Rediscovering Léon Brunschvicg’s Critical Idealism: Philosophy, History and Science in the Third Republic 9781350171671, 9781350171701, 9781350171688

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 The man, the context
2 The nature of the intellect and the critique of Bergsonism
3 Brunschvicg and the history of philosophy
4 The legacy of the nineteenth century
5 A philosophy of judgement
6 History: The philosopher’s laboratory
7 Lessons of science
8 The last years: From the Sorbonne to Exile
Epilogue
Notes
Introduction
1 The man, the context
2 The nature of the intellect and the critique of Bergsonism
3 Brunschvicg and the history of philosophy
4 The legacy of the nineteenth century
5 A philosophy of judgement
7 Lessons of science
8 The last years: From the Sorbonne to Exile
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Rediscovering Léon Brunschvicg’s Critical Idealism

ii

Rediscovering Léon Brunschvicg’s Critical Idealism Philosophy, History and Science in the Third Republic Pietro Terzi

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Pietro Terzi, 2022 Pietro Terzi has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: © Archives Léon Brunschvicg/IMEC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Terzi, Pietro, author. Title: Rediscovering Léon Brunschvicg’s critical idealism : philosophy, history, and science in the third republic / Pietro Terzi. Description: London, UK ; New York, NY, USA : Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021031102 (print) | LCCN 2021031103 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350171671 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350171688 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350171695 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Brunschvicg, Léon, 1869–1944. | Idealism. | Philosophy, French–20th century. Classification: LCC B2430. B754 T47 2022 (print) | LCC B2430. B754 (ebook) | DDC 194–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031102 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031103. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-7167-1 ePDF: 978-1-3501-7168-8 eBook: 978-1-3501-7169-5 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To the Veugels and to the enduring memory of Tommaso, ten years later

vi

Contents Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations

xi

Introduction

1

nter the watchdog E bout this book: Overview, methodology and scope A 1

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43

Brunschvicg and the history of philosophy 45 Introduction45 Ancient philosophy: From Homo Sapiens to Homo Credulus46 Consciousness awakens: Montaigne, Descartes and … Pascal? 49 Spinoza: The immanence of truth to thought 58 The spirit of criticism: Kant and Fichte 63 Conclusion

4

4

The nature of the intellect and the critique of Bergsonism 27 Introduction27 Dividing lines 30 Idealism, spiritualism, intellectualism 31 Time and judgement 33 Intelligence or/as intuition 36 Against psychological interiority 40 Conclusion

3

1

The man, the context 7 Origins7 Formative years 11 Apogee15 Political engagement

2

x

70

The legacy of the nineteenth century 73 Introduction73 From one spiritualism to another 74 The dawn of reflective philosophy

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Contents

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Scientific philosophy rises The marriage of reflective and scientific philosophy Critical idealism versus neo-criticism

80 84 87

Conclusion

91

5

A philosophy of judgement 93 Introduction93 A farewell to syllogism 94 The problem of modality 100 Varieties of judgement 106 Confessions of a beaten idealist 111 Conclusion114

6

History: The philosopher’s laboratory 115 Introduction115 Contingency in history 118 History and judgement 121 Chronology and mentalities 123 The history of Egypt as the history of Egyptology 127 Conclusion131

7

Lessons of science 133 Introduction133 Mathematical bloodlines: Arithmetism, logicism, intuitionism 135 The idealism of metageometry 145 The relativistic revolution 151 Einstein and the philosophers 155 A critique of experimental judgement 158 Relativity, uncertainty and humanism 162 Conclusion167

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The last years: From the Sorbonne to Exile 169 Introduction169 Scientific humanism 170 Concrete struggles 172 The God of scientists and the God of Abraham 177 The European mind 184 Conclusion189

Contents

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Epilogue 191 Exodus191 The existentialist patricide 195 The fates of reflection 206 The epistemological offspring 212 Outro Notes Bibliography Index

225 229 301 329

Acknowledgements I came up with the idea of a monograph on Brunschvicg in late 2018, while I was still working on my PhD dissertation on the reception of Kantian philosophy in France. When I finally signed the contract, I was clawing my way out of the personal annus horribilis 2019. A first draft was finalised during the spring confinement of the collective annus horribilis 2020. What I originally thought would be an easy hit, a sort of spin-off of my doctoral research, turned out to be a much more uphill battle than expected. Finding the necessary clarity of mind to work on an almost unknown French philosopher amid inner and worldly chaos was often challenging. I wish to thank everyone who got me through the last two years – you know who you are. Writing a book means running up a number of personal, scholarly and practical debts. I owe my gratitude to Andrea Bellantone, Giuseppe Bianco, Camilla Cottafavi, Francesca D’Alessandris, Massimo Ferrari, Elio Franzini, Matteo Marcheschi, JeanMichel Salanskis, Massimiliano Simons and Stefano Suozzi, who have agreed either to discuss the initial prospectus or to read early excerpts of the text, providing insightful and often decisive comments. Besides, two anonymous reviewers have done their best to save this book from reflecting the flaws of its author – an impossible task perhaps, but which in this case will not remain thankless. François Chaubet, Marco dal Pozzolo, Ian Alexander Moore, Joel Revill, André Simha and K. Steven Vincent kindly shared with me essential bibliographical resources during the ‘grand renfermement’. May they all be thanked. Furthermore, I had the chance to present part of my research for this book in a webinar I held in May 2020 for the Fondazione Collegio San Carlo in Modena on the relationship between philosophy and science in Brunschvicg and Bergson. That experience has been instrumental in clearing my mind about a number of issues, with regard in particular to those discussed in Chapter 2. I am grateful to the Foundation and its remarkable students for the opportunity. My editor Jade Grogan has proved to be an irreplaceable point of reference through all the phases of this project, while Thomas Rossetter has polished my rough-hewn English with artisanal care. I also wish to acknowledge the concrete help of the archivists of the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine in Caen, especially Allison Demailly, and the courtesy of Marc-Olivier Baruch who kindly granted me permission to use the cover image. My father Paolo lent his professional skills to enhance the quality of the picture, but it is understood that my debt to him extends well beyond that.

Abbreviations Brunschvicg’s most important works are quoted using the abbreviations listed below. To avoid confusion between an excess of abbreviations, exceptions are made for minor writings that are quoted only once or a few distant times throughout the book. In this case, complete references are given directly in the endnote. Unless otherwise specified, all translations are mine. A detailed and comprehensive bibliography of all Brunschvicg’s published texts can be found as an appendix in SR, 253–94. Spinoza et ses contemporains. Paris: Alcan, 1923. Augmented edition of the second version (1906) of Brunschvicg’s first book Spinoza (Paris: Alcan, 1894). MJ La modalité du jugement. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964. 3rd edition of Brunschvicg’s main dissertation La modalité du jugement (Paris: Alcan, 1897), including the French translation of his complementary Latin dissertation Qua ratione Aristoteles metaphysicam vim syllogismo inesse demonstraverit (Paris: Alcan, 1897) and the minutes of Brunschvicg’s PhD defence. VMS La vertu métaphysique du syllogisme selon Aristote, translated by Yvon Belaval, in MJ, 243–71. IVE Introduction à la vie de l’esprit. 1900, edited by André Simha. Paris: Hermann, 2010. IC L’idéalisme contemporaine. Paris: Alcan, 1905. EPM Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique. 1912, edited by Jean-Toussaint Desanti. Paris: Blanchard, 1972. IOP ‘Introduction’. 1914. In Œuvres de Blaise Pascal, edited by Léon Brunschvicg, Pierre Boutroux and Félix Gazier, vol. 4, xvii–lxxx 14 vols. Paris: Hachette, 1908–25. IPP ‘Introduction’. 1921. In Œuvres de Blaise Pascal, edited by Léon Brunschvicg, Pierre Boutroux and Félix Gazier, vol. 12, iii–cxlii. Paris: Hachette, 1908– 25. Reissue of the introduction to Blaise Pascal, Pensées, edited by Léon Brunschvicg, iii–cxlii. 3 vols. Paris: Hachette, 1904. NL Nature et liberté. Paris: Flammarion, 1921. MEN Un ministère de l’éducation nationale. Paris: Plon, 1922. EH L’expérience humaine et la causalité physique. Paris: Alcan, 1922. GP Le génie de Pascal. Paris: Hachette, 1924. PC Le progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale. 2 vols. Paris: Alcan, 1927. CS De la connaissance de soi. Paris: Alcan, 1931. AI Les âges de l’intelligence. Paris: Alcan, 1934. SSC

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Abbreviations

La physique du vingtième siècle et la philosophie. Paris: Hermann, 1936. Le rôle du pythagorisme dans l’évolution des idées. Paris: Hermann, 1937. La raison et la religion. 1939. 2nd edn. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964. DPM Descartes et Pascal, lecteurs de Montaigne. 1942, edited by Thierry Leterre. Paris: Pocket, 1995. HMI Héritage de mots, héritage d’idées. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1945. EE L’esprit européen. Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1947. AR Agenda retrouvé, 1892–1942, edited by Jean Wahl. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1948. PE La philosophie de l’esprit. Seize leçons professées en Sorbonne (1931–1932). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949. VFC De la vraie et de la fausse conversion, suivi de la Querelle de l’athéisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950. HO Écrits philosophiques. Tome I: L’humanisme de l’Occident. Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, edited by A.-R. Weill-Brunschvicg and Claude Lehec. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951. OR Écrits philosophiques. Tome II: L’orientation du rationalisme, edited by A.-R. Weill-Brunschvicg and Claude Lehec. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954. SR Écrits philosophiques. Tome III: Science – Religion, edited by A.-R. WeillBrunschvicg and Claude Lehec. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958. PVP RP RR

Introduction

Enter the watchdog A vacuum looms large over recent accounts of contemporary French philosophy. It is not uncommon to come across the name of Léon Brunschvicg (1869–1944) in the ever-growing harvest of articles, collective books and monographs on the subject. This obscure character is often mentioned as a symbol of a dead and gone intellectual era, evoked as the professor of this or that great philosopher, cited as representative of a vaguely defined ‘French idealism’ or ‘neo-Kantianism’. Contemporary scholars seem to converge on the importance of such a dusty figure, taking their cue from what the protagonists of their studies or illustrious twentieth-century predecessors said or believed. For Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou and others, Brunschvicg lies at the roots of the lineage of French epistemology, a history-oriented ‘philosophy of the concept’ opposed to the more phenomenological bloodline of the ‘philosophy of experience’,1 whereas the entire oeuvre of an eminent exponent of the latter, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is replete with harsh rebuttals of Brunschvicg’s allegedly abstract ideas on experience and science. For radical leftist thinkers, he was a philosophical worst of the worst, a bourgeois thinker locked in his ivory tower and unable to account theoretically for the miseries and impasses of human existence.2 Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir despised him, while their close friend Paul Nizan famously but unflatteringly compared him to a ‘watchdog’ of the established order, readily joined by Simone Weil, for whom he was ‘the most stuffily bourgeois theoretician’.3 According to Louis Althusser, he was an ‘ideological autocrat’, a university mandarin always ready to mix philosophical ruminations and scientific toppings in order to ‘sing sacred hymns’ to the esprit and its freedom.4 And even outside France Brunschvicg’s fame was not exactly positive: in Antonio Gramsci’s eyes, for example, he came across as the specimen of the endeavour of French intellectuals to devalue the popular ‘common sense’ and transform it according to the worldview of the ruling class.5 However, it goes without saying that these judgements are heavily biased, ideologically charged and, as such, should be understood in their context and relativised accordingly. Hence, any portrait based on this kind of sources would be just the contour of a shadow, as that traced on the wall by the Corinthian maid in Pliny the Elder’s tale about the origin of painting. Brunschvicg would be merely a name, one of those ‘êtres de fuite’, to quote his

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Rediscovering Léon Brunschvicg’s Critical Idealism

friend Marcel Proust,6 those elusive figures that – just like Albertine in the Recherche – everybody talks about but nobody really knows. Who actually was Léon Brunschvicg? Sparse attempts have been made since the beginning of the century to partially respond to this question, chiefly, chauvinism oblige, by Italian scholars.7 A monograph, which alone could provide a proper answer, has been lacking since Marcel Deschoux’s quite hagiographic one of 1969.8 The present book springs precisely from the desire to fill this gap, rescuing from oblivion the ideas and the life of a figure whose name haunts the history of contemporary French thought, but whose unparalleled significance seems to remain shrouded in obscurity or incomprehensibly deemed unworthy of examination. Brunschvicg was a subtle and sophisticated thinker, perhaps unjustly condemned by history. Surely his thought was not as fashionable and artistically appealing as that of his friend and rival Henri Bergson, who enjoys even nowadays a widespread devotion. However, the ‘rediscovery’ to which the book’s title refers does not involve any ‘renaissance’ of Brunschvicg’s doctrines. On the contrary, it intends to unearth a neglected but crucial personality whose ideas and historical role cannot be overlooked by anyone interested in properly understanding the complex scenario of turn-of-the-century philosophy and the genealogy of twentieth-century French thought; or in rediscovering a philosopher who, just like his German homologue Ernst Cassirer and many other better-known thinkers, had many things to say about the great revolutions in contemporary science and whose contribution is still largely unacknowledged.9 Thus, it is Brunschvicg as a historical character that is here addressed. His significance is double: on the one hand, his thought was nurtured by, and deeply rooted within, the peculiar context of the French Third Republic (1870–1940), more specifically of the Belle Époque, of which it could be considered a paradigmatic intellectual expression; on the other hand, precisely as a high point of the fin de siècle – the ‘1900 moment’, as it has been loosely called10 – Brunschvicg was the junction between two centuries and two radically different intellectual epochs. As a professor at the Sorbonne for thirty years, he taught many great protagonists of contemporary Francophone culture: Sartre, De Beavuoir, Aron, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Dufrenne, Bachelard, Canguilhem, Cavaillès, Lautman, Piaget, Hyppolite, Wahl, Jankélévitch, Nabert, Politzer, Gueroult were among his students. But this fact alone does not explain anything. Brunschvicg’s uniqueness lies in that he combined a pivotal institutional role with a thoughtprovoking philosophy that is equally relevant, inasmuch as it was an attempt to take up the legacy of nineteenth-century thought and update it in light of the scientific achievements and the intellectual challenges of the new century. Many of the above-mentioned disciples were all but seduced by this blending of philosophy, history and science, which has been almost always satirised or at least simplified in ideological fashions. This is the case, most notably, of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, who, while being different thinkers themselves, both staged a patricide meant to shelve an entire philosophical landscape, that turn-of-the-century academic philosophy which Brunschvicg came to symbolise. Thus, precisely because Sartre and Merleau-Ponty defined their own theoretical enterprises, and intellectual postures as well, in stark opposition to their former professor, an in-depth study of Brunschvicg

Introduction

3

as a thinker and an institutional figure turns out to be key for a proper comprehension of existentialism. For other disciples, instead, the convergence of philosophy, history and science implemented by Brunschvicg in his major works, and conveyed through his teaching, opened up new avenues of research. Note that Brunschvicg is often considered a founding figure for the tradition of the so-called French ‘historical epistemology’, which, according to standard narratives, would originate from some of his bestknown students, such as Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, and would be characterised by the philosophical study of the forms of rationality involved in, and highlighted by, the historical development of a specific science or set of sciences (formal, biological, human/social, etc.).11 Indeed, it is true, as Cristina Chimisso argues,12 that Brunschvicg’s oeuvre retrospectively presents the typical features of this approach: the close relationship between philosophy and a given science (notably mathematics); the belief that the history of science is the proper ground for the study of the transformations of rationality; and the overcoming of the separation between reason and reality, since ‘their interaction changes both’. Most importantly, and this is a distinctive trait of his thought, in Brunschvicg we already find the idea – shared by his intellectual ‘sons’ and ‘nephews’, from Bachelard to Foucault – that the history of philosophy and science is discontinuous, that is, marked by ‘epistemological breaks’, to quote Bachelard’s own term, which make it an open-ended process. This set of qualities, cross-bred with the seeds planted by other thinkers with different roles and backgrounds, but all interested in science, its theory and history (Henri Poincaré, Pierre Duhem, Émile Meyerson, Gaston Milhaud, Abel Rey, Helène Metzger and Alexandre Koyré, just to name a few), has surely contributed to shaping a peculiar national philosophy of science which differed from logical positivism and its AngloAmerican ramifications. However, reading Brunschvicg in light of categories or labels that surely owe much to his work, but which are ultimately external to his world, would inevitably end up mutilating or deforming his thought, especially now that, after the influential works of Ian Hacking, Lorraine Daston and others, ‘historical epistemology’ has spread beyond the French borders and has become a name denoting most often academic research projects13 rather than an actually existing historical movement or school.14 There is nothing wrong in pro domo genealogies, as traditions are always, to some extent, retrospective constructions. Yet the process of selection and appropriation should not outpace, or do without, the patient and exhaustive work of reconstruction and contextualisation. Deeper analyses are therefore needed that put Brunschvicg’s reception between brackets and consider his thought per se, in its milieu, starting from the very term chosen by Brunschvicg to denote his philosophical position. ‘Critical idealism’15 was conceived of as an implacable war machine against all sorts of dogmatism, that is, for Brunschvicg, everything that could clip the wings of the intelligence and its creative push towards a rational understanding of reality. Every doctrine or notion that did not meet the requirements of intellectualism and dynamism had to be eradicated from the philosopher’s mind: substantialist ontologies, naive realisms and positivisms, static and normative epistemologies, purely deductive logics, mystical transcendences and metaphysics of absolute realities such as life, will, intuition, sentiment or the unconscious. Aristotelianism was Brunschvicg’s archenemy

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Rediscovering Léon Brunschvicg’s Critical Idealism

and the cradle of all the abominations of Western philosophy; Descartes, Spinoza, Kant and Fichte his personal heroes. Not believing in the possibility of accessing our mind from within, of grasping tangibly some fluid inner dimension beyond the web of our judgements, Brunschvicg adopted a reflective stance that sought to clarify the functioning of the mind by means of wide historical overviews, as if in a ‘laboratory’ where crucial experiments have already been conducted and their results are there to be acknowledged. His rejection of sentimentalism, in both its trivial and more sophisticated manifestations, led him to an often exacerbated intellectualism which saw in science and its tormented progress the ideal of a world resolved into purely intelligible relations and formulas and of a community of intellects governed only by the power of self-critical examination. For Brunschvicg, as Gaston Bachelard once noted, intelligence was a ‘destiny’.16 The cultivation of science, the passage from the biological to the spiritual level, had the purpose of introducing ‘a new use of the brain’, free from utilitarian particularistic ends and open to the unselfish quest for truth.17 As we will see, this was not to say that reality and its ‘resistance’ were neglected. On the contrary, it is often overlooked that Brunschvicg was the first to describe himself as a ‘beaten idealist’, who had had to acknowledge the often elusive reasons of the real, who had even made the sting of reality the true spur of any intellectual activity and the hand-to-hand fight of reason with experience the engine of the history of thought, with all its breaks and revolutions. And yet he failed to apprehend the full complexity of intellectual activity, which alone, by following purely its idealising drive, was unable to instil universality and rational transparency into the world and orient it towards spiritual and moral emancipation. Such a ‘pureness’, resting on the model of a Spinozian emendation, was a dream of autonomy – what goes under the name of ‘intellectualism’ – that could not actually leap beyond its being a regulative notion. Indeed, reality was not simply the external reference of the mind, the term of its operations, the begrudging target of man’s will to knowledge, truth, dominion and manipulation. It was an unsteady field traversed by historical, social, economic, political and cultural forces within which the life of the mind itself was inscribed, and which, while opening the doors to progress, exposed also the pureness of the Idea to material contradictions, tragedies and failures. But this is just a hint of the complexity of a figure who can hardly be identified with the schematic portraits drawn by his hostile readers. Here I will try to rectify our historical and philosophical perspective upon this forsaken father of French contemporary philosophy.

About this book: Overview, methodology and scope This work was conceived as a sort of spin-off of my PhD dissertation on the reception of Kant in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, defended in January 2020 and soon to be published in French by Honoré Champion under the title La philosophie française au miroir de Kant, 1854–1986. Inevitably, a certain complementarity and overlapping subsists between the two texts, especially with regard to those parts dealing with Brunschvicg himself, of course, and his mentors, friends, adversaries and disciples.18 Needless to say, though, this monograph is an autonomous product, not only because

Introduction

5

it has a different purpose and plays with another historical scale but also because it contains a great deal of new material and information. Moreover, the further inquiries conducted have led me to partially revisit and adjust the illustration of Brunschvicg’s thought provided in the French book, which is incomparably more succinct (roughly fifty pages) and oriented primarily towards an assessment of his reading of Kant. Now a word on the seemingly elliptical structure of the present book. The first chapter provides an overview of Brunschvicg’s life, describing his biographical and intellectual trajectory against the background of Third Republic France, with its philosophical, social and political stakes. After that, the book ideally follows two movements. The first of these, articulated in Chapters 2, 3 and 4, accounts for Brunschvicg’s philosophical stance somewhat indirectly, through his views on other thinkers, be they contemporary to him or belonging to the history of philosophy. The main reason behind this choice is twofold: on the one hand, it allows us to delineate the physiognomy of the scenario in which Brunschvicg moved, distinguishing his stance from those of other actors within the philosophical field of the time; on the other hand, it complies with Brunschvicg’s own historical mentality, which linked a philosophy to its scientific and, more broadly, cultural context and subordinated the direct enunciation of philosophical theses to a retrospective assessment of past ideas and problems. Most notably, I have chosen to introduce Brunschvicg’s critical idealism by way of a comparison with the thought of Bergson (Chapter 2), which is an established milestone in the history of French thought and is becoming increasingly familiar to an international readership. This is justified by the historiographical reason that Brunschvicg and Bergson are often mentioned together as the two great fathers of contemporary French philosophy, emphasising now their radical divergences and their common belonging to a still poorly understood philosophical milieu, so that a closer examination of their relationship is made necessary if not urgent. Furthermore, I believe that, paradoxically, this kind of ‘negative’ presentation could be helpful in highlighting more neatly, by way of contrast, the salient traits of Brunschvicg’s forgotten philosophy. Chapter 3 is a detour through Brunschvicg’s overall view on the history of philosophy. It is a long chapter and it may perhaps appear as a fussy détournement. On the contrary, I consider it to be a necessary build-up to a proper and direct assessment of Brunschvicg’s own theses. Not only because, as I have said, for Brunschvicg there is no direct formulation of philosophical theses apart from their historical inscription – simply put, no philosophy without historical reflection – but also because such a detour will allow us to rectify a simplification that has become common currency in scholarship on twentieth-century French philosophy. In fact, according to many commentators, Brunschvicg was the most important representative of an alleged French ‘neo-Kantianism’. Although such an association is endemic in secondary literature, Brunschvicg was not stricto sensu a ‘neo-Kantian’ (or, at least, he was a neo-Kantian no more than he was a neo-Cartesian, a neo-Spinozist or a neoFicthean). He never claimed such a term for his own thought, preferring the more nuanced label of ‘critical idealism’. Of course, one may reply that such a label has a clear Kantian descent – and this is indisputable. After all, Kant himself used the term in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics in order to distinguish his stance from the ‘dogmatic’ idealism of Berkeley and the ‘sceptical’ one of Descartes, which failed to

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Rediscovering Léon Brunschvicg’s Critical Idealism

establish scientific objectivity.19 Brunschvicg adopted it precisely for the same reason, because it allowed to assert the primacy of intellectual activity without losing sight of objective reality, grounding the latter upon the former. Furthermore, one century after Kant, Hermann Cohen explicitly used the term to denote his own thought.20 And that even Brunschvicg was interested in reviving the ‘spirit’ of Kant’s project, beyond and often against its ‘letter’, is equally undeniable. But it is also true that by using the notion of ‘neo-Kantianism’ there is a danger of engendering more confusion than clarity, reducing Brunschvicg’s critical idealism to a French branch or analogue of the German ‘return to Kant’ – which, moreover, was all but uniform and consistent – and levelling out specific (and wide) cultural differences. After having accounted for Brunschvicg’s philosophical pantheon, the time comes to focus more closely on the contemporary debates wherein critical idealism took shape. Chapter 4 is thus the last step before I enter into the second ‘act’ of the work, which addresses directly Brunschvicg’s own theses. Chapter 5 outlines the structure of his philosophy of judgement, while his conception of history, engagement with science and late thought are discussed in Chapters 6, 7 and 8, respectively. By drawing the strands together, the epilogue accounts for Brunschvicg’s final years of exile and offers a succinct but exhaustive overview of his legacy in the twentieth century. This coda is inevitably partial and will leave specialists of single authors or currents inevitably frustrated, especially those interested in philosophy of science. But, as stated above, I am not driven by (sub-)disciplinary concerns, hence why I have prevented one single perspective from prevailing over the others. From a methodological standpoint, I adopt a thorough contextualist approach. This does not mean that the complexity of Brunschvicg’s philosophical ideas is overshadowed. I linger on their conceptual articulation, but always sticking to the principle that the point is neither to defend or celebrate nor to actualise or judge. Furthermore, being the first monograph on Brunschvicg in many decades, thus concerned with providing an all-round portrait, this book inevitably involves tradeoffs between breadth and depth. My hope is that further scholarship will build upon my researches to assess more critically specific aspects of Brunschvicg’s thought. As I have said at the onset of this work, my ambition is, quite modestly, to fill a historiographical gap in a way that could shed some light on the evolution of French thought, throwing a bridge over the bergschrund that often seems to separate, in the scholarly division of labour, nineteenth and twentieth century. I would also be satisfied if one would get from this book a sense of the European stature of Brunschvicg, whose engagement with the crises and conquests of contemporary science, in dialogue with foreign thinkers such as Russell, Einstein or Cassirer, was surely remarkable. Actualisations of past neglected authors often come across as rather arbitrary and constitute a risky business. The question of whether Brunschvicg’s theories might be ‘useful’ to contemporary debates is something that is open to discussion and that I leave to the reader. Nevertheless, I gladly confess my sympathy towards someone who firmly believed in the inherent co-implication of theoretical activity and historical prospection, as well as of philosophical doctrines and scientific theories.

1

The man, the context

Nous devons notre individualité au milieu, et la véritable individualité consiste à se passer de milieu. Equivoque verbale et troublante; ambiguïté réelle et féconde.1

Origins Léon Brunschvicg was born on 10 November 1869 in Paris, in 80 rue Montmartre, a ten-minute walk from the Palais Royal.2 The social and intellectual achievements of his adulthood contrast with his relatively modest origins: his father, Nathan, worked as passmentier and a sales representative, while his mother, Céline Lambert, was a homemaker. He had two sisters, Louise and Emma, and a brother, Goudchaux, who was a barrister in the Court of Appeal, a prominent member of the Séction Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO) and the legal adviser of the Ligue des droits de l’homme.3 Goudchaux, who died in July 1940 fleeing from Paris,4 was married to Betty Brunschvicg (born Élizabeth Meyer), one of the first female lawyers at the Bar of Paris, secretary of the Groupe des avocats socialistes during the 1930s and later advisor to the government of Guy Mollet in the 1950s.5 Little else is known of Brunschvicg’s social background, besides that his paternal grandfather, Léon, son of an Alsatian merchant, born in the midst of the Revolution – in August 1789, eleven days before the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen – was a head rabbi in Paris who had served in the National Guard under the Empire.6 The Brunschvicgs were thus a low middle-class family. More precisely, they were a low middle-class family of Jewish descent. This feature should not be neglected when dealing with the cultural climate of the Third Republic, in particular with a member of a generation of young intellectuals, tied by close social bonds, who benefitted from the full integration of the Jews into French society but who also witnessed the resurgence of anti-Semitism with the outbreak of the Dreyfus Affair (1894), the disputes over the collusion between politics and finance and the debates on the decadence of French culture.7 At the same time, however, Brunschvicg’s Jewish origins should not be overemphasised, if only because they never really mattered to him. In France, since the times of the revolutionary universalism and Napoleon’s promotion of Jewish integration

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Rediscovering Léon Brunschvicg’s Critical Idealism

(1806–8), Jewishness had in fact become a contingent trait merely denoting a variant of French citizenship. Like many of his contemporary thinkers, for example, Henri Bergson (1859–1941) or the sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), Brunschvicg belonged to a community of Jews whose identity was moulded less by ethnic religious matters than by an adherence to the general intellectual and civic ethos of French bourgeoisie. Simply put, they were essentially middle-class professors, educated in the best schools of the nation and patriotically proud of their Frenchness, who happened to have Jewish origins.8 Thus, Jewishness had to be considered a social feature rather than a decisive intellectual element. This is not to deny that some influence of Jewish culture could have entered the picture and played a role in the genesis of their thought; or, most importantly, that the common Jewishness helped strengthen personal, intellectual and professional bonds in turbulent times. It remains, however, that Judaism was not as relevant an aspect of their formation and intellectual production as it was for some of their German contemporaries – like Hermann Cohen (1848–1918) or Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) – or even for Brunschvicg’s disciple Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995).9 Of course, Brunschvicg had to reckon with his cultural background many times in his life – during the Dreyfus Affair, for ­example – and was never indifferent to his descent, as proved by his joining the Central Committee of the Alliance Israélite Universelle.10 Still, this was an outcome of his civic engagement – the same that would lead him to sympathise with socialist politics and with feminist activism – rather than a sign of religious devotion or cultural attachment. According to an anecdote reported by Maurice Blondel (1861–1949), Brunschvicg never liked to consider the Jews as ‘co-religionists’. His solidarity towards them was not a question of a shared devotion but rather ‘of humanity and patriotism’. The only ‘profession of faith’ he could make was the following: ‘I am French, and I don’t need anything else.’11 But the Dreyfus Affair was not the only outburst of anti-Semitism Brunschvicg had to face. A Jewish thinker, but not a thinker of Judaism,12 he would pay the price of his Semitic roots during the Occupation: just like his brother, he was forced to leave Paris; unlike his brother, he managed to survive and go into hiding. He devoted himself to writing but finally succumbed to an illness in 1944. With his fall from the heights of Parisian high society to the underworld of history, the deprivation of half of his surname during the abasing exile, when he had to travel under the false identity of Monsieur Brun, all because of a religious origin that never meant much to him, the sun sets on an entire intellectual and political epoch in European history. As Levinas remarked, Brunschvicg embodied the spirit of the Belle Époque, ‘an age of material security in which political problems remained, at least in appearance, separate from social ones … an age of “European equilibrium” with the “great powers” stable and evenly balanced, in which Germany was Germany and not a metaphysics, Russia was Russia and not a messianism’.13 This is not to say that the political and social environments of the Third Republic were idyllic scenarios. Quite the contrary, the self-congratulatory narration of Progress harboured troubles – social asymmetries, political unbalance, unresolved traumas – the destabilising force of which was always ready to erupt violently. Born from the ashes of a humiliating military defeat and a gory civil war, the Republic actually managed to secure stability and a relative social cohesion for seventy

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years, from 1870 to 1940.14 It modernised and connected France by building an impressive railway system, bringing literacy to the population, secularising education and allowing for a certain social mobility. The triumph of Paris’ Exposition Universelle of 1889, visited by 25 million people swarming under the shade of the newly erected Eiffel Tower, marked the acme of a political narrative that looked for guiding values in the achievements of science and technology and granted the population neverbefore-seen exotic and frenzied leisure. But this was just one side of the coin, politically exploited by the propagandistic fanfare of savvy statesmen. The other side, as conservative and traditionalist intellectuals insisted, was indeed gloomier and more painful. Modernisation had a cost – although it must be said that, outside of the Îlede-France region, the country remained relatively peasant, especially in comparison to Germany and England. Secularisation and the enlargement of political representation also had one. As everywhere in Europe, the social question and the proletarianisation of the workers became burning concerns. The Bourse crack of 1882, triggered by the collapse of the catholic Union Générale, inaugurated years of economic depression, unemployment and falling birth rate, made worse by a rising anger at the predicaments of the democratic mechanism. The populist adventure of General Georges Boulanger (1837–1891), a charismatic war veteran, profited from the disillusion of the lower middle classes towards parliamentarism and managed to gain the more or less explicit support of the extreme left, the monarchists and the Bonapartists, winning a large consensus but eventually lacking the strength to seize power. The 1889 winding up of the Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez and the ensuing Panama scandal, exposed in 1892, unveiled the deep collusion between politics and finance, exacerbating anti-Semitic feelings that escalated two years later with the outbreak of the lacerating Dreyfus Affair. Meanwhile, anarchic factions tormented the country with bombings and attacks, even managing to murder the President Sadi Carnot in 1894. Furthermore, with the 1905 French law on the Separation of Church and the State, the uneasiness of Catholic or traditionalist thinkers, already appalled by the progressive laicisation of society and public education that had begun in the 1880s, reached a critical point. France was no more the ‘fille aînée de l’Église’, the eldest daughter of the Church, and anathemas against the ‘school without God’, the ‘moral crisis’ and the ‘uprooting’ of the ancestral genius loci in the name of ‘cosmopolitan’ values progressively gained currency. Even the proclaims of a ‘bankruptcy of science’15 – which voiced the discomfort of conservative circles with the rampant positivist ideology and its grounding morality and social advancement upon scientific knowledge – could be easily heard in the chaotic intellectual fray of the time. The narrative of progress and that of décadence – another buzzword of the period – were thus two coexisting options that the polarisation of the intellectual debate inevitably ended up radicalising. As serious as the predicaments of French democracy seemed to be, there persisted an almost dogmatic faith in the progressive march of reason and in its enlightening power, which fuelled the militancy of the French leftist intelligentsia trained in the key state institutions of the Republic. Belonging to this front of the intellectual field, for most of his life Brunschvicg was no stranger to such an unyielding belief (even, as we shall see, despite the crises of the old scientific frameworks, readily exploited by the traditionalist propaganda). And yet he lived long

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Rediscovering Léon Brunschvicg’s Critical Idealism

enough to see many of his certainties falter. On a rainy Sunday morning in autumn 1932, Levinas visited him in his study in rue Scheffer. He later recalled that day as the only time he saw Brunschvicg unhappy: ‘The men of my generation’, Brunschvicg said, ‘have known two victories: the Dreyfus Affair and 1918’. Outside it was now really raining, and in Germany there was mounting anger. ‘And now’, went on Brunschvicg, with the air of having no air that was unique to him, ‘those two battles are being fought all over again … unless this is just an old man’s lament’, he added after a moment’s silence, already distancing himself from what he had just said.16

The horrors of the second global conflict, combining the bloodbath of the Great War with the projection on a genocidal scale of the very anti-Semitism that ignited the Dreyfus Affair, were an utter shock for a generation that had triumphed over iniquity, that had proved that justice and truth existed and were attainable by mankind. ‘Their motives,’ glossed Levinas, ‘[lay] in justice and not in the will to power, their criteria originated in moral conscience rather than in the horrible prestige of the Sacred.’17 When Brunschvicg, in 1927, distinguished between a ‘puerile’ attitude which awaits truth from tradition or revelation, ‘like a stone falling from the sky’, and a ‘virile’ stance entailing a permanent revision of the criteria of judgement and a careful monitoring of its application,18 he could likely have in mind the experience of the battle over Dreyfus’s rehabilitation, where the search for a proven truth was hindered by the blind acceptance of the prejudices sustaining the official account established by the first trials. Unlike his teacher Alphonse Darlu (1849–1921) and his friend Élie Halévy (1870–1937), Brunschvicg was not among the early subscribers of the ‘Protestations’ published since January 1898 on L’Aurore in the wake of Zola’s ‘J’accuse’.19 He replied to Halévy’s solicitations displaying a prudent and lofty attitude: ‘My line of conduct is to follow the documents, and to maintain my intellectual integrity.’20 He was in no hurry to give in to passion and, as a good liberal, he likely feared demagoguery: ‘We will see … I am not waiting [to know] to share what is in your heart; I want [to know], however, to share what is in your mind. This is my character and my role.’21 Eventually, though, we will find him among the founders of many dreyfusard associations, such as the Ligue française pour la défense des droits de l’Homme et du citoyen – launched in April of the same year in support of Dreyfus and, more generally, of the principles of 178922 – and the Union pour l’action morale, founded in 1893 by the philosopher Jules Lagneau (1851–1894) and his disciple Paul Desjardins (1859–1940), which later changed its name to Union pour la vérité.23 It may seem thus that the question of Jewishness is somehow unrelated to the overall scope of Brunschvicg’s philosophy. Yet things can be seen from a more articulated perspective. As Joel Revill argued, the form of epistemology or ‘scientific philosophy’, as it was called at the turn of the century, heralded by Brunschvicg and his colleagues can be regarded as an ‘ethnicity-blind’ reaction against the vague of chauvinism that had exploded in France in the Dreyfus era.24 Thinkers like Brunschvicg or Durkheim, but also scholars less engaged in contemporary science like Élie Halévy or Xavier Léon (1868–1935), two of Brunschvicg’s closest associates, understood their intellectual

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endeavour as a quest for universality and a shared language in the name of rational communion. The great collective projects of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, the Société française de philosophie, the international philosophical congresses, the first of which was held in Paris in 1900, and the Vocabulaire technique et critique de philosophie, directed by André Lalande (1867–1963), which renovated and shaped the visage of contemporary French philosophy, can be seen precisely as attempts in this direction.

Formative years The reason why Brunschvicg identified primarily with the republican secular credo has to be found in his intellectual upbringing.25 He was probably one of the best examples of those children of ‘families without fortune’ whose social ascent was favoured by merit alone and the generous financial support of the State – the ‘boursiers’ (scholarship recipients), as the writer Albert Thibaudet (1874–1936) famously called them.26 In 1880, he entered the lycée Condorcet, located in the 9th arrondissement, where he had Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) and Darlu as English and philosophy teachers, respectively.27 The Condorcet was a peculiar environment for at least two reasons: for one thing, it fostered socialisation and cultural exchanges among students, beyond mandatory classes and activities;28 secondly, it was the lycée of the sons of the Jewish bourgeoisie, and it would remain such up until the end of the Third Republic. This was due to a convergence of favourable circumstances: under the Second Empire, many Alsatian Jews migrated to Paris and settled in the Western districts, right around the time Haussmann began his modernisation of the capital; in the Condorcet, they found a non-confessional high school that was perfectly suited to welcoming their children and making them part of the Republican élite. In such a secular environment, the Jews bonded together and identified with Republican values, also consorting with other influential ‘minorities’ such as the liberal Protestants.29 Despite the absence of religious emphasis, the existence of a powerful cohort of intellectuals of Jewish descent would be a determining factor during the Dreyfus Affair.30 At the Condorcet, Brunschvicg met many of his lifelong friends, like Louis Couturat (1868–1914), Xavier Léon, André Cresson (1869–1950), Élie Halévy, Dominique Parodi (1870–1955) and the future art historian Émile Bertaux (1869–1917). Despite differences in temperament and intellectual penchant, this group formed a solid network that would play an enormous part in renewing the cultural landscape of the early twentieth century. Brunschvicg was particularly close to Halévy and his family.31 Their friendship is testified by what goes under the name of Agenda retrouvé: in 1892, when Brunschvicg was appointed as a high school teacher in Lorient, he and Halévy bought two diaries with the promise of jotting down their thoughts during the year and exchanging them when they were due to meet again. After Halévy’s death, his wife returned to Brunschvicg the copy he gave to his friend, and in 1942 the philosopher used it to reflect upon the thoughts of his younger self. But Brunschvicg associated with other luminous presences. The playwright-to-be Arman de Caillavet (1869–1915) opened to him the doors of the salon of his mother

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Rediscovering Léon Brunschvicg’s Critical Idealism

Léontine Lippmann (1844–1910), muse of Anatole France (1844–1924). There, the young philosopher had the chance of meeting, besides France, personalities like Jules Lemaître (1853–1914), Ernest Renan (1823–1892) or Charles Leconte de Lisle (1818–1894). Two years younger, Marcel Proust (1871–1922) was another important member of the company. Brunschvicg recalled that they used to hang out together at the Champs-Élysées every Tuesday and Sunday, and their friendship seems indeed to have been quite strong.32 According to some, Brunschvicg was among the models from which the author of the Recherche drew inspiration for the character of Bloch, the highly intelligent, cultivated, bombastic and often ill-mannered school friend of the narrator, a fervent dreyfusard and the first to evoke the name of Bergotte.33 Despite these personal and social frequentations, however, the fact remained that the most relevant intellectual reference points were his philosopher friends Halévy, Léon, Couturat and Cresson. As one of the best pupils of his lycée, in 1888 Brunschvicg undertook the concours général, a competitive examination taken only for reasons of prestige and which had already crowned figures such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lavoisier, Turgot, Hugo, Pasteur, Jaurès and Bergson. His performance was impressive: he received an honourable mention in French, the second prize in history and geography and ranked first in Ancient Greek and, of course, in philosophy.34 The short dissertation he wrote for the philosophy competition, entitled ‘La philosophie de l’évolution et la morale du devoir’ – a classic Third Republic theme – is particularly interesting. There, we see Brunschvicg challenging one of the most influential philosophical paradigms of the late nineteenth century on a European scale, namely the evolutionism of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903).35 In particular, Brunschvicg analysed and rebutted Spencer’s solution to the moral problem, its reduction of ethics to a ‘physics of mores’.36 The positivistic doctrines were unable to explain why from instinct we move to the autonomy of the moral imperative, to the discovery of a principle of self-improvement. It was thus necessary to discard the explanations based on dubious analogies with the laws of life and nature and try to grasp instead ‘the relentless activity of a mind that becomes more and more aware of itself ’.37 What is interesting here is that we already find in nuce the main tenets of Brunschvicg’s critical idealism: the refusal of scientistic positivism and of the vagaries of sentimentalism as well, the radical separation between natural/ sensible life and rationality, and the ideal of an absolute ‘intelligible world’ that would be the product of all the individual intellectual efforts. In 1888, Brunschvicg was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure in rue d’Ulm as a ‘sous cacique’, a term of the normalien jargon indicating he who comes in second in the entrance exam (the ‘cacique’ being the first place finisher).38 It was during these university years that Brunschvicg started building his reputation, thanks to his brilliant results and spirit of initiative. For example, in order to improve his and his fellows’ knowledge of the German language, he organised collective sessions of translation from which resulted a new edition of Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.39 ‘He was the soul of our group of philosophers’, Cresson said.40 His penchant for pure intellectuality was already clear: in a 1890 letter, Halévy – who would later become a prominent historian of British Utilitarianism and nineteenth-century England41 – claimed to feel inferior to Brunschvicg: ‘he is fully satisfied with his thought, while my

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own thought is constantly busy devising projects of conduct and life trajectories for the future’.42 The philosophy professors of the École Normale were Georges Lyon (1853–1929), a specialist of modern British and French philosophy,43 and the Catholic Léon OlléLaprune (1839–1898), a staunch opponent of the laicisation of public education.44 Brunschvicg was not impressed by them. In particular, the religious sentimentalism of Ollé-Laprune stood in contrast to the rationalism taught by Darlu. At the Sorbonne, Brunschvicg followed the courses of Victor Brochard (1848–1907), a specialist of ancient philosophy and the model of Proust’s character Brichot, and the professor who would become, along with Darlu, his true mentor, Émile Boutroux (1845–1921), a disciple of Jules Lachelier (1832–1918), whom Brunschvicg would come to consider as the great father of French reflective ‘spiritualism’.45 In 1889, he graduated with a double degree in letters and science, a prefiguration of his later interests. Two years later, he crowned his education by ranking first among the candidates at the agrégation – the competitive entry exam to secondary teaching – and obtained his first appointment as a teacher in the lycée of Lorient. Moreover, in July he was awarded the Bodin Prize of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques for a mémoire on Spinoza, which would become his first book, published in 1894. In 1893 he was transferred to Tours. Despite the distance from the capital, he joined Halévy and Léon in founding what would become the most important French philosophical journal, the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. Under the tutelage of Darlu, this cohort of young idealists, which included also Couturat and, up to a point, Émile Chartier (1868–1951), later known as Alain,46 set out to bring about a revolution in the intellectual scene of their time, revitalising a discipline – philosophy – smothered by the combined action of arid positivism and the outmoded speculative postures of the spiritualists descending from Victor Cousin (1792–1867), the great father of French institutional philosophy. But their aim was not just strictly philosophical. As the title suggests, the Revue was also supposed to address what was probably the most decisive and haunting intellectual question of the Third Republic: that of morality, understood as a common ethos capable of introducing and safeguarding harmony within society. The commitment of the founders to the Republican project was strong. Brunschvicg, Halévy and Léon – the latter in particular, his personal wealth dispensing him from the necessity of pursuing an academic career, was the true architect of the project47 – were all ‘philosophers of the Rive Droite’, as Vladimir Jankélévitch said, that is, three bourgeois exponents of ‘franco-judaism’, educated in élite state institutions and marked by ‘the triple attachment to Reason, Nation and the Republic’.48 The intellectual inspiration of the young philosophers was admittedly their lycée teacher Darlu – the man ‘to whom I owe everything’,49 as Brunschvicg said. The importance of Darlu can hardly be overlooked. Darlu was the object of an authentic cult on the part of the founders of the Revue. Not by chance, he authored the anonymous presentation that introduced the first issue of the journal.50 This text is one of the rare writings left by this venerated figure who wielded his influence almost exclusively through his Socratic teaching. From Proust, who constantly magnified his figure, to Halévy, Brunschvicg and Léon, the accounts agree in portraying a powerful intellectual

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Rediscovering Léon Brunschvicg’s Critical Idealism

‘awakener’ (éveilleur).51 In his ‘Introduction’, Darlu marked the opposition between the new journal and other reviews of the time, namely, the sectarian Critique philosophique of the neo-criticist thinker and Brunschvicg’s nemesis Charles Renouvier (1815– 1903)52 or the positivist Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, founded in 1876 by Théodule Ribot (1839–1916).53 The gap between the rationalism of the Revue de métaphysique and the positivistic orientation of the Revue philosophique should not be overemphasised: they were both open to philosophers and scientists as well, and they often shared a large number of contributors.54 Still, it is true that the former aimed at implementing a rationalist, intellectualist and dialogical editorial line grounded on a conception of philosophy qua critical reflection upon the principles of knowledge and morality. In 1894, Brunschvicg wrote an article with Halévy in which they not only summarised the goal of the Revue, but also anticipated a universalistic motif that would become a refrain in Brunschvicg’s mature thought: the Revue was meant to show that ‘philosophy has a determined orientation, that it takes account of the truth toward which it tends, and finally that this truth is capable of rallying spirits and of constituting, by the spontaneous accord of individual tendencies, a philosophical public worthy of the name’.55 The following year, in 1895, Brunschvicg became teacher at the lycée of Rouen, where he would work for the next five years. During this period, in 1897, he issued his first edition of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées and, on 29 March of the same year, he obtained his doctorate defending at the Faculté des Lettres in Paris a French dissertation on La modalité du jugement and a Latin dissertation on Aristotle’s theory of syllogism. What was supposed to be another triumph for the promising philosopher turned unexpectedly into a big disappointment, as it was not awarded the highest honours due to resistance from some members of the jury, most likely Brochard, Paul Janet (1823–1899) and Gabriel Séailles (1852–1922). However, this incident did not hamper Brunschvicg’s career, for in 1900 he finally returned to Paris as a teacher at his own lycée, the Condorcet. On 23 May 1899, when he probably already knew of his transfer to the capital, Brunschvicg finally married his fiancée Cécile Kahn (1877–1946), who would become the most prominent feminist leader of the Third Republic. Together, they had four children, who received no religious upbringing: Roger (1901–1909), Adrienne (1903–1979), Jean-Claude (1914–1993) and François (1919–1987). Like Léon, Cécile had Jewish and Alsatian origins; unlike Léon, she came from an affluent family of textile entrepreneurs.56 Accounting for the life and thought of this extraordinary woman would be a task beyond our possibilities here.57 I will briefly return to her political activities below. During the three-year stint at the Condorcet, Brunschvicg launched his edition of Pascal’s Œuvres complètes and published his third book, Introduction à la vie de l’esprit, a more accessible overview of his ideas. The need to better spell out his theoretical stance can be felt in the number of articles and interventions at the recently founded Société française de philosophie, partially gathered in L’idéalisme contemporain. When this collection was published, in 1905, Brunschvicg had moved from the Condorcet to another prestigious Parisian lycée, the Henri-IV, where he stayed for six years. It was the final round in the purgatory of secondary education.

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Apogee The 1910s and the 1920s mark the apex of Brunschvicg’s undisputed hold on French institutional philosophy. Thanks to the network of the Revue de métaphysique and the Société française de philosophie and the strings pulled by Darlu, who in the meanwhile had become inspector general of public education, Brunschvicg finally managed to secure a job as maître de conferences at the Sorbonne in July 1909.58 Brunschvicg’s university career set sail in troubled waters. Only a year later, in 1910, the University of Paris came under attack from a series of articles published in the weekly journal L’Opinion and later gathered in the pamphlet L’Esprit de la Nouvelle Sorbonne.59 The authors, who concealed their identity behind the nom de plume Agathon, namely, the lawyer Alfred de Tarde (1880–1925) and the literary critic Henri Massis (1886–1970), violently decried the scientistic attitude promoted within the human and social sciences in the wake of the process of modernisation that the French universities had begun in the 1880s. Figures like Durkheim, the historian of philosophy Victor Delbos (1862–1916) and the historian of philosophy-turned-ethnologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939) were harshly satirised for their attempt to objectify and scientifically break down human experience or cultural products and, at the same time, for their allegiance to a secularist credo promoting an alienating education resting on the individualist exercise of critical reason. Due to their ‘scientific superstition’, the professors of the Sorbonne were deemed unfit to train the youth of the nation, who needed other values, more ‘virile’, shaped around energy, life, communion and tradition. De Tarde and Massis believed in fact that the new education system and the new science were inspired by the German example, thus making the Sorbonne – which, after the Dreyfus Affair, was already perceived as a temple of progressivism – a hotbed of foreign ideas. Many discursive layers overlapped inextricably in this critique of the Sorbonne’s esprit laïque, mixing the legitimate problematisation of an epistemologicalpedagogical paradigm with nationalistic concerns about the fate of French culture and society and, although not immediately visible, anti-Semitic undertones (Massis in particular was close to the ultra-right movement Action Française).60 It must be said that Agathon’s attack was not a hapax, but rather reflected a general feeling of distrust towards the Republican worship of scientific progress that was widespread not only among the cultural right61 but also among heretic leftist intellectuals, such as, for example, the libertarian socialist and early fierce dreyfusard-turned-antimodernist Catholic Charles Péguy (1873–1914).62 For obvious chronological reasons, Brunschvicg was not mentioned in the pamphlet, which was met favourably by the students, forcing the rector to respond to the criticisms and the Senate to open an investigation. Yet he would have fitted perfectly the negative portrait of the Sorbonne professor painted by Agathon, being everything the pamphleteers loathed: Jewish, dreyfusard, republican, violently intellectualist and a staunch defender of the philosophical, moral and even political value of scientific reason (the noblest form of rationality). Massis and Tarde questioned notably the scientific perversion of history, a discipline which in the new encyclopaedic set-up was meant, as has been noted, to ‘provide the material for philology, sociology, and

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philosophy’, representing ‘for these studies the equivalent of what the laboratory was for physics’.63 As if done on purpose, in 1912 Brunschvicg published Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique, a lengthy survey in which he read in parallel the evolution of mathematical and philosophical thought. There, he implemented a methodology that would later lead him to claim that history is the ‘philosopher’s laboratory’. In this, he failed to comply with the sentimental ideals of philosophy as introspection and metaphysics and of history as a means of spiritual cultivation hailed by Agathon. Brunschvicg’s book was generally saluted as a masterpiece within the French philosophical milieu.64 As it intervened in the debates around the foundations of mathematics, which had involved prestigious names like Russell, Couturat and Poincaré, Les étapes sparked interest also outside France, notably in the Anglophone world, where however reviews were unsympathetic to say the least.65 The growing popularity of Brunschvicg consolidated not only his position at the Sorbonne – his courses were in fact informally mandatory for everyone registering to take the agrégation66 – but also in the Tout-Paris. Brunschvicg was known to lead an intense social life, attending concerts and art exhibitions and taking an interest in the most recent artistic trends, from the compositions of Erik Satie (1866–1925) to the new Cubist paintings exhibited by Paul Rosenberg (1881–1959) in his gallery at 21 rue La Boétie.67 In 1914 Brunschvicg even joined Anatole France in the adventure of the Cercle Carré, a non-party (but progressive nevertheless) cultural and artistic association located in 23 rue Louis-le-Grand, the primary purpose of which consisted in fostering the free exchange of ideas and social educative actions.68 Brunschvicg’s new status was testified by the comings and goings from his office in rue Schaffer, which he took the habit of opening to students, colleagues and foreign guests every Sunday morning.69 The First World War temporarily halted the rising of Brunschvicg’s star. At the outbreak of the war, the philosophers of the Republic reacted in different ways. With a law exempting teachers from military service, the experience of the war was limited, for some, to the abstract skirmishes between French and German intellectuals on the moral and intellectual superiority of one nation over the other. This was the case of Bergson, Boutroux, Delbos and Charles Andler (1866–1933). Shocked by the German invasion of Belgium – and in particular by the Aufruf an die Kulturwelt (Appeal to the Cultural World), the manifesto drafted in 1914 by ninety-three German scholars, scientists and artists to support and justify the German military operations on the Western front – they all wrote extensively about the alleged divide between French ‘civilisation’ and German ‘Kultur’, exposing aggressive ‘pan-Germanism’ as a distinctive trait of their neighbours’ barbarism.70 The conflict inflamed the cultural and chauvinistic stakes (previously raised by Sedan), which sometimes appeared to be higher than, if not inseparably amalgamated with, the philosophical ones. For Boutroux, the essence of the German people consisted entirely in the desire to crush individuals and their freedom, dominate other countries and annihilate any ideal of humanity.71 Bergson, Parodi and Andler – the latter a member of the SFIO and future professor of German literature and language at the Collège de France – followed the trail,72 while, in a 1914 letter to Blondel, Delbos tried to explain the German misdeeds on the basis of the post-Kantian betrayal of the ideal of reason.73

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Others, like Halévy, Léon, Brunschvicg or the Germanist Victor Basch (1863– 1944), adopted a more nuanced position, refusing the chauvinism of their friends and colleagues. Espousing the theory of the ‘two Germanies’, one noble and the other, the present one, corrupt,74 Brunschvicg claimed in a letter to Léon that the moral ideas expressed by Kant, Fichte and even Hegel had nothing to do with the Wilhelmine regime.75 Philosophy was innocent. As he made clear elsewhere, no one was allowed to infer anything from the events of the war ‘about a Goethe or a Beethoven, about a Nietzsche or a Wagner, as well as about a Mussorgsky, a Maeterlinck or a Verhaeren, about a Bergson or a Debussy’.76 Germany had been the cradle of great minds, but its imperialist and barbaric policy amounted to a betrayal of the legacy of its most distinguished sons and even of the true interest of its culture.77 As to personal engagement, many within the circle of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale decided not to stick to philosophical speculation and serve the country as pragmatically as they could.78 Halévy chose not to collaborate with the French government or write propaganda, but rather worked in a military hospital, an example followed also by Léon and Bouglé.79 The Franco-Italian Parodi served as an interpreter for the vice-consulate in Ventimiglia,80 while Alain enrolled in the army serving at the front in the artillery.81 For his part, Brunschvicg likely helped his wife in establishing the Œuvre parisienne pour le logement des réfugiés, which earned her the Légion d’Honneur. Yet this was not his primary contribution. Mobilised in March 1915, he first joined the Garde des voies de communication, a division of the army in charge of patrolling railways, taking service in Chartrettes, a small town in the Île-de-France. Then, in April 1916, he was hired by the ‘Maison de la presse’ attached to the Bureau de l’information diplomatique of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.82 There, almost three hundred journalists, essayists and professors were charged with translating and analysing the foreign press and of coordinating the propaganda for the neutral countries. In particular, Brunschvicg worked in a ‘Bureau d’études’, headquartered at the first floor of 3 rue François-Ier, with the task of drafting documented notes on the hot topics of the day.83 Brunschvicg’s choice to remain in Paris was benignly criticised by Halévy in a letter to Léon: ‘Don’t persecute the unfortunate Brunschvicg. The best tactic toward him is to avoid any kind of political subject. His situation is not easy. Here he is living side-by-side … with Boutroux, Delbos, Darlu [who were all fervent nationalists].’84 After the end of the war, Brunschvicg was asked to deliver an address to inaugurate the chair of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, which had recently become French after the annexation of the Alsace-Lorraine. He then engaged wholeheartedly in a number of projects meant to bring about a tighter international cooperation between intellectuals. For example, he partook as a delegate in Bergson’s and Einstein’s International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (1922),85 an advisory organisation of the League of Nations, and founded the more scholarly, but still internationally oriented, Societas Spinoziana, the members of which included Bergson, Léon and Lévy-Bruhl.86 The interwar years were thus a period in which Brunschvicg projected on a larger, European scale the concern for a collaborative quest for truth – which solely could guarantee progress and ensure the flourishing of human reason – that marked his early militancy.

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Rediscovering Léon Brunschvicg’s Critical Idealism

Around that time, Brunschvicg’s fame grew steadily. In 1922 he published his second great historical-epistemological work, L’expérience humaine et la causalité physique, in which he tried to substantiate his critical idealism with the achievements of Einsteinian physics, followed in 1927 by the monumental survey of the philosophical and moral doctrines of the West, from antiquity to Bergson, Le progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale. This work won him the full professorship that same year. After having delivered courses at the École Normale87 and having served as professeur adjoint since 1920, he took over from Lévy-Bruhl the chair of History of Modern Philosophy that had belonged to their common mentor Boutroux.88 In 1929, Brunschvicg represented France at the second Davos conference, where he met with his friend Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) and witnessed the latter’s epochal clash with Martin Heidegger.89 Levinas, Jean Cavaillès (1903–1944) and Maurice de Gandillac (1906–2006) travelled with him, and were introduced by their teacher to Cassirer.90 Yet, Brunschvicg could not imagine how much the Davos incident would change the course of French philosophy. Soon, the new cohorts of young aspiring philosophers seduced by ‘the “woodsman” Heidegger’, as Gandillac sarcastically wrote,91 would come to identify him with Cassirer himself, that is, with a dead and gone secular humanism that needed to be overcome.92 Brunschvicg’s theoretical sunset had begun, but from then on his career advancements were fast: he was promoted to ‘first class’ professor in 1932 and to ‘exceptional class’ in 1937; in 1931 he took service as president of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, while since 1936 he chaired the philosophy agrégation jury. Despite the first symptoms of a heart condition, he travelled extensively delivering conferences all around the continent and was awarded a plethora of honorary positions or titles by many European academies. Brunschvicg finally became the mandarin of the Sorbonne, the ‘watchdog’ of French academic philosophy that a number of Marxist thinkers would learn to despise. His institutional influence was now pervasive and would have survived his death, to the point that, as Pierre Bourdieu noted, even in the 1950s graduating with a supervisor who had worked with him was still a strategic career choice.93

Political engagement A contextual introduction to the figure of Brunschvicg cannot prescind from including some remarks about his political ideas. This may seem as a nonessential complement, but in the case of Brunschvicg it is crucial, not only because it contributes to a wellrounded portrait but also because it is precisely on the basis of ideological matters that his philosophy, deemed abstract and useless, was rejected and dropped into the river of oblivion. Considering only Brunschvicg’s philosophical works, one can easily draw the conclusion that he was not politically and socially aware. For example, he explicitly pitted the spirituality of the idea, the immanent reflection of consciousness, against the vulgar materiality of contemporary societies plagued by ‘intensive advertising’, where, ‘just as in the so-called primitive societies, words are taken for things’.94 As we will see, language exemplified for Brunschvicg everything that is static, unquestioned,

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passively accepted, habitual, purely traditional, artificial and, ultimately, empty. Accordingly, his view of philosophy consisted precisely in looking beyond words, into their actual meaning and values and into the underlying intellectual judgement. Is there anything more aristocratic than a philosophical idealism having as its tagline the Pauline sentence from the Second Letter to the Corinthians (3.6) that ‘the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life’?95 Brunschvicg’s oeuvre seemed thus too projected onto the eternal realm of intellectuality to indulge in short-term policies or ideological quarrels. After all, this is the image of Brunschvicg that has been handed down through history. According to some, given his ‘lack of socio-political interest’, Brunschvicg’s humanism ended up being ultimately ‘conservative’, if not ‘antipolitical’: ‘His idealism may translate (as it did) to contemporary educational policy, but it hardly made for convincing social policy, and it clearly evaded the political or engaged intellectual realm.’ As such, it ‘could not claim monopoly over the more socially engaged legacy of the Enlightenment and liberal thought’, becoming vulnerable ‘vis-à-vis the oftrepeated charges of academic abstraction and irrelevance’.96 It is partially misleading to point at an alleged antipolitical or conservative character of Brunschvicg’s conception of politics, as well as to a sort of defection from political engagement – at least without providing any further clarification. The picture has to be more nuanced. To be sure, a fin-de-siècle philosopher of the Third Republic could hardly match the level of hyper-politicisation that typified the maîtres à penser of the following generations. Still, Brunschvicg was actually more politically engaged than is often believed, albeit he reserved his views on politics for contexts other than the academic one, as if he saw his militancy as a logical offshoot of his intellectual life, but not as a necessary and consubstantial component of his philosophical enterprise. This does not mean that a complete detachment subsisted between philosophy and politics. It seemed though that Brunschvicg operated on two levels that had to remain somehow separated, one more contingent and dealing with the political affairs of his time and the other atemporal, addressing the perennial questions of philosophy. As a matter of fact, it was difficult for a lay but still Jewish intellectual, born one year before the Third Republic, to be immune to political passions. His very attendance of the key institutions of the Parisian education system predisposed him to the development of an acute political sensibility. During the late 1880s and early 1890s, when he was a student, the École Normale was indeed a hotbed of socialist, radical and progressive views. The influence of the socialist Lucien Herr (1864–1926), who became its chief librarian in 1888, the same year of Brunschvicg’s admission, was strong. Herr managed to convert many young intellectuals to his non-doctrinaire socialism, like Jean Jaurès (1859–1914), but not all of them succumbed to his lure, remaining – like Brunschvicg – moderate leftists.97 The Dreyfus Affair, which exploded when Brunschvicg was already a teacher in Tours, had brought out the distinctive traits of the intellectual life at the ENS, which veered towards more radical forms of engagement: due to their freely critical posture, the normaliens were usually hostile to the military, the Church and the traditionalist anti-Semitic right; furthermore, a large number of them had parents involved in public education, state administration, liberal professions and, as in Brunschvicg’s case, business, all categories that looked

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favourably at the republican regime.98 These middle-class origins also explain why, for the young offspring of normaliens who were trained as the loyal élite of the Republic and who had experienced the benefits provided by the system of public education, the prospect of subverting ‘a bourgeois social ladder which they had begun so successfully to climb’ was of no interest.99 As Robert J. Smith explained, radicalism and socialism ‘came from two branches of the same political tree rooted in the Enlightenment’. They both believed that only material well-being, peace, knowledge and justice could ensure prosperity; that only the call into question of dogmas and superstitions could unleash spiritual progress; that only the emancipation from the unquestioned yoke of tradition could actualise personal and collective freedom. Moreover, they both shared a humanistic and democratic framework, at least in the rue d’Ulm. The difference lay elsewhere: ‘Radicals looked to the past, where the exemplars of humanitarian wisdom and individualism could be found, while Socialists, assuming that individualism was proven bankrupt by the ravages of industrial capitalism, envisioned a new, cooperative humanity unlike any in the past.’100 The radical republicans were basically satisfied with the existing political regime, which they thought needed to be progressively cleansed of the dregs of injustice, whereas socialists envisaged more drastic reformations (not necessarily revolutions). Where exactly should we place Brunschvicg within this landscape? His political views can be inferred mostly from his practical engagement. In Christophe Charle’s biographical dictionary of the professors of the Parisian Faculté des Lettres, the entry on his ‘political opinion’ reads as follows: ‘Dreyfusard, member of the steering committee of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, member of Desjardins’ Union pour l’action morale.’101 This elliptic definition by enumeration is not a matter of discretion, given that for other personalities the dictionary does not hesitate to mention socialist, republican or liberal sympathies. To be sure, Brunschvicg was not a revolutionary. Here and there, in his oeuvre, he explicitly took issue with Marx, claiming, for example, that in the author of the Capital he found the epochal ‘obsession of the last philosopher’ and the end of history that plagued German thought;102 or that his pretence of curing the utopian tendency of socialism with an injection of Hegelian dialectics and political economy was only a pseudo-scientific coating that paralysed consciousness.103 Brunschvicg shared the socialist critique of the bourgeois exploitation and the hypocrisy of the élites. But in Marx he perceived not only a ‘naive arrogance’, which emerged patently in his prophetic claims (he quoted as an example the grandiloquence of the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach), not only an ‘ingenuous Machiavellianism’, but also, from a technical point of view, an oppressive mix of Saint-Simonianism and Hegelianism: ‘[Marx] is suspicious of an action that has no other ground than the judgement of consciousness, the imperative of duty. He too wants, before any undertaking, the feeling of being carried by the infallibility of a process that, through economical antinomies and social catastrophes, will assure the final judgement of history, the triumph of the ultimate synthesis.’104 Furthermore, on a more down-to-earth level, he confessed to Halévy – who in the 1930s would be among the first to compare fascism and centralised state socialism105 – a certain distaste for the maximalist ‘phraseology on the proletariat organised into a class party’.106 Social harmony, for him, came before the revolutionary

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aspirations of a single class.107 In another letter of the summer of 1908, where he proudly described himself as a ‘liberal Jew’ like Spinoza, he wrote: Now I would like to be a logician so to simply study the conditions of existence of a State where the notions of republic, legislative power, judicial authority and civic liberty would be realities and not just words; it might well be that these conditions are not those which would allow France to exist as a constitutional nation … then, so much the worse for the logicians and so much the better for the misoneistic sociologists.108

For a conclusive proof of his distaste for the rhetoric of the proletariat, we can turn to a 1929 debate at the Union pour la vérité on The Conquerors,109 the first of André Malraux’s (1901–1976) novels dealing with human condition through the prism of the Chinese Civil War. During that debate, Brunschvicg contended that it was nonsense, on the part of the revolutionaries, to complain about the allegedly oppressive regime of the bourgeois order and then dream about a communist society, which was surely worse. Malraux agreed on this point, but still adhered to a political vision in which the values of collective action and transformation primed over those of ‘reflection’ and ‘intelligence’ defended by Brunschvicg. In reply, the latter accused Malraux of indicating a false model of change, for the Chinese context differed largely from the European one, and wondered rhetorically whether revolutionary praxis was actually better than a gradual reformism.110 This preference for a reformism guided by intellectual and reflective principles is manifest in the most ‘political’ (in a very loose sense) among Brunschvicg’s philosophical works, namely the final chapters of Le progrès de la conscience and the lesson on ‘L’animal politique’ in his 1929–30 course on La connaissance de soi. Brunschvicg equally despised romantic subjectivism, nihilist individualism and oppressive collectivism. He also downplayed as vain metaphysical dreaming any teleological and organicist conception of history qua transcendent engine of human agency. In the lesson on ‘L’animal politique’, we find a generally dismissive attitude towards politics when understood as the ultimate horizon of the human existence: politics pertains to society, and society is the realm of conventions, habits, rituals, traditions, stolid bureaucracy and positive laws. Brunschvicg’s politics was from this point of view just as spiritualist as his philosophy. What defined the dignity of man, and by extension of the citizen, was not his place within society or the role that tradition has attributed to him, but rather his power of reflection, of critical examination, briefly, his capacity for judgement, which he shares with every other individual – the same principles Brunschvicg held against Malraux’s ‘adventurism’. Every ‘subject of thought’, every ‘moral person’ is endowed with the same dignity, regardless of profession, gender or social status. As such, the individual has the right to deploy the totality of his ‘human functions’ within society.111 For Brunschvicg, as for many progressive republicans, social change was first and foremost an individual matter – or better, a process that could not be brought about without a personal ‘conversion’ to the values of justice and freedom. In order to save our civilisation, he claimed, ‘the political animal must remember that it is also a rational animal’, that is, a ‘philosophical animal’.112

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In Brunschvicg, thus, politics had to follow principles that were, so to speak, hyperpolitical, pertaining to the moral and intellectual dignity of man as such. True politics consisted in the attempt to ensure the triumph of the Idea within the sphere of social order, with its codes, symbols, norms and economic structure.113 As he said, ‘The point is not to sacrifice our person to the universality of an abstract goal, but to create a society which would be united from the inside by broadening our perspectives on things and on men.’114 This antagonism between the realms where the intelligence is free to deploy itself, following its impetus, and the domains in which it is instead hampered by the inertia of State procedures and logics sticks out in a number of Brunschvicg’s occasional writings. In a 1913 article published in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, he explicitly complained, data in hand, about the inefficiency of bureaucracy, with its multiplication of offices and commissions, and the consequent political incapacity to bring about the necessary reforms and address pressing administrative and social issues (e.g. by instituting a ministry in charge of social security and public health). Red tape and rigidities overrode rationality and action, and this was for Brunschvicg the political correlate of the prevalence of the Scholastic logicism over spiritualist dynamism in philosophy.115 Social problems came down for him to a proper rationalisation of society. The task of a ‘social rationalism’ was to formulate the correct ‘equations of justice’,116 starting from the assumption that problems addressed in the political and economic spheres could be compared, for their complexity, to ‘the most difficult researches in mathematics and physics’.117 From this perspective, appropriate, dynamic and progressive models were needed that avoided narrow and rigid a priori classifications and accounted instead for the multiple relationships between individuals, classes and social structures.118 The ideal model, for Brunschvicg, was Plato’s Republic, which had to be understood not as the book of a utopian dreamer but as a manual of political spiritualism. Humanity would have been more advanced in its progress towards justice, if only it had had the courage to implement the three watchwords implicitly indicated by Plato and upon which Brunschvicg often insisted: eugenics, feminism and socialism.119 Now, Brunschvicg’s reference to eugenics is quite startling, and it is hard to tell what he actually had in mind. He mentioned the virtue of a State that pursues progress to the point of using the ‘procedures of selections by means of which it is possible, after and even before birth, to work on perfecting a species’.120 Yet the practical implementation of this ideal remains unclear. Actually, it is doubtful that Brunschvicg took seriously Plato’s utopic project of normalising and controlling mating and marriage according to age, health and temper, in order to get the best possible offspring for the chaste of the ‘guardians’ of the polis. It is more likely that he wanted to stress, like many republicans of the time, the utterly political value of a proper upbringing and the need to counter deviant behaviours. As to feminism, Brunschvicg was a fervent supporter of women’s rights well before his wife’s militancy. It was him, Cécile declared, who convinced her that any policy designed to improve the work conditions of women was doomed to ineffectiveness without the leverage of suffrage.121 Brunschvicg acted as the secretary general of the Union française pour le suffrage de femmes, founded in 1909, which in 1924

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would be presided by his wife. In 1911, the UFSF created the Ligue des électeurs pour le suffrage des femmes, with Brunschvicg as its vice-president.122 The question of his socialism deserves a little more attention, beyond his critique of Marx and maximalism. Brunschvicg was ultimately a progressive and reformist republican, at best a socialist sympathiser, who – while not being a militant like his wife, and while admiring Jaurès123 – was close to the positions of the Parti républicain radical et radical-socialiste, which upheld a combination of individual rights (e.g. private property), secularism/anti-Clericalism and social justice. This party, the most famous leader of which was the fierce dreyfusard Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929), claimed to be the heir of the values of 1791, and originally distinguished itself from the still too conservative liberal republicanism of the previous generation, that of Léon Gambetta (1838–1882) and Jules Ferry (1832–1893). The Radical-Socialist Party played a crucial governmental role between its foundation in 1901 and 1919, representing a social segment constituted mostly by peasants and petit bourgeois. However, despite its social reformism, it failed to address the needs of the least protected workers, who were more drawn to the SFIO, whose politics initially oscillated between the social-democratic ideals of Jaurès and the Marxism of Jules Guesde (1845–1922).124 The break between Radicals and Socialists was consumed after Clemenceau violently repressed the miners’ and the wine-growers’ strikes in 1906.125 Furthermore, paradoxical as it may seem, the Radical Party was traditionally hostile to women’s suffrage, but Cécile hoped to raise awareness among her fellow members from within.126 Definitely, thus, the Brunschvicgs were hardly revolutionary socialists. Still, after the SFIO, led by Léon Blum (1872–1950),127 decided to remain loyal to the Second International and parted ways with Ludovic Frossart (1889–1946) and Boris Souvarine (1895–1984), who went on to found the Section française de l’Internationale communiste and join the Comintern, in 1936, Cécile accepted Édouard Daladier’s (1884–1970) invitation to serve as undersecretary of state for national education in the first government of the Front populaire (a leftwing coalition gathering radicals, socialists and communists), with Blum as prime minister.128 This government was supported by a number of civil society organisations, such as the Ligue des droits de l’homme and the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes, and managed to pass important tax and education reforms, supporting families, women and public sector workers, and new labour laws introducing the right to strike, collective bargaining, a 40-hour week, twelve paid annual holidays and wage raises for the workers. However, inflation rose dramatically, the government failed to stimulate industrial production and the economy remained stagnant. Ultimately, Blum’s major programme of rearmament, launched to keep pace with the growing German military threat, diverted resources from social reforms.129 In order to better appreciate Brunschvicg’s political views, one should turn to his interventions within the contexts of the numerous civil society organisations to which he adhered, in particular to Desjardins’ Union pour l’action morale/Union pour la vérité, of which he became co-director in 1924.130 Desjardins became one of the closest friends of Brunschvicg, who would dedicate to him and his two sons killed

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in war his 1942 book on Descartes et Pascal lecteurs de Montaigne. Together with the writers André Gide (1869–1951) and Charles Du Bos (1882–1939), founders of the Nouvelle Revue française (1908), they would become the driving force behind the Décades de Pontigny, a series of international intellectual meeting founded by Desjardins in 1910.131 Indeed, as we will see in more detail in Chapter 7, Brunschvicg was also a staunch Europeanist and a strong believer in intellectual cooperation as the only key towards continental peace and progress. It is perhaps just slightly vague, but ultimately correct, to see in Brunschvicg the embodiment of ‘both the philosophical-republican spirit of the pre-war Republic and the principles of the Union during the Locarno-era’.132 Within the context of Desjardins’s association, Brunschvicg commented on a number of concrete issues, from prison reform to the separation between Church and State, from internationalism to colonialism, from the condition of women to the status of public servants, from taxation to the health of French culture.133 The sociopolitical constellation I have traced so far defines a political horizon in which the dominant ideological framework was reformist socialism imbued with regulative ideals (Kantian in a very loose sense, but stricto sensu in Brunschvicg’s case: ‘Kantianism oblige’134), namely, that of justice within society and international peace among nations. Though more sympathetic towards socialism à la Jaurès than Halévy, and definitely less engaged, Brunschvicg shared the ideological profile of his friend: a liberal raised on the values of the Revolution (civil equality and popular sovereignty), with the addition of a sensitivity to the inequities and social imbalances of the industrialised world. This particular kind of liberalism sought to figure out precisely ‘how to safeguard precious individual liberties while at the same time addressing socio-economic needs; how to foster individualism while at the same time recognising the broadening administrative responsibilities of the state; how to balance individual emancipation, on the one hand, with political and socio-economic organisation, on the other’.135 This explains why for Brunschvicg, as we shall see, the individual is certainly important as a political point of reference, as a moral and rational agent, but not as a singularity. Analogously, in philosophy he despised the ‘amour propre’, the narcissistic investments, the exaltation of the unattainable individuality. Throughout his life, Brunschvicg developed the (loosely Spinozian) idea that our dignity as individuals relies not on our particularity, on our irreducible idiosyncrasy per se, but rather on our participation in a common universal intelligence, in the realm of pure intelligibility revealed by science. One may borrow from the Recherche what Proust says about the narrator’s sympathy for the works of his literary idol Bergotte, namely that their minds must be somehow connected: ‘For my intelligence must be one, and perhaps indeed there exists but a single intelligence of which everyone is a cotenant, toward which each of us from the core of his own separate body turns his eyes, as in a theatre where, if everyone has his own separate seat, there is on the other hand but a single stage.’136 Unfortunately, history would present the idealism of Brunschvicg and his generation with a traumatic awakening. The First World War affected only superficially the humanitarian democratic credo, but the post-1929 world – the ‘era of tyrannies’ evoked by Halévy in 1936 in a session of the Société française

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de philosophie presided by Brunschvicg himself137 – would prove to be a far more inhospitable context for idealist politics. In 1931 – witnessing the end of the order of peace sanctioned by the Treaty of Versailles and of the project of the League of Nations – Brunschvicg wondered whether the ambition of realising a ‘vision of a humanity reconciled with itself by the light of a universal reason’138 was not too pretentious, an ideal beyond the reach of the actual capacities of men. Two years later, he asked why, among young generations, France’s ‘trinary motto’ was met with irony and sarcasm, answering that the problem was that the Republic had failed to substantiate its ideals, which had remained a mere discourse.139 At the end of the Second World War, Simone de Beauvoir would stress the predicaments of moral and political idealism, which abided by ‘great idols inscribed in an intelligible heaven – Justice, Law, and Truth’, and posited an all too radical alternative between supreme laws and earthly ends. Such a model of praxis was too radical in its very ‘Kantian’ idealism, based upon standards that no truly effective political action could actually meet.140 There was no doubt, she wrote, that ‘French pacifists in the 1920s and the 1930s served the cause of peace poorly. It is absurd to ensure the defeat of those values that one wants to triumph, out of respect for them’.141 The point was not to turn to an unscrupulous and ruthless realism, but to reduce the antinomy between necessity and contingency, thought and action, ends and means, to formulate a project and adapt it to the present situation, preventing the absoluteness of the ideal from smothering the urgency for concrete results. Raymond Aron observed something analogous when he remarked that Brunschvicg’s philosophy was compatible with two possible, contradictory political stances: the first was a ‘democratic individualism’ putting its emphasis on moral education and a pedagogy of autonomy; the other was a ‘doctrine of action’ that, without compromising on the ‘ideal of freedom for all’, considered strategically the chances presented by the historical randomness and the specific conjuncture. Unfortunately, Brunschvicg privileged the former as the most philosophically dignified and disparaged the latter, which was probably the most effective one, but which for him pertained to vulgar politics and the ‘servitude of the politician’.142 His critical idealism, preaching the values of scientific disinterestedness, was thus condemned to a serious predicament insofar as it was unable to address the social reality of human ‘collectives’ and precluded any ‘hope for a reconciliation of all men’: ‘Between the scientists and the mass, the abyss is so large as it once was between the priests and the ignorant worshippers. Science establishes the fact of inequality as well as the right to equality.’143 The destiny of humanity, Aron suggested, must be entrusted not to a metaphysical humanity, to an abstract community of minds, but to a ‘reasoned conduct’ analysing the actual margins for manoeuvre for which the historical situation allowed.144 For Brunschvicg’s young critics, true ethics required that man assumed his own freedom, that is, his own transcendence towards the world, giving up the security and the consolation provided by the compliance with the Idea. What the generation of Brunschvicg seemed incapable of accepting was precisely this: that, as de Beauvoir said, ‘To come down to earth means accepting defilement, failure, horror; it means admitting that it is impossible to save everything; and what is lost is lost forever.’145

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In summer 1940, though, when the Nazis invaded France, Brunschvicg had experienced first-hand such a comedown. He had learned precisely that it was impossible to save everything. After he had left for the south of the country, the German authorities, despite Jean Wahl’s intervention, had dismembered his library and archive,146 which would be reconstituted only in 2001.147 Ill and persecuted, Brunschvicg had died seeing his idealistic beliefs challenged, if not destroyed, by the most nightmarish sleep of reason.

2

The nature of the intellect and the critique of Bergsonism

La vérité est faite d’oppositions, cela se voit bien ; mais il n’est pas sûr que ce soit d’oppositions exactes, comme celles qu’invente la logique. Souvent on se ressemble plus entre ennemis qu’entre amis : concurrence des espèces voisines.1

Introduction When introducing a forgotten thinker, an effective means of highlighting the peculiarity of his theoretical positions is to proceed in a negative manner, by way of contrast. In this chapter, I intend to introduce the reader to the philosophy of Léon Brunschvicg by comparing it with the thought of his friend and rival Henri Bergson. This is all the more worthwhile if one considers the many affinities and divergences that characterised their personal and theoretical relationship. In fact, it is beyond doubt that Bergson was the most popular thinker in fin-desiècle French philosophy, which is often reduced to Bergsonism alone as its most paradigmatic embodiment. Bergson – who was ten years older than Brunschvicg – published three of his four capital works at the turn of the century: the Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889), Matter and Memory (1896) and the Creative Evolution (1907).2 These books were as many attempts to apprehend the dimension of absolute or, as he said, ‘integral’ experience (i.e. not relative to our own scientific and practical point of view) and to establish a ‘positive metaphysics’ that would fit and complement, if not ground, the advancements of contemporary psychology, biology and physics. This project amounted to a powerful answer to the growing explicative ambitions of the hard sciences, and was surely among the most sophisticated philosophical attempts to grapple head-on with their experimental results. In fact, Bergson had been able to cut out a space for philosophical speculation precisely in a territory where the sciences claimed to have put their flag, by showing that their explanatory models were surely effective and fit for practical needs but theoretically partial.

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Metaphysics, as Bergson famously put it in the 1903 ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, was indeed for him a science that could ‘dispense’ and ‘break with symbols’,3 meaning ultimately the formal sets of concepts, signs and formulas that philosophy and positive science usually employ to make experience intelligible, measurable and ready to be acted upon. It is understood that this stance did not amount to a dismissal of science as such. In a 1902 letter, for example, Bergson expressed his hostility towards any reduction of science to an arbitrary symbolism; of course, he wrote, ‘there is a great deal of contingency and symbolism in science; it is part of the discursive intelligence. But there is also a part of intuition’,4 which was for him its most lasting and fruitful component. Thus, the point was not to jettison science as a vain and unfounded discursive enterprise, but rather to unveil, so to speak, the ‘transcendental illusion’ that made people mistake symbolic representations for reality itself. Consequently, in the Essay Bergson lambasted the reduction of the qualitative multiplicity of psychological duration to the mechanistic (spatialised and quantitative) model of Newtonian-Laplacian physics operated by contemporary psychophysiology and associationism. By doing so, he safeguarded the actuality of freedom as a realm of spontaneous causation and motivation. In Matter and Memory, he reacted against the principle of neurological localisation and tried to formulate a new understanding of the relationship between the mind and the brain. By means of a complex theory of matter as a dynamic field of ‘images’ (neither solid bodies nor mere representations), he understood perception as the bodily operation that segments reality according to the functions of the organism and the practical needs of action, whereas memory is the purely spiritual repository of past experiences which orients and gives coherence to action itself. In this context, the brain was just the ‘dispatcher’ that presents environmental stimuli to consciousness and translates the determinations of the mind into external operations. Bergson was thus able to anchor ontologically the realm of inner duration, which appeared to be somewhat solipsistic in the Essay. Finally, in the international ‘bestseller’5 Creative Evolution, he resorted to the new notion of intuition, brought to the fore in the ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, to criticise both the mechanist and the finalist forms of evolutionism, which, relying on the ‘cinematographic mechanism’ of the intelligence, were unable to grasp the creative élan of nature in fieri, beyond the discontinuous snapshots of forms and states.6 Brunschvicg was initially sceptical of Bergson’s philosophy. Among the rationalist/ idealist founders of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, the Essay had been received lukewarmly due to its mélange of psychological and metaphysical, almost neo-Platonic, assertions.7 Bergson’s choices of terminology and examples, winking at literature and aesthetics, surely did not help him convey an exact outlook of his ideas. One need only think of the notion of ‘immediate data’ – which were not for him the data that hit first our senses, but rather those qualitative dimensions that one obtains by ceasing to conceive of inner life in spatial/quantitative terms – and the references to artistic and mystical experiences that punctuated Bergson’s texts. All this surely contributed to blurring the properly rational epistemological elements of his methodology, which in no way was meant to be an irrationalism.

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Many of these misunderstandings can be found in a retrospective assessment of the philosophical year 1893, where Brunschvicg and Halévy deplored the ‘life of irreflection and instinct’, similar to a ‘state of nature’, to which Bergson wanted philosophy to return, asking rhetorically: if duration is our immediate being, why is it not given to us immediately? Why do we need to become aware of our deep self?8 Against Bergson’s ‘philosophy of becoming’, they sided with a ‘philosophy of the devoir être’ where priority was given to thought as a principle of systematisation and rationalisation.9 That Bergson’s hazy style was somehow an obstacle was quite clear since the beginning. In a 1902 letter to Halévy, Brunschvicg admitted once again not being at ease with his confused and confusing language.10 All this did not foster relationships between the two fronts, and in 1908 Halévy himself recognised that ‘In spite of all our courtesies and all our persistence, there is among us some hostility toward his [Bergson’s] philosophy, and in the Revue there is a foundation of dogmatic rationalism that he distrusts.’11 To make things worse, the popular success of Bergson in the first two decades of the twentieth century made it difficult for contemporary thinkers to separate what he actually said or meant from what his overzealous acolytes popularised as ‘Bergsonism’, a ‘new philosophy’ that had for many the same revolutionary potential as nothing less than the Critique of Pure Reason12 (a line of thought that would last throughout the century up to Deleuze13). Brunschvicg himself learned first-hand the aggressiveness of such disciples. However, he came to appreciate Bergson’s personality and ideas over time, valorising as many aspects of his thought as he criticised,14 to the point that, by 1927, Brunschvicg had reconsidered his first impressions of the Essay giving a positive appraisal of the book in light of the overall coherence of Bergson’s oeuvre.15 Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution surely contributed towards redressing the perception of extreme subjectivism that hovered over the Essay. Unfortunately, the publication of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion in 1937 destabilised once again Brunschvicg’s opinion. The long and glowing review of the text that Brunschvicg wrote for the Nouvelles littéraires was a mere gesture of courtesy.16 Bergson himself was aware of this and thanked Brunschvicg for his kindness and the ‘impartiality’ demonstrated in extolling ideas that were not always ‘congenial’ to him.17 And indeed, if one is to believe Jean Guitton (1901–1999), the great Catholic philosopher and loyal disciple of Bergson, when the book appeared Brunschvicg reacted to the chapters where Bergson flirted with Christianism, quipping: ‘Poor Bergson! As Auguste Comte in his old age, he returns to infancy.’18 In fact, the overall esteem and friendship that, in his mature years, Brunschvicg nourished for Bergson did not prevent him from always being suspicious about what he perceived as the mystical atmospheres of his thought. When Gaston Bachelard published his two books – The Intuition of the Instant (1932)19 and The Dialectic of Duration (1936)20 – against Bergson’s main tenets, namely intuition and continuity, Brunschvicg was always ready to praise and suggest reading them.21 In conclusion, as Jankélévitch acknowledged, Brunschvicg always remained ambivalent towards Bergson, being at once ‘frightened and attracted’.22 In a sense, they were at the same time too close to ignore each other and too distant to fully agree with one another – but the reverse was also true: too close to completely overlap and too distant to actually clash violently.

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Dividing lines Let us add colour and context to the alleged Brunschvicg–Bergson dualism. Indeed, French philosophy of the first three decades of the twentieth century can easily come across in many respects as a drama with two main characters, corresponding to two contrasting options: Bergson’s psycho-biologist and intuitionist empiricism and Brunschvicg’s epistemological and intellectualist idealism. Bergson himself once said that, in its historical development, French thought had always been embodied in couples of philosophers, one more intellectualist and the other more ‘sentimental’: Descartes/Pascal, Bossuet/Fénelon, Voltaire/Rousseau, Comte/Biran.23 It would be easy to add Brunschvicg/ Bergson to this list, all the more so since the former, towards the end of his life, ranked the latter among the Pascalian thinkers (and implicitly himself among the Cartesians).24 And according to some, the opposition between the two would amount precisely to the ‘general framework’ defining the scenario of the main debates of the time.25 Such an assessment – which neglects the less ‘mediatic’ but still hugely influential teaching and oeuvres of Alain26 – could be deemed fairly exaggerated. Nonetheless, it captures a sort of air du temps, which mirrors a specific sociological phenomenon: the rise of the figure of the ‘philosopher-author’, of the philosophical ‘star’. In fact, the generation of Bergson and Brunschvicg could benefit from the consolidation of the philosophical field under the Third Republic, with a rise in the number of university positions, the birth of journals and scientific societies and the establishment of a larger publishing market.27 Furthermore, the philosophical discourse timidly began to circulate outside the walls of academia, producing the first waves of enthusiasm for fashionable doctrines, in particular for pessimism and irrationalism.28 This created a sort of twilight zone between two categories that, in his analysis of the 1924 elections, Albert Thibaudet, a former student of Bergson, had neatly distinguished: the philosophy professor and the independent writer, the ‘libre écrivain’.29 At the end of the nineteenth century, one witnesses thus the dawn of the distinction between ‘producers’ and ‘reproducers’ of knowledge, that is, between ‘creative’ philosophers and simple philosophy professors.30 Brunschvicg and Bergson embodied in the most paradigmatic manner this consecration of the philosopher as both a public figure endowed with an intellectual prestige and an academic authority. There were however some important differences: while Bergson never held a university position that could enable him to wield any influence whatsoever on the orientation of the official academic philosophy (he moved almost directly from the lycée Henri-IV to the Collège de France, apart from a brief stint at the École normale supérieure from 1898 to 1900), Brunschvicg exercised his intellectual hold on the Sorbonne for more than thirty years. In a way, as Chimisso has remarked, Brunschvicg ‘identified with the French republican institutions and their ethos’ more than Bergson.31 Thus, despite both being extremely influential, they enforced their charisma in different ways: Bergson as a public ‘guru’ from his chair at the Collège de France, an institution whose method of teaching – free, public lectures open to anyone – facilitated the circulation of ideas outside the precincts of the academic halls; Brunschvicg, on the other hand, as a professor occupying the most important position in France’s biggest and most relevant institution, the Sorbonne.32 In this sense, Bergson

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was surely the more popular of the two, his influence spreading also to the milieus of the literary and artistic avant-gardes and to the salons of the cultivated middle class.33 He was in fact the one who really held the polarising power within the philosophical field of the Third Republic, dividing it between those who worshipped him and those who rejected his thought. Over the last decades, many observers and scholars have tried to provide an account of Bergson’s impact on the intellectual landscape of the early twentieth century. Of course, schematic and heuristic partitions of the Bergsonian and anti-Bergsonian fronts could be – and have been – formulated, but they should not be taken at face value. Brunschvicg’s case shows that nuanced positions were possible. On a personal level, the relationship between Bergson and Brunschvicg was marked not by a stark opposition but rather by a mutual intellectual respect with both shared and conflicting points. Furthermore, as we have seen, they took part in common institutional endeavours, such as the Societas Spinoziana and the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, not to mention the Société française de philosophie. It seems that, starting from the 1920s, their personal relationship became stronger, as attested also by the tone of their correspondence.34 In his testament, Bergson even included Brunschvicg among the friends that his family should rely upon against the insults to his memory that he saw coming from his ‘mortal enemies’ after his death.35 From a theoretical perspective, Bergson and Brunschvicg can be considered as two sides of the same spiritualist coin. They share indeed a common feature: a dynamic and creative conception of the life of the mind. But if for Bergson this dynamism meant the generative becoming of nature and the plurality of qualitative durations that one can apprehend through intuition, according to Brunschvicg the mental life was primarily intelligence, a power of rational creation and epistemic critique that formalised reality. Was this just a nominalistic quarrel or were there actual differences between these two conceptions? As Brunschvicg declared in 1928, celebrating Bergson’s Nobel Prize in the Revue de Paris, they agreed on many points, sharing the will to overcome the fixed and static framework of the Newtonian and Laplacian visions of physics, as well as a distaste for many contemporary’ doctrines: Renouvier’s ‘chimeric ambition’ of an eternal a priori, the associationism of Anglo-Saxon empiricism, German psychophysiology, Taine’s reductionism and Spencer’s deterministic model of evolution.36 However, we have to remember that, although the coin might be the same, Brunschvicg and Bergson still constitute two opposed sides. Brunschvicg’s spiritualism presents in fact some peculiar undertones that distinguish it from Bergson’s, and has to be articulated with other key labels Brunschvicg himself adopted to qualify his thought.

