Spiritualism and Phenomenology: The Case of Maine de Biran

The conflict between spiritualism and phenomenology will no longer take place. Better, it is through their encounter and their backlash that a new fruitfulness for thought will develop. The case of Maine de Biran thus comes to exemplify a new beginning a la francaise for metaphysics on the one hand and for phenomenology on the other. But the philosopher from Bergerac (in the Dordogne) is most often read according to his explicit meaning and not his implicit one. He is supposedly the thinker of "freedom and consciousness" (spiritualism) or of the "inner self and the lived body" (phenomenology). But these readings forget the exceptions to the primitive fact of "internal effort" (illness, sleep, sleepwalking, madness, the body-object, the outer self . . .), which mark Biran's oeuvre as one of the summits of a thought that escapes phenomenality and confers a real consistency upon corporeality. A new "Columbus of metaphysics," as he himself names himself, Maine de Biran, read "otherwise," initiates for today a new beginning for thought.