French Spiritualism

The claim

Effort is the primitive fact. In willing against resistance I know myself as a cause directly, not by inference, and that knowledge is unlike any knowledge of objects.

What it held

Maine de Biran's starting point is a criticism of the empiricists he had been trained on. Condillac's statue, acquiring ideas as senses are added, is passive throughout — and Biran objects that the most basic fact of consciousness is not receiving an impression but making an effort and meeting resistance.

In that effort, he argues, we are acquainted with ourselves as causes. Hume looked for the self among impressions and found none because he was looking in the wrong register: the self is known in acting, not in observing.

The tradition that follows is the main French alternative to positivism for a century. Ravaisson's essay on habit is its masterpiece — habit as the point where will becomes nature, freedom sedimenting into spontaneity, so that a skill once effortful becomes something the body does. Bergson thought it one of the finest things in French philosophy.

Blondel then extended the analysis to action as such, arguing that action always outruns what the agent intended and reveals more than they knew they were committing to.

How it argued

Introspective analysis of willing and of habit, conducted as description rather than as argument from premises.

What it was arguing against

Condillac's sensationalism, and Comtean positivism's claim that introspection is not a method at all.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether introspection can bear this weight. Whether the tradition is philosophy or psychology, which was a live institutional question in France.

Common misconceptions

That spiritualisme means spiritualism in the séance sense. It means a philosophy of mind or spirit as irreducible, and has nothing to do with mediums.

How it began

Maine de Biran was a politician and administrator who wrote philosophy privately, and much of his best work was published long after his death.

What became of it

Absorbed into phenomenology and existentialism, which took the first-person method and gave it a more rigorous form.

Lasting influence

Bergson directly. Ricoeur's philosophy of the will. Merleau-Ponty's account of the body draws on Ravaisson on habit, and says so.

Why it still matters

The claim that agency is known from the inside in a way no third-person account captures is at the centre of current work on action and self-knowledge.

Put another way

A hand pressing on a table, learning about itself from the pressure back.

Where to start

Of Habit. It is short, and it is the best of the tradition.

The surprising bit

Ravaisson's essay on habit is about thirty pages, was written for a competition, and is regarded by French philosophers as one of the finest philosophical texts in the language.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

British Empiricism

Opposed by

French Materialism

Influenced

Lebensphilosophie, Phenomenology

The verdict

A century of careful first-person philosophy that has been almost entirely forgotten outside France.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy