let us now turn briefly to Merleau-Ponty's
presentation of Maine de Biran's specific analysis of the problem of the union
of the soul and the body, in order to see how Biran applies these concepts in
his own unique manner. Merleau-Ponty's lectures assign principal importance
to Biran's Essai sur lesfondements de la psychologie and secondly to his Commentaire sur les meditations metaphysiques, and with minor attention to the
later works.
Merleau-Ponty points out that for Biran the problem of the union of the
soul and the body is a false problem; the connection of the one to the other
is a primitive fact, an irreducible relationship between two terms which
cannot be conceived separately. They are given together through a primor-

Introduction

21

dial form of consciousness by way of an inner feeling of our individual existence through bodily motility and effort. It would be absurd (67) to speak
of the union of the soul and the body because what we have here is a primitive duality (68), a primitive antithesis which is essential to the thinking
subject. Interiority and exteriority, the within and the without, enter into
the very definition of the subject such that there is no sensibility without the
self and no self without sensibility. Biran wants to reestablish ontology in its
legitimate domain, that of the primitive fact. By arguing that it is the eye and
not the soul which sees, he offers an original notion of the Cogito, beyond
Cartesianism and rooted in the mutual implication of thought and willful
motility. Here Merleau-PontyfindsBiran articulating a process theory of consciousness. Through movement we become conscious, we temporalize ourselves, we work ourselves into consciousness and freedom. Beginning with
the passive presubjective and preobjective neutral zone of phenomenal
reality, Biran shows a kind of nascent reflection already set up in bodily
hearing, which unfolds into explicit acts of attention and understanding.
The Cartesian Cogito is thus an achievement, and not an existentially fundamental ground of thinking. It is Descartes's understanding of the Cogito
which creates the radical bifurcation relative to which the problem of the
union of soul and body makes sense, as a problem, but for Biran it is a
problem misconceived.
Given this analysis, Merleau-Ponty credits Bir&n for having anticipated
phenomenology and for having circumscribed the phenomenal field.
Although he discovers in all of Biran's analyses genuine and profound intuitions, Merleau-Ponty claims nonetheless that they are "constantly compromised" by Biran's lapsing into psychologism. In this regard, Merleau-Ponty
faults Biran for having conceived lived time as flowing from the past to the
future instead of vice versa, for not having internalized the sign which links
thought with the body, andfinallyfor having embraced a nominal notion of
the self. In the end, Merleau-Ponty finds Biran incessantly wavering between empiricism and rationalism, between the exterior and the interior,
and between philosophy and psychology without being able to "truly elaborate the third position he was aiming at" (69).
In spite of the criticism, the reader of chapters 8, 9, and 10 of this volume
is left with the impression that Phenomenology of Perception is, in some
important respects, much less original in its inspiration than previously
thought, that Merleau-Ponty is once again pressing at the margins of some old
texts, looking for the impense, finding it, and then rigorously reinserting it.
But unlike Malebranche and Bergson, Maine de Biran remains unnamed and
unacknowledged, a rose missing from the bouquet in Phenomenology of Perception, constitutively present even through a kind of absence.
Of the three thinkers discussed by Merleau-Ponty in the lectures presented here, it is Bergson who most directly commanded Merleau-Ponty's

22

INTRODUCTION

attention through much of his philosophical life. As early as The Structure of

Behavior, where he is already confronting Bergson's notions of vital action
and pure perception, Merleau-Ponty is discussing Matter and Memory. In
Phenomenology of Perception, this work is taken up again in relation to
space and time constitution, and later factors as part of the text and subtext
of "Eye and Mind" and the posthumously published work, The Visible and the
Invisible. Bergson was celebrated in Merleau-Ponty's inaugural address, "In
Praise of Philosophy," at the College de France and was one of the authors
studied in a 1956-57 lecture course, also at the College de France, "The Concept of Nature," the student notes to which were published in 1995 in La
Nature (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995). Finally, in 1959, Merleau-Ponty delivered an address, "Bergson in the Making," at the commemorative Congress
Bergson, published in Signs, which reveals unabashedly Merleau-Ponty's profound debt to this monumental thinker when he writes of Beigson, "Now we
can bear witness to the vitality of his works only by saying how he is present
in our own" (Signs, 183).
In looking through these books and essays, we find that, for MerleauPonty, there are two Bergsons. There is the official textbook Bergson which
he was taught in school and which he criticizes throughout his life, but with
special vigor in these lectures, being as he was still under the influence of
G. Politzer's "La Fin d'une parade philosophique, Le Bergsonisme" at the
time of this course for the agr$gation. Then there is the disturbing, subterranean Bergson seeking, like Merleau-Ponty, to bring to expression a level
of experience so profound that it ruptures the very language which would
purport to carry it. Throughout The Structure of Behavior, Phenomenology of Perception, and The Visible and the Invisible and in the lecture
course presented here in this volume as well as those presented at the College de France, Merleau-Ponty rigorously stakes out points of opposition to
Bergson's theory. And yet, in the midst of criticism, the reader detects a
sympathy, a common project, and a dependence upon Bergson. In Sense
and Non-Sense, Merleau-Ponty makes a revealing statement: "In all these
respects, it seems to us that Bergson has perfectly defined the metaphysical
approach to the world. It remains to be seen whether he was true to his
method" (Sense and Non-Sense, 97nl5).
In the complexus of ideas conveyed in the fifteenth and sixteenth lectures,
three features of Bergson's method are especially worth noting, as they
announce the focus of Merleau-Ponty's own later methodology:
1. In the fifteenth lecture, Merleau-Ponty points to Bergson's proposal
to rediscover a "prehuman link with the living" (110); this foreshadows Merleau-Ponty's ontological move toward "what resists phenomenology within
us" (Signs, 178), the barbarous principle, the wild ily a. Bergson wants "to
draw knowledge from our primordial unity with things" (110), joining "our
mute being with our revealed being" (110). Following Bergson the later Mer-

Introduction

23

leau-Ponty proposes a radical interrogation of Being or what he calls listening to silence, the abyss, through which he too will seek a fully unified
starting point for ontology.
2. In the sixteenth lecture, we find Bergson is opposed to a metaphysical "unity without diversity," or a "unity without cracks" (116), without
ecart. For the later Merleau-Ponty, the starting point for ontology is not, as
it was for the post-Kantians, a unity through the identity of opposing terms,
but a mediation through the flesh, through the intertwining and
reversibility of the visible and the invisible, the sensing and the sensed.
3. Also in the fifteenth lecture, Merleau-Ponty says that, according to
Bergson, "in order for metaphysical unity to be natural, we must discover
within ourselves and outside ourselves what we know from the fact that we
exist, we must grasp life in ourselves, we who are living" (110). This idea is
taken up in the sixteenth lecture where Bergson is presented as showing
that the part of the real that we most directly intuit is internal duration. Intuition is a coincidence not with a reality outside of us but "with a movement
which originates within ourselves" (116) and, as he claims in the fifteenth
lecture, this movement, this "duration (and the novelty which it implies)
must grasp itself reflexively and practically" (111). These phrases clearly
presage Merleau-Ponty's "thinking from within Being" approach to ontology.
But Merleau-Ponty is quick to point out that intuition as the "thinking from
within" becomes, for Bergson, immediate coincidence or fusion of thought
with duration and not the interrogative and dialectical listening to the
depths of Being; here in the fifteenth lecture Merleau-Ponty anticipates his
lengthy critique in The Visible and the Invisible of Bergson's theory of intuition as coincidence.
The reader will find Merleau-Ponty's method for approaching a major
historical work most manifest in his treatment in lectures eleven to fifteen
on the four chapters of Bergson's Matter and Memory. Merleau-Ponty challenges the very manner in which the problem of the unity of the soul and
the body is posed here by Bergson, i.e., in terms of the alternative between
the For-Itself and the In-Itself, of idealism and realism, and argues that the
solution is insufficient, wavering between the terms of the alternative
instead of going beyond it (106). He praises Bergson for having understood
the body as a center of perspective, as a center of real action (87). But he
criticizes him for not having admitted the primacy of perception, in its primordial unity with things (110), as the middle ground between and beyond
the For-Itself and the In-Itself, and for having retained the postulates of
realism (92) to the extent that the body is not truly a subject (94). Favoring
a world of images in itself (89), the being of consciousness with its multivalent intentional structure is reduced by Bergson to an oscillation between
aspects of the In-Itself (91). According to Merleau-Ponty, this results in the
death of the subject (90), since in such an analysis neither pure memory nor

24

INTRODUCTION

the body is truly for itself (94). Because he understands the body as a "present existent" rather than a "temporal reality" (96), Bergson falls short of
"describing anything resembling the corporeal dialectic of 'temporalization,' " and consequently cannot account for the consciousness of the past
in the present (100), and ends up suppressing movement (111) and the synthesis of transition (101) through which it is perceived.
Despite the hypercritical reading of Bergson in these lectures, MerleauPonty is careful to draw the attention of the listener/reader to the fresh
insights pressing for expression at the methodological limits of the text.
"Bergson leads us to the brink of an intuition which he does not fulfill"
(106), leaving it to us to liberate this intuition from the philosophical framework in which it is embedded (91). Through his notions of "existence" (104,
105), "duration" (91, 110, 113, 116), "pure perception" (91), "pure memory" (91, 94), and "intuition as dialectical comprehension" (115), Bergson
discloses something new, inaccessible to reflective analysis, i.e., "thing and
consciousness as they are linked in the dialectical unity of time, not as correlatives, but as absolutely simultaneous" (89), without any priority given to
either. A resolution to the problem of the union of soul and body is at hand,
if Bergson can consistently employ these concepts by abandoning his realist
commitments and thereby showing what he wants to show, namely that
consciousness implies a body engaged dialectically in the constituting of
time. Once again, the reader finds Merleau-Ponty listening for the fertile
silence from which a great thinker draws his words, for that "residue which
maintains the dialogue among persons and, consequently, the history of
philosophy" (31).
The reader of these lectures is in the same position as Jacques Taminiaux
some forty years ago, reading notes taken by others of lectures for which
we do not have the professor's own notes. This would seem to be a disadvantage, having to listen in vicariously to the listener's perspectival listenings-in. Merleau-Ponty gives us some assurance to the contrary when he
writes elsewhere that we are as we affect others, that speaking and listening
and writing are fundamentally intersubjective tasks. These notes are
somehow the reverse side of his thought, the visible of his invisible. His
thought was also elicited by the faces and questions of the inscribers, in the
dynamic and charged setting of his lecture hall where the looks and gestures
of so many cross and weave a single field of vision and voice; they too participate in what he enunciated; his thought joins the invisible of their visible, and plays between and within their shared external and internal horizons. We are indeed grateful to the French editor, Jean Deprun, who put
together a multitude of perspectives, found the points where they overlapped to form a single texture. And, in this regard, must we not ask
whether we have here, in these intertracings, a text better than what we
might have risked wanting or hoping for, better than if we had the fully elab-

Introduction

25

orated notes of the professor such as those which Hegel and Heidegger left
for their students? In the preface to this English edition, ProfessorTaminiaux
tells us that "Merleau-Ponty, whose gifts of oratory and improvisation were
remarkable, based his lectures on schematic notes, relying on the spoken
word to give them life" (10). Are we not therefore encouraged to listen in
the silences and margins of these pages for the living and creative voice of
the professor and philosopher? And given the richness of what is already
said, does this listening not unveil a movement of desire to know what
"breath of fresh air" Michel Foucault might have inhaled in his notes, which
are not among those gathered for the making of this volume?
Patrick Burke

FRENCH EDITOR'S
FOREWORD

n 1947-48, the names of Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson were included

in the curriculum for the agrtigation in philosophy. Maurice MerleauPonty, who was then teaching at the Faculte des Lettres in Lyon and at the
Ecole Normale Superieure, devoted a course, taught concurrently in Lyon
and in Paris, to the problem of the union of the soul and the body in the
thought of these three philosophers. It consisted (at least in its Paris version)
of formal lectures, model analyses (our chapters 4 through 7) and commentaries on texts (our chapters 13 through 15). Since we were able to recover
neither the author's original notes nor the notes of those who attended the
lectures in Lyon, we have attempted here to restore the substance of the
course with the aid of those notes which were preserved by certain members of the Paris audience. To his own notes, the editor was able to add those
of Andre Coazan, Jean-Louis Dumas, Jean Jolivet, Francois Ricci, and Etienne
Verley. We wish to thank them for their general assistance.
The concise, confident words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty often left literally identical echoes in his students' notebooks. The editor's task was therefore simple. When the versions differed, he chose the one which seemed
the clearest and the most explicit. Since none of these differences affected
the substance of the ideas and interpretations, the reader can at least be
assured that Merleau-Ponty's thought has not been distorted. Although we
can no longer hear him speak, we can still continue to follow the development of his meditation.
In an effort to simplify the reader's task, we have standardized the references to the texts cited, referring to the most recent critical editions: for
Malebranche, the edition of the (Euvres completes (Paris: Vrin, 1962-1968);

27

28

FRENCH EDITOR'S FOREWORD

for Bergson the Edition du Centenaire (Paris: P.U.E, 1959). The quotations
from Maine de Biran are from the Tisserand edition, published during Maurice Merleau-Ponty's lifetime.
This work was undertaken at the friendly prompting of Andre Robinet.
Madame Maurice Merleau-Ponty has graciously consented to authorize our
project. We ask her to accept this expression of our gratitude.
Jean Duprun

FIRS^JECrWJE
Note on the History of Philosophy
in Relation to Malebranche,
Biran, andBergson

alebranche belongs to a philosophical tradition altogether different from the one with which we associate Biran and Bergson.
For Malebranche, the relationships between the soul and the body can
teach us nothing positive; they are illuminated from without by the soul's
relationship with Godthis is in the Cartesian tradition. For Biran and
Bergson, these relationships, on the contrary, lead to the soul's relationship
with Godthis is in the Pascalian tradition.
In Spinoza et ses contemporains, Leon Brunschvicg interprets Malebranche from a Spinozistic perspective.1 He sees Malebranche as a perceptive follower of Cartesian idealism, for whom geometry represents the
knowledge closest to the consciousness of God. "Understanding is preferable to faith."2 "Reason only incarnated Itself in order to lead men to Reason
by way of their senses."3 According to Brunschvicg, Malebranche simply
refusedunlike Spinozato take this idealism to its ultimate consequences
by going beyond the problem of the soul and the body. In Spinoza, this
problem disappears when the illusion of individuality is dispelled. "There is
no longer a need to explain how the perfect became imperfect; for there is
not, in the absolute reality, in the presence of God, an individual who says
yes and an individual who says wo."4 Brunschvicg interprets Malebranche
(and Descartes) in reference to the Spinozistic principle that every determination is negative, and Malebranchism then appears as a resistance to
Spinozism (in the Freudian sense of the word "resistance"). Thus, the soul's
relation to the body should be disregarded, being nothing more than a statement of fact.
29

30

FIRST LECTURE

Now Malebranche quite consciously distinguishesas Brunschvicg

himself notesbetween two kinds of knowledge: mathematical knowledge,
the "exact sciences such as Arithmetic and Geometry," to which "the fear of
falling into error" would have us "give preference," and knowledge acquired
by experience alone, which makes us understand "not relations of ideas
among themselves but relations to us and among themselves and the works
of God with which we live.5 Hence, Malebranche wonders whether one
should endeavor to attain clear ideas or whether one should understand
things as they are, and the opposition he thus establishes prevents us from
thinking of him as a failed Spinoza.
The historian of philosophy wavers between two dangers: that of being
blind, by analyzing texts literally (thus avoiding rethinking them); but also
that of judging more as a philosopher than as a historian and of valuing a
work by way of our interpretations. The historian of Cartesianism is tempted
to define a logic of Cartesianism which extends through and goes beyond
Malebranche in order to move toward Spinoza, thereby neglecting the
problem of the relationships of the soul and the body in Malebranche. But
this objective logic of the history of philosophy is only seemingly obligatory.
A fact is always interpreted. The Spinoza who judges Malebranche is not the
historical Spinoza, but Spinoza interpreted by Brunschvicg. Brunschvicg
himself admits that there is a "beyond Spinozism" in the sense that for
Spinoza, as for Malebranche, "the problem of idealism, which will arise later
for man, is still present. . . uniquely for God."6 Spinoza, then, saw idealism
in the mirror of God. It could just as well be said that Malebranche saw the
problem of existence in the mirror of God insofar as existence is not
reducible to ideality. The objection raised at the start is Brunschvicg's verdict, not a verdict rendered by history.
Must we conclude from this that there is nothing objective in the history of philosophy and that we can never compare two philosophers? Not
at all: we can objectively establish whether Malebranche had a positive conception of the union of the soul and the body or whether he accommodated
such a conception as best he could whenever he encountered it. In
Descartes, only three texts insist on the union; a great number of texts insist
on the distinction. In Malebranche, the portion of his work concerning the
relations of the soul and the body becomes a major theme, that of knowing
by feeling. The entire history of philosophy is a personal resumption by the
philosopher of the problem he is studying; subjective resumption, therefore
doctrine and philosophy, narration and reflectionbut not free reflection.
We must account for empirical relations, existing documents, and at the
same time discern a truth which does not lend itself to a purely objective
method. The truth of Descartes is not what he was empirically; nor is it the
recapitulation of Cartesian texts; it is, together, the totality of what he
wrote and the way in which he lived, bound together by the intuition that

Note on the History of Philosophy

31

we are able to have of a truth which he sought to express. For example,

Descartes posed the problem of the union of the soul and the body; he
affirmed their distinction, but he also thought that this distinction should be
forgotten in everyday life. The objectivity of the history of philosophy is
only found in the practice of subjectivity. The way of understanding a
system is to ask of it the questions with which we ourselves are concerned:
it is in this way that systems appear, with their differences, and bear witness
whether or not our questions are identical to those which their authors
themselves posed.
The history of philosophy is a confrontation, a communication with systems, analogous to that which we are able to have with persons. Even
though philosophers may choose, their choice is always accompanied, as if
in the margins, by a suspicion of what it overlooks. All consciousness of a
thing is, at one and the same time, consciousness of what is not this thing.
Each philosophical choice stands out in relief against the background of what
was not chosen, and it is in this way that philosophers communicate; it is
this residue which maintains the dialogue among persons and, consequently,
the history of philosophy. In this spirit, we will consider the texts of Malebranche concerning the soul and the body to be just as significant as other
texts. We will seek what Malebranche preferred to see, without ignoring that
which, in Malebranche, goes against the grain of Cartesianism.

SECOND LECTURE
The Union of the Soul
and the Body in Descartes

n Descartes, the question of the union of the soul and the body is not
merely a speculative difficulty as is often assumed. For him, the
problem is to account for a paradoxical fact: the existence of the human
body. In the Sixth Meditation, the union is "taught" to us through the sensations of hunger, thirst, etc., which issue from the "intermingling of the
mind with the body"; now, all "these sensations . . . are nothing but confused modes of thinking."1 In 1645, Descartes writes to Father Mesland,
[I]t is quite true to say that I have the same body now as I had ten years
ago, although the matter of which it is composed has changed, because
the numerical identity of the body of a man does not depend on its matter,
but on its form, which is the soul.2
The body is not, therefore, just so much matter: it is a totality, though not in
the Spinozistic sensethat is, like a constant formula. In Descartes, it
involves merely a question of the continuity of a function. It follows from
these texts that Descartes had to address the problem of the living body,
"closely joined and .. . intermingled"3 with the soul.
Let us recall three fundamental texts; (i) the Letter of August 1641, to
Hyperaspistes:
[S]i enim per corporeum intelligatur id omne quod potest aliquo modo
corpus afficere, mens etiam eo sensu corporea erit dicenda ([I]f "corporeal"
is taken to mean anything which can in any way affect a body, then the mind
too must be called corporeal in this sense);4
33

34

SECOND LECTURE

(ii) the Letter to Elisabeth of June 23, 1643. Here Descartes explains that
one must attempt to conceive of the union of the soul and the body in terms
of the union of weight and extension in Scholastic physics. Now, this relation remains unthinkable unless the soul is given a sort of materiality:
Your Highness observes that it is easier to attribute matter and extension to
the soul than it is to attribute to it the capacity to move and be moved by
the body without having such matter and extension. I beg her to feel free
to attribute this matter and extension to the soul because that is simply to
conceive it as united to the body5
(iii)The Letter toArnauld

of July 29,1648:

[S]i enim per corporeum intelligamus id quod pertinet ad corpus, quamvis

sit alterius naturae, mens etiam corporea dici potest, quatenus est apta corpori uniri (For if we count as corporeal whatever belongs to a body, even
though not of the same nature as body, then even the mind can be called
corporeal, in so far as it is made to be united to the body).6
The first of these texts was to figure in the Replies to Objections and thus
deserves to be taken very seriously
Note, however, that in their context these formulas are always accompanied by qualifications. Each time Descartes affirms, in one sense, the corporeality of the soul, he adds that the soul is not corporeal in the same way
as "whatever is made up of the substance called body" (Letter to Hyperaspistes)? And the Letter to Elisabeth specifies that
the extension of this matter [the body] is of another nature from the extension of [he thought] [the soul], because the former has a determinate location, such that it thereby excludes all other bodily extension, which is not
the case with the latter.8
In a Letter to More of April 15, 1649, Descartes seemingly attempts to
elaborate philosophically the union of the soul and the body. He here distinguishes between an "extension of substance" and an "extension of power,"
this latter belonging to the soul:
Quantum autem ad me, nullam intelligo nee in Deo nee in Angelis vel
mente nostra extensionem substantiae, sed potentiae duntaxat (For my
part, in God and angels and in our mind I understand there to be no extension of substance, but only extension of power).9
But how can this concept be coherent? The soul, from the point of view of
the body, appears as adapting itself to this body and is endowed with an

The Union of the Soul and the Body in Descartes

35

extension by contagion. However, here the point in question concerns only

the souls of others, and not the soul as soul. From without, we find the
extensity of extension; from within, we can grasp this extensity only
through reflection.
Thus, nowhere does Descartes claim that we can conceive of the union.
There is nothing to say on this point. The concepts he introduces in this
regard are mythical in the Platonic sense of the word: designed to remind
the listener that philosophical analysis does not exhaust experience.
The union can only be known through the union:
[I]t is the ordinary course of life and conversation, and abstention from
meditation and from the study of the things which exercise the imagination, that teaches us how to conceive the union of the soul and the body10
A new question then arises: no longer "how to reconcile the experienced
union and the distinction of essences" but "how does it happen that there
exists a realm of experience which we cannot conceive"? The Sixth Meditation speaks of "natural inclinations" which have their validity since God is
not a deceiver. However, if Descartes truly adopts this double attitude,
toward God and toward the world, can he sustain it? If we take the methods
of the First Meditation seriously, are we not led to consider the Sixth as an
aberration? And conversely, if we take the Sixth Meditation seriously, how
were the methods of the First possible? In Descartes, extreme theism (all
truth depends on God) joins with practical atheism, since the divine truth,
once acknowledged, exempts us from returning to God. If the union of the
soul and the body is a confused thought, how was J able to discover the
Cogito? And if I discovered the Cogito, how can I be the unreflective subject of the Sixth Meditation?
Spinoza will treat the mode of experience in the Sixth Meditation as
"privative." Conversely, Malebranche will obscure the Cogitowhich,
henceforth, will no longer "detach"so that neither the "I think" nor the
proof of the existence of God will allow us to transcend our inherent nature
as unreflective subjects. Thus are defined two opposing ways of restoring a
balance to Cartesianism.

THIRI^SCItJRE
Consciousness of Self
in Malebranche

L THE COGITO IN THE RESTRICTED SENSE,

AS EXPERIENCE OF MYSELF

escartes established an inner connection between thought and

being (the significance of which M. Guerdult minimizes, it seems,
seeing in it only the understanding of "a conceptual relationship between
[two] simple essences"1); if this were not the case, this connection would
be no more certain than other truths. If I think I am, this does not result
from an objective thought aimed at "thought" and "being," but rather from
the fact that I, myself, am this link and that I accomplish it. As M. Gueroult
writesvery correctly in this instancethe Cogito is "certitude in relationship to that certitude itself."2 When Descartes recalls that "in order to think,
it is necessary to be," he formulates his thought, but does not elaborate on
it: it is the formulation of the movement through which thought becomes
being. But this activity can only be grasped at that very moment: the pulsation of time which follows the Cogito separates me from myself, and
nothing proves that I must continue to exist thereafter. As Lachieze-Rey
points out, Descartes refused "to introduce into the mind the atemporal
unity of time"3 and therefore was unable to "accommodate himself to the
internal law [of thought], in its constituent unity"4 At the moment of the
Cogito, it remains true, however, that this certitude is perfect.
Malebranche, on the other hand, openly presents the Cogito as dependent on a single principle. "Nothing has no properties. I think. Therefore I
37

38

THIRD LECTURE

am."5 That is to say, I observe myself as a property of an unknown X. My

thoughts must be properties of something since they cannot be nothing.
Any manner of thought would allow this type of Cogito to function. Malebranche does not go through the prolonged doubt that makes thought
emerge inasmuch as it gives itself its own being, but rather he engages in an
inventory of all that is found in the mind. He observes that, true or false, my
thought remains a thought. If it is not nothing, we must relate it to something. "Even if you would have something in the soul preceding thought, I
have no wish to disagree."6 It is an "open" conception: Malebranche doesn't
even affirm that thought is the essence of the soul. His notion of the Cogito
does not put me in possession of my thought, nor does it identify me with
its principle. "Nothing is more certain than inner feeling in proving that
something exists; however, it is useless in helping us know what it is. " 7 1 do
not grasp my thought in its constituent tracings and in its origin. "I am not
my light unto myself." Moreover, this thought would be frightening in his
eyes. "I cannot think [of this] without a kind of horror."8

H. THE COGITO IN THE BROAD SENSE,

INCLUDING OBJECT OF THOUGHT
The ideas which I think are not my thoughts since thinking of an idea is not
engendering it intelligibly. My ideas appear to me as if by a miracle. It is
from the obscurity of the sense of self that we move to the vision in God.
This obscurity "might also serve to prove that the ideas which represent to
us things outside of us are not modifications of our soul" 9 What will define
the idea is that it is present to me, that it is something to be seen, it is
object. There is no confused idea; what is obscure in us stems from the soul.
If I know myself, this will be by a kind of blind contact. Therefore, there
will be no idea of the soul, but only of extension. This idea is light, I never
coincide with it; it always presents itself as the result of an intention which
originates within me but which leaves it at its distance. The distinction
between my perceptions and ideas, then, is based upon this notion. There
is no relationship between the content of the ideas and the trace they leave
in me.
Where do ideas originate if they are not nothing and they are not mine?
Every idea is a representation of something; it is what makes it, simultaneously, a light and something that is insufficient to itself. It is a representative
being, and therefore a derived or imperfect being. There is some nothingness in ideas. Each idea is distinguished from other ideas in that it negates
them. "My hand . . . embraces . . . an infinity of nonbeings."10 By the same
token, the idea of extension negates any other perfection of being.
It follows from this that an idea cannot subsist by itself, and that it

Consciousness of Self in Malebranche

39

stands out against the background of a whole, from which it appears to

have been taken. The idea is not intelligible through itself. It is "representative of," "referring to"; there must therefore be an intelligible principle by
and through itself, appearing behind ideas: this intelligible principle is God.
"I cannot conceive . . . how being that is without restriction, immense and
universal, can be perceived through an idea, i.e., through a particular
being."11 God is grasped without an idea; all of our activity involving knowledge related to ideas is based on our contact with him.
Hence, there is a tripartite division in the Cogito: (i) consciousness of
myself: I am in touch with myself obscurely; (ii) knowledge of ideas considered by me; (iii) knowledge of God, without ideas. God is not, strictly
speaking, proved except by a proof of simple sight of him. The Malebranchist Cogito includes, simultaneously, the three experiences of myself, of
ideas, and of God. The complete Cogito is the vision in God. But we do not
see God directly: "We see only what God saw in Himself, when He wanted
to create the world."12 If ideas are not ours, how can we conceive of anything? Knowledge seems possible only on the condition that it can clearly
formulate. Even when I don't think expressly about them, ideas remain present in my mind: "it moves away from them in such a way that it never loses
sight of them, and it is almost always ready to seek them out and to move
near them"13
My relationship to ideas is therefore identical to my relationship with
the perceived world. The horizonal relationship is not the index of a total
possession: I can only illuminate the horizon by moving myself from place
to place, which is nevertheless incomprehensible to me. Such, also, is my
relationship to ideas: in order to see ideas better, I use means whose secret
I, myself, do not possess.
This being Malebranche's conception, serious difficulties emerge, as
pointed out by Arnauld. "I am not my light unto myself."Moreover, this
light of the idea, I must see it! Malebranche must acknowledge this and
speak (in the III Entretien metaphysique) of a "created reason" ("created
reason, our soul, the human mind, the purest and most sublime of intellects, can indeed see the light, but they cannot produce it"14). However, if
I am a "created reason," it is certainly I who think, and then can what was
said about the transcendence of the idea be maintained? What is it to have
the feeling of an idea? Such, however, is our lot. What kind of a reason can
it be if it is limited to having a feeling? Malebranche admits in his Response
to Regis: "created minds would perhaps be more exactly defined as substances which apperceive what touches them or modifies them, rather
than simply saying that they are substances which thinks
Furthermore, as Arnauld observes, Malebranche speaks of the soul: he
must then have, in some way or another, some idea of it. Can we grant him
that we do not have an idea of the soul, but that we do have an idea of

40

THIRD LECTURE

extension? Isn't the obscurity thus introduced going to be extended to other

ideas and even affect the idea of the body? Can we accommodate obscurity?
Since pain, color and other such things are known obscurely and confusedly only when we erroneously consider them as existing outside our soul,
it follows that ideas about these sensible qualities are obscure and confused
only when we relate them to bodies, as if they were modifications of
bodies. And therefore we cannot reasonably conclude anything from their
obscurity contrasted with the clarity of the idea of the soul, and this would
cause us, rather, to doubt the clarity of the idea of extension.16
Besides, Arnauld is wrong in seeing nothing but a complete inconsistency in this theory; Malebranche actually tried to make the theory of a consciousness of self obscure but legitimate. I can construct a "pseudo-idea" of
the soul based on the idea of extension: (a) a contrario, by exclusion, by
separating from the soul anything relating to space; (b) by analogy, because
I can extend certain properties of extension to every created beingand
therefore to the soul, the soul having been created by God just as bodies
were. However, it is not a question of true knowledge. Ultimately the soul
will remain undetermined, and the idea we have of it will remain a halfthought. This situation brings to our attention the difficulties of language in
general, especially the difficulties of the natural language of emotions, of
these "natural signs" which assure their "contagious communication." Malebranche usesmutatis mutandisa. similar procedure to construct his
theory of the soul:
It should be noted that these comparisons between mind and matter are
not entirely appropriate, and that I compare them only to make the mind
more attentive, and, as it were, to illustrate my meaning to others.17
There is, in Malebranche, the deliberate intention to introduce the
unreflected into philosophy. The very fact that Descartes's Cogito was discovered on a certain date, that it was late in coming, that it needs to be
taught, proves that the reflecting self cannot be considered as myself.
Moreover, I consider my body as a part of myself: if I had an idea of the soul,
this would not be so, and I would not have to offer this body as a victim to
God. "If you were to see clearly what you are," says the Word, "you could no
longer be linked so closely with your body. You would no longer look upon
it as a part of yourself."18 This is tantamount to saying that our bodies are
taken legitimately for us.
Malebranche deals with our natural attitude. I am naturally oriented
toward the world, ignorant of myself. I know only by experience that I can
think about the past; my memory is not known to me through the direct
grasp of an operation. My reference to the past is not my doing. I receive it:

Consciousness of Self in Malebranche

41

certain memories are given to me. I am not then a mind which dominates
and unfolds time, but a mind possessing certain powers, the nature of
which it does not understand. I never know what I am worth, if I am just
or unjust. Hence, there is an aspect by which I am truly given to myself, and
not a principle of myself. There is no clarity for me which does not imply
obscurity, and this obscurity is myself. If my soul were known by the idea
of it, I would need to have a second soul to have the idea of the first. It is
essential for a consciousness to be obscure to itself if it is to be faced with
an illuminating idea.
Malebranche confronted the problem of passivity. We inherit powers
which are not immediately ours. I record the results of an activity of which
I am not a part. In Malebranche, there is not a philosophy of the mind, but
a symbolic and material thought of the soul. Knowledge loses its unity in
this thought. The soul is "touched" by intelligible extension. No internal relationship unites it to a space which it has not constituted. There is an
inevitable split in a philosophy in which there must be a detour to go from
self to self and an obscure contact of the soul with itself.
Ultimately, Malebranche would come to a philosophy which would not
at all be his own, to a philosophy in which it would be impossible to distinguish the soul from the body, to a sort of simple open thought. In order to
extricate himself from it, he must find the means to reestablish the rationality
that does not appear in the soul, he must find a perspective from which what
is obscure for us will be clear in itself. The feeling of self will be displaced in
order to be situated in God.
This is what his concept of human freedom shows. In it he gives the
consciousness of self greater value. The inner feeling I have of myself is sufficient to affirm my freedom, but insufficient to know it. Why do we not
have an inner notion offreedom?This latter is nothing more than the power
we have to follow or not to follow the movement which brings us to God.
Now, we do not have an affective intuition of this movement. Freedom
united us with God before the Fall and not since: the sinner replaces the
movement toward the infinite by the uncertain possession of thousands of
individual goods. To describe the human condition before the Fall, Malebranche will therefore use an artifice: starting with the establishment of an
existencein the strict sense, that is to say something opaquehe refuses
to remain in irrationalism and resorts to a theological superstructure
without a direct relation to our actual situation, which is fallen. However,
he does not introduce sin in the way in which Kant will later introduce "radical evil": human nature in itself is entirely rational. Malebranche recognizes
the existence of the irrational, but projects in God the conditions of rationality, the clear relationships by virtue of which nature and the human
person become analyzable.

