Maine de Biran's 'Of Immediate Apperception'

Maine de Biran, Alessandra Aloisi, Marco Piazza, Mark Sinclair

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350086210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Written when Maine de Biran was coming into his philosophical maturity, in 1807, 'Of Immediate Apperception' was the first complete statement of his own philosophy of the will. It was the winning entry to a competition organised by the Berlin Académie des Sciences et Belles-Lettres on the subject of self-awareness and of the possibility of an 'immediate apperception' of the self. It contains the core of Biran's philosophy of effort, as it is developed in dialogue with the tradition of British empiricism in particular. Notably, it is in this work that Biran first reflects on the 'lived body' and it marks the moment in which he fully accomplishes his break away from Condillac and the Ideological school. With enlightening critical apparatus, including an editor's introduction, glossary, and bibliography, the publication of this edition shows how Biran's work is pivotal for the development of French philosophy, and makes clear his influence on the later writings of Ravaisson and Bergson.

Chapter I

Of Elementary Affection, and How its Characteristics and Signs can be Determined in the Mind and Physiology of Man

§1

Division of Affective Sensibility and Voluntary Motility

The elementary mode that I have designated under the heading of simple affection is located on the periphery, so to speak, of the twilight zone of the light of consciousness, and is not to be found, by itself, in the field of the general faculty of apperception that Locke took as the essential characteristic of all the modes or acts that can really be attributed to the thinking mind, as an individual subject of inherence.

It is not a question here of the impressions that, according to the author of the critical philosophy, clothe themselves, in internal sense, with the forms of space and time inherent to pure sensibility. On the contrary, what distinguishes the type of element that I want to speak of is precisely the complete absence of all the forms that can bring a sensory impression up to the level of an idea of sensation (in Locke’s terms), that is, those forms under which the individual immediately apperceives his own existence in a time, and those which, representing to him external existences, transport his point of view into a space where the self does not exist …

Nor is it a question of a generative sensibility, such as Condillac conceives it, as if it were complete from the beginning, but rather of sensation as, precisely, incomplete and as it really is, according to the hypothesis that it is first of all without any personal form. This is affection as we conceive it, of which Condillac himself presents the example to us when he says that his statue is odour, flavour, sound, etc., and that identified with its modifications it wholly exists in them. Condillac, however, is not yet thereby thinking from the perspective of a simple living being: or, at least, his expression and his thought are not entirely in agreement. For what with one hand he takes away from his hypothetical phantom, he gives back to it with another, and, instead of putting himself in its place, or of lowering himself to it by the simple, immediate affection to which he reduces it, he tends rather to raise it to his own level, through consciousness and the individual feeling that he always tacitly grants to it, not ever really being able to conceive of the statue without the latter.

It is quite difficult to, as it were, denude ourselves and to ascribe to a being a nuance of life or sensibility, without ascribing to it also our self, without animating with our spirit the thing that we are thinking about, without conceiving it, according to an internal model, as a substantial or individual subject of inherence of modifications, however obscure or confused this conception may be.

Nevertheless, in spite of the difficulty that this sort of, as it were, antireflective abstraction presents to us, in which the self, the subject of perception, attempts to know what remains of this perception or complete sensation after having totally separated itself from it, and removed its constitutive forms,² we are no less justified in concluding from our own experience, our innermost experience, and from certain observations, which though constant are delicate and hardly accessible for the common man, that the phenomenal self, considered according to the internal, immediate apperception in which it consists, is not always associated in the same way to the diverse modifications of our sensibility, is not combined so narrowly with all of them, and does not always adhere to them, as it were, with the same degree of intimacy.

Now, in seeing that a composite varies in the more or less intense aggregation of its elements, we are led to conceive them in a state of total separation. Simply noting the differences in question, and, above all, enquiring into the causes or circumstances related to them, would therefore suffice to announce the possibility of a type of sensory or affective mode in which the self would find itself entirely excluded, which would consequently be simpler (under a material relation) than any of those that served as terms in the analysis of sensation.

But, before characterizing more precisely, and in its own signs, this type of mode, it is important to cast a glance on the efforts made by some philosophers to analyse this point and to draw it from the shadows in which it is enveloped.

§2

Diverse Signs Through Which We can Know a Purely Affective state

1. Immediate Affections Constitutive of Organic Temperament

We have already said it: man begins to feel before apperceiving and knowing.

This wholly sensitive existence, these penchants that are observable in the nascent individual, all these determinations that we vaguely relate to instinct, cannot be attributed to the source of all immediate evidence, to the inner feeling of what is in us and belongs to us. Consequently, these primary determinations, effectuated and conceived outside of the will and thought, cannot have received their imprint, nor be reproduced, under the intellectual form of memories or reminiscence.