Idealism, spiritualism, intellectualism Throughout his philosophical path, Brunschvicg would emphasise as the main tenet of his doctrine the alliance between idealism, spiritualism and intellectualism qua ‘constitutive forms of critique’.37 1. By idealism, Brunschvicg meant two things. On a strictly philosophical level, he claimed in a classical sense that one cannot grasp the world directly, getting

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rid of his own representations: ‘The world as I know it is within myself; if it were completely external, it would be unknowable.’38 Put differently, ‘the mind is the totality; the universe we represent to ourselves is in turn a fragment of the overall representation’ of our mind,39 which means that there is only one world, that is, that of consciousness. This is not to say that we live in a solipsistic dimension. Reality surely exists and has the capacity of orienting our knowledge. What Brunschvicg meant is simply that the ‘constitutive features’ of the world are determined by the mind from a heterogeneity of primitive sensations (the rohe Stoff, to put it with Kant). In classic Kantian fashion, Brunschvicg distinguished sharply between the ‘chaos’ that forms the ‘actual continuum of my representation’, which is nothing but a ‘kaleidoscope’, and its analytical categorisation, which provides the world with its proper ‘constituent characters’.40 A true consciousness of things arises when I synthetise my representations blocking their wild circulation and organising them in a coherent manner under an idea, which for Brunschvicg was ultimately a relation, or a concept, which is a general and abstract idea.41 However, there is a more specific sense in which Brunschvicg’s philosophy is an idealism. In fact, as the adventure of contemporary science clearly illustrates, the real that we consider objective is not so much the product of a construction in the sense of the vulgar idealism, as the outcome of an intellectual formalisation. In this sense, idealism is the true realism, for the affirmation of the real is never ‘a simple and isolable operation [démarche]’.42 Therefore, as Brunschvicg made clear in a note to the entry ‘Idealism’ in Lalande’s Vocabulaire, idealism maintains that every metaphysics can be reduced to a theory of knowledge: ‘The affirmation of being is based on the determination of being as known.’43 2. Brunschvicg could thus speak of intellectualism because the activity of the mind manifests itself through the translation of the entirety of reality into the laws and concepts of the intelligence.44 Contrary to what happens in Bergson, who valorises the intuitive breakthroughs of the mind as a gateway to the mobile continuity of reality, Brunschvicg posits judgement – that is, the synthetic expression of a relation – as the key activity of the mind.45 In Brunschvicg, every step of the life of consciousness is oriented towards the affirmation of a pure intelligibility: ‘To perceive is to judge. The synthesis that constitutes the representation of the universe is an intellectual work. To the images circulating within itself, the mind adds well-defined relations that confer an intelligible organisation on the sensible content.’46 The proper and fully deployed intellectual activity, which science exemplifies in the most paradigmatic way (‘the mind reveals itself in science’47), consists in an endless interlinking of judgements, that is, in a work of reflection. Such a reflective nature ensures the progress of knowledge and testifies to the mind’s inner dynamism. 3. Finally, Brunschvicg’s philosophy is a spiritualism due to this very dynamism of the mind. Science, in fact, bears witness to a relentless activity of conceptual creation that is the distinctive trait of the ‘mind’ (in French ‘esprit’, but Brunschvicg also uses interchangeably ‘intellect [intellect]’, ‘intelligence [intelligence]’, ‘understanding [entendement]’, ‘reason [raison]’ and ‘consciousness

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[conscience]’, given that, for him, the mind is not divided into different faculties).48 Sure, there will always be a certain incommensurability between the richness of scientific theories and models and the actual complexity of the world. However, this very gap leaves room for the intelligence to intervene with its creative and productive power. As Brunschvicg puts it, ‘the mind is an indefinite power of intellectual creation’.49 Marching towards a progressive refinement of our scientific model of the world, we attain not only a better understanding of reality but also a deeper insight into the functioning of our own mind. ‘Reality is not uncoupled from the mind; contrariwise, it is implied in the mind’s inner development; reality transforms with the mind and goes through all the steps of its living evolution.’50 Even more radically, Brunschvicg writes that ‘The final end of the progress we accomplish from perception to science is not the nature of things, but rather the nature of the mind’,51 and this because every concept or idea, every law, amounts to a single step in the human path towards intelligibility.52

Time and judgement From this brief outline of Brunschvicg’s stance, one can already draw a conclusion concerning his proximities and divergences with regard to Bergson: despite the shared need of overcoming the static image of the life of the mind, Brunschvicg’s critical idealism is incompatible with Bergson’s ‘metaphysics of nature’ and with the extension of duration from the inner life to reality itself (the shift from Time and Free Will to the Creative Evolution): ‘Where all hope of a metaphysics of nature is removed, there appears the freedom characteristic of a philosophy of the mind.’53 Furthermore, while Bergson acknowledged the insights of common sense – ‘There is an external reality which is given immediately to our mind. Common sense is right in this point against the idealism and realism of the philosophers’54 – Brunschvicg posits a radical break between the ‘puerile’ naivety of common sense and the ‘maturity’ of rational/scientific understanding – a break that will be further reaffirmed against Bergson’s continuism by Bachelard. As the latter writes in The Dialectic of Duration: ‘Scientific psychology can … no more invoke a first impression than astronomy can rely on the Book of Genesis. We neither think with our first impressions, love with our original sensibility, nor want with our initial and substantive will. There is the same distance between our childhood and our present self as between dream and action.’55 For Bachelard and Brunschvicg alike, continuity and reality are constructs, that is, the results of judgements entailing a dialectic between affirmation and negation, doubts and certainty, being and nothingness. ‘Bergson takes psychological intuition to be a priori a continuous thread, imposing an essential unity on experience as though experience could never be contradictory or dramatic.’56 This leads to the final macro-difference between the two. As Deleuze insisted repeatedly in his almost desperate attempt to formalise Bergson’s method, Bergsonism is ultimately a doctrine that begins by separating what has been improperly mixed: time and space, quality and quantity, memory and perception, instinct and life, and so on. This dualism is supposed to eliminate the false problems created by such undue confusions and then

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eliminate itself, giving way to a new monism.57 Brunschvicg, instead, could not see in this polarisation of experience but an artificial and ultimately specious construction – bad metaphysics, closer to literary invention than to an actual analysis of how the mind works (indeed, Bergson’s choice of terms and examples to clarify his theories surely contributed to many misunderstandings). The distinction between Brunschvicg’s and Bergson’s different ways to spiritualism – between a ‘philosophy of judgement’ and a ‘philosophy of nature’, between an idealism and an empiricism – was couched by Brunschvicg himself in a 1921–2 course at the Sorbonne entitled La philosophie de l’esprit. Bergson had to be praised because, instead of assimilating spiritual life to the elementary drives of instinct and evolution, he had shown in Creative Evolution how the life of the mind, with its creative operations, stems from a dynamic which is proper to biology itself.58 This amounted to a redressing of the pessimist and decadent vitalism of, for example, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Unlike them, Bergson never sought to reduce consciousness to an unfathomable primordial will, but rather tried to ‘re-establish the kinship between individual and universal life, instinctual action and artistic creation’.59 His main limitation, however, consisted in a misguided conception of the intelligence qua analytic and decomposing faculty that is ‘at ease’ only while operating on inert matter, that can provide a ‘translation’ of life only ‘in terms of inertia’.60 Bergson identified the intelligence with its ‘exteriorised’ – or, one can say, alienated – version. He unduly reduced the ‘inwardness of the intelligence’ to the ‘exteriority of matter’.61 According to Brunschvicg, however, by presenting intuition, as he did in the Creative Evolution, as the instinct made aware of itself, the immediate grasp of the becoming of nature, Bergson was forced to admit that it was only reflection, the folding of consciousness upon itself, that opened up the realm of freedom and unveiled the continuity between nature and the mind.62 The ‘substantial unity of life’ that constituted the main tenet of Creative Evolution, and which Bergson inherited from Schelling and Ravaisson, but which was also a notion shared by Spinoza and Schopenhauer, was not something that required a different gateway, other than intelligence, for it was precisely a construction of intelligence.63 Despite its achievements, Bergsonian philosophy was always in danger of falling into the ‘realist’ (i.e. anti-intellectualist) prejudice of the old vitalism, that is, elevating a model that was relative to the intellect to a substantial reality. In other words, Bergson flirted ambiguously with cosmological and ontological temptations. Furthermore, his ‘vital dynamism’ had a ‘realist’ character precisely because it implied a sort of resignation to the ‘monotonous rhythm’ of duration, to the ‘vis a tergo’ of the vital élan (Brunschvicg referred to the passage where Bergson wrote that ‘the élan is finite, and it has been given once for all’64). This is why, as Brunschvicg made clear at the beginning of his course, the passage from Descartes’s intellectualism to Bergson’s version of spiritualist amounted to ‘an overturning of spiritual values’: Bergson’s spiritualism was not a ‘spiritualism of the idea’, like Brunschvicg’s/ Descartes’s, but rather a philosophy of nature and action where ‘the Soul was above the Idea’.65 In basic terms, thus, the problem with Bergson was that he still sought in intuition a privileged and immediate access to reality, beyond the texture of intelligible relations

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that for Brunschvicg solely constitutes the world. Bergson completely neglected the process of intersubjective verification and self-criticism that characterised the authentic scientific rationality. He reduced science to its practical value, neglecting its inventiveness and inner transformative character. This led him to search elsewhere – that is, to invent – an alternative mode of apprehending reality meant to establish a contact with some absolute dimension of experience – which, by the way, was ultimately the reason why he completely failed to understand Einstein’s relativity. In a late text, Brunschvicg explicitly chastised the Bergsonian and Jamesian dream of a capacity allowing us to transcend the human condition ‘in order to touch … the absolute of matter, of the soul, of God’.66 Against the ‘abstract empiricism’ of John Stuart Mill, Bergson and James advocated a ‘radical’ or ‘integral’ empiricism that nonetheless was grounded upon the same ‘realist’ naivety. Therefore, when one criticised, in a Kantian sense, the pretentions of Mill’s empiricism or Taine’s positivism, thereby exposing them as fallacious, Bergson’s intuitionist alternative disappeared as well, as they both stemmed from the same ingenuous faith in the immediacy of experience. For Brunschvicg, there existed a gap separating perception and judgement, which amounted to the same leap humanity had accomplished the moment it ‘evolved’ from the ingenuous Aristotelian belief in the concreteness of the sensible world – the realm of ‘deceiving appearances’ and ‘ephemeral ghosts’ – to the rational modelisation of modern physics.67 Despite its many merits, and despite its obvious differences from a ‘vulgar realism’, Bergson’s intuition marked a step back from the ‘scientific spiritualism’ right into the dogmatism of the reality-in-itself. Already in the last pages of his PhD dissertation La modalité du jugement, Brunschvicg claimed precisely that ‘it is impossible for a purely metaphysical method to explain the essential nature of the mind’,68 where ‘metaphysics’ refers here to every attempt at fathoming the naked core of reality, whether in the object (empiricism, vitalism, etc.) or in the subject itself (like in Hegel’s ‘panlogism’). Even more radically, in the introduction he maintained that ‘every doctrine … presenting a non-representational faculty (feeling or the will) as superior to and independent from representation is a non-philosophical doctrine’.69 Although Bergson was not mentioned, it has been suggested that a criticism of the theories of the Essay might be concealed, for example, when Brunschvicg asserted the priority of judgement over time. In a footnote, he said in fact: ‘Those judgements having time as their object are outside time; in other words, the spontaneous consciousness of life which flows across the moments of time implies a centre of reflection that does not pass with the course of time.’70 In L’expérience humaine et la causalité physique, Brunschvicg rejected the Kantian conception of time as a purely a priori dimension. Nevertheless, he averred that it was in Kant himself that we can find an alternative model of temporality. In the ‘Second analogy of experience’, in fact, time was defined in relation to the principle of causality, not as the neutral form of an indifferent content but as the result of experimental procedures, where what is at stake is the formulation of causal predictions.71 This meant that time was inherently linked to the activity of judgement. In the dissertation, Brunschvicg had indeed made clear that one should not ‘separate the abstract form of the succession from the actual moments that succeed one another and that are judgements, because it is judgement that provides us with

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the notion of being and, therefore, with the notion of time’.72 This means that, by positing being as the external matter of predicates (the copula), we establish also the forms of anteriority and posterity: the past derives from the ‘judgement of observation [constatation]’ or ‘theoretic judgement’, whereas the future derives from the ‘judgement of action’ or ‘practical judgement’. And there is nothing paradoxical in the fact that the division of time is grounded on the distinction between forms of judgement: If time was real, only the present would exist. The past and the future being conceived – and were they not conceived, any notion of existence (of the external world as well of the thinking subject) would fade – then, at the same time, a relation is conceived between the different parts of time, and this relation cannot belong to one of those parts.73

The two main dimensions of time are then posited by the modalities of judgement: the past that we cannot but ascertain (theoretic judgement) is determined and necessary, while the future where our actions will be deployed (practical judgement) is undetermined and contingent. This is another way, different from the Bergsonian one, of asserting freedom (indetermination) at the core of reality. To put it simply, in Brunschvicg time is not defined, as it happens not only with Bergson but also with Kant, as the ‘inner sense’ of the subject but rather as a dimension pertaining to the external relation between things, events and actions. The subject, for him, is in fact ‘essentially activity’, that is, pure indetermination, which means that the only way to know it is through its external manifestations. According to Brunschvicg, in fact, it is impossible to attain a pure interiority as well as a pure exteriority. The latter would be a form of brutal empiricism, the negation of every intelligibility, while the pure interiority, the ideal of a perfect unity and intelligibility, cannot become an object of judgement precisely because it is its ideal. The absolute, for Brunschvicg, is precisely the pure intelligibility and the perfect unity of the life of the mind of which every judgement bears witness.

Intelligence or/as intuition The intelligence is not for Brunschvicg a faculty among the others, as Bergson and his followers believed; by contrast, it is endowed with the same attributes that Bergson gave to duration or the élan; it is the ultimate force acting in the universe. According to his disciple Raymond Aron, ‘Brunschvicg attached to the intelligence the virtues Bergson ascribed to intuition’,74 while for Jean Piaget the notion of ‘intellectual activity’ was ‘strangely similar’ to that of ‘vital élan’.75 The only life that counted for him was thus that of the mind: ‘reason is a living being [un être qui vit]’, as he used to say in his courses.76 Along the same lines is the parallelism between Brunschvicg’s intelligence and Bergson’s intuition established by the former’s student Albert Lautman.77 And indeed, as to vindicate these opinions, Brunschvicg did not hesitate to speak, in quasiBergsonian wordings, of a ‘creative intelligence’78 characterised by the ‘élan’ of an ‘originary dynamism’.79

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This terminological choice is easily explained on the ground of Brunschvicg’s ‘incontestable sympathy’80 for the essential insight of Bergson’s philosophy. One should not neglect the fact that Brunschvicg’s final masterpiece, the one that he considered his most important book, Le Progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale (1927), is dedicated precisely to Bergson. As Brunschvicg himself acknowledged in the Étapes, Bergson had to be credited for having highlighted the creative power of the mind against the dogmatism of the ancient intellectualism (i.e. the Aristotelian and Scholastic one, affecting also the Kantian criticism, but even for example the abstract astronomy of the nineteenth century).81 In his last text, written between 1942 and 1943, Brunschvicg claimed that Bergson’s Essay taught him ‘not only to exorcise the spectre of transcendence, but also to eliminate … social determination [and] the pressure from habits and trends … thereby bringing forth the thoughts, the feelings, the aspirations that truly come from us and constitute our personality in its depth’.82 Fifteen years before, in the Progrès de la conscience, Brunschvicg devoted an entire chapter to what he termed ‘Bergsonian intuition’, where Bergson was presented as the heir of a tradition of spiritualist critique stemming from Biran but having in Boutroux its most important representative. In the analysis of the Bergsonian corpus articulated by Brunschvicg, two things appear to be particularly valorised: on the one hand, the critique of the excessive rigidity of the Kantian system; on the other hand, the proximity between Bergson’s and Spinoza’s conceptions of intuition. I will deal with Brunschvicg’s readings of Kant and Spinoza in the following chapter. What matters, for now, is to stress once again that Brunschvicg found in Bergson an ally in his formulation of a dynamic conception of the mind. Indeed, what Bergson and Brunschvicg both sought was a principle of creation, of ‘openness’, that is, a philosophy opposed to any deterministic or reductionist conception of nature and life – a philosophy, ultimately, asserting freedom as the inner kernel or process of reality.83 However, while Bergson discovered this principle in the realm of pure becoming opened up by intuition, in Brunschvicg’s idealism everything was internal to the intelligence and its ‘dialectics’. For Brunschvicg, intuition was an alternative to intelligence only if by ‘intelligence’ one meant the abstract analytic faculty of the concepts, in the old Aristotelian sense, embodied in the most paradigmatic manner in the nineteenth century by Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893) in his 1870 De l’intelligence.84 Taine had claimed in fact that the intelligence was a ‘faculty of knowing’ that, far from indicating a ‘mysterious and profound essence … hidden under the flow of transient facts’, could be decomposed into its more elementary components (judgements and axioms into sensations, signs, images, ideas, recollections, etc.).85 If, on the contrary, one conceived of intelligence as the creative and critical movement of the mind as such, Bergson’s opposition waned. In this sense, intuition was, like in Descartes and Spinoza, intelligence to the highest degree, the purely intellectual grasp of abstract relations.86 As Brunschvicg wrote in L’idéalisme contemporain, from his point of view there existed no opposition between concept and intuition – a non-Bergsonian notion if ever there was one: Concept is what explain, whereas intuition is what has to be explained. Analysis does not suppress … the spontaneity of the inner activity, any more than the

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Rediscovering Léon Brunschvicg’s Critical Idealism discovery of the numerical relations in acoustics do not destroy the sensible or aesthetic nature of acoustic sensations. Even more, the concept does not simply clarify intuition, but also justifies it as a reality within the order of thought.87

Insisting on the immediate, pure character of intuition means rendering it similar to the pathological phenomena of hallucination and self-suggestion. On the contrary, one has to understand that every intuition is a judgement in disguise or in potentia. Provocatively, Brunschvicg even specified that ‘the intelligence is not a faculty of immediate data, but rather a function of progressive elaboration’.88 In L’expérience humaine, Brunschvicg regretted that Bergson had conceived of intelligence, and notably science, in the guise of the classic mathematical physics, which had been overcome by the evolution of human thought.89 However, Brunschvicg seemed to explain this opposition on the basis of a mere linguistic difference: ‘If the mind is one, it is only a matter of terminology rather than psychology.’90 If that was the case, Brunschvicg gladly celebrated the ‘revitalisation’ of the mind accomplished by Bergson,91 against their common enemies, that is, the abstract and static conceptualism of the old classificatory (Aristotelian-Scholastic) conception of nature and the contemporary narrow rationalism (or the ‘new scholastic’) of Mill, Taine and Spencer.92 However, as Deschoux pointed out neatly, whereas Brunschvicg supported Bergson in his critique of the scholastic and pseudo-scientific intellectualism, he drew totally divergent conclusions: The disparagement of a pseudo-science or an outdated science should not backfire against the intelligence, which, on the contrary, should be credited for having corrected such mistakes. Indeed, the intelligence is historically determined by its own self-criticism, so that considering it just another aspect of the vital activity, as if it was eternally bounded by nature to the discontinuous analysis of an inert matter, means humiliating it unjustly.93

The intelligence, in fact, is both a power of creation and a capacity of rectification – or, in other words, of reflection and critical analysis. One encounters here the main difference between the project of Brunschvicg and that of Bergson. Whereas the ‘conversion’ Bergson aimed at producing within philosophy, by reversing the ‘habitual direction’ of thought, hinged on intuition qua alternative perspective upon reality, for Brunschvicg it was the intelligence that, building on the critique of intuitionism of the outdated intellectualism, had to overcome the ‘dead-end combat’ between the doctrine of the concept and the doctrine of intuition and to articulate ‘a doctrine of the intelligence and truth, ruling out every preconceived definition’.94 The intelligence may err and go astray, but it still holds the power to acknowledge and rectify its alienation and its errors with a real conversion.95 Of course, in the ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ Bergson had claimed that intuition was not a shortcut but rather the outcome of a ‘long comradeship’ with the ‘superficial manifestations’ of reality.96 In 1934, he also snapped against those who conflated

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intuition with feeling or sentiment: ‘Not one line of what I have written could lend itself to such an interpretation …: my intuition is reflection.’97 Furthermore, it is often forgotten that he credited mathematics, in particular the infinitesimal calculus, with having tried to ‘follow the growth of magnitude’ and ‘seize movement no longer from outside and in its manifest result, but from within and in its tendency towards change’, providing us with a ‘pattern’ of ‘what is in process of becoming’ (but how naïve this appeal to mathematics appears in contrast to Brunschvicg’s nuanced analyses of postCartesian mathematics!). However, it remains that for him mathematics was but the ‘science of magnitudes’, and had to ‘content itself with the pattern’, while metaphysics could dispense with symbols, showing us the qualitative side of things: ‘It is therefore natural that metaphysics should adopt the generative idea of our mathematics in order to extend it to all qualities, that is, to reality in general.’98 In Creative Evolution, then, he would be quite blunt with regard to the relationship between intuition and the intellect: intuition needs the intelligence as a ‘push’ to raise above instinct and the level of practical needs.99 Yet they constitute two faculties into which consciousness is ‘split up’, even a ‘double form of consciousness’.100 Bergson’s hope was thus to reconcile consciousness, vitalising science (intelligence) with metaphysics (intuition): ‘A complete and perfect humanity would be that in which these two forms of conscious activity should attain their full development.’101 Conversely, in Brunschvicg’s eyes, there was no alternative way of thinking outside intellectualism. It was impossible to cognise reality in its absolute guise. In the Étapes, Brunschvicg made his own Spinoza’s notion of intuition, understood not as a ‘higher form of representation’ allowing access to a thing in itself, to a transcendence; quite the contrary, it is ‘the pure intellection that brings together in a indivisible act of connection a number of distinct ideas, thereby affirming their unity as an evident truth’. Intuition was ‘not a metaphysical faculty, but the principle of a science that has reached its higher degree of clarity and intelligibility’. In its simplest terms, intuition is ‘the immediate intellectual grasp of a [mathematical] relation’.102 If intuition is this and not a metaphysical faculty, we can understand why, in the final pages of the Étapes, Brunschvicg opposed the ‘scientific and philosophical sterility’ of vitalism, animism and psychologism, which considered life and being ‘in themselves’, in their ‘immediate data’, to the horizons opened up by mathematical idealism. The inherent ‘solidarity’ of the individual and the universe was in fact revealed by the ‘light of thought’, seen not as a ‘perpetual self-absorption bound to get lost in the feeling of one’s own existence’ but as the ‘thought capable of outward expansion, deploying the resources of imagination and reflection in order to assimilate the universe and make it immanent to the self ’.103 Mathematics was in fact the ultimate expression of a mind whose first move consisted in establishing intelligible relations (the Cartesian clear and distinct ideas), going beyond the psychological mirage of an immediate communion of the subject and nature.104 It made ‘the mind conscious of what it is, thereby determining the conditions of intelligibility of the universe’.105 Psychology and intuition – the latter understood here in its naïve and sensible meaning – dealt with individuality and were unable to go beyond it. Mathematics and intelligence, on the contrary, allowed man to represent the whole (the universe) of which he is part.106 Through the intelligible relations of mathematics, the mind – which otherwise would have been condemned

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by sensibility to finitude and discontinuity – discovered its ultimate destination, that is, the infinite and progressive understanding of the totality of nature, which was, by the same token, the infinite and progressive self-understanding of man itself.107

Against psychological interiority Brunschvicg’s rebuttal of intuition as a privileged psychological gateway to the inner core of reality introduces another point of conflict with Bergsonism, considered here rather as a movement or cultural trend, and not as a uniform doctrine. For Brunschvicg, in fact, it was impossible to grasp from within, through an act of ‘sympathy’, as Bergson would have said, the becoming of an object or even the living flux of my consciousness: Every individual consciousness is a sum of sensations, memories, judgements, tendencies and habits …; it is an original and unique whole … I cannot analyse such a unity per se because in this way I would introduce new ideas, I would modify the clarification of my consciousness, I would suspend the course of certain habits, the association of certain images, I would have the new feeling of a being that is analysing itself.108

Inner life is therefore a perpetual transformation that one cannot know directly without interrupting it. Subsequently, Brunschvicg asserted that ‘to know it is to live it’,109 meaning that there subsists a radical alternative between living spontaneously (provided that something as such exists) and knowing, that only what is known is real, is actual, has a meaning. Thus Brunschvicg shared with Bergson the view that the intelligence disrupts the spontaneous flow of our inner life. On the other hand, he did not believe in the existence of an alternative form of knowledge that would enable us to ‘[possess] a reality absolutely, instead of knowing it relatively’, a metaphysical means ‘of placing oneself within it instead of adopting points of view toward it, of having the intuition of it instead of making the analysis of it, in short, of grasping it over and above all expression, translation or symbolical representation’.110 The ‘absolute’, in Bergsonian terms, is unattainable. And if something like an interiority exists, it is only in the form of a purely intelligible and mathematical implication, as though in an a priori analytic judgement. Psychological or metaphysical interiority is just a mirage. In a late course at the Sorbonne, published in 1931 with the title De la connaissance de soi, Brunschvicg elaborated precisely on this impossibility of knowing ourselves from the inside. Of course, he said, there exists a unity in consciousness which is given to us immediately. In both Kantian and Biranian terms, we could say that this is the unity of the apperception, which precedes every possible inquiry into our states of mind and activities. Brunschvicg quoted approvingly Bergson’s remark that in psychology the intelligence is not external to its object but rather internal: when I look into myself, when I recall my past memories, there is a continuity linking the different moments of my analysis. However, this does not entail that the object of my analysis itself is characterised by such a unity: ‘The unity of the ego [je] that knows itself does not guarantee the unity of the self [moi] it knows, whose content remains as

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heteroclite as possible.’111 Of course, our mental life is not decomposable into separate points, and Brunschvicg had no problem adopting Bergson’s critique of the parallelism between psychological and physical atomism. However, ‘the flux of consciousness, this continuity of the inner life which is comparable to the unity of a melody, raises, by virtue of its aesthetic character, the problem raised by every aesthetic data: art is the realm of the false naivety’.112 In other words, it is impossible to trust self-knowledge, for the very reason that it is impossible to seize our inner life directly, to place ourselves at the centre of our inner duration. For Brunschvicg, we are locked in the loop of reflexivity. Brunschvicg indulged, then, in a sort of provocation. Far from providing a literary proof of Bergson’s theories,113 Proust’s Recherche – this ‘tragedy of analysis’114 – would show on the contrary the fragmentation of the self, the impossibility of going back to the coherent source of our inner life. We have seen in the introduction that, in the 1880s, Brunschvicg used to get together with Proust at the Champs-Élysées every Thursday and Sunday. Observing how Proust placed at the Champs-Élysées events that occurred later in his life, Brunschvicg concluded that the Recherche was anything but a Bergsonian text: if Bergson strived to show the coherence and unity of duration, the effectiveness of Proust’s writing derived on the contrary from the ‘perpetual fragmentation [brisure] of time depending on the caprices of memory and the disturbances of mood’.115 Then, Brunschvicg implicitly criticised the Bergsonian notion of durée intérieure by comparing it to the ‘experiences’ of the mystics. In the entanglement of memory and consciousness, it is impossible to tell what is ‘real’ and ‘normal’ from what is ‘illusory’ and ‘abnormal’: ‘There is nothing as deceiving as the appeal to a pure experience which, by definition, reveals itself to an immediate experience.’116 Elsewhere, Brunschvicg stressed Bergson’s difficulty in ‘unifying in the same experience the certitude of immediacy and the privileged possession of the absolute’. Memory, in fact, is a ‘suspect’ testimony, keen to distort, add or omit information. Furthermore, it is the domain of the utmost display of the ‘ “intersubjective” power of suggestion and imitation’.117 And, Brunschvicg added, ‘The uniformity in the description of the mystical states is far from proving its spontaneity.’ On the contrary, it is a proof of the literary influences on the religious sentiment.118 Building on Piaget’s studies of child development, Brunschvicg argued that this kind of pure experience, which is doomed never to attain the level of objectivity and intelligibility, is proper to those ‘egocentric’ adults that, incapable of living in the ordinary world, reduce reality to an ‘imaginary’ or ‘mystical’ world of their own.119 There is no direct access to the inner self: the only way to study a mind is through its intelligence at work, by analysing its products, from the outside. This is a crucial point for a correct interpretation of Brunschvicg’s overall philosophy. In other words, if interiority is always deceitful, and if the frontiers between intelligence and intuition are always fluid, we can find the ‘true continuity of our life only in our actions’.120 From the point of view of knowledge, this means that the inner life is not only obscure and tangled but also meaningless. What matters is ultimately the process by means of which we ‘go back into ourselves’ to grasp not our duration or our sensible states but rather our common, universal reason.121 Indeed, what counted for Brunschvicg was not the

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psychology of man from the point of view of individuality but rather the essence of man, that is, how the individual participates of the common spiritual world, of the world of culture (science, art, philosophy, religion). This is why, in the Progrès de la conscience, he clearly distinguished between ‘inner’ and ‘spiritual life’. Whereas the former was the life of the ‘individual’, of the contingent and transient self, the latter was the life of the ‘person’ qua universal dimension characterising every subject.122 In the inner life, the individual folds back upon himself and ultimately vanishes; in the spiritual life, on the contrary, the individual partakes of the more general life of science and civilisation.123 The former is a mere cult of the ego, while the latter is inherently communicative and universal. It must be noted that this stance actually dated back to Comte. In fact, the father of positivism famously dismissed introspective psychology and claimed that, in order to study the human intellect, one had to analyse the knowledge it produces: ‘The intellectual functions present … this particular character of not being able to be directly observed during their accomplishment itself, but only in their more or less proximate and more or less lasting results.’124 In this respect, the analysis of inner duration was pointless. More precisely, it was as though for Brunschvicg duration was split into two different processes or ‘rhythms’: biological time, which consisted in a permanent ageing; and spiritual temporality, which entailed progress, that is, the progressive emendation and correction of the mind and its conceptions.125 It is understood that biology as well as psychology, in the narrowest sense, were of no philosophical interest for Brunschvicg. According to him, the roots of Western thought lay in the lesson of Socrates, who taught us to deepen the knowledge of ourselves not in the ‘limited form of a psychology of the individual’ but in the ‘general form of a renewal, of a regeneration, of the spiritual being’.126 In Brunschvicg’s vocabulary, ‘spiritual’ means ‘intellectual’ or even ‘cultural’, that is, everything that is opposed to the purely sensible level of nature. Science was for him the highest form of ‘spirituality’, because it translated the world into intelligible notions, relations and laws. There was, in this sense, a parallelism between the work of science and the critique of interiority: just as the ‘idealism of science’ succeeded the naïve ‘realism of perception’, man had to relinquish his own amour propre and stop considering his own psychological person as an absolute in order to envisage himself as a rational being.127 Indeed, Brunschvicg applied Spinoza’s definition of what man is not with regard to nature – ‘an empire within an empire’ – also reprised by Bergson on various occasions, to the interiority of the self, adding a more violent connotation: the perspective of the sentimentalism of interiority, positing a psychological ego as an empire within the empire of a broader humanity or reality, inevitably leads to violence, for this empire wants to dominate and subjugate every other realm.128 With regard to the critique of naïve perception, Brunschvicg agreed with Bergson, who in Matter and Memory had repelled as superficial the ‘cinematic’ model of the theory of knowledge based on the triad subject–representation–object. For Brunschvicg as well as for Bergson, we must go beyond the individual perspective and attain an absolute level, which may lay beneath (the domain of images: Bergson) or beyond (the realm of pure intelligibility: Brunschvicg) individuality. Thus, although they concurred on some fundamental issues, Bergson and Brunschvicg took two parallel but different paths. Exploring psychology and biology,

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Bergson tried to attain the inner and absolute becoming of reality beyond the curtain of representations and mathematical symbolism. Analysing the historical achievements of mathematics and physics, Brunschvicg found within them the possibility of a knowledge of ‘the whole of experience [expérience intégrale]’,129 to borrow Bergson’s words, where the most abstract and the most concrete coincide.130 For Brunschvicg, the only manner to reach a sphere where the ‘emotional density of art’ and the ‘universality of the scientific truth’ coexisted was to conceive of the understanding and intuition not as separate but as two moments of the internal dialectics of the intelligence. In a way, Bergson himself recognised this point, speaking of two different kinds of intelligence: a purely analytical and calculating intelligence and an intelligence that allows us to penetrate the inmost truth of the world. Therefore, Brunschvicg declared, ‘despite the legend that still surrounds him as it surrounded Poincaré’, one had to count Bergson not among those who vilified the intelligence but among those who enhanced it.131 However, there remains that, whereas Bergson’s philosophy was aimed at thinking infinity and the absolute beyond the human (finite) perspective,132 Brunschvicg’s idealism was the quest for infinity and absoluteness within the human dimension itself.

Conclusion Although Brunschvicg made his own Bergson’s remonstrations against a static conception of the intelligence – which, as we will see, implied a revision of the Kantian paradigm – he was not eager to ‘quit Kant’. Furthermore, although he adopted a prudent and sympathetic stance towards Bergson, he did not hesitate to chastise some of his followers – like, for example, Édouard Le Roy (1870–1954) or Joseph Segond (1872–1954),133 who had turned Bergson’s theories into an ‘irrationalism’ or a ‘mysticism’,134 into a closed system.135 Those disciples were indeed ‘more orthodox than their teacher’,136 and Brunschvicg tried to curb the spread of their anti-intellectualist positions, in particular of Le Roy’s epistemology, by publishing in 1905 one of his most ‘militant’ books, L’idéalisme contemporain, a collection of essays meant as a manifesto of the idealist/spiritualist/intellectualist stance against common sense philosophies, realism, substantialism and the doctrines of the will. As Brunschvicg explained some twenty years later, what he reproached of the ‘antiintellectualist doctrines’ was how they exploited the rightful critique of conceptualism to claim the right to use ‘big concepts’ such as life, action, intuition, experience and so on, without any preliminary critique, ending up with a ‘super-conceptualism’.137 Accordingly, he discarded the possibility – over-emphasised by Bergson’s followers – of apprehending the ultimate essence of things through an act of intuition. In a 1921 discussion, Le Roy objected against Brunschvicg that reflection comes into play only in a second step. The first ‘act’ is the ‘intuition of the immediate’. But for Brunschvicg the risk was to hypostatise the given, which would become a transcendent substance, a thing-in-itself. Our only starting point is always ‘reflective analysis’. And claiming in response that, of course, we begin chronologically by reflection, in order to ‘reawaken in us the living conscience of the initial act that preceded it’, is not enough, because

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such an intuitive and primordial givenness is, so to speak, posited (in the Fichtean sense) through reflection.138 Consequently, life before judgement is, in a jeu de mots, mere prejudice.139 In other words, for Brunschvicg we cannot know the mind directly, from the inside and in its immediacy. Trapped in the loop of reflexivity, condemned as we are to mediation, we only have access to its exterior products and works. This would explain the necessity of associating a historical retrospective view to the analysis of the mind, because history provides us with the material for the study of the intelligence and its creative power. As Bréhier observed, Brunschvicg never believed, like a great thinker of our time [Bergson], that it was possible to ground philosophy upon an immediate experience of the mind, leaving aside the historical tradition; he remained faithful to a thesis the purest expression of which he found in Descartes and in Kant: that the mind can be known only in a mediate fashion, in its intellectual oeuvres, and that therefore it is inseparable from its history.140

However, before turning to Brunschvicg’s conception of history, we should move from a negative presentation to a proper direct outlook of his philosophy, starting precisely from his model of the life of the mind as reflexivity. In fact, it is important to understand the historical and theoretical background of such a model. To this end, in the following two chapters I will account for Brunschvicg’s philosophical pantheon in order to identify his most important theoretical references, first in the history of philosophy and then among his contemporaries. Finally, in Chapter 5, I will begin to analyse Brunschvicg’s own thought, starting from his theory of knowledge as deployed in his first programmatic book, La modalité du jugement.

3

Brunschvicg and the history of philosophy

Et si toute philosophie aboutissait à constater qu’un clou chasse l’autre ? Il resterait à faire une collection de clous.1

Introduction Brunschvicg and Bergson stood on the same ridge, although on opposite sides. Their philosophies originated from a common milieu and shared many theoretical points; however, they were separated by fundamental divergences. The ultimate reason for this cleavage pertained also to different interpretations of the tradition that they inherited. While Bergson looked critically at contemporary psychology and biology to amend spiritualism and repeal the Kant-inspired reflective turn of Lachelier and Boutroux, Brunschvicg remained faithful to the philosophical pantheon of his mentors, with some personal integrations. As to the history of philosophy, Brunschvicg declared his allegiance to a rationalist/ idealist tradition exemplified not only by the figures of Descartes, Spinoza, Kant and Fichte but also by the ‘scepticisms’ of Socrates and – later in his life – Montaigne. In Brunschvicg’s view, this lineage converged with the contemporary trend of the ‘philosophy of reflection’, which, inaugurated by Maine de Biran (1766–1824), had delved into ‘the primary function of inner reflection’, highlighting, from a ‘properly psychological’ perspective, ‘the very activity of consciousness that Spinoza and Leibniz, that Kant and Fichte, had probed from a metaphysical and epistemological point of view’.2 It was a movement that also included Lachelier and Boutroux, and that, ‘together with the return to the authentic Kantianism’, represented for Brunschvicg ‘the most positive and fecund aspect of the philosophical history of the nineteenth century’.3 Furthermore, this tradition followed the trail of the reflective origins of the European philosophical culture: ‘the idealism of the teachers [maîtres] of our generation, of a Lachelier or a Lagneau, reflects the impetus [élan] that, twenty-five centuries ago, Socrates gave to the European mind, when he instilled in every man the urge to be the craftsman of his own philosophy’.4 It is thus necessary to discuss in depth Brunschvicg’s philosophical pantheon. Consequently, I begin by illustrating in this chapter how Brunschvicg interpreted

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canonical authors from the history of philosophy, whereas a discussion of those nineteenth-century thinkers that Brunschvicg considered as his mentors, interlocutors or even opponents is postponed to the following chapter. This is a preliminary step to any direct assessment of Brunschvicg’s philosophy, as his own reading of the history of philosophy was philosophical in itself. As Jean Laporte remarked, ‘Speaking about Brunschvicg as a historian of philosophy means still speaking of Brunschvicg as a philosopher.’5

Ancient philosophy: From Homo Sapiens to Homo Credulus While reading Brunschvicg’s accounts of the history of Western philosophy, one cannot help being baffled by his categorical value judgements and his adamantly negative attitude towards certain thinkers if not entire epochs. The most striking example is surely his vision of the long period from Aristotle to the day before Descartes’s ‘wonderful invention’ on the eve of St. Martin’s Day in November 1619. As one can see from a conference held during the winter of 1926–7, titled ‘L’humanisme de l’Occident’, Brunschvicg believed that the ‘defeat of Platonic idealism under the blows of Aristotelian realism’ had caused an almost fatal injury that affected ‘the destiny of Europe all along the twenty centuries leading up to the Cartesian renaissance’.6 In order to understand this bold statement, we have to begin from the beginning, framing Brunschvicg’s conception of the birth of Western philosophy and, by extension, of Western civilisation as a whole. In his oeuvre, he formulated many times a methodological cautionary tale consisting in anticipating and defusing any charge of arbitrariness. He claimed that his was not a ‘retrospective construction’ that already presupposed what it sought to demonstrate and violently projected upon the past the prejudices and the axiologies of the present.7 However, one cannot escape the feeling that his history of philosophy was precisely this: an instrumental justification motivated by militant reasons and contemporary concerns.8 Thus, although there is nothing odd in considering Socrates the ‘hero of rational humanism’,9 the ‘catalyst’ of Western spirit and the most relevant watershed in the history of humanity,10 the fact that such a reflective and questioning stance culminates in the Parisian academic philosophy (i.e. ultimately, in Brunschvicg himself), as presented in the Progrès de la conscience, is no more suspicious than Heidegger’s own Seinsgeschichte or any other teleological account of history. Brunschvicg’s reading of Socrates was then heavily filtered by his own understanding of the life of the mind. For him, Socrates was the beginner of Western consciousness not merely for chronological reasons, because of the rich, layered and influential portrait painted by Plato, but due to his own discovery: the inseparability of moral and psychological consciousness. In other words, Socrates – as an intellectual figure, if not as a historical character – discovered practical reason. Not by chance, Brunschvicg privileged the image of Socrates rendered by Xenophon in the Apomnemoneumata (usually improperly translated as Memorabilia), which is more that of a sage, an ethical

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guide, than that of a philosophical inquirer or a theoretician. In an 1883 article on ‘Socrate, fondateur de la science morale’, Boutroux had already taken up the cudgels for Xenophon’s account, claiming that, unlike Plato and Aristotle, he was a historian by profession, thus worth taking very seriously as he did not manipulate Socrates for theoretical purposes.11 And what Xenophon showed was that Socrates always searched for the general – that is, for the guiding principle of human praxis and judgements, for justice – within the human realm, and not elsewhere.12 As Leo Strauss (1899–1973) also remarked, Xenophon illustrated and defended primarily the goodness, the piety, the prudence or good sense (phronesis) and the justice of Socrates.13 His was a Socrates that condemned speculative-cosmogonic researches and appealed to the gnomē, that is, to the judgement of reflection, to mind, intelligence and reason; a Socrates submitting that ‘silver and gold make human beings no better, but that the wise men’s judgements make those who possess them rich in virtue’,14 where what mattered in judgement was not truth but man’s hold on his own destiny. In the end, Brunschvicg argued, even in Plato’s dialogues Socrates was less concerned with the conceptual definition of the good or the beautiful than with their practical value, their capacity to guide our actions.15 His lesson pertained thus to the proper use of the faculty of discernment. With Socrates, ‘man realises that it is up to him to create himself, relying on a practical power of reflection which ties together the reform of individual conduct or public life and the reform of the inner being’.16 From this perspective, science was not the search for the metaphysical principles of reality but the quest for the proper, balanced relationship between nature and the ends pursued by man. This marks the starting point of Plato’s philosophy. In fact, Plato understood that the only way to prevent other reasonable men from meeting the end of his mentor was to stir in the entire society a widespread affection for spiritual values, without separating the moral life of the individual from the life of the polis. Plato completed Socrates’s dialogical humanism by supplementing it with the positive epistemological method of dialectics.17 In particular, Brunschvicg valorised the four degrees of knowledge articulated in the sixth and seventh books of the Republic: eikasia, pistis, dianoia and noēsis. The merit of Plato, in Book VII, was to have presented mathematical thinking – dianoia – as implemented in arithmetic and geometry, as a way of elevating our mind above contingent perishable things. Geometry and calculation (logistiké) were the better training for the conversion (periagogé or metastrophé) of the soul ‘from becoming to truth and being’.18 In fact, mathematical sciences ‘compel the soul to use the intellect itself on the truth itself ’.19 Together also with astronomy, they were the intellectual preconditions for ‘the release from the bonds and the turning around [metastrophé] from the shadows to the phantoms and the light, the way up from the cave to the sun’.20 These words somehow sum up not only what for Brunschvicg was the authentic kernel of Plato’s philosophy – the movement from the mathematical discursive knowledge to the noetic grasp of the ideas – but the true vocation of his own idealism. However, things were not so smooth in Plato’s dialogues. In fact, the subsequent affirmation of the Aristotelian ‘realism’ had its roots in a shift already present in Platonism. In the Timaeus, we witness in fact a sort of theological turn: the Idea of the Good is replaced with the cosmological and anthropomorphic figure of the Demiurge. Of course, in the Republic Plato placed the idea of the Good beyond the ousia, but

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without any mystical intention: he merely wanted to point out that the Good, the One, the ‘unifying unity’21 symbolised by the sun, is the common source of being and knowledge, the light that allows the eye to see and that makes things visible.22 In Brunschvicg’s view, the One had to be interpreted, along the lines of the Spinozian substance, from the perspective of immanence, as the ‘attractor’, so to speak, of our conversion to pure intelligence; it had therefore a practical value, in still a Socratic sense. The intellectual dialectics was inseparable from political, religious or moral dialectics. Furthermore, the One-Good was the farthest from the ‘Deus Paterfamilias’ of the ‘psychological anthropomorphism’, and there was no place for any substantialist conception of the soul whatsoever.23 Unfortunately, the god of the Timaeus represented a surrender to a ‘transcendent realism’, to an ontological (or, at least, mythological) hypostatisation that would inform Aristotle’s physics and Plotinus’s theology.24 In the following decades, the original force of Plato’s teachings gradually faded; the dialectics lost all its rationalist and spiritual significance, reduced to a mere profession of ignorance and exercise in scepticism. It was the time of the ‘post-Platonic crisis’.25 Aristotle marked, in Brunschvicg’s reconstruction, an attempt to recover the original spirit of Socratism, compromised in Plato’s doctrines by the influence of Eleatism and Pythagoreanism. However, Aristotle was led astray by a misunderstanding: he read Socrates as a man ‘fond of the generality of the concept and always in search of ethical definitions’.26 So, he got rid of the doctrine of the ideas and turned the rational dialectics into the logical perfection of the syllogistic theory, of the ‘universal discourse’.27 Put in Brunschvicgian terms, Aristotle overlooked the living activity of the intelligence that lay behind the Platonic distinctions of sensible and supersensible worlds, of physics and the Ideas, neglecting their practical and spiritual value while keeping only their logical or ontological articulation. Aristotle ‘made a clean sweep’ of the order of truth, of the pure noesis of the intellectual relationships, detached from the perishable realm of things. Then, a capital event occurs: the enchantment of a transfiguration is cast on the content of the Platonic cosmogony, which remains the same in its general lines; however, the finality of the Timaeus, simply because it ceases to be judged according to a rational criterion, henceforth partakes of the abstract nobility of the logical concept. What was a myth for Plato is for Aristotle physics itself. From then on, until the dawn of modern times, until the day when the matter of the sky, reduced to be nothing more than the matter of the earth, will appear again governed by the laws of the same mechanics, the distinction of the sensible and the intelligible, of nature and spirit, loses the intrinsic meaning conferred on it by Plato; it corresponds only to the opposition between two orders of reality.28

The order of knowledge became in Aristotle the order of ontology, his logic resting on a naive metaphysical translation into abstract terms and artificial genres and species of the objects that we perceive with our senses.29 What many deemed as a victory of the positive knowledge was for Brunschvicg a sign of decadence: what got lost was the Platonic emphasis on the ‘psychology of the intelligence’, on the ‘spirituality of the Idea’, whereas with Aristotle man was taken into account only from a biological

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point of view, or at least in relation to the rank it occupied in the cosmic hierarchy. Of course there was room for practical and moral considerations, as in Aristotle’s three ethical treatises. Still, man’s activity was subordinated to a ‘metaphysical biology’; it was a modest doctrine of the desirable middle way between lack and excess, proper to the place occupied by man in the universe. While Plato took into full account the capacity to progress that was inherent to the human intelligence, the faculty to move from the individual consciousness to the generality of the idea, Aristotle hindered any attempt to change ourselves: we can only understand how our nature is made, how the world is made, and nothing else.30 This is why Brunschvicg charged him with realism: because he hypostatised the ontological structure of the universe – and, within it, human nature – and tethered the intelligence to the shackles of an abstract, fixed and mechanical logicism. Aristotle embodied the primacy of representation and the concept over the dynamic life – the ‘progressus ordinans’ – of the mind.31 In other words, he formulated a philosophy of nature rather than a philosophy of the mind;32 he typified a scientific attitude where the need for classification and formalisation stifled every other concern. What followed, in the history of philosophy, during Hellenism and the Roman Empire, was the subordination of philosophy as an intellectual search for truth to syncretic theologies, mystical superstitions, political despotism and mystery cults. In particular, the ‘mystical realism’ of Plotinus was the source of a number of equivocations, given that it was wrongfully placed under the patronage of Socrates and Plato.33 Brunschvicg examines in depth the égarement of the Western consciousness during the neo-Platonic age. The most important feature that must be retained from his analyses is the following: the alleged disciples of Socrates and Plato neglected and even downplayed the value of consciousness, of the intelligence; they displaced the focus outside the mind, in a higher metaphysical principle or substance, thereby contradicting the ‘practical humanism’ of the Greek civilisation.34 This amounted to the triumph of the homo credulus and the demise of the homo sapiens.

Consciousness awakens: Montaigne, Descartes and … Pascal? Without broaching the details of Brunschvicg’s assessment of Christianity, which would bring us to discuss such a complex question as his conception of God and religion,35 I should at least dwell a little on his judgement on the most glaring example of Christian thought, that is, Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy. As one can infer from Brunschvicg’s opinion of Aristotelianism, his stance towards Thomism was no more sympathetic. If the New Testament must be credited for having reintroduced spirituality and humanism within the moral compass of the West, Thomistic scholastics froze the original impetus of the Christian religion in a sterile rationalism under the authority of Aristotle’s logic. It should be kept in mind that here Brunschvicg was arguing against his close friend and prominent Medievalist Étienne Gilson (1884–1978), who on the contrary extolled

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the Doctor Angelicus as the very first modern philosopher. Thomas, Gilson had written, ‘restored the idea of a discipline of the mind dependent only upon itself and competent by its own method to explore the field assigned to it’.36 So, Thomism was modern from the moment of its birth – in the sense that, established … on the common ground of the human reason, it professed to resolve philosophical problems by methods common to all. By accepting the Organon of Aristotle as the criterion of truth and falsity in philosophy … St. Thomas made it possible for Christian theologians to communicate as philosophers with those who were philosophers only.37

However, in the eyes of Brunschvicg, the problem of the subordination of philosophy to theology remained a nullifying issue that undermined any alleged restored emphasis on reason. If the legacy of the Greek humanism of Socrates and Plato consisted in the ‘solidarity between the autonomy of consciousness and the truth of science’,38 then nothing as such could be found in Thomas Aquinas, and the Summa Theologiae was still an offshoot of the old logical and theological realism. To put it in a manner that may sound tautological and self-evident, Thomism was for Brunschvicg still Medieval, where the Middle Age had to be understood as a sort of spiritual condition. In fact, Brunschvicg held that ‘The philosophy of the Middle Age began when Aristotle overturned the meaning that the Republic attributed to astronomy. He used it to move cosmologically, materially, to the perfection of circular movements and sidereal souls, while Plato relied on it to rise to the purity of intelligence.’39 The most telling proof that Brunschvicg’s history of philosophy was all but a neutral review is probably his framing of the Aristotelian-Scholastic paradigm as a sort of ‘infancy’ of thought, a ‘childish tradition’.40 The equivalence between philosophical and child development, where the Middle Age corresponds to a phase of immature, ‘puerile’ thinking, is repeatedly established in Brunschvicg’s oeuvre, at least since Les étapes, and is corroborated by a quite instrumental use of much scientific research, for instance, that of his colleague at the Sorbonne Lucien Lévy-Bruhl on primitive mentality and the aforementioned psychological studies by Jean Piaget.41 After all, as has been observed, Brunschvicg’s anti-Aristotelianism stemmed from a tradition that – with the sole exceptions of Félix Ravaisson and Octave Hamelin, who both studied the Stagirite extensively – had always celebrated as his founding father a philosopher, Descartes, who came to free reason from the straitjacket of scholasticism.42 One may call this idea the ‘Cartesian liberation narrative’.43 In fact, from the viewpoint shared by the French academic philosophy of the time, the author of the Discourse on Method was three things at once, as if in a structure of concentric circles: (1) the initiator of modern rationalism; (2) the noble father of French philosophy (a role contested only by Pascal); (3) and the guardian of the threshold of modernity in general.44 In 1894, the project of a critical edition of his works – supported by many subscribers, such as the Ministry of Public Education and an international committee of illustrious academicians – was launched by the Revue de métaphysique et de morale precisely with the aim of consecrating Descartes’s pivotal historical role.45 Of course, it would be wrong to believe that Descartes’s legacy was assumed in a pacified manner, without

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the creation of multiple and even conflicting images of Cartesianism. Still, for Brunschvicg and his circle this was the role Descartes played: that of the tutelary deity of Republican philosophy, of French thought in general and, universally speaking, of modern reason. However, in Brunschvicg’s historical account, Descartes was not the first, unprecedented messiah of modernity. Someone preceded him, like Socrates’s discovery of practical reason preceded Plato’s full-blown idealism.46 The first crack in the scholastic dogmatic edifice appeared indeed after the Renaissance and the Lutheran Reform, with the three editions of Montaigne’s Essays (1580, 1582, 1588). Montaigne was surely the first thinker after centuries who had been able to resettle philosophical speculation within its proper territory, bringing it back from the abstract machinery of Aristotelianism to the living activity of the intelligence. In other words, Montaigne tore the veil of conceptualist dogmatism and recentred philosophy upon the freedom of the consciousness. Simply put, he rediscovered the ‘primacy of judgement’ qua specific act of the thinking subject. In fact, as Jean Hyppolite observed, ‘the apparition of the function of judgement’ was for Brunschvicg ‘the decisive event of our history’.47 Of course, Montaigne’s merciless self-examination was well known and almost proverbial, but this should not be taken as a proof of his alleged ‘congenital scepticism’. For Brunschvicg, Montaigne was instead a rationalist thinker from head to toe, and it was precisely the need for the rightful criteria of justice that led him to take no dogmatic shortcut, abiding only by the rules of his judgement.48 Montaigne restored thus the fundamental principle of rationalism, that is, that only reason can judge reason, that reason alone is called upon to formulate an account of reason. His highest goal consisted in attaining a full consciousness of ourselves, in freeing ourselves from the external influence of deceitful passions, intellectual automatisms, ritualistic behaviours, ancient customs and unquestioned authorities. We have to isolate the naked core of our being and bring out only what we have judged as valuable, getting rid of the dross that the world has sedimented upon us.49 So Brunschvicg celebrated the fact that in Montaigne consciousness was finally above everything, being at the same time a psychological, an intellectual and a moral consciousness. There was no room for ‘abstract’ and hypostatised doctrines of the faculties, nor was there space for any transcendence whatsoever: the ‘sense of truth’ was immanent to the life of the mind, and not petrified in a Beyond, in a dogma. However, despite his many merits, Montaigne was just a first, wavering step in the right direction. For Brunschivicg, in fact, he was stuck in his infinite self-criticism and self-scrutiny, thereby being unable to provide any solid ground for the activity of the mind. Take, for instance, what Montaigne wrote in a famous passage of the Essays, which Brunschvicg quoted as a proof of this ultimate inconclusiveness: I cannot keep my subject still. It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness. I take it in this condition, just as it is at the moment I give my attention to it. I do not portray being: I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another …, but from day to day, from minute to minute. My history needs to be adapted to the moment. I may presently change, not only by chance, but also by intention. This is a record of various and changeable occurrences, and of irresolute

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In other words, Montaigne was still too individualistic and ultimately failed to move from the ‘self-centredness’ of his introspective research to the intersubjective dimension that characterises true knowledge. As Brunschvicg put it, ‘The master of the inner life lacks what produces the infinite radiance of the spiritual life, viz., the generosity of a reason which is able to justify itself and communicate itself.’51 The sage Montaigne was not able to share his wisdom. The irony and the sorrow pervading the Essays were induced by the recurrent temptation to yield to misanthropy and misology. Montaigne wanted to ground the ‘unity of humanity’ on consciousness, which was the one and only absolute. Unfortunately, he winded up showing only the ‘negative’ side of the intelligence.52 There is a tragic gap separating the inner life of the mind from the outer world of conventions, blind rituals and dogmas; man can only aspire to an inner form of self-mastery, to bare his soul and analyse his beliefs in the intimacy of his mercurial inwardness. Thus, Montaigne was left with one foot in the old age from which his oeuvre distanced us. This was not due to personal shortcomings. Brunschvicg did not psychologise Montaigne but framed him as a son of his time, of a century of massive historical changes. Indeed, Montaigne had to make sense of the mindless brutality of the wars of religion, the discovery of a new world, fanaticisms of all sorts, while the outcomes of the Renaissance and the Reformation inspired in him a sense of pessimism and isolation; furthermore, he lived in a time when the ‘instrument judicatoire’ of modern science was still lacking.53 Montaigne was thus a negative, preliminary moment in the process that would lead reason to become fully aware of its positive and creative power and take over its rightful role. The authentic revolution was marked by the passage from Montaigne to Descartes.54 In a way, ‘Montaigne, in retirement in his tower, anticipates Descartes closed up in his stove’.55 But if the former anticipated the latter, the latter raised the stakes to another level. Descartes, on a par with Montaigne, not only refused tradition and the dogmatic professions of faith of theologians and dialecticians (his teachers at La Flèche) but also rejected public acceptance and relied only on the ‘intellectual spontaneity’ of his judgement. He not only took a step forward and anchored Montaigne’s floating and uncertain reason to mathematics, in particular to arithmetic and geometry, which ‘alone are free from any taint of falsity or of uncertainty’.56 He also provided the mind with a purely intelligible method that did not need any support from experience or imaginative representations. Put in the aforementioned ‘developmental’ terms, Descartes finished what Montaigne had started, that is, bringing Western thought from infancy to adulthood (in this respect, we may claim that Montaigne was the adolescence of thought).57 It was wrong, thus, to assume, as Gilson did in a series of conferences at the University of Bruxelles in 1923, that Descartes did nothing but reach with a new method the same conclusions of Medieval philosophy concerning the ‘existence of God’ and the ‘spirituality of the soul’. According to Gilson, Descartes ruled out quality from nature, thereby preventing the analogy between the material and the intelligible which allowed for the passage from the world to God. However, he needed God; so he

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established a different kind of analogy, a spiritual analogy between thought and God, in order ‘to reach from the inside what he cannot reach from the outside’.58 Brunschvicg completely rejected this stance: there was no analogy in Descartes. If peripatetic philosophy proceeded by transfiguring the sensible to imagine the intelligible, authentic rationalism attained directly, without analogy or transposition but rather through an act of intellectual intuition, the realm where the human mind enters into communion with the mind of God, that is, the realm of geometric and algebraic evidence.59 This was best exemplified by the intuition of the figure of a triangle, which depended neither on matter nor on sensible representations: the intuitive evidence of mathematics introduces us to truths endowed with a character of universality, infinity and immutability.60 The methodical doubt was a necessary threshold Descartes had to cross if he wanted to jettison scholastic dogmatism, with its ‘pseudo-physics of quality’ and ‘pseudo-logic of generic concepts’, and uncover the ‘ground of modern civilisation’, that is, an order of knowledge that was distinct from that of perception.61 But it would be limiting to restrict the judgement on Descartes to the purely philosophical part of his oeuvre, without taking into account also the scientific side. According to Brunschvicg, in Descartes the philosophical revolution and the scientific breakthrough went hand in hand. How could one properly understand how Descartes had been able to restore the autonomy of the intelligence, recovering the inspiration of Plato’s mathematical idealism, without taking into account also the algebraic method expounded in the Geometry or his theory of inertial motion discussed in the World? This, for instance, was what Hegel had neglected. His notion of the concrete universal was nothing but a ‘loophole’ (échappatoire), ‘a means by which contemporary philosophy can elude or delay the contact with the authentic understanding of the real’.62 There was no need to resort to such an abstract notion when the encounter between the universal and the concrete had already taken place in modern science, with Newton and, in particular, with the union of science and philosophy in the founder of modern thought: Descartes. By celebrating the latter simply as a philosopher, Hegel failed to acknowledge that the author of the Meditationes was also the author of the Géométrie, that Descartes’s thought rested precisely on the ruins of medieval scholasticism: If a modern thought exists, it is because Descartes was indivisibly a scientist and a philosopher at once, because he despised the vain generalities of Aristotelianism and the universals of the dialecticians, in order to become the master and possessor of a universe deprived of any illusory virtuality, a universe that is given in its actual particularity and that is subjected to the rigid determinism of mathematical equations. Therefore, since the Cartesian science allows for the complete rationalisation of the individual, the problem of the concrete universal can no longer arise.63

‘The secret of modern rationalism’, Brunschvicg contended, lay in the beginning of Book III of Descartes’s Geometry. It is a textual locus that, according to him, philosophers and scholars had often overlooked, but which contained the key to a proper understanding of Descartes’s thought.64 In the passage Brunschvicg referred to, Descartes clarified his

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algebraic method by lingering on the ‘nature of the equations’, which poignantly showed the groundbreaking novelty of his mathematical idealism, beyond the false alternative between the ‘illusory ontology’ of the Peripatetics and the ‘sterile empiricism’ of the sceptics.65 Take, for example, two equations like x – 2 = 0 or x – 3 = 0 (i.e. x = 2 and x = 3). Multiplying together these two equations one obtains x2 – 5x + 6 = 0, or x2 = 5x – 6, that is, a quadratic equation ‘in which x has the value 2 and at the same time x has the value 3’.66 In Brunschvicg’s opinion, one finds here a methodology that is no longer made of concepts, understood as general representations of external objects, but rather of purely intelligible relations, as is motion in the posthumous treatise on the World.67 Equations are, in other words, idealities that develop according to internal laws and that are, so to speak, self-sufficient with regard to experience.68 They are the opposite of deductions.69 With Descartes, thus, science broke the chains tying it to imagination and representation, understanding its objects and laws as ‘relations that are immanent to thought, products of a spiritual activity’.70 The step accomplished by Descartes with the passage from the ‘universal mathematics’ of the Rules for the Direction of Natural Intelligence (ca. 1628) to the Discourse on the Method and the Geometry (1637) amounted to a technical revolution in the ways of practising geometry and algebra; ‘pure mathematics’, what in the Fifth Meditation he would call mathesis pura atque abstracta, was finally attained.71 Already in the Rules Descartes made clear his will to correct and update the ancient algebra and geometry as passed down by Diophantus and Pappus of Alexandria.72 However, there Descartes limited himself to applying the mathematical method of resolution to an entirely new range of problems, considering arithmetic and geometry as two equally valid disciplines meeting the basic rational needs of ‘order’ and ‘measure’. However, in the Geometry these juxtapositions became a hierarchy, and the spatial representations were subordinated to purely symbolic algebra. In other words, the implementation of the analytic method made the difference.73 If the analytic method consisted in starting from the simplest and easiest-to-know elements and ascending gradually, ‘step by step’, to the most complex,74 then the theory of equations articulated in the Geometry was the heart of the entire Cartesian revolution: ‘Dealing with algebraic equations according to the method of analysis means witnessing the generation of the equations by means of their simplest forms.’75 This is why the algebraic equation expressed for Brunschvicg the ‘absolute’, a form of ideality that progressed by itself. So, whereas in the Rules Descartes took as his point of departure the three-dimensional extension of external objects and proceeded by generalising the application of the notion of extension, assimilating to spatiality everything that was measurable, in the Geometry he created a geometry that, although susceptible to representation, no longer presupposed the structure of the perceived space. Hence a ‘revolution … in the relation between the mind and things. In 1629, the space of geometry appeared as an essential support for the realism of universal mathematics; in 1637, the space of analytic geometry is a mere auxiliary to the idealism of pure mathematics.’76 The Cartesian algebra opened up a realm of ‘intellectual transparency’ and ‘spiritual autonomy’ which was not the outcome of conceptual abstraction, but which instead subsisted in itself, rested upon itself, upon its very own immanent rules. The ‘intellectual intuition’ that one exploited when grasping the immediate

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truth of the equations had no ‘external object’, as it was ‘inherent to the dynamism of the mind’;77 it simply relied on the capacity the mind had to follow indefinitely the ‘long chains of reasonings’.78 But now came the true limit of Cartesianism, which was not exempt from what I would call a metaphysical ‘rebound effect’. Brunschvicg believed in fact that Descartes had problems staying true to his original insights. The ‘substantialist realism’ of his scholastic teachers returned with a vengeance when he strove to account for the relationship between mind and matter. Here Brunschvicg referred in particular to the fourth part of the Discourse and to the Meditations, where he detected a return of the logic and the petitiones principii of the scholastic ontology. In the first case, Brunschvicg followed Gilson in maintaining that, although Descartes wanted to assert the Thomistic unity of body and soul, making man an ens per se, he came up with a purely nominal unity: ultimately, he split man into two substances which he then had trouble reconciling.79 In the Meditations, instead, Descartes failed to stick to his purely intellectual understanding of God and relapsed in the language of logic and common sense that was spoken not only by his teachers but also by his readers. Through the Meditations, God lost his idealistic traits and became more and more akin to a ‘thing in itself ’. As Brunschvicg put it, God was no more conceived from the perspective of the ‘spiritual immanence’, that is, as an idea that followed from the affirmation of the cogito, but was anthropomorphised, substantialised, conceived along the lines of a ‘spatial realism’. God was now the enemy of the ‘evil demon’, a humanised ‘bon Diable’ that authenticated the truth of sensible experience and prevented Cartesian metaphysics from remaining a solipsism.80 This is why, Brunschvicg commented, a proper Cartesianism could be built only by integrating Descartes and his successors, Malebranche and, most notably, Spinoza. However, our account of the awakening of consciousness according to Brunschvicg would be incomplete without the figure to which his name is most often associated: Blaise Pascal. At first superficial look, it may seem that Pascal is a, if not the, crucial author for Brunschvicg. After all, Brunschvicg published a critical edition of Pascal’s Pensées that, although it is no longer the main philological reference, is still reprinted nowadays and whose numbering served as a standard for many translations in other languages.81 On top of that, he was the editor – along with the mathematician Pierre Boutroux (1880– 1922) and Félix Gazier (1870–1916) – of the eleven volumes of Pascal’s Œuvres.82 Brunschvicg’s scholarly engagement with Pascal lasted his entire life, until his last book on Descartes et Pascal lecteurs de Montaigne. Nevertheless, these early works were not dictated by the heart and were rather due to external circumstances. On the one hand, there was Brunschvicg’s own academic career, which needed such a philological work as part of the required cursus honorum. He got involved in the project of editing Pascal by chance: Guillaume Bréton (1858–1931), of the publishing house Hachette, had asked Xavier Léon if he knew someone who could be interested in such a job, and Léon suggested the then twenty-three-year-old Brunschvicg, who accepted the proposal.83 Moreover, the editors of the Œuvres were all tied to the Sorbonne, albeit Brunschvicg and Gazier were still high school teachers: Pierre Boutroux was the son of Émile, who held the chair of the history of modern philosophy at the Sorbonne; Brunschvicg was a disciple of Pierre’s father and would inherit his chair from the

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hands of Lévy-Bruhl; finally, Gazier was the son of Augustin (1844–1922), professor of seventeenth-century French literature at the Sorbonne and a specialist of Jansenism. The Hachette critical edition of Pascal works was thus the offshoot of an enterprise of monumentalisation of a great national author which involved professors associated with the most important public university, the State itself through the Ministry of Education, the Société française de philosophie, to which Brunschvicg, Pierre and Émile Boutroux belonged, and the Société de Saint-Augustin (later Société de PortRoyal), whose library was supervised by Augustin Gazier.84 On the other hand, this editorial enterprise has to be contextualised against the background of the fin-de-siècle debates on the relationship between the State and the Catholic Church, leading to the 1905 French law on the Separation of Church and State – when a state secularism and the freedom of religious exercise were affirmed by the same token – and to the ‘modernist crisis’.85 If the edition of the Œuvres was indeed characterised by a certain philological neutrality, it is true that the overall work portrayed Pascal not so much as a religious thinker but rather as a philosopher, a scientist and a moralist.86 This was particularly evident in Brunschvicg’s interpretation. His Pascal was in fact first and foremost a philosopher and a scientist, a contemporary and a counterpoint to Descartes.87 But before that, Pascal was someone who, although being well acquainted with the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition, preferred thinkers such as Epictetus, Montaigne and those engaged in the quarrels between Stoicism and Epicureanism. Furthermore, due to his precocious talent, he met Descartes’s pen friend Marin Mersenne and was introduced to the Parisian scientific circles at an early age. Therefore, for Brunschvicg Pascal belonged to the seventeenth-century awakening of consciousness in his own right. As to Pascal’s conception of Christianity, Brunschvicg underscored how much it was incompatible with the idea of theological ‘sciences’; his belief in God posited a truth beyond reason that could not be expressed through the logical framework of the Aristotelian tradition. Such divine truth was in fact irreducible to historically situated forms of language, pedagogy or thought. The Provinciales were thus an attack targeting not only Jesuits’ casuistry but also, and more generally, the moral theology of ‘the doctors of the Sorbonne and the master of Scholastics’.88 Being a man who had read Descartes, Gassendi, Montaigne and who knew by heart Jansen’s Augustinus, Pascal was an adversary of Scholasticism and of authority in general who fought to restore the spiritualistic inspiration inscribed within the Holy Scriptures. In that, he was a truly modern mind. Hence, in his introduction to the Pensées, Brunschvicg presented a Pascal that, like Montaigne, intended to dispose of the logic, rhetoric and ritualistic veils hiding or imprisoning a deeper truth – which, in his case, was not the autonomy of judgement, but rather the authentic faith and religious experience.89 Pascal was ‘neither a speculative theologian, nor a doctor speaking from the height of the chair, representing an “acknowledged” authority’.90 Of course, this did not mean that he followed Descartes or Spinoza in worshipping the God of the philosophers and the learned, whom he explicitly rejected in the ‘Memorial’ jotted down after his mystical experience on the night of 23 November 1654.91 The ‘ultimate secret’ of the Pensées, Brunschvicg maintained, was Pascal’s anguish for his own salvation, his ‘inner drama’92 – a worry

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that Brunschvicg would later fustigate as too self-referential.93 Indeed, Pascal did not believe that man can grasp any truth whatsoever by means of an act of reflection.94 Despite the common aversion to Scholastics, Descartes and Pascal subverted the dogmatic order from two opposite perspectives: Descartes in the name of reason, Pascal in the name of transcendent truths.95 Furthermore, Pascal was opposed to Descartes also from a scientific and more philosophical point of view. Not only did Pascal criticise, for example, the purely formal and nominalistic logic used by the scholastics, which usually conflated the level of discourse and the level of things: ‘There is no necessary connection – he wrote against the Jesuit Étienne Noël during their 1647–8 quarrel over the existence of the void – between the definition of a thing and the assertion of its existence.’96 He also targeted the a priori cosmology of Descartes, who had been a disciple of Noël at La Flèche.97 Consequently, in a 1921 article, Brunschvicg opposed radically Descartes and Pascal as the two fundamental roots of modern French scientific and philosophical thought – an idea that, as shown in Chapter 2, he shared with Bergson. Brunschvicg highlighted the way in which Pascal opposed the role of experience, the proof of facts, in scientific practice against Cartesian idealism.98 Of course, Pascal was the sixteenyear-old boy who made the first original contribution to the theory of conic sections since the Greeks, as well as the twenty-year-old man who invented a calculating machine for his father, or, again, the twenty-four-year-old experimenter who worked on the problems of vacuum measurement. But for Brunschvicg these were signs of a practical, rather than purely rational, genius: his theorem of the ‘mystical hexagram’ was actually the result of a scientific imagination applied to the specific properties of the conic. In Pascal’s view, science knew no ‘passe-partout’, no universal key, but a plurality of methods tailored to particular problems.99 Thus, Brunschvicg wrote, ‘according to Descartes, the mind constitutes itself by itself in its own essential principles, before turning to nature in order to “assimilate it”. Pascal takes instead the opposite route, from nature to reason.’100 Indeed, in Pascal reason did not play the leading role it assumed in Descartes: it had on the contrary the double and ambiguous function of instilling in man the aspiration to greatness, presenting itself as the infinite measure of truth, while revealing at the same time the misery of the human condition.101 A higher agency, a brighter source of light was needed that the intellect would never attain and fathom. Hence the self-humiliating and contrite way of life of the Jansenists, for whom salvation would be granted only to those who had learnt ‘not to expect anything from their own reason’ and who had ‘renounced their judgement, their free examination’.102 However, Brunschvicg made clear that Pascal should not be ascribed to a credoquia-absurdum-like stance, nor should his wager be understood as a utilitarian ploy. Simply put, Pascal marked the limits of reason and shifted the focus from theory to morality, from truth to conduct.103 This was not to replace one faculty with the other; instead, Pascal wanted to stress that truth per se was useless when it was not sentimentally imbued with the love of God. As he famously contended, ‘We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but His image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship.’104

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It seems rather that, for Brunschvicg, Pascal was a reminder of the limitations of the mind when confronted with experience, the thinker of crisis, of the contradictions in which reason can get entangled – contradictions that are not dialectisable, as Brunschvicg maintained when comparing Pascal’s ‘logique des contraires’ to Hegel’s logic.105 Of course, sometimes Pascal pushed this antinomic logic too far, for example, when he artificially divided the mind into two branches or attitudes – the esprit de finesse and the esprit de géométrie – committing the same straw man fallacy that, according to Brunschvicg, was committed also by Bergson, as shown in the previous chapter: he somehow neglected the achievements of geometry and mathematics in general, which are paradoxically testified also by his own scientific works, and depicted mathematical reasoning in a caricatural and outdated manner, that is, according to the ideal of scholastic deduction.106 His distaste for the metaphysical implications of Descartes’s pure mathesis probably led him to polemically exacerbate the divide between the two approaches to the world. Indeed, in Brunschvicg’s view, the finesse was, from the seventeenth century on, the very spur of any scientific progress, the fusion of finesse and geometry condensing the secret of ‘the intelligence of modern civilisation’.107 Still, Brunschvicg contended, if one looked closely at Pascal’s work he could see how the scientist and the philosopher always worked together in his mind, how Pascal treated geometrically moral problems and how much finesse he put into dealing with probability or infinitesimal calculus. ‘In mathematics, physics, and religion alike,’ McElroy wrote, ‘Pascal always insisted on a union of theory and concrete fact. For Brunschvicg, this is the essence of judgement.’108 However, although geometry and finesse are never completely separated, neither in Descartes nor in Pascal, despite different emphases, the fact remains that Pascal represented for Brunschvicg a counterweight to Descartes’s idealism. Pascal was a physicist, first of all, who believed that the mind ‘does not possess a priori the secret of things. It has to forge the key which will fit the specific nature of the problem … Man must resist the temptation to overcome the state of grace and anticipate the intimate unity which is reserved for the state of glory.’109 If Descartes represented an emancipated reason that marches towards a triumphant idealism, Pascal embodied a rationalism that acknowledges the resistance of reality, the role of sentiment and, therefore, the limits of reason itself. Of course Brunschvicg rejected the supernatural côté of Pascal, his devotional sentimentalism and his subjugation to revealed truths. Overall, he once noted, he did not share any of Pascal’s ideas.110 This notwithstanding, he saw in him, so to speak, the ‘dark side’ of the scientific revolution, the side that understood, pace Descartes, that there is not one single method, that facts often require the specific application of principles or formulas and the constant revision of consolidated frameworks.

Spinoza: The immanence of truth to thought Despite the importance of Pascal, which counterbalanced the limits of Descartes’s method, it was precisely the mathematical idealism that stemmed from the latter that Brunschvicg cherished the most. In Spinoza, his great hero, he saw precisely the perfect refinement of Cartesianism.

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The relationship between Spinoza and Descartes can be seen under various perspectives. Brunschvicg focused primarily, although not exclusively, on Spinoza’s debt to the Cartesian algebra. In fact, he underlined that, even if the more geometrico of the Ethics, with its articulation in propositions, definitions, axioms, corollaries and scholia, recalled directly the Euclidian geometry, the actual model of perfect intelligibility and clarity was drawn from Descartes’s algebraic geometry: the intuition of the adequate proportionality between simple numbers. Take, for example, the notion of the circle: while the Euclidian image was a ‘picture’, an imitation of an external model, the Cartesian one was a concept resulting from a properly intellectual activity, from the deployment of the ‘native force of the mind’. In other words, the Cartesian-Spinozian idea of the circle was not an image but rather an equation. For Brunschvicg, this marked a further distancing from the scholastic-dogmatic conception of truth as mere correspondence between the notion and the object resting on pictorial metaphors. The Cartesian algebraic geometry, on the contrary, made truth dependent on the laws of the intelligence, as, in the case of the circle, the properties of a curve were deduced from its analytic definition, from an abstract equation, without any direct reference to its image.111 In a way, thus, while it is true that Descartes’s reliance on divine transcendence to solve the mind–body problem appeared to Brunschvicg as a step back in the dogmatism of the old scholasticism, it is also true that Spinoza tried to establish ‘an integral Cartesianism, in spite of Descartes himself, who was ultimately a semi-Cartesian’.112 The very way in which Spinoza suggested framing the mind–body problem owed a lot to a sweeping application of Cartesian algebra, trying to understand the relationship between the body and the soul on the model of that between the geometric figure and its analytic expression.113 Brunschvicg acknowledged that this was the capital problem of Spinozian metaphysics, but for him the true achievements of the Dutch philosopher lay in his dynamic reformulation of the static Cartesian depiction of the intelligence. Indeed, Descartes famously claimed that the understanding was finite and progressing by degrees, while the will was infinite, absolute.114 Spinoza, on the contrary, submitted that thought was an ‘infinite reality’ too, transcending the limits of the individual consciousness and identifying itself with the totality of the individual determinations.115 Spinoza provides thus the intelligence with an ‘unlimited power of expansion’.116 The cruciality of Spinoza is attested by the fact that Brunschvicg’s first book was not his dissertation on the modality of judgement but rather a mémoire on Spinoza, published in 1894. This work – which had three editions, the last of which (1923) included articles which appeared in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale between 1904 and 1906 – is one of Brunschvicg’s most relevant texts. This book can be read in many ways, as a scholarly work on Spinoza, at least in its original form, or as a strong theoretical statement. The importance attached to it by Brunschvicg himself, who revised the text throughout his life, seems to vindicate the second option, or at least suggests that philological exegesis and theoretical concerns coexisted. A brief outline of the context may help clarify the relevance and originality of this work. Spinoza’s legacy in the nineteenth century was tormented and contested, both

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among academic and non-academic philosophers. For many, Spinozism was a synonym for pantheism, atheism and materialism. The Pantheismusstreit – that had exploded in Germany in the 1780s, and which would involve the crème of the philosophical scene, from Jacobi, Lessing and Mendelssohn to Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel – crossed the Rhine in the 1830s, exploding with the publication of the Essai sur le pantheisme dans les sociétés modernes (1840) by the liberal Catholic thinker Henri Maret (1805–1884). In France, the querelle du panthéisme opposed Catholic theologians, priests and apologists, who saw in Spinoza the cursed atheist Jew, to the liberal Victor Cousin and his disciples, like Émile Saisset (1814–1863), who, while not being Spinozists, understood his system as a spiritualist and often-mystical pantheism.117 More ambiguous were early republican socialists like Pierre Leroux (1797–1871), an enemy of Cousin, who was always charged with pantheism but who despised Spinoza’s rational and scientific (i.e. deprived of humanity) sense of the totality.118 Renouvier – Spinoza’s greatest opponent in the second half of the century and a former associate of Leroux before turning to Kant – rejected pantheism and depicted a terrible portrait of the Dutch lens grinder, whose fame was still under the shadow of Bayle’s negative entry in the Dictionnaire historique et critique. In particular, Renouvier reprised a popular argument in nineteenth-century France by gathering under the same negative pantheist umbrella Spinoza and the ‘substantialist’ doctrines of the German idealists. Compared to this early debate on Spinoza’s pantheism, the context of the fin de siècle had significantly changed, not only because the stakes were now on a different footing but also because a more scientific and philological way of practising the history of philosophy was being established. In more ideological terms, however, for the generation of the founders of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, educated by Darlu, Spinoza was a key intellectual figure, embodying the ideal of a libertas philosophandi which was seen as a crucial pendant to the political freedom required by properly democratic institutions and apparently negated by Dreyfus’s prejudicial persecution. Spinoza was for them the model of a critical and autonomous intellectual practice that no political or religious yoke could constrain.119 In this sense, it was a completely different Spinoza than the mechanistic and deterministic one championed by Taine, who however had the merit of having rescued his doctrine from the idle debates on his pantheism.120 Accordingly, the Spinoza cherished by Brunschvicg was basically the theorist of the emendation of the intelligence, the advocate of the immanence of truth to thought and the promoter of the independence of reason from revealed religious truths. In this sense, Spinoza confirmed Brunschvicg in his intellectualism: Brunschvicg claimed in fact that Spinoza’s ultimate concern was the autonomy and the progress of intelligence.121 As he wrote, ‘The fundamental principle that, according to us, characterises Spinoza’s philosophy and justifies all of his conclusions is … that only thought is real.’122 From this perspective, the Tractatus was not merely an anticipation of the Ethics, the former dealing with an ‘exterior’ (political) liberty and the latter thematising an ‘inner’ freedom; on the contrary, the Tractatus ‘contained’ the Ethics. Spinoza’s masterworks lay in fact on a common assumption: The mind can be confronted only with the mind. There is no contact, no common measure, i.e. no relationship between the mind and something other than it. This

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means also that truth cannot be external to the mind, because the mind cannot get out of itself to justify the truth as truth. Consequently, there is no point in drawing a rule from the outside that imposes itself to thought and leads it to truth. The mind does not have to understand how it will find [such a rule], because it has already found [it] … what it knows is true because it knows it … Hence one can infer the nature of truth: as it dwells within the mind and depends only on it, it must already be something within the mind. The truth of a true idea does not derive from a convenient relation between the idea and its object; it is not an incidental and transitory quality, as if an idea could exist before being true, receiving the truth at a certain point; on the contrary, it is an inherent and constitutive quality.123

Brunschvicg is referring here to Spinozian statements like the following from the posthumous Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (1677): ‘What constitutes the form of the true thought must be sought in the same thought itself, and must be deduced from the nature of the intellect.’124 It is a thesis that, although reworked, we can find at the end of the Progrès de la conscience, when Brunschvicg puts forward his immanentist conception of truth claiming that there is nothing outside consciousness and that man cannot escape the ‘circuit’ of his own judgements.125 Truth is not an external adaequatio between ideas and things, but rather a correspondence that is immanent to thought itself, between the idea and the activity that produced it.126 Of course, Brunschvicg translated this Spinozian perspective into more moderate, accurate and scientific terms. However, he would always comply with the underlying principle, which held true: ‘The activity of the intelligence is … what justifies and grounds knowledge and at the same time what expands it and fulfils it.’127 There was no need to find an external reference that could guarantee a clear and neutral point of view on the activity of the mind. It is the same idea that Brunschvicg encountered in Cournot and in the French tradition of reflective philosophy: only reason (or the intelligence, it makes no difference here) can judge reason. This explains also why Brunschvicg fully assumed Spinoza’s anti-Cartesian idea of method as ‘nothing but a reflective knowledge, or an idea of the idea’.128 There exists no such thing as a pregiven method that brings us to truth. Science and method, knowledge and consciousness, progress in parallel. This would be the gist of Spinozism: ‘the identity between rational method and adequate knowledge’.129 That, during this march, the mind is always confronted with the resistance of experience poses no threat to this immanent perspective, as Brunschvicg himself made clear during a discussion at the Société française de philosophie in 1921. Against Parodi, who had charged him with defending a ‘dualist realism’ instead of a proper idealism,130 Brunschvicg explained how the experience that resisted or validated scientific theorisation was not a mere empirical/external dimension; quite the contrary, it had been prepared, elaborated and set up by the scientist.131 Hence, ‘the obstacle of experience is not a screen [écran] whose opacity is substantial and permanent; instead, the destiny of intelligence is to invent a more powerful and subtler tool of penetration and enlightenment’.132 In simpler terms, the experience that Brunschvicg advocated as a counterpart to intelligence is always already part of the intellectual activity itself; it is the spur of the self-reflective activity of the mind. When he wrote that in Spinoza

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the ‘spiritualisation of nature’ is the ‘corollary’ of the ‘spiritualisation of the mind’, he wanted to underscore that our scientific and intelligible knowledge of the real is not the outcome of a mere process of representation and abstraction – that would be the Aristotelian way. Instead, by deepening our understanding of nature and its inherent relations and laws, we also deepen our knowledge of the mind, as we become conscious of our intellectual activity and its radical autonomy.133 Brunschvicg repeatedly underscores how in Spinoza consciousness ceases to be ‘riveted to the individual and immediate form of the cogito’ and ‘expands itself until it becomes adequate to the total and infinite unity of the cogitatio’.134 Being an attribute of the substance, thought has the chance of expanding its knowledge indefinitely, towards an integral and reflective knowledge of the totality of the real. It is this progressive and immanent conception of the development of the intelligence that Brunschvicg primarily retained from Spinoza, rather than the systematic architecture of the Ethics. As he wrote as early as 1893 in a letter to Halévy, there was just a slight change in perspective or emphasis separating ‘the system without method of Spinoza and our method without system … the same identity being at the end of two contrary routes’.135 As to Spinoza’s alleged pantheism or substantialism, Brunschvicg declared that ‘To be a Spinozist, it is not necessary to subscribe to the language of substantialist realism.’136 Elsewhere, he would admit that one has to choose between the Spinoza of ‘the progress of human emancipation’ and the Spinoza of ‘the metaphysics of the unique substance’.137 However, he also claimed that many critics of Spinoza, from Bayle to Renouvier, had fallen prey to various misunderstandings concerning the notion of substance. Spinoza’s was not a ‘vulgar’ substantialism. By ‘substance’ he meant nothing but ‘reality itself, taken in its entirety and unity’,138 as both spatial and ideal relationships.139 As Spinoza put it, substance was ‘what is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e., that the knowledge of which does not require the knowledge of any other thing’.140 If such a thing existed, it was sure that for Brunschvicg it would be an asymptotic ideal. For him, the Substance was the ‘total system’ of knowledge, the perfect unity of the ideal and being.141 Only an ‘infinite intelligence’ (God, but the ‘God of the philosophers’) can exhaust it. However, if thought is an attribute of the totality, the finite intelligence is allowed to progress towards the ‘pure interiority’ between the Cogito and the cogitatio – towards, that is, a complete understanding of nature, an adequate mathesis. Brunschvicg wrote: The unity of substance ensures that no obstacle, neither in the nature of things nor in the nature of the mind, will arise that could stop the development of intellectual science. The whole universe is internal to every intelligence; every intelligence has within itself, as a constitutive law of its activity, the principle of the correspondence [adéquation] between the idea and its object [idéat]; one need only reflect upon the truth itself of knowledge to realise that the fecundity of the method extends infinitely, that man is able to join the totality of nature from the inside.142

Yet we should not believe that Brunschvicg’s Spinozism implied that for him the path of knowledge was all downhill. The immanence of truth to thought did not exclude dramatic errors, sudden twists, painful adjustments and paradigm

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changes. In this respect, as we will see with regard to his philosophy of judgement, Brunschvicg remained faithful to criticism and to a subject-reality dialectics, to the idea of knowledge as a sort of ‘compromise’ between interiority and exteriority. His philosophy of knowledge was precisely meant to provide an account of the ‘potentia infinita cogitandi’ that was compatible with the ‘temporal’ and ‘human’ character of ‘the progress of critical reflection’.143 Despite this, however, there was one feature of his thought that was thoroughly Spinozian: the idea that, in the language of the second kind of knowledge, ‘what appeared to imagination as pure diversity and opposition resolves itself into community and unity for the intelligence’.144 And the third form of knowledge revealed precisely that there was a perfect coincidence between natura naturata and natura naturans, that substance was not a limit for the investigation of science, an unfathomable ground beyond the phenomenal modifications, but rather the realm of the internal connections that constituted the ‘indecomposable unity, the spiritual totality of the universe’,145 that is, the rational continuity linking every being and phenomenon in the coherence of the system. The destiny of the individual mind was thus to develop naturally from the finite domain of individuality to the infinite progress of the intelligence, as nothing could remain forever external to it. In this, Brunschvicg saw a parallelism between Spinoza and Leibniz, if one assumed that ‘the most original trait of Leibnizianism, his contribution … to human thought, is that the individual consciousness … is equivalent to the universe of representation’.146 Commenting on Spinoza, Brunschvicg held that the individual was a ‘fiction of spatial imagination’,147 and that ‘Consciousness, given first in its individual and spontaneous form, [developed] through a continuous and immanent progress and [became] consciousness of the universe, of God himself ’;148 a progress that showed how the ‘virtue of reason consists in rejoicing in its own intelligence’,149 in an acquiescentia in se ipso, as Spinoza would have said, where thought and action, reflection and life, are the same force or conatus striving for the beatitude that comes from the knowledge and the acceptance of the laws of nature.

The spirit of criticism: Kant and Fichte In short, the ideas that Brunschvicg drew from Spinoza are the following: (1) the immanence of truth to thought, (2) the progressive emendation of knowledge and (3) the coincidence of the understanding of the mind and the understanding of nature, as if they were the two sides of a Möbius strip. We have also seen that for Brunschvicg the substance was not so much that which is causa sui but rather the totality of reality that can be translated into intelligible terms. This implies a slight shift of emphasis with regard to the Spinozian perspective. In Brunschvicg, in fact, the accent fell more on the mind than on nature. To put it bluntly, it appears that nature was immanent to the mind, rather than the contrary. More elegantly, Brunschvicg wrote that

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Rediscovering Léon Brunschvicg’s Critical Idealism In order to establish the absolute autonomy of the subject, freeing ‘analytical psychology’ from dependence on a dogmatic theory of nature and an ontological position of substance, and in order to ensure that the de Libertate humana did not appear anymore as a necessary consequence of the de Deo, the [Spinozian] equilibrium and the symmetry between … the attributes of extension and the attributes of thought had to be broken.150

This was the turn accomplished – or partially accomplished – by Kant when he established the formal apriority of space and time, when he connected the scientific constitution of the universe to the structure of consciousness: ‘Nature exists only in relation to the mind. This means of course that the spectacle cannot exist without a spectator’ but also that ‘the spectacle … is better organised … as the activity of the mind becomes wider and more harmonious’.151 Positing nature as immanent to the development of the mind was the most effective precaution against the risk of hypostatising the results of our scientific or philosophical inquiries in a fixed and separated natural substance given once and for all. Nature and the mind did not constitute two juxtaposed realms but were two faces of the same spiritual development that clarified each other. Therefore, Kant acted here as a correction of Spinoza, in that he properly understood how the dialectics between finitude and infinity, which lay at the basis of the Spinozian ontology, was not a ‘dialectics of being’ but rather a ‘dialectics of knowledge’, the dialectics between the understanding and reason. ‘As Kant profoundly remarked, a rational doctrine – that is, a properly philosophical doctrine – can escape pantheism only by means of criticism.’152 Whereas thus Spinoza highlighted the unity of knowledge and being, Kant taught that such a unity was made possible only by the ‘activity of the representing being [représentant]’, by a ‘transcendental operation’. Moreover, while Descartes was too eager to establish the ‘ontological’ distinction between intelligible and sensible world, Kant showed rigorously how we are able to build scientific knowledge upon the data of sensation.153 This was the whole point of the transcendental deduction qua proper analytical method going from the actual to the possible, bypassing the limits of Hume’s associationism, Leibniz’s hyper-intellectualism and Newton’s metaphysical temptations (the idea of a sensorium Dei as the medium in which God beholds all things). There were many insights in Kant’s doctrine that Brunschvicg considered valid and still interesting (i.e. confirmed by contemporary science). First, although not in the purely intuitive form, the general perspective of the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ had to be preserved, as the non-Euclidean geometries and the existence of multiple temporal metrics confirmed the irreducibility of space and time to the classical empiricist and rationalistic conceptions. Being forms endowed with a peculiar ‘civil state’, a priori but sensible, space and time depend on a mind characterised by an ‘unquenchable plasticity’ which adapts the rational rigour required by science to the ‘demands of the real’.154 Secondly, in the ‘Transcendental Analytic’ – which, as we will see in a moment, contains the most problematic aspect of Kant’s doctrine – one could find a striking development of Kant’s conception of time. In the ‘second analogy of

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experience’, concerning the birth of the temporal series from the causal link, time ceased to be an a priori form, indifferent to its own content, and it was revealed as resting on a concrete succession which ‘the understanding cannot anticipate and which is revealed by experience alone’. Kant’s example is quite famous: when I look at a house, I can start at any point, from the roof or from the basement, nothing forces me to follow a given order. But when I see a boat run down the coast, the order of my perceptions is necessary and unidirectional: the apprehension of a thing follows rigorously from the apprehension of a thing that precedes it, and I cannot go back upstream.155 The irreversibility of the causal chain entails a distinction between the antecedent and the consequent which makes the Kantian system compatible with contemporary physics, for example, with the second law of thermodynamics.156 The significance of Kant’s doctrine of causality lay thus in that it added the notion of the irreversibility of the temporal succession to the permanence of substance, and in that it understood substance and cause not as realities but rather as relations which acquire their value in their connection with experience.157 The ‘second analogy’ offered a model of causality which resisted any a priori treatment and grounded the intellectual order on the ‘je ne sais quoi’ that constituted the bedrock of experience.158 In a way, this model of causality marked a failure in Kant’s doctrine, as it demonstrated that physics could not be purely reduced to mathematical formalism. However, it made it possible to properly frame the meaning of Kant’s relativism, which was inherently tied to a positivity. Put differently, the power of the ‘critical idea’ was best exemplified by the conception of causality developed in the ‘second analogy’, for it was there that one could best appreciate the strict correlation between transcendental idealism and empirical realism.159 These were just the main examples that for Brunschvicg testified on behalf of the insightfulness and overall validity of critical philosophy, the ultimate thesis of which was that the mind could find within itself all the resources it needed to translate the mumblings of experience into the intelligible language of science. So, Kant was a necessary complement to Spinoza insofar as he showed how man progressed from phenomenal perception to a valid intellectual rendition of the world, and insofar as it fixed the subject’s transcendental apperception as the linchpin of the unification and the progress of knowledge: ‘In Kant … the radical spontaneity of consciousness is affirmed … independently of any dogmatic imagination, of any hypothesis regarding a non-human reason; and such an affirmation has the same positive value as positive science itself.’160 Or, elsewhere, ‘The primacy of transcendental consciousness proves the existence in man of a truth-creating power.’161 In a 1924 article, ‘L’idée critique et le system kantien’, written for an issue of the Revue de métaphysique celebrating the centenary of Kant’s birth, Brunschvicg wrote that Kantianism was ‘a philosophy of reflection, of nachdenken’, which did not spring from a ‘virtuality that precedes its constitution’ where one could find its conclusions in nuce. On the contrary, Kant’s philosophy ‘searches painstakingly for a synthesis for which it cannot predict whether and how it will take place’.162 Throughout his oeuvre, Brunschvicg stressed repeatedly how the spirit of Kantianism consisted for him precisely in having grounded the possibility and the validity of scientific knowledge not so much on purely rational relationships or on

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divine entities as on the very spontaneity of the mind itself when confronted with the data of experience. This is the reason why, since La modalité du jugement, he attributed a great deal of attention to the notion of reflective judgement introduced in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, seen as the most coherent development of the key doctrine of the transcendental apperception. In the free play of faculties that defines the reflective judgement, Brunschvicg discovered in fact a perfect description of the activity of judgement in all its spontaneity and freedom, as the most peculiar expression of the creativity of the mind. As he wrote, ‘The method employed in the Critique of the Power of Judgement – a method that makes this work the most satisfying of Kant’s analyses, regardless of its relation with the two other Critiques – is the true method.’163 The feeling that accompanies the reflective judgement bore witness to the ‘integrity of our being, at the same time rational and sensible’.164 In fact, the spontaneity of the mind cannot be reduced to its products, to a set of forms and procedures defined once and for all. Precisely as a constitutive power, the Urteilskraft ‘does not exhaust itself in the determination of judgements and their objects according to a rule; it remains capable of deploying itself independently of any determination, beyond the rule, in a domain of judgements where analytical reflection regains its own reflective power at its purest.’165 Thus, Brunschvicg concluded, ‘the reflective judgement is pure subjectivity’.166 The celebration of the notion of reflective judgements went hand in hand with the downplaying of the aspect of Kant’s thought that Brunschvicg found the most outdated, namely the doctrine of the categories, which amounted for him to an authentic treason of the original insight of critical philosophy. Indeed, Brunschvicg reproached Kant for having considered geometry and mechanics fixed in a historical immutability. Kant was in fact convinced that he had established once and for all the ‘official list’ of forms and categories, a bias that was ultimately motivated by the incapacity of getting rid of a dogmatic scholastic (i.e. Aristotelian) framework.167 Furthermore, in the ‘Transcendental Analytic’ Kant did not provide a rigorous deduction of the order and the number of the categories; on the contrary, he limited himself to grounding them on the unity of apperception. But in this way the recourse to old scholastic tools such as the table of the categories was unjustified.168 Even worse, in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1785), he built a metaphysics of nature in which each branch (phoronomy, dynamics, mechanics, phenomenology) corresponded to a given category (quantity, quality, relation and modality respectively).169 In simple terms, Brunschvicg charged Kant with desperately having tried to make Newtonian science compatible with the framework of Aristotelian logic.170 Unfortunately, the progress of positive science had destroyed the necessity and the universality of the intellectual categories, thereby definitively dismissing Aristotle’s logic.171 Hence, in the preface to the second edition of his PhD dissertation, Brunschvicg added that the third Critique released the mind ‘from the uncertainties and the embarrassments that Kant suffered on account of his enslavement to the formalism of categories’.172 The original ‘critical idea’ affirmed precisely that the intelligence had a positive and constitutive, and not only legislative, function; that it was endowed

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with the power of breaking the old forms and laws, in order to attain a more precise concordance with reality.173 Kant had thus betrayed the ‘spiritual purity’ of transcendental consciousness, constraining it within logical precincts. At this point, it was Spinoza who, in turn, intervened to correct Kant. But how? We have seen that, for Brunschvicg, one had to stick to the spirit of criticism, instead of abiding by its letter. For him, the only way to do this was to separate what was living from what was dead of criticism and provide a Spinozian correction of Kantianism. The last chapter of Spinoza et ses contemporains, ‘La place du spinozisme dans l’histoire’, provides a glimpse into how Brunschvicg conceived of this interpolation. According to him, in fact, one should not be too hasty in proclaiming the incompatibility between Kant and Spinoza, as Renouvier and many others before him had done, for it might well be that what in the ‘letter’ of the Kantian doctrine appeared to be incompatible with Spinoza’s system was actually what betrayed the ‘critical inspiration’, what still bore signs of the lingering presence of Leibniz and Wolff. In fact, Kant preserved the distinction between the level of man and the level of the absolute, a ‘biological humanism’ pertaining to the finitude of the human perspective and a dogmatic ‘metaphysics of transcendence’ positing both a thing-in-itself and a God whose existence was speculatively uncertain but that must still nonetheless be assumed for practical reasons.174 Thus, it was imperative to correct human thought when ‘it still bows down to the ghost of the vanished idol’.175 It is here that the Spinozian correction intervened, in abolishing the distinction not so much between the subject and the object, that is, between knowledge and its contents, but between knowledge and what lies beyond knowledge, beyond science. Kant must undergo a conversion to immanence. Like many other French readers of Kant, as Renouvier, Couturat or Alfred Fouillée (1838–1912), Brunschvicg rejected in fact the notion of the thing-in-itself and the separation between phenomenal and noumenal sphere, which would introduce a ‘metaphysics of transcendence’.176 On this issue, he echoed his Condorcet teacher Alphonse Darlu, who in the course delivered in 1886–7, whose content is known thanks to the notes taken by Xavier Léon, had stated precisely that if the notion of noumenon is forgone, ‘it is the mind that becomes the absolute reality’, so that the true metaphysics is identified with the knowledge of the mind itself.177 The problem was in fact that Kant had maintained the old dogmatic distinction between understanding and reason, fragmenting the unity of the mind into multiple faculties. For Brunschvicg, the objects of experience necessarily resisted the assimilation to science and forced science to design new laws and grammars, but remained within the reach of the intelligence. This was the only level of knowledge that mattered: ‘Relinquishing the dogmatic distinction between the two levels of knowledge, in order to concentrate all positive knowledge on the only level of science, would ultimately mean interpreting the critical revolution in its authentic meaning – and, at the same time, regaining the deep source of the Spinozist inspiration.’178 This blending of criticism and Spinozism, where one corrected and validated the original insights of the other, was not an arbitrary conflation. Quite the contrary, it had a historical precedent. In fact, it was Fichte – or, at least, the first Fichte of the

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1794 Science of Knowledge179 – that exorcised the ‘ghost’ of the thing-in-self, of the logical-ontological apparatus of the ancient metaphysics, and identified the self with the ‘universal activity’ of thought, thereby developing Spinoza’s interpretation of the cogito.180 It was Fichte, moreover, who emphasised the freedom and the activity of the mind as presented in the second and the third Critique, where the rational man appeared as the legislator of science and action. It was Fichte, again, who properly understood the scientific bearings of Spinoza’s Ethics, which Lessing and Jacobi failed to comprehend.181 It was Fichte, finally, who highlighted the importance of adhering to the ‘spirit’, that is, the original ‘intuition’, rather than to the ‘letter’ of philosophical doctrines.182 Hence, Brunschvicg could declare that with Fichte ‘the critical ideal manifests all its power of expansion and revolution’.183 Fichte represented the maximum of dialectics and German idealism that Brunschvicg could tolerate. As Raymond Aron once recalled, for the generation of the founders of the Revue ‘the history of philosophy culminated precisely with the oeuvre of Kant, continued or, according to them, deformed by Hegel’.184 Indeed, while Fichte marked an interesting step forward in the march of critical idealism, deepening the understanding of the dynamic life of the mind/spirit, Hegel represented in turn the moment of its collapse into a self-referential and abstract logic,185 whereas Schelling’s philosophy was nothing but a ‘neo-Spinozism’ which had neglected the ‘mathematical substructure’ of the Ethics.186 In a way, Fichte may appear at times as the great model of Brunschvicg’s critical idealism. Did he not claim that ‘the truly thorough-going criticism’187 consisted precisely in ‘that an absolute self is postulated as wholly unconditioned and incapable of determination by any higher thing’?188 Like Brunschvicg, he rejected dogmatism identifying it with that philosophy which subordinates the self to an absolutised thing (ens). Furthermore, not only had he completed Kantianism by establishing that a thing was not posited against or beyond, but rather within the self, so that criticism was precisely an immanent philosophy;189 he also rectified Spinozism. Whereas the latter strived to go beyond the simple opposition between the subject and the object, between form and matter, by pointing towards an overall Substance, critical philosophy found the unifying principle in the ‘absolute Self ’ which posits itself and where the opposition between self and non-self is resolved. Thus, Fichte held that criticism was ‘Spinozism made systematic’, that is, nondogmatic.190 In this sense, Brunschvicg could claim that Fichte’s critical idealism marked a step forward, avoiding both the panlogist absolutism of Hegel’s dialectics and the risks of scepticism involved by the Kantian thing-in-itself. In Fichte, the subject was properly creator, insofar as its posited reality – the natural and the moral reality – by positing first itself qua positing being. As Fichte put it, in words deemed crucial for human history by Brunschvicg,191 ‘Just as there can be no antithesis without synthesis, no synthesis without antithesis, so there can be neither without a thesis – an absolute positing, whereby an A (the self) is neither equated nor opposed to any other, but is just absolutely posited. This, as applied to our system, is what gives strength and completeness to the whole.’192 From this perspective, which affirmed the primacy of the mind, the object was ‘nothing but an objection of the self to itself ’.193 And, more generally, the static conceptualism of the

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old dogmatism, which, as we have seen, persisted also in Kant’s criticism, recovered its original dynamism as a crystallised image of the infinite movement of the mind. The ‘universe of representation’ became larger and larger, embracing all the conflicts that might arise between the autonomy of the mind and the determinations of nature. ‘The principle that governs the life of the mind, which makes possible a life of the mind, is thus that one cannot imagine a limit at which the progress of consciousness would stop.’194 But the originality of Fichte was to have avoided the perils of dogmatism by deploying a practical perspective on the life of the mind, where the tensions between infinity and finitude, transcendence and immanence, freedom and determination, were resolved on the practical level, on the level of action and the Streben of the intelligence. This understanding of the heart of Fichte’s philosophy as the ultimate doctrine of freedom was consonant with the interpretation provided by Xavier Léon in a famous 1902 monograph, significantly entitled La philosophie de Fichte et ses rapports avec la conscience contemporaine and prefaced by Boutroux.195 There, Léon claimed precisely that, more vividly than Kant, Fichte had shown how the destiny and the authentic accomplishment of humanity consisted in working for the ‘advent’ and the ‘triumph of Reason’ – a task that could be pursued only by subjecting oneself, one’s own individuality, to a superior and universal ideal.196 In a way, Fichte provided that unification of metaphysics and morality, theory and practice, that in Léon’s view laid also at the heart of the cooperative projects of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale and the Société française de philosophie.197 In Fichte’s philosophy, Léon confessed in his book, he found a doctrine that could ‘satisfy the needs of his reason and the inspirations of his heart’.198 For Léon, Fichte was a philosopher of freedom who had remained faithful to the principles of the French Revolution and Kant’s theory of autonomy. But his Jacobin, anti-imperialist and, most importantly, anti-pangermanist Fichte conflicted starkly with the image painted by his mentor Boutroux, Delbos and the renowned founder of French German studies Charles Andler, who, during the First World War, saw in Fichtean philosophy the source of Germany’s mystical and fanatic belief in its divine mission.199 Brunschvicg was not as staunch a Fichtean loyalist as Léon. As said, he always preferred the first Fichte, closer to the spirit of Kantian criticism. However, it is true that he owed his friend Léon much of his emphasis on Fichte’s continuity with Kantianism (and Spinozism200). What Fichte’s systematic doctrine showed was what had already appeared in Kant’s rickety architectonic critique: any synthetic, theoretical, purely deductive conciliation between the self and the thing was doomed to fail. Reality always presented the bill to the abstract construction of subjectivity. However, this bill could only be acknowledged and authenticated within the sphere of consciousness. In other words, to relinquish idealism was for Brunschvicg to bid farewell also to reality and objectivity themselves. This was not to say that reality was nothing per se, that it did not have a proper visage. Of course, it informed and oriented – it ‘shocked’, as Brunschvicg said recalling Ficthe’s Anstoss201 – the activity of the mind. Nevertheless, and I will return on this point in Chapter 5 on Brunschvicg’s philosophy of judgement, the polarity Subject-Reality had to be transposed within the self, as an internal fold of the self-reflexivity of the mind. According to critical

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idealism, Brunschvicg wrote in L’expérience humaine, ‘there is no I before non-I, and no non-I before I; because I and non-I are the interdependent results of the same process of the intelligence’.202 In this way, thus, it was possible to attain the ‘Ichheit überhaupt’, the sphere of the absolute generality of the mind qua constitutive power of reality, which for Brunschvicg amounted to no less than the principle of the unity of all things, the consciousness of oneself and of things, disclosed by the Spinozian intuition. From this point of view, Brunschvicg said that Fichte’s criticism – which was ultimately a revised version of both Spinozism and Kantianism – realised the humanism already sketched by Montaigne, rescuing man from his lonely perspectivism and showing him the goal of his spiritual life: ‘the earthly community of rational beings, the living unity of thought’.203

Conclusion At the end of this long path, one may still wonder what the significance of addressing Brunschvicg’s readings of the main philosophers of the Western canon exactly is. Are they not simply a reflection of his own view, mere application of his own way of understanding philosophy? And was it not preferable to begin by directly framing the latter? Of course, the first question is true to some extent. In the case of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas or Hegel, we are dealing with utter philosophical ‘prejudices’, which means that Brunschvicg never really tried to engage in dialogue with them.204 He already knew what ‘serious’ philosophy was, and he despised everything that did not fit within the golden frame of philosophical modernity. Logical machineries irritated him, while dynamic accounts of the conceptual inventiveness of the intelligence enthused him. From his perspective, modernity amounted to a historical notion only derivatively, as it was primarily a theoretical and practical attitude: modernity was everywhere the power of judgement itself emancipated from the artificial chains of conceptualism and brought to the fore, where the demiurgic possibilities of a creator were not reduced to the actual forms of its creations. But then there is the second question: why was such a historical détournement a necessary preliminary? The point is that Brunschvicg, as we will see more in depth in Chapter 6, had a historical mindset. For him, one could not simply pretend that history does not exist and that philosophy always begins anew. Of course, the mind is indefinitely creative, but one should not believe, like Bergson did, that ‘a great philosopher cannot be explained by the work of his predecessors’.205 Such a virgin originality is simply impossible, because the exercise of the mind and its judgements are always historical, confronted with specific situations and intellectual horizons. This is why there was no philosophia perennis for Brunschvicg, as well as no absolute novelty. Precisely because he opposed any static and aprioristic conception of the mind, he believed that the history of thought could teach a lot about how the mind works. And precisely because critical idealism was a philosophy of reflection, the mind itself must reflect upon the materials that history offered it: it must judge upon the evolution of

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problems and the different solutions devised through time. It was thus impossible to frame Brunschvicg’s own critical idealism without previously understanding where it stood historically and what he argued against. This is why, having accounted for Brunschvicg’s reflection on the history of philosophy, we must now consider what he thought about his contemporaries, how he placed himself within the philosophical field of his time.

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The legacy of the nineteenth century

Quelques-uns disent que tout est fait d’oppositions, mais ils ne disent pas de quoi sont faites les oppositions. L’esprit de contradiction, érigé en principe de dialectique formelle, risque d’aboutir à la contradiction de l’esprit.1

Introduction A meta-historical aspect should be retained from the previous chapter. In Brunschvicg’s vision, in fact, the history of philosophy develops according to two different logics. On the one hand, its progress is ensured by the creative power of the intelligence, which comes up with unheard-of solutions to the predicaments the mind is confronted with. Accordingly, history is always contingent and open, not being the development of a tale whose laws are known in advance. On the other hand, it could be framed as a series of instances of the eternal clash between ‘philosophy of judgement’ and ‘philosophy of the concept’, which means criticism against dogmatism, reflection against logicism, scientific immanence against metaphysical transcendence, a posteriori analysis against a priori deduction and so on. Following these two logics, the former linear and the latter cyclic, Brunschvicg was able to explain why, despite the progress of Western consciousness through time, one can detect the presence of a bloodline that, across different contexts, is characterised by a common loyalty to the authentic philosophical spirit inaugurated by Socrates. So we have Plato versus Aristotle, Descartes versus Scholastics, Kant versus Wolff ’s Leibnizianism, Fichte against the ‘panlogism’ of Hegel or Schelling’s romantic and irrational Naturphilosophie, and so on. One may thus assume that something analogous holds for the France of the ‘long nineteenth century’. This chapter is precisely meant to place Brunschvicg’s critical idealism against its background. I have already said that Brunschvicg remained very faithful to his spiritualist teachers, to ‘his gods’, as he grandiosely called them once: ‘I have worked regularly along the path laid down by my teachers [maîtres] of the French University.’2 Indeed, he believed that the merit of Lachelier and Boutroux consisted in having broken ‘the evil spell’ of the old eclecticism.3 For this reason, French spiritualism marked the perfect and most consequential accomplishment of the Kantian-Ficthian

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criticism and of Western idealism in general (i.e. of philosophy as such). After a long historical detour, which helped us set the stage for contemporary debates, the time has come to address Brunschvicg’s relationship with his teachers, interlocutors and adversaries belonging to the philosophical field of nineteenth-century France, which was richer and more diverse than is frequently supposed.

From one spiritualism to another Let us start from one of the figures Brunschvicg admired the most: Jules Lachelier. Lachelier was not a direct teacher of Brunschvicg, yet the latter always glorified him as the baptiser of French ‘reflective philosophy’. Note: the baptiser, not the beginner. In fact, as we read in the Progrès de la conscience, for Brunschvicg the true father of this philosophical trend was actually Maine de Biran. Therefore, in order to frame the decisive turn marked by Lachelier, we have first to go through the method and the doctrines of the author of the Mémoire sur la decomposition de la pensée. Biran – the ‘French Kant’, as Lachelier and König first called him4 – was an interesting figure who lived in interesting times. He faced all the predicaments a monarchist and a conservative could face in the 1790s, retiring to the Château de Grateloup, travelling widely and resuming an active social and political life only with the advent of the Napoleonic regime. Despite his institutional roles – he served as Deputy of the Dordogne and Councillor of State after the Restoration – he was profoundly devoted to philosophical speculation, with the aim of founding a ‘science of man’ based on the opposite assumption that guided the sensualism of Condillac and other idéologues like Cabanis and de Tracy, who explained the genesis of ideas and volitions on the basis of elementary sensation.5 Against the sensualists’ project, Biran wanted to frame man and his will, his inner effort, as the driving force of reality. Brunschvicg stressed precisely how, whereas Condillac’s analytical method ultimately applied to a ‘grammatical automata’, a ‘statue’, the subject of Biran’s psychology was a man living in the real world. Biran was the pioneer of French spiritualism insofar as he cautioned psychological inquiry against the danger of linguistic and sensualist formalism, which posited substances and attributes instead of the living unity of the mind. The effort, understood as the elementary tension that accompanied voluntary movement, provided not only the ‘immediate apperception’ of the self, the basic consciousness of one’s own will, but also – and this was Biran’s properly scientific move – the notion of causality. This philosophy of effort was formulated for the first time in the 1804 Mémoire sur la decomposition de la pensée, where Biran opposed his concrete and observational method to the abstract classificatory ambitions of the idéologues. We can easily understand what struck Brunschvicg about this historical turn. Is not the shift from Condillac (and his followers) to Biran comparable to the passage from Leibniz (and the Wolffians) to Kant? The analogy is of course questionable. However, for Brunschvicg it was not purely theoretical but was also corroborated by historical and geographical elements, given that Biran, Fichte and Kant were more or less contemporary: 1804 was indeed the year in which Kant died and Fichte gave a new series of lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre. Spiritualism and criticism were thus two

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outputs of the same ‘reflective’ and ‘analytical’ inspiration running across Europe in the first years of the nineteenth century. Accordingly, Brunschvicg dreamt of a mutual integration between Biran and Kant/Fichte that, if only they had met, could have saved both Germany and France almost a century of ‘speculative ramblings’.6 Criticism would have benefited from a properly immanent psychological analysis: in Kant, in fact, there existed a radical gap between the judgement of perception, still understood in a Humean sense, and the properly objective judgement of experience. By reading Biran, Kant would have understood that sensible and scientific knowledge are perfectly ‘homogeneous’, that the activity of the intellect ‘prolongs a movement through which the subject has already proved his own power of reaction’.7 In short, Kant would have understood that there was no need to articulate experience into – and throw unstable bridges between – artificial partitions (e.g. matter and forms/categories, phenomenal and transcendental self, etc.). Vice versa, by reading Kant’s first Critique, and not only the 1770 dissertation,8 Biran would have learned to understand the notion of causality under a truly scientific and rational guise, not just as a product of psychological introspection.9 Brunschvicg devoted an entire part (book III) of L’expérience humaine et la causalité physique to the Biranian notion of causality. There, he claimed that Biran rightly pointed out that sensualism was biased in that it rested on the ‘illusion of the spectator, who, by dint of being attentive to the spectacle taking place before him, winds up forgetting his own presence and considering only the objects he sees’.10 Biran also took a step further than Descartes: in his doctrine, in fact, the immediate apperception of the self did not open up the realm of an abstract res cogitans, but rather grasped internally the organic unity of the living and thinking subject.11 However, by tying the objectivity of causality to a higher apperception of a motive inner force – the subjective effort – Biran was ultimately unable to transpose and explain causality in the external world, that is, to explain scientific objective causality.12 In other words, in Brunschvicg’s view, Biran always failed to account for how we move from the ‘primitive fact’ of apperception to the idealism of science, which for Brunschvicg could be attained only after a ‘reflective abstraction’.13 In a sense, one can say that Brunschvicg chided Biran for the same reasons he rejected certain interpretations of Bergson’s intuition: just like Biran was unable to define positively the status and the contribution of rationality, sticking to the outmoded formal conception formulated by the idéologues, just as he still remained a prisoner of a ‘sensualist prejudice’ that prevented him from properly understanding the ‘spiritual progress of the self (moi)’,14 Bergson and, more radically, the Bergsonians did not succeed in appreciating the true meaning of intellectualism because they were blinded by the artificial notion of reason depicted by Taine and unjustly raised to the sole model of intelligence. Thus, Biran and Bergson ran both in the same risk of positing a notion (apperception, intuition) that ‘seems to stand on air, apart from reason and beyond experience, so that ultimately one does not know what to think or say about it, given that one can think or say anything’.15 It was at this point that Lachelier entered the game, bringing about a Kantian reflective change within the Biranian framework. In fact, by reading Kant, he understood that, in order to be objective and certain, psychological reflection should be focused not so much on effort, as on the act of judgement.16 Lachelier

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was in many respects a peculiar figure. His published oeuvre amounts to two short books – the two mandatory PhD dissertations – and a few articles.17 Despite that, he wielded a huge influence over the philosophical field of the late Second Empire and the Third Republic, as maître de conférences at the École Normale Supérieure from 1864 to 1875 and, after that, as general inspector of public education and president of agrégation committee. His theoretical importance was thus closely tied to his institutional roles, which made him and his writings a necessary encounter for every philosophy student in the second half of the century. After his death, many saluted with great emphasis his intellectual and pedagogical contribution. For Brunschvicg, for example, he played the same leading role, but with more positive consequences, that Victor Cousin had played in the mid-nineteenth century.18 Boutroux saw in him a ‘spiritual father’,19 while Jean Guitton magnified him as the ‘father of contemporary French philosophy’, as the ‘guide of the French conscience’.20 Not to mention the fact that Bergson’s Essay on the Immediate Date of Consciousness was dedicated to him, although scholars have debated whether this was motivated by academic opportunism or actual admiration. Be that as it may, all these displays of respect should not be taken literally, but rather understood as symptoms. In fact, as was observed, the themes Lachelier addressed were hardly original.21 A monarchic and conservative thinker, keen to an intellectual elitism,22 Lachelier was an austere and stern personality, whom it was prudent not to defy if one cared about one’s own career.23 Still, in the case of Brunschvicg, the esteem seemed to be authentic. Actually, he was not a direct disciple of Lachelier. As we have already seen, his mentor and supervisor was instead Boutroux. Not that this changed much: the latter being a disciple of Lachelier, Brunschvicg was bound to be affected by the legacy of the founder of reflective philosophy. Nevertheless, he encountered the writings of Lachelier well before meeting Boutroux at the university. In fact, he had already started reading Lachelier at the lycée, at the prompting of Darlu. Then, once at the ENS, he read and copied with his friends the manuscript of a course of logic Lachelier gave in 1866–7, the first where the Kantian influence was patent.24 Lachelier’s debuts, in fact, were not Kantian. He began under the influence of Félix Ravaisson (1813–1900), who had studied under Cousin becoming later one of his harshest adversaries.25 In a groundbreaking 1863 report on La philosophie en France au XIXe siècle, Ravaisson contributed to the final nail in the coffin of the old eclectic spiritualism, advocating a new ‘spiritualist realism or positivism’26 which – despite its neo-Platonic and Schellingian understanding of nature – was characterised by the will to measure up with scientific knowledge while at the same time opening up a new space for metaphysics.27 In Ravaisson’s view, the mind had to be framed as the explication of nature itself, as the most perfect manifestation of a metaphysical principle that remained latent, undeveloped and unconscious in nature. For this reason, Lachelier would consider him as the father of a new era of French philosophy. In an 1891 letter to Paul Janet, Lachelier wrote that it was Ravaisson who taught them to conceive being not so much in accordance with the objective forms of substances or phenomena, but in accordance with the subjective ones of spiritual action,

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whether this action consists in … thought or will. I think that you could find this notion in Bergson …, as well as [in Boutroux and] in myself. This is perhaps the only [notion] that we all share and that creates the unity of the philosophical movement of the last twenty years.28

Janet himself – an open-minded disciple of Cousin who held the chair of history of philosophy at the Sorbonne (the one that Brunschvicg would later inherit) – had noticed a shift occurring in French philosophy. Already in 1865 he had held that the spiritualist tradition could be divided in two main phases: a first, ambitious wave, which had managed to impose itself on the sensualist philosophies of the late eighteenth century, and a new phase, whose main aim was rather to defend the autonomy of the mind from the threats posed by the growing explicative ambitions of scientific determinism. In Janet’s view, the hope of the spiritualism of the first half of the century – viz., Cousin’s eclecticism – had been to bring about a ‘complete regeneration of philosophy’ and formulate a ‘comprehensive synthesis’ that could cater for ‘all the needs of humanity’.29 However, this first wave of spiritualism had failed to withstand the impact of the scientific attitude, ‘l’esprit des sciences positives’.30 According to Janet, it was not until the re-establishment of the agrégation in 1863 that one could see the reawakening of spiritualism – or better, the awakening of a new, more scientifically aware spiritualism. In Janet’s partition, the watershed was represented by the publication of some important books that saw the light between 1867 and 1872, most notably Ravaisson’s Rapport, Lachelier’s PhD dissertation The Foundation of Induction and Alfred Fouillée’s La Liberté et le déterminisme.31 Ravaisson was thus a crucial figure in this context, as Brunschvicg’s generation knew very well. No wonder that, whereas Bergson paid tribute to him in a famous text of 1904,32 Brunschvicg and friends asked him to sign the first article for their Revue de métaphysique et de morale.33 Nevertheless, while Ravaisson seemed to be an essential reference for Bergson,34 Brunschvicg acknowledged his importance but did not grant him any relevant place in his historical accounts, most notably in the Progrès de la conscience.35

The dawn of reflective philosophy The problem was that, in the eyes of Brunschvicg, Ravaisson’s perspective was too metaphysical, combining neo-Platonic and Schellingian flavours with the finalistic influence of the philosopher on whom Ravaisson wrote a prize-winning book36 and whom instead Brunschvicg despised the most, namely Aristotle.37 Indeed, ‘reflective philosophy’ began only when Lachelier broke with his mentor and turned from Biran to Kant, a thinker who was harshly criticised by Ravaisson and who Lachelier was the first to introduce systematically among French academic circles. Still, it must be noted that, despite the momentous Kantian turn, the overall scope of Lachelier’s project was the same as Ravaisson’s: reconciling a Christian metaphysics of nature with the deterministic framework of positive science.

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Furthermore, the teacher and the disciple shared a somewhat elitist conception of spiritualism, understood by Ravaisson as a ‘royal and aristocratic’ philosophy opposed to the ‘plebeian’ character of materialism.38 However, Lachelier needed something more rationalistic, if not less ‘sentimental’ and ‘romantic’, than the Biranian and Ravaissonian psychological metaphysics. The reason why Lachelier was drawn to the Critique of Pure Reason was the same reason that justified Brunschvicg’s own critiques of Biranism: how was it possible to justify rationally and objectively the existence of causality in the physical universe on the basis of inner apperception alone?39 Effort was ultimately, for Lachelier, an empirical fact, whose explanatory role, as he wrote to Janet, needed to be ‘justified, deduced, to speak the language of Kant’.40 As a famous anecdote told by Boutroux has it, Lachelier was struck by paragraph 16 of the first Critique, where Kant claims that ‘The “I think” must be able to accompany all my representations.’41 From this, he drew the conclusion that the mind is not defined by the apperception of an interior effort revealing the indissoluble link between volition and consciousness and, by transposition, the external causation of the world; on the contrary, not being a substance, the self is first and foremost thinking, reflection. There is little doubt that the rendition of the German ‘Ich denke’ as ‘Moi’, that is, as the reflective first-person singular, by the early translators of Kant facilitated enormously this psychological reading of the formal Kantian subject.42 But philological concerns aside, what Lachelier was looking for and what he discovered in Kant was a conception of the mind qua legislator of nature. He did also something more than Kant, at least according to Brunschvicg: just like Fichte, he understood that what first needed to be posited was the absolute unity and autonomy of the mind. As in criticism, the objectivity of reality was grounded on the fact that, as Lachelier wrote in his 1866–7 lessons on logic, ‘the mind finds itself [in reality] because it exerts an action on the external world’.43 Or, as he put it in The Foundation of Induction, from a Kantian perspective the most elevated item of knowledge is neither sensation nor an intellectual intuition but a reflective act by which our thought achieves an immediate grasp of its own nature and the relation which holds between it and phenomena. From this relationship we are able to deduce the laws which thought imposes on phenomena. These laws are nothing other than principles.44

Lachelier’s PhD dissertation was aimed precisely at explaining the meaning of this problematic ‘immediate grasp’ that allowed thought to understand its own primacy with regard to nature. There, the problem of induction was raised to the rank of the most crucial philosophical question, the one that gave access to the utmost essence of nature. The choice of such a theme could be explained by considering the importance of induction for the empiricist and positivist doctrines that, in the wake of the popularisation of Comte’s and Mill’s thought by Littré, were dominant at the time.45 It was precisely against them that The Foundation of Induction was written. There, Lachelier tried to find a ‘third way’ between the empiricist account – induction as experiential inference – and the old metaphysical account of Cousin, who believed that causality could be explained via an intellectual intuition of the substance. This is

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how Lachelier proceeded in the book: of course, the law of succession – the fact that an event B is necessarily determined by a previous event A – exists independently of our mind. This is the notion of efficient cause, which forms the kernel of every deterministic view and which for sure is scientifically useful and effective. However, if we limit ourselves to a vision of nature as an indefinite causal series, we are unable to endow reality itself with an objective existence. It is only finality that can make nature intelligible, providing it with a form, namely a harmonic unity, and showing the connections between the parts and the whole. Lachelier referred to a variety of sources, from Leibnitz to Claude Bernard, from Aristotle to the Kant of the third Critique. The latter is particularly important. In fact, Lachelier described finality as an ‘aesthetic function of thought’ enabling us to perceive in nature the same creative force that inhabits our mind. Lachelier recovered the finalism of Ravaisson from a different perspective. On the one hand, he took up the idea of a ‘spiritualist realism’ positing that ‘every being is a force, and all force is thought which tends toward a more and more complete consciousness of itself ’.46 On the other hand, he claimed, if the distinctive trait of the mind is the capacity of varying its own projects, coming up with new ideas and so on, then this freedom is already anticipated in the power of nature creating always new forms for different ends. Brunschvicg mistrusted precisely such a teleological metaphysics of freedom. What he retained from Lachelier was instead the instauration of the dialectics of reflexivity as the proprium of the mind, as well as the subordination of objectivity to thought – in short, his idealistic perspective. In particular, he showed appreciation for the pages of ‘Psychology and Metaphysics’, an article written by Lachelier in 1885, where the inspirations of criticism and Spinozism seemed to converge: Thought – Lachelier wrote – is numerically identical with sensible consciousness. It differs from it … in that it converts simple subjective states into facts and beings existing in themselves and for every mind. It is consciousness not of things, but of the truth or of the existence of things. For man, there is no existence without the action of a thought that knows it and affirms it; neither is there any thought that is not the consciousness and affirmation of an existence.47

Nonetheless, Lachelier’s introduction of a final causality appeared to Brunschvicg as highly questionable. In fact, this introduction was ultimately a ‘superimposition’, motivated not by a ‘reflection on scientific knowledge’ but rather by an aesthetic ideal of harmony. Lachelier too readily ontologised what should remain an epistemological principle and ended up with an abstract metaphysics. Science, in fact, excluded such a finalism, which was not verifiable and which did not play any constitutive role in the scientific enterprise. As Kant had already said, teleology is a way of interpreting the world, not a description of the world itself. Lachelier, thus, had unduly transformed the teleological judgement into a determinant judgement.48 A rigorous critical idealism should not trespass the threshold of the reflection on positive knowledge in search for a higher principle. If it did that, it would turn into a ‘metaphysical dogmatism’ driven by imagination. On the contrary, it must adhere to the immanent and properly human level of scientific activity.49

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Scientific philosophy rises This was the path chosen by the successor of Lachelier and true mentor of Brunschvicg, namely Boutroux.50 Boutroux meant for Brunschvicg two things at once: (1) he was the ‘innovator’ of the history of philosophy in France;51 and (2) he marked the moment when ‘the critique of scientific knowledge’ became ‘conscious of itself, proceeding with the analysis of science for science’s sake, without any metaphysical prejudice’.52 I will return to the first aspect in Chapter 6. For the moment, let us consider just the relevance of Boutroux for Brunschvicg’s scientific orientation. As Émile Bréhier observed, Brunschvicg’s peculiarity lies in the fact that his spiritualism marks a ‘decisive break from the vitalist ideas that were still present in Ravaisson and Lachelier’.53 In a way, thus, his spiritualism had a strong ‘intellectualistic’ inflection. Now, categories such as ‘intellectualism’, ‘spiritualism’ and so on should be taken with a grain of salt. They have just a heuristic value, as they enable us to distinguish the many facets of Brunschvicg’s thought. One must also consider that these labels, as rough as they might sound, were frequently used at the time by contemporary historians or observers and even by Brunschvicg himself to characterise his own philosophy, as shown in Chapter 2. Thus, we should try to understand what they meant and use them like the famous Wittgenstein’s ladder. So, what did Bréhier mean when he said that Brunschvicg added an intellectualist vein to the spiritualist framework of his teachers? Until now, I have focused mostly on the more rationalist and spiritualist sides of Brunschvicg’s philosophical pantheon. I have shown, in particular, how the line of reflective philosophy officially initiated by Lachelier embodied for him the best of the Western philosophical tradition, from Socrates to Fichte. However, this rationalist-idealist-spiritualist lineage merged, in Brunschvicg’s thought, with another bloodline – or rather, constellation of thinkers – practising what at the time was often defined as ‘critique of science’. I refer to authors – philosophers and/or scientists – that, since the mid-nineteenth century, devoted themselves to analysing the theoretical assumptions of the positive sciences and the range of application of their laws. There is a certain unanimity in considering Cournot and Bernard as the founding fathers of this trend, which includes authors as diverse as Renouvier, Émile Borel, Louis Liard, Brochard, Milhaud, Couturat, Poincaré, Meyerson, Louis Weber, Pierre Duhem, Arthur Hannequin, up to Bachelard. Both Isaak Benrubi and Bréhier, in their comprehensive but outdated tableaux of the history of French philosophy, spoke of a ‘critique of science’ which came to the fore as a reaction to the exaggerations of the explicative claims of Comte’s positivism, Spencer’s evolutionism and Taine’s reductionism.54 This is true in a general sense, although the many differences subsisting between these authors make it impossible to reduce them to a school or even a tradition (which is why I have preferred the term ‘constellation’). In a 1908 account of fin-de-siècle French thought, meant as a follow-up to Ravaisson’s 1867 Rapport, Boutroux himself acknowledged the importance, but also the variety, of such a constellation, dividing it between those philosophers who were more disposed to metaphysical speculation and those who, instead, preferred not to quit the level of strictly epistemological research. He placed himself in the first group, along with

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Brunschvicg, Liard or Hannequin. Among the ‘philosophers of science’, Boutroux locates, for example, Milhaud, Poincaré, Duhem or Couturat. What harmonised these two families was for him ‘the tendency to unite philosophy with the positive sciences’, most notably with mathematics and physics. In this respect, they abided by the lesson of Descartes, Malebranche or Comte.55 Comte was certainly decisive for the subsequent philosophical reflection on science, even among those who did not align themselves with his overall tenets. Indeed, most nineteenth-century academic philosophy explicitly loathed the abuses of positivism made by his followers. Still, as Anastasios Brenner has put it, ‘Comte set the agenda’, compelling philosophers to address issues like ‘the classification of scientific disciplines, the role of hypotheses and the empirical criteria of meaning’.56 Brunschvicg, for his part, seemed to appreciate Comte’s original desire to start from an assessment of pure positivity and a historical understanding of the progress of science. He even compared Comte to Kant, submitting that they both contributed to the convergence of philosophy and science, dispelling the lures of the old metaphysical transcendence.57 Furthermore, Brunschvicg seemed to embrace implicitly Comte’s critique of psychology, understood here as any attempt to study the mind in itself, from within, so to speak. Comte did not target also the Cousinian spiritualism, which rested on an introspective philosophical psychology serving as a ‘vestibule’ to metaphysics. Just think of what Comte wrote in a letter as early as 1819, when the enemy was still the sensualist idéologie: ‘One cannot at all study the human mind a priori, in its nature, or prescribe rules for its operations; we can only do this a posteriori, based on results, or on observations of the facts, and these are the sciences.’58 However, as we will see in the next chapter, Brunschvicg refused the sociological conclusions of Comte, trying instead to use the history of science and the tradition of reflective philosophy to recast psychology on firmer grounds. In fact, just as Kant got stuck in the cobweb of the old scholasticism, Comte imbibed the influence of the reactionary and Catholic thinker Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821). Ultimately, this resulted in the pre-eminence of the ‘dogmatic’ desire of synthesis and order over the ‘positive analysis of progress’: ‘The analytical positivism of physical and mathematical philosophy’ was gradually replaced by ‘the synthetic positivism of biology and sociology’, in particular by the ambition to design a ‘social physics’ regulating in a scientific manner the organisation of society.59 In other words, Comte succumbed to a systematic ambition that ended up forcing his overall doctrine – degenerated into a ‘sociocracy’ and a ‘sociolatry’ – back into the theological age that it wanted to overcome.60 By doing so, Comte reversed the method of the Cartesian analysis that he seemed to follow in his early days which consisted in moving from the simple to the complex, relinquished any rational perspective and fell for the romantic seductions of the vague generalities of biologistic organicism.61 Ultimately, Comte’s turning of the ‘ “pure gold” of objective analysis’ into the ‘ “vile lead” of subjective synthesis’ determined a confusion in the relationship between science and metaphysics that lasted well beyond his death.62 Thus, the authentic heir of the properly ‘scientific philosophy’ – the term used before the spread of ‘epistemology’63 – inaugurated by Descartes should be looked for elsewhere. Who was he? Brunschvicg thought of a contemporary of the father of positivism, three years younger, namely Antoine-Augustin Cournot (1801–1877). It

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was him the true founder of the reflective and critical attitude towards the sciences.64 In particular, in Brunschvicg’s narrative, Cournot would have brought to the fore the intimate connection between scientific and philosophical revolutions. As he wrote in Matérialisme, vitalisme, rationalisme (1875), ‘the renovating crises in the sciences have been the only useful renovating crises for philosophy’,65 an idea that Brunschvicg readily made his.66 As Brunschvicg explained, it was impossible to understand Boutroux’s works, or even Duhem’s and Poincaré’s theoretic writings, without referring to Cournot’s research on probability and philosophical certitude.67 Usually known for his technical contribution to econometrics, microeconomics and probability, Cournot was also a brilliant philosopher who tried to draw general epistemological conclusions from his works on determinism and randomness, providing fundamental insights into the differences between scientific and historical knowledge. Cournot broke the chain of causal determinism and escaped its rigid opposition with finalism. He did so by focusing on the role played by chance and probability not only in specific and less relevant fields like, for example, gambling, but more widely within the entire system of knowledge. The contemporary advancements of the social sciences (criminal sociology, economics, etc.) certainly helped Cournot reconsider the status of probabilistic knowledge, its mathematical foundations and its philosophical implications. Concerning the latter, since his 1843 Exposition de la théorie des chances et des probabilités Cournot claimed that mathematical probability was not enough to explain our belief in the truth of certain objective assertions. In a Kantian fashion, for Cournot another regulative faculty was needed besides the calculating understanding: we do not establish the validity of certain truths by mere probabilistic inference; on the contrary, we presume by reason that an order exists in things that grounds the systematicity and the regularity of our observations. Against Kant, however, Cournot would make clear in his Essai sur les fondements de nos connaissances et sur les caractères de la critique philosophique (1851) that reason is not a speculative or regulative faculty. On the contrary, it is the power that allows discovering, objectively, the principles that regulate the production of things and grasping, subjectively, the forms and the procedures of thought.68 For Cournot, then, there was no such thing as a transcendental deduction of the categories of thought, and this was the reason why a Kantian like Dominique Parodi could reproach him for his unquestioned realistic assumption of the objectivity of sensory data.69 Reason discovers the lawfulness of things in the things themselves. Analogously, Brunschvicg observed how Cournot always reduced the ‘rational order’ to an ‘objective order’, which amounted to a form of ‘metaphysical realism’, that is, to a remnant of dogmatism.70 However, in Brunschvicg’s view, Cournot’s main contribution lay in his innovative philosophical conception of science. Up until him, in fact, scientists had always tried to conceal behind the ‘vernissage’ of perfectly polished and harmonic theories ‘the complication and the irregularity of the lines’ or ‘the breakdowns in symmetry’ that troubled the ‘classical taste, its love for order and harmony’,71 while philosophers, for their part, had been used to fashioning upon this model their theories of knowledge as perfectly rationalist-deductive or empiricist-inductive (which is the same) systems. Cournot, instead, cast doubt on whether the actual scientific procedures and results

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could be reduced to such harmonic frameworks and drew attention to another kind of certainty that was no longer apodictic, but rather probabilistic or philosophical. As he wrote in his 1843 book, the objective reality of time and space cannot be demonstrated, and the same goes for the most certain of the laws of physics (e.g. gravitation): we do not accept them only by virtue of a formal demonstration; a ‘judgement of reason’ must intervene that assesses the theories in terms of the ‘order and rational coordination they introduce into our system of knowledge’.72 Whereas Kant was influenced by the achievements of the Newtonian axiomatic blending of rational mechanics and geometry, Cournot was confronted with developments in the biological and social sciences. What these sciences showed unambiguously was the existence of a variety of causal chains or series that intersected by ‘chance’ (hasard), generating new beings or events. Cournot’s theory of ‘probabilistic or philosophical certainty’, praised by Brunschvicg, marked thus the passage from the dogmatic search for ‘sufficient reasons’ to the search for the ‘objective reasons’ of given phenomena. From a scientific point of view, it amounted to the shift from geometry to probability as the key to the extension of science and the progress of knowledge, to measurement as the nexus between calculus and experience. In other words, the task was no longer, as Kant believed, to expel probability and hypothesis from the realm of the critique, establishing a distinction between pure forms and contingent contents that did not hold anymore. On the contrary, one had to look at probability as a positive form of certainty, describing an asymptotic relationship between our subjective and philosophical search for order and the progressive but always incomplete manifestations of the reasons of things. If chance, and not necessity, governed the world of phenomena, science could not be based on pure deduction and apodictic certainty. In conclusion, there are four reasons why Brunschvicg appreciated Cournot and saw in his works the dawn of scientific philosophy: 1. Although he was not an idealist and still adhered to a certain dogmatic realism, Cournot dispelled the naïve faith in the a priori deductive method, based on pure forms and categories, and focused on the ‘connection between the intelligence and things’, thereby abiding by Kant’s ‘critical inspiration’ but also avoiding the dogmatic and formalist mistake of Renouvier’s neo-criticism.73 This is also why Brunschvicg considered Cournot as the true French initiator of the ‘return to Kant’ launched in Germany by Helmholtz.74 2. Furthermore, Cournot found a way out of the deadlocks of eclectic spiritualism and positivism, of the opposition between determinism and finalism, ushering in a new alliance between the sciences and philosophy, where the latter was no longer a ‘specialty of generalities’, the ancilla of a speculative dogmatism, but rather a ‘reflection’ which was ‘immanent to science’.75 3. Cournot highlighted the role of judgement in the constitution of our scientific image of the world and acknowledged that only reason can rectify reason through a continuous exercise of self-reflection and self-analysis. As we have seen, Brunschvicg developed this stance into a full-fledged intellectualism. 4. Lastly, Cournot was also a theorist of history, whose notion of historicity stemmed directly from the introduction of chance at the core of reality. If the

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The marriage of reflective and scientific philosophy At this point, one question remains unanswered: why did Brunschvicg consider Boutroux’s work a continuation of Cournot’s? At the beginning of this section, I have hinted at the fact that Boutroux integrated the reflective framework of Lachelier with a deeper knowledge of, and a more systematic engagement with, the positive sciences. In fact, in 1869, one year after his agrégation, Boutroux was sent by the Ministry of Education to Germany, more precisely to Heidelberg, to study the local university system. There, he had the chance of meeting thinkers like Helmholtz and Zeller, becoming acquainted with the main tendencies of post- and neo-Kantian thought and reflecting upon the intense and fertile dialogue between science and philosophy that was prevalent on the other side of the Rhine.78 From then on, he came to despise philosophy when practised in accordance with the belief that it could be self-sufficient. For him, an engagement with the sciences was indispensable in providing up-to-date and persuasive answers to traditional metaphysical questions.79 His dissertation The Contingency of the Laws of Nature was published in 1874, four years after Taine’s On Intelligence, a book that, at the time, ‘seemed to mark the most advanced state of scientific philosophy’. However, for Brunschvicg, Boutroux completely destroyed Taine’s ‘neo-Scholasticism’, based upon an abstract admixture of physiology, associationist psychology and Aristotelian logic.80 He did so by showing that our mind does not provide any a priori understanding of nature and its forms. As he claimed, logic – and by extension, every intellectual representation of the world – was only a tool created for humanity’s convenience. Hence, one should not mistake its

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crystallised abstraction for an ‘absolute truth’ and a set of ‘creative principles’ that we can arbitrarily impose upon reality. More generally, Boutroux’s dissertation was aimed against scientism as a whole and its two underlying assumptions: determinism and reductionism. Namely, he rejected a particular version of determinism that conflated it with necessitarianism. For him, in fact, that things were determined did not imply that they could necessarily be predicted a priori. Indeed, what separated Boutroux from a certain positivism or even from Kant were the radical scientific achievements of his century, accomplished by Cauchy, Lobachevsky and Sadi Carnot in abstract mathematics, classical geometry and general mechanics. This new context prevented any philosopher from reducing a multiplicity of disciplines, each with its own status and language, to the unity of a system. Furthermore, it invited scholars not to fall for the idea that mathematical reasoning could exhaust the content of experience, as if in a one-to-one static correspondence.81 From this perspective, Brunschvicg always thought that Boutroux’s dissertation somehow anticipated the results of quantum mechanics, like the wave-particle duality, making determinism and contingency compatible.82 In the Contingency, thus, Boutroux took a step further with regard to Lachelier: while the latter stayed within the framework of a Kantian dualism between natural determinism and reflective, ‘noumenal’ freedom, the former aimed at grounding human freedom within nature itself. For Lachelier, the finalist spontaneity of nature was a purely metaphysical and, so to speak, ‘analogical’ anticipation of the subject’s creative power. For Boutroux, instead, this power should be ontologically presupposed within nature itself. He then proceeded to dismantle the homogeneity that usually characterised causal determinism: in his view, the proportionality that one could establish between correlative phenomena was always precarious and variable, affected by qualitative variations that – against the dogma of modern science – could not be easily written off from nature. Even more radically, qualitative variation was the precondition for causality itself: ‘If the effect is in every respect identical with [that is, reducible to] the cause, it simply forms one with it and is not a true effect. If it is distinct from it, this is because it is, to a certain extent, of another nature.’83 This idea contradicted the principles of conservation that sustained Descartes’s and Leibniz’s mechanism, gesturing at the biological notion of epigenesis, which introduced a gap between production and product, and at the second principle of thermodynamics, according to which the energy degrades into heat following an irreversible process.84 Then, Boutroux proposed a topology of reality consisting of a plurality of ‘worlds, forming, as it were, stages superposed on one another’:85 the world of causes, the world of notions, the mathematical world, the living world and, lastly, the thinking world. The superposition of these worlds did not entail an order of fixed and deterministic sequentiality, because every stage was characterised by a configuration of its own that owed nothing to the configuration of the inferior stages. From a scientific point of view, this amounted to saying that the laws regulating a layer of reality were not sufficient to account for what happened in the superior layer, and this irreducibility carved out a space of contingency in the development of the system of nature. In this pyramidal architecture, the apex was of course consciousness, which could not be explained in light of physiological and chemical processes. What is interesting here is how Boutroux characterised consciousness and its activity: consciousness was not, according to him,

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‘a phenomenon, a property or a function’ but rather ‘an act, a transformation of external data into internal data, a kind of living mould in which phenomena undergo a process of successive metamorphoses and the whole world may find exercise for activity, by losing its own distinctive substance and form, and assuming an ideal form, one both unlike and analogous to its real nature’.86 Consciousness does not constitute being, but rather, as Boutroux said, it ‘makes being’.87 Now, there are two interesting elements here: on the one hand, consciousness is presented as an act, in keeping with the psychology of the spiritualist lineage Boutroux belonged to, wherein resonated elements taken from Aristotle and Leibniz; but on the other hand, consciousness is also what shapes experience, in a strong Kantian sense. However, as has been noted, Boutroux retained from the a priori only what could be interesting for a spiritualist, namely the idea of an original action of the mind.88 In fact, when it came to determining the status of natural laws, he rejected the transcendental perspective qua a priori inquiry on the formal possibility of knowledge. The fundamental laws are not posited a priori by the mind. ‘It is not exact, then, to say that laws govern phenomena. They are not posited anterior to things, but presuppose them.’89 In other words, ‘the concept of law results from the effort we make to adapt things to the mind’,90 and not a synthetic and a priori judgement originating in our mental conformation – an argument that directly inspired Brunschvicg’s own critique to the table of categories. If Kant, who fully assumed the Newtonian framework, assimilated law and necessity, contemporary science, by dissociating mathematical formalisation and the experimental methodology of the physical sciences, destroyed every possibility of finding the very form of intelligence in the laws of nature. To be sure, Boutroux’s conception of science was not deprived of metaphysical connotations and even mystical suggestions. I have already said that, like Lachelier, he wanted to make human freedom and positive science compatible. The last pages of his dissertation are indeed extremely metaphysical, presenting morality and society as the apical levels where humanity realises its essence and proves wrong the fatalism of those reductionist perspectives that downplayed agency as a delusional manifestation of instinct, character or habit. Like Lachelier, Boutroux was in fact a Catholic who searched and found a way to reconcile his faith with science. However, this did not pose a problem for Brunschvicg. As a matter of fact, Boutroux’s students ‘tended to minimise the role that religion played in [his] philosophy’. They ‘were republicans, often Jews; writing at a fin de siècle in which the credibility of Catholicism wat at a nadir with the French left; they had little reason to emphasise the religious roots of their scholarship’.91 What ultimately mattered for Brunschvicg was the fact that, in Boutroux, science was the necessary starting point if one wanted to frame the ‘values of order and reason, harmony and freedom. Any transcendent synthesis is deceitful’.92 With Boutroux, the philosopher was no longer someone who tried to imagine entities or invent logical generalities in order to force the real into his own aprioristic frameworks.93 Of course, like Lachelier’s, Boutroux’s doctrine was perhaps too finalistic. Furthermore, it anticipated many Bergsonian tenets that Brunschvicg surely did not appreciate, like the primacy of the qualitative heterogeneity over the quantitative mechanism and the hierarchical conception of nature in which freedom and creation progressively unveil themselves as the essence of reality. Despite that,

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however, Brunschvicg valued and retained two fundamental perspectives: first, the rejection of any deductive or merely empirical approach to science, which had to be studied instead by always remembering that it was a spiritual activity through and through, constantly bearing traces of the intervention of the mind; secondly, the idea that, if the world rested upon transformative, dynamic principle, upon the primacy of action over essence, history was a necessary dimension of the reflection on science and of science itself. Accordingly, Boutroux’s lessons consisted in this precious teaching: that, instead of wasting our energies to dress ambitious narratives telling how history and science should go, instead of reducing knowledge and nature to conclusive tables of categories or concepts, we should study science at work and learn something about the creative and plastic essence of our mind.94

Critical idealism versus neo-criticism With Boutroux’s amendments to Lachelier’s reflective analysis, a rigorous idealism was finally established. In fact, critical idealism was not merely the antithesis of realism, as if they were two different answers to a common problem. On the contrary, it followed a logic of its own, which had nothing to do with the ‘primacy of representation and the concept’ that characterised Aristotle’s realism.95 Idealism was not the ‘contemplation of closed system of phenomena and essences’; its ambition was not to describe and provide the final cartography of the ‘ordo ordinatus’. Instead, it aimed at seizing the living becoming of such an order, its ‘progressus ordinans’, linked to the creative and dynamic activity of the mind.96 Put differently, ‘Reason can successfully fulfil its characteristic function of reflection only if it accepts to seek itself not in the physical world and the hierarchical forms of the universe, but in positive knowledge and the successive stages of its progress, only if it conceives of itself as thought of thought and not as thought of nature.’97 Throughout the years, from La modalité du jugement to his late writings, Brunschvicg always pitted the reflective philosophy of his teachers against another, dominant doctrine, namely the ‘neo-criticism’ of Charles Renouvier (1815–1903).98 Renouvier was surely one of the greatest personalities in nineteenth-century French philosophy.99 Although he never held an academic position, he wielded a strong influence over the intellectual climate of the Third Republic, thanks to his widely read journals La Critique philosophique (1872–1889) and L’Année philosophique (1890– 1913) and to an impressive body of work, whose thematic spectrum spanned from logic to social theory, from the philosophy of science to metaphysics. The vertiginous theoretical enterprise of the four Essais de critique générale (1854–64) – where Renouvier deployed a sophisticated reworking of the Kantian criticism – was just the first step of a philosophical path that reached its peak at the turn of the century. For almost fifty years, in his articles and books, Renouvier advocated a doctrine that tied together a reflection on science aimed at showing, against the determinism of Comte, the limits of positive certainty, and an ethical-political vision seeking to combine the best of socialism and liberalism, meaning civil liberties, individual rights, solidarity and social cohesion.

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The main tenets of Renouvier’s doctrine – at least those that are relevant for present purposes, given that his philosophy was extremely complex and changed significantly over the decades100 – can be briefly summarised as follows: 1. Starting from a ‘finitist’ conversion that took place in 1851, he rejected the existence of an actual infinite in mathematics, a stance that led him to deny the divisibility of space and time, the continuity of motion and, ultimately, mechanical determinism. This finitist perspective oriented also his interpretation of criticism: he accepted from Hume the reduction of knowledge to the enchainment of phenomena and from positivism the limitation of epistemological inquiry into the laws of nature. This entailed that, for him, every metaphysical transcendent principle – infinity, the absolute and, above all, substance – was to be banished, as incompatible with the finite horizon of experience. In his view, ‘substantialism’ meant everything that postulated the existence of a reality beyond representations, for example, Kant’s thing-in-itself or the substance of Renouvier’s utterly despised archenemy Spinoza. 2. Similarly to Karl L. Reinhold (1757–1823), but actually inspired by Hume, he argued that reality as we know it is purely representation – more properly, a synthesis of finite representations. Relation was therefore the most fundamental law guiding our knowledge of the real. Criticism had thus the task of bringing to light the ways in which science organises the relations between phenomena and of determining its epistemological limits, thereby providing ‘the elements of a universal grammar and dictionary’.101 It did so by establishing, on the basis of a further elaboration of the law of relation, a set of categories, from the most abstract to the most concrete. They were: relation, number, position, succession, quality, becoming, causality, finality, personality.102 For Renouvier, the rewriting of the table of categories was, until the end, ‘the key to everything’,103 as it provided the elementary laws of representation upon which science was grounded. 3. This perspective also rebounded on Renouvier’s conception of the history of philosophy, which he understood as the eternal recurrence of preordained opposite categories (e.g. thing/idea, infinity/finitude, evolution/creation, necessity/freedom, happiness/duty, evidence/belief). The most paradigmatic text in this regard is the Esquisse d’une classification systématique des doctrines philosophiques (1885–1886), which Brunschvicg often quoted.104 4. The introduction of the categories of finality and personality gave a practical twist to Renouvier’s criticism. Finality had to be understood as the inner tendency animating nature and culminating with the human subject (in the same vein as Lachelier), while the primacy of personality, the most concrete of the categories, indicated that the categories were functions of the actual thought of the subject – more precisely, of man as knowing and moral agent. The second Essai bore precisely on the study of the concrete laws of human psychology and action. It was a way, for Renouvier, to reconcile the two poles of humanity that Kant had fatally divided, that is, cognition and practice. In Renouvier, the realm of knowledge was subordinated to the psychological dimension of certitude,

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belief and volition. From this point of view, freedom was not a noumenal feature of human life but rather the concrete possibility of triggering willingly a causal series in nature, a principle of radical discontinuity (given that, as we have seen, for Renouvier there was no necessary determinism). However, freedom was not something that could be empirically or logically demonstrated, but rather a practical and probabilistic belief that was the object of an act of volition105 – an idea that influenced profoundly William James’s pragmatism.106 In other words, it is because we think of ourselves as free that we are actually free, that we can intervene effectively in the course of phenomena (which Kant on the other hand excluded). Now, despite his marginal position (institutional and geographical), his lack of public presence and his convoluted philosophy exposed in a number of thick books written in an intricate, rough-hewn and cumbersome French, Renouvier was highly respected during the years of Brunschvicg’s intellectual development. However, Brunschvicg inherited from Boutroux a certain distrust towards any doctrine of the categories, that is, towards any stance constraining the life of the mind within a logical cage, freezing the plasticity of the mind into an fixed set of pre-established and universal laws. In one of his last works, Boutroux articulated this critique – which, according to a witness, was recurrent in his courses at the ENS107 – in the following fashion: What we call the categories of the understanding are only the totality of habits which the mind has contracted in striving to assimilate phenomena. It adapts them to its ends, and it is adapted to their nature. It is through a compromise that harmony is reached. And so the scientific spirit is no longer, henceforth, a bed of Procrustes, in which phenomena are supposed to be kept in order. We see the intellect, living and flexible, expanding and growing – not unlike the organs of the body – through the very exercise and effort that the task to be accomplished exacts from it.108

These lines perfectly summarise Brunschvicg’s position towards the categorial framework of ‘neo-criticism’. Such a position is best outlined in a long article published in 1920 in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. There, Brunschvicg condemned not only Renouvier’s ‘neo-criticism’ but also the doctrine of his foremost and most talented follower, Octave Hamelin (1856–1907), a specialist of ancient philosophy who taught for many years at the University of Bordeaux and who, in 1907, a couple of months before his untimely death, published a book titled Essai sur les elements principaux de la représentation.109 Also thanks to its de facto posthumous character, this book was favourably received and went on to become a must-read in the following decades. There, Hamelin provided a dialectical reworking of Renouvier’s categories emphasising their logical construction. A few examples can help explain why Brunschvicg abhorred this method: the category of Time as Duration was for Hamelin the ‘synthesis’ of the Instant (thesis) and the Span of Time (laps de temps; antithesis); Quality as what is Determined was the synthesis of the Positive and the Negative; Alteration qua Transformation was the synthesis of Persistence and Denaturalisation; and so forth.

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We can thus understand why – pace Hamelin himself, who claimed to be inspired by Kant – his doctrine was often perceived as Hegelian, even by Brunschvicg.110 According to the latter, with Hamelin ‘neo-criticism’ presented itself under its most ‘sterilising’ guise, articulating categories that were not reflectively distilled from the actual activity of the mind, but rather a priori and logically deduced one from the other.111 The categories were thus a purely ‘verbal’ construction, deprived of positive content, stemming from the desire to imprint an artificial mould upon experience and the activity of the mind.112 In Renouvier and Hamelin one could find thus an absolutisation of representations that neglected what critical idealism asserted firmly, namely that representations are just stages in the progressive march of the intellect, which consists in the power of judgement.113 As we have seen in the previous chapter with regard to Fichte, the mind is characterised by an infinite tension, a Streben, which has to deal with the resistance of reality. Classifying its activity according to a fixed and allegedly definitive hierarchic system of forms means therefore mutilating it. Incidentally, this is also the reason why Brunschvicg loathed the ‘sociological realism’ of Durkheim, who had been a friend and a colleague of Hamelin in Bordeaux and was partially inspired by his dialectical reworking of Renouvier’s categories.114 The second critique that Brunschvicg levelled at Renouvier targeted his attempt to correct Kant by unifying the man of knowledge and the man of morality. In doing so, Renouvier ended up subordinating knowledge to the psychological experience of belief. In his 1924 article on Kant, Brunschvicg distinguished himself from Renouvier’s ‘dogmatism’ that made rational demonstration and critical analysis dependent on ‘an initial leap of faith’, that is, on an act of belief, which betrayed a pre- and anti-critical attitude.115 In his second Essai de critique générale on ‘rational psychology’, Renouvier had held that the problem of the simultaneous relation between the subject and the object of knowledge – that is, the coexistence, revealed by reflection, of the self which is and the self which represents itself as being – could be resolved only by means of ‘a sort of leap of faith’,116 which meant that the solution to the problem of truth lay in a form of primitive belief concerning the existence of the external world. In Renouvier, recourse to faith and belief was necessary because his finitist phenomenalism, which locked consciousness within the ‘braincase’, prevented him from solving the issue of the external relationship between thought and extension, mind and universe. Due to this shortcoming, neocriticism came across as a ‘Kantianism without critique’117 – a judgement later repeated in the Progrès de la conscience, where Renouvier was accused of ‘divesting theoretical as well as practical reason of their rational principle’.118 By grounding scientific knowledge on the concrete reality of the psychological man, of the subject of desires, passions, beliefs, hopes and so on, Renouvier’s criticism turned his back on critical idealism and regressed to a ‘transcendental realism’ akin to the Scottish doctrines of Hume and Reid. The third and last problematic aspect of Renouvier’s thought concerned his conception of science, which has been acknowledged by almost every observer as out of step with the new scientific breakthroughs. In particular, Brunschvicg targeted two features of neo-criticism. First of all, the use of the principle of non-contradiction in order to substantiate what Renouvier called ‘the law of number’, namely the refusal of an actual infinite number and the affirmation of the determined, finite and relational

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character of every phenomenon. According to Brunschvicg, this law was based on a simplified conception of mathematics, reduced to the domain of positive natural numbers, which meant ontologising arithmetic and neglecting its infinite generativity determined by the intellectual laws of production.119 In fact, the law of number entailed the realist postulate which grounded the criterion of truth only in the represented object and not in the thinking subject. Secondly, Brunschvicg contested the correction of Kantian causality in the name of a phenomenal indeterminism giving room to moral freedom. Renouvier needed phenomenal relativism to show the capacity of free will – a faculty which was always linked to representation – to impose its causality in the world. But for Brunschvicg this solution relating an actual effect to an ‘abstract’ faculty was fatally biased by ‘a sort of psychological realism’.120 Indeed, the developments of contemporary science pointed in the direction of the infinitely big and the infinitely small, towards the affirmation of an ‘unlimited fecundity’ of the intelligence that transcended conceptualism and that made it possible to define intellectualism as a ‘philosophy of pure activity’.121 When compared to this progress of science and the mind, culminating, for example, in the works of Cantor, ‘the followers of the law of number’ took a backward step of twenty centuries, to the times of Pythagoras or Zeno of Elea.

Conclusion Brunschvicg’s critique of Renouvier implicitly reiterated Ficthe’s objections to Reinhold – a parallelism that was restated in the Progrès de la conscience when Brunschvicg compared the progress from Reinhold to Fichte to that from Renouvier to Lachelier.122 We know that Fichte studied extensively an extremely popular essay published anonymously in 1792 with the title Aenesidemus, which consisted in a questioning of Reinhold’s Elementarphilosophie and of critical philosophy in general. Later, the author turned out to be Gottlob E. Schulze (1761–1833), who advocated a sceptical ‘meta-critical’ reading of Kantianism.123 While reviewing the book, Fichte came to acknowledge the pertinence of many of Schulze’s critiques of Reinhold, although he did not agree with his scepticism.124 In particular, Fichte agreed precisely with the idea that a representation (Vorstellung) was just a mere fact (Tatsache) of consciousness. Reinhold thus debased the true nature of the mind, which was not a collection of elemental facts but rather a productive activity, a Tathandlung. Analogously, Brunschvicg believed that a Reinhold-like like phenomenalism as Renouvier’s neocriticism still belonged to a pre-modern spiritual epoch that the intellectualisation of modern and contemporary science had ruthlessly disqualified. A proper critique of science, like the one articulated by Cournot, could only rely upon a criticism revived by the import of Lachelier’s and Boutroux’s reflective philosophy, where the bearing structure of the architecture consisted not in an artificial and unnecessarily sophisticated network of categories but rather in the intellectual enchainment of judgements. In brutal terms, ‘being’ was a function of thought: that was the starting point of Brunschvicg’s philosophy of judgement.

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A philosophy of judgement

La contradiction gît au sein de la copule: est signifie tantôt vérité et tantôt réalité. De là cette double tendance perpétuelle, à juger du réel suivant l’idée du vrai, à laisser l’idée se dégrader pour s’adapter aux anomalies du réel.1

Introduction The distinctive traits of Brunschvicg’s critical idealism are already outlined in their definitive form in his 1897 PhD dissertation, La modalité du jugement. This text is often downplayed by commentators, who prefer to focus on the more fascinating and systematic analyses of the great historical works of the 1910s and 1920s. Yet the idea, expressed at the end of the Progrès de la conscience, that ‘man cannot escape the circuit of his judgements’,2 and that somehow epitomised critical idealism, can be understood only against the background of the Modalité. Undoubtedly, this is a text that, despite its programmatic nature, presents all the limits of any ambitious debut. It is clear that Brunschvicg wanted to show off his theoretical abilities and establish himself as an original thinker. However, the book ended up being judged too virtuosic and even too systematic in its will to classify all the different forms of judgement. As we will see in the following pages, Brunschvicg articulated a sophisticated architecture to account for the various modalities that judgement could assume in the theoretical and the practical spheres – which, coherently with the lesson of Fichte and, in France, of Lachelier, Darlu, Lagneau and Boutroux (but also with that of the nemesis Renouvier) were solidly tied together. Indeed, this excess of systematisation may easily attract cogent objections, notably the following: is a posteriori systematisation better than a priori systematisation? In other words: is Brunschvicg’s attempt to articulate rigorously the different forms of judgement less dogmatic or less crystallised than, say, Renouvier’s or Hamelin’s tables of categories, only because it has a reflective nature while the latter an aprioristic character? The problem remains, and Brunschvicg himself seemed to acknowledge it, given that apparently, as Gualandi has remarked,3 the framework, the methodology and the concepts of the Modalité were abandoned and returned only in L’expérience humaine

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et la causalité physique, twenty-five years later. This is not to say that Brunschvicg disavowed his thesis, which on the contrary continued to provide the backdrop to his more historical inquiries. He simply thought that it was better to proceed more prudently in his research. It must be noted, in fact, that his dissertation was almost a fiasco, at least with regard to the high expectations on the young philosophy professor. Brunschvicg was indeed acknowledged as a very promising thinker, but the jury refused to reward his work with the highest honour (‘très honorable’), which required unanimity of the members. According to some, Brochard believed that the defects of the text made it impossible for his author to even consider getting a post at the Sorbonne.4 Paul Janet protested that Brunschvicg did too much work for a PhD thesis, which should rather be a scholarly exercise. Instead, he had wanted to ‘encompass the entire philosophy’ and produce an original ‘system’ of his own, a tendency that, Janet argued, was widespread among young students and that inevitably led to a lack of common language and ideas.5 Finally, Séailles was not convinced by Brunschvicg’s obscure conclusions: ‘Brunschvicg provides us with a very complicated theory only to wrap us in mystery, which normally would be a departure point for philosophy.’6 But which were exactly Brunschvicg’s mysterious conclusions?

A farewell to syllogism In the preface to the second edition of his dissertation, Brunschvicg claimed that the charges of ‘rashness’ and ‘boldness’ were due to his ‘deliberate break with the claims of the obsolete metaphysics’.7 This was perhaps a way of presenting his own work in quite a heroic way. Actually, things are more elementary than that. By looking at the minutes of the defence, in fact, it appears that the members of the jury found Brunschvicg’s demolition of Aristotle in his secondary Latin thesis – Qua ratione Aristoteles metaphysicam vim syllogismo inesse demonstraverit – which amounted to the pars destruens of Brunschvicg’s theoretical project, a little bit too hasty and based on philological errors, misunderstandings and even sly manipulations. Theirs was not so much the reaction of touchy guardians of the old metaphysical order, as a series of critical remarks made by scrupulous professors on the work of an ambitions candidate who could not conceal his distaste for Aristotelianism. I have demonstrated, in Chapter 3, how negatively Brunschvicg depicted Aristotelian philosophy. I have also pointed out that one should see behind it a strong identification with the legacy of Descartes, he who, as written in the Rules for the Direction of Natural Intelligence, omitted ‘all the precepts of the dialecticians’ that were meant to ‘regulate human reason’ and ‘whose conclusions follow so necessarily that the reason which relies on them, even if it should, in a certain manner, take a holiday from the evident and attentive consideration of the inference itself, could still, meanwhile, draw a conclusion which is certain by the force of the form involved’.8 Although Aristotle clearly distinguished between dialectic and sophistry, for Descartes they were both on the same side of the coin from a scientific point of view.9 Setting out from this line of argumentation, Brunschvicg developed a stance that remained

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unchanged over the years, up to his last works. As he said to Halévy in a letter of 1894, ‘I apply to Aristotle my own universal method: determining metaphysics through logic.’10 Translated, it meant that Brunschvicg tried to attack Aristotelianism on the front of the alleged inherent and unwarranted interdependence between logics and metaphysics – a manoeuvre that was judged by the jury to be quite hazardous and not sufficiently corroborated by textual elements. However, in the eyes of Brunschvicg a deconstruction of Aristotle’s theory of syllogism was strategic for the articulation of a proper philosophy of judgement in his main dissertation. Brunschvicg’s critique of the theory of syllogism stirred up controversy also because it exploited to its advantage observations elaborated twenty-six years before by an untouchable figure like Lachelier, who was the teacher or close friend of almost every member of the committee. In his own Latin PhD dissertation, De natura syllogismi (1871), Lachelier had indeed problematised the syllogistic logic of the Stagirite, but he could not be considered an anti-Aristotelian at all. Rather, he had been interested in correcting Aristotle’s model.11 Lachelier had dealt with a highly technical problem of Aristotle’s logic, denying the existence of the so-called ‘immediate consequences’, that is, operations by means of which a proposition can be deduced from another proposition without introducing a third proposition (subalternation, conversion, contraposition). We shall shortly see what role Lachelier’s reading plays in Brunschvicg’s critique of syllogism. For the moment, it must be remarked that the latter retrieved from the former the necessity of bringing forth the psychological reality that lay buried beneath the formalistic scaffolding of syllogistic logic. This means that logic for both of them was strictly linked to the study of intellectual operations. According to some, this led to some serious misunderstanding, in that their interpretation was too biased by prejudices and concerns that were foreign to the Aristotelian system.12 However, Brunschvicg was unapologetic in his goal, which, far from being philological, was that of evaluating Aristotle’s solution to a perennial problem. In fact, the Latin dissertation, which discussed the ‘metaphysical virtue’ of syllogism, was meant to address a question that, although under different guises, haunted Brunschvicg throughout his life, namely that of how the order of knowledge relates to experience, which was ultimately tantamount to inquiring into the foundations of science and scientific reasoning: ‘It was a question of deciding whether the logical deduction can legitimately appear to be the tool par excellence of the knowledge of nature.’13 During the public defence, Brunschvicg declared having being struck by the ‘duality’ of Aristotle’s inspiration: on the one hand, physics and metaphysics, which deal with the concrete object and proceed by induction; on the other hand, logic, which finds in deductive syllogism the key to universal and necessary conclusions. Brunschvicg was then interested in seeing how Aristotle reconciled the duality between being and thought.14 He singled out notably the middle term, which in Aristotle’s syllogistic system was the element relating to both the major premise and the minor premise, thereby ensuring the formal rigour of the reasoning. Brunschvicg claimed that, for the syllogism to be properly scientific, that is, according to Aristotle’s own definition, to establish a properly causal knowledge, the middle term must refer to the cause. This

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view was supported by a reference to Aristotle himself, who, in the Posterior Analytics, had said that the middle term is the ‘cause for a substance’s being’.15 If that was true, Brunschvicg argued, logic and metaphysics would be connected, ‘the former being grounded upon the nature of things and the latter being enlightened by reason’. In such a case, the order of ideas would be a perfect mirroring of the order of things. Brunschvicg maintained in fact that Aristotle modelled his logical theory upon what for him was the ultimate mode of existence: the ‘living and animated body’, the organism. The structure of the syllogism, with two propositions engendering, thanks to the middle term, a third proposition called conclusion, was therefore meant to mimic the ‘generative power’ of the living being, ‘containing in itself its cause of existence’.16 However, the problem was that there were multiple forms of syllogism, generated by the various rules of conversion from imperfect to perfect forms, and four different causes: material, final, formal, efficient. This raised a series of difficulties, for there must be a homogeneity between the order of the middle terms and the order of the causes. The first kind of reasoning is the inductive syllogism, which is imperfect, given that it does not proceed in a rigorous deductive manner, but is purely enumerative, accumulating a series of empirical examples instead of grasping the ‘authentic reason of things’. In this case, the conclusion is not necessary and is purely extrinsic. Aristotle’s famous example, quoted by Brunschvicg, is that of the war against neighbouring countries. If we want to prove that a war with Thebes would be a disaster, we must move from analogous and antecedent instances, like Thebes’ war with the neighbouring Phocaea, which ended up in a disaster. Hence the syllogism ‘The war against neighbouring cities is bad – Thebes is a neighbouring city – The war against Thebes will be a disaster.’17 In this case, the major premise is inherent in the minor one thanks to a term (‘the Thebes-Phocaea war was a disaster’) that is similar to the conclusion of the syllogism. However, such a kind of inductive reasoning – that is, knowledge by experience – where the cause is material, is necessary as a preliminary step towards a proper scientific knowledge. Matter per se is in fact a pure potentiality that is not determined and that, accordingly, cannot determine and produce anything. Science begins only when we convert imperfect inductive syllogisms into perfect syllogisms of the first figure. Take, for example, the belief that the planets, because they do not shine, are close to us: ‘All that does not shine is close to us – The planets do not shine – Then the planets are close to us.’ This is once again an empirical observation, where the middle term is the simplest thing to know by means of the senses. However, we can convert this syllogism into a more rigorous reasoning: ‘Nothing that is close to us shines – The planets are close to us – Then they do not shine.’ By changing the syllogism and converting the middle term, we arrive here at a properly causal explanation, moving from a reasoning that simply registered the ‘how’ to a reasoning that shows the ‘why’. Hence, Brunschvicg held that ‘the principle of conversion is the origin of authentic science’18 and, even more radically, that ‘The entire Aristotelian philosophy is worth what the art of conversion is worth.’19 Science begins when we search for something that goes beyond the senses and empirical changes, when we try to establish, thanks to the middle term, some intelligible causal relation, some necessity within contingency. The first cause we look for to explain change is the efficient one, by

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means of which syllogism actually seems to describe causal necessity. However, physics is not the realm of absolute necessity, but of ‘what happens most often’, and cannot therefore represent the perfect science, just as efficient cause is not the perfect cause. We have therefore to look at metaphysics, a science of the eternal causes. This introduces us to the realm where syllogisms express formal causality, that is, the ‘essence of the thing’, the reason why the thing is what it is. We have here a complete causal determination and a conclusion expressing an intellectual (i.e. non-empirical) universality. However, although form is certainly more important both logically and ontologically than matter, it is nothing if taken per se. This is why Aristotelian metaphysics rests on the fundamental category of substance as a synolon of form and matter. Consider now the following major and minor premises, where the middle term is the substance with its two elements (both form and matter): ‘All men are animals – Callias is a man.’ When I say that ‘Callias is a man’, I see empirically the individual Callias but, at the same time, I grasp intellectually the essence of humanity that is in him like in every other man. However, the quidditas – that is, what it means to be a man – is given only by the major (in this case, being an animal). ‘Thus, when in a man one grasps the animal, or the reasonable being, or the biped, one obtains the major proposition by which one attributes this property to man and by which, consequently, one will affirm a certain genre of a species.’20 From this, Brunschvicg concluded that the perfect form of syllogism is not the demonstration of an essence but its definition. ‘In such a syllogism, the medium term refers sometimes to the intellect, sometimes to the actually existing thing. This is why the form does not refer to anything external, but must be said to be only the cause of itself.’21 Although then the essence is the ‘absolute cause’, for he who knows the essence of a thing also knows its cause, it cannot be the ‘ultimate cause’. A formal cause, in fact, does not explain changing and movement. This is where the final cause comes in. Accordingly, syllogism must also be able to incorporate oriented processes and change. Aristotle provided an example in the Posterior Analytics, considering a man who walks in order to stay healthy.22 The syllogism would be something like this: ‘Digesting well is healthy – Walking after dinner makes you digest well – One who takes a walk stays healthy.’ According to Brunschvicg, here the middle term (digesting) is not the final cause, which is rather indicated by the major premise (health). However, the middle term is that which makes causality effective, just like in a statue its form is not enough, but presupposes a middle term – the sculptor’s love for beauty – that gives matter a shape. The more we ascend the ladder of beings, the more the middle term loses its merely logical function and acquires a metaphysical character, expressing directly, the extreme terms being one, the ‘action itself by which one moves immediately from the origin to the end’.23 Living beings, in fact, are as such an end to themselves, causes of their own development. In this sense, in order to understand properly the Aristotelian doctrine, with its unity of logics and metaphysics, one has ‘to follow metaphysics up to its apex’.24 If nature is a coherent whole and not a ‘badly built tragedy fabricated with different parts’, it is because all things have a common end, that is, the noesis, incarnated in its ultimate form by the ‘noesis noeseos’, the divine ‘thinking of thinking’.25 God is here the ‘eternal’ and ‘living’ syllogism ‘wherein the mind, which can know its authentic essence in itself, intuits itself without middle term as intelligible object’.26

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It is clear that Brunschvicg emphasised radically Aristotle’s metaphysical finalism, drawing heavily on Book Lambda of the Metaphysics and likely targeting Ravaisson’s teleological and Schellingian reading of the Stagirite and the remnants of it that still subsisted in Lachelier. After having described the alleged perfect mirroring between the order of the intelligence and the order of things, however, Brunschvicg proceeded to invalidate it, deconstructing the scientific pretence of Aristotle’s syllogistic logic, which could not claim for itself any vis metaphysica. The pressure point upon which he insisted was the theory of conversion, which, as mentioned, allowed turning imperfect inductive reasonings into properly scientific syllogisms of the first figure. It is here that Lachelier entered the game. Referring to him – ‘qui veram de conversion doctrinam restituit’, as said in the dedication of the thesis – Brunschvicg asserted that the conversion was not immediate but already presupposed another syllogism, which meant that ‘the link between logics and metaphysics … is broken’.27 Take, for example, the proposition ‘All A are B.’ Its conversion would consist in turning the predicate into the subject: ‘Some B are A’ (e.g. ‘All humans are mortal’ → ‘Some mortals are human’). In fact, one cannot be sure that, while all A are B, every B would be A. However, in Lachelier’s opinion, the two ‘A’ are not the same thing. In the universal affirmative proposition, ‘all A’ indicates every real subject (Socrates, Aristotle, etc.) endowed with humanity, whereas in the particular proposition ‘A’ is the general property itself (humanity). One cannot simply invert subject and predicate, because one is actually dealing with three terms. Hence, given that ‘All A are B’ does not state a general law, but is merely the expression of a fact (every individual characterised by the predicate of being human), in order to give logical coherence to the syllogism one must add another major premise, that is, the particular proposition ‘Every man (Socrates, Aristotle, etc.) is a man (i.e., has the attribute of humanity).’ In this way, a middle term (the real subjects) is reintroduced that was excluded by the theory of immediate consequences and we obtain an imperfect syllogism in the third figure in Derapti.28 As we can see, this is all quite technical, and no doubt a rigorous Aristotle scholar would have many philological objections to raise. It has been noted, for example, that Brunschvicg conflated formal conversion with the mere inversion of subject and predicate,29 and surely many other problems could be found. For Brunschvicg, though, the consequences of such difficulties were clear: Aristotle failed to harmonise thought and being, which remained two distinct principles that could only come close without ever coinciding. In fact, Aristotle showed that the proposition, inasmuch as one can distinguish in it between the substance and the quality, corresponds to the nature of things and is conceived in accordance with truth. But given that the logical force comes down to the metaphysical force, how can intellection not differ too when the nature of things is no longer the same?30

By showing that the ‘reciprocation of the terms’ is not automatic and simple, Brunschvicg could then claim having ‘destroyed’ the foundation of the Aristotelian doctrine.31 This meant that syllogism was ultimately a purely verbal architecture that

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presupposed recursively its own validity and that, therefore, could not claim any direct reference to the order of things. Indeed science, as modernity had taught with Descartes, never worked with generalities: ‘Far from translating an ideal to which any other form of rational connection should be reduced … the syllogism of essence has no inherent relationship with the truth norms that the advent of a physical mathematics has allowed us to establish.’32 On the contrary, the universal proposition – the law – was the difficult and always falsifiable accomplishment of a process wherein fact and right intermingled. In La modalité du jugement, the critique of the identification of the intelligence with the formal structures of Aristotle’s syllogism was further questioned. In fact, Brunschvicg’s idea was that the three traditional forms of syllogism could be entirely reduced to an elementary operation of the mind, which, of course, was judgement. He believed in fact that a perfect syllogism like, say, ‘All philosophers are just – Socrates is a philosopher – Then Socrates is just’ was not actually a series of judgements but rather one single judgement. The major proposition ‘All philosophers are just’ goes beyond the capacity of human reason if it is understood from the point of view of extension. One has therefore to consider it from the angle of intension, where ‘philosopher’ = ‘just’. The minor proposition, instead, comes to signify that ‘the philosopher is a philosopher’, which is the only judgement made explicit by the abovementioned syllogism.33 In Brunschvicg’s vocabulary, judgement is not defined by its verbal character, nor is it a ‘particular operation in the series of logical operations’. Rather it is an act: ‘Judgement is the unique and complete act of the intellectual activity’, having no ‘this side’ (the concept) and no ‘beyond’ (reasoning). As such, it ‘must be considered as the beginning and the end of the mind, as, absolutely speaking, the mind itself, and it is judgement itself that one has to study in order to understand the mind’.34 Against this background, syllogism became a mere transcription, if not a travesty, of true rational activity. A crucial point in Brunschvicg’s argument was that, by merely sticking to the rules of syllogism, one could easily formulate a reasoning that was formally perfect but ontologically absurd. For example, one could invert the premises of a judgement in Felapton, like ‘No Englishman is French – Every Englishman is a man – Then some men are not French’, and obtain an indirect Felapton: ‘Every Englishman is a man – No Englishmen is French – Then some Frenchmen are not men.’ This ‘error’ could be fixed, Brunschvicg held obscurely, by ‘replacing the conclusion with a judgement with two predicates: the predicate French is not the predicate man; they are not necessarily affirmed together’.35 This was meant as a sort of ‘experimentum crucis’ against syllogistic logic. Unfortunately, during the discussion Brochard disproved Brunschvicg’s demonstration, observing that such a syllogism was proscribed by classical logic and, most importantly, by Aristotle himself.36 Brunschvicg did not reply to Brochard. However, twenty-seven years later, in the 1934 preface to the second edition of his French dissertation, he tacitly admitted his earlier failure by presenting a new example of the experimentum crucis that, in many respects, was even weaker than its predecessor: the syllogism in Darapti, ‘Every dragon spits fire – Every dragon is a snake – Then some serpents spit fire’, which can be made meaningful only by adding a judgement of existence.37 This constituted yet another proof, for Brunschvicg, of the verbalistic and ultimately

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empty (i.e. non-scientific) character of syllogism, which concealed the originary and authentically concrete dimension of judgement.

The problem of modality The centrality of judgement in Brunschvicg’s idealism emerged from the coagulation of a plurality of suggestions coming from different sources. We have repeatedly emphasised how much Brunschvicg owed to the reflective philosophy of Lachelier and Boutroux. However, he supplemented it by further determining the actual dynamic of intellectual activity, ultimately consisting in judgements. Lachelier’s critique of Aristotle’s syllogistic logic surely played a decisive role in making him feel the need for a renovated theory of judgement. Nevertheless, Brunschvicg also followed the lead of another influential-but-forgotten philosopher of the time, who, like Darlu, never cared about writing down his theses, understanding philosophy rather as a pedagogical practice. In the foreword to the Modalité du jugement, Brunschvicg mentioned having read the content of the lessons on ‘Judgement’ delivered by Jules Lagneau, who taught at the lycée Michelet in Vanves from 1886 until his death.38 Although he never wrote a PhD dissertation and never pursued a university career, Lagneau was an important figure in the fin-de-siècle landscape: not only was he a friend of Gabriel Séailles – who, as a Sorbonne professor, was in the jury during Brunschvicg’s defence – but, most importantly, he was a model of political engagement, as he had been the founder, together with Desjardins and Letellier, of the Union pour l’action morale at the outbreak of the Dreyfus Affair in 1894. We do not know whether Brunschvicg had the chance to meet him personally, given Lagneau’s untimely death. One might suppose that his acquaintance with the latter’s thought was due to the mediation of Alain, who had been a devoted disciple of Lagneau and who gravitated around the founders of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale at the beginning of his career, when he was still known by his birth name Émile Chartier.39 That the topic of judgement was in the air is attested by the fact that Alain himself developed a philosophy of judgement that, while sharing many theoretical references with Brunschvicg’s (Plato, Montaigne, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant), was less idealist, less rhetorically charged, not at all concerned with history or science and more oriented towards political and philosophical individualism, in that it opposed the individual power of judgement qua value-bestowing capacity to the ideological descriptiveness of scientific facts and the prescriptiveness of state apparatuses.40 Yet the relationships between the anti-academic Alain and the ‘mandarin’ Brunschvicg were always tense and marked by mutual distrust.41 Thus, if Brunschvicg seemed to hold Lagneau in high esteem, this was probably because he saw in him less the teacher of Alain than a disciple, albeit original, of Lachelier, as was his own teacher Darlu. Indeed, in his late works he often mentioned Lachelier and Lagneau together as the authentic fathers of reflective thought and heirs of the original Socratic spirit of philosophy.42 Of course the conception of judgement elaborated by Lagneau, who was a Catholic thinker and therefore had metaphysical concerns, differed in many respects from

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Brunschvicg’s one, especially with regard to the importance of science, which Lagneau disregarded in the name of a pure reflexivity and a deduction of the principles of knowledge from the ‘necessary nature of thought’.43 However, Lagneau’s philosophy was far less ‘individualistic’ than that of his disciple Alain. What Brunschvicg inherited from the former was in fact primarily the idea that the individual mind is just an instantiation of a sort of universal rationality that defined the criteria of intelligibility, evidence and perfection. Philosophical reflection, for Lagneau, consisted in fact in the genetic study of the passage from subjective experience (perception) to objective universal knowledge, following the constructive and creative operations of the power of judgement.44 That was the lesson of those who Lagneau called ‘the three great inventors: Socrates, Descartes and Kant’, who ‘looked for truth within the thinking subject’ and not elsewhere, not in some kind of ontological or formalistic dimension.45 The analogies and the terminologies borrowed from Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement and implanted in the territory of French reflective philosophy were numerous. For example, Lagneau declared explicitly that the properly philosophical judgement was a ‘reflective judgement [jugement réfléchi]’ by which ‘the mind tries to judge judgement itself, to see whether it complies with truth’.46 This general framework could be found in Brunschvicg’s dissertation. He opened La modalité du jugement precisely by placing himself within critical coordinates: the crucial revolution of modernity took place when Kant shifted the focus of the reflection from being as such, in itself, to being as known, that is, from ontology to criticism. Indeed, Kantian philosophy was for him ‘a philosophy of reflection, of the nachdenken’.47 Accordingly, the overall ambition of an idealism that wanted to be critical had to be that of providing ‘an integral knowledge’: ‘intellectual activity becoming aware of itself, this is what the integral study of the integral knowledge is, this is what philosophy is’.48 This is what properly distinguished philosophy from the sciences. Any complete or adequate knowledge of the object as such was impossible without a preliminary reflection on the modes of knowledge itself: ‘This means that being as such ceases to be a philosophical idea, inasmuch as it is by definition the negation of the idea as such. Being a genre of knowledge, philosophical speculation can only decide on the known being – better, insofar as it poses in an absolute manner the problem of knowledge, it judges knowledge as being.’49 This entailed that the inquiry into the method and the object of philosophy must always be renewed. Knowledge of knowledge, philosophy had thus to be concerned primarily with the study of the most essential operation of the mind, namely, of course, judgement. Although in his dissertation he mentioned works by Frege, Erdmann, Brentano, Sigwart and Bergmann, Brunschvicg’s critical idealism was not famous enough in the Austro-German context to be discussed during the turn-of-the-century debates on the nature and role of logic. If it had been, it is likely that many would have ranked it among the variegated constellation of ‘psychologistic’ doctrines. Now, the notion of ‘psychologism’, which was originally coined for polemical purposes to identify reductionist stances in the philosophy of logic, was used at the time to indicate a plethora of heterogeneous and often contrasting philosophical visions.50 In Brunschvicg’s case, it would have pointed towards his radical rebuttal of any formalistic

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logicism or deduction of the forms of knowledge from general principles. Suffice it to read what Brunschvicg said about formal logic, which he deemed nothing but a more refined version of Aristotelianism: From Peano to Hilbert and from Russell to Wittgenstein, the formal and verbal character of the deductive process has become clear in an increasingly brighter light: considered in itself, it remains extraneous to the psychology of intelligence as well as to the conquest of truth. Once the prejudice concerning the hierarchy of genera and species, raised to essences, has been eliminated, and the victory of a radical nominalism has been assured, it is possible to understand the value of rational knowledge.51

However, as argued in Chapter 2, Brunschvicg was equally sceptical towards the more mystical or sentimental drifts of Bergson’s intuitionism, not to mention associationist, ‘ontogenetical’ or developmental accounts of the intellectual formation of the mind. When, in the quoted passage, Brunschvicg mentions the ‘psychology of intelligence’ as the key to ‘rational knowledge’, he surely subordinates logic to intellectual operations, and truth to judgements stemming from the mind’s struggle with nature, but always from an intellectualistic perspective, where the intelligence is a capacity for objectivity and rationalisation, not merely an aggregate of mental states. Again: it is true that, in an article on philosophy in French higher education, he ranked psychology at the top of the philosophical encyclopaedia,52 but his was a philosophical psychology, heavily shaped by the idealist post-Cartesian bloodline of which Brunschvicg presented himself as an heir. Therefore, embracing a ‘radical nominalism’, as he said in the quotation, did not mean giving up to relativism, but rather rejecting the idea that the ‘order of the concepts’ was equal to, and a faithful representation of, the ‘order of truth’. The order of the concepts had rather to be explained on the basis of the underlying intellectual processes. And intelligence, Brunschvicg claimed, could only be accounted for by the intelligence itself, that is, through an act of reflection. If the object, in its determinations, is not given in advance, but rather produced through the process of knowledge, a first philosophy should only try to grasp the ‘intellectual activity’ in its ‘movement’. Philosophy must thus thematise the ‘living production’ instead of the ‘product’, going from the determined object or from the forms of language (‘the words expressing thought from the outside’) to the living and dynamic activity of the mind.53 Brunschvicg’s idealism, which was, as we have just seen, a philosophy of intellectual activity, was meant thus to study the logos as reason instead of trying to exhaust the possible declinations and articulations of the logos as discourse.54 The latter, in fact, was based on an unwarranted privilege of the concept as the most elementary component of knowledge, a result achieved by ‘chemically’ or, which is the same, ‘philologically’ decomposing thought into ‘inert atoms’.55 However, Brunschvicg held, a concept always presupposes a judgement, that is, in this case, the establishment of a relation. Considered empirically, a concept is in fact a ‘schema’ grouping together ‘simultaneous’ common characters (intension or comprehension) and a ‘series’, ‘set’ or ‘class’ of given objects (extension).56 Brunschvicg observed that,

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from Plato and Scholasticism to, for example, Mill and Hamilton, philosophers, whether realists or nominalists, had always chosen to frame concept in one way or another. In order to obtain a full understanding of the nature of concept, one must rather consider the act of ‘conception’, which gives birth to a logical unity including both extension and intension. The concept of ‘man’, according to Brunschvicg, refers at the same time to a collection of properties and a set of objects. Therefore, a concept was for him the relation between an extension and an intension: ‘pure extension is blind, just as pure comprehension is chimerical.’57 Behind the concept ‘man’ there is thus the judgement ‘man is man’, where ‘man’ is in turn the equivalent of an individual (Peter, Paul, etc.) or of a character (rational, mortal, etc.). And in Brunschvicg’s view this holds true even when we are dealing with judgements that are not so symmetrically two-sided, as with mathematical judgements, which are pure intension. However, in such a case, Brunschvicg believed that a mathematical judgement (e.g. an equation) is always endowed with a minimal form of intension corresponding to the symbol elaborated by the mind, which is necessary for its application to an indefinite extension.58 Now, by identifying judgement with the elementary act of the mind, Brunschvicg dismissed radically as secondary and merely linguistic any debate concerning its form. For him, there was no point in discussing whether the intellectual activity consisted primarily in a generalisation, that is, in the formulation of universal judgements, or in an opposition, that is, in the antithesis between affirmative and negative judgements. These were all different and purely formal specifications of the mental act. They concerned the two logical categories of quantity and quality, but said nothing about intellectual activity per se.59 The diversity of the forms of judgement concealed in fact its most ‘essential and characteristic element’, which is the copula, the affirmation of being: ‘Judgement, in a general sense, is the act that poses the copula. No matter the form of the proposition, affirmative or negative, this act is positive, it is an act of the intelligence.’60 Furthermore, Brunschvicg argued that one must get rid of the purely linguistic prejudice prescribing that a judgement must have two terms, like ‘Man is mortal’, because, as we have already seen, it can be reduced to the basic relation ‘Man is man’. In Brunschvicg’s minimal interpretation, even ‘It rains’ or ‘I am’ are actual and proper judgements.61 The problem remained, however, of finally specifying in what the study of judgement actually consisted when one excluded even the option that judgement is essentially the establishment of a relation. In fact, by raising relation to the dignity of key category, one ended up subordinating (the study of) judgement to (the study of) the different kinds of relations established between the terms. Moreover, another and more fundamental level of justification was needed in order to ground the connection between the terms placed in relation to one another. This is what happened most prominently in Kant, even despite the many insights that could be found in his oeuvre about the equivalence between the study of judgement and the study of knowledge itself.62 In Brunschvicg’s view, in fact, the categorical classification of judgements in the ‘Analytic of concepts’ ran against the spirit of criticism in that it subordinated judgement to a pre-established and fixed table of categories, which had not been subjected to a critique but rather accepted without question. By

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analysing judgement, thus, Kant did not go back to the original intellectual activity, deepening the critical insight of a transcendental logic, but developed instead a new ‘metaphysical logic’ emptying judgement of its ‘spiritual content’.63 ‘When all the truth of judgement lies in the concept, judgement marks no advancement towards truth; it is absolutely sterile, and it does not exist as intellectual act.’64 This explained also why, when Kant had tried to think of a spontaneous and non-determined judgement in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, the only thing he could come up with was a ‘mysterious intermediary between abstract understanding and practical reason’, a reflective judgement ‘punished with subjectivity’, that is, in Kantian terms, with the capacity of qualifying the subject and its states rather than the object – that is, again, this time in Brunschvicgian terms, incapable of producing positive knowledge.65 Nonetheless, this did not prevent Brunschvicg from celebrating, along the lines of Lagneau, the epistemological model of the third Critique, an appreciation that would remain a constant in his oeuvre, from the Modalité du jugement to the final paragraphs of the Progrès de la conscience. The model of the reflective judgement, in fact, gave back to the mind its spontaneity, tearing apart the curtain of dogmatism that still enveloped the first Critique.66 Hence, because of the ‘plasticity’ and the ‘fecundity’ of its conception of intellectual activity, the Critique of the Power of Judgement was deemed by Brunschvicg the ‘most critical of the three Critiques’,67 the text where Kant’s ‘authentic method’ was revealed.68 However, if one wanted to stay true to the spirit of Kantianism against its letter, and recover thus the lesson of the reflective judgement, developing such an insight beyond the limitations of the Kantian system itself, the only thing to do was to focus not so much on the problem of relation but rather on the modalities of judgement, which since Aristotle were necessity, possibility and actuality. It was only the notion of modality, in fact, that could do justice to the ultimate plasticity of human knowledge. How? For Brunschvicg, classifying the modalities of judgement was tantamount to understanding the various roles, meanings and determinations of the copula ‘is’. The problem was that such a classification could not be done a priori or purely analytically, that is, by resorting to the ‘verbal forms’ of judgements. Taken in their linguistic formulations, indeed, judgements could be susceptible of expressing different or even multiple modalities at the same time. (The judgement ‘All bodies can be set in motion by adequate forces’, for example, could express ‘the actuality of the necessity of a possibility’.69) The logical issue of the modality of judgement could then be resolved only on the level of reflection and, more broadly, in relation to the metaphysical question of the relationship between knowledge and reality: The metaphysical question of the right that the mind has to affirm being is implicated in the logical question of modality. If we agree to indicate with two words usually considered as synonyms two philosophically distinct ideas, if we call copula the link between the two terms of a determined and concrete judgement and verb the affirmation of being considered in general and independently of the particular judgements that manifest it, we can say that the question of the meaning and the value of the copula presupposes that the question of the meaning

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and value of the verb is solved. For us, this is the fundamental question of critical philosophy.70

The study of the modalities of judgement amounted for Brunschvicg to posing the typically critical problem of the relation between judgements and being, that is, of the validity of knowledge or, in other words, of truth. Such a problem could be raised however only in reflection, retrospectively, as truth cannot be determined a priori, but only through a critical examination of the validity claims of specific judgements. As Brunschvicg explained, in fact, our judgements can change modality over time, as in the case of scientific judgements (laws) that were once the expression of natural necessities and which are now mere hypotheses (or vice versa).71 Therefore, the progress of knowledge modifies the modal status of knowledge itself. In order for formal logic to translate and codify in its technical language the modalities of judgement, Brunschvicg held, science should be complete once and for all – a purely asymptotic ideal.72 In light of this, the meaning of ‘critical idealism’ should be clearer. By studying the modalities of judgement, Brunschvicg aimed in fact at presenting (1) judgement, and by extension knowledge, understood as the determination of being, as the most crucial philosophical problem (idealism) and (2) intellectual activity as a process of judgement-formation and reflective problematisation (critique). A proper understanding of the meaning of ‘critical idealism’ is crucial insofar as it allows working out the problematic character of Brunschvicg’s idealism, to which I will return in the last section of this chapter. In fact, for an idealism to be said to be ‘critical’, reality must be able to play a role within the intellectual process of knowledge. The reflective verification and revision of judgements must be done in relation to something external to the mind (otherwise, it would amount to a self-referential formalistic exercise). The second chapter of the Modalité du jugement, dealing with the ‘historical significance of the problem’, is meant precisely to briefly expound the way in which the topic of the dissertation has been discussed by philosophers from Plato to Lachelier and draw some relevant conclusions. Ample space is of course given to the tradition of critical and reflective philosophy, where, besides Kant, Fichte occupies an apical position, for he provides, as we have already seen, the model of an idealism which refrains from abolishing the irreducibility of the ‘intelligible’ and the ‘real’ by means of a ‘purely speculative unity’ (as in Hegel).73 This is an important point, which connotes Brunschvicg’s idealism. The historical inquiry deployed in Chapter 3 ends in fact by declaring in the most ‘brutal’ guise the ‘opposition of the intelligible and the real’, which is ‘an eternal problem having its roots in the nature of the human mind’.74 In Brunschvicg, thus, the reflective ‘knowledge of knowledge’ entailed the reflection upon the struggle between the mind and experience. As he wrote, this dialectic – which, while acknowledging the primacy of the mind and its capacity to produce universally valid forms of knowledge, subordinated it to a painstaking confrontation with a contingent reality – amounted to ‘the most mysterious and deepest fact of spiritual life’.75 Consequently, the determination of the modalities of judgement followed from the distinction between these two alternative poles: ideality and reality.

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Varieties of judgement There were thus two forms of judgement that, according to Brunschvicg, could be immediately distinguished, namely the form of interiority and the form of exteriority, corresponding to the foregoing two poles, ideality and reality, respectively. The form of interiority consists in the affirmation of a purely intelligible relationship. Such a relationship, which precedes the relative terms, is ‘primitive’ and ‘absolute’ in that it asserts an ‘intellectual unity’. In this kind of judgement, Brunschvicg held, two ideas are connected that are ultimately one, which means that the link between them is internal rather than external and extrinsic. The most glaring examples are mathematical or geometrical judgements like ‘The sum of angles of a triangle equals the straight angle’, where thinking of the sum of the angle is the same thing as thinking of a straight angle. The two notions are not connected, but rather explicated in their inherent relationship by a ‘simple act of thought, which is judgement itself ’.76 The pure interiority implicated in this kind of judgement has nothing to do with identity, which – provided that a judgement like ‘A is A’ actually expresses an identity, something that, as we have seen, Brunschvicg contested – is a formal principle that could be applied indeed only to pre-existing terms and which consequently is not primitive.77 The principle of identity could only have for Brunschvicg a negative and practical purpose, in the guise of the law of non-contradiction, which is useful to debunk false arguments and reasoning.78 Therefore, interiority is conceived of by Brunschvicg as a relationship of logical co-implication. However, the form of interiority should not be conflated with Kant’s analytical judgements (‘All bodies are extended’), because in this latter case we have no progress of knowledge, but only the translation or the development of a previously grasped concept. A judgement like the abovementioned one concerning the angles of the triangle establishes and expresses a ‘rational synthesis’, an inherent connection between two ideas that, taken separately, would be meaningless abstractions (the undetermined sum x of the angles; the notion of a straight angle per se, awaiting to be related to something).79 ‘Mathematical thought’ in its ‘living genesis’ is constituted precisely by a network of internally connected ideas, which the mathematician concatenates when formulating his theories or proofs. ‘Mathematical reasoning conceals under the appearance of a rigid and complete system the immanence of an active thought whose elements are all interior to it.’80 And the same goes for the esprit de finesse, which for Brunschvicg was identical to the esprit de géométrie, with the sole difference that the former can be analytically decomposed, while the latter cannot. The esprit de finesse is not an act of unfathomable intuition, but precisely an instance of such a logical reciprocity between pure ideas: The genius of the poet, the critical sense of the historian, the flair of the investigating judge, the bedside manner of the man about town exist only thanks to this mutual penetration of ideas within the mind, which allows them to modify each other from the outside, to act and react, and finally to translate this interiority into a judgement.81

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In the eyes of Brunschvicg, thus, the form of interiority, which translates the ‘intelligible world’, manifested the living activity of the ‘mind itself ’, and as such, while perhaps appearing as the most abstract form, it was actually very concrete.82 Unfortunately, such a pure interiority is doomed to remain to some extent an ideal. The mathematical judgement, in fact, is only the highest degree of approximation with regard to ‘authentic intelligibility’ that can be attained. Pure ideality does not exhaust the activity of the mind; quite the contrary, it even excludes it, for it is precisely a fixed relation of inherence.83 In order to grasp the ‘reality’ of knowledge in its fullness another ‘primitive form’ must subsist in which being, far from denoting the co-implication of ideas, is posited in an ‘absolute’ manner, without predicates, in itself.84 This is the form of exteriority. By this term, Brunschvicg did not mean to embrace a naive empiricist or realist stance. Contrariwise, one has to remember that we are always dealing with judgements. Being is therefore posited of course as such, in its undetermined character, but always against the background of the intellectual activity: The form of judgement must be drawn from experience. The reality of intellectual activity, which justifies its existence, is itself the first and most indisputable experience … [A]‌s observed by Kant, the object of experience, as it is given to a man who thinks, forms a world, which is undoubtedly a sensible world, but which is already a shadow and an image of the intelligible world.85

This is why ‘absolute exteriority’ has to be determined at first as that which is not intelligibility, that which cannot be fully penetrated by the mind.86 From an outright Fichtean perspective, Brunschvicg maintained that, in the process of cognition, the mind encounters the ‘resistance’ of the external world, which, of course, is not material or physical; nor does it imply some kind of ‘homogeneity’ between the two poles. Against any form of absolute idealism, Brunschvicg claimed that the ‘shock’ (as he translated the Fichtean Anstoß) of such a resistance awakens in the subject the consciousness not only of the ‘positivity’ of reality but also of the ‘radical heterogeneity’ between the latter and himself.87 Brunschvicg tried thus to incorporate a sort of realism within an idealist framework. Again, exteriority, being, reality, nature, no matter what one calls it, is not raw matter, raw experience, something ‘substantial’, but precisely ‘a negation of the intellectual activity that only makes sense in relation to this very activity, while remaining inexplicable to it … the exterior for us is nothing; exteriority is but a principle of affirmation, the foundation of the position of being’.88 In other words, it is the mind that, by affirming being as exteriority, delimitates it in space and time, that is, according to a hic et nunc, and, by the same token, posits it as infinite, extending well beyond such finite delimitation.89 Now, if interiority and exteriority were the sole modalities of judgement that could be reflectively determined, we would end up with a radical dualism: the pureness of intellectual synthesis on one side and the acknowledgement of the intelligence’s external limitation on the other. However, Brunschvicg asked, how can there be knowledge if the mind is doomed to perpetually oscillate between these two logical alternatives? For knowledge to exist, and the history of science and philosophy has proved that something like a fairly accurate knowledge of the world does exist, there must be a

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‘relationship’ between interiority and exteriority. Considered in themselves, in fact, they are just, so to speak, edge cases, extreme formulations, abstractions produced by reflective analysis. This is why it should be possible to think not so much of a ‘synthesis’ or a ‘unity’ of the two poles, as rather a mixed form of judgement wherein they can be somehow connected. The acknowledgement of such an ‘essential relativity’ and ‘logical reciprocity of the contradictories’90 – which, as we will see in Chapter 7, will inform Brunschvicg’s reading of science – is what distinguishes his critical idealism from any other form of ‘metaphysical idealism’ or even monism, even from Spinoza’s substantialism91 and from Descartes’s ideal of evidence.92 But how to connect then two orders that, as repeatedly proclaimed, have to remain distinct and irreducible to each other? To solve this problem, Brunschvicg introduced a third modality of judgement corresponding to a ‘mixed form’, where what is asserted is ‘a sort of confused melange’, a judgement that ‘participates’ in two different orders.93 This is the place of knowledge, of the productive exchange between the mind and the real, but also, as a consequence, of the constitutive presence of error, which, along the lines of Brochard, Brunschvicg tried to frame in a positive way, as an inevitable step.94 Error, in fact, is due to the necessarily non-transparent character of knowledge, always stemming from the melange of two opposite principles, which are never perfectly symmetric, and always expressing itself in language, images and formulas. It is easy to understand to which classic ‘modalities’ the three forms of judgement ‘discovered’ by Brunschvicg correspond: the form of interiority, by affirming the inner intellectual order of the mind, expresses the modality of necessity; the form of exteriority, by asserting the resistance of the real to our cognitive grasp, expresses the modality of reality; the mixed form, having a ‘confused’ and ‘incomplete’ nature, expresses the modality of possibility. Before moving on, it is important to stress that the modalities of judgement did not affirm for Brunschvicg three degrees of being, but rather three radically distinct ways of conceiving of being, if not – given that being is always determined within the sphere of intellectual activity – three ‘natures of being’.95 Having determined by the analysis of the verb the three forms and modalities of judgement, Brunschvicg tried to provide a detailed examination of the modalities of the copula in a number of different judgements, that he broke down into two macrocategories: theoretical and practical judgements. Here is a schematic overview (not featured in the dissertation): Theoretical judgements

Practical judgements

Judgement of pure exteriority

Automatism

The ‘This is’ [‘Cela est’]

Pain

Judgement of predication

Desire

Normal judgement

Utility

Judgement of reality

Will

Aesthetic judgement

Art

A Philosophy of Judgement Theoretical judgements

Practical judgements

Judgement of experimental analysis

Wisdom

Judgement of pure interiority

Mysticism

Judgement of mathematical analysis

Obligation

Geometrical judgement

Devotion

Physical judgement

Right [droit]

Judgement of probability

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I am not going to linger in detail on every one of these judgements. Nonetheless, some general remarks about such a classification are needed. First, these judgements are not deduced, either a priori or dialectically, by the three general modalities. They are, on the contrary, obtained by reflecting upon ‘what we know on [their] matter’, building on the history of philosophy and science. In Brunschvicg’s view, in fact, logic must by studied in accordance with the ‘actual knowledge of the universe’ on the one hand and with the ‘psychological and scientific conceptions of contemporary thinkers’ on the other.96 Of course, this is an altogether vague and circular answer, which does not dispel the possible charge of arbitrariness. Yet Brunschvicg himself was not concerned with providing a definitive classification of the varieties of judgement, as he was aware of the ever-changing state of knowledge and conditions of reflection. Rather, he intended to underscore what for him was the most important point, namely that formalism must give way to the study of the ‘mind at work’.97 The second thing that has to be observed is that the two columns follow, from high to low, a progression including judgements of exteriority, then judgements of interiority and finally mixed judgements. In the first series, which is surely the most important one, we have a succession of judgements that, as Brunschvicg highlighted, are not mere ‘logical moments’, but correspond rather to particular phases in the work of perception and scientific knowledge, thereby establishing a close connection between psychology (always understood in intellectualist terms), logic and metaphysics (as a theory of knowledge). Building on the ‘shock’ of the ‘This is’ – of the mere acknowledgement of an exteriority, the judgement of fact that remains the undetermined possibility of something98 – the mind proceeds by further specifying being determining first its quality and then its content (judgement of predication: ‘this is blue’; normal judgement: ‘the curtain is blue’). A judgement of reality then intervenes, generalising its conception of reality: the mind aims in fact at grasping not so much that peculiar object (the curtain which is blue) but rather being as ‘a universal system of objects’, a ‘whole’ that systematises a number of changing sensations (to continue with the example: ‘the curtain is’, which for Brunschvicg is tantamount to ‘asserting the reality of the universe’99). At this point, the aesthetic and the experimental judgements mark a moment of ‘crisis in the life of the mind’, which prefigures the proper discovery of the role

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played by intellectual activity. In fact, aesthetic judgement, while being similar to the judgement of reality, introduces an element of ‘irreality’, of distance from the world that allows the mind to focus on its own renditions of the world and to start translating it into an abstract scientific image. Concepts like ‘mass’, ‘force’ and so on, which are provided by experimental judgements, are in fact distilled by means of a progressive ‘simplification’ of the ‘concrete reality’, in relation to which they appear as a sort of ‘negation’, inasmuch as science ‘breaks’ the syntheses of perception.100 The following and properly scientific judgements cover the whole mental spectrum wherein the activity of science deploys itself, from the ideal of pure intelligibility constituted by mathematical analysis to the ‘compromise of the intelligible and the real’ represented by geometrical, physical and probabilistic judgements. Science is in fact a ‘movement of approximation’ between the two poles of the abstract and the real, a progressive and always perfectible attempt at ‘assimilating’ the universe.101 Analogously, in the second series we begin with the raw affirmation of being – pain (the trigger of any need), desire, ambition or will – and the most elementary forms of external dependence (desires, passions, utilitarian calculations); we discover, by confronting ourselves with reality, that we are endowed with the possibility to reflect upon our own will and motivations; and then we find a balance between inner satisfaction and public peace by inscribing our actions within a society regulated by positive laws and shared customs.102 Now, it is not necessary to dwell too much on practical judgements, pertaining to the dimension of the ‘ought-to’ (le devant être). Indeed, albeit coessential, this is not the most original and most interesting section of the book.103 The moral that has to be retained from Brunschvicg’s dissertation concerns rather the antidogmatic character of his philosophy of judgement, which was ultimately meant – in a critical vein – to determine the conditions of positive reflection and speculation. By establishing in fact the conditions of possibility for the affirmation of being, the study of the modalities of judgement framed also the sphere of possible knowledge. In fact, for Brunschvicg being was not a metaphysical realm in itself, a ‘self-sufficient’ substance, but rather what was posited by the copula of judgement. Being was relative to its intellectual affirmation: Relation, which is the essence of judgement, contradicts the absolute by which metaphysical being is defined. If reality is known as such thanks to judgement, one must refrain from positing it before us as an independent object, superior to any relationship with us. Reality is not separated from the mind; it is implicated in its internal development; it transforms along with it and goes through all the degrees of its living evolution.104

Hence the conclusion that no judgement can assert and determine being in an absolute manner, once and for all. No judgement has the last word. Rather, each judgement is a stage in the progressive activity of the intelligence, a stage where a momentary compromise between thought and reality is reached that never satisfies the ideal of pure interiority and the simplicity of absolute exteriority either. Any ‘metaphysical dialectics’ following some sort of onto-logical necessity is thus

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banished.105 In its place, a ‘power of judgement’ is affirmed that, however, can be apprehended only in action, so to speak, analysed only in its instantiations. Such a faculty is therefore purely undetermined as nothing pre-exists it, neither an external object nor the logical essence of the subject. And it is precisely because of this indeterminacy, which has an utterly positive value, that the subject is free.106 The ultimate aim of Brunschvicg’s philosophy of judgement was thus to make man aware of the decisive role his intelligence plays in the constitution of the world (philosophical, scientific and moral), of the capacity it has to face reality and overcome its resistances by devising new theories, new concepts, new values and institutions. From this point of view, although interiority and exteriority are two antithetical and horizontally juxtaposed logical ideals, it is clear that for Brunschvicg interiority is the one that has to be pursued as a value, as a model for knowledge. Man has to cultivate the intellectual solidarity and coherence of his ideas (or, on the practical level, of his societies), rather than losing himself and his freedom in the desperate attempt to grasp reality in itself.107 Pure interiority, albeit unreachable, is in fact a synonym of autonomy and, ultimately, joy.

Confessions of a beaten idealist During his defence, Brunschvicg admitted something that can epitomise in the clearest way the actual nature of his critical idealism. He acknowledged in fact being a ‘beaten idealist [idéaliste vaincu]’, a definition coined by Séailles.108 The meaning of this expression should be evident by now, but it is worth insisting on this point, insofar as Brunschvicg has gone down in history as a ruthless and cold idealist. Being a ‘beaten idealist’ did not mean for him giving up on his convictions. From this point of view, Brunschvicg always remained a dyed-in-the-wool idealist. In Chapter 8, we will see that he even exacerbated his idealist faith when confronted with the emergence of the new philosophies of life and existence. If he declared himself as ‘beaten’, it was only because his idealism was well aware that it could not be absolute, that perfect transparency was impossible, that ‘empirical shocks’ were necessary to the mind as a source both of destruction and progress, that is, of rectification.109 In critical idealism, the ‘struggle’ between the ‘prodigious finesse of the human mind’ and the ‘prodigious complexity of nature’110 could not be solved by any higher synthesis, any philosophical dialectics; it could only find a partial equilibrium within the operative dimension of science.111 This ‘beaten’ nature of Brunschvicg’s idealism appears glaringly when he speaks of ‘the sense of the drama in which humanity found itself involved as soon as it started to become aware of its contact with things’.112 As we have seen, true knowledge springs for Brunschvicg precisely from this drama itself, and not from its resolution. Pure exteriority and pure interiority are for him just limited ideals, which means that no judgement can establish an absolute necessity or an absolute reality, as they would be either ‘empty’ or ‘impenetrable’.113 Knowledge always presupposes a percentage of intelligibility and a percentage of reality, without this entailing any sceptical stance. Rather, it means accepting the intellectual activity for what it is, tainted by perceptual

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and logical errors. To the point that, in a crucial footnote, Brunschvicg himself had to acknowledge that any ‘concrete’ judgement, any ‘human affirmation’, belongs to the realm of the possible.114 ‘The path to truth’, Brunschvicg argued, is for [the mind] a slow, obscure and apparently roundabout path, obliging the mind to do violence to its spontaneous tendencies towards the clear and the distinct. The mind must fight against itself in order to avoid resting upon a premature conclusion; without this inner fight, there is no truth. And such a truth, the access to which is so difficult, is not the pure and absolute truth. In fact, no judgement has appeared to us such that it could bestow being upon its object unreservedly and in an unfettered manner.115

This is where Brunschvicg departed more radically from Spinoza and the idea of a homogeneity between the order of the intellect and the order of things. Speaking about geometrical judgement, he claimed that the ‘relative necessity’ that constituted the modality of scientific judgements went against both Spinoza’s monism and Kant’s apriorism: ‘The coincidence between necessity and reality is neither, as Spinoza claimed, a metaphysical truth depending on the essential nature of being, nor, as Kant thought, a fundamental law depending on the constitution of the human mind.’ Rather, ‘it is an empirical coincidence that appears to the mind as a radically obscure fact’.116 That is to say: science works, it is effective, thus it is necessary; and yet it is relative to reality under specific conditions, not deducible from eternal logical laws or psychological forms. However, and this is the point that should be stressed, this dialogue between the intelligence and experience, from which science arises, is determined in the first instance by the activity of the mind. For Brunschvicg, reality had a very peculiar status, perfectly summarised by this passage: Being is a pure form in that it is posed by virtue of a law of the mind, and it is a form of exteriority in that the mind discovers its being tied to something other than itself. On the one hand, the affirmation of being is not the ascertainment of something already defined that would be anterior to the mind …; on the other hand, exteriority is not a creation of the mind, but rather something absolute, from which judgement cannot separate itself, as exteriority is inseparable from a thinking being.117

This quotation presents us with the defining tension of Brunschvicg’s idealism, which was not concerned with naïve ontological determinations, but rather with the epistemological status of reality. In the first pages of the Modalité du jugement, Brunschvicg declared that ‘Knowledge constitutes a world that is the world for us. Beyond there is nothing. A thing beyond knowledge would be inaccessible by definition, indeterminable, and would therefore amount for us to nothing.’118 This means that things exist when we confer them the predicate of existence, when they are included into the realm of our scientific knowledge of the world. Many other statements could be quoted that point towards Brunschvicg’s unapologetic scientific idealism. Always

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in this dissertation, for example, he wrote that ‘at the basis of the represented universe there is nothing but an affirmation of the mind … there is nothing, outside of the mind, in relation to which the affirmed object could gain a higher degree of reality or truth’.119 In the Introduction à la vie de l’esprit, Brunschvicg even seemed to take a step further towards a radical idealist stance: The reality of the universe is not a reality absolutely independent of the mind; such a reality is a pipe dream: the mind cannot go out of itself to reach and determine what would be absolutely foreign to it. It only gives what it has. It is in itself, and by the mere development of its internal activity, that the mind can confer a real existence, linked to its own existence. Reality is therefore not what opposes us, but what is grounded in us, higher than our individuality, because we are more than an individual: we are a spirit.120

However, although in this passage Brunschvicg apparently underscores strongly the dependence of reality upon judgement, his subsequent works on science always stressed the reciprocal interpolation between the mind and experience. Indeed, Brunschvicg was absolutely clear about the need for a ‘realist’ attitude (in the sense of Kant’s ‘empirical realism’) as a counterpoint to idealism121 – which, without it, was doomed to become a dogmatic conceptualism. In his view, in fact, perception entailed realism, whereas science presupposed idealism, and knowledge consisted precisely in a continuous back and forth between them, a movement similar to a ‘double current’.122 Hence, ‘the condition of any scientific knowledge is that the scientist gives things themselves the chance to pass judgement on the various systems of representations which are put forward in order to account for the various orders of phenomena’.123 Exteriority has thus to be understood not as the proof of the ‘helplessness of human reason’ or ‘the radical irrationality of the universe’, but rather as the reminder that the world is not ‘arbitrarily constructed by science’.124 Of course, reality is somehow subordinated to the march of the intelligence, and it manifests itself only in response to intellectual activity. Yet it has the power of stimulating the mind to come up with new theories and concepts. It ‘does not provide a positive content, a complete determination’, but only ‘reference points’.125 Its ‘resistance’, in fact, provokes as a reaction a victory over nature, which will translate into a widening of the intellectual field. Whereas reason constitutes the tissue of the scientific universe, expanding it, tightening it. experience remains, with regard to it, a negation, a relative negation, a provisional negation, because the nature of science is to transform it into a starting point for a bigger circuit of a subtler thought … this negative character is essential to experience.126

In the case of contemporary physics, for example, the observation of the irregularities of Mercury’s orbit, being incompatible with Newtonian celestial mechanics, provided the ‘point of attachment’ of a new cosmological theory (Einstein’s relativity).127 But more generally, whether in ordinary experience or in scientific experimentation, reality always plays a decisive orienting role. The resistance of experience that we encounter

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in scientific research is just a higher and more complex example of the basic ‘shock’ of reality that, as seen, is modelled upon the Fichtean Anstoß, which in German suggests something like a push, a stimulus, a trigger. In the Science of Knowledge, for example, we read that while ‘the mode and the manner of presentation in general is certainly determined by the self ’, the very fact that ‘the self should engage in presenting at all is determined … not by the self, but by something outside it’.128 In Brunschvicg the dynamic is exactly the same, although retranslated into more psychological French terms. Of course, as we will see in Chapter 7, when dealing with contemporary science this idea has to be made compatible with the progressive refinement of the counter-intuitive character of contemporary physics. Bacon’s experimentum crucis is no longer available in its original guise. Instead of having to decide between true and false theories, one is confronted with theories constantly in need of more or less radical revisions, precisely because we no longer have at our disposal the objective and external reference of a substantial reality per se that could serve as a comparison to our representations. On the contrary, experience is always constructed and already shaped by the intervention of the mind, which makes – again, in a purely Fichtean fashion – the clash between formalisation and experience entirely immanent or internal to the sphere of consciousness.

Conclusion As his mentor Darlu told him, the Modalité would have represented for Brunschvicg ‘the programme of all [his] life’.129 Indeed, the theoretical framework of his later grand historical works was already laid out in the dissertation, and despite minor adjustments, it remained fundamentally unchanged. To be sure, as I have already stated at the beginning of this chapter, Brunschvicg tried to learn from the terrible experience of his defence and avoided venturing into bold systematic applications of his philosophical doctrine, which however continued to inform his subsequent works as an undercurrent. Apparently, he realised in fact that the methodology implemented in the dissertation, while being necessary for liberating judgement and intellectual activity from their dogmatic cages, was highly at risk of appearing artificial and arbitrary. The assumptions of critical idealism must be defended by showing their actuality and truth in a more concrete manner, by actually engaging in a thorough work of reflection. It is arguable that this was the reason why he decided to complement his early logical analyses with long researches in the history of ideas. He had to try out his theories and prove their relevance. Ultimately, Brunschvicg’s stance in the Modalité consisted in elaborating a philosophy that made compatible the act of judgement and the event, logic and changing, positive knowledge and freedom, without neutralising the latter by means of a rigid determination and formalisation of the former.130 History provided the perfect test bench.

6

History: The philosopher’s laboratory

À force de parler de progrès, l’homme arrive à croire que c’est une chose ou une force, et il renouvelle le péché originel. Toujours la même prétention à cueillir immédiatement les fruits de l’arbreconnaissance, alors qu’il ne peut naître que de nous, qu’ils doivent mûrir en nous.1

Introduction From the discussion of Brunschvicg’s philosophy of judgement carried out in the previous chapter, we are now able to understand the theoretical reasons behind the significance of history. The tenet of critical idealism is clear: the activity of the mind has to be studied from the outside, by analysing the modalities of its judgements. This is due of course to the reflective nature of the intellectual enterprise, which excludes any naive immediacy, but also follows from what we have seen in Chapter 2 concerning what I have called Brunschvicg’s ‘critique of interiority’. There is no special faculty by means of which we can grasp our own mind directly, in its pure spontaneous becoming, bypassing the movement of intellectual reflection. Such a spontaneity is in fact ‘unconscious’, and we are aware of our judgements only when they are translated into words and images, which explains also the possibility of error, due to the fact that the exteriority of the form in which our judgements are formulated is always ready to betray us. Translated: we do not have any immediate insight, no ‘intellectual intuition’, into our own thoughts; the mind always mediates itself and we are doomed to always find in it ‘something opaque and impenetrable’.2 Therefore, given that we ‘cannot escape the circuit of [our] own judgements’, we can only reflect upon the mind’s cultural productions, its ‘exteriorised products’, and try to understand its functioning.3 And what is the vastest repertoire of spiritual productions that is available to us, if not history? It is in history that the mind can ‘become aware, naturally and necessarily, of its eternal actuality’.4 This is because, by analysing history, we can distil what constitutively belongs to reason from what on the contrary is purely transient.5 As Brunschvicg made clear already in La modalité du jugement, historical analysis was not for him just a ‘vain curiosity’. On the contrary, given that philosophical

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problems are not imposed from the outside, but ‘exist only in the mind’, the study of history was the only way to eschew the solipsism of our individual meditation and understand exactly the proper significance of a particular question for the progress of humanity.6 Coherently, thirty years later, in the introduction to the Progrès de la conscience, Brunschvicg would reassert the same stance: ‘Contemporary philosophy is, for us, a philosophy of reflection, which finds its natural matter in the history of human thought.’7 The solid unity of the life of the mind also explains the variety of fields embraced by Brunschvicg’s great historical overviews, namely mathematics, physics, philosophy and moral doctrines. His critical idealism can also be seen as a philosophy of culture resting on the ideal of a total history accounting for ‘all the doctrines which had an actual influence’ upon the development of the understanding and for ‘the connection of the properly philosophical reflection with the state of science and technology, with the vicissitudes of political and religious societies’.8 Accordingly, philosophy should ideally ‘resume the experience of the thinking humanity’,9 whereas history provides the chance of writing ‘a monograph of the homo sapiens’.10 Ultimately, this stance is modest to the extent that it follows closely the vicissitudes of reason in its most peculiar manifestations, rejecting any aprioristic framework and any transcendent speculation. However, its overall aim is extremely ambitious: as Brunschvicg explained in grandiloquent terms, ‘it is through history that the mind conquers naturally and necessarily the conscience of its eternal actuality’.11 To use the words of Valéry, the ‘Mind … divides the past from the present, the future from the past, the possible from the real, the image from the fact. It is both what goes ahead and what lags behind, what builds and what destroys’.12 Briefly, the mind is the probing drive to which one should refer ‘everything we call civilisation, progress, science, art, culture’.13 This notwithstanding, the richness of the historical apparatuses often obscured Brunschvicg’s ultimate philosophical goal, drawing criticism from other thinkers. According to Dominique Parodi, for example, Brunschvicg reduced philosophy to a simple historical review, condemning any attempt to raise above the level of immanent reflection as abstract and artificial metaphysics.14 He relinquished all idealistic ambition to discover an ‘intelligible continuity’ or ‘a law of progressive development’ in history, so that his doctrine was far from being a true ‘critical idealism’: on the contrary, it was a ‘dualist realism’ pitting the power of the mind against a ‘rebel nature’.15 For the rationalist Parodi, who himself had been a disciple of Darlu and who cherished Hamelin’s attempt at idealistic systematisation of nature, Brunschvicg ended up being a mere historian of science.16 Along the same lines, but from a different perspective, Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) lamented the fact that in Brunschvicg philosophy abandoned the heights of the ‘eternal metaphysics’ and became ‘miserably tributary to science and its history’.17 Gilson, for his part, stigmatised Brunschvicg’s reduction of philosophy ‘to a critical consideration of the stages passed through by thought in the constituting of science – the history of Mind’.18 Finally, René Berthelot (1872–1960) remarked that Brunschvicg’s idealism was ultimately a historicism (although he did not use this term) where reason and science, seen ‘sub specie historiae’, were reduced to their various manifestations, unable to escape from the grip of time.19

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However, this is not to suggest that Brunschvicg’s interest in history was a hapax in early-twentieth-century France. As Chimisso has shown in a splendid and now referential study, the history of philosophy was a widely practised discipline at the time, especially at university level, and its study was encouraged by a series of curriculum reforms.20 The Sorbonne was, from this point of view, the privileged site to receive historical training, given that it hosted a number of historically oriented philosophers, like, besides Brunschvicg, Boutroux, Lévy-Bruhl, Lalande, Bréhier, Delbos, Gaston Milhaud (1858–1918), Louis Rodier (1864–1913), Léon Robin (1866–1947), Abel Rey (1873–1940), Albert Rivaud (1876–1955) or Jean Laporte (1886–1948).21 But while, for example, Bréhier, Delbos and Robin had a quite conventional (i.e. philological and intra-textual) approach, Lévy-Bruhl and Brunschvicg overtly built on the fluid exchanges between disciplines rendered possible and encouraged by journals like the two Revues – philosophique and de métaphysique – or the meetings of the Société française de philosophie.22 This created a number of disciplinary issues. Lévy-Bruhl had clearly abandoned philosophy and turned to ethnographical ‘armchair’ research, but Brunschvicg’s case was more ambiguous. As a matter of fact, he ‘practised the history of philosophy in a manner that seemed to contradict [traditional] views, when he embarked on a study of the mind through the history of philosophy and indeed the history of science; he appeared to erase the difference between these two histories, which was seen as functional by many historians of philosophy’.23 Yet, as Brunschvicg always made clear, especially after some critics ranked him among the historians of science, his interest was not strictly historical but rather thoroughly philosophical: ‘Our task is not to understand what is the nature of things, but rather to tell how the human mind is made.’24 And when the historian of science George Sarton (1884–1956) invited him to write more frequently for his journal Isis, he declined by reaffirming his ultimate philosophical interests.25 His history of science was thus philosophical – that is, focused on the close connections and reverberations between philosophy and science – rather than properly historical, along the lines of the research conducted by Henri Berr (1863–1954), Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), Rey, Aldo Mieli (1878–1950), Hélène Metzger (1889–1944) or, later, Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964) at the Centre international de synthèse.26 Brunschvicg’s stance is clearly reflected in the article on higher education that I have mentioned in the previous chapter, where he ranked history as the most important philosophical branch after psychology, which was at the top. The fact remains, however, that history was for him neither a concern per se, an object of erudition or the gate to a philosophia perennis, nor a simple chronological sedimentation that could be overridden by reviving the original intuitions of past philosophers (the position of a Bergsonian historian like Bréhier). Old texts did not afford ‘the possibility for readers to find a mind similar to their own, or to make the reader’s mind “vibrate in sympathy” ’.27 Quite the contrary, history was for Brunschvicg something different, that is, the main route towards a greater ambition: the study of the progress of the mind and its underlying driving force, namely, a plastic intelligence. However, unlike the aprioristic models of history, and coherently with his own reflective philosophy of judgement, Brunschvicg could only focus on this evolution from an a posteriori perspective, where texts are not timeless

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conceptual clusters but rather documents, traces – as Chimisso brilliantly put it – ‘of development and change rather than heritage’.28

Contingency in history Brunschvicg’s critical idealism thus accomplished a step forward with regard to Kant’s criticism, overcoming the Wolffian distinction, expounded in the ‘Architectonic of Pure Reason’, between historical knowledge as mere cognitio ex datis (i.e. ‘historisch’, factual cognition of philosophical doctrines) and philosophical-rational knowledge as cognitio ex principiis.29 In fact, Brunschvicg believed that – precisely because reason does not have an unchangeable structure, or any structure whatsoever, consisting ultimately in a creative and modal power of judgement – it was only historical retrospection that could enlighten the essence of rationality. However, the challenge was to make history something more than a mere historisch doxography without turning it into a deductive or teleological Geschichte. In an authoritative account of twentieth-century French philosophy, we read that ‘Brunschvicg’s idealism draws its inspiration from Kant’s, but it is informed as well by a Hegelian attention to historical development’.30 If the first part of the sentence might be true, the second is misleading, if not a mistake. Brunschvicg’s historical sensitivity has to be understood against its proper background. The fact remains, however, that an introductory comparison with Hegel might be interesting, for reasons that will become plain in short order. Ostensibly, in his lectures on the history of philosophy, Hegel advanced a historiographical stance that could at first sight be assimilated to Brunschvicg’s. After all, the latter could have easily agreed with the idea that philosophy is the selfdeployment of thought, thought thematising itself and infinitely returning upon its own determinations, in a circular motion that defines the true essence of its freedom. As we have seen, in fact, Brunschvicg defined philosophy as ‘the intellectual activity becoming aware of itself ’, ‘the integral study of the integral knowledge’. However, Hegel also added that, whereas philosophy per se consists in the formation of systems qua totalities endowed with a truth content, the history of philosophy must serve the purpose of showing the temporal, gradual formation of such systematic unities. Hegel’s history of philosophy was ultimately the history of ‘Thought finding itself ’.31 Far from being accidental or contingent, each philosophical system was therefore a necessary stage towards the constitution of ‘the science of Philosophy’, which meant that the history of philosophy was itself scientific, being a recapitulation of the becoming-aware of itself of the spirit, of the inner development of the Idea, as summed up by Hegel’s own doctrine: ‘The Idea as concrete in itself, and selfdeveloping, is an organic system and a totality which contains a multitude of stages and of moments in development. Philosophy has now become for itself the apprehension of this development and, as conceiving Thought, is itself this development in Thought’.32 This meant that if ‘philosophy is system in development, the history of philosophy is the same’,33 that ‘the sequence in the systems of Philosophy in History is similar to the sequence in the logical deduction of the Notion-determinations in the Idea’.34

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History would thus amount for Hegel to an organic ‘development’ (Entwicklung)35 through change leading from potentiality to activity, from being-in-itself to being-foritself – briefly, according to the biological model, from a germ to the organism. Of course, unlike natural growth, which is immediate, historical development was mediated by man’s freedom and thought.36 Yet, in Brunschvicg’s eyes, this difference was not enough to save Hegel from the charge of panlogism, of resolving history into an artificial logical construction. Indeed, although even for Brunschvicg speculative thinking and historical retrospection were welded together, history was not meant to unveil a teleological progression leading up to the triumph of (one’s own) idealism. Simply put, Brunschvicg rejected the coincidence of – to use anachronistically Ernst Haeckel’s terms – phylogeny and ontogeny that governed Hegel’s aprioristic historiography. From a Brunschvicgian perspective, in fact, even historical recapitulations positing the a posteriori rationality of an evolutionary process were aprioristic insofar as they were arranged according to a pre-established starting point.37 But what is the actual reason why Brunschvicg’s stance was incompatible with Hegel’s? One can answer by referring to the general mistrust of any a priori historical view, be it that of Cousin, Comte, Spencer or Hegel himself, that was widespread among fin-de-siècle French philosophers.38 However, I believe that it is possible to provide a more precise answer. In fact, as Brunschvicg himself declared,39 such a reason is to be found in Boutroux’s rebuttal of the historiography of the German Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), one of the foremost philosophical personalities in his country and even in Europe.40 During the year he spent in Heidelberg (1869), Boutroux had attended the lectures of Zeller and started translating under his supervision the monumental survey on Greek philosophy, Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung dargestellt (1844–52). Boutroux’s translation was published between 1877 and 1884.41 In his long introduction to the first volume, Boutroux launched an explicit attack against Zeller’s understanding of history. Boutroux presented Zeller as an early admirer of Hegel who had progressively disavowed the latter’s aprioristic construction and the overlapping between chronology and logic. Indeed, Zeller had studied at the legendary Tübinger Stift and received training in theology under the supervision of the founder of the Tübingen historical school of theology, Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), and the Hegelian David Friedrich Strauß (1808–1874). In the 1840s, Zeller had started distancing himself from the ‘intellectualism’ of Hegel’s philosophy of religion and, most importantly, the excessively speculative character of his conception of history. By the early 1860s, Zeller had established himself as one of the most prestigious advocates of the return to Kant, to a philosopher who, unlike Hegel, did not conflate the form and the content of knowledge. This amounted to asserting, against Hegel’s zealous disciples, that the history of religion, with its representations and individual, temporal experiences, was not immediately translatable into the universal dynamic of conceptual necessity. The plea for a return to Kant made in his 1862 inaugural lecture at Heidelberg insisted precisely on the pure formal value of the dialectical logic, which by no means reflected the forms of being. In other words, Zeller had argued, content could not be derived from form, and the particular was irreducible to the universal.42

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However, Boutroux was convinced that, in his famous historical work, which belonged to a phase of transition in Zeller’s path, the latter still retained some Hegelian elements, winding up being more a reformer rather than an adversary of Hegel’s doctrine.43 Although he accepted the intervention of free will and contingency in history, Zeller subordinated their existence to historical necessity. As he wrote, the historian had to ‘detect the thread of historical necessity in notions and actions apparently the most fortuitous’.44 From this point of view, the reference to the notion of Entwicklung in the subtitle of the book was particularly meaningful. This was for Boutroux a telling proof of how much the ‘German spirit’ was inherently enamoured with the mystic exaltation of the totality, where only the individual can find meaning.45 For Boutroux, instead, the history of philosophy or of science should find its pivot in the creative activity of the individual mind, in that intellectual and moral force which makes every philosophical doctrine something infinitely more complex than a determined stage in the development of the universal reason.46 A philosophy could not be defined by what anticipated it, what surrounded it or what it prefigured.47 If, for Brunschvicg, Boutroux was the great moderniser of the history of philosophy in France, it was because he understood that ‘the truth of history lies not in a system of history, which would transcend the writings of the philosophers, neither in the systematic form of these writings’, but rather in the living activity of the mind from which a particular doctrine stems.48 There is a passage from The Contingency of the Laws of Nature that Brunschvicg often quoted: ‘Instead of departing from the principle of things, as would be the case if their essence were contained germinally in their nature and were but their analytical and necessary development,’ we should understand that ‘it is act that explains essence, far more than essence can explain act. It is not, then, the nature of things that should be the final object of our scientific investigations, it is their history.’49 Just like nature, for Boutroux history was utterly contingent. This was not to say that everything was random but rather that the world as such was the sum of the events taking place within it, and not a totality that could be deduced from a moment or a principle before or beyond time.50 Brunschvicg assumed Boutroux’s framework emphasising the ruptures and the breaks produced in history by crucial and groundbreaking events, triggering – as he said in the Progrès – ‘violent breakages of balance’ which threaten the old systems of values (e.g. Socrates’ death, the ‘advent of the Cogito’, etc.).51 But already in 1908 he had submitted that in the history of science and of philosophy one could find ‘definitive ruptures’ or ‘decisive eliminations’ marking ‘the stages of progress’ and ruling out the possibility of finding a compromise, a happy medium between the old error and the new truth. The course of thought, Brunschvicg claimed, cannot be reversed.52 The only acceptable methodological option consisted in following the historical stream instead of deducing it, bringing into light the moments of discontinuity and contingent revolution. Of course, this was not to renounce finding the reasons why paradigm changes happen or giving way to mystical exaltations of the event. As Brunschvicg made clear, ‘independence and unpredictability does not mean … disorder or arbitrariness’. Whereas Hegel believed that contingency was just a transitory illusion or an inessential fragment of the historical narrative, Brunschvicg sought rather to

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banish ‘the ghost of dialectical reason’ and directly grasp reason ‘in the continuity of its movement’.53 This implied both an attention to radical changes of direction and a sensibility for the inherent logic behind the evolution of thought. History could be rationally construed, but the evolution of ideas banned any ‘synthesis of the syntheses embracing the totality of thoughts dispersed across individuals and generations’. The ‘chain of consciences’ does not follow a unique formula. ‘The contingency of human progress is radical: the centre of reflection moves constantly, dragging into this movement not only the intellect’s view of the universe, but also the outlook on its own history.’54 Historical contingency makes it impossible for the philosopher to deduce anything from a principle; a proper ‘reflective idealism’ can only find in history, at the end of its path, ‘the spontaneity of a function’ which is ‘actually at work in the course of time’: ‘What we expect from history is not that it reveals, at the starting point, the invariance of an abstract scheme …, but that it unveils, at the point of arrival, the invariance of a function that is exerted spontaneously, which was at work in the development of knowledge.’55 From this perspective, history is, in Boutroux’s words, the ‘necessary corrective of static psychology’.56 Hence, a conclusion that harbours in nuce the further development of the French ‘historical epistemology’: ‘The a priori is not guessed, it is discovered.’57 As we will see by the end of this chapter, however, if this methodology distinguished Brunschvicg from Hegel’s abstract determinism, it did not spare him charges of idealism and Condorcetian teleologism.58

History and judgement Starting from the assumption that the history of thought is radically contingent, depending on the creative solutions devised by the mind when confronted with the ‘shock’ of experience, Brunschvicg claimed coherently that the motto of historical research should not be ‘Narratur ad probandum’, that is, narrating in order to demonstrate some abstract and ahistorical principle, but rather ‘Narratur ad judicandum’, which means understanding the temporal deployment of the resources and the capacities of the intelligence.59 This reference to judgement introduces an important aspect of the Brunschvicgian conception of history. The historian must in fact articulate a critique of history, that is, a retrospective evaluation of the solutions devised by consciousness through time. In this sense, Brunschvicg’s history of thought was similar to Hegel’s insofar as it read the past in light of the present. It was not, so to speak, a contextualist history that limited itself to explaining past doctrines or ideas on the basis of their historical, social and cultural milieu. On the contrary, it strove to retain from the past some insights enlightening our current predicaments. One has to bear in mind the double tension that animated Brunschvicg’s account of the history of ideas, the dialectics between diachronicity and synchronicity, between intellectual progress and recurrent oppositions. The history of thought was interpreted indeed through well-defined axiomatic lens, distinguishing between those philosophers who promoted the dynamism of the mind and those who imprisoned its plasticity within fixed frames. Hence, ‘the judgement of history

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translates into a discernment between the fecundity of a properly scientific knowledge and a sort of metaphysical inertia that would fix the latter’s contours for good, that would cushion its élan, under the pretext of determining its foundations’.60 This is why, Brunschvicg held, every history is a contemporary history, inasmuch as the past and the present clarify and implicate each other: The technical arguments in favour of non-Euclidean geometries or Einsteinian physics are provided by the current development of our knowledge. The philosophical arguments come from very far. It is Euclid who justifies and consecrates Lobachevsky in advance, introducing as a postulate the fundamental proposition on the parallels that pseudo-Euclideans have claimed to demonstrate, in the hope of completing a work left imperfect. Likewise, the intellectual joy immediately aroused by the theory of general relativity can be explained by the fact that the theory retrospectively vindicates Huygens’s and Leibniz’s critiques to the Principles, by the fact that it also shows how well-founded were Newton’s own reservations about the scope of the law of gravitation, by the fact that it finally dissipates the antinomies to which according to Kant … one is condemned when one imposes on to the physical universe a space and time which are believed to be given once and for all, as mathematical ideals, in the apriority of a single form … Linking the achievements of the present to the predicaments of the past: this is the operation that assures us that we have understood the authentic meaning of both; this is what gives an objective aspect to the integral course of history.61

In order to appreciate Einstein’s breakthrough, as we will see more clearly in the next chapter, one has to project it against the historical background of the debates following the advent of Newtonian gravitation. Only thus can it acquire its real significance. When, thanks to hyperbolic and elliptic geometry, one finally understands that classical geometry is only a kind of metrics, and not the ultimate model of our spatial experience, the way he looks at Euclid, far from becoming dismissive, becomes more careful and accurate, more sympathetic, more aware of the actual value of his theories.62 Furthermore, as Brunschvicg explains in L’expérience humaine, an ‘integral’ and ‘synoptic’ historical analysis allows one to leave the past in the past, that is, to understand which theories are now outdated and unworthy of reconsideration.63 Because of this, history exerts a ‘liberating’ function that unlocks ‘fecund values for the advancement of the intelligence’64 and warns against the persistence of ancient superstitions.65 Ultimately, as we can read in the Étapes, ‘critical analysis … proceeds from history’.66 The introduction of a critical look upon history has an important consequence: history reveals itself as a sort of philosophical repertoire, a source of case studies illustrating the evolution of consciousness through time. As Brunschvicg famously puts it, history becomes ‘the philosopher’s laboratory’:67 just as nature is subjected to analysis in the laboratory, the intellectual progress of humanity is given to reflection only in history.68 As he wrote elsewhere, ‘the texts provided by history are, for the analysis of our mind, what an experiment in the laboratory is for the analysis of matter’.69 Moreover, if one does not want history, and most notably the

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history of philosophy, to be ‘an exercise in retrospective philology, a review of dead beliefs, a museum of fantastic controversies’, he must understand it as a chapter of the history of truth, just like the history of science.70

Chronology and mentalities Let us now focus more closely on the tension that characterised Brunschvicg’s historiography and that sustained its evaluative ambitions. In fact, one cannot help but think that the tension between contingency and teleology, between historical sensitivity and philosophical Manichaeism, may determine the limits as well as the strength of Brunschvicg’s historical surveys. As we will see, this is something of which many commentators were well aware. Did Brunschvicg not claim that historical becoming led to the ‘discovery of an intellectual consciousness’ based on the ‘progressive connection’ between ‘the infinitely infinite resources of the intelligence’ and the ‘scruple of verification’?71 Was not his 1927 masterwork the history of a Progrès, where the ‘task of philosophical reflection’ consists precisely in ‘becoming aware of the reflective character of the progress of modern science’?72 And did not the identification of the evolution of human culture with the development of the individual from infancy to adulthood – a common topos in modern philosophy that Brunschvicg substantiated with the research of Piaget and Claparède73 – revive the coincidence between phylogeny and ontogeny? Just as in Hegel, thus, one could easily suggest that in Brunschvicg the vicissitudes of history were ultimately subordinated to the advent of his own philosophy, understood as the full deployment of the emancipated and creative reason. This is a critique lodged, for example, by Martial Gueroult, who maintained that Brunschvicg’s view of the history of philosophy was utterly ‘egocentric’.74 However, others have recently claimed that the key to Brunschvicg’s overall project lies in the desire to find a balance between rationality and event, between the intelligibility of history and the irreducible chaos of its dynamics.75 The two interpretative options are not perhaps mutually exclusive. There is surely a teleologism in Brunschvicg, a ‘mathematicising télos of reason’, leading to the ideal of a fully intelligible knowledge.76 However, such an almost messianic attitude is never pacified, never fully optimistic, always conscious of the ‘mixed form’ that is the inescapable modality of our historical judgements upon reality. As Brunschvicg pointed out in a series of retrospective articles on the reception of the Progrès de la conscience, posthumously published as De la vraie et de la fausse conversion, his histories surely consisted in chronological overviews from ancient to contemporary times. However, the overall scope of its methodology was not to provide a mere doxographic review of what philosophers and scientists had believed. Rather, chronology was only a tool, a fil rouge that he followed in order to show the existence of opposite values and ‘mentalities’ running across the epochs and the corresponding ‘ages of the intelligence’ (the title of a series of lectures given at the Sorbonne in the 1930s). This means that the Brunschvicgian history is a complex dialectical entanglement between diachronicity and synchronicity – or, to put it in the terms of

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his philosophy of judgement, between interiority and exteriority, ideality and actuality. These poles determine a ‘radical opposition’ that gleams through ‘the irreversible order of the intellectual ages’. A passage is worth quoting in full that perfectly sums up this perspective: The history we are dealing with is not the one that remains on the surface of time, as geography remained on the surface when it was not based on geology. The century in which a man exerts his brain has no direct and necessary relationship with the state of his intellectual development: the age of a mind is actually affected by the time in which the ideological framework from which such a mind proceeds emerged. Hence, the mentality of a James will appear by far less advanced than that of a Pascal in the evolution of the belief in a transcendent and supernatural world.77

Brunschvicg offered the example of Pascal and James, but many others could be given. From his perspective, in fact, Descartes was not only more modern than Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, which is obvious, but also more modern than Taine. And the same goes for Fichte with respect to Renouvier, for Spinoza if compared to Durkheim, and so forth. In the quoted passage, I have emphasised the word ‘mentality’, which is crucial here. Brunschvicg also employed the expression ‘mental structure’. In both cases, he meant exactly the same thing, which derived from his acquaintance with the ethnological researches of his colleague Lucien Lévy-Bruhl on the mentalities of the so-called primitive peoples.78 For the philosopher-turned-ethnologist, a mentality was a way of thinking and feeling that affected also the ways of acting and which did not depend upon subjective features, but rather belonged to a social dimension.79 Such a notion – loosely inspired by the Comtean notion of ‘stage’ and later questioned by Lévy-Bruhl himself in his posthumous Carnets – had an extraordinary impact at the time, becoming a sort of interdisciplinary buzzword, from psychology (Piaget) to general history (the ‘history of mentalities’ of the Annales school) and the history of science (Metzger).80 Philosophically, however, Lévy-Bruhl’s concept challenged the Cartesian assumption of the universality of the human mind, by showing that among native peoples reason worked according to other principles, which were mystical and ‘prelogical’, although not illogical (they were insensitive to contradictions and followed what Lévy-Bruhl called the ‘law of participation’, which abolished rigid separations between man and nature, wake and dream, etc.). From this, as Lévy-Bruhl made clear, one should not resort to a rigid separation between ‘inferior’ and ‘civilised’ mentalities. Forms of primitive thinking could survive even within the most ‘developed’ societies. Accordingly, as emerged from the previous chapters, throughout the history of philosophical and scientific thought Brunschvicg detected the presence of these contrasting mentalities, opposing one thinker or scientist to the other or even the early stance of an author to his late beliefs, while at the same time accounting for the breaks and ruptures punctuating the progress of consciousness. As he submitted clearly in the introduction to the Progrès de la conscience,

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the crucial opposition between the mathematical idealism of the Platonic Republic and the astro-biological realism of the Aristotelian Metaphysics defined the fundamental theme of the West, in the practical as well as in the theoretical realm … the controversy between the Academy and the Lyceum bears clear witness to the existence of two fundamentally different types of mental structure, one determined by the relations of science (mathemata) and the other by the concepts of the discourse (logos).81

In a way, thus, the Brunschvicgian history was permanently affected by such an oscillation between discontinuity and continuity, conceptual revolutions and eternal recurrences. The reader has thus the impression that, despite Cournot’s and Boutroux’s influence that I discussed in Chapter 4, a part of Brunschvicg’s mind was still lured by the Renouvierian antinomic model expounded in the Esquisse d’une classification systematique des systèmes philosophiques, a text quoted by Brunschvicg since La modalité du jugement.82 Indeed, as he wrote, ‘systematic spirit and spirit of doubt, dogmatism and scepticism are inseparable but incompatible. This surely explains well the undulatory rhythm that the history of philosophy seems to have followed, the alternation of “bellies” and “knots”, periods of dogmatic growth and periods of sceptical tightening.’83 The querelle with neo-Thomism in the 1930s is in this sense particularly enlightening.84 From Brunschvicg’s interpretation of the history of philosophy, one can easily infer how much he could despise the revival of the old Aristotelian-Thomistic scholasticism promoted under the auspices of the popes Leo XIII (1878–1903) and Pius X (1903–14). In fact, this meant downplaying the radical impact of the Cartesian breakthrough and questioning the very idea of modernity in philosophy, which, for Brunschvicg, was closely connected to science. Endorsing such an interpretative line, Lévy-Bruhl backed up Brunschvicg by stressing the ‘close affinity between the mathematical and the philosophical spirit’ as the DNA of French thought from Descartes on.85 Predictably, the ‘singular persistence of the Cartesian spirit’ – or, one might say, of the Cartesian ‘mentality’ – opened up a chasm forever separating the modern world from the Middle Ages, the task of post-Cartesian thought being ‘to definitely separate scientific or philosophical speculation from theology, and to overthrow the entire body of institutions based on a historical tradition that was often indefensible’.86 Lévy-Bruhl concluded in a Comtean vein by acknowledging that, behind the façade of ‘spasmodic advances, fluctuations and recoils’, their time was actually ‘a stage of the great transition’ from the religious state to ‘another state’, yet to be determined, but in which dogma and blind assumptions no longer subsisted.87 Brunschvicg’s objections to neo-Thomism were motivated by a similar outlook. For him, the ultimate effect of the ‘renaissance of the Medieval ontology’ was to keep alive the antinomy between two contradictory and anachronistic forms of rationalism: on the one hand, a ‘rationalism before science’ that rested on naïve sensible representations and that could only build by abstraction ‘a system of logical deduction according to the descending order of a conceptual hierarchy’; on the other hand, a ‘rationalism after science’ that attains, rather than constituting, the ‘concrete truth’ of the universe by a ‘progressive composition of properly intellectual

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relationships, that is, of equations’.88 As Piaget had shown in his studies on the infant’s representation of the world, Aristotle’s ‘realist metaphysics’ was a childlike philosophy because it hypostatised the immediate appearances of our perception into general concepts. On the contrary, an authentic and mature rationalism understood that perceptual representations were only transitory fragments of the intelligible totality of nature elaborated by the mind. The naivety of realism consisted in fact in believing that the things that we perceive are already constituted and given as such before being perceived and known. Accordingly, through a series of imaginative acts, a realist attached to the object as such, to a transcendent reality, the attributes that actually pertained to his own intuition.89 Generalising such qualities, he then articulated the logical framework of an abstract and unverified ‘discursive universe’. For Brunschvicg, the medieval quaestio de universalibus stemmed precisely from the empty and meaningless antinomies generated by such a naïve stance.90 In his view, metaphysics from Aristotle to the advent of modern science ‘lacked not simply this or that truth, but precisely everything, the idea itself of truth’.91 By reviving such a ‘primitive’ attitude, neo-Thomism revealed how much its rationalism was utterly anachronistic, and not simply an alternative to the postscientific rationality. Having endured the ‘virile test’ of the methodical doubt, Descartes was a ‘man, in the strong sense’, while Thomas Aquinas came across as an ‘infant’ philosopher.92 Pace Maritain and Gilson, Thomism marked a step back to the early stages of our civilisation, to the ‘metaphysical sensualism’ of ‘primitive humanity’.93 As Brunschvicg wrote in 1939, reason was not a generalising and abstracting faculty; rather, its nature was ‘to coordinate fragmentary and seemingly divergent perspectives provided by the senses so as to come to constitute the real universe’.94 Ultimately, there no longer existed a common language that could allow for an exchange of views between the scholastic and the scientific determinisms, between the ‘constructive synthesis’ and the ‘reflective analysis’, between the ‘return to the pre-critical realism’ and the ‘progress towards critical idealism’.95 For Brunschvicg, thus, an accurate study of history was functional to an overall assessment of the diachronic and synchronic condition of Western consciousness. From this perspective, the dialectic or the tension of continuity and discontinuity, of progress and the permanence of mentalities, could not be resolved. In Brunschvicg’s account, history resembled a spiral, where different authors occupied the same positions on different levels. ‘The intelligence of truth, with regard to the relationship between man and nature,’ he wrote, ‘does not present itself as identical across the various phases of the evolution of modern knowledge.’96 The very idea of a ‘progress’ of Western consciousness obviously implied a normative stance that is most evident in the debate with neo-Thomism. However, in this way Brunschvicg seemed not to conceive that the permanence of conflicting models of reason could be an inherent feature of the European mind itself, that the true virtue of European rationality might consist precisely in enabling the coexistence and the dialogue between different perspectives upon itself. Brunschvicg’s one-sidedness, which radicalised the opposition between mentalities and Spinozistically differentiated between inadequate (homo credulus/homo faber) and adequate (homo sapiens/homo socraticus) forms of thinking, might at times be at odds with his own dynamic notion

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of the mind. Is this not yet another categorisation that might appear as dogmatic as those he wanted to ruin? Yet, besides this problematic aspect, in Brunschvicg the study of history had more often a positive connotation. In fact, the ‘intelligence’ of the past had the precise function of taking stock of the present spiritual situation by discovering the ‘contradictory movements of our civilisation’, its lacerating conflicts pertaining to contrasting options. For example, the study of history allowed deciding if one really wanted to reduce rationality to conceptualism. As such, history had to be practised not only in a ‘geographical’ fashion, that is, by describing doxographically a panorama of subsequent doctrines, but also ‘geologically’, in order to dig out the elements that could enable one to explain and respond to present concerns.97

The history of Egypt as the history of Egyptology While Brunschvicg’s stance was deemed too historicist by some of his contemporaries, like Parodi, Gilson and Maritain, the generation of his direct disciples or subsequent readers found on the contrary that his conception of history was still too idealistic, to the point of annihilating actual, concrete historicity. The idea that knowledge is a thoroughly historical process was rapidly oversimplified and reduced to a slogan that readers drew from a passage of L’expérience humaine: ‘The history of Egypt presupposes the history of Egyptology’ – which, quoted outside its context, was condemned to stick out for its self-evident absurdity, reduced to the claim that we only have access to discourses or tales. As such, this sentence was brought as evidence of Brunschvicg’s detachment from reality, of the nonsense of his intellectualist dogmatism. The examples are numerous, which confirms how much this view corresponded to a vulgate in the early twentieth century. For instance, in his 1930 PhD dissertation Esquisse d’une philosophie de la structure, Raymond Ruyer (1902–1987) claimed that one should not conceive of reality on the model of the ‘science of the real’. In fact, while inevitably moving a posteriori in our exploration of the past, we follow threads emanated by ‘the object itself ’.98 Julien Benda (1867–1956), who severely reproached throughout his entire life those philosophers who advocated a dynamic conception of the mind, quoted approvingly Ruyer’s remarks. Following a rigorous Kantian and Cartesian attitude, mediated by the filter of the neo-criticism of Renouvier, Benda believed in the existence of invariable intellectual categories and severely chastised the trend of what he called ‘contemporary mobilism’. He targeted not only, as one might expect, Bergson’s philosophy of duration but also Brunschvicg’s and Bachelard’s historical epistemologies. In particular, Brunschvicg’s idealism – exemplified in the most paradigmatic fashion by the sentence under discussion – implied that there could not be any Egypt before Egyptology, or that there could not be stars before astronomy, which was utter nonsense.99 Jean Piaget exposed the circular line of argumentation and the progressus in infinitum entailed by the sentence: if the history of science was reduced to the history of the scientific discourse, it was impossible to conceive of a reference, an object, which would

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remain independent from thought. The problem lay in the fact that Brunschvicg’s historical approach was too philosophical, never taking into account – as for example Lévy-Bruhl had done with the ‘primitive’ people – the thought of the ancient Egyptians, of pre-historic men or even ‘animal intelligence’.100 MerleauPonty saw in the infamous sentence the ultimate proof of Brunschvicg’s reduction of nature to the mere correlate of scientific laws that are alone the only objective reality. Proof of it was the fact that he often spoke indifferently of ‘World’, which implied a subject–object relation and would have thus required a phenomenological account, and of ‘universe’, which was instead a purely scientific construct.101 Along the same line, Dufrenne argued that ‘It is useless to allege that the history of Egypt is the history of Egyptology’, for ‘man is not just his own narrative, and history is not merely a meaning without an object’,102 whereas Raymond Aron observed that Brunschvicg’s motto clashed against the irreducibility of the concrete lives of fellow men to reflection and science.103 More recently, the great scholar of Greek philosophy Pierre Aubenque (1929–2020), who revitalised Aristotle studies after decades of decadence due to Brunschvicg’s contempt for the Stagirite, quoted Brunschvicg’s sentence in a discussion of Heidegger’s Seinsgeschichte: just as for Heidegger the history of ontology and the history of being were one and the same thing – owing to the fact that the history of being is necessarily a history of the logoi concerning being, where being unveils and, by the same token, conceals itself – for the idealist Brunschvicg there was a perfect match between the history of an object and the history of its concept, although everybody knows that ancient Egypt existed even without Egyptologists.104 In a different but similar vein, Vincent Descombes (1943) has tried to debunk reflective/idealist approaches to history along the lines of Brunschvicg’s sentence claiming that such a stance inevitably leads to sophistry, as it prevents any rational argumentation: ‘If the history of France has no object, neither does the history of the history of France.’105 In sum, all these references to Brunschvicg’s motto go in the same direction, pointing towards a problematic conflation of, if not a confusion between, epistemology and ontology. However, a philological point is worth clarifying. Actually, Brunschvicg never wrote that ‘the history of Egypt is the history of Egyptology’. This is a simplified rendition of a more complex passage from L’expérience humaine. As it happens, in particular when the posterity of an author is determined more by commonplaces or second-hand references than by close and direct readings of his works, the real meaning and form of a sentence fatally get lost. Here is thus the actual formulation located within its context: The nunc the universe is related to is not only this moving point of the present where the real inscribes on a measuring device a sign that will decide the fate of a scientific theory; it is, in conjunction with the actuality of experience, the actuality of the scientific content that is concentrated in a given moment in the mind of the scientist and by which the latter draws the architecture of the past ages and of the ages to come. Hence the consequence that the architecture of these ages is renewed with the science of the architect. The history of Egypt is in perpetual evolution, because it is, so to speak, a second-degree knowledge, which presupposes the history

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of Egyptology. Likewise, we do not write directly the history of the Earth, but the history of geology, which shows us the constitution of the temporal field in stages comparable to the degrees of the constitution of the spatial field.106

As to the sentence itself, it may seem that the only thing that changes is the stylistic formulation, while the underlying notion remains the same. Nevertheless, to claim that the history of Egypt is the history of Egyptology is different from holding that the history of Egypt presupposes the history of Egyptology. Let us take a closer look at the context. The passage appears in a chapter in which Brunschvicg criticises the idea of a static conception of causal determinism, which would amount to the biased delusion of an equally static conception of science. By encasing actual experience within an abstract model of cause–effect relations, this determinism winds up neglecting the contingency, the randomness and the irreducible novelty of the events generated by the unfathomable complexity of reality and by the interactions between mind and world. In this sense, this determinism turns out to be a ‘pre-determinism’ that is incapable of ‘grasping the spectacle of reality, thereby denying man the … understanding of freedom’.107 Instead, Brunschvicg claimed, our causal understanding of nature changes through time, the more our scientific image of the world develops. The mind, in other words, does not simply extrapolate from experience nor project upon it a universal model of causality. On the contrary, it enters into a constructive and reflective experimental dialogue with nature in which any simple induction or representation is made impossible, in which scientific modelisation and natural processes or phenomena are deeply entangled. Up until Einstein, for example, humanity had assumed that the space was filled with ether, while now we have a very different interpretation of ‘objective’ reality. Of course, Egyptology and geology are concerned with things that are no more, whereas physics, for example, pertains to everlasting realities or recurrent/reproducible phenomena. Yet in both cases, according to Brunschvicg, objectivity is always a construct, produced by the intellectual, reflective interrogation of reality. From this perspective, as MerleauPonty explained, Brunschvicg did not accept Cournot’s distinction between ‘physical sciences’ (e.g. chemistry and physics), based on ‘theoretical givens’ and aiming at eternal truths, and ‘cosmological sciences’, relying on ‘historical givens’ and addressing the causal enchainment of single facts.108 Brunschvicg followed Cournot in saying that the progress of geology deepens our knowledge and widens the scale of geological times. Yet he was convinced that this historicity was a feature that did not characterise only the ‘cosmological sciences’ but also every science, even the ‘physical’ ones. What Brunschvicg meant by the infamous sentence should now be clearer: science is always a temporal process, in which what counts as objective alters according to the transformation of the theories themselves. As he would later say in the Progrès de la conscience: The reflection on the becoming of science results in a continuous correction of the historical perspective of humanity, in the same way that science itself, from

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approximation to approximation, makes the structure of the universe more and more coherent and true. Ultimately, the progress of the human perspective and the progress of the cosmic structure constitute one and the same progress.109

Judith Schlanger (1936) was thus right in criticising the simplistic ‘realist’ debunking of Brunschvicg. In fact, to assert the existence of Egypt independently of Egyptology is not enough. It is obvious that Egypt as such existed. What did not pre-exist Egyptology was instead the ‘Egyptologisable Egypt, the object of the Egyptologic treatment’.110 Differently put, in Schlanger’s view there surely is a hard ontological kernel of Ancient Egypt that orients scientific research. At the same time, however, it is Egyptology that establishes what is scientifically or historically meaningful concerning Ancient Egypt. From this perspective, history is something more than a chronicle or a review enlightening the diachronic evolution of the ideas and showing the constitutive presence of revolutions and breaks: it also instructs us about the way in which the objects to which ideas refer are constituted. The history of reality is therefore the history of the theories that have tried to figure out its mysteries. Again, one should pay attention to Brunschvicg’s wordings: he does not say that the reality of Egypt – the Egypt as such qua ancient world – does not exist as such; nor does he maintain that reality as a structured universe is a mere intellectual invention. It should be clear by now that this was not his perspective. He just pointed out that, in order to see the structure and the evolution (the history) of X, one needs theories about X – that is, reflection. Whether X is a historical phenomenon or a physical fact does not change anything. Even physical facts, for Brunschvicg, are historical, inasmuch as they make sense only within a broader set of theories which are constantly under revision (the long and complex history of atom theory – admitted in ancient times, rejected by modern science and reprised, although in a different guise, by quantum physics – is from this point of view a telling example). This is why, to conclude, in Brunschvicg the philosophy of mind is a philosophy of judgement and the philosophy of judgement a philosophy of history: because reality as the objective reference of our discourse is always a function, a value, which is inherent to the operations of the mind. However, these operations are not purely a priori, for they are always confronted with the irreducible kernel of the real qua external spur of our intellectual activity; finally, this intellectual activity is reflective, that is, temporal. Therefore, reality acquires sense only within our judgements, understood as formalisations of the confrontation of our concepts with a given experience, a given hic et nunc shifting through time. The only way to study the mind is thus to look at the history of its judgements, and not to search for its alleged formal functioning. From this, it derives that for Brunschvicg reality does not dissolve ontologically in the constitutive power of the mind. If the mind was reflection, it must have something to reflect upon. Nevertheless, this ‘something’ is not meaningful per se; it becomes meaningful only when it is processed by the intellectual activity. There exists thus a circularity between the mind and the real that ‘produces’ an objective reality understood as the common reference of our scientific theories or even common-sense beliefs and assumptions.

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Conclusion Brunschvicg’s conception of history was a direct consequence of a reflective idealism that turned out to be a historically situated idealism. This is what Lachelier had already said in a 1905 letter that Brunschvicg quoted precisely in L’expérience humaine. Idealism, Lachelier contended, does not assert ‘that phenomena can exist merely in consciousness’. After Kant, this would be a vulgar perspective. Rather, it consists in ‘believing that phenomena are given, even in a consciousness, only at the moment and to the extent that consciousness gives them to itself ’. Although our representations are finite in the present moment, they ‘virtually’ suppose an infinite network of past and future representations. Seduced by imagination, our understanding compels us to exhaust in a determined way this infinite variety of perspectives, ‘in the vain hope of dating and situating in an absolute way the moment when and the place where we are’. On the contrary, instead of building abstract all-encompassing deductions, Lachelier claimed, ‘we should … begin from this moment and from this place in order to project regressively the world in the space and history in the past’.111 Critical idealism was thus the philosophy of a situated consciousness, although it lacked a proper thematisation of temporality and historicity as constitutive features of human experience. In a way, this formed the abstract schema that existentialism would later try to fill with concrete contents and Erlebnisse – of course, after having dismantled the notion that the world as a meaningful totality exists only within the realm of judgement. Rhetorically, Merleau-Ponty would have asked precisely whether the notion of the world submitted ‘to something other than my here and my now, that is, the field of my representation’.112 This objection surely hit the mark, in that it acknowledged that Brunschvicg’s history was just the history of ideas, the history of the mind, and not of man or concrete world. As Georges Canguilhem put it, in Brunschvicg history was ultimately, ‘for reason, the conquest of its own essence which it pursues through its own exercise’.113 Yet, in this chapter, I have tried to underscore that such an intellectualism was not necessarily linear and was indeed more tormented than it may appear, making an undeniable teleologism coexist with the acknowledgement of the evenemential (i.e. punctuated by events) character of history. The idea of a haunted historicity which is altogether open to contingency, to a form of ‘situatedness’, although within the realm of knowledge and not yet on the level of concrete existence, was something that Brunschvicg introduced in the philosophical discourse and that many twentieth-century thinkers, be they ‘existentialists’ or ‘historical epistemologists’, would have more or less consciously inherited.

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Lessons of science

Les savants ont fait avancer la science ; puis la science a fait avancer les savants. Avertissement aux philosophes. Et j’ai joué de mon mieux en philosophe averti.1

Introduction In his 1935 conference on ‘The Outlook for Intelligence’, Paul Valéry summed up in vivid terms the epochal passage his generation had witnessed in science. Since the discovery of electrical current in 1800, he claimed, an ‘era of new facts’ had opened up, calling into question the scientific image of the world and ‘even our habits of thought’, not to mention their practical applications, requiring an incredible ‘effort of adaptation’ from mankind.2 This amounted to a ‘profound, rapid, and irresistible transformation of all the conditions of human action’, so that ‘a man who lived through the years from 1872 to 1890, for example, and then from the years 1890 to 1935, would … feel some difference of rhythm between these two periods of his life’.3 The realm of historical continuity, Valéry contended, had been broken by the suddenness of inventions and destructions, by the overwhelming emergence of new unexpected problems that somehow disrupted the ‘intellectual tradition’.4 Was this feeling not a consequence of the various announcements about the ‘end of nature’ that had been made by scientists and philosophers since at least the beginning of the twentieth century? Sticking to the French context, in 1901 the great chemist Marcellin Berthelot (1827–1907) signalled that, besides the old familiar Nature, a sort of ‘antiphysis’ had arisen, a ‘superior nature’ made possible by the new discoveries of electromagnetism, if not a ‘counter-nature’ which, while allowing man to enhance his technical capacities, presented itself in an altogether counter-intuitive guise,5 ‘detached from our primary observations’.6 A few years later, another national scientific glory, Henri Poincaré (1854–1912), reissued his masterwork Science and Hypothesis (1902) adding a final chapter entitled ‘The End of Matter’, in which he discussed the hypothesis that mass is not constant but varies proportionally according to velocity. This chapter was drafted in the aftermath of Poincaré’s and Albert Einstein’s (1879–1955) parallel and independent contributions

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to special relativity building on the theory of electrodynamics formulated by Hendrik Lorentz (1853–1928). Poincaré’s thesis was precisely that, while the observation of planetary motion somehow preserved the concept of the invariability of mass, things dramatically changed when one turned to phenomena like e-beams or cathode rays: ‘One of the most surprising discoveries that physicists have announced in the last few years,’ Poincaré wrote, ‘is that matter does not exist.’7 Of course, Poincaré was quick to make clear that such findings were not definitive; still, he pointed to a radical change in the way of understanding nature. Revolutions and paradigm shifts are always a complex matter, which lends itself to often-divergent interpretations and whose scope is thus difficult to establish objectively beyond the interference of ideological frameworks, disciplinary contexts, personal expectations and other forms of subtle conditioning. Brunschvicg himself was among the first to insist, if not, as contemporary historians do, on the strict entanglement of science, society and culture, at least on the interdependence between science and philosophical views. This is why we should be concerned here not so much with the actual nature of the multifaceted scientific revolution that took place at the turn of the century but with the way in which a thinker like Brunschvicg was affected by the several turnarounds that could be witnessed in the sciences. This is an important methodological caveat. We have to remember that Brunschvicg, whose most important works on science date to the 1910s and the 1920s, with some minor interventions in the 1930s, was a situated observer of an ongoing and still debated process. It is thus unsurprising to find that he privileged certain authors or theories and neglected or overlooked the import of others. Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique (1912) and L’expérience humaine et la causalité physique (1922) are thus necessarily partial works. Yet, precisely because they were not conceived as exhaustive historical surveys in the positive documentary sense, but rather as interpretative inquiries, they retain their value as courageous attempts to draw philosophical conclusions from transformations that were underway – and they should be evaluated as such. The use of a historical method for the resolution of epistemological deadlocks was motivated by the assumption – fundamental for a philosophy of reflection – that a gap, a sort of deferral, separated the work and the results of science from the ‘awareness’ (prise de conscience) of their meaning and relevance. Not that scientists were incapable of reflecting upon their work. Philosophers, though, and in particular reflective philosophers, were able to better grasp in hindsight the historical significance of scientific events like those witnessed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But significance for what? In other words: why should a philosopher turn to the sciences and observe the progress made in the study of nature? For Brunschvicg, the answer lay in a sentence by the great German mathematician Félix Klein (1849– 1925): ‘It often happens that things are more reasonable than men.’8 Via Klein, Brunschvicg meant to say that examining the research outputs of the scientists might teach useful things about the actual functioning of our mind and about the ways in which we organise knowledge.9 As he had already made clear in the Introduction à la vie de l’esprit, the progress from raw perception to science was not headed towards ‘the nature of things’ but towards ‘the nature of the mind’. Brunschvicg reprised the Comtean idea according to which the history of science alone could provide a positive/

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empirical basis for the discovery of the ‘logical laws of the human mind’,10 although from a reflective and spiritualist perspective: the creations of science, in fact, ‘mark the degrees of intelligibility that humanity has gone through since the day of the awakening of thought and thanks to which humanity has turned this universe that seemed to encircle and imprison the individual into a system that results in intelligible relationships’.11 For Brunschvicg, this constituted yet another proof that reason was not a faculty that could be determined a priori in its constitutive operations. Considered in itself, it was just an ‘empty form’, a ‘potentiality without manifestation’.12 Hence, as repeatedly stressed, it could not be studied per se but only in its activity, in the historical progress of its quest for truth. This, as the previous chapter has shown, explained also the evenemential character of Brunschvicg’s history of science, which depended on the immanent reflective logic of judgement, constantly reconfiguring the order of knowledge. In Brunschvicg, then, the event was not an ontological notion, as for example in Heidegger. On the contrary, it was an ‘event of the intelligence’13 that, as Bachelard noted, was not immediately disruptive but was rather a slow burn, a late-onset revolution that needed to be intellectually and reflectively appreciated as such.14 Therefore, the history of science was instructive insofar as Brunschvicg did not admit the division of the mind into the ‘bureau of science’ and the ‘bureau of philosophy’.15 Just as he rejected the Kantian partition of the mind into faculties, he affirmed a sort of intellectual and trans-disciplinary monism for which philosophy, science, religion, art and so forth were as many realms where the inventiveness of the mind could express itself. The study of history was geared towards ‘the elaboration of an immanent and impersonal philosophy overcoming and judging philosophers, of a progressive rationalism based on the critical reflection on positive science’.16 This also explains why Brunschvicg did not care about formulating a philosophy of science but rather a scientific philosophy.17 This distinction might easily sound like mere wordplay. On the contrary, it was motivated by Brunschvicg’s own approach to science, which, again, was not concerned with science per se but rather with its philosophical import, that is, with its contribution to a renovated psychology of the intelligence.

