Victor Cousin - Biography, Philosophy, Bibliography
Philosopher, born in Paris, France. After the 1830 revolution, he became a member of the Council of Public Instruction, and in 1832 a peer of France and director of the Ecole Normale. In 1848 he aided the government of Cavaignac, but after 1849 left public life. His eclectic philosophy can be seen in his Fragments philosophiques (1826) and Du vrai, du beau, et du bien (1854, On the True, the Beautiful, and the Good).
Victor Cousin (November 28, 1792 - January 13, 1867) was a French philosopher.
Biography
Early life
The son of a watchmaker, he was born in Paris, in the Quartier Saint-Antoine. The lycée had a connection with the university, and when Cousin left the secondary school he was "crowned" in the ancient hall of the Sorbonne for the Latin oration delivered by him there, in the general concourse of his school competitors. From the lycée he passed to the Normal School of Paris, where Pierre Laromiguière was then lecturing on philosophy. In the second preface to the Fragments philosophiques, in which he candidly states the varied philosophical influences of his life, Cousin speaks of the grateful emotion excited by the memory of the day in 18.., when he heard Laromiguière for the first time. Laromiguière taught the philosophy of John Locke and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, happily modified on some points, with a clearness and grace which in appearance at least removed difficulties, and with a charm of spiritual bonhomie which penetrated and subdued."
Early influence on Cousin's philosophical thought
Cousin wanted to lecture on philosophy, and quickly obtained the position of master of conferences (maître de conférences) in the school. This teacher, he tells us, "by the severity of his logic, the gravity and weight of his words, turned me by degrees, and not without resistance, from the beaten path of Condillac into the way which has since become so easy, but which was then painful and unfrequented, that of the Scottish philosophy." In 1815-1816 Cousin attained the position of suppliant (assistant) to Royer-Collard in the history of modern philosophy chair of the faculty of letters. Another thinker who influenced him at this early period was Maine de Biran, whom Cousin regarded as the unequalled psychological observer of his time in France.
These men strongly influenced Cousin's philosophical thought. Royer-Collard taught him that even sensation is subject to certain internal laws and principles which it does not itself explain, which are superior to analysis and the natural patrimony of the mind. It was through this "triple discipline" that Cousin's philosophical thought was first developed, and that in 1815 he began the public teaching of philosophy in the Normal School and in the faculty of letters.
He then took up the study of German, worked at Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and sought to master the Philosophy of Nature of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, which at first greatly attracted him. The influence of Schelling may be observed very markedly in the earlier form of his philosophy. Hegel's Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften appeared the same year, and Cousin had one of the earliest copies. The following year Cousin went to Munich, where he met Schelling for the first time, and spent a month with him and Jacobi, obtaining a deeper insight into the Philosophy of Nature.
Political Troubles disrupt career
France's political troubles interfered for a time with his career. Then came a reaction against liberalism, and in 1821-1822 Cousin was deprived of his offices in the faculty of letters and in the Normal School. The Normal School was swept away, and Cousin shared the fate of Guizot, who was ejected from the chair of history. His eclecticism, his ontology and his philosophy of history were declared in principle and in most of their salient details in the Fragments philosophiques (Paris, 1826).
During the seven years when he was prevented from teaching, he produced, besides the Fragments, the edition of the works of Proclus (6 vols., 1820-1827), and the works of René Descartes (II vols., 1826). For Cousin was as eclectic in thought and habit of mind as he was in philosophical principle and system. In 1827 followed the Cours de l'histoire de la philosophie.
Reinstatement at the University
In 1828, de Vatimesnil, minister of public instruction in Martignac's ministry, recalled Cousin and Guizot to their professorial positions in the university. The three years which followed were the period of Cousin's greatest triumph as a lecturer. His philosophy showed strikingly the generalizing tendency of the French intellect, and its logical need of grouping details round central principles.
There was a moral elevation in Cousin's spiritual philosophy which touched the hearts of his listeners, and seemed to be the basis for higher development in national literature and art, and even in politics, than the traditional philosophy of France. His lectures produced more ardent disciples than those of any other contemporary professor of philosophy. Judged on his teaching influence, Cousin occupies a foremost place in the rank of professors of philosophy, who like Jacobi, Schelling and Dugald Stewart have united the gifts of speculative, expository and imaginative power.
Influence on others
Among those influenced by Cousin were Théodore Simon Jouffroy, Jean Philibert Damiron, Garnier, Jules Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, Felix Ravaisson-Mollien, Charles de Rémusat, Jules Simon and Adolphe Franck--Jouffroy and Damiron were first fellow-followers. Jouffroy always kept firm to the early--the French and Scottish--impulses of Cousin's teaching. Cousin continued to lecture for two and a half years after his return to the chair. Writing in June 1833 he explains both his philosophical and his political position:
"I had the advantage of holding united against me for many years both the sensational and the theological school. The sensational school quite naturally produced the demagogic party, and the theological school became quite as naturally absolutism, safe to borrow from time to time the mask of the demagogue in order the better to reach its ends, as in philosophy it is by scepticism that it undertakes to restore theocracy.
The government was quick to honour him. He ceased to lecture, but retained the title of professor of philosophy. In fact, during the seventeen and a half years of the reign of Louis Philippe, Cousin mainly moulded the philosophical and even the literary tendencies of the cultivated class in France.
Impact on primary instruction
The most important work he accomplished during this period was the organization of primary instruction. It was to the efforts of Cousin that France owed her advance, in gelation to primary education, between 1830 and 1848. Prussia primary and Saxony had set the national example, and France was guided into it by Cousin. The result was a series of reports to the minister, afterwards published as Rapport sur Vital de l'instruction publique dans quelques pays de l'Allemagne et particulièrement en Prusse (Compare also De l'instruction publique en Hollande, 1837) His views were readily accepted on his return to France, and soon afterwards through his influence there was passed the law of primary instruction. (See his Exposé des motifs et projet de loi sur I'instruction primaire, présentes a la chambre des deputes, séance du 2 janvier 1837.)
In the words of the Edinburgh Review (July 1833), these documents "mark an epoch in the progress of national education, and are directly conducive to results important not only to France but to Europe." Cousin remarks that, among all the literary distinctions which he had received, "None has touched me more than the title of foreign member of the American Institute for Education." To the enlightened views of the ministries of François Guizot and Adolphe Thiers under the citizen-king, and to the zeal and ability of Cousin in the work of organization, France owes what is best in her system of primary education,--a national interest which had been neglected under the French Revolution, the Empire and the Restoration (see Expose, p. His speeches on this occasion were published in a tractate Défense de l'université et de la philosophie (1844 and 1845).
Writing period 1830 to 1848
This period of official life from 1830 to 1848 was spent, so far as philosophical study was concerned, in revising his former lectures and writings, in maturing them for publication or reissue, and in research into certain periods of the sophical history of philosophy. From 1825 to 1840 appeared Cours de l'histoire de la philosophie, in 1829 Manuel de l'histoire de la philosophie de Tennemann, translated from the German.
During this period Cousin seems to have turned with fresh interest to those literary studies which he had abandoned for speculation under the influence of Laromiguière and Royer-Collard. As the results of his work in this line, we have, besides the Des Pensées de Pascal, 1842, Audes sur les femmes et la société du XVII siècle 1853. He has sketched Jacqueline Pascal (1844), Madame de Longueville (1853), the marquise de Sable (1854), the duchesse de Chevreuse (1856), Madame de Hautefort (1856).
When the reign of Louis Philippe came to a close through the opposition of his ministry, with Guizot at its head, to the demand for electoral reform and through the policy of the Spanish marriages, Cousin, who was opposed to the government on these points, lent his sympathy to Cavaignac and the Provisional government. Speaking in 1853 of the political issues of the spiritual philosophy which he had taught during his lifetime, he says,--"It conducts human societies to the true republic, that dream of all generous souls, which in our time can be realized in Europe only by constitutional monarchy."
Death
During the last years of his life he occupied a suite of rooms in the Sorbonne, where he lived simply and unostentatiously.
Philosophy
Three distinctive points
There are three distinctive points in Cousin's philosophy. These are his method, the results of his method, and the application of the method and its results to history,--especially to the history of philosophy. It is usual to speak of his philosophy as eclecticism. All eclecticism that is not self-condemned and inoperative implies a system of doctrine as its basis,--in fact, a criterion of truth. Otherwise, as Cousin himself remarks, it is simply a blind and useless syncretism. And Cousin saw and proclaimed from an early period in his philosophical teaching the necessity of a system on which to base his eclecticism. This is indeed advanced as an illustration or confirmation of the truth of his system,--as a proof that the facts of history correspond to his analysis of consciousness. These three points--the method, the results, and the philosophy of history--are with him intimately connected;
Cousin strongly insisted on the importance of method in philosophy. This observational method Cousin regards as that of the 18th century--the method which Descartes began and abandoned, and which Locke and Condillac applied, though imperfectly, and which Thomas Reid and Kant used with more success. He insists that this is the true method of philosophy as applied to consciousness, in which alone the facts of experience appear. But the proper condition of the application of the method is that it shall not through prejudice of system omit a single fact of consciousness. Previous systems have erred in not presenting the facts of consciousness.
Observational method
The observational method applied to consciousness gives us the science of psychology. This is the basis and the only proper basis of ontology or metaphysics--the science of being--and of the philosophy of history. To the observation of consciousness Cousin adds induction as the complement of his method, by which he means inference as to reality necessitated by the data of consciousness, and regulated by certain laws found in consciousness, those of reason. By his method of observation and induction as thus explained, his philosophy will be found to be marked ofi very clearly, on the one hand from the deductive construction of notions of an absolute system, as represented either by Schelling or Hegel, which Cousin regards as based simply on hypothesis and abstraction, illegitimately obtained; and on the other, from that of Kant, and in a sense, of Sir W Hamilton, both of which in the view of Cousin are limited to psychology, and merely relative or phenomenal knowledge, and issue in scepticism so far as the great realities of ontology are concerned. What Cousin finds psychologically in the individual consciousness, he finds also spontaneously expressed in the common sense or universal experience of humanity. In fact, it is with him the function of philosophy to classify and explain universal convictions and beliefs; but common-sense is not with him philosophy, nor is it the instrument of philosophy; it is simply the material on which the philosophical method works, and in harmony with which its results must ultimately be found.
Three results of psychological observation
The three great results of psychological observation are Sensibility, Activity or Liberty, and Reason. These three facts are different in character, but are not found apart in consciousness. The facts of reason are also necessary, and reason is no less independent of the will than the sensibility. All light comes from the reason, and it is the reason which apprehends both itself and the sensibility which envelops it, and the will which it obliges but does not constrain. But Reason is the immediate ground of knowledge and of consciousness itself.
But there is a peculiarity in Cousin's doctrine of activity or freedom, and in his doctrine of reason, which enters deeply into his system.
Doctrine of the reason
But it is in his doctrine of the Reason that the distinctive principle of the philosophy of Cousin lies. The reason given to us by psychological observation, the reason of our consciousness, is impersonal in its nature. The recognition of universal and necessary principles in knowledge is the essential point in psychology; This was the point which Kant missed in his analysis, and this is the fundamental truth which Cousin thinks he has restored to the integrity of philosophy by the method of the observation of consciousness. they are each and all given to us, given to our consciousness, in an act of spontaneous apperception or' apprehension, immediately, instantaneously, in a sphere above the reflective consciousness, yet within the reach of knowledge.
But what is the number of those laws? Kant reviewing the enterprise of Aristotle in modern times has given a complete list of the laws of thought, but it is arbitrary in classification and may be legitimately reduced. According to Cousin, there are but two primary laws of thought, that of causality and that of substance. In the order of acquisition of our knowledge, causality precedes substance, or rather both are given us in each other, and are contemporaneous in consciousness.
These principles of reason, cause and substance, given thus psychologically, enable us to pass beyond the limits of the relative and subjective to objective and absolute reality,--enable us, in a word, to pass from psychology, or the science of knowledge, to ontology or the science of being. These laws are inextricably mixed in consciousness with the data of volition and sensation, with free activity and fatal action or impression, and they guide us in rising to a personal being, a self or free cause, and to an impersonal reality, a not-me--nature, the world of force--lying out of us, and modifying us. As I refer to myself the act of attention and volition, so I cannot but refer the sensation to some cause, necessarily other than myself, that is, to an external cause, whose existence is as certain for me as my own existence, since the phenomenon which suggests it to me is as certain as the phenomenon which had suggested my reality, and both are given in each other.
But these two forces, the me and the not-me, are reciprocally limitative. As reason has apprehended these two simultaneous phenomena, attention and sensation, and led us immediately to conceive the two sorts of distinct absolute, causes, correlative and reciprocally finite, to which they are related, so, from the notion of this limitation, we find it impossible under the same guide not to conceive a supreme cause, absolute and infinite, itself the first and last cause of all. he must be conceived under the notion of cause, related to humanity and the world. He is absolute substance only in so far as he is absolute cause, of philosophy and his essence lies precisely in his creative power.
This theodicy of Cousin laid him open obviously enough to the charge of pantheism. But I distinguish the two finite causes self and not-self from each other and from the infinite cause. They are not mere modifications of this cause or properties, as with Spinoza,--they are free forces having" their power or spring of action in themselves, and this is sufficient for our idea of independent finite reality. The deity of Spinoza and the Eleatics is a mere substance, not a cause in any sense.
The elements found in consciousness are also to be found in the history of humanity and in the history of philosophy. First, in the spontaneous stage, where reflection is not yet developed, and art is imperfect, humanity has thought only of the immensity around it. The finite and the infinite become two real correlatives in the relation of cause and product. As philosophy is but the highest expression of humanity, these three moments will be represented in its history. The East typifies the infinite, Greece the finite or reflective epoch, the modern era the stage of relation or correlation of infinite and finite.
Eclecticism thus means the application of the psychological method to the history of philosophy. Confronting the various systems co-ordinated as sensualism, idealism, seep-ticism, mysticism, with the facts of consciousness, the clsm result was reached " that each system expresses an order of phenomena and ideas, which is in truth very real, but which is not alone in consciousness, and which at the same time holds an almost exclusive place in the system; whence it follows that each system is not false but incomplete, and that in re-uniting all incomplete systems, we should have a complete philosophy, adequate to the totality of consciousness." Philosophy, as thus perfected, would not be a mere aggregation of systems, as is ignorantly supposed, but an integration of the truth in each system after the false or incomplete is discarded.
Comparison to Kant, Schelling and Hegel
Such is the system in outline. Cousin was opposed to Kant in asserting that the unconditioned in the form of infinite or absolute cause is but Schelling a mere unrealizable tentative or effort on the part of and something different from a mere negation, yet not equivalent to a positive thought. With Cousin the absolute as the ground of being is grasped positively by the intelligence, and it renders all else intelligible;
With Schelling again Cousin agrees in regarding this supreme ground of all as positively apprehended, and as a source of development, but he utterly repudiates Schelling's method.
Again the pure being of Hegel is a mere abstraction,--a hypothesis illegitimately assumed, which he has nowhere sought to vindicate. Besides this, of course, objections might be made to the method of development, as not only subverting the principle of contradiction, but as galvanizing negation into a means of advancing or developing the whole body of human knowledge and reality. This led Cousin, still holding by essential knowledge of being, to ground it in an analysis of consciousness,--in psychology.
The absolute or infinite
The absolute or infinite--the unconditioned ground and source of all reality--is yet apprehended by us as an immediate datum or reality; The doctrine of Cousin was criticized by Sir W Hamilton in the Edinburgh Review of 1829, and it was animadverted upon about the same time by Schelling. The correlation of the ideas of infinite and finite does not necessarily imply their correality, as Cousin supposes; on the contrary, it is a presumption that finite is simply positive and infinite negative of the same--that the finite and infinite are simply contradictory relatives. A study of the few sentences under this head might have obviated the trifling criticism of Hamilton's objection which has been set afloat recently, that the denial of a knowledge of the absolute or infinite implies a foregone knowledge of it. and the negation of a notion with positive attributes, as the finite, does not extend beyond abolishing the given attributes as an object of thought. The infinite or non-finite is not necessarily known, ere the finite is negated, or in order to negate it; Secondly, the conditions of intelligence, which Cousin allows, necessarily exclude the possibility of knowledge of the absolute--they are held to be incompatible with its unity. Here Schelling and Hamilton argue that Cousin's absolute is a mere relative. Thirdly, it is objected that in order to deduce the conditioned, Cousin makes his absolute a relative; Cousin made no reply to Hamilton's criticism beyond alleging that Hamilton's doctrine necessarily restricted human knowledge and certainty to psychology and logic, and destroyed metaphysics by introducing nescience and uncertainty into its highest sphere--theodicy.
The attempt to render the laws of reason or thought impersonal by professing to find them in the sphere of spontaneous apperception, and above reflective necessity, is unsuccessful. Cause, substance, time, space, are given us as realized in a particular form. In no single act of affirmation of cause or substance, much less in such a primitive act, do we affirm the universality of their application. There may be particular instances or cases of these laws, but we could never get the laws themselves in their universality, far less absolute impersonality.