This impotence of memory, which is attached in our experience even to the most lively sensations of internal or external sensibility, is one of the characteristic marks of any perfect, simple (simplex in vitalitate) affective mode, and of a sort of affective matter that is separate or separable from any personal form of time as well as space.

The whole of the determinations that we are right to understand under the heading of instinct are not limited to the first age of human life. The sphere in which this blind power continues to exert itself, far from being limited, can extend itself, in several respects, to that of our habits; but beyond that there is still a sphere of activity of a being that has now become double (duplex in humanitate).³ It is not a single force, a single sensory power that can produce effects that are so often contrary and opposed. They are two which, without transforming themselves into each other, act together, each in its own domain, conspire, oppose each other, fight and triumph in turn. Who among us is not, at each moment, actor and witness of such internal scenes?

‘There is not a single one of the parts of our body’, as says Montaigne, he who is such an assiduous and judicious spectator of these scenes, ‘that does not often exert itself against our will; they each have their own passions, which awaken them or put them to sleep without our concord’.ⁱ

We can recognize the character of simple affections or the most immediate results of a sensitive property in the partial passions of which the author of the Essays speaks, in the brusque appetites of a particular organ, such as the stomach, the sixth sense, etc., whose influence, increasing sometimes by degrees, ends up by absorbing any feeling of the self and by guiding, unknowingly, all the movements or acts, that have thus become quasi-automatic. This is how can we recognize truly animal sensations.

From the more moderate support of the immediate impressions that are produced in the organs that affect each other by consensus, there arises the fundamental and absolute mode of a sensory existence, which can be said or conceived to be simple only following the model of a resultant of forces that are multiple and variable at each moment. This is not consciousness, for it does not know, does not illuminate itself; and, while it changes or dies incessantly, so as not to be reborn, there is something that remains and knows this.

The fugitive modes of such an existence, now happy, now baneful, succeed each other, push each other like mobile waves in the torrent of life. We thereby become, without any other cause than the simple affective dispositions to which any return is forbidden to us, alternatively sad or cheerful, agitated or calm, cold or ardent, timid or courageous, fearful or full of hope. Each age of life, each season of the year, sometimes each of the hours of the day⁴ sees the contrast of these intimate modes of our sensory being. They fall under, for the observer grasping them, certain sympathetic signs; but, located by their very nature and intimacy outside of the field of perception, they escape the thinking subject by the very effort that it would make to grasp them. Thus the part of ourselves about which we are the most blind is the whole of these immediate affections that result from temperament, of which what we call character is always something like its physiognomy.ⁱⁱ This physiognomy has no mirror in which it could be reflected for its own eyes…

Such affective dispositions, associating their unnoticed products to the exercise of the senses and of thought, always impregnate things or the coloured images that seem to belong to them. This is a sort of organic refraction that makes nature manifest to us, now with a gay and graceful aspect, now covered with a funereal veil, which makes us discover in the same objects, now motives of hope and love, now subjects of hate and fear. Thus is hidden, in the secret dispositions, the source of almost all the charm or the disgust attached to the diverse instants of our lives. We bear it in ourselves, this most real source of goods and evils, and we accuse fate or we erect alters to chance!… But regardless, indeed, of whether this unknown power be within or without us, is it not always the fatum that pursues us?… Let us dare to say it: it is not in the power of philosophy, of virtue itself, all powerful as it may be on the actions and the thoughts of the good man, to create any of these lovely affections that render so sweet the immediate feeling of existence, nor of changing these baneful dispositions that make it difficult and sometimes unbearable.⁵ But does virtue itself not consist in this happy and ineffable feeling of existence, that is noticed and thus redoubled by reflection and the memory of all the great, generous and kindly actions whose inexhaustible source it is? Let us love and celebrate the good man, but let us also deplore the fate of the bad person, unhappy in the immediate impressions that he suffers, unhappy in apperception, unhappy in remembering and in foresight…!⁶

Under the law of instinct, in the simple appetites, the penchants and primitive needs of the organism, the sensory being, becoming all of these affections or identified with them, immediately enjoys happiness or suffers the unhappiness of being. If a more developed intelligence observes these interior scenes, it is too often unable to distract them or change their course. This is not the pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction, by Alessandra Aloisi and Marco Piazza
• Of Immediate Apperception
• First Part
• Second Part
• First Section
• Chapter I: Of Elementary Affection, and How its Characteristics and Signs can be Determined in the Mind and Physiology of Man
• Chapter II: On the Power of Efforts or Will: Origin, Grounds and Primitive Conditions of Immediate Apperception
• Second Section
• Chapter III: Application of the Preceding to an Analysis or Division of the External Senses
• Chapter IV: Of the Relations of Apperception, Intuition and Feeling with Notions and Ideas
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright