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ABSTRACT
There is a paradox in the fate of nineteenth-century French philosophy: the ‘eclecticism' or ‘spiritualism' that was university philosophy, championed by Victor Cousin – ‘the king of the philosophers' – and commander of a ‘regiment' of other teacher-philosophers who docilely disseminated his doctrine, is almost entirely absent from today’s canon. Between the familiar figures of Maine de Biran and Bergson, the work of Comte or Tocqueville might be taught and studied but Cousin's work and the work of his followers is ignored. This article turns back to the regiment. By showing how certain spiritualists attempted to philosophically distinguish themselves from their commander, this article views spiritualism as a school developing a programme rather than as a school of (one track) thought. From this perspective, the case of Théodore Jouffroy is of particular interest – initially he and the young Cousin shared a philosophical programme which aimed to scientifically found new forms of psychology. However, Jouffroy evolved in a radically different direction to Cousin. By looking at Jouffroy as an ‘emancipated king of philosophy’, I intend to return to the philosophical rather than simply political meaning of ‘French spiritualism’.
Acknowledgements
Research for this article was done with the financial help of the project IDEXLYON and the University of Lyon, in the context of the program Investissements d’Avenir (ANR-16-IDEX-0005). I thank Mark Sinclair and Samuel Lézé for their careful reading of this text. And I am particularly grateful to the reviewers for their very helpful comments and to Mark Sinclair for his relevant revisions.
Notes
1 This extract is quoted by Patrice Vermeren, Victor Cousin, 176. The recurrence – in that period – of this metaphor of royalty to designate great leaders should be underlined. Concerning the monarchical behaviour of Victor Hugo, and the self-consecration of the ‘Romantics’, see, for example: Planche, “Les Royautés littéraires”. Planche, a literary critic, is also the author of a biography of Cousin.
2 On the origin and various uses of this historiographic label, see Daled, Le Matérialisme occulté et la genèse du « sensualisme ».
3 On the instrumentalisation of Plato’s Republic and Laws against the ideologists of the clerical party and in support of the ‘representative government’ of the Charter, see: Narcy in Cousin. Platon, 245–7.
4 Dubois was a pupil at the Ecole Normale with Jouffroy, a teacher of mathematics at Guérande, as well as being the journalist who launched Le Globe. In 1830, he took part in the July Revolution. The following year he was elected député by the Nantes electoral college and re-elected until 1848. He was a recognised literary critic. He was elected director of the Ecole Normale, from 1840 to 1850. At his death in 1874, he was a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, with the project of writing a biography of his friend, Jouffroy.
5 On the philosophy of the young Cousin, see: Matton, Vermeren and Raggianti, Victor Cousin, introduction.
6 The respective contributions of Erwin Goffman, Stephen Greenblatt, Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer to the reflection on the ‘Self’ of the historian of philosophy in the nineteenth century are discussed by König-Pralong in La colonie philosophique, 31–3 and 55–7. Elsewhere, Goldstein has described the modalities and stakes of the constitution of a ‘post revolutionary Self’ in nineteenth-century France (Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self). For my part, I transpose a more Pascalian perspective and envisage the symbolic constitution of an ‘ego’ of the point of view of this complex collective which has been called the spiritualist ‘school’.
7 See also: Baudelaire’s words about Cousin: “I have known people who attentively watched mortality, especially among celebrities, and actively ran to families and cemeteries to praise the deceased who they had never known. I indicate to you Mr Victor Cousin as a prince of the genre” (Curiosités esthétiques, 877. The text was published anonymously in Le Figaro on 14th April 1864, under the title: “Anniversaire de la naissance de Shakespeare”).
8 In De la mutilation, Leroux highlights three important points. First, he shows that De l’organisation des sciences philosophiques was censored and re-written by Cousin between the first presentations of extracts in the Revue des deux Mondes and its final publication. The ‘critical’ passages dealt with unfavourable descriptions of Cousin and his teaching, and with developments on philosophical religion or philosophy of religion. In order to rehabilitate the ‘true Jouffroy’, Leroux provides in an appendix the text “Comment les dogmes finissent”, which had been published in Le Globe in 1825 and re-published, with Jouffroy’s agreement, in the Revue Indépendante in 1841. Here, Jouffroy explains how he had ‘lost the faith’ and what kind of scepticism he defended. Second, Leroux refers to the journals involved in the battle: the Constitutionnel, the Courrier, the Siècle and the Débats, to defend Cousin; the Revue Indépendante, to give voice to Leroux; and the National, which published a letter where Damiron tried to respond to all charges against him. Leroux used this letter to prove Cousin’s manipulations and direct intervention on the text of the Mélanges. Leroux wanted to highlight the discord within the spiritualist camp itself. Last but not least, Leroux affirmed that Jouffroy was not the ‘cherished pupil’ Cousin claimed he had been; that Jouffroy “barely tolerated being regarded as one of the columns of French Eclecticism” (47) and that Cousin only produced in Jouffroy a sense of ‘frustration’ because of Cousin’s abandonment of their initial common philosophical project.
9 Concerning the sentences which disappeared from the 1833 edition, see: Goblot, “Jouffroy et Cousin”, 77.
10 On Cousin’s conception of experimental method in this preface, see Antoine-Mahut, “Experimental Method and the Spiritualist Soul.”
11 On this point, I agree with Clauzade who, in his “La philosophie écossaise” (164), argues that “This extremely circumscribed scepticism refers to the most profound and perhaps most interesting [part] of Jouffroy’s philosophy”.
12 It would be relevant here to contrast Jouffroy’s position with that of the Saint Simonians who also diagnosed a crisis in belief characteristic of the ‘critical period’ opened by the French revolution. They called for the instauration of an ‘organic period’ in which science would provide areas and values that would allegedly ‘organize’ the ‘new world’.
13 For a genealogy and an analysis of the relation between Broussais and Jouffroy as a strict opposition, see Braunstein’s reference work on Broussais (Broussais et le matérialisme).
14 Damiron adds a new and long chapter on Broussais in the second edition of his Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie en France (november 1828), in the section of the ‘sensualists’.
15 This point is at the heart of the article by Clauzade, “La philosophie écossaise”.
16 For a typology of the trees of knowledge between Spiritualists see also Antoine-Mahut, “To Replant and Uproot”.
17 For an analysis of the way Cousin stands out from Biran, see Antoine-Mahut, “Maine de Biran’s Places in French Spiritualism”.
18 From this point of view, the title of this article by Boutroux is very revealing: “La philosophie en France depuis 1867” (Philosophy in France from 1867). 1867 is the year of Cousin’s death and of the publication of the famous report by Ravaisson on the state of philosophy in France. In L’âme et la vie, 23–4, Saisset explains the rebirth of animism in the 1860s, in the spiritualist school, as a reaction to Jouffroy’s conception of psychological facts. Francisque Bouillier (1813–1899), Albert Lemoine, Claude Joseph Tissot (1801–1876), and Emile Charles (1825–1897), testify to the persistent divisions in this school. But for Saisset, the truth is more on Jouffroy’s side.