But if these three correlative facts are immediately given, it seems to be thought possible by Cousin to vindicate them in reflective consciousness.
The self
The self is found to be a cause of force, free in its action, on the ground that we are obliged to relate the volition of consciousness to the self as its cause, and its ultimate cause. It is not clear from the analysis whether the self is immediately observed as an acting or originating cause, or whether reflection working on the principle of causality is compelled to infer its existence and character. if it is not so given, causality could never give us either the notion or the fact of self as a cause or force, far less as an ultimate one. All that it could do would be to warrant a cause of some sort, but not this or that reality as the cause. And further, the principle of causality, if fairly carried out, as universal and necessary, would not allow us to stop at personality or will as the ultimate cause of its effect--volition. Once applied to the facts at all, it would drive us beyond the first antecedent or term of antecedents of volition to a still further cause or ground--in fact, land us in an infinite regress of causes.
The same criticism is even more emphatically applicable to the influence of a not-self, or world of forces, corresponding to our sensations, and the cause of them. Starting from sensation as our basis, causality could never give us this, even though it be allowed that sensation is impersonal to the extent of being independent of our volition. Causality might tell us that a cause there is of sensation somewhere and of some sort; but that this cause is a force or sum of forces, existing in space, independently of us, and corresponding to our sensations, it could never tell us, for the simple reason that such a notion is not supposed to exist in our consciousness. All it can do is to necessitate us to think that a cause there is of a given change, but what that cause is it cannot of itself inform us, or even suggest to us, beyond implying that it must be to the effect. Sensation might arise, for aught we know, so far as causality leads us, not from a world of forces at all, but from a will like our own, though infinitely more powerful, acting upon us, partly furthering and partly thwarting us. And indeed such a supposition is, with the principle of causality at work, within the limits of probability, as we are already supposed to know such a reality--a will--in our own consciousness. When Cousin thus set himself to vindicate those points by reflection, he gave up the obvious advantage of his other position that the realities in question are given us in immediate and spontaneous apprehension. The same criticism applies equally to the inference of an absolute cause from the two limited forces which he names self and not-self.
The truth is that Cousin's doctrine of the spontaneous apperception of impersonal truth amounts to little more than a presentment in philosophical language of the ordinary convictions and beliefs of man.kind. This is important as a preliminary stage, but philosophy properly begins when it attempts to coordinate or systematize those convictions in harmony, to conciliate apparent contradiction and opposition, as between the correlative notions of finite and infinite, the apparently conflicting notions of personality and infinitude, self and not-self; And whether the laws of our reason are the laws of all intelligence and being--whether and how we are to relate our fundamental, intellectual and moral conceptions to what is beyond our experience, or to an infinite being--are problems which Cousin cannot be regarded as having solved. These are in truth the outstanding problems of modern philosophy.
Cousin's doctrine of spontaneity in volition can hardly be said to be more successful than his impersonality of the reason through Volition spontaneous apperception.
Eclecticism is not open to the superficial objection of proceeding without a system or test in determining the complete or incomplete. But it is open to objection, assuming that a particular analysis of consciousness has reached all the possible elements in humanity and in history, and all their combinations. History is as likely to reveal to us in the first place true and original elements, and combinations of elements in man, as a study of consciousness. Besides, the tendency of applying a formula of this sort to history is to assume that the elements are developed in a certain regular or necessary order, whereas this may not at all be the case;
It was the tendency of the philosophy of Cousin to outline things and to fill up the details in an artistic and imaginative interest. He left no distinctive permanent principle of philosophy, but he left very interesting psychological analyses, and several new, just, and true expositions of philosophical systems, especially that of Locke and the philosophers of Scotland. He was familiar with the broad lines of most systems of philosophy. As an educational reformer and a man of learning, who greatly influenced others, Cousin stands out among the memorable Frenchmen of the 19th century.
Sir W Hamilton (Discussions, p. 541), one of his most resolute opponents, described Cousin as "A profound and original thinker, a lucid and eloquent writer, a scholar equally at home in ancient and in modern learning, a philosopher superior to all prejudices of age or country, party or profession, and whose lofty eclecticism, seeking truth under every form of opinion, traces its unity even.
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