Mathematical bloodlines: Arithmetism, logicism, intuitionism The historical aim of the Étapes was to provide a rationale for the impasses of contemporary mathematics, to outline the diachronic reasons that had led to the deadlock of the alternative between intuitionism and ‘logicism’, that is, between the stances of Poincaré and Russell (Brunschvicg was not yet aware of Brouwer!).18 As he declared in the book, ‘The experience of history renders a double service to the philosopher: it dissipates the veil that dogmatic systems interposed between philosophy of mathematics and the reality of science and thus it allows him to seize again this reality in a nascent state and determine its true character.’19 Thematising

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a mathematical philosophy meant thus precisely focusing on the philosophical activity that was immanent to the ‘normal rhythm of science’,20 without trying to tell aprioristically what mathematics are or should be (the task of a traditional philosophy of mathematics).21 The insight that lay behind the book was revealed by Brunschvicg himself during a debate at the Société française de philosophie.22 Apparently, while reading the first pages of the Leçons d’arithmétique théorique et pratique (1894) of Jules Tannery (1848–1910), professor of differential and integral calculus at the Sorbonne, he had been struck by a comparison between the notion of correspondence that many modern analysts had posed as the key to abstract mathematics and the practice of calculation among primitive people, consisting in associating rudimentary numbers to body parts.23 In Tannery the analogy was quite loose and merely illustrative, but in the first and the last chapters of the Étapes Brunschvicg would develop this insight into a full-fledged historical interpretation of mathematics, relying heaving on the works of ethnologists like Lévy-Bruhl or Edward B. Tylor (1832–1917). For Brunschvicg, this fil rouge connecting pre-logical mentalities to the world of science was tantamount to reasserting the relational nature of mathematics, showing that the emancipation from external sensible intuition that one could admire in, for example, Lie group analysis already began with the most elementary forms of enumeration and calculation that could be found among the natives of Canada, Australia or Polynesia.24 In a way, therefore, despite its diachronic progression, the Étapes was a sort of circular book, ending where it began, with the claim that scientific intelligence was characterised by the dialectic of two distinctive features: ‘an infinite capacity of progress’ and ‘a perpetual concern for verification’ (i.e. for critical self-examination).25 Now, it would be impossible to account exhaustively for the thematic richness reviewed by this monumental text covering Western scientific culture in its entirety, surely the most vertiginous and technical among Brunschvicg’s works.26 I will thus proceed as follows. In this section, I sketch out the main historical and conceptual paths that are traced in Brunschvicg’s archaeological account. No doubt, my summary might appear quite rough here and there, as its aim is primarily to bring us to the advent of what for Brunschvicg amounted to a contemporary neo-Aristotelianism, namely Russell’s logicism, and to the intuitionist reaction. In the next section, I will deal with Brunschvicg’s reading of non-Euclidean geometries, which allows us to appreciate in the best possible way his understanding of mathematics’ contribution to philosophy. Let us start from the beginning.27 Brunschvicg identifies three main scientific breakthroughs that shook the foundations of contemporary mathematics. In mechanics, the second principle of thermodynamics, with the introduction of irreversibility and the degradation of energy, rendered it impossible to account for the properties of bodies in the purely geometrical terms of the old mechanism (figure and movement).28 In analysis, Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789–1857) rejected the principle of the generality of algebra (the application to infinite expansions of the usual rules of calculus that were valid for finite expansions) and inaugurated the process of autonomisation of analysis from the forms of spatial intuition that would culminate with the discovery by Karl Weierstrass (1815–1897) of the continuous function without derivatives.29 Finally, the third, great revolution, and surely the most paradigmatic for Brunschvicg, was the

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‘discovery’ of non-Euclidean geometries, which destroyed the ‘geometrical imperative’ modelling our conceptualisation of space upon the direct perception of an external homogeneous reality. For Brunschvicg, the main consequence of these three events was that knowledge could not rest any longer on pure intuitions of the mind or on the general facts of nature, as in the Kantian and in the Comtean theories of knowledge, respectively. Geometry was no more the science of a single and homogeneous kind of space, understood as the receptacle of all phenomena; the object of mathematical analysis was no longer conceived of under the guise and laws of spatial representation; mathematics emancipated itself from geometry and so on.30 However, in Brunschvicg’s account, the immediate backlash to this earthquake was ‘naturally’, as often happens after violent revolutions, a sort of reaction, or more precisely a restoration of old and apparently dead and gone mathematical positions. It was as though the fall of modern theories had brought back to life conceptions that had long been deemed fossils during modernity. There were two great trends in which Brunschvicg detected such resurrections. The first one was embodied by the ‘arithmetism’ of Renouvier and Charles Méray (1835–1911), who articulated a sort of ‘neo-Pythagoreanism’. I have already dealt this in Chapter 4 with Brunschvicg’s critique of Renouvier’s ‘law of number’. Renouvier understood the number not so much as the outcome of a technical elaboration, the articulation of a system of relations, but as a sum of distinct unities, a universal condition and principle of knowledge: the phenomena that are given to us are finite countable elements. Renouvier’s privilege of the whole positive number was such that every arithmetical operation leading outside this domain, for example, into the realm of rational numbers, corresponded to a move from reality to pure subjective symbolism. This is why Renouvier, by reverting to the old metaphysical distinction between potentiality and actuality, deemed infinitesimal calculus rigorous from a purely ideal and symbolic perspective, but only approximate and lacking reality compared to the actuality of unity.31 Due to the ascription of substantial properties to the numbers and the strenuous defence of the finite and the discontinuous against infinity and continuity, Renouvier’s neocriticism ultimately came across as a neoPythagoreanism.32 The same held for the ‘arithmetisation of analysis’ driven by the works of Méray. Renouvier’s arithmetism was ultimately a philosophical doctrine, where elementary arithmetic set the standard of pure intelligibility.33 Méray, on the contrary, built on the works of Cauchy and Lagrange in order to develop a rigorous arithmetical theory of irrational numbers. By introducing the notion of imaginary number (e.g. √−1) as a middle term between the whole and the irrational number, Méray strove to extend to infinitesimal analysis the application by analogy of arithmetic combinations. Unlike Renouvier, his aim was thus that of expanding the range of science. Nonetheless, another kind of predicament arose, due to the extension of the model of the properly arithmetic number to the entire scope of algebra and analysis. The alternative was the following: either one attributed to the number an inherent and necessary truth, thereby ‘going back to the realism of the Pythagoreans’, or one assumed that the whole number was just a case of the generalised and symbolic formalisations of analysis, thereby slouching towards

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nominalism and scepticism.34 The second option, nominalism, dismissed the empiricism underlying Renouvier’s finitist atomism35 and developed the purely combinatory dynamics of the post-Cauchy analysis, as could be seen in the works of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), who tried to get rid of the notion of cardinal number and reduced arithmetic to a set of arbitrary definitions, conventional rules and purely symbolic combinations.36 The tools of mathematics were now extremely refined and powerful. However, Brunschvicg argued, in all its arithmetist versions, ‘mathematical philosophy appeared to be unable to account for the truth of science’.37 While arithmetism resuscitated Pythagoreanism, the renovation of formal logic that took place around the same time corresponded for Brunschvicg to a restoration, mutatis mutandis, of Aristotelianism. Modern logistics was born precisely as a reaction to the failed attempts to justify a priori mathematical truths on the basis of the inherent intelligibility of the whole positive number.38 The rise of algebraic logic was triggered thus by the acute awareness that the mathematical discipline was not necessarily anchored in privileged and pre-constituted models, be it the geometrical or the arithmetic (numeric) one. In particular with the pioneering works of George Boole (1815–1864), Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) and Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932),39 and notwithstanding the obvious and often radical differences among these thinkers,40 mathematical logics – the reduction of mathematics to the notions, relations and laws of logics, independently of their contents – seemed to accomplish the old Aristotelian, and later Leibnizian, dream of finding a universal organon or characteristica of thought. This was not to say that there was a perfect equivalence between the old Aristotelianism and what Brunschvicg provocatively called ‘neo-Aristotelianism’. To put it briefly, according to Brunschvicg syllogistic logic was essentially based on the repartition of beings into genre and species, that is, on a doctrine of predication and on a set of categories which provided a general framework for the early biological and zoological classifications, thereby linking common sense and ontology.41 As shown in Chapters 3 and 5, Brunschvicg rejected precisely the ontological essence of the Stagirite’s logic. Aristotle’s Analytics set the standard of deductive exposition for centuries, to the point that even Kant claimed that Aristotelian logic was somehow definitive and no further development was to be expected.42 Modern logicism came precisely to prove Kant’s belief wrong. While the old Aristotelian organon mimicked in the realm of conceptual generalities an alleged hierarchy of beings, still relying on the correspondence between form and substance, logicism stemmed from the algebraic idea that the only matter of mathematical proposition was their very form.43 Furthermore, according to the classificatory nature of Aristotle’s logic, based on a ‘common sense realism’, beings and entities were finite and organised in discrete series, the one being distinct from the other. This inevitably contrasted with the modern status of mathematical science, which rested precisely on the notions of the infinite and the continuous.44 Yet, although modern logicism broadened considerably the range of application of formal logic, it shared with Aristotelianism a radical realist prejudice and the failures that inevitably descended from it. In other words, Brunschvicg saw in post-Boolean logicism a new spring for the interest in the actual powers and limits of our intellect, beyond the mandatory reference to quantitative intuitions or fixed categorical frameworks – which was surely a positive aspect. Nonetheless, he could not overlook the fact that this often

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resulted in a new attempt to exhaust once and for all the combinatory possibilities of thought, that is, to reduce the intellectus ordinans to an intellectus ordinatus. The ultimate crisis of logicism was due for Brunschvicg precisely to its neo-Aristotelian hyper-rigid character. This was particularly clear in what for Brunschvicg, in 1912, represented the summa of modern logicism, namely the Principles of Mathematics (1903) by Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). Russell’s work – introduced in France by Couturat as early as 190545 – built on Frege’s achievements, Peano’s symbolic logic and the set theory formulated by Georg Cantor (1845–1918). That book, not to be confused with the Principia Mathematica (1910–1913) authored with Alfred N. Whitehead (1861–1947), famously included a chapter devoted to the exposition of the paradox that Russell stumbled upon while reading Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic.46 Russell had discovered that attempts to formalise naïve set theory could lead to a contradiction when it came to consider ‘predicates not predicable of themselves’.47 Cantor’s set theory was regulated by the so-called ‘principle of comprehension’ or ‘abstraction’, according to which one can create sets with arbitrary characteristics. In fact, a given property always identifies a set, namely that of the objects that enjoy such a property. Russell proposed thus to distinguish between two categories of sets: the sets that contain themselves, that is, having themselves as their elements (e.g. ‘the set of all set’, which is itself a set), and the sets that do not contain themselves (e.g. the set of natural numbers, given that the set itself is not a natural number). In his view, we fall into the paradox (or the antinomy) if we try to classify according to this partition a set R which includes all the sets that do not contain themselves. In other words, where does R stand? Does it contain itself or not? If we say that it contains itself, this would be a self-contradictory statement, because it would mean that R is a set which does not contain itself. If, on the contrary, we say that R does not contain itself, the outcome would be the same, since it would imply that it does not share the property of the sets it regroups and therefore it contains itself. This means that R has no place whatsoever in a naïve set theory, because it determines the following paradoxical eventuality: R ∈ R ⇔ R ∉ R. More generally, naïve set theory was not, to use the language of the Principia Mathematica, complete and coherent. The type theory that Russell formulated in various versions, the first of which was expounded in an appendix to the Principles,48 strove precisely to establish a hierarchy of logical classes so to avoid the recursive self-reference that had engendered the paradox. According to this solution, it was impossible to predicate of a given set the same property w that characterises all the elements it contains; it was meaningless, thus, to claim that ‘the set of all sets’ is itself a set, or that ‘the set of all concepts’ is itself a concept, because we are dealing with two different logical orders. The comprehension axiom of the naïve set theory had to be restricted, which meant, in technical terms, that it did not hold anymore that the propositional function φ(x) was always meaningful no matter what value x assumed. X was no more a free variable. By distinguishing different kinds of classes, thus, the type theory asserted that ‘a class as many may be a logical subject, but in propositions of a different kind from those in which its terms are subjects; of any object other than a single term, the question of whether it is one or many will have different answers according to the proposition in which it occurs’.49

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Now, Brunschvicg was only tangentially concerned with Russell’s paradox per se – he was no professional mathematician, after all. What mattered to him was rather the reason behind this first crack in the foundations of mathematics after the great development of mathematical logics. He did not fail to grasp the artificial and contrived character of Russell’s solution, which did not really address the antinomy head-on but rather attempted to avoid certain logical consequences by means of a terminological reformulation.50 In Brunschvicg’s eyes, Russell acted like those French lawmakers that, in 1850, scared by the prospect of universal suffrage but unwilling to undermine the principle of universality, rewrote the juridical definition of ‘voter’ by adding restrictive clauses which de facto excluded most of the working class.51 Indeed, it was Russell’s solution that, more radically than the paradox itself, put at stake ‘the very possibility of any logical foundation of arithmetic’,52 as Frege wrote, precisely because it highlighted the limitations of such an abstract logicisim resting ultimately on a realist philosophy of mathematics. Simply put, the foundational crisis was the consequence of the tongue-twisters that inevitably arose from a theory made of purely logico-linguistic definitions – a theory that, even worse, mistook these definitions for actual realities: ‘The alleged “crises” that have marked the course of contemporary mathematics and physics never cease to expose, if not to dismiss, the arbitrary terminology that deceives those metaphysicians who persevere in wrapping the well-founded idealism of science in a web of homogeneous concepts.’53 So, whereas the ultimate consequences of arithmetism seemed to be nominalism, if not scepticism, with Russell mathematical philosophy rediscovered a full-fledged realism. Cantor’s set theory made it possible to represent the infinite and the continuous, and Russell capitalised precisely on this to articulate his own realist profession of faith. As Brunschvicg summed up: With Cantor, a multiplicity of given terms become capable of representing the infinite and the continuous. As soon as one is able to translate the continuous and the infinite into the language of formal logic, it becomes possible to represent as given the multiplicity of points in space and time, to give back to space and time, and ultimately to movement, the character of absolute reality that Newton attributed to them, but which modern philosophy had been unable to justify. In Russell’s system, scholastic realism joins Newtonian realism.54

In other words, Russell’s doctrine was based on a misconception of idealism as a purely subjective and psychological stance. Therefore, Russell was led to believe that, had space, time and movement been conceived as merely relative to the properties of the mind, geometry and mechanics would have lost their scientific value (e.g. geometry was for him precisely a branch of pure mathematics, owing its purely and rigidly deductive character to arithmetic).55 While criticising Russell’s realism, Brunschvicg was surely under the spell of the Couturat–Poincaré–Russell debate on the Revue de métaphysique et de morale56 and, in particular, of Russell’s Parisian conferences of 1911. In the first talk, ‘The Philosophical Importance of Mathematical Logic’, given at the Sorbonne on 22 March, Russell had in

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fact emphatically declared that mathematical logics was able to solidly ground both a ‘philosophy of space, time, and motion’ and the objectivity of mathematical knowledge, refusing at the same time empiricism and idealism, since it showed ‘that human knowledge is not wholly deduced from facts of sense, but that a priori knowledge can by no means be explained in a subjective or psychological manner’.57 In the third conference, delivered at the Société française de philosophie, he tried to qualify his philosophical vision as an ‘analytic realism’: his doctrine was realist because it stated that the objectivity of ‘cognitive relations’ hinges on external non-mental contents, and analytic because it assumed that the existence of the complex depended on the existence of the simple.58 Incidentally, this was the first time in which Russell unveiled himself as a ‘logical atomist’, precisely insofar as for him reality consisted of ultimate, indecomposable logical ‘facts’/‘atoms’. Against the holism of the idealism of his early mentors,59 Russell revived thus a dualism between concepts (‘universal atoms’), similar to Platonic ideas, and the sense data (‘particular atoms’), namely ‘substances’, between the ‘world of existence’ and the ‘world of essence’60 (the kósmos noetós and the kósmos aisthetós, as Brunschvicg put it more elegantly). Russell argued: The philosophy I call analytic realism … yields the conclusion that there is no reason to doubt the absolute truth of mathematical propositions. It resolves all the contradictions, both ancient and modern, which have been found in mathematics, and it shows that the exactitude of mathematics depends on its being concerned with an abstract world, a world of essences or Platonic ideas, which is not subject to the inaccuracies of sensory knowledge, and which is not constrained by the subjective variations one would have to fear in accepting a psychological theory such as that of Kant. The transition from the world of abstractions to the world of particulars is the same as the transition from pure mathematics to applied mathematics; it is made by finding, in the actual world, something which verifies an hypothesis of pure mathematics.61

It is easy to imagine how much these words, especially the reference to Kant, might have impacted upon Brunschvicg’s idealist sensitivity. Not only did Russell welcome the claims of naïve realism, he also stated that the objectivity of the universals was completely independent of the mind, that the laws of logic depended ‘as little on the mind as the law of gravity’.62 In Brunschvicg’s view, the return to realism that could be found in Russell allowed logicism to claim that it had restored the connection between logic and reality that got lost after the collapse of the Aristotelian science, with Descartes and Leibniz. In brutal terms, Aristotle’s logic was the hypostatisation of the inductive processes used by scientists in classifying natural beings. Indeed, syllogistic was for Brunschvicg nothing more than the transformation of such an inductive methodology (bottom-up) into a powerful deductive formalism (top-down). The principles of Aristotelian logic were thus inherently tied to the principles of his physics and metaphysics (the categorical distinction between substance and its qualities having an obvious metaphysical bearing). However, Brunschvicg was of the opinion that, in the following centuries, philosophers had lost sight of the inherent connection between syllogism

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and ontology: ‘Logic became a rigorously formal deduction where the mere verbal expression sufficed to justify the conclusions.’63 At the time of Kant, for example, the philosopher was confronted with a plurality of sciences – from arithmetic to algebra, from geometry to mechanics – each with a formal system of its own. This parcelling seemed to testify on behalf of the purely artificial character of logical formalism, as principles were floating in the void, neither depending on the essence of reality nor relative to the conformation of the mind. Kant’s transcendental turn, grounding both the possibility of thought and the possibility of experience in the synthetic character of mathematical judgement, was meant precisely to solve this predicament. However, the progress of analysis made it possible for deduction to lose the regressive character it had in Newtonian physics and Kantian philosophy, fully embracing the progressive form that Descartes and Leibniz thought it could have.64 Was it mere chance that Russell had written a book on Leibniz when he was in the process of relinquishing his old idealist McTaggartian perspective?65 Brunschvicg elected not to take too seriously the reference to Leibniz – the great champion of ‘modern intellectualism’66 – given the ultimate realist and dualist character of Russell’s logicism, which strongly contradicted the essence of Leibniz’s mathematical philosophy.67 The very difficulties inherent in the ‘realism of the classes’ and the mythology of a self-sufficient progressive deduction ‘capable of conferring itself an absolute value’68 explained why logicism ultimately failed: ‘Realism wanted to forgo psychology, but ultimately it only accepted the common sense faith in the transcendent character of the object of thought.’69 Brunschvicg’s basic critique consisted in discrediting the very attempt to account for numbers in terms of classes. In particular, he argued, the passage from the class used in propositional logic from Aristotle to Boole to the numeric class used in mathematical logic was not smooth and required a transformation of the notion of class itself. In propositional logic, I consider the ‘specific identity’ of a class. In the class of the ‘apostles’, for example, I am not concerned with their number, as rather with the shared property of being a follower of Christ. If, instead, I consider the class of the apostles as belonging to the overall class corresponding to the number 12, I take Peter, John, James and so on in their ‘numerical diversity’, as an arithmetic collection. This is where things get tricky according to Brunschvicg. In fact, a numeric class implies that its members are connected not by an immediate nexus of logical identity, but rather, as Russell acknowledged, by the arithmetic nexus ‘and’,70 that is, by an intellectual operation of addition. Within the ‘upper’ class corresponding to the number 12, the class of the apostles enters then into a relation of reciprocal and univocal correspondence with other classes sharing the same numerical determination, like that of the astrological signs. What we have here are two different phases of intellectual activity – enumeration and identification – that logicism simply neglected in order to hypostatise their results in different orders of classes, and this is all the more clear if one considers the classes corresponding to the zero or the infinite, where the realist tenet falls short. Differently put, Brunschvicg sought to defend a synthetic conception of mathematics against the purely analytic ambitions of logicism,71 which for him was just ‘a way of talking knowledge’, rather than a description of its modalities.72 Ultimately, the crisis of logistic brought about

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by Russell’s paradox proved true to Brunschvicg’s protestations. Of course, the type theory could somehow ‘save’ the internal coherence of symbolic logicism, but it could not save its more general metamathematical, if not philosophical, pretence. The illusion that it could clarify forever the principles of mathematics had to be discarded.73 By losing its contact with the intelligence and its actual operation, and sinking into the pure realm of definition, postulates and demonstrations, logicism became ultimately unverifiable.74 Intuition represented the other front engaged in the battle for the methodological hegemony over fin-de-siècle mathematics. For Brunschvicg, the origins of the intuitionist pole had to be found in the religious nineteenth-century reaction to the philosophical momentum of Kantian criticism and the scientific absolutisation of natural mechanism. Leaving aside its ancient meanings, from Archimedes to Pascal and Spinoza, intuition represented here that peculiar form of experience, irreducible to critical rationalism, that allowed the preservation of the dimension of religious spirituality, with its ‘mystical meditations’ and forms of ‘collective cult’, from the reductionist psychological and historical analyses of the eighteenth century. Despite their differences, the Comte of the System of Positive Polity (1851–4), the James of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), the Bergson of the ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ and even the Durkheim theory of the ‘collective representations’ all introduced intuition as a ‘super-scientific’ faculty opening up realms that could not be accounted for by analytical examinations: religious sentiment, transcendent revelations, psychological duration, the biological continuity of the élan, transindividual determinations and so on.75 From this point of view, the peculiarity of the nineteenth century was that intuition was not used to oppose science from the outside, but rather to correct it from within. Consequently, two different interpretations of science were available at the time: one, logicism, that was prisoner of ‘logical generality’ and the ‘mechanist prejudice’; the other, intuitionism, that adapted its methodology to the specificity of its object.76 How did this translate into mathematics? What were the consequences of the importation of a notion of religious and metaphysical origins within the realm of rationality par excellence? Intuition appeared in mathematics with the works of authors like Weierstrass, Joseph Bertrand (1822–1900) or Charles Hermite (1822–1901), the discovery of the continuous function without derivatives and the critique of the ‘principles of permanence’. As to the latter, Brunschvicg alluded to the projective geometry of Jules Poncelet (1788–1867) – based on the idea that the metric properties or descriptive relations of a primitive figure remain applicable, without modifications other than changes of signs, to all correlative figures which can be considered to arise from the first by a continuous change (‘continuity principle’) – and to Hermann Hakel’s (1839–1873) ‘principle of permanence of formal laws’, according to which the elementary operations and rules of calculation that are used for whole numbers can be applied also to the domains of rational, negative, imaginary or irrational numbers, thereby preserving as much as possible in algebra the arithmetic laws of the whole numbers. If, for Brunschvicg, the critique of such principles marked ‘a decisive turn in the history of science’,77 it was because the possibility for mathematics to operate its deductions in a purely a priori way

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was eventually undermined. From Descartes to Comte, philosophy could rely only on a monolithic version of mathematics, but now, thanks to the sensitivity to ‘local’ logics introduced by intuitionism, one witnessed a proliferation of different branches of mathematics grounded on particular notions and methods among which it was possible to establish different sorts of coordination, thereby expanding their range of application.78 For Brunschvicg, thus, intuitionism relieved the sciences from the oppression of universal deductive methodologies and awakened them from the dream-turnednightmare of a logica magna, recovering the constructivist nature of mathematics.79 Coherently, he sided with intuitionism in the battle against the neo-Pythagorean mathematism and the neo-Aristotelian logicism. After all, intuitionism was for him a ‘doctrine of combat’ with an eminently negative function, targeting the ‘false ideal of logical deduction’80 and breaking ‘the coherent discourse of systematic delirium’.81 It was not by chance that his discussion of intuitionism opened the long last book of the Étapes, ‘L’intelligence mathématique et la vérité’, where Brunschvicg set out to deploy coherently his personal understanding of mathematical philosophy. Yet, while appreciating its negative function, Brunschvicg acknowledged many limitations as to the positive side of the intuitionist project, which were mostly due to the transposition of the notion of intuition from the religious-metaphysical realm to the properly mathematical one.82 Furthermore, intuitionism relied too heavily on the old – and for Brunschvicg completely out of date – dualism between concept and intuition, between logical reasoning and spontaneous constructivism.83 Brunschvicg’s critique of intuition was by far shorter and less technical than the criticisms directed at arithmetism or logicism, and this is because he had already developed it, although in more philosophical terms, in L’idéalisme contemporain. There, his main target was in fact always the philosophy of Édouard Le Roy, who radicalised Bergsonism, manipulated Poincaré’s conventionalism and expounded a pragmatic conception of science that was ultimately functional to religious apologetic aims.84 With the fall of logicism, intuitionism seemed to be doomed as well.85 However, the solution came for Brunschvicg from the lesson of great representatives of intuitionism like Poincaré and Felix Klein.86 For them, intuition was neither a mystical faculty filling the gaps left open by the combinatory procedures of logical reasoning nor a pre-reflective sensible act. Quite the contrary, following Klein, it was necessary to distinguish between ‘naïve’ and ‘refined intuition’; furthermore, while reading Poincaré’s famous autobiographical accounts of his scientific discoveries, it was easy to understand that, by ‘intuition’, he meant actually ‘intelligence’ in its maximum splendour: it was, as in Descartes, the simultaneous ‘vision’ of the distinct moments of reasoning, the intellectual source of every deduction and analysis.87 The ‘natural opposition of intelligence and intuition’ was thus an ‘unfortunate mishap of history’.88 If it wanted to attain the truth of science beyond the vagaries of individual psychological invention and the rigid classifications of discursive forms, mathematical philosophy had to undergo an authentic ‘conversion’89 and relinquish once and for all the ‘equivocal and deceiving’ notion of intuition.90

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The idealism of metageometry The pars destruens of Brunschvicg’s discourse once established, let us now ask how exactly Brunschvicg understood mathematics (in the broadest sense) and the task of mathematical philosophy. Mathematical philosophy, for him, had to stick to the properly mathematical level, without trying to reduce it to logic or natural science, that is, to a different kind of truth that would precede and inevitably govern its activity. Mathematical philosophy was then meant to study immanently the intelligence at work in mathematics. This entailed that it had to devise a new concept of truth resulting a posteriori from the analysis of the activity of the scientist. However, and this was a crucial point, mathematical philosophy aimed not at coming up with yet another grand system. Rather, precisely by means of historical retrospection and by following immanently the development of science, it sought to find the ‘convergence’ and the ‘coordination’ of the various contributions that had marked the progress of mathematics through history.91 In the final chapters, Brunschvicg tried to account for the historical-intellectual genesis of mathematical truth in arithmetic, geometry and algebra. As to arithmetic, as we have seen, he showed that already in the most elementary forms of calculus in ancient and primitive societies it was possible to grasp ‘reason reacting on experience’. This was particularly evident in the operations of correspondence and exchange that, well before measuring and symbolic notation, gave rise by repetition to mathematical abstraction and synthesis. The passage from these elementary relations to the notion of number and the realm of arithmetic required another intellectual jump or ‘invention’ doubled by an act of ‘verification’. For example: ‘A numerical concept such as “two” is located at the crossroads between two operations: the first is simply the repetition of the action and is the germ of addition; the other is the whole action [action d’ensemble] and is the germ of multiplication.’92 This means that the number as such is not an abstract entity existing autonomously in an ethereal conceptual realm but the symbol of a judgement, that is, of an equation (to continue with our example: ‘one times 2 is equal to two times 1’). Not only is the number not a concept in the logicist sense – that is, a set of elements, a fixed entity – but the notion of concept itself has to be revised according to the primacy of judgement.93 If by concepts one means ‘the simple elements of representation corresponding to terms qua simple elements of discourse’, then concepts as such do not exist, and there exist only judgements.94 However, if one understands that the concept presupposes a judgement, then it is possible to attain a different perspective on logical concepts that dissipates their alleged fixity: The psychological reality that underlies the constitutive judgement of the concept consists in an act of the mind that moves between two levels of experience: a confused and chaotic experience from which the qualities with which species and genres are defined are extracted; and an organised experience in which individuals are classified according to the predicates they have in common. The concept is properly a twofold process of intellectual decomposition and recomposition, a method in the Cartesian sense of the term or a scheme in the Kantian sense.95

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It remains, however, that the number cannot be reduced to a concept. The number is neither a concept nor a judgement: it is a law of reasoning, the symbol, precisely, of a double operation of analysis and synthesis having as its starting point perceived reality. Put differently, for Brunschvicg the number was both ordination and cardination, presupposing the series of acts by means of which the mind considers each element and the synthesis gathering these acts into the unity of an intellectual object.96 Brunschvicg summarised as follows: We will therefore say that at the starting point of the analysis lies perceived reality. … But the groups provided by perception are subjected to the resolving activity that discerns each element of the group, which reduces it to the simple fact of presence, to the act of positing the object and counting it for one. Starting from the units made homogeneous to each other, synthetic thinking will recompose a number.97

The solidarity of analysis and synthesis is essential, because a number is not a simple sum of elements but rather a system of equivalence between synthetic operations. (The number 6, for example, can be expressed in various equivalent formulas: 1+1+1+1+1+1, 2+4, 2×3, etc.). There is no point in examining here in detail how Brunschvicg conceived of divisions and fractions. It will suffice to know that fractional calculus prolonged the creative élan of the mind by extending to purely intellectual objects the operation that applied to whole numbers. In a way, thus, the mind went beyond the original suggestions of experience and showed its autonomy – without, of course, relinquishing itself to pure arbitrariness.98 With fractional calculus, the mathematic intelligence turned out to be capable of devising methods to fix the problems left unresolved by properly arithmetic calculus, which implied leaving behind the reference to ‘real objects’ and relying only on the intelligibility of rational relations.99 Now, besides the technicalities of his reconstruction, what is important to retain is the fact that Brunschvicg was actually engaged in the search for a genetic account of mathematical notions and operations, where – pace the specular dogmatisms of logicism and (Le Roy’s) intuitionism – ‘the essential values of truth and activity’ were preserved and coexisted.100 Against logicism, Brunschvicg held that arithmetic was a ‘psycho-arithmetic’ discipline, involving a preponderant role of judgement.101 The ‘logic of classes’, he contended elsewhere, had to be replaced by a logic of relations, relation being here the ‘primordial act of the mind’.102 On the other hand, Brunschvicg unexpectedly shared the basic assumption of pragmatism – ‘The first matter of philosophical reflection are men who act’ – but supplemented it with a further intellectualist step, focusing on the moment in which men lose sight of their particular point of view and establish common rules of actions and interpretation. Indeed, ‘truth stems from experience and is more valuable than it’.103 For reasons of space, we leave aside here Brunschvicg’s assessment of ‘algebraic truth’, which would oblige us to restate many points already stressed while illustrating his critique of logicism. Just as a glimpse, his basic claim was that, with set theory, algebra had assumed a dogmatic character, neglecting the constitutive operations of

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the mind. Instead, the theory of continuous transformation groups formulated by Sophus Lie (1842–1899) provided a beneficial intellectualist correction, emphasising the role of reflection and the judgements progressively leading to the establishment of a system of intellectual relations.104 This amounted to a progress testifying once again to the capacity of self-reflection and self-emendation that was proper to the inherent plasticity of scientific reason. The advent of the Lie groups, Brunschvicg held, bore proof to the fact that the truth of science was tied to the processes of verification that are immanent to the development of mathematics.105 However, the most paradigmatic and glaring example of such an immanence is to be found elsewhere, namely in the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, an event that surely occupies a pivotal historical role in Brunschvicg’s narrative – not least because, as he wrote in his dissertation, geometry, due to its ‘double relationship with intelligibility on the one hand and reality on the other’, was for him ‘the most accomplished form of science’.106 For Russell, ‘far more than non-Euclidean geometry’, the recent developments in algebra and analysis, especially the emancipation of the definition of irrational numbers from the reference to quantity, had been ‘fatal to the Kantian theory of a priori intuitions as the basis of mathematics’.107 For Brunschvicg, precisely the opposite was true – with a disclaimer: while Russell wanted to leave the Kantian legacy behind, Brunschvicg aimed rather at correcting it and wiping off its dogmatic debris. Even in this case, whereas for Russell it was the classification of the different typologies of space through logical definitions that mattered,108 Brunschvicg was drawn to understanding such typologies as so many products of the intellect’s confrontation with experience. Non-Euclidean geometry broke the spell of a strict solidarity between methodical deduction and spatial intuition. With his conception of geometry as paradigmatic example of a priori synthetic knowledge, Kant had done nothing but systematising the Euclidean nexus between reasoning and intuition. The negation of the fifth postulate of Euclid wreaked havoc within the classical conception of geometry and, consequently, within the traditional framing of the relationship between the mind and experience. In the first half of the nineteenth century, and independently of one another, Nikolai Lobachevsky (1792–1856) and János Bolyai (1802–1860) showed the irreducibility of the fifth postulate to the previous four, developing hyperbolic geometry. The revolution was completed in the second half of the century by Bernhard Riemann (1826–66) and his differential geometry. Although Eugenio Beltrami (1835–1900), Klein and others later demonstrated the possibility of ‘translating’ nonEuclidean systems into the Euclidean language, the transformation of geometry into a hypothetico-deductive science, consecrated by Hilbert’s Foundations of Geometry (1899), was now a fact. This mutation was replete with philosophical implications. In the posthumous last instalment of his survey on Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, Brunschvicg’s homologue Ernst Cassirer – with whom he showed an impressive theoretical consonance,109 as we shall see below with regard to the interpretation of Einstein – would claim that the stakes were far from being purely internal to mathematics. On the contrary, they were, so to speak, transcendental, in that ‘the whole problem of the truth of mathematics, even of

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the meaning of truth itself, was placed in an entirely new light’.110 The time when the concepts and propositions of geometry provided the ideal of a self-evident and intuitive philosophical clarity was definitively over. To admit the existence of non-Euclidean geometries was not merely to violate the idea of the unity of space; worse, it ‘seemed to mean renouncing the unity of reason’.111 However, Cassirer argued, the only thing that ought to be relinquished was the old naïve reliance on intuition. Cassirer referred in particular to the works of Klein and Hilbert, who had proved that the entire system of non-Euclidean geometry could be derived from the Euclidean one, so that a contradiction in the former inevitably led to contradictions in the latter, and vice versa.112 Truth and reason were no more at risk. But what philosophical conclusions could be drawn from the fact that mathematics was increasingly revealing itself as a science of relations? For Cassirer, Klein’s ‘Erlanger Program’ (1872) – which exploited the theory of groups in order to bring order to the archipelago of geometries, so that each geometry was associated with a given symmetry group with its own invariants – had a significant bearing on the critique of knowledge. In fact, the group theory dismissed any recourse to intuition (and to quantities and numbers as well), being ultimately a system of purely intellectual operations.113 Analogously, although he did not discuss Klein’s solution, we have just seen how Brunschvicg believed that group theory was an extraordinary intellectual achievement, providing us, as Cassirer would write, with ‘a pure science of relations which has to do not with the ascertaining of objects and their characteristics, substances and their properties, but with the order of ideas alone’.114 However, Brunschvicg added that group theory should not form the basis of a new logic of classes, like neo-Aristotelians as Russell had tried to do. One should not hypostatise the ‘empty and indeterminate form of relation’ and remember that a theory of relation always presupposes ‘actual operations’ of the human mind, that is, judgements.115 This emphasis on judgement characterised also Brunschvicg’s solution to the problem of metageometry. Now, Brunschvicg’s take on non-Euclidean geometry developed independently of Cassirer’s perspective. For example, he never mentioned the early formulation of it provided in Substance and Function (1910).116 However, Brunschvicg was surely and heavily inspired by a leading figure in turn-of-the-century science, namely Poincaré, whose three great epistemological works were all published in the first decade of the twentieth century.117 The lasting influence of these texts – Science and Hypothesis (1902), The Value of Science (1905) and Science and Method (1908), to which one should add the posthumous Last Thoughts (1913) – should not be underestimated. On the one hand, Poincaré was indeed an internationally recognised voice in the debates around the new paths in physics and mathematics. On the other hand, we should remember that Poincaré and Brunschvicg shared common milieus: not only was Poincaré an in-law of Brunschvicg’s mentor, Émile Boutroux, who had married his sister Aline (1856–1919), but he was also a contributor to the Revue de métaphysique et de morale and the activities of the Société française de philosophie. Proof of Brunschvicg’s acquaintance with his work can be found in the long text on ‘L’œuvre de Poincaré’ that he published in the Revue one year after the great mathematician’s death.118

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Brunschvicg’s general debt to Poincaré consisted in the following notions or ideas: 1) That experience is certainly decisive for the elaboration of scientific theories, but only as an ‘occasion’, as a spur to bring out a formal set of laws or to choose which one fits best. Experience does not tell us anything about the essence of nature (e.g. about space, time, etc.). 2) That many philosophical conceptions of science, emphasising the import of experience, are still burdened by an ‘anthropomorphic’ vision, the one that in classical mechanics was at the roots of many notions, for example, mass or force. Indeed, these are not ‘experimental truths’ but rather ‘definitions’ (meaning that they are implicitly defined by the basic laws of mechanics), principles that are modelled upon direct empirical intuitions. For example, the primitive notion of force is worked out from the elementary sensation of effort, which however is just a ‘symbol’ that cannot ground a properly philosophical or scientific understanding. What matters is thus not what force or mass is but rather how we can measure it.119 3) That, consequently, the history of science displays a progress from a naïve anthropomorphism to a subtler conception of the status of scientific laws and notions as rational conventions or functions. For Poincaré, a ‘convention’ was not a random conceptual filler that we come up with for instrumental purposes and that attests to the arbitrariness of science with regard to nature (this was the ‘nominalist’ interpretation advocated by Le Roy and against which Poincaré reacted vehemently). On the contrary, a convention is a generalisation that experience itself suggests as the most practical and, precisely, convenient. The original reference to experience as spur of the conventions accounts therefore for the fact that conventions are not arbitrary. They are just those doctrines that are able to combine logical coherence and continuity with a firm and effective grip on experience. With regard to the fundamental propositions of geometry, Poincaré wrote that they are ‘nothing more than conventions and it is as absurd to try to find out whether they are true or false as it is to ask whether the metric system is true or false. Only, those conventions are useful, as certain experiments have shown us’.120 4) That conventions bear witness to the creative intervention of the mind in giving shape to the scientific understanding of the world. This is not to say that the problem of the actual validity of objective laws should be explained away on the basis of purely psychologistic/relativistic considerations, but that a proper philosophical interpretation of science would be incomplete without a critical examination of its psychological presuppositions, that is, of the conception of the relationship between experience and mind. The refinement of scientific knowledge is first of all a refinement of the knowledge that the intelligence has of itself. Indeed, what is the passage from the ‘anthropomorphic’ and imaginative conception of science (the idea that laws and theories are representations of an ontologically autonomous and substantial Nature) to an intellectual vision of science as a system of thoroughly intelligible relations expressed in a formal (but not formalistic, which would entail again the opposition between a fully constituted

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This brings us to Brunschvicg’s specific debt to Poincaré, which pertained to the philosophical interpretation of non-Euclidean geometries. Following the trail of the great mathematician, Brunschvicg bypassed the problem of establishing whether metageometry in its various forms was true. In fact, the question of truth could arise only in a ‘correspondentist’ context where scientific theories were still conceived of as abstract renditions of lived sensible experiences. This did not mean that, again, objectivity as a value had to be relinquished and that one was bound to a nominalist pragmatism. Poincaré only blamed the naïve conception of truth as an immediate given. As a Kantian sui generis,121 he was well aware that the problem of truth and objectivity had to be reconfigured according to a critical model, meaning: of course scientific laws and notions are inseparable from the constitutive operations of the mind that formulates them; nonetheless, they are objective and true insofar as their validity is attested intersubjectively.122 Thus, it is true that in Science and Hypothesis Poincaré stressed the pragmatic side of geometrical theories. In a section added in a reissue of the book, entitled ‘Ancestral experience’, he submitted precisely that, ‘through natural selection, our minds have adapted to the conditions of the external world … they have adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most useful’, which means ultimately that ‘geometry is not true, it is advantageous’.123 Still, the ‘evolutionistic’ if not ‘Spencerian’ echoes of these words were a consequence of Poincaré’s more (so to speak) deconstructive concerns. Confronted with the need to rescue his theses from the nominalist interpretations, in his following works he would make some adjustments by highlighting more clearly and positively the pars construens of his view: experience has the strength to mete out justice to physical theories, which is why we can conclude that the Ptolemaic system is wrong and the Copernican system true. As Brunschvicg pointed out repeatedly, Poincaré’s ‘conventionalism’ rested precisely on an ‘intimate penetration’ and on a ‘progressive harmony between the mind and things’.124 It is precisely this tension between the inexhaustible richness of nature and the indefinite plasticity of the creative mind that has to be kept in mind while addressing Brunschvicg’s interpretation of metageometry. In this case too, Brunschvicg intended not to deduce consequences from alleged logic or sensible evidences, but rather to follow the movement of the intelligence in its relation to experience. His basic gesture consisted thus in showing that the ‘discovery’ of non-Euclidean geometries cast a retrospective light upon geometry as a whole. In other words, metageometry does not contradict Euclidean space but rather brings out something that in classical geometry is more hidden but already in place. Brunschvicg’s assumption was the same as Poincaré’s: Euclidean space is not a natural representation of extension imposed by a priori intuitions. On the contrary, both Euclidean and non-Euclidean space share a ‘common basis’, namely a three-dimensional ‘amorphous continuum’ without any

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metric (the one studied by analysis situs), from which one can get both of them, either Euclidean or Lobachevskian space.125 This, again, eliminates the problem of which one is the true geometry, since they are both constructions with a different degree of convenience. Even the notion of a three-dimensional space was for Poincaré non-natural: if by space is understood a mathematical continuum of three dimensions, were it otherwise amorphous, it is the mind which constructs it, but it does not construct it out of nothing; it needs materials and models. These materials, like these models, pre-exist within it. But there is not a single model which is imposed upon it; it has choice; it may choose, for instance, between space of four and space of three dimensions. What then is the role of experience? It gives the indications following which the choice is made.126

Indeed, Poincaré had shown that our perceptual space (visual, tactile and motor) is all but homogeneous or isotropic like the geometrical one.127 As Brunschvicg would say, thus, the Euclidean metric of space itself is just ‘a point of view on space’,128 the most suitable to describe and operate in our lived world, as confirmed by experience. As such, it already implies a ‘passage à la limite’, the ‘transintuitive’ power of intelligence.129 Consequently, in the Étapes Brunschvicg tried precisely to account for how geometrical space is produced through a complex series of experiential operations (movement, drawing, rotations, translation, metric analyses, etc.) in which the intelligence is never a passive recorder of sensation but an active transformative (creative) agency. Geometrical thought is not a ‘schematic production’ but a ‘production of schemas’, in the sense of a construction of space rather than of a construction in space.130 Again, this should not be understood in purely intellectualist terms: although we do not see space as such, the construction of space begins in dialogue with experience, which posits limits and constraints, but is achieved only in reason.131 For Brunschvicg, metageometry illustrated precisely, in an extreme but perspicuous manner, how the fundamental gesture of mathematical/geometrical reason consists in emancipating the mind from the naïve reliance on both a priori and external intuitions.

The relativistic revolution The celebration of the rational inventiveness that was at the basis of the ‘discovery’ of non-Euclidean geometries should not lead to an overemphasis on the role and value of formalisation per se, as a sort of mathematical art for art’s sake which would be detrimental to experience. Brunschvicg’s overall perspective upon science was geared to underscoring the exact opposite, namely the deep entanglement in contemporary science between mathematics and physics. His recurrent praise of Kant’s conception of causality in the ‘Second analogy of experience’, which asserted the solidarity between ‘transcendental idealism’ and ‘empirical realism’, went precisely in this direction, anticipating a double-sidedness that, mutatis mutandis, was one of the distinctive traits of contemporary science. While previously mathematics often claimed to

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impose its framework upon physical experience, now analytical formulations and experimental verification were two sides of the same strip enlightening each other, the two preconditions of any scientific judgement. The new scientific breakthrough thus posed the problem of relativity, understood as the key notion that had to be thought through in order to properly understand human experience. L’expérience humaine et la causalité physique was written precisely with the aim of deepening this perspective. In presenting a preview published in the Revue de métaphysique, Brunschvicg made clear how that book was the ‘physical’ counterpart to the ‘mathematical’ Étapes, the overall project being always the same: producing a new and more up-to-date ‘psychology of intelligence’.132 This also tells us something about the title: the ‘human experience’ that Brunschvicg speaks of here is not defined in sharp opposition to the scientific image of the world, or in pre-categorial terms as in phenomenology. On the contrary, human experience is enlightened by the critique of science and, in this particular case, by the diachronic study of the conceptualisation of causality – which, as made clear since La modalité du jugement, is the ‘foundation of all knowledge and all reality’, which justifies the reality of both the ‘perceived’ and the ‘scientific universe’.133 As Piaget correctly observed, this means that the forms of experience are not invariants laying below, and presupposed by, scientific inquiries; rather, experience ‘has a history, and this history is not closed’. Furthermore, this history is precisely the history of the interaction between experience and reason. Once again, the forms of experience are disclosed only by the study of the history of thought.134 For Brunschvicg, modern physical science had begun precisely when scientists managed to combine experience and calculation according to an innovative method that had nothing to do with the ancient logic of the discourse, modelled upon the forms of language (concept, propositions, reasoning).135 Accordingly, in L’expérience humaine, Brunschvicg started from the assumption that both the old empiricist reliance on what he called ‘absolute experience’ – that is, an immediate experience directly providing from the outside the data for the elaboration of the understanding – and the panlogist construction of reality were now bankrupt. Twentieth-century physics, like geometry, did not proceed from invariant principles, nor from primordial intuitions. Rather, it proposed new ways of ‘putting the world into equations’, invented new tools of measurement and provided a new language for expressing the nexus between the mind and reality.136 One witnessed an intimate solidarity between mathematical symbols and experimental data that rendered obsolete the old binary options of the modern tradition (idealism/realism, convention/truth, representation/model, etc.). The point was no longer to choose between intellectual modelisation and sensory data as the primum of knowledge but to understand that such a primum was instead precisely the interrelatedness in scientific reasoning of ‘abstract expression’ and ‘concrete meaning’.137 The structure of the book reflects this overall project. While the first part deconstructs the ambitions of the theories of ‘pure experience’, whether internal (Biran) or external (Mill), the following three parts are devoted to a historical assessment of the ways in which causality has been ‘intellectually organised’ across history, from the primitive societies to Kant. That only one part out of six – the first – is devoted to empiricism

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suggests how much for Brunschvicg physics, at least after Descartes, was a game entirely played within the field of rationalism. Once he had cleared up the misunderstanding that he recognised in the reference to an alleged raw and self-sufficient experience as the ground of physical theories, the problem remained for him to distinguish, as usual, between good and bad rationalism or, more precisely, between the dogmatic Aristotelian conceptualism and the post-Cartesian critical idealism in their multiple diachronic instantiations. He thus followed the development of the evolution of postNewtonian physics through its various instantiations, from Laplace and Lagrange up to thermodynamics. In particular, he showed how the parallel popularisations of the two laws of thermodynamics and Darwinian evolutionism in the mid-nineteenth century easily led to a widespread belief that an overall explanation of reality had been found and, accordingly, to a hypostatisation of the principle of the conservation of energy and the principle of irreversibility. Convinced that they had finally attained the ‘positive state’ (in the Comtean sense), nineteenth-century scientists and philosophers yielded to the ‘realist illusion’, which consisted in conceiving of universal mechanism as an ontological law, and not as an experimental/phenomenal principle. On Brunschvicg’s account, the seventeenth century had ‘founded the universality of mechanism on the clarity and distinction that were intrinsic to the notion of movement’ and had ‘endeavoured to prevent confusion between the phenomenal level, in which force is measured in relation to mass and speed, and the metaphysical level in which force, analogous to the psychic being, becomes an absolute reality’.138 By the nineteenth century, however, the ‘relativistic’ notion of a ‘matter-mass’ had been replaced by the ‘substantialist’ notion of a ‘matter-substance’, a ‘causal substratum’ persisting through its physical transformations.139 It was against this background that, for Brunschvicg, one had to place the great revolutions of contemporary physics. Statistical mechanics, with Maxwell, Gibbs and Boltzmann, was the first reminder that science had to be understood in idealistic terms, which meant that its laws were relations, stemming from experimental judgements, and not metaphysical/realist assumptions. The ‘coming of age’ of the calculus of probability, which ceased to be considered as a ‘fraction of truth’ and became instead a systematic form of ‘mathematical analysis’, that is, of positive description, was particularly revealing in this sense.140 Einstein’s modelisation of Brownian motion and, of course, his cosmological breakthroughs in the theory of relativity, which eliminated the ancient notion of luminiferous aether, were the last nails on the coffin of the old mechanist realism, finally implementing a strict collaboration between mathematical formalisation and technical-experimental observation. The EuclideanNewtonian age where one could ‘see things approximately’ was over.141 Indeed, what exactly were the particles or the quanta studied by contemporary physics? Could one actually say that they were something, things located in time and space like the objects of our ‘middle world’? Almost a century before contemporary analytic epistemologists, Brunschvicg was already well aware that, if one wants an up-todate metaphysics, he has to relinquish any substantialist perspective.142 However, he believed that there was a golden thread linking Kant’s Newtonian relativism to the ‘relativistic relativity’ implied by contemporary physics, which did not depend anymore on a fixed and invariable transcendental framework, but was based rather

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on the reciprocity or, better, on the indistinctness of the frame and the painting, of form and matter.143 In this, Brunschvicg embraced what Cassirer had written one year before in his book on Einstein’s relativity, which began precisely by asking whether the new cosmology could still somehow fit the edifice of critical philosophy.144 According to Cassirer, the result of general relativity was ‘so little a paradox from the standpoint of the criticism of knowledge’ that it could be deemed ‘the natural logical conclusion of an intellectual tendency characteristic of all the philosophical and scientific thought of the modern age’.145 However, although they both shared the idea that the new scientific concepts were ultimately ‘metric’ functions expressing relations or systems of relations, Cassirer prolonged his inquiry in a slightly different direction, more faithful to the critical-epistemological stance of Kantianism (filtered by the lesson of his teacher Cohen): he contended in fact that criticism still mattered precisely inasmuch as the notion of scientific ‘object’ was not uniform and unequivocal but rather meant different things depending upon the theory employed. This functionalist conception of truth and objectivity, sensitive to the determination of the various ‘regional axioms’ (Gebietsaxiome) of the sciences, was less pronounced in Brunschvicg, who used science as a tool to pursue his psychology of intelligence based on the faculty of judgement. Yet, despite minor interpretative discrepancies, the overall appreciation of Einstein’s relativity and, more generally, of the critical (Kantian) revolution was almost identical. What the ‘beaten idealist’ Brunschvicg stressed more than Cassirer was the dramatic conflict from which positive knowledge always arises. In his eyes, there existed no ultimate reason or essence of things for science to penetrate, but rather an endless negotiation between experience – in the refined sense of that set up by experimentation146 – and the mind: This is, in its most striking aspect for the philosopher, the character that knowledge has assumed in this early twentieth century. The facts revealed to the physicist by laboratory techniques are of such a nature as to force him to adjust the mathematical tools he has been using up to that point. The progress of science, since the distant epoch in which Pythagoras discovered a law of correspondence between the mathematical relationships of numbers and the musical relationships of sounds, seemed to consist in going beyond the sphere of the discontinuous in order to organise methods more and more suitable for the continuity of the phenomena. Now the growing complexity of both the means of calculation and the observation procedures draws attention to this discontinuity that we believed we could put behind us as if it were an elementary and too simple stage of scientific analysis. A physics of the discontinuous, to quote Langevin’s expression, is now in the making which requires new mathematical schemes.147

The lack of naivety of Brunschvicg’s idealism should be noted: in fact, he stressed that nature cannot be ‘channelled’: ‘It forbids man to keep part of his resources in reserve. It obliges him to rethink his attack plan and to fall back upon himself, in order to examine the very principles of his strategy, in order to forge a new technique that, alone, will allow him to face the obstacle again and to remove it.’148 If there ever

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was a ‘moral’ of relativity, it would be that Einstein never allowed the old intuitive representations to harness the deployment of his mind: he brought philosophy down to earth, he showed that man, far from being a transcendent observer, was embedded in reality, with his own limitations and his arsenal of the means of measurement.149 More than that, Einstein embodied in the most glaring manner that reflective attitude that for Brunschvicg was the true engine of science and philosophy. More precisely, Brunschvicg compared Einstein’s and Lorentz’s solutions to the problems raised by Maxwell’s electrodynamics: while Lorentz’s proceeded in an ‘intuitive’ way, by trying to expand the scope of existing frameworks, Einstein reconsidered thoroughly the ground upon which he stood. He chose to ‘rewrite the first pages of the system of the world’.150

Einstein and the philosophers Brunschvicg’s interpretation of relativity should be placed against the broader background of Einstein’s reception in France, which was a complex and tormented process. Outside the academe, the old Comtean and Cartesian rationalist Alain blasted the philosophical enthusiasm for relativity in a humorous short tale: the dead father of a prestigious ‘académicien’ comes back from the ‘realm of Shadows’ to awaken his son from his ‘academic sleep’ and warn him not to put all his money on the ‘Einstein shares’, but rather to sell them all before it is too late.151 Writing in 1923, Alain was surely reacting to Brunschvicg’s book and, in particular, to Einstein’s famous visit to Paris, which took place the year before. The mediator or ‘passeur’ of Einstein’s theories in France was a former disciple of Poincaré, Paul Langevin (1872–1946), famous inventor of the ‘twin paradox’, who had been holding the chair of general and experimental physics at the Collège de France since 1909.152 Early attempts to bring Einstein to France dated from 1914, but the outbreak of the war made the travel impossible. When in 1922 Langevin joined forces with Brunschvicg and re-invited Einstein, this was done in the name of the internationalism of science, going against the boycott of German scholars organised by the recently founded International Research Council. Only after lengthy negotiation, Langevin managed to carry out his project and fulfil his duty as the ‘apostle of the new Gospel’, to quote Xavier Léon,153 having Einstein give talks at both the Collège de France and the Société française de philosophie.154 Of course, the Société was not new to this kind of themes. On the contrary, it had already hosted a number of sessions dealing with the new advancements in mathematics and physics. For example, Brownian motion was discussed in two sessions in 1910 by the physicist Jean Perrin (1870–1942), while the following year Langevin talked about time, space and causality in modern physics.155 The session of 6 April 1922 made no exception in this respect. Yet it was particularly meaningful, not only because, as we have seen, it helped normalise the scientific relationships between France and Germany but also because, from a theoretical point of view, it bore witness to the philosophers’ difficulty in measuring up conceptually with the Einsteinian revolution. In 1922, relativity was still the subject of lively debates – not only in France: just remember that, a few months later, Einstein

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would be awarded the Nobel Prize, not for his most famous theory but for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. Brunschvicg’s L’expérience humaine was thus among the first books appearing in France which discussed the subject at length.156 Hence, philosophers interpreted Einstein in conflicting ways, always risking projecting onto his theories their own ghosts and dreams. Bergson has often been presented as the one who completely missed the target and deeply misunderstood the import of relativity, incapable of taking a step outside his own philosophical framework. Lots of ink has been spilled on the subject, between detractors and defenders.157 Still, it is true that, unlike Brunschvicg and others, Bergson tried to make his own chevaux de bataille, notably the concept of duration, compatible with what he perceived as the key problem of special relativity, namely the notion of simultaneity, by distinguishing sharply between the realm of philosophy and the domain of science. Relativity was yet another instance of the refinement of mathematical symbolism. As such, it was silent about the ‘real’, namely about the intuitive experience of duration. Whereas relativity formalised a multiplicity of temporalities, where time made sense in relation to a given system of reference, philosophy affirmed through intuition the existence of a lived duration that was absolute, that is, not relative, and the same for the different subjects living in the various systems in relation to each other.158 Bergson reiterated thus his set of constitutive dualisms – science/philosophy, symbols/ intuition, spatialisation/duration, exteriority/interiority, etc. – which Einstein refused by claiming that there existed just a psychological or subjective time on the one hand and a physical or objective time on the other, but not something like ‘a time of the philosophers’.159 Brunschvicg and Meyerson, on the contrary, tried to think through relativity, to extract what they perceived as the philosophical lesson of Einstein’s work. Brunschvicg had already discussed relativity in the 1911 session of the Société where Langevin had illustrated some aspects of special relativity, pointing out how much it disrupted the classic conception of the world, grounded on the solidarity between scientific knowledge and common sense. Brunschvicg had insisted precisely upon this point, underscoring, however, that for him the two versions of time – that of classical physics and that of the ‘new physics’ – were utterly compatible, in that they had been devised for different purposes, the former to account for ordinary experience and the other for solving the contradictions between mechanics and electromagnetic theory.160 During the 1922 session, Brunschvicg took the floor and asked Einstein for some clarifications regarding the relationship between the theory of relativity and the Kantian conception of science. While the Kantian world rested upon the distinction between the ‘container’ (space, time) and the ‘content’ (matter, force), Einstein’s universe rejected the ideas of space qua ‘receptacle of the real’ and of an arithmetic time that was empty and homogeneous in analogy with space. It was a physical universe defined only by its content, ‘independent from the spatial and temporal forms under which it takes place’. Furthermore, if ‘the Kantian conception plunged us into antinomies’, the Einsteinian one liberated us from them, for in the ‘doctrines of relativity’ the idea of a pure mathematics, of a space and time given apart from their contents, made no sense. The close link between the act of measurement and the measured thing disqualified every philosophical problem ‘concerning space before matter or matter after space’.161 Still, for

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Brunschvicg, the Einsteinian ‘revolution’ did not render Kantian philosophy obsolete; on the contrary, it marked the achievement of the relativist turn already begun by Kant himself. With the latter, in fact, the ‘parallelism’ between ideas and things had turned for the first time into a ‘connection’, a ‘reciprocity’. In Einstein, this connection became deeper, because relativity made ‘the expression of physical reality look more abstract’.162 Einstein’s reaction to Brunschvicg’s long intervention was tellingly short and blunt: ‘I believe that every philosopher has a Kant of his own.’163 He then added a brief confusing remark on Kant’s and Poincaré’s convergence on the point that science needs ‘arbitrary concepts’, whether a priori or conventional – a statement that would have sounded quite problematic to Kant and Poincaré themselves. Einstein proved to be much more sympathetic towards the reading formulated by the Polish immigrant Émile Meyerson (1858–1933), a peculiar figure in the intellectual landscape of the time, who never held an academic position but was a respected member of the philosophical community. Meyerson defended an epistemology – he was indeed the first to popularise this term164 – that was in many respects antithetical to critical idealism.165 Having studied in Germany, being very well acquainted with the local scientific-philosophical debates and having a first-hand knowledge of laboratory practice (he worked as a chemist for many years), Meyerson could mobilise a wide array of references that distinguished his scientific philosophy from the traditionally French one of Brunschvicg. In works like Identity and Reality (1908)166 or Explanation in the Sciences (1921),167 he argued that the evolution of scientific knowledge is the outcome of the confrontation between reason and the ‘irrational’ (in the sense of not-yet-rational) multiplicity of nature. In its work, reason is guided by two principles or ideals that are often intertwined de facto but that remain nonetheless independent de jure: the principle of legality and that of identity. The former aims at the establishment of a fixed order of laws, without exception, that could serve the purposes of action and prediction (a principle of unity), while the latter concerns rather the explication of phenomena on the basis of the principle of causality (namely the identification between the antecedent and the consequent). Although Meyerson’s epistemology always presupposed the mixed and evolutionary character of science, as well as the perpetual mélange between rationalism and empiricism, theory and practice, it remains that the insistence on the principle of identity and unity as the immutable framework of reason, operating everywhere and in any time in the same manner, contrasted substantially with Brunschvicg’s plasticity. In a 1921 letter, Brunschving told him precisely that he was resistant to the idea of an opposition between reason, with its eternal identity principle, and the irrationality of nature on the other.168 Brunschvicg’s pupil, Gaston Bachelard, who in a way turned the stance of his teacher into the ‘mainstream’ of French epistemology, would then write dismissive pages against Meyerson, condemning him to an oblivion interrupted only in recent years.169 Despite this, Meyerson was the only one who really managed to enter into a dialogue with Einstein, even after the 1922 session. Not by chance the great physicist would salute Meyerson’s 1925 book The Relativistic Deduction with an illuminating review published in the Revue philosophique.170 This book is significant because of Meyerson’s radical rebuttal of the ‘superficial’ Kant–Einstein continuity thesis put forward by Brunschvicg and by Cassirer in Germany. Meyerson expounded instead a rather realist interpretation: whereas in Kant space and time were in the

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subject, Einstein’s relativity took the reverse route re-incorporating them ‘in the thing in itself ’, as objective coordinates gathering a multiplicity of observation points within a universe existing in itself outside the subject.171 What Einstein implicitly appreciated in The Relativistic Deduction was precisely that, in Meyerson, the tension between reason and reality was not translated and somehow resolved within the inner dialectic of intellectual activity, as in Brunschvicg.172 On the contrary, relativity theory appeared to Meyerson as ‘much more realistic than pre-Einsteinian theories’, becoming ‘the very model of a theory that is explicative and ontological’.173 As Meyerson wrote, ‘the reality of relativity theory is certainly an ontological absolute, a veritable being-in-itself, even more absolute and ontological than the things of common sense or pre-Einsteinian physics’.174

A critique of experimental judgement It appears thus that the legacy of Kantianism represented a major philosophical stake in the debate around Einstein’s theories. Despite Einstein’s laconic put-down and Meyerson’s criticism, Brunschvicg never relinquished his idea that Kant was the first to understand that in mathematics one could find the ‘connection of reason and experience’, that experience itself was far from being simple, pure, ‘raw’, but always elaborated and informed by the human mind.175 In Brunschvicg’s view, the limitation of Kant’s theory consisted in the exteriority of the relationship between mathematics and physics, between form and content. In a way, even the ‘semi-scepticism’ of nineteenthcentury conventionalism176 depended on the fact that mathematics and physics were still accepted as external to one another, the problem being that of applying to experience procedures formulated by pure theory. On the contrary, Brunschvicg wrote that contemporary science does not know such a duality of moments, the former being the moment of mathematical theory and the latter that of physical application. Measurement is an entirely physical operation, taking place within real nature, with instruments that cannot be reduced to mathematical ideals, to perfect concepts. The measurer [mesurant] and the measured are both actual things: they are endowed with properties that could not be predetermined by deductive reasoning, but are unveiled only by experience.177

Mathematics and physics were now tied together, and the former no longer held the right to ‘hand out orders’ to the latter. This was the first philosophical implication of relativity. The time when one could simply impose the apodictic forms of geometry upon experience was definitively over. Pace Kant, space and time were no longer pure intuitions but relative functions within systems meant to account for the complexity of the universe. ‘The world that the theory of relativity urges us to conceive is a world of digits [chiffres], a non-Euclidean multiplicity in four dimensions, which defies any attempt at immediate representation.’178 These digits were not abstractions or figments but ‘coefficients’ of reality expressing objectivity within a ‘cosmometric’ system where

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space did not pre-exist measurement but was rather generated by it.179 As such, the ‘world of Mr. Einstein’ made the old conceptual deduction and experiential induction vanish; digits, in fact, ‘do not suppose before them either an a priori truth as the condition of their formal expression or an intuitive image as the condition of their physical meaning’.180 With regard to this, Bachelard would stress the peculiarity of Brunschvicg’s ‘doublets’ – the measurer and the measured, the numbering and the numbered, the determinant and the determined, and so on. – insisting that for his former teacher one needed to learn to ‘speak both languages’ in order to think of the reciprocity between ‘scientific experience’ and ‘rational coherence’ as the two sides of the same ‘human logos’.181 We can now understand in which sense, for Brunschvicg, the theories of relativity somehow accomplished Kant’s criticism: not because they confirmed this or that particular notion but because they validated the overall spirit of critical philosophy, namely, the idea that the scientist is not the creator or the imitator of the creator of nature but rather the author of knowledge, the term in relation to which crucial notions like those of truth, objectivity, even reality, acquire meaning. Was Kant not the one who, in introducing the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, said that ‘Reason, in order to be taught by nature, must approach nature with its principles in one hand, according to which alone the agreement among appearances can count as laws, and, on the other hand, the experiments are conceived in accordance with these principles’?182 Yet reason and experience should now be conceived not so much as external to one another but rather as two opposite sides of the same process. In other words, a truly critical idealism should take a leap beyond the postulates of both the psychological and logical realism that governed Kant’s transcendental aesthetics. As shown in Chapter 5, according to Brunschvicg the primordial element of perception was the simple affirmation or judgement ‘This is’, which did not entail any intuition or determination of the object. This non-substantialist and non-empiricist conception of perception was a necessary presupposition for the new critical idealism. In fact, causality here was not something that applied to pre-existing substances, a law or a force that tied phenomena together. On the contrary, it was ‘an [intellectual] act of connection that provide[d]‌the objects, without connection and object being considered and represented independently from one another’.183 In other words, what the naïve perceptual realism called ‘object’ was the product of an intellectual system of causal relations. Taking a classic example, we do not see the lightning, hear the thunder a second later and then establish that the former caused the latter. On the contrary, it is the causal synthesis itself that allows us to identify the lighting and the thunder as such in their mutual connection. Our entire sensible world is constituted by such elementary judgements that establish some basic reference points in the environment. ‘Of course,’ Brunschvicg wrote, ‘this universe has no other content than sensations and images; but these sensations and images are connected by a stream of intelligibility of which causality is the expression.’ By means of causality, they become ‘a single whole, susceptible to being affirmed as constant or, more precisely, as being the total existence’.184 One cannot fail to understand why Brunschvicg’s intellectualist theory of perception would so much upset Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological sensitivity. Still, Brunschvicg

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was far from neglecting the role played by our body in the constitution of reality. For him, the very construction of the space that surrounded us was made by taking the body as the main ‘centre of reference’. Brunschvicg even tried to describe in a concrete manner what, in his view, lay at the roots of the ‘origin of geometry’, a problem that tormented philosophers from Husserl to Derrida and Merleau-Ponty himself. Space, he claimed, is nothing but the coordination of visual and tactile data in relation to movements. So, a proto-geometry arose when man discovered that the outline of an object corresponds to a fixed relation between tactile and visual data, that I can use the object and my bodily perception to assess the correctness of a drawing (i.e. an idealised image) of the object – which, incidentally, also accounts for the origin of the notion of truth qua correspondence. Geometry was thus for Brunschvicg the constitution of a ‘true space’ resting on a series of constitutive judgements.185 With this first gesture of abstraction, reason discovered in geometry an ideal science that followed immanent ‘chains of reasons’, that found the sources of evidence within itself and its rational rules. As we have seen, non-Euclidean geometries were just the radicalisation of intellectual operations which were now fully emancipated from the reference to sensible intuitions. But this did not mean that geometry could now subsist independently from experience, that is, from physics. On the contrary, general relativity showed that the metric properties of the space–time continuum varied according to specific configurations of the gravitational fields, that the curvature of the continuum was affected by local mass or energy.186 Space and time, therefore, lost the homogeneous, intuitive and absolute character they had under Newtonian science and became entangled determinations within a system of reference that changed according to the acts of measurement. They were no more a priori but established in dialogue with experience; they formed a causal ‘texture’ of regular relations which enabled the subject to make sense of reality itself and which had been refined by our own confrontation with reality, that is, by our own actions, for it is only by acting in the world that we get a sense of before and after, of here and there – in short, of causality. As Brunschvicg explained, this allowed formulating a determinism that was not a ‘predeterminism’ – that is, an ‘apodictic determinism’ in which causes are considered apart from their application to experience – but rather a determinism de facto in which causal laws are always relative ‘to the position of the hic and the succession of the nunc’. And precisely because it is linked to a specific spatiotemporal field, such a determinism is always in flux, exposed to the variations occurring within our theories and models (see the example of the history of Egypt and of Egyptology discussed in the previous chapter).187 What we have here is not a mere pragmatist perspective, because, for Brunschvicg, an act of the intelligence, reflecting upon the action and organising its coordinates, is always entailed by every human operation. In this sense, although it is true that science, and more peculiarly contemporary science, breaks with the realm of ordinary representation, the scientific world is constituted by the same intellectual élan that was already behind the organisation of our lifeworld. Between the calendar orienting us in the succession of days and months and the models predicting the dynamics of astronomic phenomena, the difference is only in the degree of approximation, for the ‘operations of the mind are the same’.188 Hence, Brunschvicg argued, the ‘activity of perception’ – being inherently

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intellectualised – is always geared towards the ‘activity of science’, given that ‘humanity does with regard to the universe what the individual does with regards to its practical life’.189 Precisely because of this reflective character of scientific practice and theory, which relinquishes any aprioristic framework and acknowledges the operational (rather than pragmatic) birth of those categories and forms that Kant ranged in the realm of the a priori, Brunschvicg claimed that the task of the philosopher was to bring about what he termed a ‘Critique of experimental judgement’ – which for him was the only possible metaphysics, that is, a reflection and not a determination of science.190 We have already seen how much Brunschvicg appreciated Kant’s third Critique and its more flexible conception of judgement, which represented one of the most useful conceptual tools of criticism, the less impaired by dogmatic remnants. The notion of a critique of the power of scientific judgement turned out particularly useful given that, as Brunschvicg always made clear, his project consisted in distilling from the retrospective analysis of physical theories not so much a philosophy of nature (Hegel, Schelling) or science (Kant, Comte) but rather a philosophy of the mind, a psychology of the intelligence. Again, Brunschvicg was suspicious of the term ‘philosophy of science’, which seemed to imply an attempt to ground science, to predetermine or prescribe its course and its contents. Hence Brunschvicg preached a ‘scientific philosophy’ that consisted ultimately not in determining but in reflecting upon science to draw conclusions pertaining to the functioning of the mind. Scientific or experimental judgement had nothing to do with the ‘anthropomorphism’ of deduction or the naturalism of induction. Due to the inseparability of physics and mathematics, contemporary science had opened up a frightening realm that escaped the realism of imagination and its representative notions. In other words, it had separated the notion of objectivity from that of the object as the intuitive substantial correlate of our mental operations.191 This, as we have seen, was precisely the consequence of an intellectual activity that, while taking cue from ordinary experience, relied only upon itself, was a purely immanent process of formalisation and self-examination. Any old naïve notion of truth qua correspondence of ideas and things had therefore to be dropped. Brunschvicg spoke of a ‘rationality of the circuit’ to designate this reflective circularity in which thought no longer resorted to external criteria of verification (whether empirical facts or logical entities) but rather searched within itself for the key to objectivity and truth.192 In the new scientific theories, there were no objects apart from the acts of measurement, no laws valid beyond their system of reference, outside their range of application; nature manifested itself only as an ‘abstract sign’ within a formal system obtained though measurement and calculation.193 This was the new sense of relativity, beyond the Kantian static model: a ‘to and fro between a reason and an experience that are both inexhaustible, a system of digits that do not refer to any preliminary intuition, that do not produce any direct representation, but which imply the necessary solidarity of abstract expression and concrete signification, the connection of the intelligible and the real.’194 In this sense, the modality of experimental/scientific judgement was neither interiority nor exteriority but rather the mixed form of possibility, precisely because it did not derive from a logical or an empirical necessity but rather from the always

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unheard-of relation (the reciprocal relativity, as Brunschvicg said in 1922) of mind and world.

Relativity, uncertainty and humanism There would be infinite aspects in Brunschvicg’s confrontation with the sciences that would deserve a proper treatment. In the previous sections I have only managed to discuss the most salient of them, in a way that surely fails to do justice to the complexity and the richness of the Étapes and L’expérience humaine. Nonetheless, although it is true that, according to the current meaning of the term, Brunschvicg could be deemed a philosopher of science, the accent should fall on what for him was the ultimate significance of the history of science, namely the insights it provided about the dynamism of the intelligence. Of course, we have seen how Brunschvicg tried to take a step beyond the predicaments of Poincaré’s conventionalism, towards a full assumption of the historicity of science and the mind in general. Still, one should not frame his attempt in purely epistemological terms, simply conceiving him as a ‘post-conventionalist’ philosopher of science who prefigured Bachelard.195 This is not to say that the presentday philosopher of science cannot find interesting insights in Brunschvicg. Indeed, Brunschvicg was convinced that – by providing a diachronic account of the ways in which the ‘dialectical’ relationship between the mind and experience, between formalisation and verification, had been framed – a historically oriented ‘scientific philosophy’ could clarify many aspects of contemporary mathematical physics, as the status of its models and objects. Brunschvicg accepted, for example, the main tenets of Poincaré’s vision of science, except the idea that theories and notions are not true but rather acknowledged as practically useful by the community of minds on the basis of experimental results. In Brunschvicg’s idealist (Kantian–Fichtean) view, this vision was still based on a dogmatic conception of a correspondentist truth, rejecting anything that did not match the criteria of immediate evidence into the realm of practical conventions.196 Yet it should be clear by now that for Brunschvicg the stakes were much higher than these kinds of ‘regional’ problems, stakes involving science as well as philosophy, history, morality and even – as we will see in the next ­chapter – European culture and spirituality. Indeed, there is an element of truth in Jean-Toussaint Desanti’s quip that Brunschvicg still belonged to the ‘category of the philosopher-readers’, who read science for ‘higher’ theoretical ambitions.197 Desanti himself, however, knew very well that there was much more to it. For Brunschvicg, the problem of science was ultimately a problem of ‘awareness’ (prise de conscience). But awareness about what? Not simply about the link between mathematics and physics or between objectivity and measure, but more widely about the relationships between the mind and things, theory and reality, that could no longer be reduced to the dynamic of a submission of progress to the linear deployment of a priori frameworks.198 A new status for objectivity, validity and truth had to be found that was compatible with the constructive and, at the same time, historical character of scientific formalisations.

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Again, then, the point was not to tell whether the theories of metageometry, quantum physics, statistical mechanics, electrodynamics and so on were consistent, whether they provided the ultimate model of nature, but rather to account for their meaning and, most importantly, for their significance for a broader transformation in thought. It is only in this peculiar sense, and not because it was normative, that Brunschvicg’s philosophical history of science implied an evaluative stance, the distinction being made in fact not so much between correct and false doctrines as between those that improved our understanding of the life of the mind and those which did not. This is why Brunschvicg roundly contested the method of the eighteenthcentury Encyclopaedists, who believed that the progress of humanity could be assured simply by offering people a ‘mechanical recording’ of the results of the sciences of the time: ‘The positivity of science,’ he wrote, ‘is grounded not so much on the sum of the propositions that constitute the body of the Encyclopaedia, as on the living reality of the intelligence that coordinates them.’199 In other words, again, science was above all a reflective activity. On this basis, Brunschvicg’s statement that ‘In all domains, from Cauchy’s or Cantor’s analysis to Planck’s or Einstein’s physics, the crucial breakthroughs have been made going in the opposite direction of the schema predetermined by the doctrine of the forms and the categories’200 acquires its full meaning. Contemporary science questioned the apodictic value of the old principles handed down by tradition and brought to light unprecedented ideal relations, recasting its models according to a multiplicity of complex variables and reframing nature by enlarging its scale, from the infinitesimal level to the infinitely large of the cosmos. This is all true. But for Brunschvicg the most valuable contribution of contemporary physics lay elsewhere, namely, in the abolition of the centuries-old debate between idealism and realism, which should be replaced by a full assumption of critical idealism, which of course not only asserted the primacy of the mental pole but also acknowledged its dialectical unity with the resistance of experience.201 In other words, the universe as such certainly existed, but it was ‘nothing before or beyond its mathematical formula’, it had ‘no name in a language other than mathematics’.202 Once one assumed this stance, it was also possible to properly understand the humanistic import of relativity. Despite thus the uncanny aspect of the new scientific imago mundi that both scared and fascinated Valéry, for Brunschvicg the new science was human through and through. Critical idealism insisted precisely on this close link between humanism and relativity, between man and objectivity. And this perspective was, in Brunschvicg’s view, perfectly compatible with the non-human or beyond-human character of the recent scientific discoveries: indeed, it belongs to the human mind to constantly transcend the cramped spaces of sensible perception and ordinary experience, getting rid of the last ‘earthly remainder’, as Cassirer said, probably quoting Nietzsche.203 Furthermore, we have to bear in mind that for the intellectualist Brunschvicg humanism was antithetical to subjective psychologism. In fact, a true scientific humanism consisted in the realisation of a community of minds working together to leap beyond the individual singular perspectives. It was, in other words, a humanism of an autonomous intelligence, shared by every individual, and its power of abstraction, its power to work out truth, rather than a modest celebration of the values of a human-scale world: ‘To know ourselves means to apprehend ourselves

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in our own constituent power, it means already transforming ourselves by awakening and accelerating the dynamism of rational progress. In the course of his uninterrupted dialogue with the universe, man appears to himself as a mind, and the universe becomes the world of science.’204 For Brunschvicg, thus, the relativity of contemporary physics proved that man, qua experimental observer as well as moral agent and theoretical subject, was the ‘point of reference’ of reality, that there existed an ‘intimate connection’ between the mind of the scientist and the universe of science. The subject would no longer be the external and indifferent gaze posited outside space by Laplace and Newton and contemplating nature from an ‘imaginary observatory’. Contemporary physics, in particular Einstein’s relativity, validated critical idealism, precisely to the extent that it updated the Socratic lesson, according to which the moral world does not derive from an abstract a priori order that pre-exists the reflection of the mind but that it is up to the subject to discuss dialogically the actual significance of notions such as justice, truth, beauty, the Good and so on. Similarly, the present-day physicist too has the obligation to start by ‘locating himself ’. Starting from the position he occupies in space and from the moment in which he is in time, he projects before himself ‘lines of truth’ that will progressively advance, which will constitute a universe with ever larger dimensions, with ever closer links, and whose reality will have, not only as a guarantee, but also as a weave, the rational connection of our judgements.205

Hence, as I have anticipated in the previous chapter, Brunschvicg held that the refinement of the ‘cosmic structure’, that is, of our scientific image of the world, and the ‘progress of the human perspective’ were ultimately the same thing. The words I have just quoted were written in 1927, when Brunschvicg had in mind mostly Einsteinian physics. The reader may wonder what Brunschvicg thought about the other great breakthrough of twentieth-century physics, namely the uncertainty principle, which was formulated precisely in that year by Werner Heisenberg (1901– 1976). Actually, Brunschvicg would appreciate its philosophical repercussions only later, seeing it as a powerful confirmation of his theories about relativity, and this notwithstanding Einstein’s own scepticism towards the Copenhagen interpretation. Therefore, it is not entirely correct, as has been argued, that Brunschvicg ‘turned his back on quantum physics’. It is true, though, that he failed to take notice in a systematic manner of the possible convergence between his own ‘panmathematism’ and the Copenhagen interpretation, as Meyerson himself acknowledged.206 This is probably because the older Brunschvicg of the 1920s and 1930s relied increasingly on secondhand reports, provided by his friends and, although he never lost interest in science, stopped trying to modify his views in accordance with the new horizons. From this point of view, he is confirmed to be a philosopher in the most general sense rather than a philosopher of science stricto sensu. As the French physicist Louis de Broglie (1892–1987) remembered, Brunschvicg always took part in the sessions of the Centre international de Synthèse where quantum physics was discussed.207 And indeed we find numerous minor contributions in which

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Brunschvicg explicitly addressed the problems raised by the new scientific insights. A first session of the Société française de philosophie, animated precisely by de Broglie in 1929, focused on the issue of determinism/indeterminism. There, Brunschvicg suggested that already Boutroux, in The Contingency of the Laws of Nature, had explained how determinism and uncertainty were perfectly compatible, provided that one conceived determinism correctly, that is, not as implying necessity.208 In a 1935 intervention at a congress on the evolution of physics and philosophy organised by the Centre, he held that quantum physics obliged us to conceive of science as a ‘dialogue’. In fact, natural phenomena were not graspable in themselves, but only within a system of reference including the observer (in the technical sense of the term) and the means of observation.209 This did not mean renouncing objectivity but rather deepening our understanding of its conditions of possibility, transforming what was once perceived as a sign of impotence into a positive condition of existence (something analogous, in Kantese, to the shift from the Schranke, the limit as negative limitation, to the Grenze, the positive limit that encloses and confers determinateness).210 Along the same lines, in 1936, Brunschvicg insisted on this complication of a reality that was becoming nonhuman: ‘The nature the impression of which we directly receive, that children and infant people [peuples enfants] represent as reality, is not what in adult life and after reflecting on experience we are entitled to call reality.’211 Such an antiphysis, to reprise Berthelot’s formulation, required ‘a heroic effort of conversion’ from the ‘immediate data of perception to the intellectual construction of the world’.212 In fact, on the one hand, there are like two layers of reality which not only overlap, but which also contradict themselves; on the other hand, there are two ideal kinds, two normative forms of truth, depending on whether we trust ordinary language, turning grammatical categories into metaphysical entities, making the substantive and the adjective the substance and the attribute; or, on the contrary, on whether we subordinate the logic of expression to the evidence of thought, as it springs from the precision and the scruple that are prerogative of mathematical demonstration.213

What is interesting in Brunschvicg’s take on contemporary physics and mathematics is that for him there was no point in talking about a crisis. If there was a crisis, it affected only a certain kind of realism, as we have seen regarding his interpretation of Russell: ‘Crisis of reality, the scientists would say; which for the philosopher means crisis of realism, crisis of imagination, which is ultimately an imaginary crisis.’214 This is something that de Broglie observed correctly, while believing that Brunschvicg’s ‘easy-come, easy-go’ attitude made it all look too simple.215 Indeed, in Brunschvicg’s perspective the predicaments of science were only the necessary destructive moments of an ongoing construction – that is, of a progress. In fact, the intelligence progresses because reality and its richness force it to ameliorate its models. More precisely, as we have seen, this progress is determined by the ‘shock’, by the traumatic encounter, between the élan of the intelligence and, so to speak, the sting of reality, which prevents the mind from indulging too much in its own conceptions. The reason behind this traumatism is that a minimal gap between scientific formalisations

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and the data of experience always subsists which plunges the scientific reason into a state of permanent discontent.216 The notion of uncertainty in physics amounted for Brunschvicg to yet another ‘miracle’. What was the wave-particle duality if not the unexpected resolution of the age-old conflict between the dogmatic visions of atomism and becoming, between Democritus and Heraclitus?217 Brunschvicg referred in particular to the groundbreaking 1924 PhD thesis in which his friend de Broglie had put forward the Nobel Prize-worthy hypothesis that all matter exhibits wave-like behaviours, connecting momentum and observed wavelength. ‘Uncertainty’ was thus for Brunschvicg an improper term: the certainty that was negated or contradicted was a kind of certainty that was no longer needed. Analogously, the Pythagoreans called ‘irrational’ those numbers which did not fit into their strict conceptions of arithmetic rationality. What Heisenberg’s works destroyed was just Laplace’s dream of a thorough knowledge of a state A from which a future state B could be deduced, and not causality itself. Instead of giving free rein to fantasies about a groundless or incomplete nature, succumbing to the same Pythagorean fear for the ‘irrational’,218 the mind had rather to embrace a subtler conception of physical determinism, integrating the determinism of the observed phenomenon with the determinism of the observer and trying to follow their interaction as close as possible.219 It seems thus that Brunschvicg would have rejected Heisenberg’s bold (and later softened) statement that quantum mechanics, allowing describing only ‘correlations of observations’, established the ‘final failure of causality’.220 Rather, as we have seen, Brunschvicg was prone to bypassing the problem by stating that determinism was always in becoming, precisely because it was not a static rendition of the ‘things themselves’, but was rather always relative to our observation points and measuring systems – thus inherently tied to probability and contingency – and never simple, that is, not reducible to the simplistic and abstract platitude that ‘every fact has a cause’.221 Contemporary science presented a ‘one-hundred-act play’ where facts and causes could not be isolated in a linear fashion.222 The only thing one could do was to try to reconstruct from his own perspective the ‘texture of universal becoming’ without relinquishing the notion of causality but instead endlessly refining it. Brunschvicg never addressed the stakes of the Bohr–Einstein debate, but we might assume that he would have found it quite misguided. Whether uncertainty had said the final word upon subatomic reality or whether it marked only a temporary stage in the march towards the construction of ‘a theory representing things themselves and not merely the probability of their occurrence’,223 as Einstein hoped, this was quite irrelevant for critical idealism, according to which being acquires a determined existence only within the experimental context set up by the intelligence at work. In a more sophisticated fashion, Brunschvicg would have probably agreed with Heisenberg when the latter said that Einstein, as a scientist, acted in a way that was more advanced than his own philosophical mentality: due to his ‘dogmatic realism’, Einstein failed to accept that, in quantum physics, the content of a statement depended on the conditions of its verification and, therefore, could not be objectified.224 In fact, the existence of an elementary particle could be asserted only in terms of a probability function, of a ‘potentiality’ or a ‘tendency’ for being. For Brunschvicg, this was surely a revolution – a revolution that, however, marked the culmination of a process of idealistic relativisation

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necessarily entailing the loss of any intuitive, realist or naively representationalist reference. Thus, had he further pursued the matter, Brunschvicg would have probably commented that Einstein was not able to value the full philosophical meaning of what he himself had contributed to. As to who was right from a scientific point of view, whether Einstein or Heisenberg, one had only to wait and see, although surely Brunschvicg would have been suspicious of attempts to translate quantum physics into the language of classical physics. In any case, this was something that could be decided only by having recourse to deeper and more sophisticated formalisations excluding, in practice, any realism. Once again, scientific research was more philosophically meaningful than straightforward philosophical theories or views themselves. And, for Brunschvicg, this was the only thing that mattered, given that, let us stress it one more time, science instructs not about nature but about the potentia infinita cogitandi of the human (and not divine, as in Spinoza) mind.

Conclusion Ultimately, quantum physics achieved the destruction of the old ‘realism of imagination’ and the establishment of a full-fledged ‘idealism of the intelligence’ initiated in the nineteenth century with the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries and, even earlier, in the eighteenth century with Kant and Newton. Early twentiethcentury science, Brunschvicg claimed, finally disproved any ‘metaphysics of nature’, any ‘realism’, supporting instead ‘a philosophy of thought, an idealism’.225 Of course, it is often difficult to espouse Brunschvicg’s confidence in the homogeneous and, so to speak, ‘one-directional’ character of the new scientific achievements, which all magically seem to validate his own critical idealism. Not that he ignored the complexity of the debates going on among scientists, from which his ‘rival’ Meyerson but also thinkers he never mentioned, like Moritz Schlick (1882–1936) or Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953), drew completely different epistemologies.226 However, although the physics community was still in search for an agreement, and even despite Einstein’s own refusal to admit that the stochastic interpretation of quantum physics forever excluded a complete determination of how nature works,227 Brunschvicg held that the philosophical repercussions of Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s achievements were ultimately the same. Here one might raise an easy objection: was such a generalisation warranted? In other words: is it really possible to understand how the mind functions in general by taking into account the genesis, for example, of Einstein’s theories? The answer lies in Brunschvicg’s historical view: relativity was just the culmination of a tendency that was at work at least since Kant, but which, from a broader perspective, was always present since the Greek origins of philosophy. In fact, for Brunschvicg, the lesson of contemporary physics converged, even more radically, with the lesson of Socrates in presenting human reason as the living source of judgement, ‘endowed with a legislative dignity in the Republic of the Minds’, which alone can bestow meaning and objectivity upon reality.228 By boldly combining these two lessons into one single teaching, Brunschvicg believed that it was possible to understand that the universe was immanent to science, that is, immanent to the original and inexhaustible constructive

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activity of the intelligence. The problem was – and many of Brunschvicg’s colleagues and students saw it – that this grand narrative not only tended to reduce the history of the mind to the history of science, understood as the ultimate model of intellectual activity, but also subordinated history itself to a powerful set of philosophical (idealist/ intellectualist) values that were not always rigorously questioned and justified.

8

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Pour qui accepte la vie, avec toutes ses conséquences, l’idéalisme n’est qu’une couverture, à moins qu’elle ne devienne un masque. Et que devient la vie pour qui professe l’idéalisme pour de bon, avec toutes ses conséquences ?1

Introduction What was the ultimate meaning of Brunschvicg’s philosophical enterprise? If one were to summarise his thought with one formula, a possible answer would be that he aimed at showing his contemporaries that science was not a blind and purely instrumental application of reason, not a cage of fixed procedures imposed upon the spontaneity of the mind, but rather the ultimate accomplishment of the dynamism of the intelligence, the horizon wherein the progress of Western consciousness could finally deploy its full potential. As he wrote as early as 1893, in an article devoted to Ernest Renan, philosophy must go from science to freedom and return, in order to study constantly, by looking at the new conquests, the field subject to the jurisdiction of reason. The continuity of this intellectual effort, the accumulation of positive discoveries alone will assure science the moral direction of humanity, for only such discoveries will allow it to gradually resolve all the questions that humanity has asked itself. It is a mistake to believe, with positivism, that, by destroying the old hypotheses, the achievements of human reason thereby suppress also the problems which suggested them. On the contrary, by limiting the number of possible solutions, they has made the need for a solution more pressing. Therefore, it would be dangerous to pretend to ignore feelings such as moral and religious feelings, which are the most precious and certain conquest of civilisation, under the pretext that these feelings, which cannot be justified by immediate experience, have no place in the current organisation of positive science. True science is alien to nothing that is human; it excludes only one thing, namely exclusion itself. Science will thus be a work of reconciliation, a source of intellectual wealth and peace.2

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This passage was worth quoting in full because it exemplifies in the most paradigmatic manner Brunschvicg’s almost dogmatic faith in the contribution of science. Indeed, as was remarked, Brunschvicg was close to Comte in that they were both convinced that the analysis of scientific progress had to go hand in hand with, and even orient, the reflection on the ends of humanity.3 But did this faith accompany him even through the years of the First World War and the 1929 economic crisis, up until the dawn of the Second World War? The conclusion to the Progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale – ‘that philosophical breviary of the Universe where all is well that ends well’, in Nizan’s corrosive words4 – seems to provide an affirmative answer to this question. This book, which was published in 1927, is surely Brunschvicg’s most relevant and substantial testament, and should be read alongside some of his more ‘modest’ works of the 1930s and 1940s, like the 1932–3 lectures on Les âges de l’intelligence (1934), the seemingly merely academic monograph on Descartes et Pascal lecteurs de Montaigne (1942), the posthumously published Héritage de mots, heritage d’idées (1945), written for his niece Marianne, and L’esprit européen (1947), his last course at the Sorbonne. What results from these texts is an astonishing faith in the capacity of reason to endure and survive through the harshest conditions. Despite a growing sense of crisis and insecurity, a more acute perception of the constitutive predicament of the life of consciousness – ‘we understand how much human reason is frail and in contradiction with itself ’, he wrote in 19405 – Brunschvicg never ceased to uphold his fundamental beliefs and to stand up for his progressive vision of European civilisation. In this chapter, I will deal with the ultimate worldview formulated by Brunschvicg in his last works and show how it clashed with the new movements and trends that came to the fore in the 1930s, with a particular reference to two figures of the ‘proto-existentialist’ generation like Jean Wahl and Gabriel Marcel, both born in the late 1880s.

Scientific humanism In the Progrès de la conscience, Brunschvicg asserted that, although the question of the fate of humanity no longer fell within the competence of metaphysical or theological ‘temerarious speculations’, the philosopher was left with the problem of framing ‘the future of humanity with respect to the scientific civilisation of the West’. For critical idealism, this avenir was tightly connected to the ‘progress of exact knowledge about the evolution of life and the world’.6 Brunschvicg quoted approvingly a passage from a 1914 conference at the Académie des sciences morales et politiques where Bergson had claimed that, whereas the advancements of science and technology had enhanced the ‘body’ of man by equipping it with new ‘organs’, his ‘soul’ risked falling behind, breaking a balance that the moral sciences (philosophy) must re-establish.7 However, Brunschvicg believed that this stance might not be that effective, since in the previous century philosophers had looked at science mostly with the aim of taking its place. On the contrary, before worrying about restoring balance within culture, one should focus more closely on the

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inventiveness of science, so as to learn in the first place how science had managed to restore balance within itself.8 Brunschvicg even maintained that the ‘decisive progress of contemporary thought’ consisted in the shift from one ‘psychology’ to the other, that is, from ‘philosophical reason’ to ‘scientific reason’.9 Of course, this was not to dismiss the value of philosophical inquiry. As we have seen, Brunschvicg himself always said that he was no historian of science but rather an unapologetic philosopher. Nonetheless, we have also remarked that for him philosophy had to learn from science. And what was the lesson of science? As shown by the unanticipated perspectives opened up by Einstein’s relativity, the precincts of ordinary human experience, of the individual self, could not contain the indefinitely creative élan of the mind. The progress of the intelligence, best embodied by scientific research, necessarily overcomes the ‘barrier’ of the world of perception, of the world of ‘things’, representations and concepts. In this sense, contemporary physics and mathematics destroyed the old prejudices that engendered and nurtured the line of thought of Aristotelian realism, fulfilled the prophecy of Descartes’s mathematical idealism and inaugurated a vision of the world which was humanist precisely insofar as it was non-human or inhuman from a traditional perspective.10 ‘The peculiar virtue of the intelligence, in the age of its maturity, is that it is always ready to correct itself by creating unprecedented means to adapt itself to the bewildering complexity of a world that man … has to stop conceiving as fit to his size.’11 Such was the conclusion of the previous chapter. Science served thus the purpose of teaching us to ditch the delusions and the prejudices of our immediate perception. Its value went beyond the mere application of knowledge to industry, it pertained not so much to the ‘order of power’ as ‘the order of truth’.12 Science allowed us to penetrate into the natural determinism and to orient its course.13 The ‘Euclidean tradition’, to which Brunschvicg wholeheartedly adhered, was indeed grounded on a ‘profound hope’: that scientific truth would ensure the cohesion of humanity, the establishment of a ‘spiritual community’.14 Brunschvicg highlighted how for Descartes – or even for Leibniz, with whom he often disagreed – science was not simply a branch of knowledge, a particular kind of inquiry, but rather a pedagogical model, the royal road towards peace and justice. Mathematics in particular was often indicated by Brunschvicg as the fundamental pillar of an overall reform of education. In Un ministère de l’éducation nationale, for example, a book originally published in 1917 under the false name of Jacques Brinville, he pitched an education based on mathematics against an education resting purely on grammar and ‘orthography’, that is, on the repetitive and dogmatic assimilation of rules.15 Indeed, a universal science, articulated in a clear and distinct manner, such as to dispel confusions and bring down false authorities, would provide the values and the model for the agreement among men. ‘Every philosopher who does not limit himself to descanting on the abstract necessity of progress, who actually cares for the interests of humanity, is committed to honing the disciplines that are capable of hastening the time of the universal demonstration, that is, of the universal pacification.’16 After all, this was what Descartes had in mind when he came up with the provisional title of what would later be published as Discourse on the Method: ‘The Project of a Universal Science to Raise our Nature to its Highest Degree of Perfection.’ And this was what

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Brunschvicg meant when he spoke of a ‘mathematical philosophy’ and not merely of a ‘philosophy of mathematics’, that is, a philosophy inspired by the quest for truth that was proper to science. We can imagine the sense of estrangement of the young and more politicised philosophers in front of someone who, in the 1930s, was still convinced that, by analysing history, one could ultimately witness the march of a reason which ‘becomes conscious of the eternity of its principle precisely thanks to the perpetual renewal of its actuality in the infinite deployment of a universal conquest’.17 Even the celebration of the bravery of the ‘free citizens’ who fought in the Great War and whose ultimate victory was that over physical exhaustion, moved as they were by the ideal of justice – one of the most rhetorical passages in the Progrès de la conscience, which was supposed to bear witness to the spread and rooting of modern spiritual values18 – should sound nauseatingly grandiloquent, inane and mawkish. Not to mention the paragraphs, always from the Progrès, where Brunschvicg celebrated the power of art to convert men from ‘egocentrism’ to a ‘generalised morality’ through a disinterested contemplation and the sharing of aesthetic experiences.19 A contemporary deconstructionist reader might easily see in critical idealism a powerful metaphysics of the spiritual Idea, privileging the intellectual analytical evidence over the opacity of language, according to a systematic and explicit use of conceptual oppositions (purity/impurity, dynamism/stasis, immanence/transcendence, thought/ language, universality/particularity, etc.).20 Brunschvicg’s insistence on the overcoming of the concrete individual self as the key to the progress of Western conscience and his dream of a pure commonality of reason and spiritual values made him blind to what on the contrary was essential for the new generations, namely the raw fact of human existence, the idea that the logos is always situated, incarnated in a hic et nunc that cannot be defused and incorporated within scientific knowledge. Brunschvicg often made his voice heard against metaphysical transcendence in the name of an immanent conception of truth. But this immanence was ultimately internal to reason, to the dialectics of the life of the mind, and thus it appeared as belonging to the most abstract form of transcendence. The new generations demanded a new immanence, the thematisation of a new realm of experience. Whereas for a ‘philosophy of pure consciousness’, like the one that Brunschvicg preached, ‘there is nothing outside freedom’,21 that is, beyond the free reflection of the mind, for the new trends of the twentieth century freedom was not so much an ideal as a problematic and tragic aspect of our existence that had to be reconsidered in light of new forms of knowledge and new historical events.

Concrete struggles In the writings of the 1930s and the 1940s, we can perceive a slight shift in Brunschvicg’s narrative, which consists in acknowledging more frankly the role of the negative, the possibility of failure, in the vicissitudes of reason. In 1931, introducing the book edition of his 1929–30 lectures on La connaissance de soi, Brunschvicg warned against ‘the danger of a collective regression’.22 He saw his young students drawn to the ‘most

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archaic and rudimentary’ political orthodoxies, seduced by sterile meditations on war and death, which went far beyond the recognition of class, cultural or religious conflicts, indulging rather in a self-referential complacency.23 This is why, in a 1934 article, he acknowledged that the march of the understanding was always threatened, if not interrupted abruptly, by the resurfacing of the ‘bio-social infrastructure of the mind’, that is, of those habits, traditions, beliefs and dogmas which form the recondite face of our consciousness.24 To be sure, Brunschvicg admitted, this had been a constant of human experience since the Pythagoreans, who determined on an arithmetic basis the standard of truth, while at the same time providing numbers with the status of a thing in itself that prevented them from acknowledging the rational nature of the ratio of incommensurable magnitudes, which they confined to the realm of the ‘alogos’ (inexpressible or irrational).25 It was precisely the ‘constant discrepancy’ between action and reflection that opened the door to elements negating the values of the intelligence.26 In a conference held a few years later at the Centre Universitaire Méditerannéen in Nice, upon the invitation of Valéry, Brunschvicg pointed out that by looking at the history of Pythagoreanism it was possible to understand precisely how, in every time and space across the centuries, the true intellectualist inspiration of the mathēmatikoi is always perturbed by the dogmatic faith of the akousmatikoi. The opposition merely changes shape, but the substance remains. Thus, we have reason versus faith, intelligence versus revelation, idealism versus realism, intellectual constructivism versus conceptualism, the trust in the progress of the intellect versus the submission to the burden of the past and so on.27 From this we can learn, Brunschvicg claimed in the 1934 article, that ‘error and truth, tradition and reason’ will always walk together, imposing the need for an ever renewed exercise of judgement.28 In a course held at the Sorbonne in 1932–3, eloquently titled Les âges de l’intelligence, Brunschvicg tried to measure up to the changing of course that was taking place before his eyes. He was aware of the scepticism that was gradually infecting his students, in years in which the French governments spectacularly failed to contain the economic and social havoc wrought by the Great Depression, giving ground to extremisms and violent polarisations, and in which the neighbouring Germany was being taken over by an antidemocratic and militarist force. Indeed, commentators have observed that the early 1930s were a period of ‘cruel reawakening’ from the ‘years of illusion’ of the previous decade.29 In the preface to the published version of the lectures, he noted that his auditors were young people ‘affected and threatened by the disorder of society’, who rightfully demanded that ‘tomorrow would not resemble today’.30 Brunschvicg knew very well that his students were far from following him in believing that the shift from the medieval tradition to modern civilisation really amounted to a progress comparable to that from infancy to childhood.31 Had not recent history proved that the modern man was as likely to succumb to obscurantist fantasies and nightmarish delusions as the ancients he was so eager to criticise? Still, Brunschvicg believed that he was entitled to propose an intellectual corrective to the present barbarism and expose the false prophets of truth. The task of the lectures, then, was to heal ‘the ills that history has produced by projecting an untimely past … upon the present’.32 Accordingly, Brunschvicg insisted in illustrating to his students his teleological conception of the history of thought – which,

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as I have already mentioned, relied heavily on the interpretative model provided by the combination of Lévy-Bruhl’s accounts of primitive pre-logical mentality and Piaget’s studies on the child’s cognitive world.33 Unfortunately, in generic terms, one can say that most of Brunschvicg’s students could hardly share his hope in a final spurt that would finally establish the idealist paradise of intellectual communion, practical wisdom and full reflexivity. No pure universality based on Brunschvicg’s secularised cult of the ‘inner Word’, of the ‘Deus interior’ of reason, was in sight. Brunschvicg was convinced that the progress of the intelligence was ultimately due to the immanence of truth to thought, to the fact that thought did not attain truth, but rather gradually enlightened it or, better, determined it. It was a Spinozian attitude that, although mitigated by the Kantian-Fichtean awareness of a gap between, to put it in his own terms, ‘interiority’ and ‘exteriority’, assumed the existence of a common ground for the mutual understanding and fellowship of the minds. Around the early 1930s, a new philosophical trend arose that radically questioned the old ‘bourgeois’ spiritualism and idealism, that of the ‘concrete’. As a ‘heretical’ student of Brunschvicg, Georges Politzer (1903–1942), observed in 1929, the notion of concrete had become an omnipresent refrain, the ‘custard pie’ of contemporary thought,34 and in Vers le concret (1932),35 Jean Wahl (1888–1974) enhanced this momentum, which he himself contributed to launching with his books on AngloSaxon pluralism36 and Hegel’s notion of unhappy consciousness.37 The new philosophy of the concrete could hardly be reduced to a uniform profile, being rather a mix of various references, most of them foreign to Brunschvicg’s pantheon. As proof of this, one should not forget that those were the years of the so-called ‘Hegel renaissance’, inaugurated by Wahl himself, Alexandre Koyré and Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968), which represented a considerable innovation within the philosophical field of the Third Republic, fuelled as it was by the discovery of the ‘romantic’ Hegel of the early Jena writings and the re-discovery of the Phenomenology of Spirit to the detriment of the old ‘logicist’ image of the Hegel of the Encyclopaedia.38 Wahl, who had been a disciple of Bergson and Boutroux, but who was also the nephew by marriage and a close collaborator of Brunschvicg,39 was among the first to widen his own array of sources, contributing in a decisive manner to fostering change in French philosophy.40 His PhD dissertation, directed by Boutroux, on The Pluralist Philosophies of England and America ended precisely by advocating a thought that must ‘be able to retain, from the pluralist doctrines, that sense of the concrete particular, that empiricism, that voluntarism, and that mysticism which mostly characterise them and to which they owe their lasting value’.41 By focusing on the problem of the ‘non-relational ground’ of experience, which tormented the pluralist thinkers, Wahl emphasised the existence of a pure experience which comes before any cognitive polarisation between subject and object. In the context of the thesis, the notion of the ‘concrete’ was devised to overcome the abstract contrast between the whole of monism and the parts of pluralism. However, Wahl’s definition of it became paradigmatic: ‘The concrete is the particular seen as a whole … the particular that closes upon itself, which becomes a separate life.’42 The point was not to oppose particularity to generality or individuality to universality; rather, the concrete was the opposite of the abstract, of the partitioning

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produced by the intelligence.43 Individuality was already a segmentation of reality, and as such was abstract. The primum of reality had to be found elsewhere, in an absolute that could not result from the mere juxtaposition of single elements or from a higher synthesis. This absolute – the particular and irreducible sensible ground of experience, the raw fact of indecomposable existence – consisted in an ‘empirical unity that was perhaps more transcendental and complex than transcendental unity’.44 Seen from this perspective, Brunschvicg’s system of oppositions, most notably the idealism–realism divide, appeared as an artificial machinery. As has been correctly remarked, a scholarly work like The Pluralist Philosophies presupposed a certain penchant for Bergson’s ‘empiricism’ against Brunschvicg’s intellectualism.45 In the following years, however, Wahl would significantly expand his horizon, including references like – besides Hegel – Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger and Jaspers that sharpened his theoretical arsenal. The results of these readings are clear in the preface to Vers le concret, which reads like a direct attack against Brunschvicg’s idealism. It begins by criticising what Wahl perceived as the paradigmatic tenet of every idealism, that is, Hegel’s notion that the particular and the concrete are actually the most abstract and the most general. Of course, even the most adamant idealist is forced to grant that there exists something to which intelligence contributes, something which affects us through a ‘shock’. Fichte and Brunschvicg are proof. But ‘for the critical idealist, this impact fulfils only the role of an occasion, of an invitation to investigation’. However, for Wahl it was an illusion to believe that reality can be entirely reduced to science, because something always resists this subsumption, namely the ‘concrete space’, the ‘primitive voluminosity’ that constitutes our pre-predicative experience, as Husserl would have said.46 ‘By placing our spirit or mind among things’, philosophers like James, Marcel and Whitehead ‘make us see that the shock is not only this X on which idealism reflects but also a contact, a kinship, we would readily say with Claudel, a “knowledge” of spirit and of things. By giving back to the immediate its value and its role, they make us better understand what is the point of departure of the reflection’.47 Despite their differences, the philosophers of the concrete shared the capacity to grasp ‘blocks of duration, volumes, events’, ‘this mixture of the continuous and the discontinuous that defines a rhythm, a volume, or a person’.48 One could find in them ‘the same cult of reality in its thickness’, of that ‘primitive datum’ of experience forming the ‘nonrelational background’ that critical idealism could not exhaust and neither downgrade to a form of inadequate and pre-scientific level of reality. These philosophies denied precisely ‘the intelligibility of being’, which was for them ‘a feeling rather than an idea, something that rebels against reason’,49 and brought to the fore the communion of the subject with the world on a pre-reflective level that could not be read according to the teleological axiology of critical idealism. Wahl reserved one final pun to Brunschvicg’s philosophy: starting from the idea of the ‘concrete possible’, of the dynamis of actual reality, ‘we could say that there is only one modality of judgement, that of existence. The other modalities, which are no less real but not in the same sphere, are modalities of feeling’, for example, those studied by Heidegger.50 Ultimately, Wahl was a transitional figure between the old turn-of-the-century philosophy and existentialism, which explains why Sartre was somehow ‘disappointed’ by Vers le concret, by the ‘towards’ of its title.51 Wahl said that ‘The concrete will never be

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something given to the philosopher. It will be what is being pursued,’52 but they wanted the ‘absolute concrete’ and they wanted it now. However, Sartre admitted that Wahl’s book had merit: it ‘embarrassed idealism by discovering in the universe paradoxes, ambiguities, conflicts, still unresolved’.53 The allusion to Brunschvicg’s ‘optimistic’ philosophy is once again patent. Let us now see how Brunschvicg reacted to this cult of the concrete that often flirted, at least in Wahl, with poetry and mystical experience. The detachment between Brunschvicg’s beliefs and the Zeitgeist was astonishing, if we consider that, for him, questioning, if not overtly despising, the search for a pure intellectualism and the value of pure ideas automatically amounted to a ‘sin’ against the esprit.54 He was convinced that a new ‘realist’ front was on the rise that gathered together different philosophical trends united by a common aversion to idealism: from the Kierkegaard renaissance to Nietzscheanism, from Bergson to pragmatism, from Heidegger to Jaspers.55 The self-mastery that a Socrates or a Montaigne demanded us to achieve through the discipline of reflection will no longer be given credit. Life will get lost in the dazzling variations of Martin Heidegger on the delectatio morosa that is constantly renewed by the haunting perspective of nothingness. The simple problem [problématique], where man suffers because he feels unable to secure possession of the object he has in sight, is overlapped by the metaproblem [métaproblématique], because man cannot be sure anymore that he actually forms the thought of any object whatsoever when he utters a word or feels an emotion.56

This emphasis on anxiety, corporal affections, existential predicaments and so forth determined, in Brunschvicg’s view, a state of ‘permanent hesitation’ hindering the progress of rational activity. It amounted to a capitulation to the irrational forces that of course haunted the life of the subject, but that should not be celebrated, glorified. That obscurity and confusion were part of the mind was, so to speak, an undisputed fact of life. As Valéry said, ‘consciousness is compatible with disorder’.57 That was ultimately Montaigne’s lesson. But acknowledging the presence of such turbulences is one thing; elevating them to the role of primum movens of knowledge is another. If judgement consisted in the determination of values, the insistence of the ‘lower’ functions of the subject and the ‘inferior’ levels of the real was an explicit attack against the pre-eminence of reason and the values of humanism. What Brunschvicg found problematic was precisely the complacency with which the new generations – ‘lovers inebriated of flesh’58 – yielded to the seduction of the concrete. He ranked the new doctrines of the existence, of the unconscious, of the autonomous laws of history among his old enemies, among reductionist physiology and sociology, but also among the decadent vitalism of Schopenhauer and the ‘antiSocratic’ Nietzsche. In fact, they all tried to explain reality from the bottom-up, on the basis of the naïve givens of ordinary perception and life, whereas for him the ‘existence of the world’ could be explained only through a top-down approach, that is, starting from the judgements of reason.59 The true concrete was the opposite of what the new generations believed – and in claiming this Brunschvicg confirmed what Wahl said about Hegel and idealism. In the 1932–3 lectures, he explained that a ‘fundamental

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misunderstanding’ was at the root of the generational clash, that his young students were misguided by a false conception in their ‘repulsion’ for an ‘anaemic’ idealism.60 This misconception was due to prejudices and confusions stemming from the poor state of philosophical language and a certain ignorance of history.61 There was nothing new in the new philosophy, only old pre-scientific illusions. Brunschvicg then quoted Leibniz, who in the New Essays (1703) has his figurehead Theophilus make clear that ‘the concrete is as it is only by virtue of the abstract’.62 Of course, in the context of Leibniz’s dialogue, the problem is that of the existence or otherwise of two extensions, one for space (abstract) and the other for body (concrete), which Theophilus/Leibniz negates, given that for him what is spatially concrete cannot be different from the network of abstract geometrical relations. However, the point was clear. The true sun is not the shining and warm globe that our eyes see rising every morning and setting every evening, but a celestial body that overcomes the human scale of our representations and whose reality only astronomers can properly determine.63 The true concrete universal was neither that provided by Hegel’s panlogism nor that offered by raw experience, but rather a system of equations.64 As Brunschvicg would say a few years later, ‘the proper order of the mind and truth reverses the order of sensibility and flesh’. It is the upgrade, again, from a puerile age of the intelligence to a proper adult status, the passage from the ‘animal level of perception’ to the ‘human level of science’.65 This was the only ‘transvaluation of values’ that mattered.66

The God of scientists and the God of Abraham It is understood that, for the new philosophers possessed by existential and/or political torments, reality could not be exhausted by Brunschvicg’s axiological distinction between the spiritual self of science and the biological ego of perception. Their bet was that other models of knowledge and forms of experience were possible. Life was something much richer that what Brunschvicg believed. There is indeed a predicament, or at least a problematic aspect, in Brunschvicg’s critical idealism. As Bréhier wondered as early as 1946, do the conclusions drawn from the reflective study of mathematics and physics also hold for other forms of knowledge and experience, like aesthetics, politics or ethics? Are they not domains in which the instinctual, passional and ‘irrational’ side of consciousness intervenes in a decisive and irreducible manner?67 Brunschvicg believed that the reflection on positive knowledge was sufficient to find the key ‘to the problem of consciousness in its entirety’.68 For him, in fact, the intellectual progress amounted necessarily, immanently, to a progress in the realm of practical reason. But such a solution appeared as completely out of touch to students and young readers. Furthermore, they found deeply troubling Brunschvicg’s quasi-theological faith in the salvation provided by science. In Les âges de l’intelligence, he went as far as holding that there was now, after the recent scientific breakthroughs, a widening gap between ‘the human avant-garde that actually has access to the secrets of nature and the mass to which science is denied as an instrument for inner culture, which can only be affected by the hope of material consolation or by the menace of wild destruction’.69 But already

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ten years earlier, in the course on La philosophie de l’esprit, Brunschvicg had underscored how, behind the recent historical turmoil and tragedies, lay a diversion that had turned humanity from the path to true idealism towards the steep trail of narcissism, egotism, particular interests and international competition. Humanity had relinquished the spiritual values of science, universality and moral emancipation, embracing instead those of materiality, individuality, tradition and dogmatism. Referring to the First World War and its consequences, he said: We have barely exited (and saying ‘we have exited’ is perhaps an error) the most terrible upheaval that the planet has ever witnessed. Collective passions never manifested themselves to such a degree of exaltation, dragging the individuals into the underworld of systematic barbarism as well as to the sublime heights of sacrifice. The outcome of this gigantic collision has been to bring into the brighter and at the same time contradictory light the diversity and the antagonism of national interests. … On the other hand, never have individuals tried so much to react against the grip of society, working for the benefit of their own particular advantages and to secure themselves another destiny in the domain of speculative thought or aesthetic creation … the influence of society tends thus to break and disperse into an infinite number of divergent trends.70

This ‘disorder’ resulted for Brunschvicg from the erroneous assumption that society and the individual are autonomous and absolute realities in themselves. Contrarily, in his view, only a critical idealism based on the teachings of science could bring about the actualisation of the ideal of humanity as the moral correlate of the properly scientific image of the universe, the latter understood as a system of relations depending on the normative function of the human mind.71 This ideal of humanity emancipated man from the empire of traditional culture, seen as a web of unquestioned values and forces (the myth of the race, the ties of customs, the dogmas of faith, and the illusions of concreteness). It disclosed the horizon of a mature civilisation capable of determining its own ends, of indicating its collective destination. It was only from this perspective – and not in the sense of the brutal organicist submission of the particular to the Whole that he criticised in Hegel – that for Brunschvicg the individual per se was meaningless. This was not to say that individuality could be downplayed, even suppressed or exploited. On the contrary, individuality acquired its meaning only as part of a general intelligence. Its exaltation, instead, whether on the personal level or on the geopolitical one, could only lead to the disaster of the civil or world war. The true individuality was not that revealed by psychological introspection, that of the subjective singularity of one’s own feelings – Brunschvicg often implicitly referred to the philosophy of the ‘Cult of the Self ’ of the early Maurice Barrès (1862–1923)72 – but the ‘person’ whose ‘essence’ consists in the power of judgement, in the disinterested love for justice, in the Stoics’ caritas generis humani.73 These considerations somehow anticipated the last chapters of the Progrès de la conscience, where Brunschvicg lingered at length on the meaning that religion had for him. The basic assumption was that the advent of modern science in the seventeenth century had changed forever the way in which one should conceive of religious

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experience, denying the possibility of any spiritual transcendence. Reason alone was the source of all the values that we attribute to the sphere of religion. From this purely immanent angle, God was nothing more than the Word, the logos understood not so much – to reprise a distinction that was common in Hellenistic philosophy (e.g. Philo of Alexandria) – under its oracular shape, in the exteriority of language (Verbum oratio/logos prophorikós), as in its purely intellectual guise, as the reason within (Verbum ratio/logos endiáthetos), as creative normative power that cannot be reduced to a set of revelations or commandments.74 Brunschvicg, then, reversed Pascal’s choice of the God of Abraham against the God of the scientists. The latter was in fact the true divinity, so to speak, the symbol of the universality of the progressus ordinans of the intelligence that science brought into light. Therefore, religion was a conversion, a Platonic periagogé, to an ideal humanity, to the universality of reason, the pure spirituality of the Idea, conceived as the ideal organising principle of the world, as the intelligible network of analytic relations expressing the laws of phenomena.75 The ‘mutual spiritualisation of God and man’ translated into a deeper understanding of the fact that the divine was the ‘inner light’ that every man shared, the fact that we all live ‘the same life of the mind’.76 God became thus ‘the pure and intimate reality commanding the spiritual life in every one of us’.77 Levinas perfectly summed up Brunschvicg’s theses: ‘The inner life for Brunschvicg is not confused either with mysticism or with religious anxiety. … He is much more wary of religions and Christianity than of God. He knows another way to reach Him, one based on the coincidence of rational activity and moral consciousness.’78 Many of Brunschvicg’s contemporaries vehemently criticised his conception of religion. For Le Roy, he simplified too much the life of the mind and simply neglected what did not fit into the purity of his model (sentiment, mysticism, evil, etc.).79 Blondel submitted that, beyond Brunschvicg’s artificial distinction between realism and idealism, there was room for a conciliation between the religion of the ‘humbles’ and the religion of the ‘most intellectual souls’.80 For Gilson, instead, Brunschvicg took too literally Pascal’s distinction between the tangible God of Abraham and the intellectual God of the scientists, conflating the former with the God of common sense. Moreover, his idea of a single kind of knowledge had to be rejected: it was wrong, in fact, to presume that the shift from metaphysical physics to mathematical physics could have implications for religious life, which tread a different path.81 Still, the toughest clash around these themes was that, inevitable, which opposed Brunschvicg to Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), probably the most foremost representative of the so-called French Christian existentialism.82 For Marcel, an idealist stance like Brunschvicg’s was vulnerable to the critiques of historical materialism on the one hand and, on the other, a ‘concrete religious philosophy’ like the one Marcel himself wanted to articulate.83 For many years, every Friday, Marcel’s home welcomed not only the most important philosophers of the time but also young thinkers who, while there, had the chance to encounter new ideas outside the academic enclosure. His historical significance thus makes his opposition to Brunschvicg all the more relevant. A friend of Wahl84 and a disciple of Bergson, Marcel was a personality paradigmatically affected by the new intellectual climate imbued with existentialism and unhappy consciousness, this Hegelian notion with which he himself identified

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his own basic Stimmung as a young man.85 The maturation of Marcel’s original ideas marked a change of course within the scenario of French Christian thought. Although during the 1920s and 1930s the question concerning the existence or otherwise of a ‘Christian philosophy’ was hotly debated, Marcel felt a certain distance with regard to the terms in which the problem was posed. The rigorous realist approach of neoThomism was foreign to him.86 It was during the 1930s that Marcel came up with the idea that men were living in a ‘broken world’ (monde cassé), as the title of one of his most famous plays states,87 that is, a world in which the alienation due to the obsession with technology and bureaucratic oppression was only the most apical symptom of the undisputed pre-eminence of abstract reflexivity: ‘contrary to all those who before me had approached speculation on being from purely abstract premises, I felt that this speculation – I would more willingly say research – only took on value and meaning from a kind of observation that accounted for the very situation of the world in which I found myself engaged’.88 The 1927 Metaphysical Journal and Being and Having, published in 1935, are both axed on a harsh critique of the Cartesian subject and, by extension, of the idealist credo of academic philosophy.89 Even the diaristic composition of these texts, made of notes and unsystematic entries, thus refusing the classical treatise form, is telling in this regard. The only way to escape idealism, for Marcel, consisted in ‘a kind of intra-existential transformation’ positing thought not as supreme form of objectivity but rather as a peculiar ‘mode of existence’. ‘In this regard,’ he said, ‘certain kinds of Cartesianism, and above all some sorts of Fichteanism, seem to be the most serious errors of which any metaphysics has been guilty.’90 In a conference held in 1933 at the Philosophical Society of Marseille – which, according to Gilson, was for Marcel what the ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’91 had been for Bergson – he addressed the problem of the ‘ontological mystery’ of existence by considering concrete examples, drawn from the ordinary lives of an employee of the metropolitan transit authority or of a health-care specialist. He distinguished life reduced to a sum of biological and social functions, to a set of ‘problems’, and life considered as a ‘mystery’, in its relation to being understood as ‘what resists … an exhaustive analysis of the data of experience’.92 Mystery, Marcel famously claimed, was precisely ‘a problem that encroaches upon its own data, that invades the data and thereby transcends itself into a simple problem’.93 Marcel’s insistence on the ‘ontological exigency’ of the human being, a dimension neglected by contemporary Cartesianism, was surely at odds with Brunschvicg’s critical idealism. Whereas Marcel emphasised as an irreducible given the bodily ‘participation’ of the existence to being, Brunschvicg stressed the intellectual capacity of the subject to detach himself from the immediate given of experience, society or religion.94 Marcel then quoted a remark by Maritain, according to whom there was nothing easier for a philosopher than to yield to the sense of tragedy, only to reverse it: for him, on the contrary, it seemed that philosophy naturally inclined ‘towards realms where the tragic dimension … has simply disappeared, evaporated by its contact with abstract thought. This can be verified in the thought of many contemporary idealists.’95 The reference to Brunschvicg is patent. Marcel had first met Brunschvicg during the Sunday meetings at Xavier Léon’s home in Rue des Mathurins,96 but they soon came

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into a conflict around religious issues that spanned two decades. Already in a 1921 session of the Société française de philosophie Marcel had accused Brunschvicg of ‘metaphysical opportunism’, meaning that his refusal to admit the existence of different levels of experience and thought – where metaphysical experience is radically other from the strictly philosophical/cognitive one – amounted to a simple ‘transposition’ of pragmatism, in that philosophy is reduced to a mere clarification of the intellectual processes of particular domains. He also mocked Brunschvicg’s identification of intellectual joy with the satisfaction aroused by the way in which Einstein’s general relativity accounts for the anomalies in the orbit of Mercury.97 Another clash took place in 1928, at two points: first, at a session of the Union pour la vérité, on the topic of the ‘religion of the philosopher’;98 then, during the session of the Société française de philosophie on the ‘Quarrel of Atheism’, in March. The title of this latter session, recalling the dispute over Fichte’s alleged atheism,99 was suggested by Xavier Léon, who, the year before Brunschvicg outlined to him the main arguments of the Progrès de la conscience, remarked, ‘This is the quarrel of atheism!’100 On that occasion, Brunschvicg restated his radical alternative between sociology and philosophy, between ‘the God of an ethnic tradition’ and ‘the God of autonomous reflection’.101 But for Marcel this alternative was the result of an arbitrary reconstruction of the history of European philosophy, which manipulated at will the doctrines of the great thinkers and belittled fundamental authors like Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard or Nietzsche. Marcel took issue with the progressive character of the Brunschvicgian narrative, which claimed the right to judge what was living and what was dead in history. The nobility of thought did not consist only in dealing with scientific truth but also, and more primordially, in facing the ‘mystery’ of existence, the spiritual dimension of faith, prayer and suffering. The methodical procedures of the scientific realm are impersonal, and as such cannot be applied to religious experience. The God of the scientists was ultimately an ‘abstract fiction’.102 In 1929, Marcel wrote an article for the Nouvelle revue française in which he exposed Brunschvicg’s ‘lack of spirituality’, his lack of ‘profound aesthetic culture’ and his ignorance about ‘religious things’,103 denouncing in particular the way in which the latter had resulted in him manipulating the meaning of the word ‘God’, bestowing on it a sense that was different from that of the common language.104 In other terms, Brunschvicg had emptied the notion of God of its authentic spirituality. But Brunschvicg, in the articles on De la vraie et de la fausse conversion (1930–2), contested precisely that God – or better, the spirituality that the idea of God conveys – was something that could be perceived and defined unanimously as if it was a material object, like a table.105 It was the only way, for him, to avoid any naïve and pre-critical anthropomorphic personification of God, to extract from its notion its authentic ideal value.106 Brunschvicg despised Marcel’s ‘easy eloquence’ and ‘empty’ preachy tone, as well as his judgemental attitude. ‘A philosopher,’ he had already told him at the 1921 session, ‘is free to create ontological systems without caring about positive verification, just to satisfy his own ideal of aesthetical construction.’ But such systems were precisely that, aesthetical artefacts.107 Marcel’s vehement attack was all the more biting in that he opposed Brunschvicg’s aridity to the true religious heart of his mentors Ravaisson, Lachelier and Boutroux.108

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The final showdown was at the ninth International Congress of Philosophy, held in Paris in August 1937, where Marcel gave a lecture on ‘The Transcendent as Metaproblematic’. According to Marcel himself, that period marked the apex and the full development of his intellectual life.109 In his intervention, he described the ‘metaproblematic’ posed by the possibility of one’s own inexistence as ‘the highest form of wisdom …, the expression, not so much thought as lived, of an ultimate truth’.110 ‘The absolute despair to which my mortal condition beckons me,’ Marcel observed, ‘remains a permanent temptation.’111 The ensuing exchange with Brunschvicg was destined to become quite famous and paradigmatic of a generational, as well as intellectual, clash. Here is how Lévinas reported it: ‘Gabriel Marcel launched a fiery attack on those thinkers “deprived of any gift of inner life”, blind to God, blind to death. At which point Brunschvicg, still with the air of having no air, said: “I think that the death of Léon Brunschvicg preoccupies Léon Brunschvicg less than the death of Gabriel Marcel preoccupies Gabriel Marcel”.’112 However, Lévinas omits Marcel’s final reply, where he made clear that he cared not so much for his own death as for the death of his beloved ones, for the death of the Other.113 In other words, while for Marcel philosophy consisted in confronting death, Brunschvicg was not concerned by the fate of the ‘phenomenal being’ that bore his name, a stance that appeared to Marcel as literally ‘inhuman’. As Brunschvicg had already said in 1922 in another context, Life biologically defined is a semblance of freshness, of novelty, but in a circular rhythm that inevitably alternates exaltation with depression, birth and growth with decadence and death, condemning its prophet to the despair of the eternal recurrence. Freedom without the reflection capable of prescribing progress towards a defined goal, freedom without autonomy, is the fatality of instinct, which has the appearance of independence only because it is blind and still.114

In a letter to Marcel, Maritain would take his side against Brunschvicg, claiming that in the doctrine of the latter the mind took the role that once belonged to God, and even that Brunschvicg himself wanted to play God.115 But later in his life, after re-reading Brunschvicg’s last works and hearing reports about his last years in exile, Marcel somehow came to appreciate the ethical stance of the old idealist, praising his lack of sectarianism and finally admitting that, although in terms he could not share, the religious concerns of the late Brunschvicg were authentic.116 Yet Marcel was somewhat right in claiming that, from his point of view, Brunschvicg’s idealism was abstract or that, as he said, had no ‘human significance’.117 Of course, Brunschvicg did not deny the presence of death and suffering casting their shadow on the pure activity of the mind. What he contested was not only that death could have the last word, emptying the deeds of men of their meaningfulness, but also that death was something important at all. From his perspective, ageing and death are of course a ‘drama’, but only for the psychological or organic life: ‘materially, the mind is nothing’.118 That an organism goes through a phase of growth and then a phase of decadence is in the facts. It is a process pertaining to psychology or, in its minimal terms, to biology, not to philosophy or science. A scientist that worries about his own

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ego and the survival of his name and work is a scientist who gives up his own raison d’être, and the same applies to a philosopher. In fact, ‘the spiritual life looks beyond the alternative between life and death’, to a ‘superior sphere’ which is that of the intellectual and transhistorical ‘community’ of minds. This is why science and philosophy require a ‘perpetual conversion to the order of thought and truth’ and a ‘perpetual victory over the order of life and instinct’.119 The philosophical stance disclosed by such a conversion is perfectly exemplified by the last words of Poincaré’s The Value of Science, which Brunschvicg certainly shared wholeheartedly: All that is not thought is pure nothingness; since we can think only thoughts and all the words we use to speak of things can express only thoughts, to say there is something other than thought, is therefore an affirmation which can have no meaning. And yet … geologic history shows us that life is only a short episode between two eternities of death, and that, even in this episode, conscious thought has lasted and will last only a moment. Thought is only a glimmer in the midst of a long night. But it is this glimmer which is everything.120

This is a strange kind of, so to speak, ‘intellectualist existentialism’, according to which, if a supersensible realm, a life beyond life, exists it can only consist in the spiritual communion of minds, of all the ‘living and active mirrors [miroirs vivants actifs]’. In a way, Brunschvicg reprises the ancient doctrines of the common reason, of the stoic and Eraclitean vision of logos not only as the higher form of knowledge but also as the active principle of the world or internal law of the cosmos. Brunschvicg himself suggests that analogies could be established with Augustin’s and Malebranche’s meditations on the incipit of the Gospel of John. The gap between the other and me disappears if we envisage this relationship not from the perspective of an existential mystery, of a connection between singularities, but from the point of view of our common reason, of the ‘immaterial link’ that allows for the reciprocity of our intellects.121 Of course, as a raw fact, life is not the opposite of death. Biologically speaking, it is instead the set of forces leading us to death. However, we can emancipate ourselves by rediscovering our ‘non-temporal root’, the ‘dignity of our thought’.122 Brunschvicg attaches thus a feeling of eternity to the intelligible realm of scientific laws and concepts. In fact, the scientific image of the world allows us to transcend the relativistic and subjectivist perspective that we adopt as perishable individuals. This overcoming of individuality is indeed a Spinozian lesson, amounting to the passage from the second to the third form of knowledge. ‘The secret of Spinoza’s life,’ Brunschvicg wrote, ‘lies in the entirely interior and universal conception of truth by which man, crossing the limits of his individuality, becomes deeper until he reaches the root of being.’123 And Spinozian echoes can be detected in the final pages of a 1939 book, La raison et la religion, in a long passage that is worth quoting in full as it illustrates perspicuously Brunschvicg’s thesis: It is no longer a question of man escaping the human condition. The feeling of our inner eternity does not prevent the individual from dying, any more than the intelligence of the astronomic sun prevents the scientist from seeing the

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appearances of the sensible sun. However, just as the system of the world became true from the day thought succeeded in detaching itself from its biological centre, and settled in the sun, so it has happened that, from the life which flees with time, thought has brought forth an order of time which is not lost in the instant of the present, which allows us to integrate into our consciousness all those positive values that emerge from the experience of the past, those very values that our reflective action helps to determine and create for the future. … By the dignity of our thought we understand the universe that crushes us; we dominate the time that carries us away; we are more than a person as soon as we are able to go back to the source of what in our own eyes constitutes us as a person … Thus, beyond all the circumstances of detail, all the contingent vicissitudes, which tend to divide men, to divide man himself, the progress of our reflection discovers within our own intimacy a focal point where intelligence and love appear in the radical purity of their light. … It is necessary not to give up on the generous effort, indivisibly speculative and practical, which brings humanity closer to the idea that it has formed of itself.124

The European mind In December 1939, two months after the Nazi invasion of Poland, Brunschvicg began his last course at the Sorbonne before retiring in June 1940125 and being forced into a demeaning exile in southern France. The subject of the lectures – published posthumously in 1947 – was L’esprit éuropéen. There, Brunschvicg claimed that Europe was not a geographical expression but rather a telos, an infinite task which consisted in assuring the right to freedom of thought and scientific research against dogmatic beliefs, authoritarianism and obscurantism.126 This meant that the European mind was not a static and eternal essence; quite the contrary, it had a history and was constantly in the making. In order to discern what was properly European and what on the contrary belonged to other civilisations, Brunschvicg availed himself once again of the researches of LévyBruhl, who had presented ‘primitive mentalities’ as characterised by animistic and prelogical conceptions. Instead of merely contrasting the primitive mythological thinking to an alleged European rationalism, Brunschvicg drew from Lévy-Bruhl the following moral: of course, Europe’s vocation lies in achieving the progressive emancipation of the mind and in the free search for truth; however, in doing so, Europe is regularly confronted with the remnants or the resurgence of superstition and dogmatism within its own culture: ‘The will to progress is just a part of the spiritual heritage that is handed down through generations. We will have to reckon also with the instinct of tradition, insofar as this instinct is rooted in the very form of language on which the philosopher … is forced to rely to express and convey new ideas.’127 This permanent attitude of selfcriticism was the distinctive trait of the European mind and the only resource it had against the return of violence and barbarism. This is why the history of Europe was for Brunschvicg a history of recurring crises, on the model of the late seventeenth-century

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culture analysed by Brunschvicg’s former colleague Paul Hazard (1878–1944) in his great 1935 book.128 The Crisis of the European Mind, which focused on the years 1680 to 1715, was met favourably by Brunschvicg, not only because Hazard quoted him often but because it showed that the threshold of modernity had been crossed by a cohort of authors that came before the thinkers of the Enlightenment and built on the breakthroughs of noble fathers like Bacon, Descartes or Spinoza: their names were Bayle, Toland, Simon, Bossuet, Leibniz, Fontenelle, Locke, Mandeville, Pope, Vico or Voltaire But more than that, Hazard’s erudite and passionate book was a eulogy of Europe, of this ‘living paradox, something at once rigid and fluctuating’, of its misery and its greatness: Europe is ‘a spirit that is for ever seeking’, tormented by an ‘unending quest’ for truth and happiness: ‘No sooner does she make some discovery that seems to her to satisfy her twofold need, than she suspects, nay, she knows, that what she grasps, all too precariously, is, after all, but a temporary, an imperfect thing?’129 Crisis is thus not an accident but a permanent clinical state of the European spirit. Such a perennial self-questioning is as destructive as it is creative and productive: ‘Europe has no taste for ruins’, as Hazard put it. Those who criticised and deconstructed claimed ‘they were only pulling down the old edifice to replace it with a new one, whereof they had drawn the plans, laid the foundations and built the walls; and that, even while the work of demolition had actually been going on. Pull down, and at the same time build up, that was the order of the day’.130 Hazard envisaged ‘la conscience européenne’ as a whole, in both its rational and imaginative powers, in both its material and cultural vicissitudes.131 Brunschvicg, on the contrary, focused only on the spiritual side of the matter, on ‘l’esprit européen’, and from Pythagoras to himself, the narrative that Brunschvicg deployed in front of his students was always the same. There had been crises in the passage from Plato to Aristotle, in the shift from the scholastics to Montaigne and Descartes, in the transition from Hume to Kant and Fichte or, again, in the progress from Comte to Bergson. These were historical as well as spiritual turning points. A further crisis, however, the most tragic ever, was in the offing. The Second World War, the event that imposed a new assessment of the continental spiritual legacy, was not a mere change in the relationships of power between the European states, a phenomenon that affected only their frontiers: ‘What is at stake is the immediate future of a civilisation that surely is not only European, but which has acquired in Europe the most clear and exact awareness of itself.’132 The history of the European mind traced the progress from the ingenuous belief in sensible experience and revealed truth to the full constitution of experimental science, which alone disclosed the realm of ‘true spirituality’, a formula, Brunschvicg acknowledged, that sounded like a ‘tragic paradox’ in wartime, that is, in a time when the unbridled technological spree – the most obscene perversion of the true vocation of science – threatened human existence on the continent. The war had been triggered and propelled by the subordination of scientific knowledge to the ‘organic needs’ and the ‘worst instincts of our nature’. As he had already explained to Marcel during the quarrel about atheism, the ‘tragedy of man’ was determined by ‘the interference of the three levels of matter, life and spirit, under the threat of the collective “stupidity”, of puerile regression and

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irreparable death’133 – surely a poor explanation if applied to the new context. Yet, accordingly, Brunschvicg invoked a return to the virtues of disinterest and idealism that characterised the grand march of science. Only thus it was possible to become aware ‘of the rights and duties of the intelligence, which render it impossible for us to fall below the human level’.134 If the European culture is the ensemble of means that humanity has designed to make life on this planet more tolerable, peaceful and just,135 then science pertains to morality: it spiritualises us; it compels us to widen the horizon of our generosity, to renounce egoism and self-absorption – briefly, it makes us true European men. Brunschvicg’s portrayal of the European mind is not devoid of rhetoric and naiveties. For example, it never occurs to him that, just as the condemnation of scientific rationality as inherently evil and exploitative is an unwarranted overstatement, the celebration of its spiritual and ethical function might be ill-founded and simplistic as well. Furthermore, compared to other great meditations on the idea of Europe, that of Brunschvicg is perhaps a little too self-cherishing, at least in the last lessons, where as usual Brunschvicg sings the praises of the French spiritualist tradition. In a dismissive and sarcastic review published in the Annales, Lucien Febvre claimed that Brunschvicg’s work was ultimately one of the last ‘masterpieces of the old University’, one last lesson from a dying generation – a generation raised on literature, properly formed by teachers of which it was eager to follow the steps, and, as such, completely incapable of comprehending the concrete dynamics of historical change.136 ‘Excellent’ and ‘cultivated’ people like Brunschvicg were exegetes of philosophical doctrines or scientific theories, enclosed ‘in the enchanted circle of their thoughts and their specialties’, surely not interpreters of the actual world.137 They were ‘technicians of philosophy’ who cannot believe in the existence of different kinds of peoples, animated by other concerns.138 Notions like ‘Europe’ or ‘esprit’ could only have a well-defined meaning within their own theoretical speculation, but for a historian they were hardly clear or self-evident.139 This is why works like Brunschvicg’s course were of no use or interest for the historian.140 The problem, for Febvre, was not that Brunschvicg was what he was, namely a philosopher, but that he projected onto the actual movement of history his own needs for axiological categorisation. Speaking from the heights of an ‘ideological Jungfrau’,141 abstract theoreticians like him despised the more modest and concrete work of those people – the historians – who deal with the real world, with the realm of what for Brunschvicg was but naïve raw experience, trying to account for its transformations in detail and outside the comfort zone of big speculative narratives.142 Nevertheless, L’esprit européen deserves to be mentioned among other classic investigations of the essence of European culture. For example, it can be read alongside the reflections on the crisis of the mind formulated in 1919 by Valéry, who wondered whether Europe, regarded as ‘the elect portion of the terrestrial globe, the pearl of the sphere, the brain of a vast body’, was doomed to become just ‘a little promontory on the continent of Asia’.143 It should be reminded, in fact, that Valéry and Brunschvicg shared a common engagement in the ‘Entretiens’, the conferences organised by the League of Nations around topical subjects (the 1933 conference, chaired by Valéry, where Brunschvicg anticipated the themes of his course, was devoted precisely to the future of the European spirit144). One can read also the beautiful description of

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European civilisation provided in a 1922 lecture on ‘The European’, and find the same narrative of our civilisation as the concentration in a small geographical area of three major influences, that is, the Greek, the Roman and the Christian, corresponding to the virtues of science, of right and political organisation, and of universalism and reflexivity, respectively.145 In the years preceding the Second World War, Valéry himself started to sense more acutely the insurgence of a dramatic crisis: Europe, he thought, was on the eve of a terrible ‘disturbance’, due to a reaction that was taking place against the dialogue between the nations: ‘What we once tried to unite, what seemed to be tending to unification …, seems today to be splitting up, and if this movement becomes more pronounced it may well make the men of this continent less and less intelligible to each other’.146 But we can also compare Brunschvicg’s lectures to the meditations on Europe developed a few years before by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). Brunschvicg’s relationship with the father of phenomenology is a fascinating but obscure chapter. Many scholars have suggested that Brunschvicg’s philosophy contributed to creating a favourable climate for the reception of phenomenology in France,147 sensitising young students to the problematic relation between subjective operations and scientific objectivity.148 Still, one should restrain from indulging in easy analogies. It is true that Husserl delivered his 1929 lectures in the Amphithéâtre Descartes of the Sorbonne, under the aegis of the Académie française, the Institut d’études germaniques and the Société française de philosophie.149 However, Jan Patočka (1907–1977) relates that ‘the great teachers of the Sorbonne’, such as Brunschvicg, Bréhier and Gilson, did not attend the conferences.150 When the Paris lectures appeared in French, in 1931, translated by Levinas and Gabrielle Peiffer, they were negatively reviewed in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale and, by Bréhier, in the Revue philosophique.151 Phenomenology was surely more popular among young students than the old guard. The little that Brunschvicg knew about phenomenology was due to what his friends told him. Besides these two reviews, he had certainly read the 1911 Victor Delbos’s conference on the first volume of the Logical Investigations, where Husserl was presented as a ‘logicist’ thinker inquiring into ‘the possibility of theory and of deductive unity’ and seeking a grand ‘theory of theories’.152 Delbos, who complained about Husserl’s abstruse and difficult style, thus focused more on his critique of psychologism, outlined in the first volume, than on the attempts to lay out his proper phenomenological project.153 It is not known if Brunschvicg had read the writings published in the 1920s by Lev Shestov (1866–1938), Jean Héring (1890–1966) or Bernard Groethuysen (1880–1946).154 Perhaps – one may speculate – his acquaintance with Scheler and Koyré may have provided him with some insights, which however might have made him even more suspicious, given Scheler’s and Koyré’s tendency to connect phenomenology and Bergsonism. Surely, though, he was aware of the content of the 1928–9 lectures of Georges Gurvitch (1894–1965) at the Sorbonne on the recent trends in German philosophy. Furthermore, we know that he read and praised in a report Levinas’s dissertation on The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (1930).155 As we can see from the preface he wrote to the published version of Gurvitch’s lectures, though, while appreciating the revitalisation of the Cartesian legacy, he

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completely failed to understand Husserl’s method, comparing it to the models of Renouvier and Hamelin: The link between phenomenology and Renouvier’s phenomenalism greatly exceeds the similarity in doctrinal vocabulary: it was the same reaction against Kantian criticism, the same movement to rejoin, beyond Hume, Aristotle, in order to find in his ‘exigencies of pure logic’ support for resisting psychologism and its attempts or threats on subjectivity. The relationship is accentuated with the Éléments principaux de la représentation: Hamelin clings to an ontology of the phenomenon and, despite a Hegelian manner of presentation, the Wesensschau of categories constitutes the eminent merit of the work.156

Brunschvicg grasped an essential aspect: that phenomenology is precisely a method, and not a doctrine, which explains why in Husserl the esprit de finesse prevails over the esprit de système.157 Still, he mistrusted Husserl’s notions of ‘intuition of essence’ (Wesensschau) or ‘eidetic intuition’ (eidetische Anschauung), which were incompatible with his own philosophy of reflection and which he actually did not have the tools to understand.158 Elsewhere, in an article written in 1940 but published only posthumously, Brunschvicg even said that, in his early works (meaning probably the Logical Investigations reviewed by Delbos), Husserl had tried to establish the existence of ‘essences situated in a perfectly intelligible world, completely independent from the human mind, Platonic ideas, or better, caricatures of the Platonic ideas’.159 This is why in the course on L’esprit européen he defended his historical approach against the phenomenological intuition, which in his eyes might represent a gateway for ‘indulgences and prejudices’.160 The diachronic method of history was more reliable, for him, than any eidetic variation. And this was all the more true since the ‘realism’ that was connected to the ‘intuition of essences’ paved the way for the ‘ “problematic and metaproblematic” fantasies of existential philosophy’ (the reference to Marcel is explicit).161 One can only speculate whether Brunschvicg knew about Husserl’s Vienna and Prague lectures of 1935. However, he likely attended the public reading of the letter that Husserl, who was denied participation in the German delegation due to his Jewish origins,162 had sent to the 1934 International Congress of Philosophy held in Prague. There, Husserl described philosophy as the organ of a new mode of historical existence for humanity (‘das Organ eines neuartigen historischen Daseins der Menschheit’), based on the ‘autonomy’ provided by ‘scientific responsibility’. In this international ideal lay the meaning of the European humanity and culture (Kultur).163 Europe embodied thus an ‘infinite [Unendlichen liegende] idea’, that of a ‘general community’ governed by ‘the spirit of autonomous reason’.164 As Husserl would better articulate in the Vienna Lecture, far from having a purely geographical meaning, the name ‘Europe’ indicated primarily a ‘spiritual form [geistliche Gestalt]’ unifying the cultural manifestations of a civilisation. Its ‘infinite task’165 consisted thus in the foundation of an over-arching episteme, which by no means could be reduced to the affirmation of a technological or purely positivistic supremacy. On the contrary, the Galilean mathematisation of nature, the advent of modern ‘objectivism’, depleting the world of its qualitative and

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‘lebensweltlich’ character, defined precisely the horizon of crisis into which modernity had plunged. For Brunschvicg, instead, the crisis was not immanent to the development of modern science but was rather triggered by the return with a vengeance of the old ‘primitive’ mentalities. He too denounced the perils of a pure logification/objectivation of science, but only in the name of a different conception of scientific reason. What objectivism neglected was for him simply intellectual constructivism, and not the grounding of science onto the lived world. Thus, Brunschvicg never tasked philosophy with reminding the different sciences of their human foundation; in his eyes, on the contrary, philosophy had rather the mission of converting humanity to the cult of impersonal intelligibility and rational verification.

Conclusion It would be difficult not to acknowledge that Brunschvicg’s historical vision of Europe was governed and oriented by a powerful teleology that at times comes across as even more single-minded than the ‘immanent teleology’166 that sustained Husserl’s conceptualisation of the asymptotic goal of philosophy and of the ‘West’s mission for humanity’.167 Husserl entrusted transcendental phenomenology with the task of recovering the authentic rationalism qua ‘functioning brain’ of European culture.168 There was only a remedy to the uneasiness of the contemporary sciences, reduced to the naivety of modern objectivism: a thorough reflection on the humanistic meaningfulness of their enterprise, the sense and the unity of their mission. A crucial passage is worth quoting that perfectly exemplifies Husserl’s perspective: The spirit, and indeed only the spirit, exists in itself and for itself, is self-sufficient; and in its self-sufficiency, and only in this way, it can be treated truly rationally, truly and from the ground up scientifically. As for nature, however, in its naturalscientific truth, it is only apparently self-sufficient and can only apparently be brought to itself, to rational knowledge in the natural sciences. For true nature in the sense of natural science is a product of the spirit that investigates nature and thus presupposes the science of the spirit.169

One cannot fail to hear the Fichtean undertones of these remarks, which determine a sort of proximity, despite the obvious differences, between Husserl’s and Brunschvicg’s ideas that philosophy can bring to light the immanent teleology of European culture. They were both ‘good Europeans’ who championed in different ways what Husserl called the ‘heroism of reason’, the intellectual attitude embodying the idea that ‘the spirit alone is immortal’ and fearing not the prospect of an ‘infinite struggle’.170 In Brunschvicg we can find the same teleological assumption that oriented Husserl’s and Valéry’s ruminations, namely, as Jacques Derrida would have said, the idea of Europe as a ‘universal heading’ or example for all the peoples of the world. The same logic that Derrida detected in Hegel, Valéry, Husserl and Heidegger applied to Brunschvicg: the discourse on tradition, the ‘old discourse about Europe, a discourse at once exemplary and exemplarist, was already a traditional discourse of modernity’.171

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In particular, both Brunschvicg and Husserl’s visions, despite the different theoretical quality of their works, were governed by the theme of a ‘transcendental teleology’ and a ‘transcendental community, the subjectivity of a “we” for which Europe would be at once the name and the exemplary figure’.172 But, rhetorical emphasis aside, a difference remained: while Brunschvicg wrote of a Progrès, Husserl was drawn to reflect upon a Crisis, which means that a different evaluation of the ‘mathematisation’ of nature was at stake, an assessment that depended on the different contexts in which Brunschvicg and Husserl lived and worked and on their divergent theoretical enterprises. Of course, one may say that, from an epochal point of view, they were almost spiritual neighbours in the tormented condominium of Europe. Still, one world war was still to come, and the national genius loci still mattered a lot. It is not by chance that many of Brunschvicg’s disciples, who travelled to Germany in the 1930s and saw what was brewing beyond the Rhine, like, for example, Raymond Aron, were appalled by the abstractness of their teacher’s conception of history. It would be easy to say that Brunschvicg’s teleological conception of history was culturally determined through and through, a magnificent instance of the Third Republic teleology of progress (which, incidentally, already appeared as ivory tower-esque to many theorists of the fin-de-siècle decadence). Yet, whether or not it was a socially acquired intellectual habitus, a certain optimism and faith in the scientific and intellectual resources of the European culture seemed to be inherent to Brunschvicg’s psychological mindset – an attitude that never abandoned him even in the last turbulent years of exile.

Epilogue

Il y a un art de vivre, et une science de mourir. Art qui demeure nécessairement inachevé, science qui trouvera inévitablement son accomplissement.1

Exodus During the Belle Époque, Aix-les-Bains was a renowned holiday destination, famous throughout Europe for its thermal baths. For Brunschvicg, on the contrary, this small commune on the shores of the Lac du Bourget, in the department of Savoie, was the last stop on a demeaning exile. Gravely ill, he was treated at the local hospital, where he died ‘in full consciousness’ on 18 January 1944.2 There is a striking opposition between the final days of Brunschvicg and those of Bergson, who also had Jewish origins. They were of course equally shattered by what was happening: ‘reality has gone beyond what the darkest fantasy could have imagined. We have reached the bottom of the abyss’, Bergson wrote to Brunschvicg on 31 July 1940.3 However, the former died peacefully in 1941, in his apartment at 47 boulevard de Beauséjour in Paris, mourned by his numerous acolytes, who went on to fabricate a number of legends on his account (e.g. that he had chosen to wear the yellow star on the jacket anyway despite a special dispensation from the Vichy authorities, although such a requirement was actually imposed in France only after his death).4 Brunschvicg, instead, faced the brutality of both exile and oblivion. When the news spread of his passing, the climate was such that only the Heideggerian resistant Jean Beaufret (1907– 1982) dared to write an obituary, which appeared in the Lyonnais journal Confluences.5 Beaufret attempted to present Brunschvicg in a different light, making him a philosopher of the twentieth century by pitting his thought against the decadent intellectual milieu of the turn of the century, when ‘eminent teachers’ used to blather abstractly, and as if authorised by a ‘royal prerogative’, about ‘the laws of Knowledge, the conditions of Truth, the canons of Reasoning’.6 Brunschvicg was the only one to understand that such a patronising attitude was misplaced, and that the history of science was to offer the necessary supplement of mediation and meditation to the philosopher. Beaufret even tried to rectify the prejudice of attributing to Brunschvicg a panmathematism

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that disqualified any other order of experience: before being a branch of knowledge, science was a model in that it was a practice of self-criticism and self-transcendence, a refusal of the shackles fastened by common-sensical reasoning, self-centred biases and prejudices of all sorts, no matter the field, whether science, philosophy, politics, art, ethics or spirituality.7 Lest it be wrongly presumed that Brunschvicg’s intellectualism depleted life of its strictly existential dimension, Beaufret remembered that for him a rational understanding of the world was the only key to a proper appraisal of life, death, love, responsibility and social passions.8 Critical idealism was thus an uncompromising philosophy, rejecting any ‘factitious conciliation’, any ‘harmony of circumstance’, whose legacy, in a period of war, was for the resistant Beaufret more precious than ever.9 We are indebted to François Chaubet for a detailed account of Brunschvicg’s exile years.10 In September 1940, while the Nazis were busy looting their place in Paris and confiscating their archives,11 the Brunschvicgs reached Aix-en-Provence, where one of their sons worked as State’s attorney. The anti-Jewish legislation of October 1940 and July 1941, signed by General Pétain and depriving the Jews of their citizenship and, consequently, of their right to hold public functions, enormously afflicted Brunschvicg: ‘I have no courage left today’, he wrote to Jankélévitch.12 Despite the trauma of the exodus, life in the town of Cézanne was on the whole comfortable. The Brunschvicgs rented an apartment at the second floor of a hotel and tried to rebuild a normal daily life. Léon revisited classic readings, like Goethe’s Faust or Cervantes’ Don Quixote, studied attentively the volumes of Lalande’s Vocabulaire and read contemporary novels. Furthermore, he managed to maintain contacts with a network of close friends, including Wahl, Jankélévitch, Bachelard, Parodi, Valéry, Blondel, Canguilhem, Koyré, Paul Mouy (1888–1946), Gaston Berger (1896–1960), the State administrator and historian Roger Nathan (1897–1966), Pierre Mesnard (1900–1969), Jean Hyppolite (1907–1968) and Henri Gouhier (1898–1994). Chaubet shows very vividly Brunschvicg’s effort to keep in touch with his friends and stay aware of the changes in the Parisian philosophical scene. We know that he read with enthusiasm the works of Albert Lautman (1908–1944) and saluted the advent of a new generation of philosopher-mathematicians inspired by his works, such as Jules Vuillemin (1920–2001) and Gilles Gaston Granger (1920–2016). It was during this time, after buying an edition of Bayle’s Dictionnaire, that he came up with the idea of writing a fresco of the intellectual landscape of the late seventeenth century, ‘made more evocative’, as he said to his daughter Adrienne, who had escaped to the United Kingdom, ‘by a comparison with Montaigne’. Indeed, Brunschvicg had originally thought about delivering a course on the author of the Essays for the academic year 1940–1. Unable to do that, he decided to give shape to his meditations with what became the last book published during his lifetime, Descartes et Pascal lecteurs de Montaigne, completed in May 1941 and released in 1942 by the Swiss publisher La Baconnière. In 1942 Brunschvicg also re-read and commented on a diary he kept in 1892 for Élie Halévy, entering into a diachronic dialogue with his younger self and adding a more dramatic (but not pathetic) flavour to his early impressions. In June 1892, for example, he had noted: ‘astonishment reigns supreme in my life’. In June 1942 he commented thus: ‘Once at the mediocrity of the [provincial] milieu, now at the horror of inhumanity.’13 And two months later, on 20 August, he reinforced

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the message: ‘The tragic spectacle of humanity in the twentieth century: the more the summit rises, the more the mass sinks and threatens to capsize everything.’14 In November 1942, the Nazis and the fascists invaded the zone libre. The Brunschvicgs were once again forced to flee, adopting the false identities of Monsieur Brun and Madame Léger, in a condition of prostration and separation aggravated by Léon’s progressing disease. A quote by Fénelon, jotted down in one of Brunschvicg’s notebooks, perfectly sums up his mood: ‘The world seems like a bad comedy that will disappear in a matter of hours.’ Despite the understandable moments of discouragement, Brunschvicg tried to keep his intellectual morale high. He always preserved, in a manner that may at times appear forced, his idealistic attitude, finding solace in the certainty that, eventually, the sense of truth will prevail, that the chain of scientific progress cannot be broken. In spite of everything, perfect happiness still consisted for him in the Platonic ideal of the knowledge of truth. When the writer Jean Schlumberger (1877–1968) of the Nouvelle Revue française visited Brunschvicg in Provence, he was appalled by the philosopher’s tendency to ‘transpose everything into a sort of unreality’, by his ‘wisdom beyond any bitterness’. Jankélévitch recounted how much he was detached with regard to himself and to the surrounding events. This was not a manifestation of aristocratic indifference – Brunschvicg was indeed deeply anguished, as we have seen – but rather a Spinozian preference for the intelligere over the turmoil of sadness and anger. He was worried for his young students, rather than for his old and dying self: ‘The drama is in itself, not in me.’ And he often stated: ‘I don’t see myself as particularly interesting in any respect.’15 Descartes and Pascal lecteurs de Montaigne and Héritage de mots, heritage d’idées testifies to this unbending belief that seemed to be unable to draw the necessary conclusions from the lessons of history. After all, it was too much to ask a 74-year-old man to change the visions that had guided him throughout his life. In Aix-en-Provence, the company of Montaigne was the necessary haven from the events Brunschvicg was witnessing.16 As he confessed to Wahl on 28 December 1941, ‘I continue to write in order to understand how I survive.’17 The book on Montaigne, Descartes and Pascal is a fascinating and erudite oeuvre, written in a plain scholarly and pedagogical register. Yet it is easy to see how the tragic situation that Brunschvicg was enduring, the spectacle of a world on the verge of self-destruction, reflected into his analysis of the ‘drama’18 of modernity, where the quest for knowledge and rigour coexisted with – or stemmed from – the experience of doubt, fragility and precariousness. As Leterre brilliantly put it, modernity began for Brunschvicg precisely with this ‘unexpected alliance between science and uncertainty’.19 Descartes et Pascal lecteurs de Montaigne brought to the fore precisely this restlessness of modern rationalism and problematised the perhaps too optimistic and linear tone of Brunschvicg’s earlier accounts of seventeenth-century thought. This translated into a deeper attention to the moment of Montaigne, which was analysed per se, as a beginning, and not in light of the Cartesian revolution, as a pre-modern stage. While in the Progrès de la conscience Brunschvicg had presented Montaigne as a negative and preliminary step towards the full affirmation of modern reason, here he reversed the perspective, underscoring Descartes’s debt to the author of the Essays. Montaigne was thus fully integrated at the core of the ‘triple origin’ of French thought, consisting in

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the triple affirmation ‘I doubt’ (Montaigne), ‘I know’ (Descartes), ‘I believe’ (Pascal).20 This is not to say that Brunschvicg somehow depleted the revolutionary potential of Cartesianism. Nonetheless, he acknowledged the ‘status of negativity in philosophy’,21 the fact that the ‘critique of reason’ was consubstantial with its progress. Not only, then, was the mathematical intellectualism of Descartes to be read against the background of Montaigne’s wandering rationalism, but it had to be complemented by Pascal’s more practical, ‘tactical’, even ‘positivist’22 scientific genius.23 Ultimately, Brunschvicg adopted a less triumphant tone that re-equilibrated his vision of modernity. Yet Descartes et Pascal lecteurs de Montaigne contained something more. In the eyes of Brunschvicg, reading Montaigne allowed one to grasp ‘the entire form of human condition’, which is why he was a contemporary author.24 The timeliness of his work depended on the historical context from which it stemmed. Montaigne was indeed a thinker who, locked in his tower, struggled to make sense of a world ravaged by the war of religions, facing the antinomy between reflection and action.25 Forced into exile, relegated to a position of marginality and impotence, Brunschvicg identified with Montaigne. Like the France of the sixteenth century, the times in which Brunschvicg was living his final days were ‘sick’ times, full of cruelty and deception, times where, as Montaigne famously wrote, everything was collapsing,26 where ‘the decadence of the West is consecrated’.27 However, Brunschvicg did not renounce his proverbial faith: that Montaigne and his time were followed by the advent of Descartes, Pascal and modern science was for him a reason for hope.28 Héritage de mots, heritage d’idées, drafted between 1942 and November 1943, somehow crystallised Brunschvicg’s views into short and plain, but nevertheless dense, intellectual recommendations, officially written for his niece but implicitly meant for the whole of humanity. One can find here a condensation of Brunschvicg’s major themes: the opposition between intelligence and dogmatic conceptualism, the importance of historical retrospection, the celebration of the virtues of scientific emancipation, the identification of the true human soul with the unlimited intellectual power of the Cartesian cogito, the critique of sociologism and psychologism, and so forth. However, the style and the register are completely different, far from the virtuosic historical-theoretical exercises of the past. Ill and confined in Aix-les-Bains, Brunschvicg still had the strength to celebrate the ‘dynamic virtues of immanence’, understood – as we have seen – as the capacity to closely analyse the actual life of the mind, without resorting to transcendent imaginative beings, naïve empirical postulates and abstract logical frameworks. Critical idealism was meant precisely to open up this realm of pure intelligibility, which can be partaken of by every human being. It was thus a properly humanistic and universalist thought that decried any form of individualism, such as Stirner’s and Nietzsche’s ‘transcendental egoism’, based on the ‘enjoyment of an individual self [jouissance d’un moi unique]’.29 The progress of knowledge traced an upward movement, a spiritual ascension that, despite the false steps and the failures of men, was still a possible path for Western civilisation. In a letter to the Swiss philosopher Arnold Reymond (1874–1958), the teacher of Jean Piaget, dated 17 July 1943, Brunschvicg still defended his ‘doctrine of pure immanence’ where consciousness is at every moment aware of its content, of the totality of the relations between things, and always open to a new progress.30 But this vision was

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only relatively optimistic, for someone who in his youth had been imbibed with the triumphant narrative of the Republic, had seen truth prevail over slander and racial discrimination and had witnessed the full power of the scientific spirit at work. Two world wars might not have annihilated Brunschvicg’s faith in the goodness of reason, but certainly they provided him with an acute sense of the world’s despair. His idealism became suffering, increasingly so as his appeals to the virtues of the intellect got more heartfelt and urgent. When Brunschvicg died, all his certainties had turned into precarious possibilities with all the odds stacked against them.

The existentialist patricide At this point, there is still room to ask one more question and thereby add a little coda to our story: what’s left of critical idealism in contemporary thought? Which was its legacy in subsequent generations of leading French thinkers? This book cannot end before having unpacked, although all too rapidly, this still obscure issue in its salient elements. In a letter to Jankélévitch dated 30 December 1940, Brunschvicg exhorted his former pupil not to make him feel like his epoch belonged to the past, that no one cared about him anymore: ‘The old man must figure that out for himself.’31 Unfortunately, many of his students, especially those seduced by Marxism, would not spare him reminders of such a brutal truth. His disciple Georges Politzer, for example, wrote to him in 1927 that he felt now completely estranged from the ‘official Philosophy’ Brunschvicg embodied, and this was because of a generational gap that could not be overcome.32 Despite the adherence to the French Communist Party and his closeness to thinkers like Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991), Pierre Morhange (1901–1972) and Norbert Guterman (1900–1984), with whom he edited the journals Philosophies (1924) and Esprit (1926), Politzer was in many respects a consequent disciple and reader of Brunschvicg. For example, as a fierce defender of the tradition of modern rationalism, from Descartes to Kant, he did not hesitate to chastise the new ‘scholastics’ of Bergsonism, with its ‘codified formulas’ and ‘self-triggering metaphors’.33 Politzer’s famous pamphlet La fin d’une parade philosophique: le bergsonisme, released in 1929 under the pseudonym François Arouet (the birth name of Voltaire), consisted precisely in a virulent dismissal of the doctrine of a thinker who, as Lefebvre recalled, made them ‘physically sick’.34 Indeed, Politzer had been hugely influenced by Brunschvicg since his early years in France. Born in Hungary, he had exiled himself to Paris in 1921 after the demise of Béla Kun and begun taking courses at the Sorbonne, graduating with a thesis on Kant’s schematism directed by Brunschvicg.35 These were the years when Brunschvicg was publishing L’expérience humaine et la causalité physique, and the reflective attitude towards science, especially the Einsteinian revolution, shown in the book left an indelible mark upon Politzer. His first published text, a review of a 1924 issue of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale devoted to Kant, was a celebration of the French way to Kantianism against the ‘Kantphilologie’ and the sterile neo-Kantianism of thinkers like Vaihinger, Cohen and Riehl. In the eyes of the young Politzer, in fact, Brunschvicg

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had been able to disclose the ‘true figure of Kant’, this ‘Christ of lay society’36 who preached the ‘gospel’ of the ‘practical and theoretical sovereignty of consciousness’.37 In 1924, Politzer was thus more eager to inscribe himself within a constellation that was critical of any realism or empiricism – the ideology of the dominant class – and that put an emphasis on the subjective pole and its freedom. And yet, in the space of two years, that is, in the 1926 ‘Introduction’ to the journal Esprit, Politzer came to the conclusion that the notion of a spiritual autonomy of consciousness was empty without a proper appraisal of its embeddedness within a singular existence, within what he would call ‘drama’.38 Indeed, freedom was always connected to an undetermined capacity to act within a specific context and ‘situation’.39 This ‘dramatic’ vision of human existence as a radical solitude condemned to act would be nourished by Politzer and his travelling companions with the reading of classical sources, like a Descartes reinterpreted in a revolutionary vein40 and more unorthodox references, at least with regard to the standards of French academia, like Schelling, Hegel or Nietzsche. In the ‘Introduction’, the whole of French philosophy was discarded as a hollow thought ‘without matter’, a ‘theatre’ with a ‘fixed repertoire’ that had nothing left to say.41 Revising his 1924 article, Politzer even reached the conclusion that Brunschvicg had mistaken the true meaning of Kant’s critique, which was not the discovery of a constitutive faculty, of a power of intellectual creation.42 Kant’s first Critique was instead a warning against everything that, in the theoretical domain, does not spring from a ‘contact’ with matter.43 The full assumption of the critical horizon must thus signify also the ‘death of abstraction with regard to man’.44 Ultimately, Brunschvicg’s contribution was meagre, for such a ‘local philosophy’ contained no ‘great idea’; it was just a scholarly exercise, a rereading of the Critique of Pure Reason in light of modern mathematics.45 This break with Brunschvicg was consummated in Politzer’s most famous book, the Critique des fondements de la psychologie (1928), whose influence over twentiethcentury thought has still to be fully assessed in its multidimensionality.46 Of course, Politzer implicitly retained the Brunschvicgian inspiration while addressing another kind of conceptual revolution, namely, that brought about by psychoanalysis, which was supposed to provide decisive answers to the enigma of the human life, something going beyond the mere affirmation of an ‘ego’, a ‘mind’ or a ‘spirit’.47 In fact, what was at stake with Freud and his followers was rather the first-person singular, the ‘I’ whose ‘act’ is an individual, concrete life.48 This is not to say that psychoanalysis was passively assumed. On the contrary, Politzer decried its attachment to the ‘abstract’ notion of the unconscious, which prevented such a revolutionary discipline from grasping the concrete in its full essence.49 Yet, despite the critique of the unconscious being something he had in common with Brunschvicg himself or even Alain, the perspective from which Politzer looked at things was now entirely different. His existentialist friends, equally in search for a philosophy of the concrete, were more radical in staging the patricide. ‘Mr. Brunschvicg is perhaps a man of worth, but for me = zero.’50 This is how a young Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) spoke of her thesis advisor in a notebook of 1927 – a harsh put-down that perfectly sums up the feeling of many students of her circle towards their illustrious professor: Monsieur Brunschvicg was perhaps a nice person, erudite and a man of good faith, but there was nothing to gain from him or his thought. Initially, however, the Castor was attracted to

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Brunschvicg’s critical idealism, at the time when she started to take a serious interest in philosophy and read Bergson, Plato, Schopenhauer, Leibniz, Hamelin and Nietzsche.51 She eventually obtained her diploma with a dissertation on Leibniz’s notion of concept, a topic suggested by Brunschvicg himself,52 but rapidly became dissatisfied with the repetitiveness of her supervisor’s teachings and the shortcomings of his philosophy.53 She recalled that Brunschvicg taught them about the progress of science but not about ‘the adventure of humanity’: ‘The subjective idealism to which I was now giving my allegiance deprived the world of its solidity and originality.’54 This dismissal of idealism would find a literary manifesto in her first collection of short stories When the Things of the Spirit Come First, written between 1935 and 1937 but published only in 1979. De Beavuoir said about this book that it was meant to express her ‘conversion to the real world’,55 her rebuttal of the ‘bad faith’ of the old spiritualism.56 Written before meeting Sartre and under the influence of the literature of the Nouvelle Revue française, this collection gathered histories of women who are each ‘a living incarnation of the philosophy of the spirit that the young Beauvoir studied, at times accepted, and ultimately rejected’. Accordingly, When the Things of the Spirit Come First could be understood as ‘the fictional equivalent of Paul Nizan’s essay The Watchdogs’. As Eleanore Holveck writes, ‘Beauvoir constructs her critique of Brunschvicg and other idealist philosophers in the voices of women who apply philosophy to their daily lives.’57 Her lifetime sentimental and intellectual partner Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) undertook a similar transformation, but his distaste for the academic idealism ripened earlier and perhaps more violently. A proof of this is his choice of thesis supervisor: unlike the Castor, Sartre wrote a thesis under the philosopher-psychologist Henri Delacroix (1873–1937), who was famous for his psychological studies of religious and mystical experiences.58 Furthermore, Sartre had been a pupil at the lycée Henri-IV of Alain, who embodied a philosophical posture and a style that were distant from the academic grandiloquence of Brunschvicg. Inevitably, as a student at the Sorbonne from 1924 to 1927, he followed Brunschvicg’s courses and even presented a paper on Nietzsche at one of his seminars, declaring that the author of the Zarathustra was not a poet but a full-blown philosopher.59 However, his intellectual path had already oriented him towards positions that were incompatible with Brunschvicg’s intellectualism and, more generally, with the philosophical climate of the Third Republic: ‘For us, all these names are dead and the liquidation has taken place painlessly and noiselessly. We have been brought up otherwise.’60 The Diplôme d’Études Supérieures, directed by Delacroix and defended in 1927, was the dawn of such an emancipation. Entitled ‘L’image dans la vie psychologique: rôle et nature’, it formed the rough bulk of Sartre’s early philosophical works, notably the essay on the Imagination (1936), written at the request of Delacroix, and the book on the Imaginary (1940). There, Sartre outlined in fact the notion of a non-substantial, spontaneous and creative subjectivity that, by the end of the 1930s and after the discovery of phenomenology, would be endowed with a nullifying power, which was to become the hallmark of the Sartrian conception of consciousness. The Imaginary in particular was originally meant to be defended as a thesis for the Doctorat d’État, under the supervision of Wahl and Brunschvicg himself.61 However, it seems that this was Wahl’s hope, rather than Sartre’s own

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intention, which remained firm in the pursuit of a path alternative to university. Indeed, according to the director of the Nouvelle Revue française Jean Paulhan (1884–1968), Wahl was plotting with Brunschvicg to make Sartre a doctor against his will, something that flattered the young philosopher enormously: ‘I was quite excited about it and … imagined Wahl saying to Brunschvicg … “Better to have him inside than outside”.’62 Sartre had sensed correctly the risk of the operation: the choice of imagination and imaginary as the key to the study of consciousness would have inevitably set him on a collision course with someone, like Brunschvicg, for whom imagination was a primitive tool and its celebration a ‘sin against the mind’, to quote an expression he often employed.63 However, the narcissistic gratification did not soften Sartre’s position towards the old idealism, which he could not but see in ideological terms. For him, the rejection of idealism went along with an ideological demonisation of Brunschvicg the republican professor. In his famous essay ‘What Is Literature?’ (1947), he disparaged Brunschvicg as ‘the philosopher of the regime’, who believed that everything could be assimilated into the pacified realm of the intellect, including ‘evil’ and ‘error’, reduced to mere ‘false shows, fruits of separation, limitation and finiteness’.64 Moreover, he sketched a sombre portrait of the generation of the Dreyfus Affair, which displayed the traits of a ‘liberal petty bourgeoisie’ unable to really rise above a mediocrity passed off as moderation. This ‘average class’, of which Brunschvicg, Durkheim and Alain were the most iconic specimens, was completely deprived of historical sense, cultivated modest ambitions and thought that every conflict could be resolved by establishing a ‘lay morality’.65 It was at this point that the philosophical and the political critiques welded together: on the social level, the liberal and progressive bourgeois thinkers believed that order and justice were compatible, that the latter could be entirely pursued within the framework of the former; on the theoretical one, this meant that the negative could be resorbed by reason: ‘We have all read Brunschvicg, Lalande, and Meyerson,’ Sartre wrote, ‘we have all believed that the spidery mind trapped things in its web, covered them with a white spit and slowly swallowed them, reducing them to its own substance.’66 With particular reference to Brunschvicg, Sartre stated in The Transcendence of the Ego (1936) that his ‘idealism’ amounted to ‘a philosophy in which the effort of spiritual assimilation never encounters any external resistances, in which suffering, hunger, and war are diluted into a slow process of unification of ideas’.67 Sartre’s break with the academic register, embodied by Brunschvicg in the most spectacular fashion, was patent also in the examples he chose to illustrate his bestknown notions, which mirrored his lifestyle as a public persona. As Pierre Bourdieu pointed out, one could not imagine Brunschvicg writing in cafés and then using a waiter to exemplify the acceptance of an inauthentic life (what, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre called ‘bad faith’).68 From this point of view, the unconventional attitude of Sartre, who moved from his teaching position in secondary education to earning a living with writing alone, surely remained influenced by Alain’s anti-academic model of the libre écrivain. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) was perhaps the only one of the Marxist existentialists who restrained from talking trash to Brunschvicg as a man. Quite the contrary, he willingly praised him as a human being and a scholar. Merleau-Ponty

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recalled how much he was popular among students due to his ‘quite extraordinary personal qualities’: He was a philosopher who had access to poetry and literature, who was an extraordinarily cultivated thinker, and his knowledge of the history of philosophy was as profound as possible. He was a man of the first order … because of his personal experience and talent, which were considerable … Brunschvicg had an admirable knowledge of the sciences, the history of the sciences, and the history of philosophy.69

Merleau-Ponty’s moderation can perhaps be explained on the basis of his belonging to academic philosophy, whereas Politzer, De Beauvoir, Sartre and Nizan all searched outside the university halls for a different manner of embodying that very figure of the intellectual which had been ‘invented’, so to speak, by Brunschvicg’s generation. Nonetheless, this personal appreciation did not prevent Merleau-Ponty from developing what is probably the most sustained philosophical critique of critical idealism ever spawned. He acknowledged in fact that Brunschvicg wielded little influence over the students of the 1920s and the 1930s. However ‘flexible’ and critical, his idealism still carried with it the dogmatic legacy of Cartesianism and Kantianism, rooted as it was in the tenet of a primacy of reflection and scientific construction over sensible experience. His fundamental lesson, Merleau-Ponty argued, consisted in making them feel the urge to thematise the subject as the agency that constructs science and the perception of world. Unfortunately, Brunschvicg did not believe that the mind itself could be described phenomenologically; rather, he considered it as a general ‘principle of all thought’, a universal reason, a sort of ‘One’ in which every singular mind partook but which ultimately remained undetermined in its actual traits.70 Indeed, Merleau-Ponty’s entire oeuvre, from his first article – ‘Christianity and Ressentiment’ (1935), an analysis of Scheler’s Ressentiment – to the posthumous The Visible and the Invisible (1964), could be framed as an attempt to reverse Brunschvicg’s ‘intellectualism’, in particular its ‘top-down’ understanding of the passage from perception to judgement. In the Progrès de la conscience, Brunschvicg had in fact claimed that, from the Cartesian/Kantian perspective that he made his own, ‘the necessity and the universality of scientific judgements attest to the existence of a world that can be explained not from the bottom, on the basis of sensible perception, but from the top, by means of the principles of reason’.71 On the contrary, in the ‘Preface’ to the Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty set out to restore dignity to the ‘naïve contact’ with the lived world thematised by the late Husserl.72 The phenomenological gesture of returning to the pre-scientific dimension of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt), although heavily filtered by concerns and philosophemes borrowed from the French context of the 1930s, had a clear anti-Brunschvicgian aim, which was more or less explicit. Through the attacks launched at Descartes and Kant, at the ‘idealist return to consciousness’ and ‘reflective analysis’, Merleau-Ponty accomplished what has been rightly called a true ‘patricide’.73 ‘Science,’ he declared, ‘neither has, nor ever will have the same ontological sense as the perceived world for the simple reason that

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science is a determination or an explanation of that world.’74 In this sentence there lies the entire reversal of Brunschvicg’s vision, in which the world acquired meaning and objectivity only when subsumed under scientific laws.75 Instead of a world-for-science, Merleau-Ponty introduced, via Husserl, another world that was not only distinct from, but also ontologically primary and grounding with regard to, the scientific one. Phenomenology, in a way, was the tool Merleau-Ponty had been seeking for a long time. His intolerance for Brunschvicg’s abstractions emerged quite early, when he chose Bréhier to supervise his mémoire on Plotinus. According to Sartre, in fact, he started developing his distaste for the ‘ “high-altitude” thinking [pensée de survol]’ practised by the sorbonnard philosopher precisely towards the end of his university years.76 Bréhier, a historian of philosophy, represented a viable alternative to Brunschvicg, purportedly because of his sympathy for Bergson’s thought. This is not to say that Merleau-Ponty was a card-carrying Bergsonian: at the time, Bergson’s philosophy did not find much room in the programmes of the Sorbonne, where Brunschvicg reigned, and MerleauPonty recalled in fact that it was only later, under the influence of the ‘philosophies of existence’, that he came to realise that texts like Matter and Memory could have oriented him towards ‘a much more concrete philosophy, a philosophy much less reflective than Brunschvicg’s’.77 Nevertheless, it is clear that Merleau-Ponty had already decided which side he was on. It must be noted that, initially, Merleau-Ponty’s criticism to the hyperuranian philosophy of the Sorbonne professors was conditioned not so much by Husserl’s phenomenology or Marxism, as rather by another kind of influence that is usually passed over in silence. In the early 1930s, Merleau-Ponty, who came from a devout religious environment, gravitated in fact around the new Catholic milieus that had emerged out of the crisis of the Third Republic liberal and individualistic republicanism and that, as we have seen, clashed repeatedly with Brunschvicg’s idealism: Maritain’s entourage, which met regularly at his house in Meudon, the Dominican Éditions du Cerf, which edited the journal La Vie intellectuelle, in which Merleau-Ponty published his first articles, the circle of the review Esprit, founded by the personalist thinker Emmanuel Mounier (1905–1950), and the frequenters of the famous ‘Friday meetings’ at Gabriel Marcel’s house.78 As Merleau-Ponty later recalled, it was from this variegated constellation that he derived a motif – that of ‘incarnation’, of a carnal bodily existence – which would affect decisively his reading and, later, criticism of Husserlian phenomenology: ‘These philosophers set out to examine this sensible and carnal presence of the world, whereas previously, particularly under the influence of Kantian critique, scientific objects were what philosophers sought to analyse.’79 In ‘Christianity and Ressentiment’, that is, from the outset of his career as an author, Merleau-Ponty revealed himself as a ferocious scourge of Brunschvicg’s critical idealism, which was able to think and understand only that which had been ‘reduced to an object of science’. Against such an intellectualism, the new philosophers of the concrete that he lauded and who marked the first steps of his formation provided a welcome exit strategy.80 One may enumerate the multiple references to and critiques of Brunschvicg, explicit or veiled, punctuating minor Merleau-Pontian texts, from the 1933 and 1934 research projects on perception up to the posthumous working papers, not to mention the published courses. Suffice to remember that, in a 1938 session of

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the Société française de philosophie, he even declared, in front of Brunschvicg himself, that the declining performance of students on the agrégation was due to a serious generational gap, arising from academic philosophy’s lack of appeal to the young pupils, who were in need and in search of broader and more comprehensive accounts of experience and existence.81 However, it is The Structure of Behaviour (1942), rather than the Phenomenology of Perception, which represents the most accomplished attempt to dispose of Brunschvicg’s ‘criticism’. Indeed, both texts tried to recast in a different light the mind–body problem that the reflective philosophies, with their emphasis on intellectual activity and the epistemological function of perception, never actually resolved. Yet the Phenomenology, which adopted a properly intentional, first-person perspective, already presupposed the ‘external’, third-person analysis of man’s perceptual operations deployed in the previous book in dialogue primarily with behaviourism, Gestaltism, child psychology (e.g. Piaget) and the holistic theory of organism developed by Kurt Goldstein (1878–1965). There, in fact, Merleau-Ponty had made more than clear that criticism was completely unable to frame the relationship between consciousness and nature beyond the dichotomy opposing materialism to spiritualism. Only by studying behaviour, conceptualised as the interface relating human intentions, organic dispositions and actions against the background of a structured milieu, one can properly articulate a transcendental philosophy accounting for the actual modalities of our being in the world and overcoming the naive alternative idealism/realism. ‘Critical philosophy’, to quote Merleau-Ponty’s umbrella term, failed thus to catch what a thorough transcendental analysis of the structure of behaviour allowed one to see, namely, the indiscernibility of ‘an idea and an existence’, the reciprocation ‘between function and substrate’ – briefly, ‘intelligibility in the nascent state’.82 For criticism, indeed, and here Brunschvicg is an explicit target, everything is constituted by ‘a homogeneous activity of the understanding from one end of knowledge to the other’; here the mind is confronted with the opacity of its own material, organic, existential inscription.83 Critical thought, which seemed to be ‘incontestable’, had now to be left behind.84 Within the context of the generational turn of the 1930s and 1940s, and among the figures gravitating around Sartre, Nizan and others, Raymond Aron (1905–1983) was surely the one who held Brunschvicg in higher esteem and who remained more fond of his memory, in spite of the care he put into distancing himself from his teachers with regard to the vision of history and the destiny of European consciousness.85 In his Memoirs, which constitute a rich repository of insights into twentieth-century French thought, Aron recalled that he felt close to Brunschvicg in the idea that we can do something more than just endure existence, submit to it in a passive way: we can think it, ‘enrich it by reflection’. Brunschvicg’s lesson was a lesson in clear judgement.86 Of course, the author of the Progrès de la conscience ‘was a mandarin among mandarins’. Yet, he was a teacher that ‘incited respect’ in students because he ‘philosophised more than the others’.87 Aron admired in particular his capacity for joining the history of philosophy with the history of science, an openness that enabled Brunschvicg to escape ‘the platitudes of idealism or academic spiritualism’.88 Therefore, in 1927 Aron chose him as the supervisor for his thesis on Kant, titled La notion d’intemporel dans la philosophie de Kant: moi intelligible and liberté.

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However, Aron was already conscious that the choice of a mentor already contains the seeds of his killing. On balance, he observed, Brunschvicg’s critical idealism ‘tended to reduce philosophy to a theory of knowledge’, precisely because it followed too closely the trail of science, leaving no room for other regions of experience. This explained ‘the kind of impasse toward which apprentice philosophers had the feeling they were being led’.89 Ultimately, the academic philosophy of the time did not prepare students for the asperities of life, and Aron was left with the impression that he had not learnt anything relevant about the world, at a time when history was knocking furiously at the door.90 The ‘rebellion’ against Brunschvicg was gradual. At the end of the first chapter, I have already recalled an article written in 1934 for the Revue de synthèse where Aron exposed the inherent limitations of Brunschvicg’s practical philosophy, which was biased by its scientific and intellectualist ideals.91 Furthermore, in order to get out from under Brunschvicg’s influence, and following the inspiration of Karl Mannheim, Aron drafted a one-hundred-page long article where critical idealism was judged on the basis of the old mandarin’s Jewish origins and bourgeois lifestyle. Brunschvicg took it badly, as he felt ‘sociologised’, so Aron refused to publish the text, which was lost during the war.92 However, the rebellion reached its peak only during a three-year stay in Germany, between 1930 and 1933, where Aron saw the rising horror of Nazism and discovered the local historicism (Max Weber in particular, but also Dilthey, Simmel and Rickert). Aron’s ‘conversion’ was motivated by the same need that turned Sartre away from the ‘digestive philosophy’ of the old Third Republic. In particular, Aron felt that Brunschvicg and his fellows were completely unprepared to deal with the advent of someone like Hitler, as if they lived in a different world.93 Aron was of course not the only one to point out this deficiency. According to an anecdote reported by another disciple of Brunschvicg, the sociologist and urbanist Henri Lefebvre, during a 1943 conversation in Aix-en-Provence his former professor stated that the battle of Stalingrad was nothing but a series of singular events and encounters between German and Soviet soldiers – a telling proof of the old philosopher’s incapacity to think in global, structural terms, outside the schema of a chain of judgements.94 Whether this anecdote is accurate or deliberately caricatural, it is true that Brunschvicg himself acknowledged his own intellectual deadlock. In a letter to Jean Cavaillès, dated 14 October 1939, he explained that the new conflict was for him even worse than the previous carnage. He confessed how much, as a professional of reflection, he felt impotent in a moment when action dominated. Furthermore, thinking seemed even more difficult than in 1914: then, he observed, ‘there was a Germany with a quasi- or pseudo-philosophical facade, and we could discuss its “culture”. Now we are just confronted with brute force’.95 And he added a revealing point: ‘Neither Hitler nor Stalin give material for thought, in the form in which we are used to practising it.’96 Confronted with the quandary of his intellectual fathers, Aron though adopted a fair-minded perspective. Far from dismissing as inane the humanistic credo of Brunschvicg, he shared the bulk of his ‘Socratic’ ethics, demanding universality and reciprocity. What he found problematic, if not completely out of focus, was the conviction that the model of such an ethic should be discovered in the disinterestedness ‘of the scientist in the laboratory’.97 Consequently, Aron decided to turn to the study of society and the limits of historical knowledge, in order to elaborate a thought capable

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of dealing with the ‘harshness of human existence’.98 He recalled how, after having defended in 1938 his two PhD theses – the Introduction to the Philosophy of History99 and his presentation of the German ‘critical philosophies of history’100 – he happened to clash with Brunschvicg’s ‘ahistorical universalism’101 during sessions of the Union pour la Vérité.102 The break with the old philosophical horizon seemed thus to be accomplished without compromise. And yet, if we look closely, for example, at the Introduction, we can clearly see traces of many Brunschvicgian themes. Most notably, Aron translated into concrete terms the centrality of judgement, which ceased to be a manifestation of spiritual autonomy and became instead the expression of an individual subject involved in a ‘historical movement’.103 The kind of thinking that was once associated with a transcendental subjectivity was now attributed to a man understood in light of his social conditions.104 In Aron’s eyes, the philosophy of history became a ‘historical philosophy’, framing history itself as a reflective and retrospective process aimed at understanding the ‘human development [devenir]’ in both its facets, the social and the spiritual.105 Following the hermeneutical lesson of German historicism, re-read through the lens of Brunschvicg’s insights, Aron claimed that the science of history did not work with the causal models of the natural sciences but sought to place the human observer itself within the totality of which it is part.106 However, this perspective inevitably entailed a difference with regard to Brunschvicg, consisting, of course, in the rebuttal of the notion of history as the philosopher’s laboratory and of the idea that history would stage the full deployment of the essence of reason. In fact, the radical assumption of historicity inevitably led to the valorisation of a concept that Aron took from Heidegger via Kojève107 and which would be reprised more famously by Sartre: that of decision, by means of which man determines himself starting from a historically given situation that envelops and conditions him. Aron’s relationship with Brunschvicg remained thus always marked by a tension between loyalty and betrayal. Ultimately, Aron saw in Brunschvicg above all a moralist and a humanist, guided by the need to answer the question ‘What is man?’, ‘What is man at his highest, when he is one with the Idea?’.108 In spite of the thorough revision of his mentor’s views on history, Aron stood firmly by his rationalist legacy, abiding by, even in his late years, a regulative ‘Idea of Reason’. As he himself acknowledged, Brunschvicg inoculated him with a Kantian vaccine that, paired with Halévy’s late denunciation of the ‘age of tyrannies’, saved him from the dogmatic Marxist interpretations of history.109 This was probably why Nizan, Politzer and Sartre accused Aron of being too tenderhearted towards Brunschvicg’s critical idealism.110 Doubtless, Aron’s judgements were nothing compared to the brutal personal attack against Brunschvicg’s work and legacy concocted by Paul Nizan (1905–1940) in The Watchdogs (1932),111 an anathema that was to weigh heavily on his reception among the new generations. Here is how Nizan had introduced the figure of his teacher in his previous book, the novel Aden, Arabie (1931): Because he had the precision of a watchmaker and the adroitness of a conjurer, you thought at first he was a philosopher. But in the end you found only a Robert Houdin whose measure you could take, whose lies you could count. This little

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retailer of sophisms had the physical appearance of an old maître d’hôtel, who late in life had been permitted to grow stout and wear a beard. Guile lurked in the corners of his eyes and guided the short, insipid movements of his hands, the hands of a Jewish merchant. Winking, letting fly his witticisms as though they were decrees of reason, suggesting in every speech: leave it to me, everything is going to be all right, I can fix everything, both in souls and in the sciences. Then bowing to the audience. What a hidden appetite for position, for rest and honours! What a real terror of the truth which poses a threat, the truth which, for example, might have placed in jeopardy this rich man’s money! The disciples ranked around him held themselves in readiness to raise above his corpse the mercenary banner of critical idealism. But men were working on the assembly line, policemen were walking the streets. In China men were dying violent deaths, in Upper Volta forced labour was felling the Negroes like an epidemic.112

Brunschvicg’s idealism amounted for Nizan to a philosophical abdication, to the tricks of an old magician like Houdini. How were his ‘grotesque fruits of the contemplative process’ supposed to help humanity make sense of illness, the humiliations of the military service and the degradation of work, unemployment, corruption, war, abuses of power and so on?113 Was not the chance of reflecting upon oneself and discovering that man’s salvation lies in rationality just a luxury good, available only to those who were socially sheltered from existential risks, material insecurity and anguish, that is, only to a privileged élite?114 From Nizan’s communist perspective, the objections of Wahl and Marcel that I have detailed in the previous chapter were still ineffective, for they remained too bourgeois.115 A more radical stance was needed which could question the ideological and symbolic framework sustaining the socio-political order that made such speculative prattle possible. The same conviction was shared also by Emmanuel Berl (1892–1976),116 writer, historian and journalist, who, between 1929 and 1930, published two witty essays on the ideology of the Third Republic, La mort de la pensée bourgeoise and La mort de la morale bourgeoise. There, he painted the old academic philosophy as a thought that lived in fear of being confronted with its own ineffectiveness, paralysed by its lack of courage and ultimately inconsistent. In Berl’s eyes, even his friend Marcel ended up playing the game of Brunschvicg, agreeing to fight on the latter’s battlefield by simply opposing a negation to his affirmation.117 Berl decried culture understood as a system of manners, notions and values raised against the proletarians, practised only in small circles and completely ignorant of the most significant form of knowledge: that concerning human existence.118 He exposed the intimate relation between the State and the widespread idealism, both philosophical and political: ‘The idealist reaches out to the bureaucrat, and the bureaucrat reaches out to the idealist.’119 And who was, for him, the ultimate example of the bourgeois idealist thinker if not precisely the Fichte avidly read by Brunschvicg and Léon?120 In a chapter of La mort de la morale bourgeoise, entitled ‘Léon Brunschvicg et la chose enveloppée’, he satirised the traditional stance of the academic philosopher, who, when attacked for his social role, could always reply that it was just a contingent and external ‘envelope’, not his true substance or the true

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spiritual essence of his oeuvre. But try to threaten his chair or his wealth: you would have seen him protesting in the name of the envelope that ‘free thinking’, ‘disinterested speculation’ or ‘the eternal man’ were under attack.121 ‘This philosophy cut off from its social foundations,’ Berl wrote, ‘can always be used to justify any condition of society.’122 Nevertheless, although he befriended Nizan for a while, Berl was not a member of the Philosophies group, and was judged by Nizan as still too soft, unable, despite his materialism, to really accomplish the revolutionary step uprooting him from the ideological milieu in which he grew up.123 Communism too, Berl argued, was dogmatic and conformist, hence it was a false alternative to capitalism.124 A firm pacifist, Berl would later join the Radical Party and support the government of the Popular Front. Nizan, for his part, took issue in particular with Brunschvicg’s rebuttal of Marx as a betrayal of reason, which he found ironic coming from someone who was blind before the tragedies and sufferings that the working class had to endure. Not that Brunschvicg was directly responsible for this, not that he was explicitly disdainful of human sorrow. To be honest, Nizan wrote, ‘Brunschvicg has never said that he despised the workers who are threatening the social order which sustains him.’125 Furthermore, he was a ‘rather clear-sighted individual’ who knew well ‘the price of prosperity’.126 But precisely because he belonged to such an order he was incapable of thinking beyond it: he criticised Marx on the basis of a purely theoretical distaste, without understanding the practical meaning of his thought, without hearing the grievances to which it gave voice. The idealism of the old philosophers was actually ‘only an expression of their approval of this world – which is their world’.127 Despite all his talk about humanity, Brunschvicg would never ever ‘desert the party of the bourgeoisie and rally to the cause of mankind’.128 Nizan, thus, was well aware that a philosophy must be judged in relation to its circle of possibilities, as confirmed by this amusing and humorous portrait of Brunschvicg that is worth quoting in full and that will sound more provocative now that we have a full view of Brunschvicg’s persona: He attended the Lycée Condorcet. One day he heard mention of Spinoza and he decided then and there that he would get to know this man better – once he had become a man of leisure. Among his friends were Élie Halévy and Xavier Léon. On Sunday mornings, in the Bois de Boulogne …, seated next to an old coachman who had been with his family for years, he and they would discuss plans for founding the Revue de métaphysique et de morale; and found it they did. Ludovic Halévy treated this gifted adolescent like a son. Through him, Léon Brunschvicg met Octave Gréard and Lucien Prévost-Paradol. On Wednesdays, he attended soirées given by Mme de Caillavet, where he rubbed elbows with Renan, Lemaître, Leconte de Lisle, and Anatole France. Around the year 1884, it was his wont to take strolls along the Champs-Élysées in the company of Marcel Proust. Then he became a professor, he produced some books, and, ‘enjoying extraordinary good health, abundant leisure, and complete independence’, he meditated. … M. Brunschvicg wrote only the books that he himself felt like reading. He has come a long way; he approves of everything he has done; he feels that he has built a veritable monument to Philosophy. He is a member of the Legion of Honour and of the Academy of

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Moral Sciences. He is invited to Holland to lecture on Spinoza. His name appears in the Parisian Who’s Who. He lives in an exclusive residential hotel, surrounded by precious objets d’art. A glorious career, the war notwithstanding. He is inclined to believe that, had it not been for this war, his generation would have been ‘one of the most fortunate generations in human history’. But he has also been an activist, he has been involved with the society of his time: he gave a series of lectures at the Université Populaire in Rouen (one must bring enlightenment to the people, you know). He once remarked: ‘If so many of our philosophers are drawn to the Université Populaire, it is because they view it as the realisation of the idea of the Spiritual Life’. But what do the stevedores of Rouen and the workers of Maromme think of this? … he taught a most noble code of ethics to the protégées of the right-thinking ladies on the rue Amyot. As his reward for these good works, whose price in terms of human liberty is quite obvious, he received many gifts (a sugar bowl from Saxony and a bronze virgin, among others). In view of all this, what reasons would M. Brunschvicg have had for even flirting with dangerous ideas? His life has nothing difficult or tragic about it; there were never any antagonising problems to overcome. It would be silly to harbour resentment against the man who led this life and who was led by it to where he is today, simply because it did not occur to him to defend those men who never get a chance to disport themselves on the Champs-Élysées.129

However, Nizan warned, though one ought not to ‘harbour resentment’, one should neither be too sympathetic. The fact that Brunschvicg might be a good, well-meaning person did not change anything: ‘If I think about the moral conscience of M. Brunschvicg, then I am thinking like M. Brunschvicg. In other words, he has defeated me,’ because ‘I am thinking in bourgeois terms.’130 This is what Marcel did not understand when, while accepting Nizan’s criticism against the human and metaphysical ‘vacuousness’ of the sorbonnard philosophy, he implored him to spare Brunschvicg personal attacks.131 What mattered was Brunschvicg’s ideological function: just as Kantianism justified bourgeois morality, critical idealism warranted this same ethos ‘by borrowing some of the magic attached to the mathematical calculations of Einstein’.132 The alleged eternity of science, the immortal nature of the rational image of the world, was just a cover-up meant to conceal the transience of bourgeois capitalism and social order. In other words, Brunschvicg never really attained the level of actual historicity, never really considered the possibility that his own standpoint could be just a passing moment in the evolution of thought, and not the supreme pinnacle from which all things past and present could be judged.133

The fates of reflection Despite the existentialist and Marxist crusade, spiritualism (let us use this general term) never ceased to survive within the French philosophical genome, albeit in

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environmental conditions that were now decisively unfavourable. Between the 1930s and the 1950s, when the new doctrines of the concrete were raging, a front of thinkers continued to champion what the title of a book collection published by AubierMontaigne defined as ‘philosophie de l’esprit’. The founders of this collection were two Catholic thinkers, Louis Lavelle (1883–1951) and René Le Senne (1882–1954). However, their main point of reference was not necessarily represented by critical idealism. Lavelle, for example, was close to Brunschvicg’s archenemy Édouard Le Roy, in whom he found that religious élan which Brunschvicg could not offer and whom he would later succeed at the Collège de France.134 Le Senne, for his part, defined his idealism and his philosophy of value in dialogue with another nemesis of Brunschvicg, namely Octave Hamelin, and, after the war, with Bergson.135 Nevertheless, this did not prevent Lavelle from admiring the author of La modalité du jugement. Not by chance, his main PhD dissertation on La dialectique du monde sensible (1921) was dedicated to Brunschvicg, who acted as its supervisor. Furthermore, in a 1942 essay, Lavelle celebrated Brunschvicg’s faith in the ‘fecundity of the human mind’ and in the power of the intelligence, against ‘all forms of idolatry’ and the ‘infiltrations of sentiment’.136 In particular, and forcing slightly Brunschvicg’s actual intentions, the Catholic Lavelle extolled his retrieval of the authentic inspiration of the ‘homo religiosus’ beyond the veil of ‘superstition’ and ‘myth’ that for a long time had obfuscated religious experience.137 In a way, Lavelle emphasised the spiritualistic dimension of Brunschvicg’s thought to the detriment of its properly epistemological side, retaining merely the rhetorical references to the parallelism between the disinterestedness of the intellectual quest for truth and the advent of a religion of humanity based on solidarity and reciprocity. Ultimately, however, the name of Brunschvicg was absent in Lavelle’s major works. It appears thus that for him the reference to Brunschvicg was purely functional to the valorisation of an idealism or a spiritualism affirming the values of consciousness against a ‘realism’ that he saw as rampant and spreading.138 It was rather Lavelle’s early associate, Jean Nabert (1881–1960), who played a crucial role in the perpetuation of many Brunschvicgian themes and perspectives into the twentieth century.139 For example, the relationship of Paul Ricœur (1913–2005) with the tradition of the Third Republic spiritualism – which for him included primarily Lachelier and Lagneau, who were surely more interested in the philosophy of religion than Brunschvicg – was mediated precisely by his acquaintance with Nabert, who took care of defending the legacy of what he called ‘reflective philosophy’.140 Nabert studied in fact at the Sorbonne in the early 1920s, graduating in 1924 with two dissertations supervised by Brunschvicg: L’expérience intérieure de la liberté and L’expérience interne chez Kant. During the following years, up until the publication of his major work, the Éléments pour une éthique (1943), Nabert engaged in a close dialogue with his teachers, deepening the import of the philosophy of reflection and developing an original stance. The continuity with Brunschvicg was patent already in his dissertation, where Kant was understood not so much as a dogmatic rationalist but as a thinker of the inner sense (‘sense interne’) and its temporal dimension, highlighting the intellectual processes and mental operations lying at the roots of our judgements. The ‘I think’ expressed not only a formal apperception, as Kant believed, but rather ‘the spontaneity of my act of thinking’.141 The notion that thought should be grasped in its primal source, before its

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categorial specification, was surely a way of taking up the Brunschvicgian gesture of reading Kant via Fichte.142 In an article written in 1957 for the Encyclopédie française on ‘reflective philosophy’, Nabert characterised ‘reflective philosophy’ as consisting precisely in a variegated constellation of thinkers identifying – and this was their common feature – thought with reflection. This might sound self-evident, but for Nabert this meant stressing the capacity of the subject to apprehend itself in its own thinking, to attain the original meaning of his conceptions, before the sedimentation of categories, symbols, grammars, representations, codes and so on. In other words, reflection was framed from a radically immanent angle, as the folding of thought upon its own functioning, leading to the discovery of the constituting (transcendental) character of consciousness.143 The bloodline of reflective philosophy corresponded to the tradition traced by Brunschvicg and that I have discussed in Chapter 4, spanning from Maine de Biran to Lachelier and Lagneau up to Brunschvicg and, of course, Nabert themselves. The (post-)Kantian criticism and the French philosophie réflexive found thus a common point of gravitation in the ‘self-position of the act through which the pure subject is constituted’.144 Of course, Nabert was not a mere epigone of Brunschvicg. His religious and ethical inspirations prompted him to valorise in particular the latter phase of his mentor’s reflection, from the Progrès to the writings on religion of the 1930s. He believed indeed that reflective philosophy, due to its immanent approach that banished any ontological dilemma or metaphysical conundrum, was particularly appropriate for a concrete study of morality and religious experience. For example, Ricœur’s analysis of culpability, evil, will, responsibility and so on was deemed by Nabert the best possible continuation of the reflective tradition, in that any transcendent reference to the imperfections of Being or the metaphysical flaws of mankind were circumvented in favour of a direct assessment of the aspirations and the lived experiences of the subject.145 This was not to yield to easy ‘existentialist’ temptations: reflexivity entailed in fact a jump from the deadlock of singularity and the solitude of idiosyncrasy to the clarification of shared experiences and meanings stemming from the same universal and active consciousness that inhabits every subject.146 ‘This is why reflection is not merely a return to interiority, but also a progress towards unity.’147 Despite the re-evaluation of the contribution of Maine de Biran in terms of the inquiry into the actual, concrete dynamics of inner life, Nabert espoused the gist of Brunschvicg’s philosophy of religion, at a time when Blondel, Maritain, Marcel and others were campaigning for a rediscovery of transcendence as a key philosophical notion. As previously seen, Brunschvicg projected upon Christianity the values of the Socratic-Platonic idealism. More precisely, he saw in it a doctrine of pure spirituality pitting the universal communion of all minds to the Idea, to the logos, against the separations and conflicts induced by the narrowness of psychological realism, biological organicism, sociological reductionism and so forth.148 Far from being a personalistic, anthropomorphic entity, God became the intuition of something in the self that went beyond individuation, the insight into a creative power of rationalisation that every individual shared with the spiritual collective of humanity. In more contemporary terms, foreign to the Brunschvicgian lexicon, this immanent and interior God amounted to the symbol of a ‘collective brain’, of a general rationality

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that was able to think the infinite (as attested by the progress of the mathematical sciences). However, Nabert claimed that this was just an aspect of Brunschvicg’s ‘philosophical Christianity’, the more intellectualist one, which had to be completed by a practical engagement meant to implement ‘down here’ the values of generosity, love and solidarity that alone can turn the ideal of humanity into an actually existing community.149 After all, this was what Brunschvicg meant by the notion of a progress of consciousness. Other thinkers can be mentioned who inscribed themselves within a certain continuity, albeit critical, with Brunschvicg around ethical or religious issues. In Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903–1985), for example, scholars have always been readier to locate the influence of Bergson and Simmel, thus of the so-called ‘philosophy of life’, largely passing his relationship with Brunschvicg over with silence.150 Yet close ties existed between the two men. From an academic standpoint, Jankélévitch wrote his complementary dissertation under solicitation from Brunschvicg.151 Valeur et signification de la mauvaise conscience was first published in 1933, then revised in 1951 under the title The Bad Conscience, marking the dawn of Jankélévitch’s mature reflection. Outside the academe, Brunschvicg used his influence on Jérôme Carcopino (1881–1970), a member of the Vichy government and former director of the ENS, to save his disciple when weapons were found in Jankélévitch’s apartment during the Occupation in 1941. Jankélévitch reprised many Brunschvicgian themes – most notably the inquiry into the vicissitude of consciousness152 – but gave them a slightly different twist. Consciousness was not for him a Cartesian epistemological faculty, nor a pure power of enlightenment. Playing on the ambiguity of the French ‘conscience’, which, unlike other languages such as German or English, can mean both the thinking subject (consciousness) and a state of concrete awareness (conscience), Jankélévitch argued that consciousness should be understood as a separating principle, producing a ‘splitting-in-two [dédoublement]’ of the mind, torn between the immanent lived experience of the I (‘moi’) and the reflective gap of the Self (‘soi’). The Bad Conscience opened precisely by stating this point: Consciousness is nothing other than spirit. The act by which spirit divides in two and distances itself simultaneously from itself and from things is such an important act that it has ended by giving its name to the entirety of psychic life; or rather, ‘becoming conscious’ does not designate a distinct act, but a function into which the total soul to some degree figures and that is proper to the philosophical attitude. In its infinite mobility consciousness can consider itself as an object: between the spectator and the spectacle a back and forth is thus established, a reciprocal transfusion of substance; the consciousness-of-self, in sharpening itself, recreates and transforms its object since it itself is something of this object, [namely] a phenomenon of the mind … There is in us something like a principle of agility and universal worry that permits our mind never to coincide with itself, to be reflected back onto itself indefinitely; we can make any thing at all into our object, and there is no object to which our thought cannot become transcendent; the idea ideae exists, thus, at varied ‘powers’, under innumerable exponents.153

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Brunschvicg would have certainly endorsed this vision, in which heavy Fichtean resonances could be heard. And yet for Jankélévitch this was just a segment of how the ‘esprit’ works. The description of the consciousness’ alienation from its own objects did not prelude, as in critical idealism, to a pan-intellectualism, to the discovery that the élan of the mind lies behind known reality. The ‘spirit of worry’, the unrest of the intelligence, did not anticipate beatitude or conversion. The deepening of reflection, if it did not want to turn into a self-congratulatory and abstract exercise, had to lead not to a progressive purification, as in Brunschvicg, but rather to the discovery of impurity at the heart of the life of the mind. Bergson’s and Simmel’s influence is felt when Jankélévitch alluded to ‘intuition’ as a peculiar state engaging the totality of one’s own spirit, beyond the alienation of purely mental activity.154 Like many of his generation, Jankélévitch tried thus, in his own personal way, to show that a mere philosophy of reflection, translating the wholesomeness of human life (cognitive, moral, aesthetic, religious, etc.) into a conceptual/discursive facade, was utterly insufficient. Ethics was equally important as a form of first philosophy. Hence Jankélévitch’s attention for those phenomena in our experience that defy purely rationalistic treatments and that form, so to speak, the substratum of any conscious activity: remorse, which is crucial for bad conscience, but also anxiety, love, happiness, the experience of the irreversible and the irrevocable, nostalgia, boredom and so on. In a letter written in February 1944, Jankélévitch acknowledged his dual relationship towards Brunschvicg, whose ideas he did not share, but whom he deeply loved. Only two years before, in a book titled Du mensonge, he had lambasted the old ‘intellectualism’ of the turn of the century,155 triggering the self-defence of his mentor, who vindicated the importance of universal truths obtained through rational critique and verification.156 In the aftermath of his advisor’s death, Jankélévitch came to admit that Brunschvicg was somehow right in defending a rationalist stance against suspicious returns to ‘irrational’ dimensions of thought and experience: ‘Now I have a guilty conscience toward him. He was right about us, and everything that happened happened because of us, because we have played with such dangerous ideas.’157 Jankélévitch was likely referring to the ‘romantic’ themes of which his philosophy was imbued, but probably the true target was his early interest in the German philosophies of existence. Indeed, one of the differences between The Bad Conscience and the original text of his dissertation was precisely that a reference to Heidegger – that great philosopher who turned out to be a Nazi – had been removed.158 Emmanuel Levinas too, for whom Heidegger was a major reference, had to deal with such a philosophical shock in wartime. In both cases, though, the critique of certain bearings of Heidegger’s thought had no impact on the theoretical estrangement from critical idealism. Like Jankélévitch, Levinas had mixed feelings towards Brunschvicg, whom he met at Davos in 1929. As we have seen, he celebrated the intellectual and moral stature of his mentor, his idealistic integrity, even keeping a picture of him in his library. Still, Brunschvicg had often proved to be brutally frank and unfair, indulging in chauvinistic snobbisms. Legend has it that he once said to the young Lithuanian philosopher: ‘With your accent I would never pass you on the oral exam of the agrégation.’159 From a theoretical point of view, Levinas radically rejected critical idealism, in which he saw a pursuit of universality that was at risk of

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being authoritarian. His ethics was the farthest from a philosophy concerned with speculations on the link connecting the progress of science with the refinement of human consciousness.160 Ethics as a first philosophy, the primitive relation to the Other alone, allowed one in fact to rephrase spiritual universality as a particular and fundamental experience of the meaning of being that can be found in every culture, but which is inseparable from its specific cultural instantiations. We cannot leap directly into the ‘world of Ideas’, we cannot dream of an intellectual communication beyond language, without perpetrating an unduly violence to otherness. Hence, Levinas placed himself at the antipodes of what Léon Brunschvicg … taught us; the progress of Western consciousness would no longer consist in purifying thought of the alluvium of cultures and the particularisms of language, which far from signifying the intelligible would perpetuate the infantile. It is not that Brunschvicg could have taught us anything but generosity, but for him this generosity and the dignity of the Western world was a matter of liberating truth of its cultural presuppositions … The danger of such a conception is clear; the emancipations of minds can be a pretext for exploitation and violence.161

However, these lines bear witness to a dual relationship with regard to the Brunschvicgian legacy. While upholding the value of the non-historicity of the intelligible, of meaning (in his interpretation, the naked manifestation of the Other), Levinas implied that such a universality was transcultural rather than purely noncultural: it was a transcendental structure that allowed for a certain communication and reciprocation between cultures and languages: ‘This universality would consist in being able to penetrate one culture from another, as one learns a language on the basis of one’s mother tongue.’162 This recasting of universalism was also crucial for another aspect, which was discussed in Levinas’s review of the Agenda retrouvée, namely the question of spirituality and the idea of a ‘true conversion’, to quote the title of a late Brunschvicg book.163 As I have already demonstrated in Chapter 1, Brunschvicg was not a thinker of Judaism. Still, he was engaged, although in a non-confessional manner, in the project of the École Normale Israélite Orientale, a branch of the Alliance Israélite that Levinas directed after the Second World War. What united the two men, then, was a vision of spirituality that translated into a humanism, a universalisation of consciousness and ethics, of dialogue and recognition. For Levinas, who condemned the sentimental and mystical elements of Hassidism, Brunschvicg’s rational spirituality provided a different approach to spiritual practice, inscribing it within a broader and more modern dimension trespassing the precincts of particularisms and narrow identities.164 Yes, Brunschvicg ignored Judaism, but did ‘he not discover its essential strains by affirming that at the heart of the Infinite, where the intellect dwells, there is an independent man, master of his fate, who communicates with the Eternal, in the clear light of intellectual and moral action?’165 Brunschvicg’s atheism, continued Levinas, was thus ‘much closer to the One God than the mystical experiences and horrors of the Sacred to be found in the supposed religious revival of our contemporaries’.166

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The epistemological offspring Epistemology was certainly the strand of twentieth-century French thought where the seeds planted by critical idealism actually managed to survive and blossom. In particular, the constellation of thinkers usually gathered by current scholarship under the banner of the so-called ‘historical epistemology’ was certainly more welcoming of Brunschvicg’s thesis – even without knowing or explicitly admitting it. Now, ‘historical epistemology’ is a controversial label, whose coinage is usually attributed to Abel Rey,167 but which, in its strictest sense, is often meant nowadays to describe a lineage in French philosophy of science originating from Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), culminating with Michel Foucault (1926–1984) and insisting, as a common trait, on the epistemic ruptures that punctuated the history of knowledge. The first to use the label in a systematic manner was Dominique Lecourt (1944), who took inspiration from Canguilhem in characterising precisely Bachelard’s philosophy.168 As Lecourt remarked, despite substantial differences among these thinkers, they all articulated a ‘philosophical history of science’, which radically distinguished their projects from Anglo-American epistemology.169 The existence of a common ‘style’, rather than a proper school, has been theorised by Jean-François Braunstein in a famous essay.170 The distinctive traits of this trend or galaxy would basically be four: it consists in an a posteriori reflection on the sciences; it articulates a ‘critical’ or ‘philosophical’ history of science; it tackles the problem of the ‘development of reason, which is grasped only through the development of the sciences’; it always inscribes itself within a political horizon, ‘broadly construed’.171 On this basis, one might easily argue that the echoes of Brunschvicg’s original inspiration are still resonating loud and clear – even with regard to the fourth feature, to the extent that, as we have seen, science was for Brunschvicg also a political model, although not in an ideological sense, but rather as a regulative ideal of truth, justice, critical examination and universality. And yet it is surprising how rarely Brunschvicg is mentioned and discussed in an informed way in secondary literature. This is due to the fact that, for many ‘historical epistemologists’, Brunschvicg was more a noble father, a passeur taking the torch from the hands of Comte, Cournot and Boutroux and passing it down to the twentieth century. On many counts, indeed, Brunschvicg’s integration of historical prospection as the natural counterpart to philosophical meditation had effects that could hardly be reduced to powerful but vague buzzwords. Chimisso has effectively shown how much historical epistemology runs the risk of becoming a simplistic label obfuscating all the various layers structuring the twentieth-century French reflections on science.172 Furthermore, in a referential book, she inscribed the dawn of historical epistemology within a context marked by a broader interest in the ‘history of the mind’ that cut across the humanities, from philosophy to ethnology, from the history of particular sciences to socioeconomic history.173 Building on this insight, and as evidence of the multiple refractions of the influence Brunschvicg wielded over twentieth-century epistemology, it is interesting to take a little step to the side and begin by considering two figures that, as distant as they might

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appear, shared the fact that their relationship with Brunschvicg is usually passed over in silence. The first is Jean Piaget (1896–1980), who took up decisive insights from Brunschvicg, whose teachings he followed in Paris between 1919 and 1921, alongside those of Lalande and Lévy-Bruhl.174 Notably, Piaget welcomed the emphasis on the imbrications of history and psychology, against the background of a common antipositivistic and anti-aprioristic conception of the mind.175 In his major texts dealing with the project of a genetic epistemology, the Brunschvicgian imprint could be found in the notions that knowledge is the outcome of a ‘continuous construction, since in each act of understanding, some degree of invention is involved’, and that scientific progress entails a succession of stages characterised by ‘new structures’.176 Therefore, given that science is in perpetual evolution, ‘a progress of continual construction and reorganisation’, it is impossible to separate theory and history of knowledge.177 The basic assumption of genetic epistemology was precisely that ‘there is a parallelism between the progress made in the logical and rational organisation of knowledge and the corresponding formative psychological processes’.178 Indeed, in his early works, Piaget overtly stressed the affinity between his developmental approach and Brunschvicg’s historical analyses. The Progrès in particular appeared to him as ‘the widest and the most subtle demonstration of the fact that there exists in European thought a law in the evolution of moral judgements which is analogous to the law of which psychology watches the effects throughout the development of the individual’.179 Accordingly, Piaget’s account of the evolution of the child’s moral judgement from the initial ‘sociological conformism’ or ‘moral realism’, when the child rigorously respects the norms, to the development of autonomy, critical attitude and context sensitivity seems to follow closely Brunschvicg’s historical narrative of the abandonment of the old Aristotelian realism and the subsequent reliance on judgement. The connection between Aristotelianism, infant thought and primitive mentalities was established repeatedly, for example, in The Child’s Conception of Physical Causality180 or The Child’s Conception of the World,181 with an almost perfect mirroring between psychological traits and epochal tendencies of human thought. However, the point of departure from Brunschvicg was clear since Piaget’s early years. According to him, in fact, psychology was not conceived of anymore under the guise of a spiritualism, no matter how scientifically informed. Ultimately, Piaget could not accept the idealistic framework that sustained Brunschvicg’s blending of epistemology and history: the history of the mind could not be dissolved into the tale of an intellectualised faculty of judgement. Despite the claim that knowledge ‘is a system of transformations that become progressively adequate’,182 Piaget’s genetic epistemology was firmly rooted instead within an evolutional theory of biology and psychology that, tributary in part to Bergson’s views, encompassed the sphere of judgement itself. Precisely as an idealist, Piaget observed in 1927, Brunschvicg had severed the link between psychology and biology.183 And again, twenty-five years later, he restated that what is lacking in Brunschvicg’s epistemology is thus a study of biological knowledge, because it is upon this ground that idealism, already a little too extreme in the interpretation that he gave of physical thought, finds itself grappling with

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a forced realism: the living organism is both the starting point of the subject’s psychological activity, and therefore of knowledge itself, and an object for biology, an object that is much more independent of the mind of the biologist than the physical object is of the mind of the physicist.184

For genetic psychology, thus, it was impossible to overlook the continuity between cognition and life. Secondly, we should mention Alexandre Koyré, whose acquaintance with Brunschvicg is not always recalled and stressed as it should be. Despite being born in Russia, Koyré studied first under Husserl and Hilbert in Gottingen, Germany, where he tried to bring about a convergence between phenomenology and Bergsonism, which he saw as two utterly compatible doctrines. When Husserl refused to supervise his PhD thesis on the paradoxes of set theory, he permanently moved to France after a stint in the army during the war. In Paris, he studied at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, later defending at the Sorbonne his doctoral theses on the thought of Jakob Böhme and the national problem in early nineteenth-century Russia.185 Koyré was thus a polymorphous figure, not only acting as a mediator between the German and the French world but also moving freely within the French philosophical field. In fact, he paired his closeness to many members of the philosophical establishment, like LévyBruhl and Brunschvicg himself, who was among the discussants of his main doctoral dissertation, with the frequentation of non-academic thinkers, like Meyerson, and more innovative contexts: the École Pratique, which offered teachings that were, in terms of contents and methodologies, alternative to those delivered at the Sorbonne, or the journals Recherches philosophiques (still quite traditional in many respects) and Critique. Due to his bifocal position, he managed to secure his relationship with the old philosophical guard while at the same time introducing French thought to foreign inspirations that would soon sweep it off, most notably Hegel’s dialectics, Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s existential analytics.186 To be sure, Koyré’s approach to the history and the philosophy of science differed largely from Brunschvicg’s, due to the vast repertoire of sources he relied upon in shaping his own method. In an unpublished talk, he also presented Brunschvicg and Meyerson as two sides of the same coin.187 There, and in a text published under his name but actually written by Alexandre Kojève – the review of a choral work on L’orientation actuelle des sciences prefaced by Brunschvicg – one could find a harsh critique of Brunschvicg’s and the philosophers’ incapacity to properly interpret the evolution of scientific knowledge, especially in physics. Thinkers like Brunschvicg in fact spent too much time revising the past, while the authentic scientific philosophy was being made, although maladroitly, by the scientists themselves.188 Yet Brunschvicgian echoes could be found in some statements, dealing in particular with the way in which the relationships between science, history and philosophy should be framed. One can only speak of ‘echoes’ because of what I have just said about Koyré’s plural background, which allowed him to mix the lessons of phenomenology, critical idealism and Meyerson’s epistemology. The hostility to any form of positivism, from Bacon to the Vienna Circle and from Comte to Mach, as well as to materialist reductionisms, surely was the combined outcome of this multifaceted formation.

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Typically Brunschvicgian is the idea that the history of science cannot be taken as a self-sufficient process, unaffected by the action of philosophical ideas and world views, with which it entertains instead a circular relationship. The world of values and the world of facts are two sides of the same strip, modifying each other as knowledge progresses.189 For Brunschvicg as well as for Koyré, human thought was characterised by a certain unity, so that philosophical, scientific and religious doctrines were not susceptible of being treated as compartmentalised. Common ‘mental habits’, in fact, defined epochs and contexts.190 For this reason, Koyré accepted being labelled an ‘idealist’, insofar as he focused his gaze on the role played by scientific ‘ideas’, and not merely on the evolution of techniques,191 especially considering that social and material conditions alone could not explain the actual breakthroughs of the sciences in certain regions at a certain moment. Science, for Koyré, was thus essentially theoria, a search for truth, which entailed that it had an ‘immanent history’ of its own. The study of science was thus part and parcel of the ‘intellectual autobiography’ of man.192 In the incipit to the Galileo Studies, for instance, he contended that the study of the evolution and the revolutions of scientific ideas showed ‘the human mind grappling with reality’, revealing ‘its defeats’ and ‘victories’ and the way in which such a ‘superhuman effort’ to understand the real ended up transforming the intellect itself.193 In conclusion, the history of science unveiled the ‘itinerarium mentis in veritatem’ – tortuous, full of errors and predicaments, achievements, contradictions and revisions. The cases of Koyré and Piaget are meant as a caveat against easy historical simplifications. Instead of getting lost into nominalistic tangles, Brunschvicg’s presence should be followed by analysing clusters of authors connected by personal and/or theoretical relationships and/or affinities, who hardly belonged to the same school or movement, but who were all interested in the status of the sciences, whether physical, biological or mathematical and whether from historical or more ideological point of views. In other words, Brunschvicg was not the father of something like a French historical epistemology, but one of the fathers of twentieth-century studies in the history and philosophy of science in France. If Brunschvicg could be deemed to be more influential in the long run than, for example, Meyerson, this is not due to ethereal reasons, but because he was a powerful academic figure whose main heir too, Bachelard, occupied key institutional positions that in turn he bequeathed to another central figure like Canguilhem. Thus, the relevance of Bachelard’s role in securing the survival of Brunschvicg’s legacy in French epistemology, and in marginalising competing models that were already marginal from an institutional point of view, like Meyerson’s, should not be underestimated.194 From a strictly philosophical point of view, there is no doubt that Bachelard was definitely the most original and faithful follower of Brunschvicg’s critical idealism, although his irregular intellectual path and professional career inevitably produced a series of differences.195 Born in a humble and provincial milieu, Bachelard famously started as a high school teacher of chemistry and physics and ended up directing since 1940 the Institut d’histoire des sciences et des techniques founded by Rey at the Sorbonne. Thus, whereas Brunschvicg was before all a philosopher endowed with a perfect academic pedigree, who saw in science the proof of the fluid and plastic

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character of human intelligence, Bachelard was conversely a scientist who found in philosophy the cues and the setting to clarify and analyse (in a sort of psychoanalytic way) scientific rationality at work.196 This entanglement of continuity and difference could already be found in Bachelard’s main PhD dissertation, the Essai sur la connaissance approchée, supervised by Brunschvicg and defended in 1927. As to continuity, Bachelard himself indicated what was their most meaningful point of convergence, namely their interest in the ‘events of reason’, which ‘never thunderous …, often give scandal at a distance of time, in a distant future’.197 But upon a broader look, it is possible to detect many fundamental notions that Bachelard inherits from Brunschvicg, namely: (1) the idea that science is endowed with a paramount ethical and pedagogical significance, bringing about a purification from selfishness and idiosyncratic stances; (2) the sharp separation between rationality and imagination – although, as is known, Bachelard would try to give dignity to the latter’s reveries – as well as between science and common knowledge; (3) the principle that the adventure of science leads the mind to discard its naive, immediate, subjective and purely perceptual assumptions and to embrace a rational, objective and constructivist stance; (4) the belief that philosophy should be historyoriented, in that its task is to describe ‘how things and minds are, which means how they historically develop and change’;198 (5) the denial of continuity in the experience of time and history (an overt anti-Bergsonian stance), in favour of events, ruptures and epistemic reorganisations; (6) the harsh criticism levelled at Meyerson’s principle of identity and his eternal conception of reason; (7) a rebooting of Kantianism that breaks with its ‘static’ elements (the ‘definitive’ determination of the structure of the mind as in the table of the categories); (8) a conflict-ridden vision of the progress of history and rationality, where mentalities clash and ‘epistemological obstacles’, remnants of older epistemic ages, are progressively taken out. However, precisely in relation to this last point, a first important difference sticks out. In fact, the Bachelardian vision of history departed from the optimistic teleology that (at least initially) was present in Brunschvicg. As Dagognet put it, Bachelard’s rationalism was more ‘polemical’ and his vision of the progress of rationality more ‘faltering’.199 Furthermore (second difference), already in his PhD dissertation, which deals with the issue of approximation, Bachelard proved to be more aware of the concrete life of the scientists, with its operative and technical problems. Whereas Brunschvicg insisted on the intermediary nature of experimental judgement (its ‘mixed form’), articulated at the crossroad of mental formalisation and the resistance of the real, Bachelard felt more acutely the need to relinquish the Cartesian ideal of clarity and distinctiveness – of course, without thereby accepting any lapse into irrationalism. As he wrote in Le rationalisme appliqué (1949), the exteriority of the ‘Brunschvicgian doublets’ had to be avoided,200 and this could be done only by ‘forcing the door to the laboratory’.201 A fair historical assessment should certainly stress equally the proximity and the discrepancy between Bachelard and Brunschvicg, but in this case it must be emphasised that Bachelard, as acknowledged by his mentor himself,202 assumed entirely what had already been the remit of Brunschvicg, namely the desire to formulate an ‘open rationalism’203 that, to use Bachelard’s famous terms, would be a kind of ‘surrationalism’,

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that is, a rationalism that has finally forgone any aprioristic view and that strives to account for the dynamism of rationality, a dynamism that thrives on crises and revolutions.204 Of course, Bachelard stripped Brunschvicg’s philosophy of judgement from its more speculative and idealistic character. Nevertheless, he kept the idea that one should seize the act of knowing ‘in its nascent state’, when it deals with the unknown and has not yet reduced it to theory.205 From this perspective, approximation becomes a positive index of scientific knowledge, not a limit but a condition of possibility, allowing us to adjust concepts and laws – which have a technical nature, insofar as they are functional to laboratory experimentation – according to the complexity of the object.206 The reform of the Brunschvicgian reform of Kantianism, so to speak, had thus to lead, in Bachelard’s hopes, to the advent of a pluralist, ‘distributed’207 or ‘differential’ philosophy ‘of epistemological detail’208 capable of studying knowledge (a hypothesis, a problem, a theory, an equation, etc.) in its local applications, in relation to the practices required by particular experimental circumstances or proper to a given scientific field. Georges Canguilhem (1904–1995), for his part, appears at first glance less compromised with Brunschvicg’s bequest, due to his often-stressed connections with Alain and the latter’s peculiar interpretation of reflective philosophy as primarily a philosophy of values. In such a tradition, judgement is understood less as a creative/ constructive operation than as an axiological activity bestowing value upon external facts.209 The thematic and methodological abyss that would eventually separate the mature Canguilhem from the younger one of the 1930s who still contributed to the Alinian review Libres propos did not prevent certain insights and concerns to remain central within the economy of his oeuvre. What does the famous essay on The Normal and the Pathological (1943) consist in if not in a displacement of the source of normativity from the subject to life? Subjectivity was preserved, but its judgemental activity was inscribed within a broader biological milieu that already exhibited a primordial, spontaneous axiology.210 This inevitably implies a rupture with any intellectual theory of knowledge, including critical idealism. However, although for someone like Canguilhem Brunschvicg was a figure that could not be sidestepped, one may wonder whether the author of works on the history and philosophy of mathematics and physics had anything to say to the author of groundbreaking essays on the history of medicine and biology. Many at the time (Piaget, as we have seen, but also Aron and Hyppolite) took issue with Brunschvicg’s ‘unilateral’ presentation of science, which completely neglected biological research, allegedly because he regarded it as not yet scientifically matured – that is, incapable of corroborating an idealism, but rather exploitable by substantialist or evolutionist doctrines.211 Actually, the parallel evolution of science and philosophy came down to an interaction between philosophy, mathematics and physics, something that could not be accepted peacefully by anyone interested in the actual history of the sciences. And yet, Jacques Lautman argued that, while Canguilhem was not among the firstrank disciples of Brunschvicg, he nonetheless accepted his influence, as evidenced by certain texts like, paradoxically, those gathered in The Knowledge of Life (1952).212 To be precise, Brunschvicg was evoked already in the introduction to the dissertation of 1943,

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where Canguilhem symbolically placed the research there exposed under his aegis. For Brunschvicg, Canguilhem recalled, philosophy was ‘the science of solved problems’,213 that is, ‘the questioning of received solutions’.214 Trying out critically the strength of the thesis asserting a qualitative difference between normal and pathological states was a way of ‘making this simple and profound definition our own’.215 Taking a step further, the very critical conception of epistemology that Canguilhem articulated could be seen as indebted to Brunschvicg’s own critical use of history. Epistemology, in fact, must not ‘deduce the criteria of scientificity from a priori categories of the understanding’; on the contrary, it has to draw them from the ‘history of conquering rationality’.216 Due to its critical and normative character, epistemology was for Canguilhem distinct both from philosophy and the history of science, as it consisted, in a way that mixed both Alain’s and Brunschvicg’s legacies, in a critical reflection upon the establishment of certain values and norms in history. To be sure, it is clear that, before Brunschvicg, it was Bachelard and his attempt to describe a plurality of regional rationalities that Canguilhem had in mind, in spite of a few differences.217 But this should not blind us to certain undertones that could be heard in Canguilhem’s works that seem to directly echo Brunschvicgian topoi, suggesting a more direct connection. Besides the notion that philosophy is the science of solved problems, one may mention another idea, formulated throughout the 1943 dissertation, on the status of philosophy, asserting that this latter is a discipline which deals constitutively with foreign matters: ‘Philosophy is a reflection for which all unknown material [matière étrangère] is good, and … for which all good material must be unknown.’218 It would not be that venturesome to speculate that this too could be an innuendo to Brunschvicg, who, in a discourse at the lycée Condorcet of 1902, had precisely declared that philosophy has ‘no proper matter’, given that its material is the progress of the mind as can be studied in history.219 Equally marked in a decisive way by the Brunschvicgian imprinting, and close both to Bachelard and Canguilhem, was Jean Cavaillès (1903–1944), who did more than merely continue his teacher’s research in the philosophy of mathematics, understood in a broad and not sector-specific sense, as he also recuperated the Spinozian inspiration that animated it. The personal connections between them were close. Brunschvicg supervised not only Cavaillès’s mémoire on La philosophie et les applications du calcul des probabilités chez les Bernoulli (1925) but also his two PhD dissertations, Méthode axiomatique et formalisme and Remarques sur la fonction de la théorie abstraite des ensembles (1938). Again, Cavaillès’s relationship with Brunschvicg was fatally marked by a certain generational gap. The differences concerned not solely the theoretical level, where they consisted in a distancing from the idealism of the ‘Maître’, deemed still too psychologistic. They emerged also with regard to the intellectual postures and style of the old Third Republic academic milieu, for which philosophy was a sort of ‘ersatz of religion’.220 Commenting on a meeting of the Union pour la vérité, chaired by Brunschvicg and dedicated to the topic ‘Time and Eternity’, for example, Cavaillès could not help noticing and teasing the stilted rhetorical style of the interventions and the skirmish of egos (‘amours-propres’) between Brunschvicg himself, Marcel, Maritain and Benda.221 This notwithstanding, it is entirely correct to consider Cavaillès as a philosopher working along the lines of Brunschvicg’s criticism, well beyond the narrow scope of

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mathematics, if it is true that Cavaillès’s work embraced great philosophical questions that were at the heart of critical idealism, like the relationship between knowledge and history, the epistemological role of consciousness, the status of rational entities and so on.222 For him, the lesson of Hilbert, Dedekind and Cantor consisted in having demonstrated that mathematics, as a science of pure thought, is characterised by a creative and genetic dynamics of its own that cannot be reduced to the activity of the subject. And indeed, considering principally his most famous work, the posthumous On Logic and the Theory of Science (1947, but drafted in 1942), scholars have usually painted an image of Cavaillès as the great enemy of consciousness in epistemology, who tried to purge from his account of scientific rationality any reference whatsoever to the activity of a constitutive subjectivity. And yet things are more complicated than that, as acknowledged by other studies.223 A clarification of this point can be achieved only by reading Cavaillès’s main texts against the legacy of critical idealism. Cavaillès’s project could indeed be framed as a prosecution of Brunschvicg’s Spinozism and a reiteration of his critique of the Kantian a priori as completely incapable of accounting for the evolution of contemporary mathematics. On closer inspection, one can see how Cavaillès embodied what had surely been one of the most distinctive features of Brunschvicg’s critical idealism, namely, the dismissal of the individual per se and the depiction of the intelligence as an ‘impersonal’ power of rationalisation. Claiming, as has been done,224 that critical idealism was an ‘enemy of subjectivity’, already anticipating such later themes as the death of subject and man, means taking matters too far. But certainly rationality was envisaged as something devoid of substratum, as an autonomous realm of intelligibility endowed with its own laws of development. It was the Spinozian/Brunschvicgian dream, condensed in the Étapes, of an ‘intuitive science’ that would be ‘sufficient unto itself ’, following an ‘internal dynamism’, a sort of ‘spiritual automatism’, in which every idea would ‘affirm itself and produce its own consequences’.225 What distinguished Cavaillès’s work from that of his teacher was the different appreciation of the input of the mind qua constructive power, which in Brunschvicg, as we have seen, expressed itself through judgements, understood as acts of determination pre-existing the articulation of concepts. In Méthode axiomatique et formalisme Cavaillès still referred to the work of a constitutive consciousness as the ground of mathematical operations. Every ‘thematic field’ – the set of objects construed and utilised in a certain epoch – always presupposed consciousness as its correlate (and here one can detect echoes of the Husserlian language). For Cavaillès, the construction of the mathematical object was inscribed within the reflective and thematising movement of consciousness: it did not pre-exist the formal language in which it was deployed. The dialectical relationship between experience and the mind was the same that one could find in Brunschvicg: in Cavaillès’s eyes, indeed, there was a coincidence between the ‘widening of consciousness’ and the ‘dialectical development of experience’, wherein it was impossible to properly separate form and content, de jure and de facto conditions226 – the great paradox of transcendental philosophy exposed in a famous posthumous article, ‘Transfini et continu’.227 However, Cavaillès’s thesis already bore traces of a critique of Brunschvicgian idealism, in favour of what would subsequently become a full thematisation of the autonomous ‘dialectic of the concept’. During his PhD discussion, Brunschvicg had pointed out the lack of

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consideration for the psychology of the mathematician, something that, Cavaillès replied, was completely outside his concerns.228 From then on, not only the genesis of mathematical idealities but more generally the very evolution of scientific theories, punctuated by crises and reformulations, were framed by Cavaillès as questions that could find a solution only on the objective level of the ‘intellectual liaisons’ alone. The unfinished On Logic and the Theory of Science was meant to be a first decisive step towards a proper philosophy of the concept, through a thorough criticism of both the Kantian and the Husserlian perspectives. By claiming that science rested on internal conditions, that is, on conditions belonging to the realm of intelligibility itself, progressing by means of a ‘spontaneous generation of intelligible elements’,229 it might seem that Cavaillès finally managed to kill off every remnant of idealism. Are not the talks of the ‘self-enclosed dynamism’ of ‘a conceptual becoming which cannot be stopped’ utterly incompatible with a philosophy of judgement? And yet Cavaillès did not abolish fully the role of subjectivity but rather reduced its acts to moments of a dialectics that were internal to the conditions of the evolution of the concept. Differently put, by refusing the primacy of the transcendental subjectivity and gainsaying the possibility of considering consciousness as a primitive given, in relation to which science could be explained, Cavaillès sought less to eliminate consciousness than to valorise the autonomy of the structures of internal growth and progress of rationality.230 Parallel but quite different was the path taken by Cavaillès’s friend and fellow martyr of the Resistance Albert Lautman.231 Himself a disciple of Brunschvicg, Lautman was no less concerned by the broad philosophical issue of the essence of mathematics as a human construction. Like Cavaillès, he departed from the mentor in his attempt to give authentic dignity to mathematical knowledge in its own right, without overdetermining it by means of a specific philosophical view (idealism): philosophical impulse, he believed, had in fact to emerge out of the technical problems or, as he called them, ‘logical dramas’232 of ‘effective mathematics’, rather than be guided by specific doctrines.233 Yet, he interpreted this task in a different way, under the spell of something that Brunschvicg could not know in 1912, namely, Hilbert’s axiomatic. Lautman extolled Brunschvicg’s Étapes as the book that taught philosophers ‘to associate in an indissoluble way the elaboration, or even only the comprehension of mathematical theories, and the experience that the intelligence has of its own power’.234 However, he maintained that, since at least the development of non-Euclidean geometries, mathematics could hardly be represented ‘as an indefinitely progressive and unifying extension’. Rather, the new theories were ‘figures of an organic unity’: ‘The point of view of a new mathematics gradually asserts itself, and substitutes for the infinitist process of the analysis of the nineteenth century, the structural schemas of algebra or of topology.’235 Brunschvicg had been right to make clear the irreducibility of mathematics to an a priori logic, and still such an irreducibility had now to be made compatible, reconciled, with the ‘structural logical schemas’ around which the new mathematics (e.g. the ‘qualitative’ one of Poincaré or the ‘integral’ one of Severi) was developing.236 This meant abandoning the reference to judgement: ‘The reality of mathematics, Lautman argued, is not made in the act of the intellect that creates or understands, but it is in this act that it appears to us.’237 Lautman saw in

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the breakthroughs achieved in ‘mixed’ domains like group theory, algebraic topology, functional analysis or differential geometry the validation of a Platonic vision in which the creative progress of mathematics was brought forth instead by the productive opposition between conceptual polarities that intermingled constantly (global/local, finite/infinite, algebra/analysis, whole/part, extrinsic/intrinsic, continuous/discrete, etc.). In perhaps simpler terms, the progress of mathematics was sustained, according to Lautman, by constant attempts to ease the tensions between these poles. This could be done, for example, by implementing a tighter solidarity between the whole and its parts, by passing from imperfection to the absolute or by reducing relational properties to intrinsic properties.238 This was not to say that mathematical theories were fatally bound to err between contrasting options. Just as in Plato the distinction of the Same and the Other was grounded in the unity of Being,239 for Lautman mathematics evinced a unity that, however, had to be found in a rational distribution of differences, in the ‘transit between a world of ideas of possible, free relations, and a world much richer in determinations, full of precisions and delimitations’.240 More precisely, the unity was provided by the fact that the possible relations between the dialectical notions were enshrined in what Lautman called, in a Platonic fashion, ‘Ideas’, understood not so much as static essences, as rather qua ‘structural schemas’ presiding over the organisation of effective theories.241 From a different angle, Ideas were ‘questions’ posing dialectical problems of which each theory represented a partial solution,242 so that the attempts to better understand and solve them actually determined scientific steps forward.243 It appeared, then, that mathematical activity was governed and animated by an ‘ideal reality’, which could only be fathomed through its own historical instantiations.244 By presenting mathematics (but also physics) as stemming necessarily from a metaphysics that purported to offer a purely rational and non-temporal model of the genesis of the concrete from the abstract, ‘eternally recommencing the act of the genesis of a Universe’,245 Lautman leaped beyond the primacy of judgement established by Brunschvicg’s mathematical philosophy, subordinating it, in a way far more radical than Cavaillès,246 to a higher and autonomous rational dimension. Although intellectual activity was not discarded, given that a creative element always subsisted, the formulation of mathematical theories did not originate anymore from the mind’s constructive effort to turn the gross data of immediate experience into a system of relations, but proceeded instead from Ideas that were logically, if not ontologically, anterior.247 Lautman’s philosophy of mathematics was thus an idealism in a different sense from the spiritualist one of Brunschvicg, as it winded up resting, admittedly, on a metaphysics of ‘participation’.248 Despite this, though, the old mentor never disowned the disciple: in 1943, from exile, Brunschicg wrote to Lautman that the desire to see how his research would develop had awakened in him something rare, namely, ‘the longing for a second existence’.249 As Bachelard was crucial in conveying many Brunschvicgian themes into the subsequent reflections on the history of the sciences, the short magisterium of Cavaillès and Lautman opened up new avenues to the survival of the ‘mathematical philosophy’ baptised in the Étapes. Suffice it to consider the still quite unappreciated work of Jean-Toussaint Desanti (1914–2002), primarily known for his rather technical book of 1968 on Les idéalités mathématiques,250 but hugely influential within the

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mid-twentieth-century French landscape. It is no accident that Desanti authored the preface to the 1972 reissue of Brunschvicg’s great work on mathematics. He had come into contact with Brunschvicg in the second half of the 1930s, when he was a student at the École Normale Supérieure. His appraisal of the Brunschvicgian legacy was therefore inevitably mediated, notably by his acquaintance with Cavaillès, who directed the thesis on L’être et la relation dans la philosophie platonicienne submitted for the Diplôme d’études supérieurs in 1938. But there was more to it. In fact, in those dramatic years of transition within the philosophical field, Desanti found himself right in the eye of the storm, preserving the Spinozian understanding of mathematics that ran through the bloodline of his teachers Brunschvicg and Cavaillès, but also amalgamating it with the discovery of phenomenology, which he owed to MerleauPonty, and an adherence to Marxism (he would join the French Communist Party in 1943, while contributing clandestinely to the resistance, before quitting it in the 1950s). Since then, Desanti’s life as a scholar was inevitably affected by a close interplay between militancy and philosophical work, even when dealing with apparently technical themes in the philosophy of mathematics. Indeed, his staunch and almost apologetic Stalinism in first post-war decades, voiced in books like the Introduction à l’histoire de la philosophie (1956)251 or Phénoménologie et praxis (1963),252 could hardly be downplayed as inessential. As a professor at his former alma mater, Desanti had the chance of teaching central personalities in subsequent French philosophy, like Foucault, Althusser and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), but his work remains even today largely unexplored outside small French circles.253 Knox Peden has the merit of having brought to light Desanti’s allegiance to a twentieth-century French Spinozism that strove to counterbalance, or to integrate, the phenomenological mainstream between the 1940s and the 1960s.254 Under the double aegis of Cavaillès the Spinozist and Merleau-Ponty the (anti-Spinozian) phenomenologist, Desanti retrieved the commitment to rationality of the former, while adopting the phenomenological method of eidetic reduction to dispel the rigidity of the Spinozian system and account for the genesis of true and adequate ideas. More precisely, although Desanti perfectly understood the full importance of Cavaillès’s critique of the transcendental consciousness, he dropped his Spinozian interpretation of the genesis and status of rational idealities in terms that completely obliterated the subject, claiming that such a process, and thought in general, could not be abstracted from its temporal and material anchorage. This blending of Spinozism and phenomenology was often seen as suspicious within the radical circles of the time, where Husserl’s doctrine was often considered as a pernicious fruit of the bourgeois tree, a collapse of reality into the solipsistic dimension of methodological individualism. Famously, Desanti’s clinging to phenomenology would determine a moment of falling out between him and his student Althusser. In his Introduction à l’histoire de la philosophie, written under pressure from the Party to produce a piece of scholarship legitimising the scientific profile of historical materialism, Desanti had indeed articulated the first materialist interpretation of Spinoza in France. However unlikely it might seem in a book full of contemptuous references to ‘bourgeois thought’ and its will to shape the history of philosophy and the world in its guise, Desanti acknowledged the importance of Brunschvicg’s historiographical and theoretical works on Spinoza, especially for

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having stressed the parallelism, the homogeneity, between scientific facts and laws on one side and the freedom of the mind, consisting in the coincidence with rational ideas, on the other. This did not mean that Brunschvicg was immune from ideological biases: indeed, he still abstracted ‘his own preferred form of thought – idealism – from its historical conditions to one side of a Manichean transhistorical struggle against its opposite’.255 Desanti’s disciple Louis Althusser (1918–1990), whose work was well inscribed within the epistemological debates of the time, might seem the most distant from Brunschvicg in the constellation that I am tracing. As I argue elsewhere, he took up Bachelard’s non-Kantianism and turned it into an anti-Kantianism.256 In that regard, he surely departed from Brunschvicg’s bourgeois apologetic humanism and idealism, which for him was nothing more than the philosophy of a ‘functionary’, whose only interest was the preservation of social order.257 Althusser even painted a bleak portrait of the man in his famous 1974 course on the spontaneous philosophy of the scientists: ‘A “great mind” (at least as far as the history of modern French philosophy is concerned), who spoke incessantly of Spirit. The fact that he came to a miserable end in an occupied France whose government hunted down the Jews changed nothing in his official past.’258 Then, Althusser went on questioning Brunschvicg’s knowledge of the history of philosophy: ‘Brunschvicg was a spiritualist who … knew how to make use of the prestige of certain arguments taken from the most disparate philosophers, and how to distort them for his own purposes.’259 And yet there were theoretical continuities that are worth underscoring briefly, although they should not be overemphasised, given that the mediation of Bachelard and Canguilhem was strong. The first of these concerns the way in which, at least in the 1960s, Althusser conceived philosophy, namely – along the lines of Brunschvicg and Canguilhem – as a discipline having no object proper. In Brunschvicg, the history of philosophy came down to the tale of the mind’s reflection upon itself, torn between two macro-tendencies, idealism and realism. Althusser took a step further: in fact, this absence of object meant that philosophy could not have a history in a proper, positive sense, a progress comparable to that of the sciences: ‘If nothing happens in philosophy it is precisely because it has no object.’ Philosophy was thus just the eternal Kampflatz, the recurrent rumination on clashing tendencies, like idealism and materialism, whose conflicts, however, were often, according to Althusser’s logic of ‘overdetermination’, merely superficial manifestations of the real stakes embedded and concealed in the social world.260 Hence, the paramount critical task became that of exposing, through a theoretical intervention, philosophical abstractions as the surface effects of structural mutations (which, of course, were for Althusser utterly contingent). Secondly, it has been argued indeed that, despite his penchant for radical ‘breaks’, Althusser stood ‘at the cumulative point of a trajectory of French Spinozism that has its roots in Cavaillès, if not Brunschvicg himself. … At a philosophical level, Brunschvicg’s own assessment of Spinozism would reach its supreme expression in Althusser’s project’.261 The difference, of course, lies in the fact that Althusser could not tolerate what he perceived as an ideological deformation of Spinoza, ‘who would turn in his grave if he knew he was being read as a spiritualist’.262 The point of contact was instead loosely constituted by the rejection of a representational model of truth, by the

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linchpin of the ‘verum index sui et falsi’, which however Althusser understood not so much in the sense of a progressive ascension of an enlightened intelligence, as rather along the lines of a totality (the world, history) that, in order to be framed, does not presuppose the existence of an external essence, criterion or telos. The scientism of the mature Althusser, who tried to purge Marxism of the HegelianFeuerbachian ‘subjectivism’ (read via Kojève), is almost proverbial and has been widely discussed. According to his former pupil Jacques Rancière, science was for him ‘the only important thing’, while everything else was pushed ‘into that realm of illusion known in our discourse by the term lived experience’.263 It is difficult to image something more Brunschvicgian than this scenario, where of course the emphasis on science should be understood not in ideological/positivist terms but rather as a valorisation of its critical and demystifying power. Ideology in fact is a blind practice that receives its basic coordinates from the outside, in a process of ‘overdetermination’, while science is defined by the capacity of producing its own objects. This attention to science is surely the reason why Althusser was ambiguous towards Brunschvicg’s legacy (or, at least, the legacy that stemmed from his thought). For example, in an often neglected text of the 1950s on ‘L’enseignement de la philosophie’, he maintained that there was a danger for contemporary thought consisting in the detachment of existentialism and phenomenology from ‘the great classical rationalist tradition that strongly connected philosophy with the problems of the positive sciences’.264 Fortunately, he saw in some scholars and in new cohorts of students a renewed interest in the epistemological aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology and even Brunschvicg’s criticism. Althusser was indeed referring to the generation of students taught by him and Desanti, like Derrida or Foucault. To be sure, the influence of Brunschvicg could no longer hold its own against the relevance that Husserl had acquired within the philosophical field. But a certain thematic blending was surely possible, as phenomenology was often endorsed by philosophers working more or less consciously in Brunschvicg’s footsteps. As Derrida recalled, phenomenology was for him ‘a discipline of incomparable rigor’, but not ‘in the versions proposed by Sartre or Merleau-Ponty’; what interested him and his fellows was rather the phenomenology that allowed them to tackle questions like ‘the historicity of science, the history of ideal objects and of truth’.265 Personally very close but theoretically distant, Althusser and Derrida surely clung, even if in an odd manner, to a French rationalist tradition of which Brunschvicg was undoubtedly part, although his influence could often be hidden and filtered by other references. How can one not detect Brunschvicgian echoes in what Althusser wrote in 1954, namely, that ‘philosophy’s struggle’ was the ‘struggle for the rigour of reflection and of method …, the struggle for respect and the intelligence of positive reality’?266 Later, however, Althusser’s position became more nuanced and conflicting. With regard to science itself, for example, he came to claim that spiritualist philosophers like Brunschvicg exploited ‘the difficulties, contradictions and crises internal to the sciences’, as well as ‘all forms of human misery’, to apologetic ends, to corroborate their own ideological vision, just as Pascal used science to justify his religious views.267 So, we end up again with an ambivalence that perfectly recaptures the attitude towards the Brunschvicgian legacy detailed so far. While Althusser looked favourably

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at Brunschvicg’s work, in particular its critical attention to the scientific world, he nonetheless could not see in such an allegiance between philosophy and science but a ‘bastard opening’, ultimately manipulative and implicitly ideological.268 He knew that the demise of critical idealism was not tantamount to its death, as its tradition survived in ‘great names’ like Cavaillès, Bachelard, Koyré, Canguilhem and so on.269 Marxist philosophy, in Althusser’s own peculiar interpretation that I cannot detail here, was emerging as an autonomous line of thought precisely as a reaction to the crises of rationalism and criticism themselves. However, despite the claims of ‘anticritical idealism’,270 Althusser never disavowed it completely. That fin-de-siècle ‘French academic philosophy’ had overlooked the import of Lenin, Marx, Freud and even Hegel was indeed a scandal. Yet this did not mean that critical rationalism was a tradition that could not be materialistically reprised and updated, in a new theoretical and ideological conjuncture, against the remnants of spiritualism and humanism that still haunted philosophy and political thought.271

Outro As Althusser observed, ‘it was the disagreement between the real problems and the classical problematics that caused the despair of the old Brunschvicg in his outcast solitude and the end of his philosophical reign’.272 Brunschvicg was a ‘pure soul’, but incapable of ‘anticipating’ what was to come.273 The turn of events surely mowed down Brunschvicg’s ideals and exposed critical idealism as a doctrine which, despite its great capacity to account for the dialectical, constructive and problematic nature of scientific advancements, managed only to see one side of the question. In fact, Brunschvicg correctly understood that modern science was animated by an unrestrainable drive to translate nature into codes, digits, symbols and so on – today we would speak of data, metadata, algorithms and everything connected to the world of information technology. Through the great scientific turnarounds of the fin de siècle, beyond the specific revolution in mathematics and physics, he saw more generally that humanity was embarking on a journey leading to a progressive dematerialisation of exchanges (in finance, bureaucracy, communication, etc.) fuelled by the mind’s properly constructive power, a power of formalisation and abstraction. The vision of a future in which the world would change at an exponential rate was already crystal-clear to him. The vertiginous pace that he deemed characteristic of his time and the times to come was nothing but the speeding up of the inherent rhythm of modernity since Descartes. The belief that ‘everything had already been fixed for all eternity’ defined the Middle Ages, when the ‘human machine bowed to the practice of the trade in a guild as for the practice of prayer in a church’.274 On the contrary, the modern and contemporary age, under the impulse of rational science, was an epoch of permanent ‘acceleration’ and ‘revolution’, which required a plastic, progressive and emancipated conception of the human intelligence – not alienated ‘automata’ working on exterior ends but autonomous minds capable of reflecting upon and orienting the finality of science and technology.275 In Brunschvicg’s view, the constraints of matter, biology, old institutions, codified cultures and traditions, natural languages and all sorts of automatisms were

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doomed to count increasingly less, bent to the expansion of the collective scientific reason and its will to inform the world, to structure reality according to its own forms. In science, but also in art and morality, the mind – or more broadly the spirit as a collective intelligence – was ascending to the point where ‘negation’ is no longer perceived, where the ambiguous and changing appearances of things and the pull of the past vanish, where all that’s left is the ‘jouissance’ of no longer being separated from a world rendered into ‘a network of scientific relations’ – the spirit recognising itself in the world.276 The problem was that Brunschvicg went beyond the ambitions of a philosopher of science, concerned with ‘regional’ technical problems, and claimed to provide a wholesome philosophy of culture, where science, art, ethics and politics all partake in this celebration of an intelligence striving to be ‘internal’ to everything.277 In this regard, he remained lured by the stadial conception of progress that, since Condorcet, undergirded the vision of a society redeemed by the cult of science, seen as the ultimate human achievement. This is why his disciples, tormented by the terrible trials of the new century, turned their back on him and the narrative of scientific progress that sustained the Belle Époque. It is true that Brunschvicg failed to appreciate, unlike many of his contemporaries – from Marx to Weber, from Valéry to the late Élie Halévy, who died in utter despair at the sight of the abyss over which Europe was leaning278 – how much the economic and social trends of rationalisation (in the sense of the German Rationalisierung) were not simply automatic machineries resisting the dynamism of the Idea but a seedbed of potential contradictions and conflicts that, combined with the resurgence of nationalism and antidemocratic feelings, were ready to burst out. Although, as we have seen, his idealism was not naive, in that he was aware of the persistent presence of threats that could easily prove it wrong, Brunschvicg still abided by a Fichtean credo according to which the system of freedom was meant to achieve the system of science. What happened was that the non-I revolted against the I’s pretence to saturate it, showing a complexity and a refractoriness that was impossible for the Self to master and orient. Or, alternatively, it turned out that the general spirit could serve other purposes unrelated to the principles of universality and truth that for Brunschvicg were the bright suns of the scientific universe. In other words, Brunschvicg did not realise, or did not fully appreciate, that the autonomisation of the intelligible harboured risks of depersonalisation, that technological development could run amok, emancipating itself from, and turning against, the values of rationality. In a way, it is true what Brunschvicg’s disciple and Althusser’s teacher Georges Gusdorf (1912– 2000) observed, namely, that in Brunschvicg philosophy winded up being reduced to a second-instance activity, a mere ‘recapitulation’ of positive knowledge, consisting in ‘extracting from scientific work the structure of the legitimate use of reason’, without even considering the hypothesis that philosophy could also think, criticise, question and perhaps attempt to transform the world.279 The limitations of critical idealism, which fatally ended up lagging behind a violent acceleration of history, were unfortunately the only things that the last century bequeathed to us. The negative image cast by Nizan and others has affected the ways of looking at the figure of Brunschvicg for many decades. Especially among those who are not historians of philosophy but rather theorists, Nizan’s characterisation is still

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common sense. It is no surprise, then, to see Brunschvicg’s ‘Cartesian epistemology’ presented as ‘philosophy at its most stale, academic, irrelevant and “dead” ’ in texts by leading contemporary leftist thinkers.280 The aim of this book has been to dispel some of these dark shadows. From a diachronic perspective, where what matters is not the atemporal validity of speculative models, the point has been not to determine whether Brunschvicg’s critical idealism was true, legitimate, correct, well-founded, more or less sophisticated. In the history of thought, every doctrine is valid insofar as it stems from a context of concerns, problems and ambitions that determine its tone, style and solutions. Doctrines can be more or less effective, more or less appropriate, more or less popular, but they all have equal dignity insofar as they allow to better understand an epoch or a particular moment in the history of ideas. Theories come to life with a historical function. We may debate whether they can be reduced to it. Still, when theories exhaust such a function, darkness descends on them. Critical idealism played a crucial role in renovating the intellectual landscape of the turn of the century. It provided answers to the philosophical disorientation ensuing from the growth of the explanatory ambitions and capacities of the sciences. It responded also to the theoretical questions that arose from the foundational crisis within the sciences themselves. It articulated a historical view capable of embracing Western thought in its entirety while making available interpretative keys to grasp its vitality and project it into the future. It knotted in a new way the threads of philosophical, scientific and moral speculation, in an often polemical dialogue with the torments of the religious consciousness. More generally, it announced, and contributed to, the reflective and ‘meta-’ character of twentiethcentury culture, in which every discipline expressed itself through an examination of its status, language and procedures, from philosophy to science, from literature to music and painting. Commenting on Poe’s Marginalia, Valéry had famously written: ‘The essential object of the mind is the mind. What it pursues in its analyses and its construction of worlds, what it tracks down in heaven and on earth, can only be itself.’281 The overall sense of Brunschvicg’s doctrine was unknowingly encapsulated in these words. The successive generations did what critical idealism taught them to do, what, in a way, it expected them to do: they criticised it, although from a heretic perspective, which was meant to rain on the parade of scientific and intellectual progress. As Koyré rightly observed after the war, ‘Bergson and Brunschvicg, with their idealism and optimism, seemed rather inadequate. The world as it is did not seem to fit into their categories; they seemed not to be able to give an answer to the most burning questions of the day.’282 And Nizan: ‘Bourgeois idealism, no matter what shape or colour it may assume, does not function very efficiently during periods of extreme tension. What little real substance it may contain suddenly loses its persuasive force.’283 We have seen that Brunschvicg complained about this change in direction. But it was upon precisely this kind of turn that his own historical view was grounded. As Aron remarked with the benefit of hindsight, when he, Sartre or Merleau-Ponty looked at Germany to free themselves from the tight fetters of the fin-de-siècle academic thought, they ‘simply repeated the step taken by the generation before us’, who looked at Kant as a way of rejuvenating philosophy against the old eclectic spiritualism.284 The new generations

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merely exerted the critical power of their reason, judging and discerning, choosing to set sail for other shores. Yet this does not cast any sort of retrospective shadow on Brunschvicg’s idealism per se, which was judged according to a set of needs, and in light of events, that were beyond its scope, that it could not address, that were not those from which it emerged. As Brunschvicg said in the Introduction à la vie de l’esprit – in a sentence that would later be engraved in a commemorative plaque affixed in 1949 at the hospital of Aixles-Bains285 – ‘Humanity is the necessary intermediary between the individual that we are and the spirit that we want to be.’286 Rhetorical as they may sound now, and as they already sounded to the philosophers of the 1930s and 1940s, these words encapsulated a life in thought, a philosophical experience that, directly or indirectly, opened up many of the paths upon which the twentieth century, apparently so far removed from the ruminations of the old ‘watchdogs’, would set its course.

Notes

Introduction 1. See Michel Foucault, ‘Life: Experience and Science’ (1985), in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984. Vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998), 466–7; Alain Badiou, ‘Preface: The Adventure of French Philosophy’ (2005), in The Adventure of French Philosophy, ed. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2012), liii. For a problematisation of this narrative, see Giuseppe Bianco, ‘Experience vs. Concept? The Role of Bergson in TwentiethCentury French Philosophy’, European Legacy 16, no. 7 (2011): 855–72; and Pierre Cassou-Noguès and Pascale Gillot, eds, Le concept, le sujet et la science: Cavaillès, Canguilhem, Foucault (Paris: Vrin, 2009). 2. An exception is Badiou, who does not hesitate to call himself a ‘descendent of the Brunschvicgian current of French philosophy’ (‘Theory from Structure to Subject: An Interview with Alain Badiou. Paris, France, 6 May 2007’, in Concept and Form, ed. Peter Hallward and Knox Peden [London: Verso, 2012], vol. 2, 281). 3. Cf. Paul Nizan, The Watchdogs: Philosophers of the Established Order, trans. Paul Fittingoff (New York: Monthly Review Press, [1932] 1971); Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 146. 4. Cf. Louis Althusser, ‘Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists’ (1974), in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays, ed. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2011), 124. 5. Cf. Antonio Gramsci, ‘Notebook 8 (1930–1932)’, in Prison Notebooks. Volume III, ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), §173, 334. 6. Cf. Marcel Proust, ‘The Captive’ (1923), in In Search of Lost Time. Volume V: The Captive – The Fugitive, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (London: Vintage Books, 2000), 98. 7. Interest in Brunschvicg seems to sparkle every ten years or so. In 1999, Giuseppe Bentivegna published Introduzione alla filosofia di Léon Brunschvicg. Dall’idealismo critico alla filosofia della matematica (Catania: Centro Studi per la Storia della Filosofia, 1999), followed eleven years later by the seventy-page-long Per una rilettura di Léon Brunschvicg (Acireale: Bonanno, 2010). Alberto Gualandi was the first, although from a strictly theoretical angle, to suggest what Brunschvicg’s contribution to French philosophy and the philosophy of science in general might have been, identifying it with the introduction of a look at knowledge and truth in terms of historicity and epistemological ruptures or events (cf. Le problème de la vérité scientifique dans la philosophie française contemporaine: la rupture et l’événement [Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000], 17, 59–98. Cristina Chimisso’s Writing the History of the Mind: Philosophy and Science in France, 1900 to 1960s (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) deals extensively with Brunschvicg, placing him within

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an intellectual and disciplinary context marked by a growing interest in history as the key to understanding the changing structures of the human mind (see in particular pages 71–80). More recently, two voluminous works appeared, both dealing with the reception of Kantian philosophy in France and featuring more historical and quite lengthy presentations of Brunschvicg’s thought (although inevitably focused on his Kantianism). The first is Laurent Fedi, Kant, une passion française, 1795–1940 (Olms: Hildesheim, 2018), chap. 22–4. The other is my own La philosophie française au miroir de Kant, 1854–1986 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2022), especially chap. 7.1. 8. Cf. Marcel Deschoux, Léon Brunschvicg, ou L’idéalisme à hauteur d’homme (Paris: Seghers, 1969). 9. This is an answer to Michael Friedman, who, in an otherwise beautiful book, wrote that, ‘aside from the early efforts of Husserl …, Cassirer is the only significant twentieth-century philosopher to make a serious effort to comprehend both these developments within the exact sciences and the contemporary turmoil taking place in the foundations of the historical and cultural sciences’ (A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger [Chicago: Open Court, 2000], 152–3). 10. Cf. Frédéric Worms, ed., Le Moment 1900 en philosophie (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2004). 11. See Jean-François Braunstein, Iván Moya Diez and Matteo Vagelli, eds, L’épistémologie historique: histoire et méthodes (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2019); Anastasios Brenner, ed., Les textes fondateurs de l’épistémologie française: Duhem, Poincaré, Brunschvicg et autres philosophes (Paris: Hermann, 2015). 12. See Cristina Chimisso, ‘François Dagognet et l’évolution de l’épistémologie historique’, in François Dagognet: philosophe, épistémologue, ed. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Jean-François Braunstein and Jean Gayon (Paris: Éditions Matériologiques, 2019), 23–35. 13. See the website of the Research Network on the History and the Methods of Historical Epistemology, https://episthist.hypotheses.org/ (accessed 9 October 2020). 14. See Yves Gingras, ‘Naming without Necessity: On the Genealogy and Uses of the Label “Historical Epistemology” ’, Revue de synthèse 131 (2010): 439–54. 15. In a previous 1949 book on Brunschvicg prefaced by Jean Hyppolite, Marcel Deschoux refused to use ‘cursory labels’ like ‘panmathematism, immanentism, critical or rational idealism’, as it would have been tantamount to looking at Brunschvicg’s philosophy from the outside and encapsulating it into a fixed system, thereby losing the vitality of his ‘philosophy of the spiritual work’ (La philosophie de Léon Brunschvicg [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949], 1). Such a qualm is absolutely legitimate. There is however an aspect that makes the use of ‘critical idealism’, which is very popular in the secondary literature, quite appropriate, as well as convenient (although of course, as with any label, it should not become selfevident). In fact, Brunschvicg actually used the term to qualify his thought in a fairly consistent and outright manner, at least since the 1900 article ‘La méthode dans la philosophie de l’esprit’ (see IC, 73–97). 16. Gaston Bachelard, ‘La philosophie scientifique de Léon Brunschvicg’ (1945), in L’engagement rationaliste (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 176. 17. VFC, 115. 18. In particular, I used the chapter devoted to Brunschvicg (chap. 7) as a matrix for the present book, which in its final structure retains some degree of resemblance with it. Besides that, the reader can refer to Terzi, La philosophie française au miroir de Kant,

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chap. 2.1 (for Renouvier), 3.1 (for Lachelier), 3.2 (for Boutroux), 5 (for an outlook of French philosophy at the fin de siècle), 6 (for Bergson and his early reception), 7.2.2 (for Politzer), 7.2.3 (for Aron), 9 (for the generational turn of the 1930s), 10 (for phenomenology) and 11 (for French epistemology). 19. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, ed. Gary Hatfield, 2nd edn (1997; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1783] 2004), 126–7 [Ak. IV, 375]. 20. See Reinier W. Munk, ed., Hermann Cohen’s Critical Idealism (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005).

1 The man, the context 1. AR, 180: ‘We owe our individuality to the environment, and true individuality consists in doing without the environment. / Verbal and disturbing equivocation; actual and fruitful ambiguity.’ 2. Cf. Frédéric Lefèvre, ‘Une heure avec M. Léon Brunschvicg’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, artistiques et scientifiques 6, no. 239 (14 May 1927): 1. 3. See Goudchaux Brunschvicg, L’Arbitraire en Tunisie: rapport (Paris: Laroche, 1911). He figures among the signatories of the Manifesto of the Comité d’Action Antifasciste et de Vigilance drafted during the Occupation by Paul Rivet, Alain and Paul Langevin. He also wrote notes of jurisprudence for the socialist journal La Vie socialiste and was among the authors of a text, published by the radical review La Révolution proletarienne, against the Moscow Trials and in defence of the ‘freedom of speech in the revolution’ (see La Révolution proletarienne 255 [1937]: 2). 4. Cfr. Édouard Depreux, Souvenirs d’un militant: cinquante ans de lutte, de la socialdémocratie au socialisme, 1918–1968 (Paris: Fayard, 1972), 156. 5. See Anne Mathieu and Gilles Morin, ‘Brunschvicg Betty’, in Dictionnaire biographique, mouvement ouvrier, mouvement social, http://maitron.univ-paris1.fr/spip. php?article198815 (accessed 15 June 2019). 6. Cf. Christophe Charle, Les professeurs de la Faculté des Lettres de Paris. Dictionnaire biographique. Vol. 2: 1909–1939 (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1986), 44. 7. See the famous La France juive (1886), by Édouard Drumont (1844–1917), in which he attacked the so-called ‘Jewish capitalism’ that was held responsible for the financial crack of the Union Générale in 1882. French anti-Semitism was rarely a purely racial phenomenon, but mingled frequently with, and sustained, the rightist antiParliamentarism and diagnosis of the decadence of French culture. 8. Cf. Ivan Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), chap. 2. On the French Jews and the Republic, see Pierre Birnbaum, Les fous de la République: histoire des Juifs d’État de Gambetta à Vichy (Paris: Fayard, 1992). Cristina Chimisso observes that Brunschvicg was among the first Jews to pursue an academic career (cf. Writing the History of the Mind, 25). 9. On these matters, see, e.g., Sophie Nordmann, Philosophie et judaïsme: H. Cohen, F. Rosenzweig, E. Levinas (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008). For a brief but effective comparison with the German context, see Perrine Simon-Nahum, La cité investée: la ‘Science du Judaïsme’ française et la République (Paris: Cerf, 1991), 17–18. See more generally ibid., ­chapter 1 and pp. 265, 271–84 for insights on the forms of assimilation and the intellectual contribution of Jewish intellectuals in France.

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10. A Paris-based association founded in 1860 by the statesman Adolphe Crémieux (1796–1880) to defend the human rights of the Jews. 11. Cf. Maurice Blondel, ‘Une des formes de la spiritualité et de l’amitié de Léon Brunschvicg’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 50, nos 1–2 (1945): 13. 12. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Diary of Léon Brunschvicg’ (1949), in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Séan Hand (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 44. 13. Ibid., 41. 14. Literature on the Third Republic is immense. For this inevitably sketchy contextualisation, I have relied on Michel Winock, Décadence fin de siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 2017); Arnaud-Dominique Houte, Le triomphe de la République, 1871–1914 (Paris: Seuil, 2014); Marion Fontaine, Frédéric Monier and Christophe Prochasson, eds, Une contre-histoire de la Troisième République (Paris: La Découverte, 2013); Vincent Duclert, La République imaginée, 1870–1914 (Paris: Belin, 2010); Michel Winock, La Belle Époque: la France de 1900 à 1914 (Paris: Perrin, 2003); William Fortescue, The Third Republic in France 1870–1940: Conflicts and Continuities (London: Routledge, 2000); Christophe Prochasson, Paris 1900: essai d’histoire culturelle (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1999); Christophe Prochasson, Les années électriques: 1880–1910 (Paris: La Découverte, 1991). 15. The expression was famously coined by Ferdinand Brunetière (1849–1906) in an explosive article, ‘Après une visite au Vatican’, published in the Revue des deux mondes on 1 January 1895. It referred to the idea that science had proved to be ultimately incapable of delivering the providential keys to human existence that many awaited from it. Rather, it got stuck in methodological quarrels and epistemological impasses (the echoes of Du Bois-Reymond’s 1872 famous ‘Ignorabimus’ speech were still resonating). See Harry W. Paul, ‘The Debate over the Bankruptcy of Science in 1895’, French Historical Studies 5, no. 3 (1968): 299–327. For a broader account of the motif of the crisis of science, see Anne Rasmussen, ‘Critique du progrès, “crise de la science”: débats et représentations du tournant du siècle’, Mill neuf cent 14 (1996): 89–113. 16. Levinas, ‘The Diary of Léon Brunschvicg’, 42. 17. Ibid., 43. 18. Cf. PC, II, 730. 19. See on this topic Jean-Louis Fabiani, ‘Les philosophes et l’affaire Dreyfus’, in L’affaire Dreyfus: les événements fondateurs, ed. Vincent Duclert and Perrine Simon-Nahum (Paris: Armand Colin, 2009), 209–18. 20. Cf. Élie Halévy, Correspondance: 1891–1937, ed. François Furet (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 1996), 211. Quoted in Joel Revill, ‘Taking France to the School of the Sciences: Léon Brunschvicg, Gaston Bachelard, and the French Epistemological Tradition’ (PhD diss., Department of History, Duke University, 2006), 67–8. 21. Ibid. 22. Cf. the manifesto for ‘Les droits de l’homme et du citoyen’, L’Aurore, no. 165 (1 April 1898): 2. The Ligue was officially registered on 4 June 1848. See Emmanuel Naquet, Pour l’Humanité: la Ligue des droits de l’homme de l’affaire Dreyfus à la défaite de 1940 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2014). 23. On the Union, see François Beilecke, Französische Intellektuelle und die Dritte Republik. Das Beispiel einer Intellektuellenassoziation, 1892–1939 (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 2003); François Chaubet, ‘L’Union pour l’action morale et le spiritualisme républicain (1892–1905)’, Mil neuf cent 17 (1999): 67–89.

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2 4. Cf. Revill, ‘Taking France to the School of the Sciences’, iv. 25. For an effective overview of the French education system of the time and the role philosophy played in it, see Cristina Chimisso, Gaston Bachelard: Critic of Science and the Imagination (London: Routledge, 2001), chap. 2. 26. Cf. Albert Thibaudet, La République des professeurs (Paris-Genève: Ressources, [1927] 1979), 121–2. 27. Cf. Lefèvre, ‘Une heure avec M. Léon Brunschvicg’, 1; ‘Lettre de M. André Cresson’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 50, nos 1–2 (1945): 5. On Darlu, see Henri Bonnet, Alphonse Darlu (1849–1921): le maître de philosophie de Marcel Proust (Paris: Nizet, 1961). For an analysis of his teaching, see Charles Braverman, ‘À partir du lycée Condorcet, un climat kantien. Darlu, la Revue de métaphysique et de morale, Brunschvicg et l’idéalisme’, Revue d’études proustiennes 10, no. 2 (2019): 61–93. 28. Cf. Charles Chassé, Les Nabis et leur temps (Paris: La Bibliothèque des arts, 1960), chap. 1. 29. See Patrick Cabanel, Juifs et protestants en France, les affinités électives, XVIe-XXIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2004), chaps. 4–5. 30. See Pierre Albertini, ‘Les juifs du lycée Condorcet dans la tourmente’, Vingtième siècle 97, no. 4 (2006): 81–100. 31. According to Nizan, Ludovic Halévy (1834–1908), Élie’s and Daniel’s influential father, ‘treated this gifted adolescent like a son’ (The Watchdogs, 59). An anecdote related by Paul Valéry gives us a glimpse into the social milieu to which Brunschvicg was introduced: Léon Brunschvicg told me how, as a young philosophy student, he met Degas at Ludovic Halévy’s, in the Rue de Douai, and was introduced to him. Learning that it was a metaphysician he was meeting, Degas drew him into the embrasure of a window and said abruptly: ‘Look here, young man, take Spinoza, can you tell me what he’s all about, in five minutes?’ (‘Degas Dance Drawing’ [1936], in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry. Vol. 12: Degas Manet Morisot, ed. Jackson Mathews [New York: Pantheon Books, 1960], 72) On the Condorcet and the social background of Brunschvicg’s friends, see Stéphan Soulié, Les philosophes en République: l’aventure intellectuelle de la Revue de métaphysique et de morale et de la Société française de philosophie (1891–1914) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009), chap. 1. This remarkable book is a crucial reference for everything related to the foundation of the Revue, the Société française de philosophie and the various collateral ventures. 32. Cf. ibid., 4; Bonnet, Alphonse Darlu, 37–9. Bonnet has sketched out an ingenious parallelism between Brunschvicg’s and Proust’s conceptions of joy, love and freedom in ‘L’ordre des joies’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 72, no. 3 (1967): 321–31. 33. Cf. George D. Painter, Proust. Volume 1: The Early Years (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1959), 55. Maurice de Gandillac and Gabriel Marcel rejected the hypothesis (cf. Maurice de Gandillac, Le siècle traversé: souvenirs de neuf décennies [Paris: Albin Michel, 1998], 133; Gabriel Marcel, Gabriel Marcel interrogé par Pierre Boutang [Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1977], 79). 34. Cf. Soulié, Les philosophes en République, 34. 35. On Spencer’s evolutionism, see Mark Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007); Daniel Becquemont

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and Laurent Mucchielli, Le cas Spencer: religion, science, politique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998). 36. Cf. Léon Brunschvicg, ‘La philosophie de l’évolution et la morale du devoir’ (1888), Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 159 (1969): 386. 37. Ibid., 388. 38. Cresson and Bertaux also passed the competition, and the former recalled that, upon hearing about their success, Proust bought them all lunch as a reward (cf. ‘Lettre de M. André Cresson’, 6). 39. Cf. ibid. See Immanuel Kant, Prolégomènes à toute métaphysique future qui pourra se présenter comme science, trans. Léon Brunschvicg, Louis Chambert, André Cresson, Fernand Gazin, Henri Havard and Paul Landormy (Paris: Hachette, 1891). 40. Cf. ‘Lettre de M. André Cresson’, 7. 41. On Halévy’s intellectual itinerary, see K. Steven Vincent, Élie Halévy: Republican Liberalism Confronts the Era of Tyranny (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020); Myrna Chase, Élie Halévy: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). See also Léon Brunschvicg, ‘Élie Halévy (6 septembre 1870–21 août 1937)’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 44, no. 4 (1937): 679–91. 42. Quoted in Michèle Bo Bramsen, Portrait d’Élie Halévy (Amsterdam: Grüner, 1978), 11. 43. On Lyon, see Dominique Berlioz, ‘Préface’, in Georges Lyon, L’idéalisme en Angleterre au dix-huitième siècle (1888), ed. Dominique Berlioz (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), i–xxii. 44. On Ollé-Laprune, cf. Albert Bazaillas, ‘Une philosophie de la certitude et de la vie: Léon Ollé-Laprune’, Revue des deux mondes 156, no. 1 (1899): 139–68. 45. Not to be confused with the belief in spirits, ghosts and other immaterial realities, spiritualism (spiritualisme) was a distinctive trend in nineteenth-century French philosophy. The term had various meanings in the course of the century, although common features can be detected, namely the emphasis on the epistemological/ ontological primacy of the mind (esprit), as reflective and active principle, with regard to matter and physiological, biological or social processes. I have attempted a classification of its various incarnations, with a focus on the turn of the century, in my article ‘Determinism and Moral Freedom: Spiritualist Fault Lines in a Debate at the Société Française de Philosophie’, History of European Ideas 46, no. 6 (2020): 876–95. 46. The lycée professor of major French philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Georges Canguilhem, extremely influential among the French youth of the early twentieth century, Alain was an idiosyncratic figure. Philosophically, he advocated a rationalism inspired by Plato, Descartes, Kant and Spinoza focusing on the individual capacity of judgement and on the mastery of passions in opposition to prejudices and dogmas; politically, he professed a staunch critical individualism and radicalism of the citizen against all forms of political, clerical, economic and military authoritarianism. See Natalie Depraz, ed., Alain, un philosophe rouennais engagé (Mont-SaintAignan: Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2017); Thierry Leterre, Alain, le premier intellectuel (Paris: Stock, 2006) and La raison politique. Alain et la démocratie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000). 47. On Léon, see Stéphan Soulié, ‘Xavier Léon, philosophe’, Archives juives 39, no. 1 (2006): 143–7; Christophe Prochasson, ‘Philosopher au XXe siècle: Xavier Léon et

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l’invention du “système R2M” (1891–1902)’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 98, nos 1–2 (1993): 109–40. 48. Soulié, Les philosophes en République, 20. On the Revue, see also ‘Xavier Léon/Élie Halévy. Correspondance (1891–1898)’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 98, nos 1–2 (1993): 3–58. 49. Lefèvre, ‘Une heure avec M. Léon Brunschvicg’, 1. On Darlu, see Bonnet, Alphonse Darlu (1849–1921). 50. See ‘Introduction’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 1, no. 1 (1893): 1–5. 51. Cf. e.g., the obituary ‘A. Darlu, 20 mars 1849–5 mai 1921’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 28, no. 2 (1921): 1–3. 52. See Laurent Fedi, ‘Philosopher et républicaniser: la Critique philosophique de Renouvier et Pillon, 1872–1889’, Romantisme 115 (2002): 65–82. 53. See Mara Bertolini Meletti, Il pensiero e la memoria: filosofia e psicologia nella Revue philosophique di Théodule Ribot, 1876–1916 (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1991). 54. See Dominique Merllié, ‘Les rapports entre la Revue de métaphysique et la Revue philosophique: Xavier Léon, Théodule Ribot, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 98, nos 1–2 (1993): 59–108. For a list of the most important contributors, see W. Paul Vogt, ‘Identifying Scholarly and Intellectual Communities: A Note on French Philosophy, 1900–1939’, History and Theory 21, no. 2 (1982): 267–78. See also Daniela S. Barberis, ‘Moral Education for the Elite of the Democracy: The Classe de Philosophie between Sociology and Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 38, no. 4 (2002): 355–69. 55. Léon Brunschvicg and Élie Halévy, ‘L’année philosophique 1893’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 2, no. 4 (1894): 478. I use the English translation provided by K. Steve Vincent in Élie Halévy, 34. 56. An excellent analysis of the Brunschvicgs as a couple can be found in Cécile Formaglio, ‘Un engagement commun pour la République: Cécile et Léon Brunschvicg, un couple d’intellectuels démocratiques’, Les études sociales 2, no. 170 (2019): 53–74. As far as we know, Cécile was not into philosophy. Quite the contrary, she was the pragmatic half of the couple: not only was she entirely in charge of the domestic economy, but she was also the most concrete when it came to political militancy. 57. On Cécile’s life and works, see Cécile Formaglio, ‘Féministe d’abord’: Cécile Brunschvicg (1877–1946) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2014). 58. Revill has discovered in the archives of the Ministry of Public Education a report by Darlu in which Brunschvicg is presented as a highly intelligent professor, a born teacher, lacking just some discursive clarity and linearity (cf. Revill, ‘Taking France to the School of the Sciences’, 98–9). 59. See Agathon, L’Esprit de la Nouvelle Sorbonne: la crise de la culture classique, la crise du français (Paris: Mercure de France, 1911). 60. For an overview of these debates, see Sarah Shurts, Resentment and the Right: French Intellectual Identity Reimagined, 1898–2000 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2017), chap. 2; Gisèle Sapiro, ‘Défense et illustration de l’“honnete homme” ’: les hommes de lettre contre la sociologie’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 153, no. 3 (2004): 11–27; Henk L. Wesseling, ‘Commotion at the Sorbonne: The Debate on the French University, 1910–1914’, in Certain Ideas of France: Essays on French History and Civilization (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 39–50; ClaireFrançoise Bompaire-Évesque, Un débat sur l’université au temps de la Troisième République: la lutte contre la nouvelle Sorbonne (1910–1914) (Paris: Aux amateurs de livres, 1988).

