Overcoming the divide between freedom and nature: Clarisse Coignet on the metaphysics of independent morality

ABSTRACT

Clarisse Coignet (1823–1918) played an important role in a number of the most important intellectual movements in nineteenth-century France. She grew up around and documented the leaders of the Fourierist movement, provided the philosophical support for La Morale indépendante (an influential movement that promoted the rebuilding of French society on the basis of free morality, rather than religion), and spent twenty years defending the secularization of education and improving French primary schools. She developed her own theoretical and practical philosophy and applied it in the social world to play her part in the transformation of her country into a “free republic”. Despite all of this, her work has received very little philosophical attention. This article focuses on the theoretical underpinnings of her practical philosophy, and the importance of her engagement with the French spiritualist tradition for its development.

KEYWORDS:

• French spiritualism
• Kantian ethics
• Bergson
• independent morality

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Delphine Antoine-Mahut, Mark Sinclair, Joe Saunders, Emily Herring, and Emily Thomas for comments and help with earlier drafts of this article. I’d also like to thank the two anonymous referees for their encouragement and corrections.

Notes

1 The only philosophical presentation of Coignet's philosophical works in English is a summary of her ethical work La Morale indépendante. This is part of a collection of overviews on women in the history of philosophy. See Allen (“Clarisse Coignet”).

2 In a 1914 New York Times article, Louis Levine reports Bergson claiming that a book authored by him on ethics would be “news from nowhere”.

3 On Fourier's utopian socialism, see Beecher (Charles Fourier). On the Fourierist movement, see Alexandrian (Le Socialisme romantique), Beecher (Victor Considerant) Coignet (Victor Considérant, sa vie, son oeuvre), and Louvancour (De Henri de Saint Simon à Charles Fourier).

4 Mothers were warned “to guard their children against morale indépendante” (Stock-Morton, The Development of Morale Laïque in Nineteenth-Century France, 71; cf. 72n51).

5 See Moreau (“In Naturalismo”) and Vermeren (Victor Cousin). Interestingly, the very young Cousin may have been much closer to Coignet than his published writings suggest. In 1817, Jouffroy wrote that Cousin would not publish his latest course because it “shows too clearly a truth that one cannot yet say, namely that morality is independent of religion” (cited in Matton, Ragghianti, and Vermeren, Victor Cousin).

6 Coignet's Kantianism is in line with the kind of interpretation of Kant we find in Korsgaard's work. See Korsgaard (Creating the Kingdom of Ends, 128–31). For a critique of this reading of Kant, see Allison (Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, 209–18).

7 On Maine de Biran and the experience of activity, see Dunham (“Idealism, Pragmatism, and the Will to Believe”).

8 Jules Simon publicly abandoned his earlier views on the connection between theology and ethics and argued for an independent morality of sorts in 1869. See Le Devoir (20–1).

9 Bergson writes that we do not think “real time” (Creative Evolution, 53).

10 On Bergson's reception amongst Catholics, see Azouvi (La gloire de Bergson, 141–7), Cohen (“Reason and Faith”), Hellman (“Jacques Chevalier, Bergsonism, and Modern French Catholic Intellectuals”), Viellard-Baron (“Réflexion sur la réception théorique de L’évolution créatrice”).

11 See Bergson (Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 130). I think Dewey gets it right, in his discussion of Bergson, when he writes, “A spiritual life which is nothing but a blind urge separated from thought … is likely to have the attributes of the Devil in spite of its being ennobled with the name of God” (Human Nature and Social Conduct, 53). For a recent defence of Bergson's ethics, see Ansell-Pearson (Thinking Beyond the Human Condition).

12 As Rödl has rightly claimed, the heart of German idealism is the claim that “self-consciousness, freedom and reason are one” (Self-Consciousness, 105).