FOOm^CrtJRE
Natural Judgments
and Perception

atural judgment" is an ambiguous and bastard expression,

JL ^ eevoking two opposite possibilities of consciousness. On the
one hand, consciousness is always feeling, never a coincidence between
myself and the content of my thought: "It is necessary that I feel myself only
in myself when one touches me,"1 even on the lev^l of ideas. There is,
between sentient consciousness and intellectual consciousness, only a difference in the action of intelligible extension on me. But, on the other
hand, what defines me as mind is the fact of apperceiving: "For it is the same
for the soul to receive the mode called pain as to perceive or to sense pain,
since it cannot receive pain in any other way than perceiving it."2 It is impossible for a consciousness to be caused or activated: consciousness can only
maintain relations of apperception with that which is not itself. Certainly
Malebranche does not believe that to apperceive is to illuminate, but there
remains an opposition between "apperceiving" and "sensing oneself."
This problem comes up again with regard to natural judgments. Consciousness will form "free judgments" when it receives a slight impression of
the idea of extension. This is the origin of a "free geometry." But the clarity
of the judgment is not due in this instance to consciousness of connection:
even then, there is a distinction between the affection (J who see) and the
content (what I see). On the contrary, there is a confusion between the two
levels when the touch to which I am subjected is stronger: at that moment,
I p& extension in my affections; and, as the soul can only be apperception,
it is necessary that this also be a judgment. However, I do not apperceive

43

44

FOURTH LECTURE

the link between subject and predicate. We were seeking to find out how
the soul could at one and the same time be perception of idea and passive
subject, subject to error: natural judgment forms the junction between
these two aspects of the soul.
Certain natural judgments are always erroneous (the presence of heat in
the hands), others always true. This notion constitutes a building block for
a theory of one's own body. How can I be conscious of the results of an
intellectual operation which takes place outside me? Now the problem of
one's body consists precisely in that it is at the same time both mine and
other. The theory of natural judgment resolves this problem owing to a theological superstructure: God judges in me, for me, without me, and in spite
of me.
Brehier, in his study on "Les jugements naturels chez Malebranche,"3
speaks of "pseudo-problems" due to the fact that "Malebranche supposes that
forms and distances are the givens of sight."4The theory of natural judgment
becomes, therefore, pointless as soon as one agrees with Berkeley that "it is
with solids known by touch that geometry deals."5 But this totally disregards
everything which gives a general scope to this theory, everything that roots
it in Malebranche's thought.
The comparison of the editions of the Search shows that Malebranche
changed in this regard from idealism to occasionalism. Let us study further
this dilemma.
(A) Descartes, in the Sixth Discourse of his Optics, interprets the perception of depth from an intellectualist point of view. The distance from
point X is judged "as if by a natural geometry" and
by a mental act which, though only a very simple imagination, involves a
kind of reasoning quite similar to that used by surveyors when they measure inaccessible places by means of two different vantage points.6
Hence, it is a question of an enveloped judgment. It is here more than an
unconscious judgment (an unthinkable notion since it supposes the unconscious consciousness of a true relationship). This is more finalism rather
than idealism. One considers the perceiving subject by placing oneself outside of the subject: an attitude of a scientist, and not an attitude of the subject. We are involved with an exterior point of view: Descartes introduces
here a judgment In Itself or For Me, but not For Itself. In the Meditations,
on the other hand, he adopts an authentic attitude, that of the human
person engaged in the experience of perception. Here genuine idealism
appears, the type in which one ceases to invoke judgment as a factor or as
a force. In the case of the piece of wax, for example, judgment in not a supplementary factor, an aid. Quite the contrary, the piece of wax, as an
immutable quantity of extension, only has meaning for the mind. As Alain

Natural Judgments and Perceptions

45

was to express it, "the cube is judged," since the very definition of the cube
has an existence only for thought: the cube is never seen as cube. In this
case, perception is judgment inasmuch as it brings into play afixingpower,
which alone can grasp the entire cube. By the same token, when the perception of size is involved, authentic idealism does not consist in saying
"There is a judgment, since the size of the object is deduced." Here again
judgment would be a factor, a psychic cause. Idealism, in this case, consists
in saying that there is only one total system which is the world, in which
only a partial perception is possible.
We could reply to the intellectualist psychologist, "You conclude the distance from the size, and inversely; however, where do we begin?" This is
introducing judgment in a purely causal sense. True idealism affirms that
there is a perception of size and of distance included in the position and the
construction of the object and of the universe: for this idealism, there could
be no consciousness of anything whatsoever without total consciousness of
the world. It is meaningless here to talk of sensible perception. Now, Malebranche lost sight of this true idealism: his theory of the soul prohibited him
from thinking in these terms. But his own theory raises internal difficulties:
natural judgment cannot be homogeneous with any other judgment.
Idealist analysis follows from each perspective to its geometric representation, but these perspectives are devoid of meaning and we destroy
what we are trying to analyze. Let us transport ourselves into the "cube as it
is thought of": it disappears as cube. The subject doesn't see the cube from
anywhere in particular; it sees it from everywhere. But how can the unsituated subject distinguish the inside and the outside, the interior and the exterior of each square? By the same token, what would "perpendicular movement" signify for an unsituated subject? We cannot move to an unsituated
thought which would be beyond the perceived, nor find a way to go beyond
the sensory givens by an operation carried out from our perspective.
(B) The other hypothesis is Malebranche's. When I am given indices, I
receive a conclusion already formulated by virtue of a law established by
God. This isfinalism:I benefit from the passage made once and for all by God
from sign to meaning. Now, if it is God who judges, it is not I: if he communicates to us the conclusion without an intermediate term, my consciousness becomes a simple, finite unfolding. In the constancy of objects,
it is God who now fixes the image. It is no longer a question of an ideal constancy, but of a real constancy produced in me. Thisfinalityis outside me and
the theory of natural judgment becomes the equivalent of an ordinary empiricism. In fact, the constancy of this radiator, for example, is the fruit of an
identification practiced across change: now idealism and realism both suppress perspectivalism. For idealism, perspective is only a nonbeing. Realism,
for its part, replaces perspective by the grasp of an actual size.
The theory of natural judgments poses, then, a very general problem:

46

FOURTH LECTURE

that of the alternative of going beyond the dilemma of idealism which attributes to me an immanent consciousness of the whole world, and realism in
which consciousness is constituted from a succession of states. Both of
these conceptions miss the point. For idealism, it will be necessary to show
how this pure consciousness can receive in it the particular perspective of
the thinking subject engaged in the perceptible world. This idealism was
Sartre's idealism in Transcendence of the Ego; there, consciousness is "all
lightness, all translucence"; it doesn't leave any place for an "inhabitant," not
even the "I."7 Sensations, such as the I, are before consciousness. For Sartre,
there was not, therefore, any problem of the other: I am no further from
the other than from my own states, which is the same as saying that the
other is as near (or far) from me as myself. But how can we understand the
relationship of this consciousness empty relative to its hyle? The problem
was unsolvable: the basic materials were too far from consciousness. This
consciousness which is not linked to any hyle exists nowhere, it is divine.
If the inherence in the hyle is taken seriously, we can no longer cling to a
bipartite analysis. Consider the analysis of the Psychology of the Imagination: in this work the image is not given as a thing present in my consciousness, but as an imagining consciousness. Now Sartre's analysis is not
entirely explicit: how does the imagining consciousness differ from the
judging consciousness? When I imagine, there is not before me just an analogon of the absent being: the absent being appears to me as mysteriously
present, present by a magical quasi presence. How can I give myself this virtual presence? I conjure it up, as one conjures up the spirit of the dead.
Consciousness, in this instance, becomes caught up in its own game.
There is, between it and the image, a relationship of complicity, of fascination. But if my consciousness is fascinated, there is, then, a secret relationship between it and its hyle. This problem thus leads us beyond idealism.
Will we say that the constancy of forms, of objects, etc., stems from a
natural organization? This would be tantamount to forgetting that my perception is consciousness and would be professing an inverted idealism.
The problem is as follows: it is necessary that there be mediation
between the pure For Itself and that which consciousness poses In Itself in the
presence of itself, that there be a connivance between the For Itself and the
In Itself. "[I]t is the soul which sees, and not the eye," Descartes said.8 "The
eye or the soul": for him, there is only one or the other. Natural judgment
would attempt to be this mediation, yet it is only a wavering between the In
Itself and the For Itself. In order to get beyond this alternative, it would be
necessary not to consider pure consciousness first, but to return to the perception itself: to take consciousness already at work, already situated, and not
to put our trust in a schematic notion of consciousness. If I give myself a pure
idea of consciousness, I will never be able to recover perception. But isn't
consciousness precisely that which can never be taken as pure?

Natural Judgments and Perceptions

47

We see that today's problems are already there in Malebranche and

appear as in myths or in dreams. The historical situation of a philosopher
delimits what he can think about with certitude, but not what he can try to
think about.

FIFTH LECTURE
Perceptible Extension and
Intelligible Extension

xtension cannot be said to be perceptible since sensations are modalities of the soul. We relate these modalities to extension: there is,
then, a relationship between them and intelligible extension, and we must
discover the basis of the instinct which pushes us toward it.
Extension is not a manner of being, but a being. It is not an abstract, it
contains its parts as a white canvas contains the drawings which will be
traced upon it. This relationship between extension and its parts cannot be
elucidated by a reference to analytical geometry, as Leon Brunschvicg
thought to be the case:
Malebranche envisages analytical geometry only in its relationship to space.
. . . the concrete representation of space supposes the reality of the idea
which is without parts, without extension, which is a relationship such as
the equation of a circle.1
Laporte, in L'Etendue intelligible chez Malebranche,2 observes correctly that Malebranche never draws examples from analytical geometry3
There is nothing in common between intelligible numbers, which are "all. . .
mutually commensurable,"4 and intelligible extension, whose parts are not
always such.5 In fact, Malebranche undertakes a direct analysis of extension,
just as Leibniz openly attacked analysis situs. Malebranche confronts the
notion of spatiality head on.
What relationships are there between intelligible extension and created
extension?

49

50

FIFTH LECTURE

In the Search (first edition), we see in God the ideas of all bodies. The
theory is modified in Elucidation Ten: human experience of extension is in
fact subject to perspectival variations, and one cannot accept that God perceives individual bodies himself. But Malebranche does not renounce placing
in God the ideal foundation for particularities. "It is therefore certain that one
sees bodies only in general and intelligible extension, made perceptible and
particular by color."6 The word "general" is ambiguous: it is not a matter of the
relationship of potency to act; rather extension contains the internal seeds of
every being.
Intelligible extension is "the idea of created extension." There is in fact
only one extension (created) and one idea of extension (intelligible). Perceptible extension is itself connected to the source without which it would be
inconceivable: there is an inner genesis of exteriority, at the end of a movement which establishes the relationship of the parts among themselves.
Here Malebranche returns to his analysis of knowledge: in order to have
light, I must have a representative (in scientific language) being facing me,
otherwise my soul would be dispersed and at the mercy of its various states.
This necessitates a being whose entire essence is to offer itself to knowledge
and which refers back to reality, because the human soul does not, by itself,
have this agility and this transparence which alone would render it capable
of knowing.
Intelligible extension is neither on the side of the subject (it is not a fact
of knowledge) nor on the side of the object (it is not an In Itself): it is the
conceptual nucleus by which real extension opens up to consciousness.
Thus it can be explained that while there is only one extension, there is
nonetheless an intelligible extension, that is to say a mode of being which is
only the transition from consciousness of extension to effective extension.
Intelligible extension is not an aspect of divine psychology, which would
render it a thing or a kind of thing.
Descartes, in a letter to More, writes: "I call extended only what is imaginable as having parts distinct from one another" ["ita illud solum quod est
imaginabile, ut habens partes extra partes, . . . dico esse extensum"]. 7 This
certainly represents a good description of this conceptual nucleus which
consists of continuity and possible division. Malebranche, in turn, considers this nucleus and describes it as an object composed of intelligible
parts and including "outsides and distances."8 However, he affirms as early
as the Responses to Arnauld that "the intelligible segment of a circle is
smaller than the same circle and occupies neither more nor less space since
it occupies no place."9 Is this a compromise? In no way: Malebranche conceives of an extension which extends itselfa spatializing spacebut
which remains a space because the subject has already spatialized itself. This
is the attitude of a philosophy for which there is ideality of space, but
without any reduction of extension to what is not itself.

Perceptible Extension and Intelligible Extension

51

Having failed to understand this, Laporte fell into several errors:

(1) He wonders, "how can we understand that something immaterial
and unextended could represent matter, or could be used by God as a model
for creating it?"10 Now it is precisely because it is merely representative that
intelligible extension can represent effective extension. Laporte does not
distinguish between the unextended in the sense of psychological interiority and the unextended in the sense of ideality: the former inextension is
opposed to the thought of extension whereas the latter makes it possible.
(2) He writes,
In this case, the known object, in that it is known by pure knowledge, is
the idea of an entirely nude extension, colorless, invisible: in short, the
idea of empty space, or more precisely (the notion of the void being as
chimerical for Malebranche as it was for Descartes) the idea of air
and in this regard he quotes, in a footnote, a fragment of the Response to
R4gis, chap. II, 3: "Since air is invisible, this idea does not modify my soul
with some color nor with some sensible perception in order to represent it,
but with a pure perception."11 However, this does not signify that the intelligible is merely attenuated sensibility. This purity is entirely relative.
(3) From Malebranche's having written that intelligible extension is "the
immediate object of the mind when it thinks about bodies which do not
exist,"12 Laporte deduces that intelligible extension is nothing more than
imaginary extension, that it is "part of what makes up these images, of which
contemporary psychology often still makes one of the ingredients of the psychic world as opposed to the physical world,"13 and that it only resides in our
consciousness. This is an error because Malebranche does not think consciousness is closed: its meanings are not its own. Here again Laporte mistakes the example for a definition and believes them to be interchangeable.
Malebranche, precisely because he is a classic philosopher, escapes from
realism by means of illusion (dream, hallucination, the error of amputees),
but this is not to say that ideality is illusion. Psychological immanence is here
only a transition toward transcendental immanence.
The real difficulty would be this: "Does there exist a way to include in the
idea of extension the total reality of extension?" Malebranche writes,

'

[God] possesses everything which is real and perfect in creatures, without

any imperfection, without any limitation. My hand is not my arm. It is real,
but it contains, so to speak, the negation of my arm and of all the rest of
the universe.14

Now in God such negations have no place, and Malebranche, who knows
this well, adds, "But in God there is no nothingness."15 How, then, can the

52

FIFTH LECTURE

divine Word represent extension? Malebranche does not respond except by

a categorical refusal:
That if I am asked to explain clearly how the divine Word contains bodies
in an intelligible way, or how it is possible that the divine substance,
although perfectly simple, is representative of creatures or participatable
by creatures, I will respond that it is a property of the infinite which
appears incomprehensible to me, and I will leave it at that.16
In other words, is the constitutive nothingness of creatures a simple privation of being? If nothingness is nothing, we are on the path which leads
to Spinoza. Otherwise it can be asked whether God remains God, since he
does not have in him this real nothingness. Now the Correspondance avec
Mairan maintains the reality of the reciprocal exteriority of the parts of
extension. A "cubic foot of extension," whether there is something around it
or not, will remain what it is. Since it is the negation of all others, it will
maintain its existence:
What makes one cubic foot different from all others is its own being, its
existence. Whether there are beings of the same or a different nature, if
this is possible, or whether there is nothing which surrounds it, it will
always be what it is.17
To Mairan, who objects that if ball A were a substance, "it would be infinite,
for who would limit it?" Malebranche responds: "Nothing, I will reply.
Because nothing is required to limit it."18 Therefore Malebranche chooses
resolutely to say that the alleged nothingness of things is not nothing; since
they are not God, things must have their existence in themselves.
Going back to a perceptible extension, instinct, natural judgment: all
these themes assume a "connection with existence" outside clear and distinct thought.

sixmuiciura
Causality in the Relationships
between the Soul and the Body

oes Malebranche find causality in God alone?This is what seems to

emerge from the texts. However, the efficacy of God's will escapes
our clear understanding:
You ask me for a clear and distinct idea of this infinite efficacy, which gives
and conserves the being of all things. Your asking is inappropriate. You are
asking me about God's power; ask me about his wisdom if you want me to
satisfy you now. I do not give men a distinct idea which corresponds to the
word power or efficacy; because God did not give any real power to creatures and because I must share ideas only in order to make God's worries
and the wisdom of his way known.1

We must therefore content ourselves with knowing that it is impossible for

God to be inefficacious.
Moreover, Malebranche shows himself to be anti-Cartesian in regards to
the creation of organized beings; for him the laws of nature are notas for
Descartesprior to the formation of organisms: they come into play only
after "the first impression of motion wisely distributed which would suffice
to form at once the animals and the plants."2 Finality, then, is reintroduced.
God himself is only accessible by means of the "short proof" of feeling.
True knowledge of God (for fallen humanity), that which results in our
timing toward him, is grace, that is to say a counterpleasure. Feeling alone
can reveal to us an entire dimension of divine life; this profound life of God
is accessible only by grace.

53

54

SIXTH LECTURE

Feeling enlightens us indirectly about the exceptions God had granted

before original sin, in favor of Adam, relative to the laws of the union of the
soul and the body The soul in this Edenic state "was never interrupted involuntarily in its meditations and in its ecstasy"3 And Malebranche adds, "When
you are deep in thought and the light fills and delights you, do you not feel in
yourself a remnant of this power?" 4 Unlike Descartes, Malebranche did not
build a "two part" philosophy
[We did not feel compelled to leave this lecture out of our text, despite
its extreme brevity. Let us remember (see supra, p. 27) that it was a corrected oral presentation and not, strictly speaking, a lecture.J.D.]

SEVENTH LECTURE
Theology and the Union
of the Soul and the Body

alebranche distinguished between knowledge arrived at through

ideas and a knowledge through feeling: what we know from the
mere fact that we are. Does theology not also, just as the knowledge of
extension, introduce the recognition of a realm of experience which could
not be understood from our activity as observers? Is there not a nonobservable knowledge, at least of the value of God, which would remain opaque
and should remain so for reasons drawn from the very nature of God?
At first Malebranche directs his criticism against religious experience.
However, he encounters such difficulties that thereafter he moves toward a
compromise: religious experience, however obscure it might be and
remain, becomes superimposed upon an absolute rationality.
(A) As soon as Malebranche examines the relationship of understanding
to the will, we see that he subordinates the will to understanding. The will
does not constitute a part of the soul's essence, for "the mind's essence consists only in thought." The will is only a modality; further, it is inseparable:
The power of volition, though it is not essential to it, is inseparable from
the mindas mobility, though not essential to it, is inseparablefrommatter.
For just as immovable matter is inconceivable, so a mind incapable of
willing or of some natural inclination is inconceivable.1

Nothing is more obscure than this status of a modification inseparable from

what it modifies. A mind without a will would be "altogether useless, since
the mind . . . would not love the good for which it was created."2There is no
55

56

SEVENTH LECTURE

will without thought, but the relationship is not reciprocal, at least in principle: "Willing is not the essence of the mind, since willing presupposes perception."3 The will, then, is subordinate. It is in the relationships of perfection that the will finds, in itself, what sets it in motion. Thought is already
"relationship to ."The will is but one aspect of the movement which carries
us toward God. This law does not allow any exceptions: "men [are] capable
of some perceptible love or hate only because they are capable of a spiritual
love or hate."4 "God produces whatever is of a real nature in the sensation of
concupiscence." 5 Morality, then, is defined as a search for happiness. All
these theses imply the conception of a human person naturally ordered to
an end. Evil is merely a privation, and the world appears as an obstacle to
the soul's movement toward God. Faith is only a short-cut for signifying to
feeling what could just as easily be signified to reason. An almost naturalistic
formula like "I gave to mankind this celestial bread . . . to show them outwardly that I am the Bread which now nourishes the substance of their
souls"6 renders manifest to reason a truth which is not of its order. We read
further in the Meditations cbretiennes: "Since most men are not made for
reflective work . . . they must learn about their obligations by reading the
Holy Scriptures."7 The life of Christ offers us "a faultless model." But know,
adds the Word, "that in order for you to conform to it even more surely, you
must consult the order such as it is in itself."8 The recourse to Holy Scriptures, then, is merely a simple expedient. "Dealing with fools, [the Son of
God] used a kind of foolishness to make them wise."9 For the same reason,
grace will be a holy concupiscence, a counterpleasure:
It is because desire puts us out of order and, to conquer it, God must
inspire us with a different desire which is entirely holy; it is because, for
us to acquire the equilibrium of a perfect freedom, we must have a counterweightsince we have a weight pulling us to the groundwhich raises
us to heaven.10
There is no essential difference, at this level, between nature and grace.
Christ is occasional cause just as any other phenomenon. Grace, in this context, is a simple restoration of nature: these are two species of the same
genus.
(B) It was difficult for Malebranche to stop there. Even if the will is a
movement toward God, this will must be distinguished from our will, in the
ordinary meaning of the word. This will toward God is the same whether
we will or don't will. Our natural love for God never increases nor diminishes, although presently, at every moment, it can be distracted by finite
goods which monopolize it. Our action is present love. Only this love is
constitutive of ourselves. 11 The problems heretofore avoided are now going
to reappear in relationship to this present love.

Theology and the Union of the Soul and the Body

57

The natural love of God is not yet us. In the beginning, however, he did
permit that disorder which is sin. What is the difference between natural
love and present love? Natural love concerns being, and sin inclines us
toward well-being. What happened when we sinned? We considered the
relationships of perfection poorly. Malebranche provides four reasons for
this, three of which are deficient:
(1) We are finite minds which need time. Consequently, our willed will
(volonte voulue) is not at the same level as our willing will (volonte
voulante).12But then, God would be responsible for sin! (2)" [0]ur senses
diffuse our soul throughout our body . . . "13But it is God who is the creator of the senses! (3) We don't have an idea of the soul, but only an inner
feeling.14 But this must be precisely the case!15 (4) Since the Fall, "the union
of our mind with our bodies has changed to dependence."16 This response
is better; but how was the original sin possible? If we introduce sin as an
indispensable event in order to understand the human person, we then
renounce constituting a philosophy of human nature, since we no longer
possess an Adamic nature. Human nature or the natural love of God retreats
before sin. "God withdrew from [man] and no longer wanted to be an integral part of man."17 It follows that our natural inclinations are no longer
knowable by feeling. Was the original sin "an act without consequence"?
According to Malebranche himself, however, it threw our nature into chaos.
Moreover, is our "nature" anything more than an artificial construct?
At this stage, Malebranche minimizes the consequences of sin. Sin does
not lead to any change in God's wishes. God had given Adam the power to
completely master his body's actions. He did not have to maintain this privilege for a rebellious creature and therefore did not change his will by punishing us. 18 Moreover, the natural love of God is in full effect after the sin:
it is an equal contest between good and evil in the regenerated human
person.19 Adam, on the other hand, did not have a relative freedom but an
absolute freedom. Aware of the difficulties that all of this involves, after the
Search Malebranche adopts a new conception of religion and of religious
philosophy, and he takes the exact opposite position to his first theses.
Could the history of the church have achieved nothing? Could it constitute but a vicious circle? Could it end with a reestablishment of the golden
age, in a circular evolution? No: the world redeemed by Jesus Christ is
better than the world before the Fall; "it is worth more than the same universe in its initial state."20 Therefore sin is not merely a temporary interruption of the world's equilibrium. The world has yet to be made: the present
world is "a neglected work."21 "God wanted to teach us that it is the world
to come which will properly be his work."22 Religion ceases to be retrospective in order to become prospective. The notion of creation is turned
upside-down: the human person is no longer subject to a finality but
becomes capable of absolute initiative. In the Meditations chr&iennes,

58

SEVENTH LECTURE

Malebranche rejects the idea that certain people would be predestined for
salvation. God wants to save everyone. The Word does not choose which
people will be saved but only builds his spiritual temple in its general outlines. "It makes no difference whether it is Peter or John who creates a given
effect in my temple." 23 The Word does not choose this or that stone: it is my
will which will determine which place I will occupy. The Word opens for
competition a place in his spiritual temple. "I constantly act in this way so
as to encourage the most people I can to enter the church."24 "The people,"
and not all the people. If everyone were saved, this would, says the Word,
"make my temple deformed by making it big and rambling."25 The Word
therefore, which wants to save all people, cannot in fact save them all. Is
this only for esthetic reasons, for reasons of harmony, as, for example, the
use of the word deformed indicates? Malebranche alleges another, more
interesting reason: if the Word were to give everyone a feeling grace
"granting certain victory,"26 the human person would no longer exist.
"Feeling grace diminishes worthiness. . . . Bliss is virtue's reward; it is not its
principle. When we sacrifice everything to it, we do not slaughter any
victim."27 In order to save everyone, everyone would have to be transformed into objects. Here Malebranche disavows the morality of happiness:
as a Christian, he must have remembered that "he who wants to save his life
will lose it." In this perspective, hell is the condition which demands that all
those who save themselves possess freedom and sacrifice, and that the
temple be a human temple. The glory of God thus takes three forms, which
are as so many distinct glories:
1. The "glory of the Architect," in the order of finality. This glory would
not have been, however, a sufficient reason for creation; 28
2. "The Architect also receives a second glory from the spectators and
admirers of his building
" 29 Their homage restores the world to God;
3. Supreme glory: not satisfied with "recognizing" this world, we
accomplish its divinization ourselves through sacrifice:
But it is only Christians, only those believing in the Divinity of Jesus Christ,
who truly count their own being and this vast universe we admire as
nothing,... the annihilation to which their faith reduces them gives true
reality before God.30
Here Malebranche introduces the distinction between the profane and the
sacred: this world itself reduces itself to nothing in order to honor God:
Our actions indeed derive their morality in the relationship they have with
immutable order . . . but they do not derive their supernatural dignity and
as it were, their infinity and their divinity except through Jesus Christ.31

Theology and the Union of the Soul and the Body

59

In the order of perfections, there exists no relationship between humankind

and the infinite, but Jesus Christ's act of sacrifice creates a relationship
between humanity and God. His incarnation, his sacrifice, his priesthood,
"clearly proclaiming that there is no relationship between creator and creature also establishes thereby so great a relationship between them that God
delights and takes perfect pride in his work."32 Therefore this sacrifice must
appear as a reciprocal recognition of God by the human person and of the
human person by God. We are irreplaceable in this act of self-denial. Sacrifice is an absolute initiative while being at the same time finality; therefore
the difficulty is overcome. The love of Christ is the love of someone for
someone and in this way transcends the alternative of finality versus initiative. Malebranche thus establishes a theory of religious experience in which
practical love resolves theoretical difficulties.
Malebranche himself speaks of "experience" in regards to religion: "the
facts of religion or the established dogmas are my experiences in matters of
theology."33 Henceforth the myth is no longer a simple expedient:
It might be said .. . that the objections raised against the main articles of
our faith, especially against the mystery of the Trinity, are so strong that
they cannot be given solutions that are clear and convincing and that they
do not in any way shock our feeble reason, for these mysteries are indeed
incomprehensible.34
We no longer evoke the possibility of an intelligence of faith.
When my disciples reflect and consult with all the respect and all the required
application, I reveal to their mind in a purely intelligible way several truths
which they knew with certainty only because of the infallibility of my word.
However, because religion contains mysteries completely incomprehensible
to the human mind...; the shortest and surest way to learn religion and
morality is to read the Scriptures and to listen to the Church.35
In the Dialogues on Metaphysics, Malebranche quotes Saint Paul (Eph.
2:3,12): before Christ, "We are in this world asAtheists, without God, without
a benefactor."36 God can be completely understood by nothing other than
Christ's love which, destroying our finite being, causes God to be in the world.
Our relationship to Christ is not a relationship based on reason. In this new
perspective, God is not of the order of being, and we can no longer conceive
of human nature as a naturally oriented movement toward God.
Moreover, the relations of the soul to the body appear as exemplary:
these are the same categories which make the union of the soul and the
body and the union of Christ with the church thinkable. "I give life to my
church as the soul gives life to the body," says the Word in the Meditations
chrtiennes$7And the Treatise on Nature and Grace already clearly stated

60

SEVENTH LECTURE
[WJhen we speak of the action of the soul of Jesus, we consult ourselves.
. . . Jesus Christ does not act on his members in a particular way except by
successive influences. In the same way our soul does not move, at one
single time, all the muscles of our body38

The history of God in the world can be thought of only in terms of human
categories.
At the outside, this conception of faith would be more similar to
Kierkegaard's than to the traditional conception of faith. Faith, according to
Kierkegaard, is no longer faith in something or in some being. Of those who
love Christ, it can be said that they are Christian because their love always
remained beneath what it should be. We cannot, then, relate to God as to a
comprehensible object. But Malebranche backs away when faced with the
consequences of a conception in which we would renounce seeing things
from God's point of view. He wavers between the two attitudes and places
himself most often in God's point of view, as he does, for example, when
he meditates on miracles.
Although they proceed from God's particular desires, miracles are foreseen from all eternity in the act of creation:
[W]hen God performs a miracle and does not act in accordance with other
general laws which are known to us, I claim that either God acts in accordance with other general laws which are unknown to us, or what he does
then is determined at that time by certain circumstances which He had in
view from all eternity when He enacts that simple, eternal, invariable act
which contains both the general laws of His ordinary providence and also
exceptions to these very laws.39
Therefore, even here, Malebranche maintains God's point of view.
Finally, he resolves the problem of monsters and disorder in the same
spirit. We read in the Treatise on Nature and Grace,
If rain falls on certain lands, and if the sun scorches others;... if a child
comes into the world with a malformed and useless head growing from his
breast, and makes him wretched, it is not that God has willed these things
by his particular wills; it is because he has established laws for the communication of motion, of which these effects are necessary consequences:
laws so simple, and at the same time so fruitful, that they serve to produce
everything beautiful that we see in the world, and even regain in a little
time the most general mortality and sterility.40
The philosophy of monsters and disorder remains subordinate to a more
fundamental order.

EIGHTH LECTURE
From Malebranche
to Maine de Biran

n ^Experience humaine et la causality physique, Leon Brunschvicg

established a parallel between the philosophies of Maine de Biran and
Malebranche, and we shall begin by examining this parallel. In this work,
Brunschvicg affirms that the Cartesians had saved philosophy by transferring to ideas the prerogative of evidence granted to sensory experience by
the Scholastics: "The evidence invoked by Scholasticism is evidence of a
sensory order; Cartesian evidence, upon which Malebranche relies, is evidence of an intelligible order."1 Biran, for his part, works out a "transfer of
evidence," but by displacing it again, "if not towards sensory data, at least
towards an experiential certainty."2 Bringing the philosopher's gaze back to
the body, he abandons traditional philosophy and contrasts it with a nonphilosophy, working "to the advantage of this very skepticism, whose
poison [he] wanted to eliminate."3
Brunschvicg praises the pages of Elucidation Fifteen in which Malebranche contests the implication of the experience of effort, and he concurs with it: "In the supposed inner feeling of movement, precise analysis
necessarily discerns the subjectivity of the feeling and the reality of the
movement: this latter is not necessarily linked to the former."4 Consciousness of muscular effort is doubly deceptive, since it implies neither knowledge of the means which we use to act on the muscle involved, nor certitude that this muscle is actually moved. Brunschvicg commends Malebranche for having written:
It seems to me evident that through inner sensation or consciousness the
mind does not even know the movement of the arm it animates. Through
61

62

EIGHTH LECTURE
consciousness it knows only its own sensation, for the soul is conscious
only of its thoughts. Through inner sensation or consciousness they know
the sensation they have of the movement of their arm, but it is not through
consciousness that they are informed of the movement of their arm, of the
pain they suffer there, any more than they are of the colors they see in
objects.5

[Note that in this work Malebranche seems to retract what he had said concerning "natural judgments." He adds, it is true, "Or, if one doesn't want to
acknowledge it, I say that the inner feeling is not infallible, because error is
almost always found in the sensations when they are composite."6 There is
a hesitation in his thought.] Brunschvicg appreciates such a clear distinction
thus established between "consciousness of self" and "consciousness of
things." He also praises Malebranche's critique of intellectual effort:
Malebranche, with this incomparable, in-depth gaze that seventeenth-century
philosophers cast on the unconscious, shows how intellectual effort, how
the will to understand, are only appeals to intelligence: intelligence transcends these appeals, because ideas are realities of an entirely different order
than the sensory givens of consciousness.7
Authentic philosophy must avoid any contamination of the idea by psychological determinations, must establish itself in the clear idea and discover on
this level an autonomous dimension of truth. No problem is raised concerning the origin of the idea. Philosophy consists of a conversion, clarifying, beyond psychological events, the pure relationship of the mind to the
idea. Starting with shrouded forms of the idea, the philosopher will pursue
the total idea.
Biran, on the other hand, displaces the notion of evidence again. He
takes as his point of departure the body's experience and its motility. He
contrasts with mathematical evidence or with reason a psychological evidence which he also refers to as metaphysical* This evidence cannot be
communicated directly:
The signs which we use in metaphysics can awake and excite the immediate feeling of this evidence, proper to each mind, which is, as we say,
compos sui; but these signs, always arbitrary and conventional, have no
relationship with the signified subject: they produce inner evidence, but
they do not create it; this inner evidence is prior to them, and signs would
not exist without it.9
Unlike mathematical signs which convey their meaning, the philosopher's
words cannot communicate exactly to the reader's mind an " 'entirely inner'
evidence which nothing outside can reveal."10 This is strictly individual

From Malebranche to Maine de Biran

63

experience. The philosopher can only invite us to bring about for ourselves
this coincidence with our "ego-ness" (egoite); his discourse is a kind of
incantation.
Brunschvicg infers that this is tantamount to refusing to accept any
transmissible philosophy. More critical of Biran than he is of Bergson (and
this dissymmetry is surprising), he singles out one doctrine "which challenges in such a clear way (we would be tempted to say: in such an insolent
way) the rights of intelligence and of representation,"11 and he cannot concede Biran's writing:
When it is a question of facts involving an inner sense (it is this very sense
or reflection which is capable of conceiving of them), any other faculty,
such as imagination, or even reason by itself, would be ineffective and
incompetent to judge. It is above all in this context that the only true and
equitable judgments are those among peers.12
Going back to one of Leibniz's tenets, Biran criticizes philosophers more
than once for "asking what they know":13 "There is good reason to exclaim
at the strange behavior of men who torment themselves over misconceived
questions: 'They seek what they know already, and they know not what
they seek.'"14 He objects to them citing the evidence concerning the relation of the soul and the body. Here there is no knowledge to rediscover: a
statement of fact suffices,
this relationship being a primitive given of consciousness or of man's existence, the mystery would be more in the possibility or the very necessity
of conceiving or believing in the absolute reality of each of the terms separatedfromeach other.15
And Brunschvicg ironically points out,
The problem of the union of the soul and the body disappears as a problem, because it assumes that the thinking substance is known as a separate
reality, and this conception is merely afictionof the understanding.16
He might as well say that Biran transforms the problem into a solution. What
was clear for Malebranche is obscure for Biran. What is clear for him was
obscure for Malebranche. Such a primacy of what for Malebranche was
"absolute night"17 places the Biranian doctrine "beyond any asking for explanation and elucidation."18
But is there, as Brunschvicg believes, on the one hand philosophy and
on the other its negation? Is the question posed as he feels it should be
posed, and would not Biran's "nonphilosophy" be more the expression of an
effort toward heightened consciousness, annexing new territories to phi-

64

EIGHTH LECTURE

losophy? Brunschvicg must recognize 19 that Biran describes the experience

of effort as scrupulously as Malebranche had. He knows that the consciousness of effort is accompanied by a total ignorance of its means and that it
does not precede consciousness of movement, but is contemporaneous
with it;
Every act of the will is truly indivisible and instantaneous in the fact of
inner sense. In considering this action from a physiological point of view,
I distinguish therein two elements or moments in which it takes place. The
first corresponds to the simple motor determination or the release of the
central impulse on the nerves. Yet this part of the action, thus limited to
the nervous system, doesn't seem to necessitate carrying with it a particular inner perception: but in assuming that there was such a perception
and that it was not necessarily confused with the perception of resistance
or inertia of the contracted muscle which accompanies it or immediately
follows it, we would still not yet be able to associate it with the symbolic
sign of individuality or of self, which can begin to recognize itself or to
exist for itself only insofar as it can distinguish itself as subject of the effort,
of a term which resists. . . . The second moment corresponds to what takes
place in the motor system, from the instant the muscle contracts until the
contraction's effect is transmitted or reported to the central nervous
system, where the muscle sensation then takes on this characteristic of
repudiation which constitutes the inner realization of the effort, inseparable from a resistance, or the inner apperception of the self, which knows
itself by distinguishing itself from the resisting term.20
Consciousness of the effort emerges, then, from the confrontation of a decision and of information regarding the organism's reaction.
We are quick to say "motor subject or thinking subject," as if they were
terms of an alternative. Biran did not reduce consciousness to motility but
he identified motility and consciousness. The primitive fact is consciousness
of an irreducible relationship between two terms irreducible themselves. It
is not a consciousness becoming movement, but a consciousness reverberating in movements. It is neither an interior fact nor an exterior fact: it is
the consciousness of self as relationship of the I to another term. Therefore
it is not a question of an empirical philosophy which would fill consciousness with muscular phenomena, but a philosophy which recognizes as fundamental a certain antithesis, the antithesis of the subject and of the term
which bears its initiatives.
"Knowledge is arrived at necessarily by an antithesis;"
. . . everything is antithesis for the human person; the human person is in
itself a primitive and indelible antithesis: it forms an antithesis with the universe. All beings, perhaps, reveal themselves in this way in their essence,
including God, whom it is impossible to conceive of as a solitary being.21

From Malebranche to Maine de Biran

65

Everything in Biran's work is based on this antithetical view. What is henceforth embedded at the heart of philosophy is no longer the recognition of
the I by the I, but the relationship of the I to what is not itself. Now for
Brunschvicg, the antithesis is unintelligible, it is nonbeing. "It is impossible
that the primitive fact be one fact, because it is, fundamentally, two facts."22
But if the antithesis were to appear as universal, as enveloping the very consciousness of the ideamotility, such as the ability to speak, serving as the
basis for languagecould we then continue to consider it unintelligible?
Would it not be better to establish the identity of the idea with itself, a
simple limit?
Moreover, does Brunschvicg's Kantianism allow him to criticize Biran in
this way? Would not Biran contrast the pure existence of a fact to the clarity
of the idea? But is not the Spinozistic affirmation of the idea, which Brunschvicg accepts, also a simple fact? Is this presentation of the true idea to
the mind of the philosopher something other than a fact? Confronted with
the problem of the union of the soul and the body, Descartes admits that
this union has its own clarity. Malebranche takes exception to this clarity,
but he discovers in God the reasons for the union: he too did not avoid the
problem. But Brunschvicg, for his part, does something entirely different:
he suppresses it.
Every philosophy starts from a fact, but only the system which, starting
from a fact, can account for other facts, will appear sound. Can idealism,
for example, account for imagination? Can Biranism account for ideas?
Beginning with a fact? This is true for all philosophies. The "transfer of evidence," instead of being a regression as Brunschvicg believes, is the very
progress of philosophy. Brunschvicg himself, to the degree that he does not
merely repeat what scholars say, is led to designate a term for those who
read him the Mind, which cannot be expressed as scientific objects are. All
philosophy is compelled to consider the metaphysical evidence of which
Biran speaks. The mind is not completely whole in its works, otherwise
there would no longer be any philosophy. It is Brunschvicg who suppresses
problems: he speaks on behalf of a philosophy which considers itself as
acquired, definitively in existence since the appearance of Cartesianism.
But philosophy is a perpetual inquiry and must call into question ideal evidence itself.
Moreover, Brunschvicg's attitude has strange consequences. He accepts
as self-evident the absolute distinction between consciousness of self and
external sensibility. However, this distinction is in no way self-evident and
doesn't stand up even in the light of Kantian philosophy: if I analyze, as
Kant does, consciousness at work (in the Refutation of Idealism, for
example), I must establish an integral relation between "consciousness of
self" and "consciousness of things."
Brunschvicg takes presuppositions for norms when he refers, as Male-

66

EIGHTH LECTURE

branche did, to the amputees' illusion in order to discredit "the subjectivity

of feeling."2^ Now, to agree with Malebranche that we feel pain in amputated limbs "because if the corresponding fQaments of the brain are disturbed in the same way as if these parts had been injured, the soul feels a
very real pain in these imaginary parts,"24 is not to invoke evidence but to
adopt a theory which forms a system with Cartesian physiology. Today we
cannot accept this sensorial theory of the "phantom limb" which replaced
the theory that we maintain in us an implicit and global consciousness of the
body, an "image of the body" subsisting after amputation. Therefore it is
impossible to use it against the perception of the movement of the body
itself, unless we condemn, on the pretext of saving philosophy, any development of effective knowledge. Is the authentic respect of science on the
side of a philosophy which is only maintained at its expense? (It is also not
a question of subordination, in the relationships between psychology and
philosophy, psychology and science. Science is only a part of our experience, and philosophy must be able to concern itself with all experience.)
The real question we can ask is the following: did Biran succeed in
being a philosopher, or did he only contrast the exigencies of a psychology
with philosophy? Is what he contrasted with Cartesianism a philosophy, a
conception of Being, or only a psychology, a simple thematic ordering of an
aspect of Being? Biran often gives the impression of leaning toward psychologism, for example, when he declares that he is elaborating a philosophy of touch and not of sight: this is an imprudent statement, because it
is not a question of conceiving of the whole being as tactile, and the consciousness of vision is not challenged by the primitive fact. If Biran often did
not measure up to philosophy, it is not for having questioned the evidence
of the idea (because this inquiry is philosophy itself), but, on the contrary,
for not having questioned Being itself.
Let us now examine the introduction to the Essai sur les fondements de
la psychologie in order to discover what corresponds to the problem which
we are posing. (We will consider other texts later on.)
Let us first take a look at the role played by the notion of fact in this
work. Biran criticizes Condillac for taking one term as his point of departuresensationwhich does not yet possess this characteristic:
Sensation, such as Condillac and Bonnet both viewed it, each from his own
point of view, when they wanted to situate themselves at the origin of
knowledge, simple sensation, I say, is not yet a fact.25
Biran, for his part, starts with thought, and in this sense he is Cartesian.
(There are abstractions derived from the adjective and abstractions "derived
from verbs"; the former have only a conventional value; the latter "express
action with intense power"26 and thought is of this nature, different from

From Malebranche to Maine de Biran

67

sensation.) But beginning with this notion of fact, his position deviates from
Descartes's position.
"All that which exists for us, all that we can perceive outside ourselves,
feel in ourselves, conceive of in our ideas, is only given to us as fact."27 And,
Biran adds,
There is a fact for us only to the degree that we have the feeling of our individual existence and the feeling of something, object or modification, which
confirms this existence and is distinct or separated from it. Without this
feeling of individual existence that we refer to in psychology as consciousness (conscium sui, compos sui), there is no fact that we can say is known,
no knowledge of any sort: for a fact is nothing if it is not known, that is to
say, if there is not an individual and permanent subject who knows.28
There is, then, a fact only for a witness. The fact contains a reference to
someone to whom it occurs. It is this notion, and not immediately consciousness, that Biran takes for his point of departure. Consciousness is an
"existence For Itself" (a notion that Biran rediscovers free from any Hegelian
influence). Biran does not begin with a being which exhausts itself in the
consciousness that it has of itself, but with a being which is in the process
of becoming conscious that it exists, struggling for this consciousness
against a pre-existing opaqueness, with a being which seeks to "become
self." In the expression "fact of consciousness," the word fact (in the singular)
is no longer understood the way psychologists understand it (as a world
event). It denotes essential "facticity" of consciousness, a synthesis of interiority and exteriority.
This fact translates a relationship:
Every fact implies necessarily with it a relationship between two terms or
two elements which are thus given in connection, without any one of
these terms being able to be conceived in itself separately. Thus the self can
know itself only in an immediate relationship with some impression which
modifies it, and, reciprocally, the object or whatever the mode can be
conceived only under the relationship to the subject which perceives or
which feels. This is the origin of the very expressive title of primitive
duality.2?
This duality is irreducible: "any evocation of the two elements to unity is
absurd and implies a contradiction."30 And Biran writes a little further on in
regards to categories,
Will we say that they are innate in the sense in which, as Leibniz says, the
thinking subject is innate to itself? We will respond that this subject itself is
not innate, but it is constituted as such in a fact or primitive relationship.31

68

EIGHTH LECTURE

Let us understand completely this word "constituted": the subject is not

derived from something else, but refers itself by its very essence to something else.
Starting from this position, Biran was able to elaborate this initial notion
of original duality and to derive a philosophy from it. However, he did not
really succeed: most often, rather than transcending the alternative of
Condillac and Descartes, he lapses into the juxtaposition of reflection and
empiricism. The Essai alternately adopts these two perspectives, wavering
between the point of view of the primitive fact and the simple description
of the "how" of consciousness. Now, if the primitive duality is irreducible,
the theory of the primitive fact must be profoundly changed. The distinction
between "primitive" and "derived" (Biran speaks of "dependencies" or of
"immediate derivations from the primitive fact"32) cannot be conceived:
everything is equally primitive. We cannot validly deduce categories on the
basis of intimate experience, in order to subsequently apply them to things:
the latter are not explained by the former. Biran should have adopted neither the exterior model nor the interior model. If he had carried out a sufficient critique of the two orders of experience, external and internal, Biran
would have realized the absolute parallelism of the problems which are
posed in both instances. Moreover, there is a passage in which Biran accepts
this parallelism. In dealing with external experience, he distinguishes
between
the art of observing facts which offer themselves on their own to our
senses, and another art of discovering those facts which hide themselves,
in order to torment nature, as Bacon himself says, and of forcing it to
reveal its secret to us.33
And he adds,
But if the first art of interior observation has been fortunately cultivated by
psychologists, who are Locke's disciples, has the latter, much more difficult,
that of inner experience, really been practiced?34
Thus, within, as well as without, the true method is an active inquiry and
not just a simple recording. The very fact that he brings together the two
seriesinternal and externalshows that Biran does not consider himself
closer to one than to the other. There is no longer precedence given to the
inner: inner experience must be an attempt to regain an interiority which is
at first opaque. A text such as this is beyond empiricism: anticipating phenomenology, Biran seems in this work to move toward a philosophy which
is indifferent to the distinction between interior and exterior. We can quote
in this same context the page in which he quotes Lucretius:

From Malebranche to Maine de Biran

69

The knowledge which is involved here is not that of our sense, nor of foreign impressions or wounds [Plagaeper sensus inflexae externa quasi vi.
Lucretius] to which they are subject. All of this is not the self, which
resides entirely in inner feeling or in the consciousness of this free activity
which constitutes it.35
The relationship between the self and the senses is such here that we
cannot treat the senses as simple modalities of the self, as a diminution of
its unity: they are exterior to it.
When he studies the relationship between psychology (in the modern
sense: as the science of the subject situated in the world) and reflection (as
he understands it), Biran does not hesitate any less. Must we separate the
self from sensibility? Is the self the condition of sensing or is it subsequent
to it? Sometimes Biran separates the self from sensibility so that, while referring continually to the Cogito, he nonetheless affirms that we can speak of
"sensibility without self": simple affections, obscure perceptions, preconsciousness.36 He criticizes Locke for positing, from the first sensation, the
presence of an individual personality constituted from an innate self and
without origin. He wants to show in opposition to Kant that the distinction
between the form and the matter of knowledge is not "purely logical."37
Sometimes, on the other hand, he reaffirms his principle that the original
duality is irreducible and inseparable: there is no longer any sensibility
without self as there is no self without sensibility. In this spirit, he finds the
Cartesian doubt opposed to the primitive fact: the world and the self are
two absolutely correlative perspectives. But here again he hesitates, he
wavers between "the primitive fact" (a Cartesian concept) and "the primitive
facts" (Condillac's concept), in search of a third solution, more dialectical,
which he glimpses without clinging to it, and which would be neither
Cartesian nor empirical. He would like to explain simultaneously how there
is reflective unity of experience (that is to say, totality) and how there is a
temporal unfolding of experience (that is, genesis). Quoting the page from
the Fondements de la psychologies in which Biran comments on the Dissertation of 1770 and writes, "the self, therefore, is truly abstrahens in its
reflective action, and not abstractus? Brunschvicg observes that Biran was
able "to glimpse Kant's original and seminal contribution, and how he was
capable, through reflective analysis, to define the truly modern orientation
of philosophical inquiry"39 But Biran sometimes goesas we will seein
the opposite direction, connecting this inner capacity of reflection to the
interiority of the voice: thus the body itself would reflect. . . . We see that
Biran did not truly elaborate the third position he was aiming at.
Let us now consider the relationships between motility and thought. We
distort Biran's thought by concentrating on the experience of the subject
moving its body. Biran started with Schelling and Fichte (whom he quotes,

70

EIGHTH LECTURE

according to Degerando, in the Memoire sur la decomposition de la

pensee40), and he borrowed from them the idea that the will is the condition of the self. It is incorrect, then, to say that he neglected the thinking
subject in favor of the motor subject. This error is due to the fact that Biran
first gave an extrinsic and symbolic expose of his thoughts, translating his
intuition in psychological terms. On the odier hand, this intuition is
expressed in a direct way in the Essai sur les fondements de lapsychologie,
where we can read,
If distinct perception is not prior, as I believe it to be, to whatever exercise of the will, the will too could not exist before a certain degree of perception, and although it is true to say that the thinking being can begin to
know only inasmuch as it begins to act and to will, it is nonetheless true,
according to ordinary expression, that we cannot want expressly what we
do not know in any way.41
In other words, there is mutual implication between will and perception,
which is not to say that Biran reduces one to the other. What does this
mutual implication mean? That we must recast the theory of perception.
Currently, the psychology of form considers the "perceptive sector" and the
"motor sector" as elements of some global system. Perceiving is to orient
oneself toward a thing, to zero in on it. Acting is to put in motion an intention endowed with a meaning. This requires that knowledge be a "way of
behaving in relation to," and that action be integrated with the perceiving
self. Biran speaks in the same vein of a case of complete paralysis, in which
the individual no longer has the feeling of existing. What he wants us to
understand is that there is no difference between moving his body and perceiving it. Biran does not want to dismiss consciousness, but rather to redefine it.
This is what a page on the experience of freedom shows: "I conclude from
this," he writes,
that freedom, considered as the feeling of a power at work, as the intimate
feeling of my existence, proves to us its reality. And as Descartes said: I feel
myself existing (or I think), therefore I really exist, we will say the same
thing with evidence of the same order of primacy: I feel myself free, therefore I am free. If this feeling of power were to deceive me, if I were still
able to doubt, if, at the moment when I determine myself, when I perform
an effort, it is another being, another invisible power which is the cause of
my determination, which appropriates my effort and executes my will; I
could also doubt, when I feel or apperceive my individual existence,
whether it is not another being which exists in my place.42

From Malebranche to Maine de Biran

71

Biran only wanted to restore, as this page shows, to the "I think" what he
considered its full meaning. Here he speaks as if Descartes accepted with
reservation the occasionalist idea, and he affirms the motor capability of the
body in terms which are the very ones by which Descartes affirmed the existence of the self. The "I think" is not eliminated, but broadened: if I can call
into doubt such and such sensory data relative to the outside world, I must
ultimately show how I feel myself situated in this world. Malebranche's critique does not explain to us how we can have the very notion of effective
movement: I would not ask a single question about the means of my movement if I were not first conscious of moving my body.
Finally, the Essai sur les fondements contains an attempt to introduce
the notion of a corporeal spatiality, overcoming the alternative of reflectivity and empiricism. There exists, next to exterior space, indefinitely divisible, which is the object of sight or of touch, an inner extension of the body,
object of immediate apperception. This extension is the locus of all internal
impressions:
In considering all the moving parts of the body united in a single mass, subject to the impulse of a single and same will, the subject of the current
effort, which distinguishes itself from this composite, which distinguishes
itself from that composite which resists by its inertia and obeys the motor
capability, this subject will have the apperception of this resisting continuity that is to say of an inner extension, but still without limits or distinction among parts.... In order for the impressions to be localized in the
different parts of the interior space of the body itself, these parts must be
differentiated or be separated, so to speak, some outside others by the
repeated exercise of their own immediate sense. But the general muscular
system finds itself naturally divided into several partial systems, which offer
as many distinct terms to the motor will. The more these points of division
are multiplied, the more the immediate, inner apperception becomes clear
and becomes differentiated, the more the individuality or the unity of the
permanent subject of the action manifests itself by its very opposition to
the plurality and variety of changing terms. By placing oneself outside each
of them, the self learns to place them outside each other, to know their
common limits and to relate the impressions to this process.45
Correlatively to this spatiality prior to space, Biran introduces a method
involving simultaneous analysis of inside and outside:
Our primordial power or the empire of the will over the parts of the body
is obviously known, but only in that it is felt and not in that it is represented to the outside as the existence [of] a foreign mechanism could be.
In considering only this representation, and considering the exterior movement as an effect which the will would be assumed to be the cause of, it is
certainly true to say that power cannot be known in the effect and vice

72

EIGHTH LECTURE
versa, for these two conceptions are heterogeneous, the one being based
only on an inner sense, and the other on an outer sense.... How can we
not see the opposition which occurs between these two types of knowledge, opposition such that at the moment when the will is going to move
a part of the body, if the instruments of mobility were able to be represented instead of being felt or being apperceived interiority, the will would
never be born? By the same token, if we were to represent to ourselves the
nerves of the retina and the light source, we would no longer see colors;
and how could eyes designed to see inside of themselves see what is outside? It is thus that in order to know objectively the hidden workings of our
own volitions, we must be simultaneously self and other.44

Therefore knowledge of the body can be neither purely exterior nor purely
interior. If we want to both inhabit our body and know it, we must be simultaneously ourselves and another. Therein lies the point of departure for a
general attempt to legitimize the primitive duality of within and without.
The notion of fact, the relationships between reflection and psychology, the relationships between thought and motility, corporeal spatiality: we will have to follow these four themes in their elaboration prior to
and after the Essai.

NiNTHiECTmE
Biran and the
Philosophers of the Cogito

s we have already seen, the notion of fact plays an important role

in Biran's thought and it is to this notion that we shall return first.
Biran does not use the word "fact" in its usual sense (something which
comes from without and which we observe); rather he seeks to explore
new territory. By "fact" he means something which is grasped in the nascent
state of reflection, where reflecting and reflected are in the process of distinguishing one another. Fact, thus understood, is not something which
exists in itself, facing me; the consciousness we have of the fact is not free
and distant with respect to it. Biran takes as his theme a reflection turning
toward the unreflected in which it takes root, an activity emerging from
passivity.
The Cogito must therefore be profoundly modified. Descartes purchased
certitude at the price of a renunciation of all relationships to anything other
than self. The void which I created measures certitude. Indeed, we can say
that the Cogito does not make me lose everything: I discover as thought what
doubt had set aside. However, I lose contact with what is not thought; what
remains is the intention of thought, not its content as thought of this or that.
The object which I saw becomes blurred; what remains is nothing more than
a presumptive vision.
With the Biranian notion of "fact" we would conceive of a Cogito of
operative or current thought, a Cogito containing implications or uncertainties. Its affirmation sums up and condenses a series of intuitions yet to
come. If I say, for example, that I actually see, an increasing number of such
73

74

NINTH LECTURE

intuitions intervenes: all the possible developments that I allow myself by

saying that I see blue or red, potential intuitions which arise to obscure the
Cogito and to include in it a series of relationships of the self with the world,
relationships which are not made explicit and which lack complete transparence. The Cogito becomes certitude in the presence of certain results.
Has it not been said, "The more one thinks, the less certitude one has"? On
the contrary, certainty is a prerequisite for analyses and reflections: it is certainty that makes them possible. This experience of truth must be there
first: if I call it into question, my search for truth loses all meaning. Thinking
is grasping at results for which we do not have all the premises. We should
not base actual thought on possible thought, but rather just the opposite.
Step by step, for example, my certitude of the color red or of the shape triangle becomes part of a system of certainties called the world, and in which
I find myself involved from the moment I exist.
We could thus conceive of the abandonment of criterio-logical philosophy based on the experience of error, in favor of a philosophy supported by
the experience of truth, supported by current certainty. Doubt must not be
understood as the resolve to deny as long as possible, but rather as a break
with our immediate certitude, destined to make us examine our certitude in
depth: an awe rather than a mistrust. The evil genius, as the possibility of
error, would still be present, but with a different demeanor: the idea that we
are threatened by error as soon as we devote our attention to something our
thought cannot fully embrace, instead of being a hypothesis onerous to the
point of leaving us only intimacy with ourselves, would reveal, rather, the intimacy of my thought with itself in its transcendence toward the object. To
doubt would be to rejoin one's self at a distance, to anticipate one's self.
We should ask ourselves if the certitude described by Descartes, examined more closely, does not already contain a transcendence of itself. If we
look for what lies behind the words of the Cogito, we see that this identity
of thought with itself is grasped only in its transcendence. The "I" would no
longer be a cautiousness, but a possible success. Likewise, the subject of
freedom would be understood less as choice and power to make multiple
choices than as choice already made, an exercise following from choices
already accomplished.
Such is the direction indicated by the Biranian concept of the identity
of thought with willful motility: although we are consciousness and
freedom, we have to become them, to manifest them, to make ourselves
consciousness and freedom. We must then accept thinking of ourselves as a
living antithesis. We could thus transcend the alternative of spiritual interiorization and psychologism. Brunschvicg writes in this regard,
In the description [that Biran] presents of a fact of feeling, there is something which clearly contradicts the constitutive nature of a fact as fact:

Biran and the Philosophers of the Cogito

75

feeling should be capable of transcending the immediacy of the moment at

which it actually takes place in order to attain, beyond the present of the
immediate apperception, the virtuality which preceded the data of the intimate sense and which is destined to survive it. In other words, and before
recognizing that Biran's affirmations are openI would not even say to
truth, but to meaningit would be necessary to allow for an experience
which would assure us the possession both of self and the beyond self, an
experience which would seem as if it could at the same time be, both on its
own level of transitory manifestation and on a higher level of persistent
entity, taking place in time and retaining, nevertheless, the plenitude of
time. Such an experience is a psychological monster, whose paternity
Biran, understandably, hesitated to claim.1
"Psychological monster"? Perhaps, but we become monsters precisely
because we temporalize ourselves. In fact, Biran most often wavered
between the terms of these various alternatives. He foresaw, for example,
the priority of the actual over the possible, of existence over essence. At
least once he criticized Descartes for having questioned whether the world
was real instead of seeking to see the world. He foresaw a spatiality of the
body prior to objective spatiality, a presence of the outside world within the
consciousness of self. He saw that consciousness of self is at the same time
consciousness of the body. He correctly stated that although we are consciousness, we have to transform this consciousness of ourselves into
knowledge of ourselves by means of signs. But all Of this is constantly compromised. At the same time that he roots the self in a body brought closer
to the self, he lapses again into physiologism (second and third parts of the
Essat). He resumes, in dealing with the self, the position of an outside
observer, and he treats the self as something that can be explained. He conditions the primitive fact from the outside and comes back to the point of
view of an outsider, thus risking falling outside the confines of philosophy
and becoming a psychologist.
Biran would have abandoned psychology only if he had discovered corporeality, the lived world, and others in this new dimension, instead of
dealing merely with a portion of being. Most often he will oppose discipline
to discipline, psychology to ontology. Speaking of Malebranche, he will
criticize him for having assumed the ontological point of view, which
implies that he considers himself a simple psychologist and admits to not
engaging in philosophy.
Let's verify all this briefly by reviewing first the texts in which Biran
coinpares himself to the philosophers of the Cogito: Descartes, Malebranche, Kant; and then those texts in which he treats the problem in a
related fashion in regards to space and time, to the senses, and to signs.
These latter texts assume the main problem to be solved and show how
Biran conceived of consciousness.

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NINTH LECTURE

Most certainly Biran wanted to connect at one and the same time both
the form and the contents of experience. The philosopher, especially if one
is an idealist like Kant, is not, in principle, concerned with contents, but
with their form. The psychologist tends to reduce form to contents. However, we can conceive of a philosophy which does away with this absolute
distinction and considers form as the manner in which content is presented.
Form would then be traced, in filigree, in content. Psychology and philosophy thus become identified with one another without any damage being
done, because philosophy, henceforth, grasps the universal structures of our
world. Now Biran often forgets these universal structures, and this is especially noticeable in regards to time. He points out, correctly, that lived time
begins with the absolute initiatives of a subject, the motor subject. But it
would have been interesting to show how a future dimension, flowing from
future to past, becomes established first in the experience of the free subject. Nothing of the sort is found in Biran's work: lived time flows, for him,
from past to future. Contents should intervene in such an analysis only if they
bring something to the universal structure of time. But Biran constantly presupposes the intuition of a classical temporality inside of which our initiatives successively posit units of time. Biranism is a philosophy of good intentions. The way in which Biran comments on Descartes's Meditations informs
us about his own:
The certitude I have about my existence is not the certitude of an abstract
being, but of an individual who senses himself modified in an extended
body, inert, organized, upon which he acts. The certitude of the existence
of this body therefore constitutes an essential part of the certitude that I
have of my being.2
Hence, Biran affirms in a related way the incontrovertible evidence of
body and thought, but he does not think at all of affirming the motor subject as opposed to the thinking subject. He only introduces the motor subject as a subject capable of having thought: the motor subject is thinking,
"we find in ourselves the intelligence which operates through the will."3
Willing and understanding cannot be dissociated. Therefore, we can
acknowledge that Biran wanted to show that the presence of the body was
necessary for thought itself.
The body,.. . contributes as necessarily to intellection as it does to imagination. In fact, I could no more conceive of a triangle than of a myriagon if
there were not signs to which these concepts are attached, and, moreover,
if there were not the idea of an exterior extension of which the immediate
apperception of my own body is the necessary model.4
Here, then, the sign plays the part of an intermediate term:

Biran and the Philosophers of the Cogito

77

All signs are necessarily material or drawn from one of our senses. Therefore, in order to conceive, the mind must, with the aid of some signs, also
turn itself towards the body in some way. It is true that the function of the
body or the brain, in pure intellection or in the conception of ideas which
are not related to exterior senses, is different from the function which
takes place in the imagination or representation of ideas which are related
to any interior sense, the brain being more active in this latter case, or
requiring a deployment of more energetic, more precise effort on the part
of the soul. But one cannot conclude from this that the body plays no role
in the intellect nor in any act of thought whatsoever: and if it were to play
no role, there would be no self, and, it follows, no thought.5
This text shows Biran's strength: he knows that the motor subject
exhibits sufficient thought to merit that it be considered a primitive trait.
But this text shows his weakness as well, which is to rely on signsand on
them alonein order to link thought with the body. Always on the brink of
authentic intuition of the body itself, he limits himself to saying "the brain
plays a part" in thought. For the observer of the brain, corporeality does not
arise from within, but from without. It would be necessary to grasp the sign
from within, which Biranstill too close to the eighteenth-century "ideologues"does not do. When he criticizes Descartes, Biran objects first to
what he calls "the fiction of doubt":
The fiction of doubt is repugnant to the mind relative to truths of this order.
I think, I exist as a thinking thing or substance; I am the cause of certain
acts or active modifications of my being; I am a subject liable to other
modalities which begin and end without the intervention of my will; there
are causes and substances other than myself. Descartes misunderstood the
authority of the primitive laws inherent to the human mind: he did not see
that if it were possible to doubt necessary truths for a single instant, there
would be nothing true nor certain for our mind.6
This is a text fraught with difficulties: Biran does not see that, in the
face of doubt, there is a reversal of values and that, for advanced doubt,
appearance becomes sufficient. He considers doubt simply as fictitious.
However, if we suppress hyperbolic doubt, we suppress at the same time
the only means we have to perceive ourselves as having the capacity to be
continually reborn as thought. The Cogito becomes a simple conversion to
psychic facts. We imply, therefore, an absolute observer of this thinking
soul and we miss the essential result of the Cogito, whether the subject
becomes a psychic thing, or whether it becomes absolute intellect. However, in a text from his youth, the Meditation sur la mort pr&s du lit
fundbre de la soeurVictoire, Biran declares that he is "astonished to feel that
he exists,"7 which excludes the attitude of pure and simple recognition of

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NINTH LECTURE

self as a brute fact. In such an astonishment there is consciousness of the

contingency of self, a questioning of this fact. This could be grounds for
fruitful inquiry. Why didn't Biran understand in Descartes what he should
have appreciated the most?
He also criticizes Descartes for not having linked thought to action
because "this self, which thus withdraws into itself to affirm its existence
and to conclude from it absolute reality, thus performs an action, makes an
effort."8 Here Biran explicitly declares his intention of reintegrating thought
and action.
He further criticizes Descartes for proving the world instead of directly
experiencing it. The question of the reality of the world is nonsense; we
must ask ourselves what it is, not if it is. Biran challenges any type of causal
reasoning which refers to a world in itself: feeling bears witness that there
is something we can call "world." "I am not denying that these ideas occur
within me," said Descartes. 9 And Biran responds,
You are wrong not to deny it, because if there is something that you could
claim to apperceive clearly and distinctly, it is that what you call ideas or
images of the sky, of the stars, is outside you, or is represented as foreign
to your self, far from being found in the self. What is in you, or belongs to
you, is the judgment or the thought that these things are outside or foreign
to your self; and you can only affirm this insofar as you apperceive it as
clearly and distinctly as you apperceive that you are a thinking being. When
you thus judge that there are things outside you which prompt these ideas,
you are not mistaken and you have no need for any additional knowledge to
support the truth of this first subject. But when you affirm that your ideas
are similar to things, or rather that the thing is in itself such as you apperceive it by the mediation of a sense which is possibly not appropriate for
this object, you are going beyond perception, and your judgment can be
erroneous or doubtful. I see the sky as a very low, blue firmament. I affirm
that such a visible appearance exists because I apperceive it clearly and distinctly; in the same manner, I affirm that what I apperceive is outside of me,
although I risk a false judgment by attributing to the object necessarily
apperceived as outside, modalities or qualities which are not in it.10

TENTH LECTURE
Biran and the
Philosophers of the Cogito
(Conclusion)

iran had criticized Descartes's "fiction of doubt"; his "mediate

realism" with which Biran contrasts the numerical identity of the
idea of extension and of extension itself, linking essence to existence and
refusing to distinguish essence from its manifestation;1 and his insufficient
connection between thought and action. The thought which we are certain
of must not be taken in a restrictive sense, but as/a whole and with all that
it implies. Or, rather, there is something more originary than thought: the
subject in the process of accomplishing certain acts. Reflection itself stems
from this, if it holds true that "this self which withdraws into itself, . . . thus
performs an action."2 In short, "perhaps Descartes failed only to link thought
with action, as he linked existence to thought, and if he had done so, his
thought would have taken another direction."3
These themes will be found again in Biran's critique of Malebranche.
In the course of this critique, Biran at first emphasizes the differences
between psychology and ontology, then tends, on the contrary, to identify
them with each other. He subsequently begins to see a new, broadened definition of the psychological. In his Notes sur certains passages de Malebranche et de Bossuet, he quotes a fragment of the Meditations chretiennes:
But I see what still misleads you. It is that in order to move your arm, it is
not enough for you to want to do it, for you must exert some effort in order
for this to happen. And you think that this effort, which you have an inner
feeling of, is the true cause of the movement which follows it: because this
movement is strong and forceful, in proportion to the amount of effort you

79

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TENTH LECTURE
exert. But, my son, is it not obvious that there is some kind of relationship
between what you call effort and the determination of nerve impulses in the
nerve fibers which allow for the movements you wish to perform?4

And Biran first responds, "Here Malebranche confuses the psychological and
ontological points of view."5 Our ignorance would therefore bear on the
ontological level, not on the psychological level, which would be clearly
dissociated from the first. Now, several lines further in the text, Biran
affirms that my motor power is not only certain for me, but in itself and
even for God:
But does it followfromwhat / am or apperceive myself to be the cause of, that
I am truly an absolute, independent cause? Here my inner feeling can not confirm anything to me since it involves precisely knowing what is in the absolute,
independently of my inner feeling, independently of the existing and selfapperceiving self. But why is it important for me to know it and why inquire
about it, if once the self is removedthere is no longer anything, no will, no
cause, no existence perceived as mine, nor conceived of as foreign?... It is
when I strip myself to the essentials or when I want to know whether what is
me or true in me and for me, is still true without me and outside me, it is only
then that I imagine and that I can ever progress to the point of contradicting
the primary conditions of my existence or of denying what constitutes it. I
have no need, then, of knowing the relationship of my will to nerve impulses
or nervefibersin order to be inwardly assured that my effort is inefficacious:
as soon as it is so for me or in my intimate sense, it is already absolutely inefficacious in itself and in the eyes of God; this is what creates the responsibility
of the moral agent.6
Therefore, what appears to us is. What we would conceive of as being in itself
could not be so outside the psychological domain, which is coextensive with
being. We must therefore reestablish ontology in its legitimate domain, that of
the primitive fact. In this regard, Biran is moving toward an original notion of
the Cogito, beyond Cartesianism.
If we attempt to follow the practice of this new Cogito in Biran's works,
what do we find?
First, a new conception of the "body for me" and, in particular, an original notion of the senses. My subjective life, in its previous state of "unreflection," comprises senses which define what Biran refers to as "animality."
Biran attempted to describe what the exercise of the senses prior to movement, prior to the person, might be. He speaks of a "passive immediate intuition,"7 of states in which "the weakness of motor action excludes the apperceptive characteristic."8 (Therefore, it does not exclude it completely.) His
description does not work without a certain amount of mythology: sensation
then appears to him "to come ready made from the outside" 9 as if the rela-

Biran and the Philosophers of the Cogito (Conclusion)

81

tionship to the object were a property of the impression itself. He points out
a sort of passive coordination, in space and in time, between these impressions. He is uncertain, moreover, about the reality of this prepersonal apperception, of this primitive space and time: what is an apperception which is
not apperceived? Yet, he discerns correctly the problem such intuitions raise:
do they surround the self? "We could say," he responds to Royer-Collard, "that
the self appears as enveloped in sensations from which it distinguishes itself
only later.... But this is an hypothesis and in no way a fact of intimate
sense."10 A Cartesian would say that the construct, the hypothesis, is this idea
of a sensibility without the "I." For Biran, on the other hand, the hypothesis
is to introduce the self, this "outside spectator," into the consciousness that
this sensibility has of itself. For Biran, it would be erroneous to say, as
Descartes does, "it is the soul which sees, and not the eye."11
He continues by describing a primitive space understood by "contuition,"12 a primitive time of which he says,
There is in hearing, as in vision when it is still passive .. ., an organic distinction of different tones which follow one another in time or follow one
another harmonically without becoming confused;13
in short, a whole "preworld" that one could make disappear by thinking about
it, and about which we cannot ask whether it is of the order of object or of
subject. This neutral zone is the "phenomenal reality"14
During this entire description, Biran starts to convince us, then disappoints us. He remains very close to empiricism: for him, the "intimate
sense" is limited to making statements based on evidence. He scarcely considers the objections that could be raised, and the outcomes do not correspond to the promises. Nonetheless, we find in his works intermittent, but
genuine, intuitions. He is looking for a path between empiricism and intellectualism, precisely in regard to reflection. He would like to show how
reflection is carried out by certain mechanisms of a corporeal nature, those
of hearing, for example, without being the pure result of them.
In the fourth section of part two of the Essai, chapter 1 (JDe Vorigine
de la reflexion), Biran wonders what is the origin of the fundamental references of thought to the object and to the self. These universal traits cannot
be ascribed to the sensory organ. How are they connected to one another?
By reflection which makes us grasp the underlying framework. Now consciousness, influenced by habit, continually forgets its own origin. In order
for reflection to be possible and for the senses to discover their proper
activity, a corporeal mechanism must intervene, a mechanism which we
cannot use without our being aware of it. Now the pair hearingphonation
is an example of this. Here the motor activity perceives itself without
becoming lost in its product. "This is the living harp that plucks its own

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TENTH LECTURE

strings."15 (In reality, this is only true for articulated sounds, not for cries.)
The articulated sound hears itself and reflects itself; the child imitates himself. Uttered sounds and repeated sounds are interrelated: "The activity
which immediately produces the former is reflected in the latter."16 Biran
thus attempts to describe the body as the locus of a kind of thought which
penetrates the density of the body, which is not reflection strictly speaking,
but which forms the first step and is the symbol of it. He recalls the etymology of "to hear" (entendre) and writes in regard to hearing,
We can say that hearing is pre-eminently the sense of understanding (entendemenf), since it is due to hearing alone that the being who thinks, inasmuch as he acts and moves, understands (entend), in the full meaning of
the word, all the ideas he conceives of, all the acts he determines.17
Biran seems to be looking for a new status for our experience. He would
like to make the auditive-motor mechanism something other than simply a
particular case of a general ability to think. He would like to show thought
seizing this instrument and, through it, achieving creations in which our
intellectual destiny is realized.
Such also is the meaning of chapter II of this same section (Institution
des signes). Through signs, I have access to a heightened consciousness: my
motor initiative no longer disappears in its result; I can refer the matter to
someone outside myself, referring myself to exteriority. Here appears "the
intellectual sign is, which is the Word, the logos par excellence."ls But are
these attitudes made possible by thought, or is the inverse true? There is a
circle between the word and the abstraction which proceed from one
another, and both from primitive fact. The first use of signs presupposes
primitive fact. On the other hand, there is in us a sort of natural ignorance
about the problem of signs which stems precisely from the fact that signs
are efficacious, already endowed with evidence.
Biran does not reduce thought to a result of signs imported into the mind.
He attacks this form of naivete which considers the universe of speech as
acquired, refusing to break out of it. At the origin of signs, he sees a spiritual
initiative of the self, a yet-to-be-developed seed of what reflection will be:
Without the inner apperception of acts or of the desired effort, no signs
would be instituted, without instituted signs, there would, strictly
speaking, be no reflection, no ideas or distinct notions of our acts or of
their results . . . finally no ideas of the subject (self) separated from its attributes and, it follows, no universal, abstract ideas.19
Therefore, we will distinguish three moments: inner apperception, signs,
and explicit reflection involving the use of notions. These three levels are

Biran and the Philosophers of the Cogito (Conclusion)

83

continuous and merge into one another. There is, for example, the sign of
the self or of "I exist": "As often as this sign is voluntarily repeated, the same
self just as often becomes present to itself by an act of intimate reflection."20
The phonological instrument is used by inner apperception and at the same
time aids this perception in moving to the reflective level. It helps this inner
apperception by translating in articulated phrases what it felt in a confused
fashion. From the beginning there is consciousness of self, but a consciousness
which is also ignorance of self and which needs signs in order to conquer itself.
Consciousness of self, then, is conceived of as a becoming, a process.
Thus, Maine de Biran wavers continually between two philosophies, one
empirical and explanatory, the other reflective, neither of which suits him: at
his best we find the outline of a third philosophy, at once concrete and reflective. This dissatisfaction explains the later evolution of his philosophy starting
with the Essai. He glimpsed, but failed to establish, a synthesis of explanation
and reflection. He thought he could overcome the duality of the terms by
moving to the level of belief. The Notes on Descartes and Malebranche are
prior to 1814. The Notes sur Kant are after this date. It is around 1813-1814
that he understood the necessity of allowing for a faculty of the universal and
the absolute. Unable to show how the subject can be both connected to contingent structures and subject to Beingconnected to the universal Being
Biran was forced to concentrate the conditions of universality beyond the intimate sense. He now moves to a noumenal self, breaking with his earlier philosophy. He rises from the For Us to the In Itself-^an approach he criticized
Descartes so much for; as if his philosophy had not consisted up to this point
in denying the soul in itself!
The self does not become objective in an image; it is also not conceived of
as an ontological abstraction. Its entire real existence is in the apperception
of the effort which it feels itself subject of or cause of. But when we want to
discover the origin of this felt effort, we must necessarily situate ourselves in
a point of view outside the self, and then we no longer really embrace but
the image or a notion with abstract force, of the feeling of itself.21
In reality, it would be unfair to criticize a pure and simple contradiction.
If we want to consider the soul from the outside, how can we distinguish it
from a corporeal image? Moreover, this latter conception of the self is not
without prior roots. Biran elaborates on this conception in the Rapport des
sciences naturelles avec la psychologies2 and we will conclude by examining it briefly.
In the first place, the belief in the noumenal self is not prior to the primitive fact; nor is it independent of it either. Our notion of the soul as soul
would have no meaning if we were not to start with the soul for us. Biran
indicates a relationship; he does not recant this.

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TENTH LECTURE

In the second place, the belief in the noumenal self is the affirmation of
a thing without essence. Consequently, from that moment, if the primitive
fact did not exist, our affirmation would be empty. In order to give meaning
to this absolute position, we must begin with the experience of ourselves.
The difference between the experience of self and the belief in the soul is
as follows: when we experience the self in us, we apperceive what we are
doing; when we believe in the thinking being, we apperceive what we are
not doing. This involves neither a deduction nor a logical transition:
Believing is not knowing. What our mind believes universally and necessarily, it did not create. Now, the mind knows only what it does or can do;
it does not believe in what it has createdits general ideas, its classifications, its language, its arbitrary combinationsand it cannot believe in
these things as it believes in existing things.23
So then, we know what we have done; we believe in some existing that we
have not created. In order to act, we must be:
By following the process of belief, we establish as an axiom that before
acting, before being modified in any determined way whatsoever, before
determining one's self in terms of any attribute, quality or property, we
must exist absolutely or as substance, as thing in itself, as noumenon.2*
Our belief will bear, then, on an existing conditioning our finite activity.
This belief in the noumenal self represents, in short, the excess of our existence over what we know of it, the fact that we are given to ourselves, and
that we did not create ourselves ex nihilo. The noumenal self is certain, precisely because it is unknowable.
Biran identifies, then, absolute objectivity and absolute subjectivity. It is on
this subjectivity that the objectivity of knowing is based. The noumenal subject
is neither demonstrated nor proved: it is always behind me, as something which
surrounds me, and this is why we can believe in this absolute subject which
confers a universal value on primitive fact:
How does this individual, reflective abstraction, which constitutes, with
the self, the relationship and the inherence of variable modes in a permanent subject, go from the individual and relative character, precise and
determined as a consequence of consciousness, to the universal and to the
absolute?25
The Reponse a Stapfer tells us: the selffounded upon the noumenal
soulbeing the very experience of causality, the latter achieves rational
value among all possible objects:

Biran and the Philosophers of the Cogito (Conclusion)

85

The self immediately apperceives its causal power as its existence; and from
thefirstinner experience which reveals this power to it by revealing it to
itself, it has, with the present feeling of permanent energy of the self cause,
the intuition of effect or of motion which will necessarily and infallibly
operate as soon as an express desire occurs.26
This certitude is then transferred outside:
Since each effect of the locomotion of one's own body is inseparable for the
self from the feeling or from the external apperception of the cause, as the
self is inseparable from itself, no exterior movement, no passive modification will be able to begin without being immediately attributed to a cause
conceived in imitation of the self.27
Furthermore, the relationship of God to the world is about the same as that of
the noumenal soul to the self: "We know and we believe presently that our soul
exists as substance or as absolute cause in the same way that we know that God
exists as substance and as infinite cause."28
In conclusion, Biran's importance depends more on certain of his
descriptions than on an intellectual grasp of the proper principles of his philosophy. He attempted to move beyond psychologism, to show that a subject's experience is not the simple application of a logos; but he failed to
save the particular, to show its movement and transition to the universal.
Thus the conclusion of his philosophy sees the problem of the soul and the
body posed once more, and in just as difficult terms; he reestablishes the
absolute soul facing the absolute body: we again find ourselves where we
started.

ELEVENTH LECTURE
Matter and Memory:
The New and the Positive in the
Analysis of the First Chapter

W:

hat is the starting point of Matter and Memory?1 Bergson tells us

in the "Introduction" to the seventh edition:

There are .. . diverse tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic
life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further
removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life. Here we
have one of the ruling ideas of this bookthe idea, indeed, which served
as the starting point of our inquiry.2
The distinction of the two levels of action and dream and the notion of
attention to life are, then, at the origin of Bergson's reflections; for his part,
he did not follow the itinerary of Kantian philosophy.
The first chapter develops a biological conception of the body and the
nervous system that is, at the same time, a philosophical conception of the
acting subject placed by its body in the presence of the world. Bergson aims
at restoring the body to its struggle with the world; and not as the isolating
analysis of science presents it to us, a body dissociated between sensory and
motor poles. The body must be grasped in a global view, in its connection
with its surroundings and in its positive function as "center of real action."3
Nonliving material bodies do not truly act: they are acted upon by
external forces. The living body is entirely different in that it affirms itself as
distinct and retains stimulation, responding to it only after a certain delay
and in an unforeseeable manner. It expresses less the properties of things
than its manner of treating them, otherwise stated, that which things and
87

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ELEVENTH LECTURE

the world are for it. The living organism, precisely because it is a center of
real action, is a center of perspective. "The objects which surround my
body reflect its possible action upon them."4 A "horizon" takes shape around
the living body 5
Perception is not, then, a simple inspection of things: it is an anticipation exercised by the body. If we set aside the contributions of memory
(which alone make hallucination possible), there remains a "pure perception" which establishes the body in things. This does not take place in us,
but, more properly, there, where perception seems to be, in the midst of
the world, outside. Science, therefore, is not well-suited to establish an
objective theory of perception, because it is based on this very perception.
Science refers us to the perceived world, previously given. The idea of a scientific knowledge, closed in upon itself, is only a myth:
Reduce matter to atoms in motion: these atoms, though denuded of physical qualities, are determined only in relation to an eventual vision and an
eventual contact, the one without light and the other without materiality.
Condense atoms into centers of force, dissolve them into vortices
revolving in a continuous fluid: this fluid, these movements, these centers,
can themselves be determined only in relation to an impotent touch, an
ineffectual impulsion, a colorless light; they are still images.6
By thus rehabilitating secondary qualities, Bergson quite consciously
picks up where Berkeley left off. In the "Introduction" to Matter and
Memory we read that
Philosophy made a great step forward on the day when Berkeley established, in opposition to the "mechanical philosophers," that the secondary
qualities of matter had at least as much reality as the primary qualities.7
In positing the material world, we therefore give ourselves, right away, an
ensemble of images the existence of which it is no longer possible to
renounce. Bergson repudiates the realism of thinkers which seeks to
engender consciousness, to deduce it. We do not have to "deduce consciousness," for "by positing the material world we assume an aggregate of
images."8 There is no In Itself which is not already a For-Me. In the approach
that Bergson takes, every esse is already a percipi. But Bergson does not
follow this approach to its ultimate conclusion: in place of scientific realism,
Bergson will substitute another realism, one founded upon the preexistence
of total being. In it the percipi is deduced from the esse by degradation and
carving out. "[T]he representation of an image [is] less than its presence."9
Bergson does not see, does not address the problem of the Cogito: he poses
total being and carves out my perspective from it.
An image can exist without being perceived. Bergson deduces the per-

Matter and Memory

89

ceived from being rather than admitting, as he had been tempted to do, a
primacy of perception, a kind of intermediate existence between the In
Itself and the For Itself. He does not really look for the starting point of the
subject's knowledge of being in the subject's situation in being, but places
himself directly in being in order to then introduce the perceptive
decoupage. Neither Bergson nor the psychologists he criticizes distinguish
between consciousness and the object of consciousness.
In Kantian idealism, consciousness and extension are correlatives.
Bergson criticizes subjective idealism, but not transcendental idealism.
There is in Bergson, then, a blindness toward the proper being of consciousness and its intentional structure. There is the same difficulty in
explaining what the self which perceives is: Bergson represents this to himself as a mixture of perception and recollection, the condensation of a multiplicity of movements, a "contraction" of matter. Whence, in this first
chapter, a constant mechanism of passage to the limitwith recognition of
everyday experience as a "mixture."
It would have been necessary to show that the body is unthinkable
without consciousness, because there is an intentionaiity of the body, and
to show that consciousness is unthinkable without the body, for the present
is corporeal.
Bergson began to see a philosophy of the perceived world which, in his
first intention, was not realist. However, this view was spoiled by the movement to realism that considers the percipi as a lesser esse, consciousness
being carved out from the interior of a world of images In Itself.
The truth is that the point P,. . . the rays which it emits, the retina and the
nervous elements affected, form a single whole: that the luminous point P
is a part of this whole: and that it is really in P, and not elsewhere, that the
image of P is formed and perceived.10
Here, on the other hand, there is something new: not the fact of linking
consciousness and objectKant had already linked thembut the manner
in which they are linked. In Kant, their relationship was that of a positing
power to a posited object: the being of objects was at first idealized. The
sentence quoted above is obvious for Kant, because the point P is, for him,
nothing more than an ideal object. Kant considered the phenomenon of the
object as an ideal order. What is new in Bergson, once again, is not found
here. Bergson ignores reflective philosophy; thanks to this naivete, he is in
a position to discover what remains inaccessible to reflective analysis: the
thing and consciousness of the thing are linked, not as correlatives, but as
absolutely simultaneous, without any priority Now Kant, despite everything, granted priority to the consciousness of the linker.
For Bergson perception is not constituting: it is impossible, in his per-

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ELEVENTH LECTURE

spective, for us to place ourselves in the dynamism of a constituting subject.

Perception is insensitive to the effort of reflective analysis (in spite of
Spinoza, we continue to perceive the sun at two hundred paces). The connection between consciousness and what it perceives is not the connection
between what makes and what is made: the perception preceded the connection. Consciousness of something is not an intentionality comparable to
judgment: consciousness does not appear to itself, as accounting for itself. If
we were to follow the Bergsonian thesis to its ultimate conclusions, the body
would become privileged, being what refers me to the preexisting tilings. I
am not an agile subject, and without inertia, a subject can freely make use of
a perspective; I perceive from here and not from elsewhere. It follows that
the perceptive aiming is not an immanent aiming. There is transcendence in
the active sense of the word: a presence at a distance. Consciousness, then,
would appear as situated; its finitude would be the means of positing being.
But this simultaneous transcending of realism and idealism, barely
glimpsed for an instant, miscarries. Having chosen to look at the world as
spectacle, Bergson sank into realism and realized the subject by subtraction. The subject dies because of this; the percipi is henceforth only a lesser
being. The subject will no longer have to be thought: this will be an imperceptible distance.
In fact, Bergson indeed attempts to introduce the subject later on: our
perception, he recognizes, is never "pure." But he will introduce the subject
in realist terms, as a non-being; and from the moment he conceives nothingness from being, he will conceive the subject starting from the world.
His description of pure memory, then, will be that of a "second world"
(his static conception of the unconscious attests to this). Radically different
from objectivity, the subject will at the same time be radically homogeneous
with ita simple difference of substance and not of existential modality.
The encounter between the two worlds takes place in concrete perception,
and when Bergson will want to carry out this articulation there will be a
concurrence of reality between recollection and perception. In the second
and third chapters of Matter and Memory, we will therefore see a wavering
between two theses: sometimes perception is entirely memory, the perceived being but a most recent recollection; sometimes the inverse will be
the case: memory is nothing outside the present, pure recollection being
but a bloodthirsty phantom, "drinking the blood of the living."The past, as
such, escapes us. This concurrence takes another form: sometimes it seems
that the initiative comes from recollections, the body intervening only in
order to prevent their actualization: recollection, then, would be capable
by itself of becoming present again, and the dimension of the past would
lose its ideality; sometimes, conversely, there is no proper consciousness of
the past, and the needs of the current action alone explain the call to recollection. These two descriptions cancel each other out.

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91

The theory of the body, at the junction of perception and memory, will
reveal the conflict we are speaking of: sometimes the body is the locus of
passage for movements in themselves, in the manner of an element from the
physical world; sometimes it is only a representation, homogeneous with
images from memory. Bergson plays on the two meaningsidealist and
realistof the word "image."
Consciousness and freedom, then, will have no place in chapters II and
III. Where do we find the IF It will neither be at the apex of the cone (which
corresponds to an In Itself, that of the physical world), nor at its base (pure
recollections): mental life takes on the aspect of a coming-and-going
between two levels of the In Itself. Bergson fails to establish the articulation
between the two levels he described: he tries in vain to achieve the synthesis through the combination of two objective elements: pure percept
and pure recollection.
This having been said, we find valuable intuitions in these pages: we
must recognize the truth therein, "in enigma and in a mirror." Having converted into objective propositions a reflection on the subject, Bergson
glimpses something true from time to time. It is up to us to sort out these
intuitions from the philosophical framework in which they are embedded.
The first is the analysis of extension. Here Bergson describes, all the
while objectifying it, the plan of our relationship with space. Thanks to this
analysis, the world is, in the fourth chapter, extricated from its In Itself
condition. Perception, even external perception, appears there as a duration (contrary to what we read in the first chapter): Bergson struggles to
create a theory of the world.
The second is the theory of pure perception: being is always perceived
being; this allows us to respond to the objections of realism.
The third is the theory of pure memory in the role that it ascribes to a
mixed reality. In the theory of pure perception, being was only perceived
being; in pure memory, the past is conceived by the present. This constitutes a dialectical view, for it is the same movement which opens the future
and closes the past. We transcend the simple mixture of subject and object
in order to constitute a genuine dialectic of time.
In chapter II, Bergson draws the consequences from what precedes and
strives to determine whether or not they are verified by experience. The
body is but a mere conductor, which assures the originality of memory in
relation to cerebral mechanisms. This effort is both successful (since it
allows us to account for the disconcerting aspects of aphasia) and useless
(because a minute of reflective philosophy would tell us as much: memory
is a consciousness of the past, and no present trace could suffice in
accounting for the past). The trouble Bergson takes in this regard seems to
be wasted effort, for the realist postulates which he retains lead him to conceive of memory as a second being.

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ELEVENTH LECTURE

Nevertheless, this second chapter contains some interesting perspectives. Even if we were to show, reflectively, that the unreality of the past
prevents the past from having as support an existing present, a problem
would remain: why don't we have a total consciousness of this past? Even if
we admit that consciousness is naturally centrifugal, recognition and forgetfulness remain to be explained. For Bergson, the body is the present: it
is, therefore, a moment in the dialectic of time, and all consciousness of the
past has a relationship with the body. From the Kantian perspective,
memory poses no problems since the past is constituted by us. But if consciousness is atemporal, the past, as past, loses this quality: there is no past
except in relationship to a present against the background from which it
separates itself. The problem of the past must be resolved by showing how
consciousness of the present contains reference to a past. Now this is what
Bergson does at certain times, when he tries to endow the body with a function in the constituting of time: there could, then, be a "bodily memory" 11
a comprehension of time by the body.

TWEIFraiECrtM
The Second Chapter of
Matter and Memory

n this chapter, Bergson attempts to test the central ideas from the preceding chapter, in light of the physiology of the brain.
In regards to the relationship between memory and the brain, he concludes that the body cannot be producer of the representations of the past,
since it is itself only an image: the body is but a simple conductor. But if
Bergson were to cling to this position, he would come to the conclusion that
the body, inefficient as it is, could not condition our capacity to have access
to the past: if it were only an image among all others, how would it have the
power to modify all of them? It is imperative, this being the case, that the
word "image" change meaning. The body, a mere element up to this point,
becomes a center.
It would be necessary to make this "central function" of the body more
precise, to show that the world is for the body. However, Bergson makes
subjectivity a simple function of representation: he maintains the
dichotomy between movement "in the third person" and the subject. Thus,
when he wants to connect the body and the mind, to make the body a transition toward consciousness, he must organize a series of equivocations and
stratagems.
The motor function of the brain is pregnant with consciousness. "The
past survives itself. . . . " Now there is ambiguity: it does not subsist in the
same sense in the motor mechanism (it survives there for me, observer) and
in consciousness (where it survives for itself). The use of the word "survival,"
then, is a verbal stratagem: we could just as well say that the past survives
93

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TWELFTH LECTURE

itself in things. This does not suffice in order to give the body a memory. It
is, moreover, only for a "pure" memory, independent from the body, that
there can truly be recognition. For motor recognition is merely the past
played, not represented. For Bergson, therefore, there is not true memory
of the body: memory of the body requires the mediation of pure memory.
Thus the recourse to a second stratagem: the body will offer "pure memory"
the means of realizing itself. Sometimes Bergson attributes everything to the
mind, sometimes he attributes everything to the body. He should have
shown that the body is necessitated by the dialectic of time as moment, and,
inversely, that consciousness implies a body. But Bergson wants to show
that there is in memory "something" which cannot be explained by the body.
His method consists in determining a residue which cannot be explained by
physiological means, in order to better preserve the being of spiritual substance. Thus, neither pure memory nor the body is truly For Itself. The body
does not succeed in being a subjectthough Bergson tends to give it this
statusfor if the body were subject, the subject would be body, and this is
something Bergson does not want at any price.
Take the example of the theory of two types of memory. Habit-memory
is sometimes conscious, sometimes not: it is then merely the simple reference mark of a past the body replays. Why still call it "memory"? Bergson
would have the right to do so only if all memories were indissolubly habitual
and conscious, pure recollection itself containing an element of generality.
In reality, the significance of a past episode uproots it from its temporal
haecceitas (ecc&te). Situating the past at its date is not attaining it in its
chronological locus by a direct intentionality, but rather rejoining it through
the thickness of the present. Our relationship to the past is therefore a relationship of being which transcends pure knowledge. Inversely, our relationships with the present transcend simple, practical insertion and are
already relationships of knowledge.
Bergson contrasts dream and action in a dichotomy which is open to
criticism. Dreams as he understands them still revolve around the world,
and action is conceived of only as a response to physical stimuli in close
proximity. As a result of a prejudice inherited from Spencer, the human
person is conceived of as an animal power of action, on which a "faculty of
distances" would be pathetically superimposed. Everything which is not
animal action moves then to the side of dreams. Now this description is
false: everything is action in the human person, but everything in the
human person is supra-animal organization.
"[I]n regard to things which are learned . . . , the two memories . . . lend
to each other a mutual support."1 What does this mean? We don't see what
these memories can do for one another. Lived recognition most certainly is
neither pure recognition nor pure motor habit: there is reciprocal assistance,
as is shown a contrario by the difficulty experienced by the subject who is

The Second Chapter of Matter and Memory

95

asked to speak while looking at a series of letters he must remember.2 Now

this uneasiness contradicts the Bergsonian dichotomy. It is either the body or
pure recollection which is superfluous. If the body is not subject, all the
movements in the world will not bring about consciousness of the past.
On page 98,* he says with regard to "attentive recognition," we avoid the
alternative of action and dream. In this kind of recognition, "the movements
forego their practical end, and . .. motor activity, instead of continuing perception by useful reactions, turns back to mark out its more striking features."3 It is no longer the human person facing nature, summoned to
respond under the pain of death, but the human person who utilizes its
body to explore a situation.
From the examination of the facts of aphasia, Bergson tries to conclude
that recollection has not been destroyed by the lesion. But the real question
lies elsewhere: what can this memory become, once it is deprived of the
body where it is at play?
Here is another example of ambiguity: Bergson wants pure recollections to rush into the framework offered by perception. On page 103, he
writes, "[A]ny recollection-image that is capable of interpreting our actual
perception inserts itself so thoroughly into it that we are no longer able to
discern what is perception and what is recollection."4 What we read in a
printed text is a recollection as much as it is present.
[R]apid reading is a real work of divination. Our mind notes here and there
a few characteristic lines andfillsall the intervals with recollection-images
which, projected on the paper, take the place of the real printed characters and may be mistaken for them.5
Now Bergson is wrong to distinguish in this way between "projection of recollections" and "perception": this distinction is not legitimate because it is
drawn from the consideration of retinal impressions. Bergson should not
judge perception by the retinal impression, which is only a part of the cerebral field: his approach is based on the "hypothesis of constancy," which has
since been proven to be unfounded by the theory of form.
He justifies spiritualism starting, as an antithesis, from a certain realism
which introduces the mind as a surplus. In his study of aphasia and verbal
deafness, he shows that the brain does not contain recollections, but he
does not show that recollection would have a meaning without a body
What he proves in fact is not what he set out to prove. The sensory-motor
process demonstrates that there is an intelligence of the body. Take the
*[When passages from Matter and Memory are cited by page in the main body of the original lectures, the numeration has been changed to correspond with the English translation.
Page references to the French text are contained in endnotes.Eds.]

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TWELFTH LECTURE

example of hearing an unknown foreign language, compared to hearing a

language that I understand: 6 we carve out our impressions by means of our
own movements, from the "motor diagram . . . of the speech we hear."7
Now Bergson forgets that his critique of the "projection" of recollections
also works against him: perception can no more incorporate in itself movements ("in the third person") than it can incorporate recollections. The
"logic of the body" cannot be a process "in the third person": it attests to the
fact that human motility is not motility in itself.
Bergson treats the centrifugal phenomenon of the projection of recollections in the same spirit. He foresees that the loss of a recollection is not the loss
of a thing, but of a capacity to speak, of an attitude (and not of an isolated
word). This is true, but it is tantamount to saying that without the body there
is no possession of our verbal recollections. The body, as foundation of a
dynamic, would then be linked to memory. Before becoming enmeshed in this
dynamic, recollection is nothing.
On page 130, Bergson writes, "Between the intention, which is what
we call the pure recollection, and the auditory recollection-image properly
so called, intermediate recollections are commonly interrelated."8 Pure recollection, then, is only an intention, a borderline case. Sometimes the body
represents an obstacle to its realization, sometimes it gives it, on the contrary, the means of realizing itself. How can this empty intention exist in
itself?
We understand that, in the beginning of chapter III, uncertainty is introduced into the formulas: "We have distinguished three processespure recollection, recollection-image, and perceptionof which no one, in fact,
occurs apart from the others."9 Is this "in fact" an accidental misfortune or,
on the contrary, a normal state?
Henceforth, when Bergson will want to speak about recollection, he
will forget what he had written most insightfully about the body, and when
he will speak about the body, he will ultimately leave consciousness of time
out of his consideration. His different descriptions do not fit together very
well. For him, the body is indeed a means of actualizing the past, but he
conceives of the body as a present existent rather than a temporal reality.
Bergson does not show how we can escape the present in order to constitute the consciousness of time. In Bergson there is no passage from present
to past: we are confronted either with a ghostly, distant past, or with a present without any temporal horizon. Bergson distinguishes himself in this
regard from Husserl, for whom the present is a consciousness of passage.
Sometimes Bergson attaches us to the present, and the past is no longer but
pure virtuality; sometimes he detaches us from the present, and he does
this in order to cut us off entirely from the world: neither of these
approaches is satisfactory. Bergson is wrong both when he attaches us to
the present and when he uproots us from it.

THIRTEENTH LECTURE
Commentary on Text:
The Unconscious

I. THE TEXT (MATTER AND MEMORY,

CHAPTER m , PP. 140-43) 1

hat which I call my present is my attitude with regard to the immediate

future; it is my impending action. My present is, then, sensory-motor.
Of my past, that alone becomes image and, consequently, sensation, at least
nascent, which can collaborate in that action, insert itself in that attitude, in a
word make itself useful; but, from the moment that it becomes image, the past
leaves the state of pure recollection and coincides with a certain part of my present. Recollection actualized in an image differs, then, profoundly from pure
recollection. The image is a present state, and its sole share in the past is the
recollection from which it arose. Recollection, on the contrary, powerless as
long as it remains without utility, is pure from all admixture of sensation, is
without attachment to the present, and is, consequently, unextended.
This radical powerlessness of pure recollection is just what will enable
us to understand how it is preserved in a latent state. Without as yet going to
the heart of the matter, we will confine ourselves to the remark that our
unwillingness to conceive unconscious psychical states is due, above all, to
the fact that we hold consciousness to be the essential property of psychical
states: so a psychical state cannot, it seems, cease to be conscious without
ceasing to exist. But if consciousness is but the characteristic note of the present, that is to say, of the actually lived, in short, of the active, then that
which does not act may cease to belong to consciousness without therefore
ceasing to exist in some manner. In other words, in the psychological
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THIRTEENTH LECTURE

domain, consciousness may not be the synonym of existence, but only of

real action or of immediate efficacy; limiting thus the meaning of the term,
we shall have less difficulty in representing to ourselves a psychical state
which is unconscious, that is to say, ineffective. Whatever idea we may frame
of consciousness in itself, such as it would be if it could work untrammeled,
we cannot deny that, in a being which has bodily functions, the chief office
of consciousness is to preside over action and to enlighten choice. Therefore,
it throws light on the immediate antecedents of the decision, and on those
past recollections which can usefully combine with it; all else remains in
shadow. But we find here once more, in a new form, the ever-recurrent illusion which, throughout this work, we have endeavored to dispel. It is supposed that consciousness, even when linked with bodily functions, is a faculty that is only accidentally practical and is directed essentially toward speculation. Then, since we cannot see what interest, devoted as it is supposed
to be to pure knowledge, it would have in allowing any information that it
possesses to escape, we fail to understand why it refuses to throw light on
something that was not entirely lost to it. From this we conclude that it can
possess nothing more de jure than what it holds de facto, and that, in the
domain of consciousness, all that is real is actual. But restore to consciousness its true role: there will no longer be any more reason to say that the past
effaces itself as soon as perceived than there is to suppose that material
objects cease to exist when we cease to perceive them.
We must insist on this last point, for here we have the central difficulty,
and the source of the ambiguities which surround the problem of the
unconscious. The idea of an unconscious representation is clear, and
despite current prejudice we may even say that we make constant use of it,
and that there is no conception more familiar to common sense. For everyone admits that the images actually present to our perception are not the
whole of matter. But, on the other hand, what can be a nonperceived material object, an image not imagined, unless it is a kind of unconscious mental
state? Beyond the walls of your room, which you perceive at this moment,
there are the adjoining rooms, then the rest of the house, and finally the
street and the town in which you live. It signifies little to which theory of
matter you adhere; realist or idealist, you are evidently thinking, when you
speak of the town, of the street, of the other rooms in the house, of so
many perceptions absent from your consciousness and yet given outside of
it. They are not created as your consciousness receives them; they existed,
then, in some manner, and since, by hypothesis, your consciousness did
not apprehend them, how could they exist in themselves unless in the
unconscious state? How comes it then that an existence outside of consciousness appears clear to us in the case of objects, but obscure when we
are speaking of the subject? Our perceptions, actual and virtual, extend
along two lines, the one horizontal, AB, which contains all simultaneous

Commentary on Text: The Unconscious

99

objects in space, the other vertical, CI> on which are ranged our successive
recollections set out in time.
C

The point /, at the intersection of the two lines, is the only one actually given
to consciousness. Whence comes it that we do not hesitate to posit the
reality of the whole line AB, although it remains unperceived, while, on the
contrary, of the line CI, the present / which is actually perceived is the only
point which appears to us really to exist? There are, at the bottom of this radical distinction between the two series, temporal and spatial, so many confused or half-formed ideas, so many hypotheses devoid of any speculative
value, that we cannot all at once make an exhaustive analysis of them. In
order to unmask the illusion entirely, we should have to seek its origin and
follow through all its windings, the double movement by which we come to
assume objective realities without relation to consciousness, and states of
consciousness without objective realityspace thus appearing to preserve
indefinitely the things which are there juxtaposed, while time in its advance
devours the states which succeed each other within it. Part of this work has
been done in our first chapter, where we discussed objectivity in general;
another part will be dealt with in the last pages of this book, where we shall
speak of the idea of matter. We confine ourselves here to a few essential
points.

II. COMMENTARY
We will attain the past only by placing ourselves in it. Moreover, the past is
something virtual: wanting to characterize the dimension of the past,
Bergson fills it with phantoms; it is on this one condition that there will be
past. Pure recollection, then, will be a phantom, a power of suggestion, of
incantation, a guide which permits the full image to be reconstituted.
The present occupies a place: when we say "center of movements" we
say occupation of a point of space; it is for this reason that the present is
unique:
[0]ur present is the very materiality of our existence, that is to say, a
system of sensations and movements, and nothing else. And this system is

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THIRTEENTH LECTURE
determined, unique for each moment of duration, just because sensations
and movements occupy [places of]* space, and because there cannot be in
the same place several things at the same time.2

When I relive the past, I transport myself, then, out of space, since the present is adhesion to a place. The "ideality" of knowledge consists in not confining references to space. Recollections, floating and inextensive, are the
hollow in being that we are aware of in us, prior to present consciousness.
Since consciousness is presence, unconsciousness will be the absent.
Bergson does not mention the genuine difficulties raised by this thesis (he
reduces them to an observable and speculative conception of consciousness, cf. Matter and Memory, pp. 142-43). 3 Now they stem in reality from
the fact that we cannot dissociate the relationship to an object from the
grasp of this relationship: there is no vision without the consciousness of
seeing. Bergson does not envisage this difficulty. However, once we accept
that every reference to an object contains a consciousness of self, does
Bergson's theory still have any meaning? We must recognize that it still has
meaning, for this description reveals the transcendence of the past. Consciousness must have its object in its possession as something "for myself."
But such an object would not be something past: consciousness would be
coextensive with the totality of time. Whence the necessity, for consciousness, to be temporal in order to be consciousness of time, to be something
other than a simple existence in time. Most certainly, Bergson does not
describe anything resembling a temporalization. The "virtual" past is not
shown to us in any other way than a former present. Correlatively, all consciousness of the present moment already contains the temporal index of
this moment when it will be past (as is attested to by the theory of "recollection of the present"). In this instance as everywhere else, a "lack of
describing" is revealed: Bergson translates the transcendence of the past as
a simple exteriority; at least he deserves credit for having-posed the
problem of this transcendence.
By the same token, when it involved nonperceived objects, Bergson did
not consider even for an instant the Kantian point of view, according to
which these objects have an ideal existence to which I can always return,
just as a theorem is perpetually true and I can return to it. But this having
been said, such an analysis would sin by underestimating its object: the existential modality of nonperceived objects is not ideality: this latter would
give to the absent object either possible existence, or necessary existence;
now the absent object is real. Take a desert, for example: when I affirm its
existence, I am not only saying that it is accessible, I am giving it a mode of
* [Because of the importance in this context of the distinction "place"-"space," we have
chosen to render this phrase "places of space" as it appears in the French text d'lieux de l'espace"). Eds.]

Commentary on Text: The Unconscious

101

existence comparable to the mode of what I see. The synthesis of seen and
unseen is a synthesis of transition: inasmuch as I have an insertion in space,
I feel myself capable of transporting in space this instrument of exploration
which is my body: the absent, then, is present to me as the horizon of a
world whose total possession is inherently impossible, since, in this case,
the world would disappear into nothingness. Bergson sensed all of this, but
his error is in translating this horizonal relationship by saying that the absent
object is "a kind of unconscious mental state,"4 in not seeing that consciousness is precisely this transcendence. Bergson never sees the positive
value ofourfinitude. But he is right to point out that the absent object is
not only an ideal existent, as cultural objects are. He is right to say that
simultaneity is problematic and inseparable from subjectivity. How can a
consciousness in situation see objectivity appear? What coexists with my
field, however, makes me change my perspective but only inasmuch as I am
tied to it. My table keeps me from seeing the Eiffel Tower, but it is because
I see my table that I do not see the Eiffel Tower. My body is linked to the
world by a universal reference which gives me a view of it which both is and
is not mine: this is what Bergson translates in speaking of the unconscious.
At the end of the text, Bergson shows that he described only borderline
cases. But it is not by assembling two realities that we can reconstitute a
complex phenomenon. Note, however, that there are in the pages that
follow several valid points. On page 144, he says this:
It is, then, of the essence of our actual perception, inasmuch as it is
extended, to be always only a content in relation to a vaster, even an unlimited, experience which contains it; this experience, absent from our consciousness, since it spreads beyond the perceived horizon, nevertheless,
appears to be actually given.5
It is therefore no longer an unconscious mental state, but a horizon: here,
we are moving beyond the simple relationship of exteriority.
From page 145, we see "The same instinct, in virtue of which we open
out space indefinitely before us, prompts us to shut off time behind us as it
flows."6 This involves a unique movement: here Bergson foresees a dialectic
of time and no longer treats the past as an In Itself.
On the same page:
In truth, the adherence of this recollection to our present condition is
exactly comparable to the adherence of unperceived objects to those
objects which we perceive; and the unconscious plays in each case a similar part.7
By this term "adherence," Bergson certainly seems to be indicating a synthesis of transition.

FOURTEENTHUiCItJRE
Commentary on Text:
The Definition of Existence

I. THE TEXT (MATTER AND MEMORY,

CHAPTER m , PP. 146-48) 1

ut here we come to the capital problem of existence, a. problem we

can only glance at, for otherwise it would lead us step by step into
the heart of metaphysics. We will merely say that with regard to matters of
experiencewhich alone concern us hereexistence appears to imply two
conditions taken together: (1) presentation in consciousness, and (2) the logical or casual connection of that which is so presented with what precedes
and with what follows. The reality for us of a psychical state or of a material
object consists in the double fact that our consciousness perceives them and
that they form part of a series, temporal or spatial, of which the elements
determine each other. But these two conditions admit of degrees, and it is
conceivable that, though both are necessary, they may be unequally fulfilled.
Thus, in the case of actual internal states, the connection is less close, and
the determination of the present by the past, leaving ample room for contingency, has not the character of a mathematical derivationbut then, presentation in consciousness is perfect, an actual psychical state yielding the
whole of its content in the act itself, whereby we perceive it. On the contrary, if we are dealing with external objects it is the connection which is perfect, since these objects obey necessary laws; but then the other condition,
presentation in consciousness, is never more than partially fulfilled, for the
material object, just because of the multitude of unperceived elements by
which it is linked with all other objects, appears to enfold within itself and
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to hide behind it infinitely more than it allows to be seen. We ought to say,

then, that existence, in the empirical sense of the word, always implies conscious apprehension and regular connection; both at the same time,
although in different degrees. But our intellect, of which the function is to
establish clear-cut distinctions, does not so understand things. Rather than
admit the presence in all cases of the two elements mingled in varying proportions, it prefers to dissociate them, and thus attribute to external objects,
on the one hand, and to internal states, on the other hand, two radically different modes of existence, each characterized by the exclusive presence of
the condition which should be regarded as merely preponderating. Then the
existence of psychical states is assumed to consist entirely in their apprehension by consciousness, and that of external phenomena, entirely also, in
the strict order of their concomitance and their succession. Whence the impossibility of leaving to material objects, existing, but unperceived, the
smallest share in consciousness, and to internal unconscious states the smallest share in existence. We have shown, at the beginning of this book, the
consequences of the first illusion: it ends by falsifying our representation of
matter. The second illusion, complementary to the first, vitiates our conception of mind by casting over the idea of the unconscious an artificial
obscurity. The whole of our past psychical life conditions our present state,
without being its necessary determinant; whole, also, it reveals itself in our
character, although none of its past states manifests itself explicitly in character. Taken together, these two conditions assure to each one of the past
psychological states a real, though an unconscious, existence.

H. COMMENTARY
At the beginning of chapter III, Bergson turns his attention toward pure recollection, defined by its latency. He must show that consciousness is populated
just as the world is: the past is behind us, just as the world is around us. Existence has, then, the same meaning in both domains.
Initially (from "But here we come to . . ." up to ". . . determine each
other"), he begins by limiting the discussion (the problem will only be
"glanced at"; we will exclude from the discussion what is beyond experience, such as God, or the absolute). He then provides an empirical and provisional analysis of existence: existence requires two conditions taken
together: presentation to consciousness and connection with other facts.
This analysis raises several questions: (1) Regarding the first condition: what
exactly is this "presentation"? A passive test, imposing itself by the impact of
the shock received? An intelligent grasp, imposing itself by the evidence of
the content? (2) Regarding the second condition, what is the nature of this
"connection"? Does it extend the field of our certitudes? Is it in itself con-

Commentary on Text: The Definition of Existence

105

stitutive of the meaning of the words "to exist"? (3) What is the relationship
between these two conditions? Each of them can be taken either in the
empiricist sense or in the intellectualist sense. For an empiricist, the second
condition is reduced to the first, since connection requires a presentation
to consciousness. For an intellectualist, the first condition is reduced to the
second, since presentation results from a connection, from an establishment of a relationship accomplished by the mind. What we give to one we
take away from the other. They can be simultaneously constitutive only by
being linked, only by being reduced to unity.
Now Bergson refuses to reduce them to unity. His objective is to transcend this alternative, and that is what he tries to do in the second part of
the text (from "But these two conditions, . . . " up to". . . conscious apprehension and regular connection"). This second part sets forth three ideas:
(1) These two criteria are independent (the conditions are "both necessary"). (2) Let us pursue this. When experience satisfies one of the conditions, it fails the other. In the psyche, the connection is loose, which is
explained by Bergson's psychological indeterminism. The link among my
internal states is always retrospective: my personality is never an object. (3)
Inverselyand for this same reasonmy psychic present is always perfectly
given; each "present psychological state" gives consciousness the totality of
its content. In each present, the presentation is perfect. If this were not the
case, we would have no notion of the present. In the physical world, the
connection is perfect; however, at the risk of progressing infinitely, we
must give up on the idea of a total presentation. The criteria are, then, contradictory: it is for the same reason that internal experience is never satisfactorily linked and external experience is always linked, that internal experience always enjoys a total presentation and that external experience never
enjoys it. Interdependent (existence implies them always "both at the same
time"), these criteria are antagonistic. Why is this the case?
The third part of the text ("But our intellect, .. . though an unconscious
existence") furnishes the solution: it is the intellect which crystallizes into
two distinct types what is in reality mingled. If we find again, on this side
of the analytical understanding, the contact of the self and the contact of
the world, we discover, on the one hand, that matter is a perspective, an
ensemble of images (cf. chapter I); on the other hand, we discover that the
psychic has a thickness: consciousness of the personality holds in hand the
plurality of elapsed duration. With regard to intuition, the two conditions
are "taken together" and no longer constitute an alternative.
In fact, it is we who speak of contradiction, of coming together: we set
in opposition the In Itself to the For Itself. But Bergson speaks of two mixed
elements: he talks about participation in physical existence and participation
in consciousness as if he were talking about qualities. Bergson never speaks
of his consciousness; he does not grasp the fundamental difference of texture

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FOURTEENTH LECTURE

between the partes extra partes and the being who knows itself. In posing
the problem in an insufficiently precise way, he provides only an insufficient
solution to it. Bergson always leads us to the brink of an intuition that he does
not fulfill. Instead of placing in the world seeds of consciousness and instead
of leaving in consciousness traces of materiality, he should have grasped consciousness as history and proliferation; he should have shown, in exterior perception, that the exigency of connection and the exigency of presentation are
linked; he should have shown the connection through the horizon of perception, which does not exclude a certain "mis-focus." Bergson wavers
between the terms of the alternative, instead of effectively moving beyond it.
If he had moved beyond it, and only on this condition, he would have had the
right to challenge the question "Where are recollections kept?" as he subsequently does. How could he have the right to do so, he who speaks of a "psychic place"? The weakness of his theory of the unconscious is linked to the
general weakness of his description of the For Itself.

FIFTEENTHUiCnjRE
Commentary on Text:
"Seek Experience at Its Source'

I. THE TEXT (MATTER AND MEMORY,

CHAPTER IV, PP. 183-86) 1

hat which is commonly called a fact is not reality as it appears to

immediate intuition, but an adaptation of the real to the interests of
practice and to the exigencies of social life. Pure intuition, external or
internal, is that of an undivided continuity. We break up this continuity into
elements laid side by side, which correspond in the one case to distinct
words, in the other to independent objects. But, just because we have thus
broken the unity of our original intuition, we feel ourselves obliged to establish between the severed terms a bond which can only then be external and
superadded. For the living unity, which was one with internal continuity, we
substitute the factitious unity of an empty diagram as lifeless as the parts
which it holds together. Empiricism and dogmatism are, at bottom, agreed in
starting from phenomena so reconstructed; they differ only in that dogmatism
attaches itself more particularly to the form and empiricism to the matter.
Empiricism, feeling indeed, but feeling vaguely, the artificial character of the
relations which unite the terms together, holds to the terms and neglects the
relations. Its error is not that it sets too high a value on experience, but that
it substitutes for true experience that experience which arises from the immediate contact of the mind with its object, an experience which is disarticulated and, therefore, most probably, disfiguredat any rate arranged for the
greater facility of action and of language. Just because this parceling of the real
has been effected in view of the exigencies of practical life, it has not followed
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the internal lines of the structure of things: for that very reason empiricism
cannot satisfy the mind in regard to any of the great problems and, indeed,
whenever it becomes fully conscious of its own principle, it refrains from
putting them. Dogmatism discovers and disengages the difficulties to which
empiricism is blind; however, it really seeks the solution along the very road
that empiricism has marked out. It accepts, at the hands of empiricism, phenomena that are separate and discontinuous and simply endeavors to effect a
synthesis of diem which, not having been given by intuition, cannot but be
arbitrary. In other words, if metaphysic is only a construction, there are several systems of metaphysic equally plausible, which consequently refute each
other, and the last word must remain with a critical philosophy, which holds
all knowledge to be relative and the ultimate nature of things to be inaccessible to the mind. Such is, in truth, the ordinary course of philosophic
thought: we start from what we take to be experience, we attempt various
possible arrangements of the fragments which apparently compose it, and
when at last we feel bound to acknowledge the fragility of every edifice that
we have built, we end by giving up all effort to build. But there is a last enterprise that might be undertaken. It would be to seek experience at its source,
or rather above that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our
utility, it becomes properly human experience. The impotence of speculative
reason, as Kant has demonstrated it, is perhaps at bottom only the impotence
of an intellect enslaved to certain necessities of bodily life and concerned with
a matter which man has had to disorganize for the satisfaction of his wants.
Our knowledge of things would thus no longer be relative to the fundamental
structure of our mind, but only to its superficial and acquired habits, to the
contingent form which it derives from our bodily functions and from our
lower needs. The relativity of knowledge may not, then, be definitive. By
unmaking that which these needs have made, we may restore to intuition its
original purity and so recover contact with the real.
This method presents, in its application, difficulties which are considerable and ever recurrent, because it demands for the solution of each new
problem an entirely new effort. To give up certain habits of thinking, and even
of perceiving, is far from easy: yet this is but the negative part of the work to
be done; and when it is done, when we have placed ourselves at what we have
called the turn of experience, when we have profited by the faint light which,
illuminating the passage from the immediate to the useful, marks the dawn of
our human experience, there still remains to be reconstituted, with the infinitely small elements which we thus perceive of the real curve, the curve itself
stretching out into the darkness behind them. In this sense the task of the
philosopher, as we understand it, closely resembles that of the mathematician
who determines a function by starting from the differential. The final effort of
philosophical research is a true work of integration.
We have already attempted to apply this method to the problem of con-

Commentary on Text: "Seek Experience at Its Source"

109

sciousness; and it appeared to us that the utilitarian work of the mind, in

what concerns the perception of our inner life, consisted in a sort of
refracting of pure duration into space, a refracting which permits us to separate our psychical states, to reduce them to a more and more impersonal
form, and to impose names upon themin short, to make them enter the
current of social life. Empiricism and dogmatism assume interior states in
this discontinuous form; the first confining itself to the states themselves, so
that it can see in the self only a succession of juxtaposed facts; the other
grasping the necessity of a bond, but unable to find this bond anywhere
except in a form or in a forcean exterior form into which the aggregate is
inserted, an undetermined and so to speak physical force which assures the
cohesion of the elements. Hence the two opposing points of view as to the
question of freedom: for determinism, the act is the resultant of a mechanical composition of the elements; for the adversaries of that doctrine, if they
adhered strictly to their principle, the free decision would be an arbitrary
fiat, a true creation ex nihilo. It seemed to us that a third course lay open.
This is to replace ourselves in pure duration, of which the flow is continuous and in which we pass insensibly from one state to another: a continuity which is really lived, but artificially decomposed for the greater convenience of customary knowledge. Then, it seemed to us, we saw the
action issue from its antecedents by an evolution sui generis, in such a way
that we find in this action the antecedents which explain it, while it also
adds to these something entirely new, being an advance upon them such as
the fruit is upon the flower. Freedom is not hereby, as has been asserted,
reduced to sensible spontaneity. At most, this would be the case in the
animal, of which the psychical life is mainly affective. But, in man, the
thinking being, the free act may be termed a synthesis of feelings and ideas
and the evolution which leads to it a reasonable evolution. The artifice of
this method simply consists, in short, in distinguishing the point of view of
customary or useful knowledge from that of true knowledge. The duration
wherein we see ourselves acting, and in which it is useful that we should
see ourselves, is a duration whose elements are dissociated and juxtaposed.
The duration wherein we act is a duration wherein our states melt into each
other. It is within this that we should try to replace ourselves by thought,
in the exceptional and unique case when we speculate on the intimate
nature of action, that is to say, when we are discussing human freedom.

II. COMMENTARY
These pages have a dual interest.
(1) In the first place, in regards to the relationship between experience and construction, in metaphysics.

110

FIFTEENTH LECTURE

Every synthesis, at the risk of being as arbitrary as those syntheses which

Bergson criticizes dogmatism for, must be given in an intuition. We must, then,
challenge every analysis (even an ideal one) of knowledge in terms of multiple
elements and of linking this multiplicity. In order for metaphysical unity to be
natural, we must discover within ourselves and outside ourselves what we
know from the fact that we exist, we must grasp life in ourselves, we who are
living. Instinct is a prehuman link with the living. Bergson aims at rediscovering this prehuman link. He attempts to find a passage between a being who
knows nothing and a knowledge cut off from this being. Instinct knows
nothing; intelligence knows, but at a distance from things. Therefore, we must
join our mute being with our revealed being, we must regrasp through a violent effort our spontaneous being, we must draw knowledge from our primordial unity with things. However, we have only a fragment of the curve at
our disposition: we are not the totality of being. The Bergsonian method will
not be, then, a pure and simple identification, but a coming and going
between contact with being and construction (the "integration") of being.
"Laughter"2 contains a positive theory of speech as incantation: "by
rhythmical arrangements of words, which thus become organized and animated with a life of their own, they tell usor rather suggestthings that
speech was not calculated to express."3 However, in this instance, Bergson
is speaking of poets. If speech were a bearer of truth only when it becomes
incantation, why would philosophers still be necessary? Bergson should
therefore have disavowed his theory of immediation and constructed a
theory of true communication. If the task of this philosopher is to "reconstitute the form of the curve," Beigson's philosophy cannot exhaust itself in
immediation. If life is ignorant of itself, we must recast the theory of intelligence and the theory of valid language. Besides, this task has been started:
in The Creative Mind4 Bergson returned to the problem of intuition.
(2) Secondly, regarding the relationships between reason and freedom.
Bergson takes as an example of intuition the intuition of self in which
duration appears in its natural unity. But when the objection is raised
"[f]reedom is . . . h e r e b y . . . reduced to a sensible spontaneity," he responds
that "in man, the thinking being, the free act may be termed a synthesis of
feelings and ideas, and the evolution which leads to it a reasonable evolution."5 This is tantamount to recognizing that the free act does not come from
the self the way fruit comes from a flower. The novelty of the act belongs in
principle to every moment of duration. But this novelty, guaranteed in
advance to every act, is not the full novelty. Already Time and Free Wilft
stated as much: "Many live . . . and die, without having known true freedom."7
Freedom is not, then, only a formal property of psychic becoming: there is
true duration only if, in its unfolding, there intervenes a moment during
which the act is suspended, during which the meaning of the past is clarified
and meditated upon. Duration, then, is not duration in each of its moments:

Commentary on Text: "Seek Experience at Its Source"

111

it must grasp itself both reflexively and practically, without which the expression "reasonable evolution" would remain meaningless.
The pages which follow have for their objective the purpose of obtaining
an intuition of the world: the extension behind space, the indivisible movement behind the series of positions occupied by the mobile. Applied to movement, intuition certainly appears to be, once again, a coincidence. Consciousness rejoins effective movement in returning from the movement of
multiplicity to the unity of movement, from the trajectory to the distance traveled. A question arises: is intuition going to consist for us in discovering the
interior of movement? At the time Matter and Memory was written, movement is "a solid and undivided whole."8 Now Bergson does not ask himself if
this perception is separable from all exterior perceptions: is there consciousness of duration without consciousness of a multiple? Kant showed, in his
Refutation of Idealism, that time could be perceived only against a backdrop
of space. Bergson was going to show that there is a lived space; passing, not
from space to time, but from space divided into pieces to extension. Moreover, he stated it in this same chapter IV, "It might, then, be possible,... to
transcend space, without stepping out from extensity; and here we should
really have a return to the immediate."9 However, this indication does not
receive the subsequent development that it suggested.
Thus, after having presented a first conception of intuition (immediate
coincidence), Bergson completed it with the idea of integration, therefore
of construction: his intuition tended to become dialectic. But what followed showed that he forgot these modifications and he returned, in practice, to his initial conception.

NOTE ON ZENO'S ARGUMENTS

Bergson is wrong to conclude, as indeed he does, that movement is "an indivisible whole."10 Does he not himself speak of it, in reference to the
dichotomy, as "a series of undivided facts"?11 If there is a series, the whole
problem is raised again. Bergson is right when he comes out against the idea
that movement would be a simple change of coordinates; he is wrong if it
is true that movement is a change of state, as he himself so affirms (p. 202:
"Real movement is rather the transference of a state than of a thing"12). This
change of state, if it does not leave a spatial wake, is not movement. He
wants to take movement out of space and to transfer it on the side of time,
but he suppresses movement. Why does common sense translate movement
in terms of space? What would movement be without this translation?
Bergson goes beyond the contradictions without assuming them, because
this would require more than a coincidence: an understanding of the contradiction, without which intuition is the same as refusing to think.

SIXTEENraiCrT^E
The Relationships between
Intuition and Construction
in Bergson 's Metaphysics

n regards to intuition and its nature, Bergson's work reflects oscillations in thought, rather than a change.
The Introduction to Metaphysics (1903) 1 defines a doctrine of intuition
different from the one found in Matter and Memory (1896). But Creative
Evolution (1907) takes up again the thesis of intuition-coincidence! Furthermore, the preface of The Creative Mind (1922, published in 1932), also
reveals this opposition. In this same work, Bergson adds to his Introduction
to Metaphysics a long note 2 in order to return to his "concordism."
Depending on the text, intuition is a coincidence with the object (first conception) or, on the other hand, it is only a borderline case, with the mind
being required to elaborate images and concepts in view of a reconstruction
(second conception). In reality, this question involves a difficulty continually encountered by Bergson.

I. INTUITION-COINCIDENCE
In this first conception there is, in all rigor, intuition only of oneself:"... at
least a part of reality, our person, can be grasped in its natural purity"3 Intuition, then, will be a knowledge of the self, of a limited part of the real. "The
intuition we refer to then bears above all on internal duration."4 If it extends
to, something other than me, this will be by means of a series of dilations
(cf. Introduction to Metaphysics: "we can dilate ourselves indefinitely by a
more and more vigorous effort").5
113

114

SIXTEENTH LECTURE
(1) A first extension has us attain the unconscious self:
Intuition, then, signifies first of all consciousness, but immediate consciousness, a vision which is scarcely distinguished from the object seen,
a knowledge which is contact and even coincidence.Next it is consciousness extended, pressing upon the edge of an unconscious which
gives way and which resists, which surrenders and which regains itself:
through rapid alternating of obscurity and light, it makes us see that the
unconscious is there.6

It is the marginal view that one has through an open door when one passes
by a room without entering.
(2) A second extension introduces us into "consciousness in general" by
a "psychological endosmosis."7 It is to this type of intuition that, for
example, telepathy belongs.
(3) From consciousness in general, we proceed to life by a third extension:
[I]s it only with consciousnesses that we are in sympathy? If every living
being is born, develops and dies, if life is an evolution and if duration is in
this case a reality, is there not also an intuition of the vital, and consequently a metaphysics of life, which might in a sense prolong the science
of the living?8
(4) Finally, a fourth extension will lead us to unorganized matter:"... the
material universe in its entirety keeps our consciousness waiting, it waits
itself... it has to do with intuition through all the real change and movement
that it contains."9 Matter is therefore understood as was unconsciousness: it
is what is on the brink of the self. Bergson adds that "the idea of differential,
or rather of fluxion, was suggested to science by a vision of this kind."10 (The
same indication occurs in the Introduction to Metaphysics-regarding
modern mathematics: "I take the view that several of the great discoveries,
of those at least which have transformed the positive sciences or created new
ones, have been so many soundings made in pure duration."11) Intuition,
having the penchant for its "real domain," would like "to grasp in things, even
material things, their participation in spirituality."12 Therefore the intuition of
the world is indirect. In this first conception, metaphysics has a limited
object, a special method: harmony with science becomes possible on the
basis of a sharing of the real. Science is,
therefore, already fulfilling half of the program of the old metaphysics... .
Metaphysics, then, is not the superior of positive science.. . . They both
bear upon reality itself. But each of them retains only half of it.13
Science undertakes therefore to know what is not ourselves.

The Relationships between Intuition and Construction

115

H. INTUITION AS COMPREHENSION
But this does not suffice: "as mind and matter touch one another, metaphysics and science, all along their common surface, will be able to test one
another, until contact becomes fecundation."14 There is an "extension into
each other."15 Consequently, metaphysics is no longer localized in the mind.
In the Oxford lectures, metaphysics is presented as a perception of the
world: "(without, of course, ceasing to exercise our faculties of conception
and reasoning) ought we not rather return to perception, getting it to
expand and extend?"l6This involves, then, a return to perception and not to
intuition. "But suppose," states Bergson,
That... we were to plunge into [perception] for the purpose of deepening
and widening it. Suppose that we were to insert our will into it, and that this
will, expanding, were to expand our vision of things?17
We would obtain a philosophy in which "nothing . . . would be sacrificed."18
This philosophy must be capable of telling us what it perceives. Instead
of the "ready-made," "rigid" concepts with the "fixed outlines" of dogmatism,19 it will substitute "new concepts .. . cut out for the object. . . which
are appropriate to that object alone."These new concepts will be "flexible,
mobile, almost fluid representations, always ready to mold themselves on
the fleeting forms of intuition."20 The use of concepts is therefore legitimate
and necessary in metaphysics: "concepts are indispensable to it."21 Scientific
conceptualization itself is based on the nature of things. Next to "formulated
mathematics," there is a "virtual or implicit" mathematics which is "natural to
the human mind."22 Scientific conceptualization is not without contact with
intuition. Science thrives on intuition. "The most powerful method of investigation known to the mind, infinitesimal calculus, was born of that very
reversal."23 Modern mathematics aims to "follow the growth of magnitudes."24 Moreover, "quantity is always nascent quality."25 Metaphysics,
then, will perform "differentiations and qualitative integrations."26 The very
context of scientific formulation is intuitive. Galileo gave "a sounding" in the
depths of duration.27 We are a long way from an agreement concluded on
the basis of a distinction of domains: henceforth there will be philosophical
science, and philosophy is to be conceived as a science. "Modern science is
neither one nor simple."28 Its profound and prolific ideas "are so many
points of contacts with currents of reality which do not necessarily converge on a same point."29 The Creative Mind will distinguish, in the same
spirit, two lands of clarity, the superior one being the clarity of "the radically
new and absolutely simple idea," which we will see, "itself obscure . . . dissipates obscurities."30
Thus, intuition is obtained by virtue of an effort:

116

SIXTEENTH LECTURE
[T]o philosophize consists precisely in placing oneself, by an effort of intuition, inside that concrete reality on which from the outside the Critique
takes the two opposing views, thesis and antithesis.31

The passage through thesis and antithesis can therefore be a means of

gaining intuition. Intuition is not the grasp of a unity without diversity: it is
"dogmatism" which understands unity without cracks. 32 Metaphysical intuition has an "essentially active character."33 It is not a question of "simply . . .
watching oneself live."34 It allows usand this is its paradox"to affirm the
existence of objects inferior and superior to us, though nevertheless in a
certain sense interior* to us."35 Duration is this paradoxical reality which
links us to things, and to things outside ourselves. In intuition, coincidence
therefore becomes confused with a transcendental movement: we coincide,
indeed, but with a movement which originates within ourselves:
(J]ust as a consciousness of color, which would harmonize inwardly with
orange instead of perceiving it outwardly, would feel itself caught between
red and yellow, would perhaps even have, beneath the latter color, a presentiment of a whole spectrum in which is naturally prolonged the continuity which goes from red to yellow, so the intuition of our duration, far
from leaving us suspended in the void as pure analysis would do, puts us in
contact with a whole continuity of durations which we should try to follow
either downwardly or upwardly: in both cases we can dilate ourselves indefinitely by a more and more vigorous effort, in both cases transcend ourselves.36
"Transcend": the word is there. Here sympathy no longer consists in
"making oneself an organism," but assumes an effort in order to retake the
thing to be known. We have in ourselves the means of this renewal, the
wherewithal to give a meaning to life again. Intuition becomes a meeting of
signs and acts because of a meaning. Sympathy is no longer a reception, but
rather a comprehension.
This is precisely what makes the lecture on "Philosophical Intuition" 37
possible. All systems, if we are to believe Bergson, contain a central intuition. Now, if we keep with his first philosophy, there should be in each
system a plurality of intuitions. If intuition were simple coincidence, there
would not be in every great philosophy this inner articulation of theses, and
we would not uncover therein such a logic of intuition. It is because intuition is a movement of comprehension that the intuitions of a philosophy
form a kind of organism or a kind of system. "The meaning, . . . is less a
*[We here opt for Hulme's "interior" (An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 45), which
agrees with the "interieurs" of CEuvres (p. 1416); Andison (The Creative Mind, p. 184) has
"inferior," which seems to be a typographical error; the usup6rieurs" contained in the French
text of the current lecture is an obvious error.Eds.]

The Relationships between Intuition and Construction

111

thing thought than a movement of thought, less a movement than a direction."38 Therefore, there is certainly a logic of intuition and a meaning of a
philosophy: the conception elaborated in 1903 in the Introduction to Metaphysics left more possibilities of integrating intelligence into intuition than
did the conception presented in Matter and Memory.

COMPLEMENTARY
NOTE*

ithout claiming to give here an exhaustive summary of the pages

in which Merleau-Ponty evokes the teaching of classical philosophers, we thought it would be useful to point out to the reader a certain
number of texts which parallel, either in terms of subject or inspiration,
those texts discussed in the current series of lectures.
We have used the following abbreviations:

SC/SB=

PiVPP=

SNS/SNS =

La Structure du comportement, 2d ed. (Paris: P.U.F., 1949;

first edition, Paris: P.U.F., 1942).
[The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1963; London: Methuen, 1965).]
Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945).
[Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New
York: Humanities Press, 1962; London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1962).]
Sens et non-sens (Paris: Nagal, 1948).
[Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia
Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press,
1963).]

* [Throughout this note, we have added, in brackets, abbreviations for and references to
the available English translations of Merleau-Ponty's work. See also the selected bibliography at
the end of the present volumeEds.]

119

120

COMPLEMENTARY NOTE

5/S=

GE/EM=

VT/VI=

EP/IPP=

Signes (Paris: Gallimard, I960).

[Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1964).]
L'CEtt et Vesprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).
["Eye and Mind," trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of
Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed.
James M. Edie (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press,
1964).]
Le Visible el Vinvisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).
[The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis
(Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1968).]
Eloge de la philosophie et autres essais (Paris: Gallimard,
1965).
[The loge itself, trans. John Wild and James M. Edie, appears
as In Praise of Philosophy (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1963) and has been reprinted (with identical
pagination) along with John O'Neill's translation of Resumes
de cours, College de France, 1952-1960 in In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1988). The autres essais from the French volume cited above are available in English translation in Signs.]

A detailed bibliography of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's works can be found in

Merleau-Ponty, sa vie, son oeuvre, by Andre Robinet (Paris: P.U.F., 1963),
pp. 67-74.

FIRST LECTURE: NOTE ON THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

The content of this lecture prefigures that of the essay entitled La philosophie et le dehors, which appeared in Les Grands Philosophes (Paris:
Mazenod, 1956) and which was reprinted in 5, pp. 158-67, theninjEP, pp.
170-85. ["Philosophy and the 'Outside' " is the first part of the essay "Everywhere and Nowhere," in 5, pp. 126-33.]
See also VI, pp. 242 and 252-53 [VI, pp. 188 and 198-200].

SECOND LECTURE: THE UNION OF THE

SOUL AND THE BODY IN DESCARTES
See especially SC, p. 225; CE, pp. 55-57; VI, pp. 288, 326-27 [SB, pp.
208-209; EM, pp. 176-77; VI, pp. 234, 272-73].

Complementary Note

121

THIRD LECTURE: CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF

IN MALEBRANCHE
1. Regarding the Cartesian Cogito: see especially SC, pp. 210-12; PP,
pp. 425-26, 459-61; VI, pp. 326-27 [SB, pp. 195-97; PP, pp. 370-72,
400-402; VI, pp. 272-73]. An article pubUshed November 23, 1964, "Le
Primat de la perception et ses consequences philosophiques" (Bulletin de
la Soctete frangaise de philosophie, t. XLI, not republished in book
format), analyzes (pp. 129-30) "three ways of understanding the Cogito"
["The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences" is contained in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, The Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M.
Edie (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1964); cf. pp. 21-22];
2. On knowledge by feeling and passivity in Malebranche: see especially VI, pp. 66, 302 [VI, pp. 42-43, 249];
3. On the experience of passivity: SC, p. 233 [SB, p. 216].
The expression "blind contact," used supra, p. 38, is found in SC, p. 213,
applied to Descartes [SB, p. 197].

FOURTH LECTURE: NATURAL JUDGMENTS

AND PERCEPTION
1. On the Cartesian theory of perception and its difficulties: see especially^, pp. 205-207, 211-13; PP, pp. 46-57; (E, pp. 36-60; VI, p. 263
[SB, pp. 190-92, 196-98; PP, pp. 36-46; EM, pp. 169-78; VI, p. 210];
2. On natural judgments in Malebranche: see especially SC, pp.
212-13; PP, pp. 297-98 [SB, pp. 196-97; PP, pp. 256-58].
Jean-Paul Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego, referred to supra p. 46,
is referred to and commented upon in SC, pp. 238-39 [SB, pp. 221-22].

FIFTH LECTURE: PERCEPTIBLE EXTENSION

AND INTELLIGIBLE EXTENSION
1. On the positive infinite and the partes extra partes in seventeenthcentury classical philosophy: S, pp. 186-88 (cf. EP, pp. 220-22) [S, pp.
148-50];
2. On the "cubic foot" of extension (see supra, p. 52): SC, p. 212 [SB,
p. 197].
The "connection with existence" evoked supra, p. 52 echoes the "living
connection"mentioned in PP, p. 237 [PP, p. 205].

122

COMPLEMENTARY NOTE

SIXTH LECTURE: CAUSALITY IN THE RELATIONSHIPS

BETWEEN THE SOUL AND THE BODY
On Malebranche's occasionalism: SC, p. 238 [SB, p. 221].

SEVENTH LECTURE: THEOLOGY AND THE

UNION OF THE SOUL AND THE BODY
1. On Malebranche's religious philosophy: S, pp. 181-83 (cf. EP, pp.
209-13) [S, pp. 143-45];
2. On Kierkegaard's Christianity: SNS, p. 359 [SNS, p. 176].
In several places in his work, Maurice Merleau-Ponty praises Malebranche for having seen in the world "an incomplete work": see especially
PP, p. 465 [PP, p. 406] and the Bulletin de la Societe frangaise de philosophic, t. XLI, p. 134.

EIGHTH THROUGH TENTH LECTURES:

FROM MALEBRANCHE TO MAINE DE BIRAN;
MAINE DE BIRAN AND THE PHILOSOPHERS
OF THE COGITO, I AND H
1. On the Biranian subject "which does not know itself except in the
world, but which is in the world, and could not even be subject if it did not
have a body to move": S, p. 192 (cf. EP, p. 327) [S, p. 152];
2. On the human subject which "temporalizes itself" (supra, p. 75): PP,
pp. 484-89 [PP, pp. 423-28].
The conception of doubt presented, supra, pp. 94-75, evokes the
"perceptual faith" of SNS, p. 188, n. l a n d VI, pp. 48ff. [SNS, p. 94, n. 13
and VI, pp. 28ff.]

ELEVENTH LECTURE: MATTER AND MEMORY:

THE NEW AND THE POSITIVE IN THE
ANALYSIS OF THE FIRST CHAPTER
1. OnBergson, Kant, and the point P.: SC. p. 215 [SB, pp. 199-200];
2. On "pure image": SC, p. 208 [SB, p. 193];
3. On the being of the perceived: S, pp. 232-34 (cf. EP, pp. 293-96)
[S, pp. 184-86];
4. On the relationship of the present to the past (supra, pp. 91-92):
PP, pp. 417-18 [PP, pp. 363-64].

Complementary Note

123

TWELFTH LECTURE: THE SECOND CHAPTER

OF MATTER AND MEMORY
1. On the projection of recollections in Bergson: SC, p. 209 [SB, p.
194];
2. On the body and time: PP, pp. 93-94 [PP, pp. 78-79].

FOURTEENTH LECTURE: COMMENTARY ON TEXT:

THE DEFINITION OF EXISTENCE
InEP, pp. 21-23 [Inaugural Lecture at the College de France], Maurice Merleau-Ponty was to interpret Bergson's work with an increased affinity to it
and was to recognize in the Bergsonian theory of existence the "proliferation" and the "mis-focus" mentioned supra, p. 106 [IPP, pp. 11-12.]

FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH LECTURES:

COMMENTARY ON TEXT: "SEEK EXPERIENCE AT ITS
SOURCE"; THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN INTUITION
AND CONSTRUCTION IN BERGSON'S METAPHYSICS
See especially SNS, p. 194, n. 1 [SNS, p. 97, n. 15] (on the Introduction
to Metaphysics and the "lines of facts"), S, p. 232 (cf. EP, pp. 292-93) [S,
p. 184] (on the extension of the experience of oneself) and particularly EP,
pp. 29-31 [IPP, pp. 16-17] (on the meaning of Bergsonian "intuition").
In pp. 64-65 of Merleau-Ponty, sa vie, son ceuvre, M. Andre Robinet
resituated Maurice Merleau-Ponty's work in the tradition of Malebranche,
Maine de Biran, and Bergson, as "an occasionalism of immergence and incarnation" (p. 65).
Jean Deprun

CHAPTER NOTES

["Eds." designates a note of clarification included by the editors of this volume. The
sole note of clarification from the editor of the original French edition of these lectures (apart from his Foreword and Complementary Note) has been included at the
end of the Sixth Lecture (see supra p. 54). Whenever possible when English translations of the works referred to in the lectures are available, we have used these
translations in our text. References to these passages are included in brackets following references to the original sources. To insure clarity and consistency, some
information omitted in the original French notes (e.g., cities and dates of publication, editors, full titles of works) has been added to the notes here. We have also
taken the liberty to correct several reference errors which we discovered in the
French text. Finally, for simplicity's sake, titles referred to frequently will sometimes
be indicated either by abbreviations or by the first word or words in the title. Eds.]

FIRST LECTURE: NOTE ON THE HISTORY

OF PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO
MALEBRANCHE, BIRAN, AND BERGSON
1. Leon Brunschvicg, Spinoza et ses contemporains, 3ded. (Paris: Alcan, 1923).
2. Nicolas Malebranche, Traite de morale, I, n, iii, in CEuvres completes de
Malebranche (Paris: Vrin, 1962-1968), t. XI, p. 34; cited by Brunschvicg in Spinoza
etses contemporainsy p. 336. [The twenty-volume edition, produced under the general editorship of Andre Robinet, of the CEuvres completes de Malebranche will
henceforth be referred to as "O.C." English translation: Treatise on Ethics (1684),
trans. Craig Walton (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), p. 54.]

125

126

CHAPTER NOTES

3. Traite de morale, 1, II, xiiinO.C, t. XI, p. 35; cited in Spinoza et ses contermporains, p. 336. [Treatise on Ethics, p. 57.]
4. Spinoza et ses contemporains, p. 356.
5. Entretiens metaphysiques, VI [in Entretiens sur la me'taphysique et sur la
religion], ed. Armand Cuvillier (Paris: Vrin, 1947), t. I, p. 181; alsoinO.C, C. XII,
p. 131; cited by Brunschvicg, Spinoza et ses contemporains, p. 339. [English translation: Dialogues on Metaphysics, trans. Willis Doney (New York: Abaris, 1980), p.
127.]
6. Spinoza et ses contemporains, p. 347.

SECOND LECTURE: THE UNION OF THE

SOUL AND THE BODY IN DESCARTES
1. [In the French edition of these lectures, references to Descartes's works
first cite the standard twelve-volume edition by Adam and Tannery (referred to as
"AT"), (Euvres de Descartes, rev. ed. (Paris: Vrin/C.N.R-S, 1964-76). In some cases
references to other editions of Descartes's works are also given. Where possible we
have followed the most recent and extensive collection of Descartes's philosophical
works in English, the three-volume edition The Philosophical Writings of Descartes,
trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny
(the last for Vol. Ill, "The Correspondence," only) (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984-85 [Vols. I, II], and 1991 [Vol. m]). Following John Cottingham's suggestion, we refer to this English edition as "CSM" for the first two volumes and as
"CSM-K" for the third.Eds.] AT, i. DC, p. 64. [CSM, Vol. II, p. 56.]
2. AT, t. i y p. 346; CEuvres et lettres, ed. Bridoux (Paris: Gallimard, 1952),
p. 1224. [CSM-K, pp. 278-79.]
3. AT, t. IX, p. 64. [CSM, Vol. II, p. 56.]
4. [The Latin version is from AT, t. in, p. 424. Three French translations of the
passage are cited in the French edition of these lectures: CEuvres et lettres, ed.
Bridoux, p. 41; Lettres a Arnauld et a Morns, ed. Lewis, p. 41; and CEuvres
philosophiques, ed. Alquie (Paris: Gamier, 1963), t. II, p. 362. Both the Latin version and a single French translation are included in the French edition. The English
translation included here is from CSM-K, p. 190.Eds.]
5. AT, t. in, p. 694; Bridoux, p. 1160. [CSM-K, p. 228.]
6. [The Latin version is from AT, t. V, p. 223. Only two French translations are
cited for this passage in the French edition of these lectures; Bridoux, p. 1309, and
Lewis, p. 91. The English translation included here is from CSM-K, p. 358.Eds.]
7. [Here only Alquie's French translation is cited (t. II, p. 362). English translation from CSM-K. p. 190.Eds.]
8. [Here onlyAlquie's French translation is cited (t. II, p. 362). English translation from CSM-K. p. 190.Eds.]
9. [The Latin version is from AT, t. V, p. 342. In this case two French translations are cited. The first, from Bridoux (p. 1334), renders the final phrase "mais
seulement une etendue de puissance" ("but only an extension of power"); the
second, from Lewis (p. 159), reads". . . [une etendue de puissance ou une exten-

Chapter Notes

127

sion en] puissance" ("... [an extension of power or an extension in] power"). English translation from CSM-K, p. 372.Eds.]
10. [Letter to Elisabeth of June 28, 1643,] AT, t. Ill, p. 692; Bridoux, p. 1158.
[CSM-K, p. 227.]

THIRD LECTURE: CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF

IN MALEBRANCHE
1. cf. Martial Gueroult, Etendue etpsychologie chez Malebranche (Paris: Les
belles lettres, 1939), p. 11.
2. Etendue et psychologie chez Malebranche, p. 11.
3. Pierre Lachieze-Rey, LIdealisme kantien, 2d ed. (Paris: Alcan, 1950), p. 18.
4. LIdealisme kantien, p. 21.
5. Entretiens metaphysiques, I, 1; ed. Cuvillier, t. I, p. 62: O.C., t. XIL, p.
32. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 25.]
6. Recherche [de la verite], III, I, I, inO.C, t. I, p. 388. [English translation:
The Search After Truth and Elucidations of the Search After Truth, trans. Thomas
M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), p.
202. Hereafter referred to as Search.Eds.]
7. Reponses a Arnauld, t. I, pp. 273-74; O.C., t. VI, p. 162.
8. Entretiens metaphysiques, V, iv; ed. Cuvillier, t. I, p. 162; O.C., t. XIII,
p. 115. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 109]
9. Recherche, in, II, VII, iv; O.C., t. I, p. 452. [Search, p. 238.] See also
Reponses, I, iy pp. 112ff.; O.C., t. IX, pp. 1076ff.
10. Entretien d'un philosophe Chretien et d'un philosophe chinois, O.C., t.
XV, p. 4. [English translation: Dialogue between a Christian Philosopher and a
Chinese Philosopher on the Existence of God, trans. Dominick A. Iorio (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1980), p. 66.]
11. Recherche, m, II, VII, II; O.C. t. I, p. 449. [Search, p. 237.]
12. IIP lettre a Mairan, ed. Moreau, p. 136; O.C, t. XIX, p. 883.
13. Recherche, III, II, VIII 1; O.C, t. I, p. 456. [Search, p. 241.]
14. Entretiens metaphysiques, in, iv; ed. Cuvillier, t. I, p. 102; O.C, t. XII,
p. 64. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 57.]
15. Response a Regis, ch. II, 14; O.C, t. XVIM, p. 289.
16. Antonie Arnauld, Des vraies et des fausses idees, ch. XXIII (Cologne: N.
Schonten, 1683), pp. 257-58.
17. Recherche, I, I, 1; O.C, t. I, p. 41. [Search, p. 2.]
18. Meditations chr&iennes, IX, xix; O.C, t. X, p. 104.

FOURTH LECTURE: NATURAL JUDGMENTS

AND PERCEPTION
1. Meditations chretiennes, n, iv; O.C, t. X, p. 20.
2. Recherche, I, I, 1; O.C, t. I, p. 43. [Search, p. 3.]

128

CHAPTER NOTES

3. E. Brehier, "Les jugements naturels chez Malebranche,Min Revue philosophique,

1938; reproduced in Etudes de philosophie moderne (Paris, 1957), pp. 72-78.
4. Ibid., p. 77.
5. Ibid., p. 78.
6. AT, t. VI, pp. 137-38; Alquie, 1.1, p. 707; Bridoux, p. 222. [CSM, Vol. I, p. 170.]
7. Jean Paul Sartre, Transcendance de VEgo (Paris: Vrin, 1966, p. 25); first published in Recherches philosophiques, VI, 1936-1937, p. 90. [English translation: The
Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, trans. Forrest
Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Noonday Press, 1957), pp. 41-42.]
8. Dioptrique (Optics), DiscoursVI; AT, t. VI, p. 141; Bridoux, p. 224; Alquie,
t. I, p. 710. [CSM, Vol. I, p. 172.]

FIFTH LECTURE: PERCEPTIBLE EXTENSION

AND INTELLIGIBLE EXTENSION
1. Spinoza et ses contemporains, p. 354.
2. Laporte, "L'Etendue intelligible chez Malebranche," in Revue
international
de philosophie, 1938; cf. Etudes d'histoire de la philosophie frangaise au XVTIe
siecle, pp. 153-92.
3. Ibid., p. 162.
4. Entretiens metaphysiques, II, 2; O.C., t. II, p. 52; Cuvillier, t. I, p. 86.
[Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 45.]
5. Entretiens metaphysiques, II, 2; O.C., t. II, p. 52. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 45.]
6. Reponse a Regis, II, 5; O.C., t. XVII-1, p. 282.
7. 5 February 1649; AT, t. V, 270; Correspondance avecAmauld et Morns,
ed. Lewis, pp. 114, 115 (CSM-K, p. 362). [Due to a discrepancy between "within
parts" in CSM-K and upartes extra partesn in AT, we have opted for a translation
which is closer to the Latin text. Eds.]
8. VIe Eclaircissement; O.C., t. Ill, p. 61. [Elucidation Six in Search, pp.
572-73. Because of the awkwardness, we have opted to use "outsides'-rather than
"outnesses" as is found in Lennon's translation.Eds.]
9. Reponses aArnauld, t. I, p. 342; O.C., t. VI, p. 203.
10. "L'Etendue intelligible chez Malebranche," p. 167.
11. Ibid., p. 176 and note 5; cf. O.C., t. XVII-1, p. 281.
12. Recueil des reponses aArnauld, t. I, p. 342; O.C., t. VI, p. 204; quoted
by Laporte, p. 180.
13. "L'Etendue intelligible chez Malebranche," p. 180.
14. IF Entretien sur la mort, ed. Cuvillier, t. H, pp. 244-45; O.C., t. Xm, p. 403.
15. Ibid., ed. Cuvillier, t. II, p. 245; O.C., t. XIII, p. 403.
16. Recueil (des reponses a Arnauld), t. I, pp. 343-44; O.C., t. VI, p. 204;
quoted by Laporte, "L'Etendue intelligible chez Malebranche," pp. 186-87.
17. Troisieme reponse, in Correspondance avec Mairan, ed. Moreau, p. 139;
O.C., t. XIX, p. 886.
18. Quatrieme reponse, ed. Moreau, p. 169; O.C., t. XIX, p. 909.

Chapter Notes

129

SIXTH LECTURE: CAUSALITY IN RELATIONSHIPS

BETWEEN THE SOUL AND THE BODY
1. Meditations chretiennes, IX, ii; O.C, t. X, p. 96.
2. Entretiens metaphysiques, X, xvi, ed. Cuvillier, t. II, p. 60; O.C, t. XII, p.
247. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 247.]
3. Entretiens metaphysiques, IV, xviii; ed. Cuvillier, t. I, p. 144; O.C, t. XII,
p. 102. [We have corrected this reference, which in the French text reads IV, xvii.
Eds. Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 97.]
4. Ibid.

SEVENTH LECTURE: THEOLOGY AND THE

UNION OF THE SOUL AND THE BODY
1. Recherche, I, III, I, ch. 1, 1; O.C, t. I, p. 383. [Search, p. 199.]
2. Ibid., p. 382. [Search, p. 198.]
3. Ibid., p. 383. [Search, p. 199.]
4. Recherche, I, V, I; O.C, t. II, p. 127. [We have corrected this reference,
which in the French text reads "I, IV, ch. 1."Eds. Search, pp. 337-38.]
5. Recherche, I** Eclaircissement, O.C, t. in, p. 34. [Elucidation One in
Search, p. 556.]
6. Meditations chretiennes, XVII, iv; O.C, t. X, p. 192.
7. Meditations chretiennes, XIII, xxii; O.C, t. X, p. 159.
8. Meditations chretiennes, XII, xxi; O.C, t. X, p. 149.
9. Recherche, I, V, V; O.C, t. II, p. 175. [Search, p. 367.]
10. Entretiens metaphysiques, IV, xxi; O.C, t. XII, pp. 105-106. [Dialogues
on Metaphysics, p. 99.]
11. Elucidation One; Elucidation Seven, xix; Meditations chretiennes, XVI, xiii.
12. Elucidation One.
13. I** Eclaircissement; O.C, t. Ill, p. 22. [Elucidation One in Search, 549.]
14. Elucidation Eleven.
15. Meditations chretiennes, IX, xix-xxi; O.C, t. X, pp. 103-104.
16. Entretiens metaphysiques, IV, xvii; O.C, t. XII, p. 101. [Dialogues on
Metaphysics, p. 95.]
17. Recherche, I, Y 1; O.C, t. I, p. 71. [Search, p. 20.]
18. VIIIe Eclaircissement, v-vii; O.C, t. in, p. 73-74. [Elucidation Eight in
Search, pp. 580-81.]
19. VIIIe Eclaircissement, xvii-xviii; O.C, t. Ill, p. 80. [Elucidation Eight, pp.
584-85.]
20. Entretiens metaphysiques, IX, v; Cuvillier, t. II, p. 12; O.C, t. XII, p. 205.
{Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 205.]
21. Meditations chretiennes, VII, xii; O.C, t. X, p. 73.
22. Meditations chretiennes, VII, xi; O.C, t. X, p. 73.
23. Meditations chretiennes, XIV, xv; O.C, t. X, p. 158.
24. Ibid.

130

CHAPTER NOTES

25. Ibid.
26. Meditations chretiennes, Xiy xviii; O.C., t. X, p. 159.
27. Ibid.
28. Entretiens metaphysiques, IX, vi; ed. Cuvillier, t. II, p. 13; O.C., t. XII, p.
205. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 205.]
29. Ibid., p. 206. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 205.]
30. Entretiens metaphysiques, XIV viii; Cuvillier, t. n, p. 181; O.C., t. XII, p.
243. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 347.]
31. Entretiens metaphysiques, XIY viii; Cuvillier, t. II, p. 180; O.C., t. XII, p.
243. [We have corrected this reference, which in the French text reads "XIV, vii,. . .
p. 432."Eds. Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 347.]
32. Entretiens metaphysiques, XIV, viii; O.C., p. 243. [In light of the correction in note 31 supra, we have changed this reference, which reads simply "ibid." in
the French text.Eds. Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 347.]
33. Entretiens metaphysiques, XIV, iv; Cuvillier, t. II, p. 177; O.C., t. XII, p.
339. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 343.]
34. Recherche, III, I, I, 11; O.C., t. I, p. 395. [Search, p. 206.]
35. Meditations chretiennes. Ill, 5-6; O.C., t. X, p. 28.
36. Entretiens metaphysiques, XTV, ix: ed. Cuvillier, t. n, p. 181; O.C., t. XII,
p. 343. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 347.]
37. Meditations chretiennes, XII, xiv; O.C., t. X, p. 130.
38. Traite de la nature et de la grdce. Deuxieme discours, I partie, XVII
and XVIII; O.C., t. V pp. 88-89. [English translation: Treatise on Nature and Grace,
trans. Patrick Riley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 145.]
39. Entretiens metaphysiques, VIII, iii; ed. Cuvillier, t. I, p. 238; O.C., t. XII,
p. 177. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 175.]
40. Traite de la nature et de la grdce, Premier discours, I partie, XVIII;
O.C., t. V p. 32. [Treatise on Nature and Grace, p. 118.]

EIGHTH LECTURE:
FROM MALEBRANCHE TO MAINE DE BIRAN
1. Leon Brunschvicg, LExperience humaine et la causalite physique, 3d ed.
(Paris: Alcan, 1949), p. 5. [Henceforth referred to as LExperience humaineEds.]
2. Ibid., p. 17.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 7.
5. XVe Eclaircissement, O.C., t. Ill, p. 227, note; cited in Brunschvicg, LExperience humaine, p. 7 [Elucidation Fifteen in Search, p. 670.]
6. XVs Eclaircissement, O.C., t. IV, p. 227, note. [Elucidation Fifteen in
Search, p. 670.]
7. LExperience humaine, p. 9.
8. Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie. Introduction, V; Tisserand, t.
VIII, p. 77; (CEuvres choisies, ed. Gouhier, p. 128); see Brunschvicg, LExperience
humaine, p. 18.
9. Essai sur les fondements', Tisserand, t. VIII, p. 78; Gouhier, p. 129.

Chapter Notes

131

10. Ibid.
11. LExperience humaine, p. 30.
12. Tisserand, t. VIII, p. 75; Gouhier, p. 127; see Brunschvicg, LExperience
humaine, p. 20.
13. See for example, Essai sur les fondements, Irepartie, sect. I, ch. I, 1; Tisserand, t. Vm, pp. 128-29. See Brunschvicg, LExperience humaine, p. 23, note 1.
14. Leibniz, Nouveaux essais, II, xxi, 14. [English translation: New Essays
on the Understanding, trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 179.]
15. Nouveaux essais d'anthropologie\ Tisserand, t. XTV, p. 229; see Brunschvicg, LExperience humaine, p. 28.
16. LExperience humaine, p. 29.
17. Ibid., p. 28.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 26.
20. Essai sur les fondements, Ire partie. sec. II, ch. 1; Tisserand, t. VIII, pp.
183-84; see Brunschvicg, LExperience humaine, pp. 25-26.
21. Essai sur les fondements. Introduction, III; Tisserand, t. VIII, p. 29, n. 1;
Gouhier, p. 91.
22. LExperience humaine, p. 42.
23. Ibid., p. 7.
24. Recherche, I, X, 3; O.C., t. I, 125; cited by Brunschvicg, LExperience
humaine, p. 7. [Search, p. 50.]
25. Essai sur les fondements, Introduction, II; Tisserand, t. VIII, p. 15;
Gouhier, pp. 78-79.
26. Memoire sur la decomposition de la pensee, I1^ partie, Intr., 5; Tisserand, t. Ill, p. 92.
27. Essai sur les fondements, Introduction, II; Tisserand, t. VIII, pp. 14-15;
Gouhier, p. 77.
28. Essai sur les fondements, Introduction, II; Tisserand, t. VIII, p. 15;
Gouhier, p. 78.
29. Essai sur les fondements, Introduction, II; Tisserand, t. VIII, pp. 19-20;
Gouhier, pp. 81-82.
30. Essai sur les fondements, Introduction, II; Tisserand, t. VIII, p. 31;
Gouhier, p. 91.
31. Essai sur les fondements, Introduction, II; Tisserand t. VIII, p. 33;
Gouhier, p. 93.
32. Essai sur les fondements, Introduction, II; Tisserand, t. VIII, p. 33;
Gouhier, p. 94.
33. Essai sur les fondements, Introduction, IV; Tisserand, t. VIII, p. 52;
Gouhier, p. 108.
34. Ibid.
35. Essai sur les fondements, Introduction, VI; Tisserand, t. VIII, p. 84;
Gouhier, p. 134.
36. Cf. Memoire sur la decomposition de la pensee, He partie, sec. I, ch. I,
1-2; Tisserand, t. in, pp. 141-54; Rapport des sciences naturelles avec la psychologic. Introduction, I, V; Tisserand, t. X, p. 48; Gouhier, p. 160, etc.

132

CHAPTER NOTES

37. Essai sur lesfondements, Irc partie, sec. I, ch. I, HI; Tisserand, t. Vin, p. 141.
38. Fondements de la psychologie, ed. Naville, t. I, p. 307; Tisserand, t. VIII,
p. 272.
39. ^Experience humaine, p. 40.
40. Memoire sur la decomposition de la pensee, Tisserand, t. Ill, pp. 180-81.
41. Essai sur les fondements, I rc partie, sec. n, ch. II; Tisserand, t. Vm, p. 197.
42. Essai sur les fondements, I rc partie, sec. n, ch. IV; Tisserand. t. VIII, pp.
257-258.
43. Essai sur les fondements, I re partie, sec. II, ch. Ill; Tisserand, t. VIII, pp.
208-209.
44. Essai sur les fondements, lK partie, sec. II, ch. IV, II; Tisserand, t. VIII,
p. 231.

NINTH LECTURE: BIRAN AND THE

PHILOSOPHERS OF THE COGITO
1. Brunschvicg, L'Experience humaine, p. 37.
2. Commentaire sur les meditations metaphysiques, I; Tisserand, t. XI, p. 82.
3. Notes sur quelquespassages de Vabbe de Lignac; Tisserand, t. X, p. 348.
4. Commentaire sur les meditations metaphysiques,VL; Tisserand, t. XI, p. 128.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., pp. 81-82.
7. Meditation sur la mortpres du litfunebre de sa soeur Victoire, Tisserand,
t. I, p. 12.
8. Memoire sur la decomposition de la pensee, Ire partie, introduction, V,
iv; Tisserand, t. Ill, p. 139.
9. IIIe Meditation; AT, t. IX, p. 28; Bridoux, p. 285; Alquie, t. II, p. 431.
[Third Meditation in CSM, Vol. II, p. 25.]
10. Commentaire sur les Meditations metaphysiques. III; Tisserand, t. XI, pp.
91-92.

TENTH LECTURE: BIRAN AND THE PHILOSOPHERS

OF THE COGITO (CONCLUSION)
1. Cf. Commentaire sur les Meditations metaphysiques, V; Tisserand, t. XI,
p. 121.
2. Memoire sur la decomposition de la pensee, Ire partie, introduction, V,
iv; Tisserand, t. Ill, p. 139.
3. Ibid.
4. Meditations chretiennes, VI, xiv; O.C., t. X, p. 64.
5. Notes sur certains passages de Malebranche et de Bossuet, ed. Tisserand,
t. XI, p. 147.
6. Ibid., p. 148.
7. Memoire sur les perceptions obscures, I, iii; Tisserand, t. V, p. 29.

Chapter Notes

133

8. Memoire sur la decomposition de la pensee, sec. II, chap. I; Tisserand, t.

IV, p. 14.
9. Ibid.
10. Note sur un ecrit de M. Royer-Collard; Tisserand, t. X, p. 300.
11. See supra, pp. 10-11.
12. Correspondance philosophique; Tisserand, t. VII, p. 419.
13. Essai sur les fondements, He partie, sec. I, chap. II, iv; Tisserand, t. IX,
p. 301.
14. Note sur Vid^e d*existence', Tisserand, t. XSV, p. 174.
15. Essai sur lesfondements, He partie, sec. TV, chap. 1; Tisserand, t. IX, p. 480.
16. Ibid., pp. 482-83.
17. Ibid.
18. Essai sur lesfondements, He partie, sec. TV, chap. II; Tisserand, t. IX, p. 490.
19. Ibid., pp. 492-93.
20. Ibid., p. 493.
21. Memoire sur la decomposition de la pensee, IIe partie, sec. I, chap. II,
3; Tisserand, t. Ill, p. 216.
22. Ibid.
23. Nouveaux essais d'antbropologie; Tisserand, t. XIV, pp. 293-94.
24. Rapport des sciences naturelles avec la psycbologie; Tisserand, t. X, p.
126; Gouhier, pp. 188-89.
25. Examen des legons de philosophie de M. Laromiguiere; Tisserand, t. XI,
p. 328.
26. Reponse a Stapfer, Tisserand, t. XI, p. 427; Gouhier, p. 248.
27. Ibid.
28. Response a Guizot; Tisserand, t. X, pp. 262-63.

ELEVENTH LECTURE: MATTER AND MEMORY:

THE NEW AND THE POSITIVE IN THE ANALYSIS
OF THE FIRST CHAPTER
1. [QuotationsfromMatter and Memory are based on the authorized translation
by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. Page references correspond to the most recent English
edition (New York: Zone Books, 1988) and to the French edition contained in CEuvres,
Ed. du Centenaire (Paris: RILE, 1959), pp. 159-379]. The Introduction referred to in
this lecture was originally written for the English translation and later added to the seventh French edition (which Merleau-Ponty was using in 1947-48). The remainder of the
English translation is based on the fifth French edition. In order to preserve Bergson's
distinction between "memoire" and "souvenir" we have consistently translated these
terms as "memory" and "recollection," respectively, and have altered passages from the
English translation of Matter and Memory when necessary.Eds.]
2. Matter and Memory, p. 14; (Euvres, p. 166.
3. Matter and Memory, p. 31; CEuvres, p. 182.
4. Matter and Memory, p. 21; CEuvres, p. 172.
5. Ibid.

134

CHAPTER NOTES
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.

Matter
Matter
Matter
Ibid.
Matter
Matter

and Memory, p. 35; (Euvres, p. 185.

and Memory, pp. 10-11; (Euvres, p. 162.
and Memory, p. 35; (Euvres, p. 185.
and Memory, p. 43; (Euvres,*p. 192.
and Memory, p. 152; (Euvres, p. 293.

TWELFTH LECTURE: THE SECOND CHAPTER

OF MATTER AND MEMORY
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.

Matter and Memory,

Matter and Memory,
(Euvres, p. 244.
Ibid., p. 248.
Ibid., p. 249.
Matter and Memory,
Matter and Memory,
(Euvres, p. 274.
Ibid.

p. 86; (Euvres, p. 231.

p. 87; (Euvres, p. 232.

pp. 109-11; (Euvres, pp. 254-55.

p. I l l ; (Euvres, p. 255.

THIRTEENTH LECTURE: COMMENTARY ON TEXT:

THE UNCONSCIOUS
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.

Matter and Memory, chap. Ill, pp. 140-43; (Euvres, pp. 282-84.
Matter and Memory, p. 139; (Euvres, p. 281.
Cf. (Euvres, p. 284.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 286.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 286-87.

FOURTEENTH LECTURE: COMMENTARY ON TEXT:

THE DEFINITION OF EXISTENCE
1. Matter and Memory, chap. HI, pp. 146-48. (Euvres, pp. 288-89.

FIFTEENTH LECTURE: COMMENTARY ON TEXT:

"SEEK EXPERIENCE AT ITS SOURCE"
1. Matter and Memory, chap. IV, pp. 183-86; (Euvres, pp. 288-89.
2. Ze nre: esstf/ sur la signification, du comique ((Euvres, pp. 383-485)

Chapter Notes

135

[English translation: "Laughter in Comedy" (published together with George

Meredith's "An Essay on Comedy" with an Introduction and Appendix on "The Meanings of Comedy" by Wylie Syper), trans, unknown (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday
Anchor Books, 1956), pp. 61-190.]
3. CEuvres, p. 462. ["Laughter," p. 161.]
4. La pensee et le mouvant; essais et conferences (CEuvres, pp. 1251-1482).
[English translation: The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans.
Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946).]
5. Matter and Memory, p. 186 (CEuvres, p. 322).
6. Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience (CEuvres, pp. 3-157).
[English translation: Time and Free Will; An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Harper & Row, 1910).]
7. CEuvres, p. 110. [Time and Free Will. p. 166.]
8. Matter and Memory, p. 189; CEuvres, p. 325.
9. Matter and Memory, p. 187; CEuvres, p. 323.
10. Matter and Memory, p. 188; CEuvres, p. 324.
11. Matter and Memory, p. 192; CEuvres, p. 327.
12. CEuvres, p. 337.

SIXTEENTH LECTURE: THE RELATIONSHIPS

BETWEEN INTUITION AND CONSTRUCTION
IN BERGSON'S METAPHYSICS
1. [Introduction a la metaphysique is included in CEuvres (pp. 1392-1432)
as the sixth part of La Pensee et le mouvant. Two English translations of the essay
exist: the first, T. E. Hulme's authorized translation, An Introduction to Metaphysics
(New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1913), is based on the 1903 edition of the essay;
the second, by Mabelle L. Andison, is included in The Creative Mind (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1946), the English translation of La Pensee et le mouvant,
and is based on the revised version of the essay. Page references are given for both
translations, but quotations are from the Andison translation in The Creative
Mind.Eds.]
2. CEuvres, pp. 1392-93. [Neither of the English translations includes this
note.Eds.]
3. La Pensee et le mouvant. Introduction (Premiere partie), in CEuvres, p.
1269. ["Introduction I" in The Creative Mind, p. 28.]
4. Ibid.
5. CEuvres, p. 1419. [The Creative Mind, p. 187; An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 49.]
6. La Pensee et le mouvant. Introduction (Deuxieme partie), in CEuvres, p.
1273. ["Introduction IP in The Creative Mind, p. 32.]
7. Ibid., p. 1273.
8. CEuvres. [The Creative Mind, pp. 32-33.]
9. CEuvres, p. 1274. [The Creative Mind, p. 33.]
10. Ibid.

136

CHAPTER NOTES

11. CEuvres, p. 1425. [The Creative Mind, p. 32; An Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 54-55.]
12. CEuvres, p. 1274. [The Creative Mind. p. 33.]
13. CEuvres, p. 1286. [The Creative Mind, pp. 43-44.]
14. CEuvres, p. 1287. [The Creative Mind, p. 44.]
15. CEuvres, p. 1393, n.
16. Z<z perception du changement, CEuvres, p. 1369. ["The Perception of
Change" in The Creative Mind, p. 134.]
17. CEuvres, p. 1370. [The Creative Mind, p. 134.]
18. Ibid.
19. CEuvres, p. 1421. [The Creative Mind, pp. 189-90; An Introduction to
Metaphysics, pp. 50-51.]
20. CEuvres, p. 1402. [The Creative Mind, p. 168; An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 30.]
21. Ibid.
22. CEuvres, p. 1278. [The Creative Mind, p. 39.]
23. Ibid.
24. CEuvres, p. 1422. [The Creative Mind, p. 190; An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 52.]
25. CEuvres, pp. 1422-23. [The Creative Mind, p. 191; An Introduction to
Metaphysics, p. 52.]
26. CEuvres, p. 1423. [The Creative Mind, p. W\, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 53.]
27. CEuvres, p. 1425. [77be Creative Mind, p. 193; 4 Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 55.]
28. CEuvres, p. 1430. [Tfre Creative Mind, p. 197; 4w Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 59.]
29. CEuvres, p. 1430. [77?e Creative Mind, p. 198; 4w Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 59.]
30. CEuvres, p. 1276. [The Creative Mind, pp. 35-36.]
31. CEuvres, p. 1430. \Xhe Creative Mind, p. \9&, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 60.]
32. CEuvres, pp. 1408-1409. [The Creative Mind, pp. Y75-16, An Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 36-38.]
33. CEuvres, p. 1416. [77?e Creative Mind, p. 184; 4w Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 45.]
34. Ibid.
35. CEuvres, p. 1416. [Tfte Creative Mind, p. 184; ^4w Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 45.]
36. CEuvres, p. 1419. [The Creative Mind, p. \$>1\ An Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 48-49.]
37. ^intuition philosophique, contained in CEuvres (pp. 1345-65) as the
fourth part of Z<z pensee et le mouvant. ["Philosophical Intuition" in Tfte Creative
Mind, pp. 107-29.]
38. CEuvres, p. 1358. [The Creative Mind, p. 121.]

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(1990): 80-98.
Baertischi, Bernard. "Le Probleme de la distinction de 1'ame et du corps." Revue de
M&aphysique et de Morale 87 (1968): 344-63.
. "Les Rapports de Tame et du corps. Descartes, Diderot et Maine de Biran." Bibliotheque d'historie de la philosophie 21: 434. Paris: J. Vrin, 1992.
Barbaras, Renaud. "Le tournant de l'experience." Recherches sur la philosophie de
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INDEX OF AUTHORS
CITED BY MAURICE
MERLEAU-PONTY

Alain, 44
Arnauld, 39-40

Kant, 41, 65, 69, 76, 89, 108

Kierkegaard, 60

Bacon, 68
Bergson, 29, 63, 87-96, 99-101,
104-106, 109-17
Berkeley, 44, 88
Biran, 29, 61-72, 73, 74-85
Bonnet, C, 66
Breheir, E., 44
Brunschvicg, L., 29-30, 61-65, 69

Lachieze-Rey, P., 37
Laporte, J., 49, 51
Leibniz, 49, 63, 67
Locke, 68-69
Lucretius, 69

Condillac, 66-68, 69
Degerando, 70
Descartes, 29-31, 33-35, 44, 46,
53-54, 68, 70-71, 73-79, 81,
83
Fichte, 69
Galileo, 115
Gueroult, M., 37

Mairan, 52
Malebranche, 29-31, 35-60, 61-62,
64, 65, 71, 75, 83
Mesland, 33
Paul, Saint, 59
Royer-Collard, 81
Sartre, J.-P, 46
Schelling, 69
Spencer, 94
Spinoza, 29-34, 35, 52, 90
Zeno, 111

Husserl, 96
139

SUBJECT INDEX

ACTION, and motion, 70; Biran

relates thought to action, 78-79; of
living bodies, 87-88; and dream,
94. See: Dreamy Effort, Human
Person, Occasionalism.
ACTUAL, and potential in the
Cogito, 73-74; priority of the actual
over the possible, 75. See: Implicit.
ANALAGON, and imagining consciousness, 46. SeeHyle, Image.
ANTITHESIS, and primitive fact,
64; and Bergsonian intuition, 116.
See: Contradiction, Fact, Human
person, I, Intuition.
APHASIA, Bergson and, 95-96.
APPERCEPTION, and consciousness according to Malebranche, 43; prepersonal according
to Biran, 80-81; genesis of internal
apperception, 82-83. See: Reflection, Signs, Voice.
ATHEISM, and theism in
Descartes, 35. See: Theism.
ATTENTION, to life according
to Bergson, 87.

BEING, and thought in the

Cogito, 37; extension is a, 49; God is
not of the order of, 59; thematic
ordering of a sector of, 66; subject
connected to universal being, 83; the
perspective of the subject carved out
of total being, 89; Bergsonian method
and contact with, 110. See: For Itself.
BELIEF, in the noumenal self in
Biran, 83-85.
BODY, is in Descartes a totality,
33; the soul is created just as bodies
are, 40; is taken legitimately for ourselves, 40; natural judgment and
one's own, 44; causality in the relationships between the soul and,
53-54; image of, 66; no difference
between moving one's body and perceiving it, 70; inhabited body and
known body, 72; contributes to intellection, 76-77; Biran on the brink of
intuition of one's own, 77; absolute
soul facing the absolute body, 85;
discussion of the body with the
world, 87; unthinkable without con-

141

142

SUBJECT INDEX

sciousness, 89; intentionality of, 89;

impedes the actualization of recollections, 90; as element of the physical
world and as representation, 91; its
comprehension of time, 92; from
element, becomes a center, 93; transition toward consciousness, 93;
does not succeed in being a subject,
94; means of actualizing the past, 96.
See: Causality, Extension, Memory,
Recollection, Soul, Subject, Union
of the soul and the body.
BRAIN, does not contain recollections, 95-96.
CAUSALITY, in the relationships between the soul and the
body, 53-54; experience of, 84-85.
See: Effort.
CERTAINTY, CERTITUDE, of
the Cogito, 37; makes analysis and
reflections possible, 73-74.
CHOICE, philosophical, 31;
freedom as choice already made, 74.
CHURCH, history of, 57-58;
Christ animates the Church as the
soul animates the body, 59-60.
COGITO, obscured by Malebranche, 35; as experience of
myself according to Descartes, 37;
dependent on a single principle in
Malebranche, 37; its tripartite division, 39; discovered at a certain
date, 40; referred to continually by
Biran, 69; is not eliminated, but
broadened, 71; rethought by Biran,
73-74; becomes a simple conversion to psychic facts, 79; exercise of
a new, 80; Bergson does not address
the problem of, 88. See: Consciousness, I, Idea, For Itself.
COINCIDENCE, intuition-coincidence, 111-14; and transcen-

dence, 116-17. See: Contact, Integration, Intuition.

COMMUNICATION, with systems, 31; contagious, 40; true communication, 110. See: Incantation,
Signs, Speech, System.
COMPREHENSION, of time by
the body, 92; intuition as, 114-17.
See: Contradiction,
Intuition,
Understanding.
CONDUCTOR, the body is but a
mere conductor, 91; the body is no
longer a conductor, but a center, 93.
See: Body.
CONNECTION, with existence,
52; and presentation to consciousness, 103-106. See: Existence.
CONNIVANCE, between the In
Itself and the For Itself, 46-47.
CONSCIOUSNESS, of self in
Malebranche, 37-41; imagining,
45-46; at work and already situated,
46; is what can never be taken as
pure, 46; of self as relationship of
the I to another term, 64; we have
to become consciousness and
freedom, 74; needs signs in order to
conquer itself, 83; Bergson blind to
the intentional structure of, 88-89;
of something and judgment, 90; situated, 90; in situation and objectivity, 101; Bergson never speaks of
his, 105-106; as history and proliferation, 105. See: Cogito, For Itself,
Idea, Object, Reflection.
CONSTANCY, of forms, of
objects, 46; hypothesis of, 96. See:
Perception.
CONSTRUCTION, in metaphysics, 109-10, 115-17. See: Intutition.
CONTACT, blind, 38; obscure
contact of the soul with itself, 41; of

Subject Index
self and of the world, 105; with
being, 110; intuition as contact and
coincidence, 114. See: Coincidence, Consciousness, Intuition.
CONTENT, and form of experience, 76. See: Experience, Form,
Philosophy, Psychology.
CONTRADICTION, between the
In Itself and the For Itself, 105-106;
Bergson goes beyond the contradictions without assuming them, 111.
See: Comprehension, Intuition.
CORPOREALITY, of the soul
according to Descartes, 34. See:
Body, Extension, Soul.
CRITERIO-LOGICAL PHILOSOPHY, abandonment of, 74.
CUBE, judged cube and perceived cube, 45. See: Depth, Judgment, Perception.

143

ical reality, 116. See: Evolution,

Freedom, Intuition, Time.

EFFORT, Brunschvicg criticizes

the feeling of effort, 61-62; consciousness of effort according to
Biran, 64; its ontological value,
79-80. See: Power.
EMPIRICISM, the theory of natural judgment, equivalent of an
empiricism, 45-46; fills consciousness with nerve impulses, 64; Biran
juxtaposes reflection and, 67-68;
reflective and empirical, 71; Biran
very close to, 80-82; he wavers between empirical philosophy and
reflective philosophy, 83; and intellectualism according to Bergson,
105. See: Intellectualism, Reflection.
ESSENCE, priority of existence
over essence in Biran, 75, 79; the
DECOUPAGE (CARVING-OUT), noumenal subject, thing without
perceptive, 88-89; consciousness essence, 84. See: Existence, Noucarved out from the inside of a menal, Subject.
world of images in itself, 88-89. See:
EVIDENCE, displaced by Biran,
Consciousness, For Itself, In Itself, 62; transfer of, 65; signs already
Subject.
endowed with, 82.
DEPTH, perception of accordEVIL, radical, 41; is merely a
ing to Descartes, 44-45.
privation, 56. See: Monsters, Sin.
EVIL GENIUS, would continue
DIALECTIC, of time, 91, 101.
DISORDER, and monsters, 60. to exist, but while changing
demeanor, 74.
See: Miracles, Order.
EVOLUTION, Bergsonian freeDISTANCE, perception of distance, 44-45; subject as impercep- dom, reasonable evolution, 110;
intuition of the vital and, 114. See:
tible distance, 90-91.
DOUBT, awe rather than mis- Intuition, Freedom, Life.
trust, 74; critique of Cartesian
EXISTENCE, and ideality, 30;
doubt by Biran, 77. See: Certitude, seen in the mirror of God, 30;
Evil Genius.
opaque, 41; connection with, 52;
DREAM, myths and, 46-47; consciousness is an existence For
alternative of action and dream, 94. Itself, 67; Biran and the feeling of,
DURATION, Bergsonian dura- 70; astonished at feeling oneself
tion and freedom, 109-11; paradox- exist, 77; the excess of our exis-

144

SUBJECT INDEX

tence over what we know about it,

84; definition of by Bergson,
103-104; critique of the conception, 104-106. See: Connection,
For Itself, Noumenal, Subject.
EXPERIENCE, of myself, of
ideas, and of God, 55; religious, 55,
59; of truth, 94; form and content
of, 76; is not the simple application
of a logos, 85; as mixture, 89; in
metaphysics, 110. See: Intuition.
EXTENSION, of the soul, 34; of
substance and of power, 34; clear
idea of, 38; model of a pseudo-idea
of the soul, 40; is not a manner of
being, 49; intelligible and created
extension, 49; intelligible, not a
trait of divine psychology, 50; it
remains a space, 50; is not the idea
of air, 51; interior of the body, 71;
Bergsonian analysis of, 91; behind
space, 111; space divided into
pieces and, 110; progressive from
intuition, 114-15. See: Space, Spatiality.
FACT, primitive according to
Biran, 64-68; primitive fact and
primitive facts, 69; is not something
which exists in itself, 73; notion of
according to Bergson, 107. See:
Antithesis, Philosophy.
FACnCITY, of consciousness, 67.
FALL (PECHE), the human
person before the Fall, 41; human
nature since and before the Fall, 57.
See: Sin.
FEELING, idea, reason, 40; of
self, displaced in order to be situated
in God, 41; consciousness is always
feeling, 43; the short proof of, 53;
and idea, 55; subjectivity of, 66; of
our individual existence, 67; evi-

dence that there is something that

we can call world, 78. See: Effort.
FINALISM, and idealism, 44.
FINALITY, reintroduced by
Malebranche, 53; the human person, subject to, 57; alternative of
finality and initiative, 58-59. See:
Organism.
FINITUDE, means of positing
being, 89-90; Bergson never sees
the positive value of it, 101.
FOR ITSELF, natural judgment,
wavering between the In Itself and
the For Itself, 46-47; consciousness
is an existence For Itself, 67; kind of
intermediate existence between the
In Itself and the For Itself, 89; neither memory nor body are For Itself,
94; we set in opposition the In Itself
to the For Itself, 105-106; weakness
of the description of the For Itself in
Bergson, 106. See: Consciousness,
In Itself, Subject.
FORM, constancy of perceived
forms, 46; and matter of knowledge, 69; and content of experience, 76. See: Perception, Philosophy, Psychology.
FREEDOM, human according to
Malebranche, 41; experience of
according to Biran, 70; as choice
already made, 74; and reason
according to Bergson, 110-11. See:
Evolution, Fall, Sin.
FUTURE, future dimension, 76;
the same movement opens the
future and closes the past, 91. See:
Past, Present, Time.
GENESIS, interior of exteriority,
50; and totality, 69.
GLORY, the three glories of
God, 58.

Subject Index
GOD, existence seen in the
mirror of, 30; Descartes's double
attitude, toward God and toward
the world, 35; grasped without
ideas, 39; vision in, 39; Malebranche projects in God the conditions of rationality, 41; and natural
judgments, 45; ideal foundation for
particularities, 49; alone efficacious,
53; accessible by the short proof of
feeling, 53; will, movement toward,
56-59; natural love of, 57; wants to
save everyone, 58; glory of, 58-59;
is not a comprehensible object, 60;
Malebranche puts himself most
often in God's point of view, 60; and
the reasons for union, 65; my motor
power is certain for God himself,
80; the relationship between God
and the world is similar to the relationship between the noumenal soul
and the self, 85. See: Word.
GRACE, counter-pleasure, 53, 56.
HEARING, and phonation: their
role in the genesis of reflection
according to Biran, 81-83. See:
Reflection, Voice.
HISTORY, of philosophy, 3031; of the church, 57.
HORIZON, the horizonal relationship is not the index of a total
possession, 39; a horizon takes
shape around the living body, 88; a
present without any temporal
horizon, 96; unconsciousness and
horizonal relationship, 101; and
perception, 106.
HUMAN PERSON, naturally
ordered to an end, 56; subject to a
finality, capable of initiative, 57-59;
would be changed into an object by
the salvation of all, 57-58; linked to

145

the infinite by the sacrifice of Jesus

Christ, 59; everything is antithesis
for, 64; we become monsters
because we temporalize ourselves,
75; everything in is supra-animal
organization, 94.
HYLE, and imagining consciousness, 46.
I, no inhabitant of consciousness, not even the I, 46; consciousness of self as relationship of the I to
another term, 64; would no longer
be a cautiousness, but a possible
success, 74; sensibility without, 81;
will not be at the apex of a cone,
nor at its base, 91. See: Cogito, Consciousness, For itself, Subject
I THINK, See: Cogito.
IDEA, seek to have clear ideas
or to understand things as they are,
30; nature of according to Malebranche, 38-39; my relationship to,
horizonal relationship, 39; Brunschvicg and the conversion toward,
61-62; the presentation of the idea
is a fact, 65; philosophy questions
the evidence of, 65; clarity of the
new idea according to Bergson,
115-16.
IDEALISM, Cartesian, 29; seen in
the mirror of God, 30; and perception, 44-45; removes meaning from
perspectives, 45; inverted, 46; must
take imagination into account, 65;
Beigson criticizes subjective idealism,
not transcendental idealism, 89; transcendence of realism and, 90.
IDEALITY, and existence, 2; of
space, 51; and illusion, 51-52; of
the past, 90-91; of knowledge,
99-100; of recollections and of nonperceived objects, 90.

146

SUBJECT INDEX

ILLUSION, and ideality, 51; of

amputees, 65-66.
IMAGE, imagining consciousness, 46; consciousness carved out
of the interior of a world of images,
88-89; the body is only an, 93.
IMAGINATION, can idealism
account for it?, 65.
IMMANENCE,
psychological
transition toward transcendental
immanence, 51-52.
IMPLICIT, in the Cogito, 73-74.
INCANTATION, and speech,
63, 110.
IN ITSELF, natural judgement,
wavering between the In Itself and
the For Itself, 46; Biran rises from
For Ourselves to the In Itself, 83;
intermediate existence between the
In Itself and the For Itself, 89; no In
Itself which is not a For Itself, 8889; consciousness carved out in a
world of images In Itself, 89;
coming and going between the two
levels of In Itself, 91; world extricated from its condition of In Itself,
91; Bergson no longer treats the past
as an In Itself, 101; we set in opposition the In Itself and the For Itself,
105. See: For Itself.
INDIVIDUALITY, illusion of, 29.
INSTINCT, and natural judgment, 49, 52; prehuman link with
living beings, 110.
INTEGRATION, and intuition,
108-109, 110-11.
INTELLECTION, the body aids,
76-77.
INTELLECTUALISM, and perception of depth, 44-45; and definition of existence, 104-105.
INTELLIGIBLE, is not attenuated sensibility, 51. See: Extension.

INTENTIONAUTY, intentional
structure of consciousness, 89; of
the body, 89; and judgment, 90;
attained from the past through
direct intentionality, 94.
INTERIOR, primitive fact is neither interior, nor exterior, 64; synthesis of interiority and exteriority,
67; neither exterior model, nor interior model, 68; regaining an interiority at first opaque, 68; knowledge
of the body can be neither purely
exterior, nor purely interior, 72.
See: Within and without.
INTERNAL, and external experience, 67-68.
INTUITION, of a truth that a
philosopher wanted to express, 71;
potential sensible intuitions, 73;
Bergson leads us to the brink of an
intuition that he does not fulfill,
106; as integration, 111; as coincidence, 114; its progressive extension, 113-15; as comprehension,
115-17; obtained as the result of an
effort, 115; logic of, 116-17. See:
Coincidence, Comprehension.
JESUS CHRIST, See: Word.
JUDGMENT, intentionality and,
90. See: Natural judgment.
LIFE, ignorant of itself, 109-10;
known by an extension of intuition,
114; intuition gives a meaning to,
116.
LOGIC, of Cartesianism, 30; of
the body, 95-96; of intuition,
116-17.
MATHEMATICS, mathematical
knowledge and empirical knowledge, 29-30; formulated and im-

Subject Index
plicit mathematics according to
Bergson, 115-16.
MATTER, grasped as the unconscious on the brink of self, 114. See:
Form.
MEANING, to act is to put in
movement an intention endowed
with, 70; of life, 116; of a philosophy, 117. See: Action, Intuition,
Life.
MEMORY Qnemoire), second
world, 90; body at the junction of
perception and, 91; second being,
92; bodily, 92; and brain, 93;
cannot be explained by the body,
94; the two memories, 94-95. See:
Past, Recognition, Recollection.
METAPHYSICS, perception of
the world, 115; performs qualitative
integrations, 115. See: Ontology,
Philosophy, Science.
MIND, I am a mind which has
several powers at its disposal, 41; no
philosophy of in Malebranche, 41; is
not completely whole in its works,
65-66; Bergson sometimes attributes
everything to the mind and sometimes to the body, 94.
MIRACLE, my ideas appear to
me as if by, 38; Malebranche and,
60.
MONSTERS, and disorder, 60;
we are monsters because we temporalize ourselves, 75. See: Miracle,
Time.
MOTILITY, and thought according to Biran, 64, 69, 73. See: Effort,
Power, Thought.
MOVEMENT, of the human person toward the infinite, 41; body as
locus of passage for movements in
themselves, 91; the same movement
opens the future and closes the past,

147

91; dichotomy of movement "in the

third person" and subject, 93;
Zeno's arguments against, 111. See:
Body, Effort, Motility.
MYTH, in the Platonic sense of
the word, 35; in Malebranche,
today's problems appear as in myths
or in dreams, 47.
NATURAL JUDGMENT, ambiguous and bastard expression, 43; and
free judgment, 43; building block
for a theory of one's own body, 44;
as factor, 45; idealism and realism,
45; wavering between the In Itself
and the For Itself, 46.
NOTHINGNESS, there is nothingness in ideas, 38; is not a simple
privation of being, 52; conceived of
by Bergson from being, 90-91.
NOUMENAL, belief in the
noumenal self according to Biran,
83-85; is the affirmation of a thing
without essence, 84; represents the
excess of our existence beyond
what we know about it, 84; relationship of God to the world similar
to the relationship of the noumenal
soul to the self, 85.
NUCLEUS, conceptual, 50.
OBJECT, Kant idealizes the
being of, 89; reference to the object
and consciousness of self, 90; status
of the absent object, 100.
OBJECTIVITY, and subjectivity
in the history of philosophy, 31;
absolute, 84.
OCCASIONALISM, Malebranche
changed from idealism to, 44; Biran,
Descartes, and the occasionalist
idea, 71.
ONTOLOGY, and psychology,

148

SUBJECT INDEX

79-80; and primitive fact, 80-81.

See: Metaphysics.
OPAQUE, OPAQUENESS, existence is fundamentally opaque, 41;
a nonobservable knowledge of God
would remain opaque, 55; a being
who struggles against a pre-existing
opaqueness, 66; regaining an inferiority at first opaque, 68.
ORDER, disorder, monsters, 60.
ORGANISM, living, center of
perspective,
87. See;
Body,
Finality.
PAST, my reference to the past
is not my doing, 40; dimension of
future running from future to past,
76; its ideality, 90-91; consciousness of present and reference to a
past, 92; actualized by the body, 96;
transcendence of, 100; is no longer
treated as an In Itself, 101. See:
Future, Memory, Present, Recollection, Time.
PASSIVITY, Malebranche confronted the problem of, 40-41;
emerging activity of, 73.
PERCEIVED,
PERCEPTION,
ideas and perceived world, 39; perception of depth according to
Descartes, 44-45; according to
intellectualism, 45; return to perception, 46; natural implication
between will and perception, 70;
pure according to Bergson, 88;
establishes the body in things, 88;
deduced from total being, 88-89; is
not constituting for Bergson, 90; is
entirely memory, 90; in pure perception, being is only perceived
being, 91; and projection of recollections, 95-96; status of nonperceived objects, 100-101; horizon of

perception, 106; metaphysics as

perception of the world, 115. See:
Depth, Form, Natural Judgment,
Percipi, World.
PERCIPI, conceived as lesser
esse, 89.
PERSPECTIVE, idealism and,
45; organism, center of, 87; carved
out in total being, 88-89; and objectivity, 81; matter is a, 105.
PHANTOM, phantom limb, 66;
Bergson fills consciousness with,
99.
PHENOMENAL, phenomenal
reality, neutral zone, 81. See: Preworld.
PHENOMENOLOGY, Biran anticipates, 68.
PHILOSOPHY, as conversion to
the idea, 62; and nonphilosophy,
63; starts from a fact, 65; calls evidence into question, 65; questions
Being, 66; and psychology, 75;
meaning of a, 116-19. See: Psychology, System.
PHYSIOLOGISM, Biran's, 75.
POWER, certain even for God,
80. See: Effort, Motility.
PREWORLD,
according
to
Biran, 81. See: Phenomenal.
PRESENT, consciousness of the
present contains a reference to the
past, 92; no passage of the present
to the past in Bergson, 96; occupies
a place, 99. See: Movement, Past,
Time.
PRIMITIVE,
primitive
fact
according to Biran, 64-68; primitive
fact and primitive facts, 69; primitive space and time, 81. See: Fact,
Space, Time.
PSYCHOLOGY, simple thematic ordering of an aspect of being,

Subject Index
66; science of the subject placed in
the world, 69; and reflection,
68-69; and philosophy, 75-76.
PSYCHOLOGISM, spiritual interiority and, 74; Biran attempted to
move beyond, 85.

149

REFLECTION, in the history of

philosophy, 31; voice and reflection
of the body according to Biran, 69,
81-82; alternative of reflectivity and
empiricism, 71; certainty prerequisite for reflection, 74; synthesis of
explanation and, 83; Bergson ignores
QUALITY, Bergson rehabilitates reflective philosophy, 89; perception
and reflective analysis, 89. See: Unresecondary qualities, 88.
flected.
RELIGION, prospective and retREASON, created, 39.
RATIONALITY, Malebranche rospective, 57. See: Theology.
projects its conditions in God, 41;
absolute, 55.
SCIENCE, is only a part of our
REALISM, makes consciousness experience, 66; refers us to the pera succession of states, 45-46; ceived world, 88; knows what is not
Bergson sank into, 90-91; he intro- ourselves, 114; thrives on intuition,
duces the subject in realist terms, 115. See: Intuition, Metaphysics,
89-90; realist postulates which he Perception, Philosophy.
retains, 92; he begins with a certain
SELF, a being who seeks to
realism, which introduces the mind "become self," 67; relationship
as a surplus, 95.
between the self and the senses, 69;
REALITY, phenomenal, 81; this self which withdraws performs
concurrence of reality between rec- an action, 78. See: Cogito, I,
Noumenal, Subject.
ollection and perception, 90-91.
RECOGNITION, motor, is only
SENSES, relationship between
the past played, 93; lived, is neither the self and, 69.
pure recognition, nor pure motor
SENSIBILITY, and self according
habit, 95; attentive, avoids the alter- to Biran, 68-69; without I, 81.
native of action and dream, 95.
SIGNS, natural, 40; in matheRECOLLECTION
(souvenir), matics and philosophy, 62; and
concurrence between recollection intellection, 77; and primitive fact,
and perception, 90-91; assembly of 82; origin of signs, 82-83; and conpure percept and pure recollection, sciousness of self, 82-83. See:
91; pure recollection contains itself Incantation.
an element of generality, 94; and
SIN, exceptions to the laws of
dynamic of the body, 95-96; pure union before original sin, 53; origin
recollection is only a borderline and consequences of, 57-59. See:
case, 96; pure recollection, phan- Fall.
tom, 99; floating and inextensive
SOUL, problem of the union of
recollections, hollow in being, 100. the soul and the body, 29-31 and
See: Memory, Past, Present, Recog- passim; extension of the soul
nition, Recollection.
according to Descartes, 34-35; of

150

SUBJECT INDEX

others, 35; and thought according to

Malebranche, 38; pseudo-idea of,
40; cannot be known through ideas,
40-41; symbolic and material
thought of, 41; is both perception of
idea and passive subject, 43; by itself
has neither agility nor transparence,
50; before the Fall, 53; union of the
soul and the body, union of Christ
with the church, 59-60; clarity
proper to the union, 65; soul as soul
and soul for us, 83; absolute soul
facing absolute body, 85. See: Body,
Cogito, For Self, I, Noumenal, Subject, Thought, Union of the Soul
and the Body.
SPACE, and primitive time according to Biran, 81; divided into
pieces of extension, 111. See: Extension, Ideality, Matter, Spatiality.
SPATIALITY, corporeal, 71;
prior to space, 72; prior to objective
spatiality, 75. See: Extension, Space.
SPEECH, universe of speech,
82; as incantation, 110. See: Incantation, Signs, Voice.
SPIRITUALISM, justified by
Bergson based on a realism, 95-96.
SUBJECT, our inherent nature
as unreflective subjects, 35; motor
or thinking subject, false alternative,
64-65; of freedom, 74; the motor
subject is thinking, 76; becomes
psychic thing, or absolute intellect,
77; connected to the universal
Being, 83; noumenal according to
Biran, 84; a subject's experience is
not the simple application of a
logos, 85; Bergson cannot place
himself in the dynamism of a constituting subject, 90; he arrives at the
subject by substraction, 90; he
introduces the subject as a non-

being, 90; the body does not succeed in becoming a subject in

Bergson, 94. See: For Itself.
SUBJECTIVITY, and objectivity
in the history of philosophy, 31; and
absolute objectivity, 84.
SUPERSTRUCTURE, theological, 41, 44.
SYMBOL, symbolic and material
thought of the soul, 41.
SYMPATHY, is no longer only a
reception, but a comprehension,
116. See: Intuition.
SYNTHESIS, of transition, 101;
must be given in an intuition, 109.
SYSTEM, how to understand,
31; each system beginning with a
fact must take into account others,
65; the theory of the phantom limb
forms a part of a system with Cartesian physiology, 65-66; central intuition of a, 116. See: History, Objectivity, Subjectivity.
TELEPATHY, extension of intuition, 114.
TEMPLE, 58; animates the
church as the soul animates the
body, 59.
THEISM, and practical atheism
in Descartes, 35.
THEOLOGY, recourse to, 41;
theological superstructure, 44;
nonobservable knowledge of God,
55.
THINKING, grasping at results
for which we do not have all the
premises, 74.
THOUGHT, Cogito, interior
connection between thought and
being, 37; our idea of the soul will
remain a half-thought, 40; Malebranchism, simple open thought, 41;

Subject Index

151

willful motility, 69-70, 74; the will according to Biran, 76; etymointention of thought, 73. See: Con- logical meaning of the word, 82; of
contradiction, 111. See: Compresciousness, For Itself, Motility.
TIME, and Cogito, 37; I am not hension.
a mind which dominates and
UNION OF THE SOUL AND
unfolds time, 41; we are finite BODY in the Cartesian tradition and
minds which need time, 57; the in the Pascalian tradition, 29; statehuman person temporalizes itself, ment of fact, 29; three texts by
75; starts with the absolute initia- Descartes insist upon the union, 30;
tives of the motor subject, 76; prim- is not merely a speculative difficulty
itive space and time, 81; genuine for Descartes, 33; conceived in the
dialectic of time, 91; Bergson image of that of weight and extendoesn't describe anything re- sion, 33-34; exception granted by
sembling a temporalization, 100; he God, in favor ofAdam, to the laws of
forsees a dialectic of time, 101. See: union, 53; model of the union of
Duration, Future, Past, Present.
Christ with the church, 59. See:
TOTALITY, of the writings and Body, Soul.
the life of Descartes, 31; the body
UNIVERSAL, faculty of the unias, 33; and genesis, 69.
versal and the absolute, 83; transiTRANSCENDENCE, of ideas, tion to the universal, 85.
UNREFLECTED, Malebranche
40; and perceptive aiming, 90; of
the past, 100; coincidence and in introduces into philosophy, 40;
Biran takes as a theme a reflection
intuition, 116-17.
TRANSITION, from the partic- turning itself toward the unreular to the universal, 84-85; the flected, 73; previous state of unrebody as transition toward conscious- flection, 80. See: Implicit, Reflection.
ness, 93; synthesis of, 116.
TRANSPARENCE, the human
soul does not have, 50; Cogito
VISION IN GOD, the complete
without complete transparence, 73. Cogito is the vision in God, 39.
See: Opaque, Opaqueness.
VOICE, interiority of voice, 69;
TRUTH, in the history of philos- hearing-phonation and beginning of
reflection, 81-82. See: Reflection.
ophy, 31, experience of, 74.
UNCONSCIOUS,
Bergsonian
theory of the, 97-100; its difficulties, 100; and horizonal relationship, 101; weakness of the theory of
the, linked to the weakness of the
theory of the For Itself, 106; matter
and on the brink of self, 114.
UNDERSTANDING, and will
according to Malebranche, 55; and

WILL, and understanding according to Malebranche, 55-56;

movement toward God, 56; willing
and willed, 57; and movement, 64;
and understanding in Biran, 76-77.
WITHIN AND WITHOUT, in
Biran, 72. See: Interior.
WORD (Jesus Christ), makes us
wise by a kind of foolishness, 56;

152

SUBJECT INDEX

repairs the universe, constructs his

spiritual temple, 58.
WORLD, is not yet made,
57-58; and self, correlative perspectives, 69; a system of certainties
which is called world, 74; seeking
to see the, 78; attested to by feeling,

54; relationship of God to the,

according to Biran, 85; consciousness carved out in a world of images
In Itself, 89; memory, second
world, 90; extricated from its In
Itself condition, 91. See: Pre-world.