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61. Three years later, Pierre Lasserre (1867–1930), the leading literary critic of the Action française, would launch a similar attack against the ‘ideology’ of the Sorbonne in his La doctrine officielle de l’Université: critique du haut enseignement de l’État, défense et théorie des humanités classiques (Paris: Mercure de France, 1913). The book was actually based on conferences delivered in 1908–9, which inspired directly Agathon’s book. 62. On Péguy, founder of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine (1900), see Géraldi Leroy, Charles Péguy: l’inclassable (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014); Glenn H. Roe, The Passions of Charles Péguy: Literature, Modernity, and the Crisis of Historicism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 63. Wesseling, ‘Commotion at the Sorbonne’, 42. 64. Cf. e.g., Pierre Boutroux’s review in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale 21, no. 1 (1913): 107–31. 65. Cf. those that appeared in Mind 22, no. 88 (1913): 567–74 and in The Philosophical Review 24, no. 1 (1915): 81–94. 66. Alan D. Schrift found that, e.g., in the 1919–20 academic year, every student at the ENS who intended to compete for the agrégation listed taking Brunschvicg’s course on ‘La conscience’ (cf. Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers [Malden: Blackwell, 2005], 11). 67. Cf. Deschoux, Léon Brunschvicg, 180. 68. Cf. ‘L’inauguration du Cercle Carré’, Le Radical (13 March 1914): 3. 69. Jankélévitch said that he met Max Scheler at Brunschvicg’s (cf. Vladimir Jankélévitch, ‘What Is the Value of Bergson’s Thought? Interview with François Reiss’, in Henri Bergson, ed. Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott [Durham: Duke University Press, 2015], 252). 70. On the conflict between French and German intellectuals during the war, see Fedi, Kant, une passion française, chap. 18; Caterina Zanfi and Frédéric Worms, eds, L’Europe philosophique des congrès à la guerre, special issue of Revue de métaphysique et de morale 4, no. 84 (2014); Christoph Prochasson, Ann Rasmussen, Au nom de la patrie: les intellectuels et la Première Guerre mondiale (1910–1919) (Paris: La Découverte, 2010); Martha Hannah, The Mobilization of the Intellect: French Scholars and Writers during the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), especially 106–41; Philippe Soulez, ed., Les philosophes et la guerre de 1914 (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de VincennesSaint-Denis, 1988). 71. See Boutroux’s wartime writings gathered in the posthumous Études d’histoire de la philosophie allemande (Paris: Vrin, 1927), 115–257. 72. See Bergson’s wartime discourses in Mélanges, ed. André Robinet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 1102–319; Dominique Parodi, ‘La guerre et la conception allemande en morale’ (1915), in Le problème morale et la pensée contemporaine, 3rd edn (Paris: Alcan, 1930), 246–67; Charles Andler, ‘Les origines philosophiques du pangermanisme’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 23, no. 5 (1916): 659–95. 73. ‘There is something enormous in German thought, beginning with Kant himself …; under the pretext of idealism, a betrayal of the clear idea, of the luminous classic reason. I have had this feeling for several years’. Quoted in Maurice Blondel, ‘Préface’, in Victor Delbos, De Kant aux postkantiens, 2nd edn (Paris: Aubier, [1940] 1992), 14. See also Victor Delbos, L’esprit philosophique de l’Allemagne et la pensée française (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1915), 38.

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74. Cf. Claude Digeon, La crise allemande de la pensée française, 1870–1914 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 162–3. 75. Cf. Léon Brunschvicg, ‘Letter to Xavier Léon (13 décembre 1914)’, Fonds Xavier Léon, Bibliothèque Victor-Cousin, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de la Sorbonne, Ms. 359. Quoted in Yaël Dagan, ‘ “Justifier philosophiquement notre cause”. La Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 1914–1918’, Mil neuf cent 1, no. 23 (2005): 66. 76. NL, 128. 77. Cf. ibid., 134. 78. On the various ‘life choices’ of the members of the Revue, see Dagan, ‘ “Justifier philosophiquement notre cause” ’. 79. Cf. Vincent, Élie Halévy, chap. 7. 80. Cf. Stéphan Soulié, ‘Philosophie en République et expérience morale de la Grande Guerre: le cas de Dominique Parodi’, Histoire@Politique 1 (2015): 159–75; and ‘Dominique Parodi: un philosophe au service de la diplomatie française pendant la Première Guerre mondiale’, Storicamente 14, no. 16 (2018), https://storicamente.org/ soulie-dominique-parodi (accessed 2 April 2020) . 81. See Alain’s violent pamphlet Mars, ou la guerre jugée (1921) and the more personal Souvenirs de guerre (1937), now gathered in Les passions et la sagesse, ed. Georges Bénézé (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 547–705 and 429–545 respectively. 82. Cf. Deschoux, La philosophie de Léon Brunschvicg, 241; and Léon Brunschvicg, 179. 83. Cf. Sébastien Laurent, Daniel Halévy: du libéralisme au traditionalisme (Paris: Grasset, 2001), 120. 84. Élie Halévy, ‘Letter to Xavier Léon (27 July 1914)’, in Œuvres complètes. Tome I: Correspondance et écrits de guerre (1914–1919), ed. Vincent Duclert and Marie Scot (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2016), 8. Quoted in Vincent, Élie Halévy, 309 n.91. 85. See Jean-Jacques Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée: la Société des Nations et la coopération intellectuelle (1919–1946) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999). 86. Cf. Léon Brunschvicg, ‘Chronicon Spinozanum’, Séances et travaux de l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques 83 (September–October 1923): 306–7. Chronicon Spinozanum was the multilingual journal published by the society. 87. See Paul Jaume, ‘Léon Brunschvicg et les normaliens’, Les Études philosophiques 20 (1945): 20–2. 88. See Albert Guigue, La Faculté des lettres de l’Université de Paris depuis sa fondation (17 mars 1808) jusqu’au 1er janvier 1935 (Paris: Alcan, 1935), 15, 32. 89. On Davos, see Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Friedman, A Parting of the Ways. 90. Cf. Gandillac, Le siècle traversé, 133. 91. Maurice de Gandillac, ‘Kierkegaard, le Pascal du Nord’, La Revue universelle 59, no. 15 (1934): 371–2. Quoted in Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 95. 92. Cf. Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 51. 93. Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, [1984] 1988), 93. 94. CS, 96. 95. Ibid., 97. The use of the opposition spirit/letter was widespread in German romanticism and idealism, but Brunschvicg likely borrowed it from Fichte. 96. Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought, 46.

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97. On Lucien Herr, see Daniel Lindenberg and Pierre-André Meyer, Lucien Herr, le socialisme et son destin (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1977); Charles Andler, Vie de Lucien Herr (Paris: Maspero, [1932] 1977). 98. Cf. Robert J. Smith, The École Normale Supérieure and the Third Republic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 92. 99. Ibid., 97. However, ‘The brilliant normalien of humble background was a misleading stereotype which concealed another reality … Few working families could afford to send even their eldest son to a lycée’ (ibid., 137). 100. Ibid., 116–17. 101. Charle, Les professeurs de la Faculté des Lettres de Paris, 45. 102. Cf. PC, II, 364. 103. Cf. ibid., 405–8. 104. Ibid., 409. 105. See the writings gathered in Élie Halévy, The Era of Tyrannies: Essays on Socialism and War, trans. Robert K. Webb (New York: New York University Press, [1938] 1966). 106. ‘Quelques lettres inédites de Léon Brunschvicg’, Revue internationale de philosophie 5, no. 15 (1951): 19. 107. Cf. IVE, 189–90. 108. ‘Quelques lettres inédites de Léon Brunschvicg’, 20–1. 109. See André Malraux, The Conquerors, trans. Stephen Becker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1928] 1992). 110. Cf. Gabriel Marcel, Léon Brunschvicg and André Malraux, ‘Les problèmes des Conquérants’, in Les critiques de notre temps et Malraux, ed. Pol Gaillard (Paris: Garnier, 1970), 27–31. On this episode, see Olivier Todd, Malraux: A Life, trans. Joseph West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 83–5. 111. CS, 105–6. 112. Ibid., 113. 113. This principle had already been established in an 1896 article in which Brunschvicg rejected any moral pragmatism and subordinated practice to the guidance of a philosophical ideal, that is, action to reflection (cf. ‘La paix morale et la sincérité philosophique’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 4, no. 3 [1896]: 379–84). As he noted in 1942 in the Agenda retrouvé, if one wants to prevent praxis from corrupting the Idea, he must ‘rise to an Idea so true and pure that it will have nothing to fear from action’ (AR, 177). 114. Lefèvre, ‘Une heure avec M. Léon Brunschvicg’, 4. 115. Cf. Léon Brunschvicg, ‘L’organisation de la République: d’après les travaux de M. Henri Chardon sur la Réforme administrative’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 21, no. 2 (1913): 269–306. In this text, Brunschvicg delivered an in-depth analysis of the proposal for an administrative simplification put forward by the State councillor Henri Chardon (1861–1939). Towards the end of the war, Brunschvicg held meetings with Chardon, the economist Bernard Lavergne (1884–1975) and the Germanist Henri Lichtenberger (1864–1941) to devise ways to reconstruct the State, without remarkable results (cf. Revill, ‘Taking France to the School of the Sciences’, 137). 116. OR, 87. 117. Ibid. 118. The contempt for empty slogans like ‘all men are equal’ or ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ is explicit. They are nonsense, just as

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it would be nonsense asserting in arithmetics the equality of all numbers (cf. ibid., 84, 89). 119. Cf. CS, 109; PC, I, 39 and II, 713. 120. PC, I, 39. 121. Cf. Cécile Brunschvicg, ‘Anniversaire’, La Française (30 June 1934): 1. 122. See, e.g., Léon Brunschvicg, ‘Principes et propagande, unité de principe, diversité d’action’, Ligue d’électeurs pour le suffrage des femmes 1, nos 2–3 (1911): 26–9; and ‘Introduction’, in Alice Zimmerman, Le suffrage des femmes dans tous les pays (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1911), 3–4. 123. Cf. ‘Quelques lettres inédites de Léon Brunschvicg’, 19. He adhered to two petitions launched by Jaurès’ journal L’Humanité, one to save a trade unionist unjustly sentenced to death and the other against the extension of military service to three years (cf. Chimisso, Writing the History of the Mind, 81–2). 124. On Jaurès, see Gilles Candar and Vincent Duclert, Jean Jaurès (Paris: Fayard, 2014) and Jean-Paul Scot, Jaurès et le réformisme révolutionnaire (Paris: Seuil, 2014). On the Radical Party, see the classic Serge Bernstein, Histoire du parti radical, 2 vols. (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1980–2). On fin-de-siècle French socialism, see Emmanuel Jousse, Les hommes révoltés: les origines intellectuelles du réformisme en France, 1871–1917 (Paris: Fayard, 2016); Daniel Lindenberg, Le marxisme introuvable (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1975). For an appraisal of Guesde’s Marxism, see Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: l’anti-Jaurès? (Paris: Armand Colin, 2017). 125. Cf. Paul Marcus, Jaurès et Clemenceau: un duel de géants (Toulouse: Privat, 2014). 126. Cf. Siân Reynolds, France between the Wars: Gender and Politics (London: Routledge, 1996), 164. 127. On Blum, see Pierre Birnbaum, Léon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). 128. Cf. Reynolds, France between the Wars, 159. 129. I draw this tableau from Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934–38 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 130. Cf. Beilecke, Französische Intellektuelle und die Dritte Republik, 135. 131. See François Chaubet, Paul Desjardins et les Décades de Pontigny (Lille: Presses du Septentrion, 2000). 132. Cf. Beilecke, Französische Intellektuelle und die Dritte Republik, 137. 133. A survey of his interventions can be found in SR, 292–4. 134. Léon Brunschvicg, ‘Examen de conscience’, La revue des vivants 7, no. 12 (1933): 1787. 135. Vincent, Élie Halévy, 4. 136. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, ed. William C. Carter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, [1919] 2015), 156. Translation modified. 137. Cf. Élie Halévy, ‘The Era of Tyrannies’ (1936), in The Era of Tyrannies, 265–85. See Vincent Duclert and Marie Scot, eds, Élie Halévy et l’ère des tyrannies (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2019). 138. Léon Brunschvicg, ‘Désarroi moral’, La revue des vivants 5, no. 7 (1931): 37. 139. Cf. Brunschvicg, ‘Examen de conscience’, 1789. 140. Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Moral Idealism and Political Realism’ (1945), in Philosophical Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simon, Marybeth Timmerman and Mary B. Mader (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 176–7.

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1 41. Ibid., 185. 142. Raymond Aron, ‘La pensée de M. Léon Brunschvicg: à propos de son dernier ouvrage’, Revue de synthèse 4, no. 2 (1932): 206. 143. Ibid. 144. Ibid. 145. De Beauvoir, ‘Moral Idealism and Political Realism’, 190. 146. Cf. Maurice de Gandillac, ‘Jean Wahl existentialiste?’, Magazine littéraire 320 (1994): 39; Marcel Raymond, ‘Préface’, in Poèmes de Jean Wahl (Montréal: Éditions de l’Arbre, 1945), 11. 147. Cf. the description of the Fonds Brunschvicg on the website of the IMEC: https:// portail-collections.imec-archives.com/ark:/29414/a0114540787131ZSeHI (accessed 25 May 2020).

2 The nature of the intellect and the critique of Bergsonism 1. AR, 204: ‘Truth is made up of opposites, of course; but it is not sure whether they are exact oppositions, as those invented by logic. / Often we are more alike between enemies than between friends: competition between neighbouring species.’ 2. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. Frank L. Pogson (Mineola: Dover Publications, [1889] 2001); Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy M. Paul and William S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, [1896] 1991); Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Random House, [1907] 1944). 3. Henri Bergson, ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ (1903), in The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York:Philosophical Library, [1934] 1946), 190 and 228. 4. Henri Bergson, Correspondances (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), 74. 5. On the success of the book, see François Azouvi, La gloire de Bergson: essai sur un magistère philosophique (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), chap. 6. 6. This rendition of Bergson’s thought is inevitably brutal. For richer accounts, see Mark Sinclair, Bergson (London: Routledge, 2019); Keith Ansell-Pearson, Bergson: Thinking beyond Human Condition (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Frédéric Worms, Bergson ou les deux sens de la vie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013). 7. Cf. Azouvi, La gloire de Bergson, 48. 8. Cf. Brunschvicg and Halévy, ‘L’année philosophique 1893’, 486. 9. Cf. ibid., 487. 10. Cf. ‘Quelques lettres inédites de Léon Brunschvicg’, 17. This did not prevent him from acknowledging the ‘startling’ character and the ‘originality’ of Bergson’s teachings (cf. the letter of 11 November 1901 in ibid., 16), with reference to Bergson’s course at the Collège de France on the idea of time, which has been recently published. See Henri Bergson, L’idée de temps. Cours au Collège de France 1901–1902, ed. Gabriel MeyerMisch (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2019). 11. Quoted in Renzo Ragghianti, Alain: apprentissage philosophique et genèse de la Revue de métaphysique et de morale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), 228. I borrow Vincent’s translation in Élie Halévy, 37. 12. Cf. Azouvi, La gloire de Bergson, 140–1. 13. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, [1966] 1988).

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14. According to Jean-Toussaint Desanti, despite his ‘effort of sympathy’ towards Bergson’s thought, Brunschvicg actually ‘turned it over like a crêpe and reduced it to its own measure’ (cf. Desanti’s preface to the 1972 facsimile reissue of EPM, ii–iii). 15. Cf. Léon Brunschvicg, ‘Du XIXe siècle au XXe siècle. Deuxième partie: Les problèmes bergsoniens’, Revue de Paris 2 (15 January 1927): 392; PC, II, 613–52. 16. Cf. Léon Brunschvicg, ‘Le dernier livre de Bergson: Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion’, Les Nouvelles Littéraires (2 April 1932): 1 and 4. 17. Cf. Henri Bergson, Correspondances, ed. André Robinet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), 1369–70. 18. Quoted in Jean Guitton, Un siècle, une vie (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1988), 128. 19. See Gaston Bachelard, The Intuition of the Instant, trans. Eileen Rizo-Patron (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, [1931] 2013). 20. See Gaston Bachelard, The Dialectic of Duration, trans. Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester: Clinamen, [1936] 2000). 21. Cf. Guitton, Un siècle, une vie, 130. On Bachelard’s involvement in this querelle, see Chimisso, Gaston Bachelard, 113–24. 22. Cf. Vladimir Jankélévitch, ‘Léon Brunschvicg’ (1969), in Sources: recueil (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 135. 23. According to Bergson, in fact, modern French thought was born under the sign of the dualism between Cartesian rationalism and Pascal’s ‘sentimentalism’: ‘all the modern doctrines which put forward immediate knowledge, intuition, or the inner life, are all tied up with Pascal, while all the philosophies of pure reason are more particularly tied up with Descartes … Descartes and Pascal are the great representative figures of the two forms or methods of thinking between which modern spirit has had its divide’ (Henri Bergson, ‘French Philosophy’, trans. Claude Vishnu Spaak, Philosophical Inquiries 2, no. 1 [2014]: 201). Cf. also Henri Bergson, ‘Quelques mots sur la philosophie française et sur l’esprit français’ (1934), in Mélanges, 1513–17. 24. Cf. DPM, 198. 25. See Frédéric Worms, ‘Bergson et ses contemporains: le problème de l’homme entre vie et connaissance’, in Le Moment 1900 en philosophie, ed. Frédéric Worms (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2004), 28. Analogously, Deschoux writes that ‘With Bergson, Brunschvicg dominated the French philosophical thought in the first three decades of the twentieth century’ (Marcel Deschoux, ‘Portrait de Léon Brunschvicg’, Les Études philosophiques 4, nos. 3/4 [1949]: 375). 26. Worms himself provides a more balanced picture in La philosophie en France au XXe siècle: moments (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 40–64. 27. Consider, e.g., the role played by the publishing house Alcan – founded in 1883 by Félix Alcan (1841–1925), a former associate of the publisher Germer Baillière – with its influential ‘Bibliothèque de philosophie contemporaine’. On the rise of the philosopher-author, see the classic book of Jean-Louis Fabiani, Les philosophes de la République (Paris: Minuit, 1988), chap. 4. 28. See ibid., 117–18. On the reception of Schopenhauer, see Alexandre Baillot, Influence de la philosophie de Schopenhauer en France, 1860–1900, 2nd edn (1927; Paris: l’Harmattan, 2009); René-Pierre Collin, Schopenhauer en France: un mythe naturaliste (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1979). 29. See Thibaudet, La République des professeurs, chap. 13. 30. See Fabiani, Les philosophes de la République, 164–7. 31. Chimisso, Writing the History of the Mind, 30.

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32. Chimisso has talked about a ‘rivalry’ between the Sorbonne and the Collège de France as two geographically close and competing institutions within the intellectual field (cf. Chimisso, Gaston Bachelard, 116–17). 33. See Azouvi, La gloire de Bergson, 60–76, 103–10, 215–34; Giuseppe Bianco, Après Bergson: portrait du groupe avec philosophe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2015), 36–43, 122–30. 34. Cf. Bergson, Correspondances, 1212, 1238–9, 1369–70, 1598–9, 1622–3, 1661–2, 1665. 35. ‘Testament de Bergson. 8 février 1937; codicille du 9 mai 1938’, in Bergson, Correspondances, 1669. Cf. also Elizabeth Alden Green, ‘Philosopher in the Toils’ (Caen: IMEC, Fonds Jean Wahl), 5–6; quoted in Ian A. Moore, Alan D. Schrift, ‘Existence, Experience and Transcendence: An Introduction to Jean Wahl’, in Jean Wahl, Transcendence and the Concrete: Selected Writings, ed. Alan D. Schrift and Ian A. Moore (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 23. 36. OR, 230. 37. IC, 2–3. 38. IVE, 52. 39. Ibid., 97. 40. Ibid., 100. 41. Ibid., 68. 42. IC, 2–3. 43. ‘Idéalisme’, in Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, ed. André Lalande, 4th edn (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, [1902–23] 1997), vol. 1, 443. 44. IC, 10. 45. IVE, 70. 46. Ibid., 107. 47. IC, 176. 48. We will translate ‘esprit’ mainly as ‘mind’, except when Brunschvicg refers to a more general, cultural and spiritual dimension. 49. Ibid., 103. 50. MJ, 235. 51. Ibid., 238. 52. Worms (cf. La philosophie en France au XXe siècle, 48) has suggested that the first pages of the Introduction à la vie de l’esprit might be an answer to the first chapter of Matter and Memory. Indeed, while Bergson opened his book by talking about the brain and the nervous system, thus of the mind as a part of the material world, as an ‘image’ among others, Brunschvicg began by claiming that the actual functioning of our brain, in its inmost mechanisms, is still largely unknown and that the philosopher should not be worried about this scientific gap, as the starting point of his speculations should be instead the evidence, the ‘sentiment’, of our intellectual activity, which is irreducible to matter. In a footnote (cf. ibid., p. 581), Worms wonders if Bergson had Brunschvicg’s book in mind when he chose the title ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’. 53. HMI, 32. Cf. also VFC, 107. 54. Bergson, ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, 222. See also the first introduction to Matter and Memory, 9–11. 55. Bachelard, The Dialectic of Duration, 34. 56. Ibid., 42. 57. Cf. Deleuze, Bergsonism, chap. 1. 58. Cf. PE, 82.

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5 9. Ibid., 83. 60. Cf. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 186. 61. Cf. PE, 100. 62. Cf. ibid., 85–6. 63. Cf. ibid., 89. 64. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 267–8. Translation modified. 65. Cf. PE, 11–12. 66. HMI, 19. See also SR, 127–8. 67. HMI, 20. 68. MJ, 280. 69. Ibid., 4. 70. Ibid., 233. See Frédéric Worms, ‘Between Critique and Metaphysics: Science in Bergson and Brunschvicg’, Angelaki 10, no. 2 (2005): 49–50. 71. EH, 502–3. 72. MJ, 234. 73. Ibid., 234 n.1. 74. Raymond Aron, ‘La philosophie de Léon Brunschvicg’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 50, nos 1–2 (1945): 134. 75. Cf. Jean Piaget, ‘Étude critique de L’expérience humaine et la causalité physique de Léon Brunschvicg’, Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique 21, no. 6 (1924): 602. 76. Cf. Fedi, Kant, une passion française, 593; PC, II, 647; EE, 181. This is actually a quotation from Boutroux. The anecdote was related by Maurice de Gandillac. 77. A. L. [likely Albert Lautman], ‘Léon Brunschvicg’, in Anthologie des philosophes français contemporains, ed. Arnaud Dandieu (Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire, 1931), 352. 78. EPM, 459. 79. Ibid., 567; see also PC, II, 655. According to Jean Wahl, this would imply that ‘the opposition that once existed between Bergson and Brunschvicg [now] ceased to exist’. Cf. ‘Commémoration du cinquantenaire de la publication des Étapes de la philosophie mathématique de Léon Brunschvicg’ (2 June 1962), Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, https://s3.archive-host.com/membres/up/784571560/ GrandesConfPhiloSciences/philosc08_commemoration_brunschvicg_1962.pdf (accessed 26 April 2020), 25. 80. Marcel Deschoux, ‘Brunschvicg et Bergson’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie 15, no. 5 (1951): 100. 81. EPM, 567. 82. HMI, 70. 83. Deschoux, ‘Brunschvicg et Bergson’, 109. 84. OR, 182; SR, 137. On Taine, see also PC, II, 438–51. 85. Hippolyte Taine, On Intelligence, trans. Thomas D. Haye (New York: Henry Holt, [1870] 1875), vol. 1, vii–viii. 86. Cf. OR, 43–5. 87. IC, 13. 88. SR, 132. 89. EH, 591. 90. PC, II, 648 91. Ibid., 635. 92. EH, 317; OR, 46, 190. 93. Deschoux, ‘Brunschvicg et Bergson’, 103–4. 94. EPM, 457.

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95. On this point, see Bernard Saint Sernin, ‘L’idée de conversion intellectuelle selon Alain, Brunschvicg et Blondel’, in Le Moment 1900 en philosophie, 43–61. 96. Cf. Henri Bergson, ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, 235. 97. Henri Bergson, ‘Introduction (Part II). Stating the Problems’, in The Creative Mind, 103. 98. Bergson, ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, 224. 99. Cf. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 187. 100. Cf. ibid., 188. 101. Ibid., 281. 102. EPM, 140–1. 103. Ibid., 571. 104. Ibid., 574. 105. MJ, 169. 106. EPM, 565. 107. This was actually a Cartesian motif. Suffice it to consider what Descartes wrote at the end of the Second Meditation, after his famous analysis of the piece of wax: Since I have now learned that bodies themselves are perceived not … by the senses or by the imaginative faculty, but by the intellect alone, and that they are not perceived because they are touched or seen, but only because they are understood, I clearly realise [cognosco] that nothing can be perceived by me more easily or more clearly than my own mind. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Michael Moriarty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1641] 2008), 24. 108. IVE, 94–5. 109. Ibid., 95. 110. Bergson, ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, 190. 111. CS, 3. 112. Ibid., 4. 113. This would be the stance adopted by Walter Benjamin in his 1939 essay ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Selected Writings. Vol. 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 313– 55. The fact that Bergson married the cousin of Proust’s mother has often been mentioned as a proof of theoretical analogies between the philosopher and the writer. In a recent excellent introduction to Bergson, Mark Sinclair has argued that the Recherche ‘is in many ways a Bergsonian novel’ (Sinclair, Bergson, 1) and that ‘The proximity of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to Bergson’s accounts of time and memory, a proximity which is no less evident for the fact that Proust occasionally denied it, would therefore be a family affair’ (ibid., 14). For further details on Sinclair’s thesis, see ibid., 67–8, 106, 182, 256. See also Anthony E. Pilkington, Bergson and His Influence: A Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), chap. 4. However, Fedi has argued in favour of a parallelism between the Recherche, understood as ‘an epic about consciousness’, and Brunschvicg’s great historical works, which are contemporary: ‘Is it a coincidence that Brunschvicg and Proust, who had the same philosophy professor, throw themselves at the same time into the great narration of interiority?’ (Fedi, Kant, une passion française, 630). 114. PC, II, 747. 115. Lefèvre, ‘Une heure avec Léon Brunschvicg’, 4.

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1 16. Ibid., 7. 117. HMI, 23. 118. He referred to the monumental study of the literary critic and historian Henri Brémond (1865–1933) titled Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France depuis la fin des guerres de religion jusqu’à nos jours (11 vols; Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1916–33). 119. Cf. Jean Piaget, Judgment and Reasoning in the Child, trans. Marjorie Warden (New York: Harcourt, Brace; London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, [1924] 1928), 209. 120. CS, 12–13. 121. Ibid., 8–9. 122. Cf. PC, II, 670–2. 123. In the Progrès de la conscience, Brunschvicg even distinguished between ‘culture’, that is, the set of notions and tools available to a society in a given time, and ‘civilisation’, understood as the ethical stance of a society, the purposes that it defines for itself (cf. ibid., 672). 124. Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive [1830–42], ed. Michel Serres, François Dagognet and Allal Sinaceur (Paris: Hermann, 1975), I, 854. Quoted in Warren Schmaus, ‘Comte’s General Philosophy of Science’, in Love, Order and Progress: The Science, Philosophy and Politics of Auguste Comte, ed. Michel Bourdeau, Mary Pickering and Warren Schmaus (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), 30. 125. AI, 2–3. 126. CS, 163. 127. Ibid., 172. 128. OR, 154. 129. Bergson, ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, 236. 130. In a conference at the London Society for Psychical Research, Bergson wondered what would have happened if modern science had begun by studying the mind and not mathematics, ‘if Kepler, Galileo and Newton, for example, had been psychologists’ (Henri Bergson, ‘ “Phantasms of the Living” and Psychical Research’ [1913], in Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays, trans. H. Wildon Carr [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, (1934) 1975], 98–9). Brunschvicg replied by saying that ‘it was not by siding against mathematics that humanity was able to emancipate the spiritual values; on the contrary, it was by freeing mathematics itself from the enslavement to the representation of space. Indeed, such was the service rendered by analytic geometry when it replaced Euclidian geometry’ (OR, 51). 131. Ibid., 78. 132. Cf. Bergson, ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, 228: ‘philosophy should be an effort to go beyond the human state’. On this, see Ansell-Pearson, Bergson; Ronchi, Bergson. 133. See Édouard Le Roy, The New Philosophy of Henri Bergson, trans. Vincent Benson (London: Williams and Norgate, [1912] 1913); Joseph Segond, L’intuition bergsonienne (Paris: Alcan, 1913). Le Roy was a mathematician and lycée professor who rose to fame in 1899, when he published in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale a series of articles entitled ‘Science et philosophie’ (1899–1900) consisting in a fierce profession of Bergsonian faith against intellectualism. He succeeded Bergson at the Collège de France in 1921. On his blending of Bergsonism, Catholic mysticism, conventionalism and pragmatism, see Azouvi, La Gloire de Bergson, 77–89; and Harvey Hill, ‘Pragmatism in France. The Case of Édouard Le Roy’, in

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The Reception of Pragmatism in France and the Rise of Roman Catholic Modernism, 1890–1914, ed. David G. Schultenover (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 143–66. On the controversy with Brunschvicg, see Soulié, Les philosophes en République, chap. 6. As to Segond, he taught at the universities of Caen, Besançon, Lyon and Aix-en-Provence. He was the author of works on aesthetics (see his L’esthétique du sentiment [Paris: Boivin, 1927]) heavily influenced not only by Bergson but also by the vitalism of Guyau and Séailles. See Elio Franzini, L’estetica francese del Novecento: analisi delle teorie (Milano: Unicopli, 1984), chap. 3. Both Le Roy and Segond were Catholics and coloured Bergsonism with religious undertones. This is why it was easy for Brunschvicg to accuse them of ‘mysticism’ – a mysticism that provides for a step backwards in the history of consciousness, straight into the Comtean theological state where there exists no difference between rational laws and contingent symbols, between understanding and imagination. For Brunschvicg, in fact, intellectualism is not an abstract formalisation that cannot go beyond the horizon of its own symbolisations; on the contrary, it is the ever-renewed attempt to map out the essential relations of things behind their symbols, to grasp the ‘internal reason’ of reality. 134. OR, 46, 79; PC, II, 354–6. 135. Cf. OR, 280. 136. Émile Borel, ‘Réponse à M. Bergson’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 16, no. 2 (1908): 245. For an account of the reception of Bergson within the circles of the Revue, see Azouvi, La gloire de Bergson, 37–58; Ferdinand Alquié, ‘Bergson et la Revue de métaphysique et de morale’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 48, no. 4 (1941): 315–28. Brunschvicg carefully distinguished Bergson’s own doctrine from Bergsonism, understood as its degeneration, during a meeting of the Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, chaired by Paul Valéry, in 1933. See L’avenir de l’esprit européen (Paris: Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 1934), 143–5. 137. OR, 295. 138. Ibid., 293–5. 139. Cf. IC, 165. 140. Émile Bréhier, ‘L’idéalisme de Léon Brunschvicg’, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 136, nos 1–3 (1946): 2.

3 Brunschvicg and the history of philosophy 1. AR, 134: ‘What if all philosophy ends up stating that one nail drives out another? / All that remains is to collect nails.’ 2. PC, II, 573. 3. Ibid. 4. EE, 184. 5. Jean Laporte, ‘Léon Brunschvicg historien de la philosophie’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 50, nos 1–2 (1945): 85. See also Martial Gueroult, ‘Léon Brunschvicg et la philosophie allemande’, in Études de philosophie allemande (Hildesheim: Olms, 1977), 318. 6. HO, 3, 85. 7. Ibid., 3.

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8. Gabriel Marcel was vocal about Brunschvicg’s arbitrary accounts: As long as we ‘cut’ Plato like a tree, cross out with a stroke Aristotle, the Alexandrines and the entire Middle Ages, castrate Descartes and Spinoza, treat Leibniz as you do with Plato, amputate Kant, suppress the post-Kantians except Fichte, who will also have to undergo a rather radical operation, and finally eliminate Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and, of course, all post-Hegelian speculation – as long as we do this, I believe that it is possible to paint the same picture of the development of western thought that Brunschvicg gives. (VFC, 246) 9. PC, I, 11. 1 0. EE, 52. 11. Cf. Émile Boutroux, ‘Socrate, fondateur de la science morale’ (1883), in Études d’histoire de la philosophie (Paris: Alcan, 1897), 18. 12. Cf. ibid., 43–5. 13. Cf. Leo Strauss, Xenophon’s Socrates (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), 101, 126. 14. Xenophon, Memorabilia, or the Recollections, IV, 2, 9; trans. Amy L. Bonnette (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 115. 15. PC, I, 7–8. 16. Ibid., xi. 17. Ibid., 16–8. 18. Plato, The Republic, VII, 525c. I quote from the translation of Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991). 19. Ibid., VII, 526b. 20. Ibid., VII, 532b (211). 21. Cf. PC, I, 22. 22. Cf. Plato, The Republic, VI, 509b. 23. PC, I, I, 24–5, 27–9. 24. Ibid., 33. According to Brunschvicg, the problem was that Plato always struggled to find a stable and superior point of reference that could enable him to harmonise reality and its dialectical conflicts. The political concern took over the philosophical research: Plato realised that a life devoted to a conversion to truth was a not-socontagious example. In order to establish a just society, a step beyond mere reasoning was required that entailed a reliance on ‘violence’, on a mandatory pedagogy: the demiurge of the city, as the demiurge of the universe, imposes the Ideas on a rebel matter (see ibid., 40). 25. EE, 51, 55. 26. PC, I, 46. 27. Cf. SR, 2. 28. PC, I, 47. 29. Cf. SR, 3. 30. Cf. PC, I, 49–50. 31. Cf. OR, 63–4. 32. Cf. PC, I, 96. 33. Cf. ibid., 89–90; HO, 143–6. 34. Cf. PC, I, 91.

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35. On this aspect, the most important among Brunschvicg’s texts are RR and SR. For an overview of the problem, see Fedi, Kant, une passion française, 630–5; Deschoux, Léon Brunschvicg, 48–69; Jean Nabert, ‘La raison et la religion selon Léon Brunschvicg’ (1940), in L’expérience intérieure de la liberté et autres essais de philosophie morale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 369–96; Arnold Reymond, ‘Quelques aspects de la pensée religieuse de Léon Brunschvicg’, Revue internationale de philosophie 15 (1951): 50–66; Robert Lenoble, ‘La philosophie religieuse de Léon Brunschvicg’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 50, nos 1–2 (1945): 64–72. 36. Étienne Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, trans. Illtyd Trethowan and Frank J. Sheed (Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild Press, [1924] 1965), 103. 37. Ibid., 437–8. 38. PC, I, 107. 39. Ibid., 110–11; see also EE, 50. 40. HO, 27. 41. Ibid., 3, 85. ‘For the children as well as for the primitive people, truth lies in the things; man receives it from the outside as the eye receives it from the sun.’ (RR, 38). 42. Cf. Jacques Brunschwig, ‘Un ennemi d’Aristote à Paris: Léon Brunschvicg’, in Aristoteles Werk und Wirkung. Zweiter Band: Kommentierung, Überlieferung, Nachleben, ed. Jürgen Wiesner (Berlin: Springer, 1987), 596–9. Brunschvicg’s hostility would hamper for many decades Aristotelian studies in France. 43. I modify here a formulation used by Andrea Staiti to denote the narrative shared by the neo-Kantian circles of early twentieth-century Germany (‘Kantian liberation narrative’), according to which Kant emancipated the mind from the ‘shackles of naturalism’. See Staiti’s book Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology: Nature, Spirit, and Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 223–8. 44. On the ‘glory’ and the construction of the myth of Descartes, see François Azouvi, Descartes et la France: histoire d’une passion nationale (Paris: Hachette, 2002); Stéphane Van Damme, Descartes: essai d’histoire culturelle d’une grandeur philosophique (Paris: Les Presses de Sciences Po, 2002). 45. The project was directed by Charles Adam (1857–1940) and Paul Tannery (1843– 1904). Brunschvicg was not among the subscribers as he was not yet a university professor. On this enterprise, see Soulié, Les philosophes en République, 87–95. 46. PC, I, 96. 47. Jean Hyppolite, ‘Préface’, in Deschoux, La philosophie de Léon Brunschvicg, viii. 48. EE, 87. 49. PC, I, 116–17. 50. Miguel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, [1580; 1582; 1588] 1965), III, 2, ‘Of repentance’, 610–11. 51. PC, I, 128. 52. Ibid., 125. 53. Ibid., 122. 54. Ibid., 133–5; EE, 89–90. Brunschvicg’s assessment of the passage from Montaigne to Descartes is borrowed directly from the lessons of Darlu. See Marco Piazza, ‘Le Kant de Darlu et l’idéal régulatif proustien. “Éclairer tout le souvenir d’un littérateur!”’, Revue d’études proustiennes 10, no. 2 (2019): 97–8. 55. Philippe Desan, Montaigne: A Life, trans. Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [2014] 2017), 630.

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56. René Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Natural Intelligence, trans. George Heffernan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, [1684] 1998), 73. 57. HO, 13, 26. 58. Cf. Étienne Gilson, Études sur le rôle de la pensée médiévale dans la formation du système cartésien (Paris: Vrin, 1930), 253–4. Two years later, Gilson’s famous critical edition of the Discourse – a project begun at the suggestion of Brunschvicg – was published by Vrin. On Gilson, see Florian Michel, Étienne Gilson: une biographie intellectuelle et politique (Paris: Vrin, 2008); Laurence K. Shook, Étienne Gilson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984). 59. HO, 29. 60. Ibid., 63. 61. PC, I, 137. 62. PC, II, 380. 63. Ibid. 64. PC, I, 135–7; HO, 16. 65. HO, 13. 66. René Descartes, Geometry, trans. David E. Smith and Marcia L. Latham (New York: Dover, [1637] 1954), 159. 67. EH, 186. On Descartes’s physics, see ibid., 183–95, where Brunschvicg highlights the role played by experience in Descartes’s understanding of scientific practice. 68. EPM, 120–1; GP, 6; HO, 15–16, 86–7, 310. 69. Cf. DPM, 119–22. 70. HO, 147. 71. Descartes, Meditations, 47. 72. Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Natural Intelligence, 88–9, 93. 73. EPM, 121. 74. René Descartes, A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, trans. Ian Maclean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1637] 2006), 17. 75. EPM, 121. 76. HO, 19. Emphasis added. 77. Ibid., 22–3. 78. Descartes, A Discourse on the Method, 17; EPM, 123. 79. HO, 31, 315. 80. Ibid., 61–2. 81. See Blaise Pascal, Opuscules et pensées, ed. Léon Brunschvicg (Paris: Hachette, 1897). This is the edition that goes under the name of ‘Brunschvicg minor’. Brunschvicg’s approach consisted in bypassing the problem of establishing the order of the fragments originally conceived by Pascal, which was impossible to reconstruct, and grouping the fragments according to thematic similarities. Brunschvicg went on publish two other philological contributions: an extended three-volume version of the ‘minor’ edition for the series ‘Grands Écrivains de la France’, called ‘Brunschvicg Major’ (Paris: Hachette, 1904), and a facsimile edition of the Recueil original, aimed at giving the reader a sense of the difficulties involved in the decipherment and the organisation of the materials (Paris: Hachette, 1905). 82. See Blaise Pascal, Œuvres, ed. Léon Brunschvicg, Pierre Boutroux and Félix Gazier, 11 vols (Paris: Hachette, ‘Grands Écrivains de la France’ series, 1908–14). Volumes 12, 13 and 14 are constituted by the reissue of Brunschvicg’s 1904 three-volume edition of the Pensées.

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8 3. Cf. Lefèvre, ‘Une heure avec Léon Brunschvicg’, 4. 84. Cf. Alain Cantillon, ‘L’institution des Œuvres-complètes-de-Blaise-Pascal; à propos des éditions de Léon Brunschvicg (1897–1914)’, Les dossiers du Groupe de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur l’Histoire du Littéraire, http://journals.openedition.org/ dossiersgrihl/3660 (accessed 2 December 2019). 85. See Stanislas Breton et al., Le modernisme (Paris: Beauchesne, 1980) and Henri Gouhier, ‘Tradition et développement à l’époque du modernisme’, in Études sur l’histoire des idées en France depuis le XVIIe siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1980), 127–58, for the philosophers’ takes on the matter. For a more general overview, see Louis-Pierre Sardella, Regards sur la crise moderniste en France. Une Église intangible dans un monde en mouvement (Paris: Karthala, 2018). 86. See Cantillon, ‘L’institution des Œuvres-complètes-de-Blaise-Pascal’. 87. In his Cahiers, Maurice Barrès would reproach Brunschvicg precisely for his detached and cold attitude towards the sentimental and religious gist of Pascal’s writings: ‘We have to love Pascal … as one of the heroes of our species, race, soil and culture … This is what distinguishes me from Léon Brunschvicg’ (Maurice Barrès, Mes Cahiers, 1896–1923, ed. Guy Dupré [Paris: Plon, 1993], 438). 88. IOP, xli–xliii, lii. 89. IPP, xcvi–xcviii. 90. Ibid., cxli. 91. Blaise Pascal, ‘Memorial’ (1654), in Pensées and Other Writings, ed. Anthony Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 178; GP, 61. 92. IPP, cxli. 93. AI, 149. 94. Cf. IPP, lxviii. 95. Cf. ibid., lxxxiii–iv. 96. Blaise Pascal, ‘Letter to M. Le Pailleur, Concerning Father Noël, Jesuit’ (1648), in The Provincial Letters. Pensées. Scientific Treatises, trans. Thomas M. Crie, William F. Trotter and Richard Scofield (Chicago: William Benton/Encyclopædia Britannica, 1952), 373. 97. GP, 34. 98. Cf. NL, 13–35; reprised in HO, 92–106. See also IPP, cvii; SR, 12–13. 99. GP, 10. 100. Ibid., 31. See also Alexandre Koyré, ‘Pascal savant’ (1954), in Études d’histoire de la pensée scientifique, ed. René Taton, 2nd edn (Paris: Gallimard, [1966] 1973), 365. 101. Cf. IPP, cix. 102. Ibid., cxii. 103. Cf. ibid., cxvii–cxviii. 104. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. William F. Trotter (Mineola, NY: Dover, [1669–70] 2003), 161, fr. 582 Brunschvicg. 105. Cf. IPP, cxv. 106. Cf. SR, 14. 107. GP, 45–6, 63–4; SR, 44–5. 108. Howard C. McElroy, ‘Brunschvicg’s Interpretation of Pascal’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 11, no. 2 (1950): 204. 109. Lefèvre, ‘Une heure avec M. Léon Brunschvicg’, 4. See also SR, 42–3. 110. Cf. the ‘Avertissement’ of Geneviève Lewis to a collection of Brunschvicg’s writings on Pascal she edited in 1953: Blaise Pascal (Paris: Vrin, 1953), vii. 111. Cf. SSC, 262–4; HO, 67–8.

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1 12. SSC, 266. 113. Ibid., 267. 114. Cf. Descartes, Meditations, 40–1. 115. SSC, 277–8. 116. EPM, 210. 117. On the French reception of Spinoza in the early nineteenth century, see Marco Piazza, ‘Un capitolo ignorato della ricezione dello spinozismo in Francia. Lo Spinoza di Maine de Biran’; Annamaria Contini, ‘Spinoza nella filosofia della vita dell’Ottocento francese’; and Manlio Iofrida, ‘Nello specchio di Spinoza. Note sulla filosofia francese tra la III e la V Repubblica’, all in La fortuna di Spinoza in età moderna e contemporanea, ed. Carlo Altini (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2020), vol. 2, 39–54, 103–18 and 187–206 respectively; the sections ‘Spinoza en France’ in Spinoza au XIXe siècle, ed. André Tosel, Pierre-François Moreau and Jean Salem (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2008), available online: https://books.openedition. org/psorbonne/158 (accessed 24 March 2020); and the monographic issue on Spinoza entre Lumières et romantisme of the Cahiers de Fontenay 36–8 (1985): 187– 231. See also Patrice Vermeren, ‘La philosophie au present: le juif Spinoza. L’institution philosophique française et la doctrine maudite du juif Spinoza’, Lignes 4, no. 12 (1990): 167–80; and various articles by Pierre-François Moreau, such as: ‘Trois polémiques contre Victor Cousin’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 4 (1983): 542– 8; ‘Spinoza et Victor Cousin’, Archivio di filosofia 1 (1978): 327–31; ‘Saisset, lecteur de Spinoza’, Recherches sur le XVIIe siècle 4 (1980): 85–97; ‘Spinozisme et matérialisme au xixe siècle’, Raison présente 52 (1979): 85–94. 118. Cf. Pierre Macherey, ‘Leroux dans la querelle sur le panthéisme’, Cahiers de Fontenay 36–8 (1985): 215–22. 119. See Vincent Duclert, ‘La pensée de Spinoza et la naissance de l’intellectuel démocratique dans la France du tournant du siècle’, Archives juives 36, no. 2 (2003): 20–42. 120. On Taine’s reading of Spinoza, see Pierre-François Moreau, ‘Taine lecteur de Spinoza’, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 177, no. 4 (1987): 477–89. See also Victor Delbos’s critique in Le problème moral dans la philosophie de Spinoza et dans l’histoire du spinozisme (Paris: Alcan, 1893), 489–527. 121. Cf. EMI, 72. 122. SSC, 49. Emphasis added. 123. Ibid., 31–2. Emphasis added. 124. Baruch Spinoza, ‘Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect’ (1677), in Collected Works. Volume I, trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 32. 125. PC, II, 741. 126. HO, 113, 135. 127. SSC, 33. 128. Spinoza, ‘Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect’, 19. 129. HO, 159. 130. He pitted Hamelin’s dialectic idealism against Brunschvicg’s scientific one, as we will see more in detail in the following chapter. 131. One has to bear in mind here the double meaning of the French word ‘expérience’: ‘experience’ and ‘experiment’. 132. OR, 290; emphasis added. 133. Cf. HO, 113.

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1 34. OR, 43. 135. ‘Quelques lettres inédites de Léon Brunschvicg’, 9. 136. HO, 155. 137. HMHI, 73–4. 138. EPM, 146. 139. Cf. ibid., 416. 140. Baruch Spinoza, ‘Ethics’ (1677), in Collected Works. Volume I, prop. 8, sch. 2, 413. 141. Cf. HO, 116. 142. EPM, 146. 143. Cf. EH, viii. 144. SSC, 148. 145. Ibid., 478. 146. EPM, 224. The exclusion of Leibniz from this chapter may appear surprising. Indeed, one might observe that Brunschvicg devoted two lengthy chapters (10 and 11) of EPM to Leibniz’s philosophy, praising him as the great founder of modern intellectualism, the philosopher who really grasped in reason ‘the source of the infinite and the continuous’ (ibid., 210). Yet I believe that Leibniz is not as central a reference as other thinkers like the ones here discussed and that the downsides of his philosophy are for Brunschvicg more important than the qualities. 147. OR, 56. Jean-Michel Le Lannou insists on this aspect of Brunschvicg's interpretation of Spinoza. See ‘ “Un temple pur”. Léon Brunschvicg lecteur de Spinoza’, in Spinoza au XIXe siècle, 295–310. 148. OR, 300. 149. SSC, 162. 150. OR, 58. This is what Merleau-Ponty meant when he said that ‘Léon Brunschvicg accepted all of Spinoza except the descending order of the Ethics. The first book, he used to say, is no more primary than the fifth; the Ethics ought to be read in a circle, and God presupposes man as man presupposes God’ (‘Everywhere and Nowhere’ (1956), in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, [1960] 1964], 150). 151. OR, 64. 152. ECD, 208. As he wrote elsewhere, by raising the problem of the transcendental foundation of knowledge, criticism shows that ‘a house cannot be built starting from the rooftop’ (HMI, 74). 153. PC, I, 289. 154. HO, 225. 155. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1781; 1787] 1998), A193–4/B238–9, 307–8 [Ak. III, 170]. 156. Cf. EH, 363. See also SR, 68; VFC, 100; and HMI, 11–12. 157. EH, 360. 158. Ibid., 310. 159. PC, I, 301. See also HO, 228. By ‘empirical realism’, Kant meant that the objects of outer perception were real insofar as they were given in space and time. 160. Ibid., par 149. 161. HO, 222. 162. Ibid., 208. 163. MJ, 26. 164. PC, I, 322.

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1 65. Ibid., 323. 166. Ibid. 167. HO, 224. 168. Ibid., 226–8. See also VFC, 82–3. 169. Cf. EPM, 281. 170. As Brunschvicg explains in the Progrès de la conscience, Kant’s philosophy belongs to that time of transition when modern physics was developing, when the passage from the old ‘conceptual generality’ to the new scientific attitude was still in the making, which explains the shortcomings of the Critique of Pure Reason (cf. PC, II, 687). 171. It is correct to see in this remark a blow against the neo-Kantians, who are explicitly evoked shortly after and who still accept the postulate of the ‘solidarity between the critical idea and the table of the categories’ (HO, 224). Here Brunschvicg is probably referring to Marburg neo-Kantianism, most likely to Paul Natorp (1854–1924) and his Die logischen Grundlagen der exakten Wissenschaften (The Logical Foundations of the Exact Sciences) of 1910 (cf. EPM, 303). 172. MJ, xi. 173. HO, 229. 174. We leave aside here an account of Brunschvicg’s analysis of Kant’s moral philosophy and philosophy of religion, which are addressed mainly in PC, I, §§161–70, in RR, 119–34 and in HO, 179–205, always in dialogue with Victor Delbos’s referential monograph La philosophie pratique de Kant (Paris: Alcan, 1905). 175. SSC, 489–90. 176. Ibid., 490. If the thing-in-itself is never given in phenomenal experience, then we cannot have a proper concept of it. 177. Quoted in Braverman, ‘A partir du lycée Condorcet’, 73. The content of the course is known thanks to the notes taken by Xavier Léon in his cahiers, now held at the Musée Marcel Proust in Combray. 178. SSC, 491. 179. On Brunschvicg’s negative judgement on the further developments of Fichte’s doctrine after the Atheismusstreit, see IC, 170–1; PC, II, 358–65; RR, 134–6. 180. SSC, 491. 181. Cf. PC, I, 335–6. 182. Cf. Johann G. Fichte, ‘Concerning the Difference between the Spirit and the Letter within Philosophy’ (1794), in Early Philosophical Writings, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 192–215. 183. OR, 266–7. From this point of view, Gueroult is right when he claims that, for Brunschvicg, Spinoza, Kant and Fichte were ultimately three different incarnations of the same philosophy (see Gueroult, ‘Léon Brunschvicg et la philosophie allemande’, 318). 184. Raymond Aron, ‘Préface’, in Michelle Bo Bramsen, Portrait d’Élie Halévy (Amsterdam: Grüner, 1978), i. Emphasis added. 185. Cf. Pietro Terzi, ‘Wrestling with the Shadow: The Panlogism Controversy in Hegel’s French Reception (1897–1927)’, Modern Intellectual History 17, no. 4 (2020): 981–1008. 186. HO, 157–8. 187. Johann G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, ed. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1794–5; 1802] 1982), 92 [I, 90]. 188. Ibid., 117 [I, 119]. 189. Cf. IC, 15.

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1 90. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, 119 [I, 122]. 191. Cf. PC, I, 338–9. 192. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, 113 [I, 115]. 193. PC, I, 339. 194. Ibid., 341. 195. Léon started to work on this book almost ten years before its publication, precisely at the time when Brunschvicg was writing his PhD dissertation. In a letter to Halévy of 27 March 1892, Brunschvicg said that he was busy reading the first drafts of Léon’s Fichte (cf. ‘Quelques lettres inédites de Léon Brunschvicg’, 8). See Brunschvicg’s review in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale 10, no. 3 (1902): 2. There, Brunschvicg claimed that ‘the return to Fichte satisfied at the same time the needs of contemporary thought and the needs of moral progress’. Léon’s influence on Brunschvicg’s reading of Fichte is explicitly acknowledged in PC, I, xv. 196. Cf. Xavier Léon, La philosophie de Fichte et ses rapports avec la conscience contemporaine (Paris: Alcan, 1902), 484. 197. On these matters, see Martial Gueroult, ‘Fichte et Xavier Léon’, in Études sur Fichte (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1974), 247–84. 198. Léon, La philosophie de Fichte, 508. 199. See Gueroult, ‘Fichte et Xavier Léon’. Léon would defend his view in the three volumes of his monumental biography of the German philosopher, Fichte et son temps, 3 vols (Paris: Armand Colin, 1922–7). 200. Léon, La philosophie de Fichte, 459. 201. It must be recalled, however, that Boutroux had already wrote in his PhD dissertation that consciousness ‘needs a shock in order to manifest itself ’ (The Contingency of the Laws of Nature, 144–5). 202. EH, 611. 203. PC, I, 344. 204. In a presentation of Wahl’s famous book on Hegel’s unhappy consciousness, Brunschvicg defined Hegel as a synthesis between the ‘sinister apocalypse’ of Jacob Böhme and the ‘scholastic conceptualism’ of Albertus Magnus, which means that German romanticism and idealism sank their roots in the Middle Ages. See ‘Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel, par M. Jean Wahl’, Séances et travaux de l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques 90 (January–February 1930): 370–1. 205. Quoted in Dominique Janicaud, Une généalogie du spiritualisme français. Aux sources du bergsonisme: Ravaisson et la métaphysique (La Haye: Nijhoff, 1969), 8. On Bergson’s relationship with tradition, see Fabiani, Les philosophes de la République, 76–7.

4 The legacy of the nineteenth century 1. AR, 219: ‘Some say that everything is made of opposites, but they do not say what the oppositions are made of. / The spirit of contradiction, raised to a principle of formal dialectics, risks leading to the contradiction of the spirit.’ 2. Lefèvre, ‘Une heure avec Léon Brunschvicg’, 4. 3. VFC, 68.

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4. Cf. Gaston Mauchaussat, L’idéalisme de Lachelier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), 66–7; Edmund König, ‘Maine de Biran, der französische Kant’, Philosophische Monatshefte 25 (1889): 160–91. 5. On Maine de Biran, the Anglophone reader can see Of Immediate Apperception, ed. Alessandra Aloisi and Marco Piazza (London: Bloomsbury, [1807] 2020) and The Relationship between the Physical and the Moral in Man, ed. Darian Meacham and Joseph Spadola (London: Bloomsbury, [1812] 2016). 6. Cf. PC, II, 576 and 745. 7. Ibid., 574–6. 8. On Biran and Kant, see Fedi, Kant, une passion française, chap. 2; Marco Piazza and Denise Vincenti, ‘The Self-Apperception and the Knower as Agent: An Introduction to Maine de Biran’s Notes about Kant’, Philosophical Inquiries 4, no. 1 (2016): 103–14. 9. PC, II, 576–9. See also RR, 182. 10. EH, 24. 11. See ibid., 25. 12. See ibid., 37. 13. See ibid., 41. 14. PC, II, 583. 15. EH, 43. However, Brunschvicg also claims that, whereas Biran still remained ‘a prisoner of the realist prejudice that identifies the self with the image of the individual’, Bergson’s notion of duration is a better and more intelligible description of the true nature of our inner life, discarding any ‘imagination of an immovable substance’ that Biran still needed (cf. RR, 182–3). As Merleau-Ponty noted in a 1947–8 course, due to Biran’s reliance on a psychological evidence which seems not to be ‘communicable’, Brunschvicg is actually ‘more critical of Biran than he is of Bergson’ (cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul, ed. Andrew G. Bjelland Jr. and Patrick Burke [New York: Humanity Books, [1997] 2001], 63). 16. Cf. OR, 59. 17. Now collected in Œuvres, 2 vols (Paris: Alcan, 1933). 18. Cf. ibid., 206. 19. Émile Boutroux, ‘Jules Lachelier’, Journal des débats politiques et littéraires (30 January 1918): 3. 20. Jean Guitton, Regards sur la pensée française, 1870–1914: Leçons de captivité (Paris: Beauchesne, 1968), 86. 21. Cf. Nicola Abbagnano, Storia della filosofia. Volume 3. La filosofia moderna e contemporanea: dal romanticismo all’esistenzialismo (Milano: UTET, 2003), 419. 22. Cf. Émile Boutroux, ‘Jules Lachelier’ (1921), in Nouvelles études d’histoire de la philosophie (Paris: Alcan, 1927), 4; OR, 208–9. 23. See the case of the Renouvierian philosopher Jules Thomas (1856–1906), whose career was cut short by Lachelier due to his militant and defiant anticlericalism (cf. Fedi, Kant, une passion française, chap. 13). 24. See Jules Lachelier, Cours de logique: École Normale Supérieure, 1866–1867, ed. JeanLouis Dumas (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1990). 25. Ravaisson was not a university professor, but rather took up a variety of high-ranking positions during his long life, serving as general inspector of public libraries, general inspector of higher education and, under the Republic, due to his interest in art, conservator of antiquities and modern sculpture at the Louvre. The turning point in his career was the year 1863, when his school friend Victor Duruy (1811–1894), then

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minister of education, re-established the agrégation (suppressed in 1852), appointed him head of the examining board and asked him to write a report on nineteenthcentury French philosophy to mark the event. Due to the institutional weight of its author, Ravaisson’s Rapport, published four years later, became thus a must-read for the young philosophy students. 26. Cf. Félix Ravaisson, La philosophie en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, [1867] 1984), 313. The reader can refer to Mark Sinclair, Being Inclined: Félix Ravaisson’s Philosophy of Habit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) and to Félix Ravaisson, Selected Essays, ed. Mark Sinclair (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), which are helpful and up-to-date introductions to Ravaisson’s oeuvre and life. 27. Andrea Bellantone, ‘Ravaisson: “le champ abandonné de la métaphysique” ’, Cahiers philosophiques 2 (2012): 5–21. 28. Jules Lachelier, Lettres, 1856–1918 (Paris: Girard, 1933), 139–40. 29. Paul Janet, La Crise philosophique (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1865), 5. 30. Ibid., 6. 31. Paul Janet, La philosophie française contemporaine (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1879), 37–54. As Gunn wrote, ‘The old spiritualism had no place between its psychology and its metaphysics for natural sciences … The new spiritualism … not only is acquainted with the place and results of the sciences, but it feels itself equal to a criticism of them’ (Alexander J. Gunn, Modern French Philosophy: A Study of the Development since Comte [New York: Dodd, Mead, 1922], 120–1). 32. Cf. Henri Bergson, ‘The Life and Work of Félix Ravaisson’ (1904), in The Creative Mind, 261–300. 33. See Félix Ravaisson, ‘Metaphysics and Morals’ (1893), trans. Mark Sinclair, in Selected Essays, 279–94. 34. Cf. Janicaud, Une généalogie du spiritualisme français. 35. Cf. PC, II, 589–92. 36. See Félix Ravaisson, Essai sur la métaphysique d’Aristote (Paris: Cerf, [1837] 2007). A follow-up was published in 1847. 37. Cf. EPM, 563. And this despite the fact that, as Sinclair explains, Ravaisson read ‘being in the sense of dynamis and energeia as higher than being according to the categories’ (Sinclair, Being Inclined, 158). On Aristotle’s finalism, see RR, 35. 38. Félix Ravaisson, ‘Philosophical Testament’ (1901), trans. Jeremy Dunham and Mark Sinclair, in Selected Essays, 297. This text originally appeared in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale 9, no. 1 (1901): 1–31, edited by Xavier Léon. 39. Cf. the letter to Ravaisson of 1 September 1857, in Lachelier, Lettres, 36. 40. Qtd. in Mauchaussaut, L’idéalisme de Lachelier, 35. 41. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B131–2, 246 [Ak. III, 108]. 42. See on this Étienne Balibar, ‘Je-Moi-Soi’, in Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, ed. Barbara Cassin (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 645–9. 43. Lachelier, Cours de logique, 56. 44. Jules Lachelier, ‘The Foundation of Induction’ (1871), in The Philosophy of Jules Lachelier, ed. Edward G. Ballard (The Hague: Springer, 1960), 21. 45. Mill’s System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (1843) was translated into French in 1866. 46. Lachelier, ‘The Foundation of Induction’, 56. 47. Jules Lachelier, ‘Psychology and Metaphysics’ (1896), in The Philosophy of Jules Lachelier, 86. See EP, II, 60. 48. Cf. EHCP, 530–1.

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4 9. Cf. ibid., 532–3. 50. More widely on Boutroux, see Fedi, Kant, une passion française, chap. 14; Fabien Capeillères, ‘To Reach for Metaphysics: Émile Boutroux’s Philosophy of Science’, in Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Sebastien Luft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 192–249; ‘Généalogie d’un néokantisme français: à propos d’Émile Boutroux’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 3 (1998): 405–42. 51. Cf. OR, 216. 52. Ibid., 220. 53. Émile Bréhier, Histoire de la philosophie. Tome III. XIXe-XXe siècles, 4th edn (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, [1932] 1989), 954. 54. See ibid., 927–37; Isaak Benrubi, Les sources et les courants de la philosophie contemporaine en France (Paris: Alcan, 1933), vol. 1, 325–454. 55. Cf. Émile Boutroux, ‘La philosophie en France depuis 1867’ (1908), in Nouvelles études d’histoire de la philosophie, 143–9, 164–72. 56. Anastasios Brenner, ‘French Philosophy of Science and the Historical Method’, in The Present Situation in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Friedrich Stadler (Heidelberg: Springer, 2010), 58. On Comte, see Bourdeau, Pickering and Schmaus, eds, Love, Order and Progress. 57. Cf. SR, 57, 62; and EPM, 268 and 282–3, where Brunschvicg holds that, from the point of view of the history of the philosophy of mathematics, ‘the heir of Kant’ would not be Fichte, but rather Comte, because Fichte simply lacked a proper theory of mathematics. 58. Auguste Comte, Correspondance générale et confessions, ed. Paulo E. de Berrêdo Carneiro and Pierre Arnaud (Paris: Mouton, 1973), vol. 1, 59. Quoted in JeanFrançois Braunstein, ‘L’invention française du “psychologisme” en 1828’, Revue d’histoire des sciences 2, no. 65 (2012): 205. 59. PC, II, 514. For an analysis of Comte’s philosophy of mathematics, see EPM, 282–301. 60. Cf. PC, II, 514. 61. Cf. ibid., 518–21. 62. RR, 157. More generally, see ibid., 148–66, for an extensive analysis of Comte’s project. 63. The term ‘epistemology’ was popularised by Émile Meyerson’s book Identity and Reality, which was published in 1909. As Fruteau de Laclos explains, The English word ‘epistemology’ is equivalent to the German term Erkenntnistheorie or to the French expression ‘théorie de la connaissance’ (theory of knowledge). It takes knowledge as a general category whose specifications are respectively common and scientific. But when the French word ‘épistémologie’ first appeared, it was defined as a synonym for ‘philosophy of science’. The new discipline was specifically dedicated to scientific knowledge and explicitly rejected the idea of a common knowledge. (‘The Meaning of “Epistemology”: Science, Common Sense and Philosophy according to Émile Meyerson’, Kairos. Journal of Philosophy and Science 19 [2017]: 37) 6 4. Cf. SR, 63; EH, 298–9. 65. Antoine-Augustin Cournot, Matérialisme, vitalisme, rationalisme: études sur l’emploi des données de la science en philosophie (Paris: Hachette, 1875), 371. 66. EH, xiii. 67. Cf. PC, II, 606–13; OR, 152; SR, 65; DPM, 198–9.

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68. See Antoine-Augustin Cournot, Essai sur les fondements de nos connaissances et sur les caractères de la critique philosophique (Paris: Hachette, 1851), vol. 2, 226. 69. See Dominique Parodi, ‘Le criticisme de Cournot’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 13, no. 3 (1905): 482. 70. PC, II, 608. 71. Ibid., 606. 72. Antoine-Augustin Cournot, Exposition de la théorie des chances et des probabilités (Paris: Hachette, 1843), 426. 73. EH, 299. 74. Ibid., 298. 75. Ibid. 76. Cf. Antoine-Augustin Cournot, Considérations sur la marche des idées et des événements dans les temps modernes (Paris: Hachette, 1872), vol. 1, iii–v. 77. Cf. EH, 512–19. 78. Cf. Michel Espagne, ‘L’Allemagne d’Émile Boutroux’, Cahiers d’études germaniques 41 (2001): 199–215; and En deçà du Rhin: l’Allemagne des philosophes français au XIXe siècle (Paris: Cerf, 2005), 152–7. 79. Cf., e.g., Émile Boutroux, La nature et l’esprit (Paris: Vrin, 1926), 9; and Science and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy, trans. Janathan Nield (New York: Macmillan, [1908] 1911), 236–7. 80. SR, 137. 81. Cf. EPM, 304. 82. Cf. PVP, 27–8. 83. Émile Boutroux, The Contingency of the Laws of Nature, trans. Fred Rothwell (Chicago, IL: Open Court, [1874] 1920), 30. 84. On epigenesis, cf. ibid., 158. On Sadi Carnot’s principle, cf. Émile Boutroux, Natural Law in Science and Philosophy, trans. Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, [1895] 1914), 84. On these arguments and their Bergsonian reprisal, see Laurent Fedi, ‘Bergson et Boutroux, la critique du modèle physicaliste et des lois des conservations en psychologie’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 2 (2001): 110–11. 85. Boutroux, The Contingency of the Laws of Nature, 151. 86. Ibid., 115. 87. Ibid., 116. 88. Capeillères, ‘Généalogie d’un néokantisme français’, 440. 89. Boutroux, The Contingency of the Laws of Nature, 155. 90. Boutroux, Natural Law in Science and Philosophy, 59. 91. Joel Revill, ‘Émile Boutroux: Redefining Science and Faith in the Third Republic’, Modern Intellectual History 6, no. 3 (2009): 487. 92. PC, II, 612. 93. Cf. ibid., 613. 94. Against Comte, Boutroux wrote in a late text that ‘The human soul turns out to be precisely the effort to go beyond what is given … Let man re-enter into himself, and he will find there the true god – internal as regards existence and not external, a creative influence and not a given phenomenon’ (Science and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy, 78). 95. OR, 63. 96. Cf. ibid., 64. 97. SR, 206.

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98. Cf., e.g., ibid., 328. There Brunschvicg explained how, at the turn of the century, one was forced to choose between two contrasting options: on the one hand, the criticism of the École Polytecnique (Renouvier); on the other, the Kantianism of the École Normale (Lachelier). However, this was actually how Brunschvicg perceived things. In fact, for many disciples of Lachelier, the confrontation with Renouvier and the reading of his Critique philosophique was natural, so that we can find many examples of ‘cross-fertilisation’, e.g., in the philosophical writings of the great reformer of the French university Louis Liard (1846–1917). 99. Trained at the École polytechnique, where he was a student of Comte, he actively supported the revolution of 1848. After the coup d’état of December 1851, Renouvier broke definitively with what was left of the Saint-Simonian messianism he had embraced when he was a polytechnicien. In order to avoid political persecution, he left Paris taking up residence near Fontainebleau, engaging in a deep reconsideration of his philosophical views. On this early period, see Louis Foucher, La jeunesse de Renouvier et sa première philosophie, 1815–1854 (Paris: Vrin, 1927). Renouvier rose to fame only with the advent of the Third Republic, when he imposed himself as one of the great theorists of French republicanism. 100. On Renouvier’s philosophy, see Warren Schmaus, Liberty and the Pursuit of Knowledge: Charles Renouvier’s Political Philosophy of Science (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018); Samuel-Gaston Amet, Le néocriticisme de Renouvier: fondations des sciences (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015); Fernand Turlot, Le personnalisme critique de Charles Renouvier: une philosophie française (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2003); Laurent Fedi, Le problème de la connaissance dans la philosophie de Charles Renouvier (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000); William Logue, Charles Renouvier, Philosopher of Liberty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993). 101. Charles Renouvier, Essais de critique générale. Premier essai. Traité de logique générale et de logique formelle, 2nd edn (Paris: Armand Colin, [1854] 1912), vol. 1, xiii. 102. This is actually the second table drafted by Renouvier (there are at least five versions), although it is surely the most important one, as it appeared in the first Essai (cf. ibid., 123). For a deeper and lengthier analysis, see Fedi, Le problème de la connaissance dans la philosophie de Charles Renouvier, 102–79. 103. Charles Renouvier, Derniers entretiens, ed. Louis Prat (Paris: Vrin, 1930), 9. 104. Cf. Charles Renouvier, Esquisse d’une classification systématique des doctrines philosophiques, 2 vols (Paris: Bureau de la Critique Philosophique, 1885–6). 105. Cf. Charles Renouvier, Essais de critique générale. Deuxième essai: Traité de psychologie rationnelle d’après les principes du criticisme, 2nd edn (Paris: Armand Colin, [1859] 1912), vol. 2, 77–108. 106. On this, see Jeremy Dunham, ‘Idealism, Pragmatism, and the Will to Believe: Charles Renouvier and William James’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23, no. 4 (2015): 756–78. 107. Cf. Georges Dumesnil, Le spiritualisme (Paris: Société française d’imprimerie et de libraire, 1905), 79. 108. Boutroux, Science and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy, 354. Actually, it was Darlu who first made Brunschvicg aware of the problematic character of Renouvier’s criticism (cf. VFC, 10).

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109. See Octave Hamelin, Essai sur les éléments principaux de la représentation (Paris: Alcan, 1907). Brunschvicg would continue to criticise Hamelin and to argue with his defenders like Parodi in VFC. 110. Cf. OR, 17. 111. Cf. ibid., 4–5. 112. Cf. ibid., 6–7. 113. Cf. ibid., 8. 114. Cf. PC, II, 533–44. On Durkheim’s philosophical sources, see Giovanni Paoletti, Durkheim et la philosophie: représentation, réalité et lien social (Paris: Garnier, 2012); Warren Schmaus, Rethinking Durkheim and his Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Susan Stedman Jones, Durkheim Reconsidered (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 62–87; Dénes Némedi, William S. F. Pickering, ‘Durkheim’s Friendship with the Philosopher Octave Hamelin’, British Journal of Sociology 46, no. 1 (1995): 107–25. 115. Cf. HO, 207. 116. Renouvier, Traité de psychologie rationnelle, vol. 2, 50. 117. OR, 23–4. 118. PC, II, 593. 119. Cf. OR, 26. 120. Cf. ibid., 27. 121. EH, 391. 122. Cf. PC, II, 664. 123. On Reinhold and Schulze, see Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), chaps. 8 and 9. 124. Cf. Fichte, ‘Review of Aenesidemus’ (1794), in Early Philosophical Writings, 59–77.

5 A philosophy of judgement 1. AR, 138: ‘Contradiction lies in the copula: is sometimes means truth and sometimes reality. / Hence this perpetual double tendency to judge the real according to the idea of truth and to let the idea degrade in order to adapt to the anomalies of the real.’ 2. PC, II, 741. 3. Cf. Alberto Gualandi, ‘Brunschvicg, Kant e le metafore del giudizio matematico’, Discipline filosofiche 16, no. 2 (2006): 169–70. 4. Cf. Géraud Tournadre, Le principe d’homogénéité: recherches logiques (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1988), 94. It is not clear, however, where Tournadre found Brochard’s claim, given that it does not feature in the minutes of the PhD dissertation, published as an appendix in the third edition of Modalité. 5. Cf. MJ, 280–1. 6. Ibid., 282–3. 7. Ibid., x. 8. Descartes, Rules for the Direction of Natural Intelligence, 131. 9. Cf. ibid., in particular footnote 179. 10. ‘Quelques lettres inédites de Léon Brunschvicg’, 12. 11. See Jules Lachelier, De natura syllogismi (Paris: Ladrange, 1871) . The French translation, first published in the Revue philosophique in 1876 with the title

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Les conséquences immédiates et le syllogisme’, is now included in Œuvres de Jules Lachelier, 2 vols (Paris: Alcan, 1933), vol. 1, 93–122. Brunschvicg himself acknowledged that ‘The authentic theory of syllogism is the one that has been indicated by Lambert at the end of the eighteenth century and that Jules Lachelier has masterfully developed on several occasions’ (MJ, viii). 12. Cf. Louis Vax, ‘À propos d’une “maladie philosophique”: le psychologisme dans la syllogistique (de Lachelier à Brunschvicg)’, Philosophia Scientiæ 1, no. 3 (1996): 61–89. See also Brunschwig, ‘Un ennemi d’Aristote à Paris: Léon Brunschvicg’. 13. MJ, vii. 14. Cf. the appendix ‘Soutenance de thèses’, in MJ, 273. 15. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, II, 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 48–9 [90a5–12]. 16. Cf. VMS, 245. 17. Cf. ibid., 248–9. 18. Ibid., 252. 19. Ibid., 267. 20. Ibid., 262. 21. Ibid., 263. 22. Cf. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 60 [94b8–26]. 23. VMS, 265. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. ‘Soutenance de thèses’, in MJ, 273. 28. Cf. Lachelier, ‘Les conséquences immédiates et le syllogisme’, 102–4. 29. Brunschwig, ‘Un ennemi d’Aristote à Paris: Léon Brunschvicg’, 614–15. 30. VMS, 268. 31. Ibid. 32. MJ, ix. 33. Cf. ibid., 19. 34. Ibid., 24. 35. Ibid., 22. 36. Cf. ‘Soutenance de thèses’, 278; Brunschwig, ‘Un ennemi d’Aristote à Paris: Léon Brunschvicg’, 618. 37. Cf. MJ, ix; EPM, 83. 38. Cf. MJ, 1. On Lagneau’s life, cf. the ‘Notes biographiques’ in Jules Lagneau, Écrits (Paris: Sandre, 2006), 308–16; André Canivez, Jules Lagneau, professeur de philosophie: essai sur la condition du professeur de philosophie jusqu’à la fin du XIXe siècle, 2 vols (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1965). 39. Cf. Alain, ‘Souvenirs concernant Jules Lagneau’ (1925), in Les passions et la sagesse, 709–86. 40. Cf. the essays gathered in Jules Lagneau, Alain et l’école française de la perception (Paris: Institut Alain, 1995). 41. Cf. Gilbert Kahn, ‘Alain et Brunschvicg’, Bulletin de l’Association des Amis d’Alain 66 (1998): 15–25. 42. Cf. PC, II, 594–605, 751; EE, 184. 43. Jules Lagneau, Cours intégral 1886–87. Volume 1: histoire de la philosophie, ed. Emmanuel Blondel (Dijon: CRDP de Bourgogne, 1996), 24.

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44. We know Lagneau’s thought thanks to his disciples, who made available fragments and course transcripts. Cf. e.g., the Célèbres leçons et fragments, ed. Michel Alexandre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950). 45. Lagneau, Cours intégral 1886–87. Volume 1: histoire de la philosophie, 24. 46. Jules Lagneau, Cours intégral 1886–87. Volume 5: Cours sur le jugement, ed. Emmanuel Blondel (Dijon: CRDP de Bourgogne, 1999), 63. 47. OR, 208. 48. MJ, 4. 49. Ibid., 2. 50. Cf. Martin Kusch, Psychologism: A Case Study in the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1995). However, it must be noted that Jean-François Braunstein (see ‘L’invention française du “psychologisme” en 1828’) has tracked down a first debate around the notion of ‘psychologism’ in the dispute opposing, in the late 1820s and 1830s, the Cousinian philosophers Théodore Jouffroy (1796–1842) and JeanPhilibert Damiron (1794–1862) to the physiologist François Broussais (1772–1838), Auguste Comte and, for different reason, Pierre Leroux (1797–1871). 51. MJ, ix. 52. Cf. Léon Brunschvicg, ‘La philosophie dans l’enseignement supérieur à Paris’, Annales de l’Université de Paris 5 (1930): 215–23. Quoted in Chimisso, Writing the History of the Mind, 18. 53. Cf. MJ, 4–5. 54. Cf. ibid., 5. 55. Cf. ibid. 56. Cf. ibid., 10. 57. Cf. ibid., 8. 58. Cf. ibid., 9. 59. Cf. ibid., 12. 60. Ibid., 15. 61. Cf. ibid. 62. Cf. ibid., 25. 63. Cf. ibid., 26. There was also a further issue: in fact, the table of judgements was established from the perspective of the mind, as it concerned the modality of affirmation, whereas the table of the categories was formulated from the perspective of being (cf. ibid., 36). 64. MJ, 81. 65. Ibid., 27. 66. Cf. ibid., xi; PC, II, 695. 67. OR, 257. 68. Cf. MJ, 27. 69. Ibid., 32. The example is taken from Hermann Lotze (1817–1881). Cf. Logic in Three Books: of Thought, of Investigation, and of Knowledge, ed. Bernard Bosanquet, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, [1874] 1888), vol. 1, 68. 70. MJ, 40. 71. Cf. ibid., 38. 72. Cf. ibid., 39. 73. Cf. ibid., 69. 74. Ibid., 76. 75. Ibid., 91. 76. Ibid., 79.

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7 7. Cf. ibid., 81. 78. Cf. ibid., 82. 79. Cf. ibid., 83. 80. Ibid., 84–5. 81. Ibid., 85. 82. Cf. ibid., 86. 83. Cf. ibid., 87. 84. Cf. ibid., 88. 85. Ibid. Emphasis added. 86. Cf. ibid. 87. Cf. ibid., 89–90. 88. Cf. ibid., 90. 89. Cf. ibid., 90–1. 90. Ibid., 97. 91. Cf. ibid., 93–4. 92. Cf. ibid., 99. 93. Cf. ibid., 98. 94. Cf. Victor Brochard, De l’erreur (Paris: Alcan, 1879). Brochard tried to show that error is not incompatible with certitude, as thinkers from Plato to Leibniz believed. From a criticist point of view, in fact, which assumes that the human mind does not know things as they are in themselves, error appears as a possible outcome of cognition, if not a necessary step that has to be overcome in order to reach certainty. 95. Cf. MJ, 106. 96. Ibid., 110. 97. Cf. ibid., 171. 98. Cf. ibid., 118. 99. Ibid., 167. 100. Cf. ibid., 168 and 137–8. 101. Cf. ibid., 170. 102. There seems to be some kind of symmetry between the elements of the two sets. In some cases, this is quite evident: the correspondence between art and aesthetic judgement speaks for itself; mysticism is nothing but pure interiority. In other cases, such an analogy is not immediately clear: e.g., just like predication is a specification of the ‘cela est’, desire amounts to the orientation of the undetermined organic tendency; analogously, wisdom is a reflection upon one’s own deeds, just like experimental analysis already implies a preliminary elaboration and revision of settings, tools and criteria, as well as a prudent evaluation of the outcomes. Although the correspondence is not perfect, the underlying principle is that the mind is one and not divisible into heterogeneous faculties: the man who knows is the same man who acts. Of course, this does not entail any deduction, for in order to determine the modalities of practical judgements we are always bound to move from the study of action and go back to the underlying logic of judgement that lies at its basis (cf. ibid., 179). Again, it is reflective analysis that enables us to comprehend that the modalities of theoretical and practical judgements are the same and that this is because the intelligence is one. And again, to be sure, it is difficult not to notice the logical catch-22 that casts a shadow of artificiality upon Brunschvicg’s attempt to systematise the forms of judgement.

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103. The pages Brunschvicg devotes to morality are surely the most emphatic, rhetoric and preachy, conveying the values of a republican humanism resting on Spinozian and Kantian principles (the emancipation from passion, the observance of the moral imperative, the pursuit of the Ideal in spite of personal ambitions, the pre-eminence of spiritual joy over personal, individualistic happiness, etc., the celebration of the moral and social order guaranteed by state institutions). See IVE, chap. 3. 104. MJ, 229. 105. If the ‘spiritual life consists in judgements, then there exists no metaphysical dialectics, which means that it is not possible to unify the successive moments of intellectual activity by means of an interior law and then turn these successive moments into necessary moments’ (ibid., 238). 106. Cf. ibid., 234–5. 107. Cf. ibid., 236–7. 108. Cf. ibid., 282. 109. Cf. OR, 121. 110. PE, 97. 111. Cf. ibid., 137–9. 112. EH, 571. 113. Cf. MJ, 171–2. 114. Cf. ibid. 115. Ibid., 171. 116. Ibid., 153. 117. Ibid., 91. Emphasis added. 118. Ibid., 2. 119. Ibid., 172. 120. IVE, 125. 121. ‘In the face of the world, the philosopher feels from time to time, as for example Kant did, idealist and realist; man is both at the same time’ (MJ, 176). 122. Cf. ibid. 123. EH, 442. 124. VFC, 106. 125. EH, 607. 126. Ibid. 127. Cf. e.g. ibid., 485. 128. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, 220. 129. Cf. Lefèvre, ‘Une heure avec Léon Brunschvicg’, 4. 130. Cf. ‘Témoignage de M. Pierre Lachièze-Rey’, Les Études philosophiques 20 (1945): 24.

6 History: The philosopher’s laboratory 1. AR, 136: ‘By dint of talking about progress, man comes to believe that it is a thing or a force, and thereby he renews original sin. / Always the same claim to immediately pluck the fruits of the tree of knowledge, when it can only come from us, they must ripen within us.’ 2. Cf. MJ, 101–2. 3. Cf. ibid., 99 and 101–2.

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4 . VFC, 225. 5. OR, 40. 6. Cf. MJ, 41. 7. PC, I, xi. 8. NL, ix. 9. Ibid., x. 10. Cf. PC, I, xi. 11. VFC, 225. 12. Paul Valéry, ‘The European’ (1922), in Collected Works. Vol. 10: History and Politics, ed. Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962), 309. 13. Ibid., 310. 14. Cf. OR, 288. 15. Cf. ibid., 289. 16. Cf. Dominique Parodi, La philosophie contemporaine en France: essai de classification des doctrines (Paris: Alcan, 1920), 430. On Hamelin, see ibid., 432–51. 17. Jacques Maritain, La philosophie bergsonienne, 2nd edn (Paris: Marcel Rivière, [1914] 1930), lxxiv. 18. Étienne Gilson, ‘Concerning Christian Philosophy: The Distinctiveness of the Philosophical Order’, in Philosophy and History, ed. Raymond Klibansky (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), 70. Quoted in Chimisso, Writing the History of the Mind, 72. 19. René Berthelot, ‘Sur quelques philosophes des sciences dans la France contemporaine’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 37, no. 2 (1930), 191. 20. Cf. Chimisso, Writing the History of the Mind, 16–17: e.g., the 1920 reform established that one of the four certificats needed for a licence had to be in the history of philosophy. The history of philosophy was also compulsory for teaching degrees (licences d’enseignements), which were required in order to gain the agrégation and teaching posts in secondary education. Consistently, one of the three written essays of the agrégation examination was in the history of philosophy. 2 1. Cf. ibid., 24. 22. Cf. ibid., chap. 2. 23. Ibid., 49. 24. EH, xiii. 25. Cf. Léon Brunschvicg, ‘Letter to Sarton (2 February 1923)’. Quoted in Chimisso, Writing the History of the Mind, 73. 26. For a comparative analysis of the various souls of the Centre de synthèse, see ibid., chaps 4–5. On Berr, see also Agnès Biard, Dominique Bourel and Eric Brian, eds, Henri Berr et la culture du XXe siècle: histoire, science et philosophie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997) . On Metzger, see also Cristina Chimisso, Hélène Metzger: Historian and Historiographer of the Sciences (London: Routledge, 2019). On Koyré, see Gérard Jorland, La science dans la philosophie: les recherches épistémologiques d’Alexandre Koyré (Paris: Gallimard, 1981). 27. Chimisso, Writing the History of the Mind, 63. 28. Ibid., 75. 29. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A836/B864, 693 [Ak. III, 540]. On this point and on Kant’s attempts to conceive of a philosophical historiography, see Giuseppe Micheli, ‘Philosophy and Historiography: The Kantian Turning-Point’, in Models of the History

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of Philosophy. Vol. III: The Second Enlightenment and the Kantian Age, trans. Hilary Siddons, ed. Gregorio Piaia and Giovanni Santinello, in association with Francesca D’Alberto and Iva Manova (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 697–768, in particular 754–64. 30. Schrift, Twentieth-Century French Philosophy, 11. Berthelot, one of the few benevolent readers of Hegel at the turn of the century, claimed that Brunschvicg’s ‘philosophy of science’ led ‘unwillingly’, ‘by another road’, to the same problems of Hegelianism (‘Sur quelques philosophes des sciences dans la France contemporaine’, 192). 31. Georg W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Vol. 1, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, [1833–6; 1840–4] 1892), 5. 32. Ibid., 27. 33. Ibid., 29. 34. Ibid., 30. 35. Cf. ibid., 20–3. 36. Cf. Christophe Bouton, ‘From Biological Time to Historical Time: The Category of “Development” in the Historical Thought of Herder, Kant, Hegel and Marx’, in Biological Time, Historical Time: Transfers and Transformations in 19th Century Literature, ed. Niklas Bender and Gisèle Séginger (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 61–76. 37. Cf. e.g., PC, I, xi. 38. Cf. Chimisso, Writing the History of the Mind, 38–43. 39. Cf. OR, 212–13. 40. On Zeller, see Gerald Hartung, ed., Eduard Zeller: Philosophie und Wissenschaftsgeschicte im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010). 41. See Eduard Zeller, La philosophie des Grecs considérée dans son développement historique, trans. Émile Boutroux, 3 vols (Paris: Hachette, [1844–52] 1877–84). 42. See Frederick C. Beiser, The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chap. 6. 43. Cf. Émile Boutroux, ‘Édouard Zeller et sa théorie de l’histoire de la philosophie’ (1877), in Études d’histoire de la philosophie allemande (Paris: Vrin, 1926), 20. 44. Eduard Zeller, The History of Greek Philosophy from the Earliest Period to the Time of Socrates, trans. Sarah F. Alleyne (London: Longmans, Green, [1844–52] 1881), vol. 1, 11. 45. Cf. Boutroux, ‘Édouard Zeller et sa théorie de l’histoire de la philosophie’, 29. Cf. OR, 224–7. 46. For deeper analyses, see Fabien Capeillères, ‘Uses of German Philosophy of History by French Neo-Kantianism: Émile Boutroux’s Reading of Zeller in its Historical and Conceptual Context’, in Der Begriff der Geschichte im Marburger und südwestdeutschen Neukantianismus. Studien und Materialien zum Neukantianismus, ed. Christian Krijnen and Marc de Launey (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013), 175–90. 47. Cf. OR, 214–15. 48. Ibid., 216. Cf. Émile Boutroux, ‘L’histoire de la philosophie’, in Études d’histoire de la philosophie (Paris: Alcan, 1897), 1–9. 49. Boutroux, The Contingency of the Laws of Nature, 166. Cf. OR, 219 and EE, 8. 50. Cf. VFC, 235. 51. PC, I, xiii. 52. SR, 25. 53. VFC, 109. 54. PC, II, 669. 55. VFC, 111. 56. Boutroux, The Contingency of the Laws of Nature, 140.

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57. VFC, 110. 58. Brunschvicg celebrated Condorcet’s vision of history. While being well aware of the limits of the latter’s optimism, and while criticising his sociological emphasis on ‘humanity in extension’ for neglecting the role of consciousness (‘humanity in intension’), he praised his reliance on the advancements of scientific knowledge for the analysis of progress. Cf. PC, II, 477–9 and 547. 59. OR, 117. 60. RR, 145. 61. OR, 116. 62. Cf. PC, II, 667–8; AI, 10–1. 63. Cf. EH, xi–xii. 64. Ibid., xii. 65. Cf. NL, 119–20. 66. EPM, x. 67. Cf. OR, 161. 68. Cf. ibid., 129. 69. SR, 45. As Bréhier would write in introducing the first issue of the Revue d’histoire de la philosophie (1927): ‘History … is like a substitute for the experimental method in philosophy’ (quoted in Chimisso, Gaston Bachelard, 132). 70. VFC, 22. 71. OR, 117. 72. PC, I, xii. 73. Cf. e.g., the introduction to PC. 74. Cf. Martial Gueroult, Dianoématique. Livre 1: Histoire de l’histoire de la philosophie. Vol. 3: En France, de Condorcet à nos jours (Paris: Aubier, 1988), 875–937. Gueroult acknowledges that in Hegel and Brunschvicg the relationship between history and philosophy was framed from two opposite perspectives. In Hegel, Gueroult claims, it is the system of philosophy, formulated in the ether of the concept, that clarifies history, whereas in Brunschvicg philosophy is submitted to the test of history (cf. ibid., 913). However, although they start from opposite assumptions, both Hegel and Brunschvicg end up subjecting the history of philosophy to a violent ‘esprit d’orientation’, where everything is read retrospectively in light of the advent of their own doctrine (cf. ibid., 924). By turning history into the ‘novel’ of a ‘Manichean’ struggle between primitive and modern mentalities (cf. ibid., 928–9), Brunschvicg neglects to ‘historicise’ his own position and criteria (cf. ibid., 925). We may draw an implicit conclusion, namely that, in Gueroult’s view, Brunschvicg’s attitude towards the history of philosophy is still reminiscent of the old Cousinian eclecticism. 75. Cf. Tryggvi Ö. Úlfsson, ‘Entre fatalisme et chaos: l’événement dans la philosophie de Léon Brunschvicg’, Methodos. Savoirs et textes 17 (2017), http://journals.openedition. org/methodos/4741 (accessed 14 March 2020). 76. Gualandi, La rupture et l’événement, 239. 77. VFC, 29. The geological metaphor is also exploited by Brunschvicg in EH, viii–ix. 78. Referring to Lévy-Bruhl and Brunschvicg, Anastasios Brenner wrote that ‘The former paved the way for the latter’, complementing in a decisive manner Boutroux’s historical teachings (‘Reflections on Chimisso: French Philosophy of Science and the Historical Method’, in The Present Situation in the Philosophy of Science, 59). Indeed, Brenner argued, ‘There are many connections between the two thinkers; they were associated in many networks, and together they represent a strong line of development’ (ibid., 60). Lévy-Bruhl’s book on Primitive Mentality

268

79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97. 98.

Notes (1922) stirred controversy within the French philosophical community, in that it questioned the Cartesian assumption of a universal mind. Despite Brunschvicg’s support, many others were vocal about their disagreement. See, e.g., the debate that took place in February 1923 at the Société française de philosophie, an account of which can be found in Chimisso, Gaston Bachelard, 155–8 (but see more generally chap. 6). Lest it be wrongly presumed that Lévy-Bruhl was an odd right-wing outsider, note that he was a fervent dreyfusard and a committed socialist, besides being a powerful academic and the editor of the Revue philosophique. On LévyBruhl, see Frédéric Keck, Lévy-Bruhl: entre philosophie et anthropologie (Paris: CNR Éditions, 2008). Cf. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, La Mentalité Primitive: The Herbert Spencer Lecture Delivered at Oxford, 29 May 1931 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1931), 7. For a brief genesis of the notion, see Keck, Lévy-Bruhl, chap. 2. The concept of ‘mentality’ was heavily exploited in the debates concerning the Dreyfus Affair and was even mentioned as a ‘new word’ in Proust’s Recherche (cf. In Search of Lost Time, Volume 3: The Guermantes Way, ed. William C. Carter [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018], 257). I thank an anonymous reviewer who brought this to my attention. PC, I, xvi. Cf. MJ, 191 and 229. In VFC, 10, Brunschvicg said that, despite having learned much from Renouvier’s book, he understood primarily what kind of errors had to be avoided. NL, vii. ‘Belly’ and ‘knot’ are terms used to describe the dynamics of standing waves. For a concise but exhaustive mapping of the debates on neo-Thomism and the notion of ‘Christian philosophy’, see Gregory B. Sadler, ‘The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates’, Acta Philosophica 21, no. 2 (2012): 393–406. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, History of Modern Philosophy in France (Chicago: Open Court, 1899), 470. Ibid., 477. Cf. ibid., 481. VFC, 30. Cf. ibid., 33. Cf. ibid., 53. In his view, after the Cartesian revolution, modern philosophy acknowledged that a radical nominalism was the precondition of an authentic rationalism. Ibid., 35. Cf. ibid., 35–6; and also RR, 9. Ibid., 47. Brunschvicg discussed in particular Étienne Gilson, Thomism: The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Laurence K. Shook and Armand Maurer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, [1922] 2002), chap. 7. RR, 11. Far from being an introduction to the thought of Brunschvicg, Jourdain Messaut’s La philosophie de Léon Brunschvicg (Paris: Vrin, 1938) is instead a critique of his positions from a Thomist perspective, probably written as a reply to VFC. See Bentivegna, Per una rilettura di Léon Brunschvicg, 25–8. VFC, 52. Ibid., 86. See Raymond Ruyer, Esquisse d’une philosophie de la structure (Paris: Alcan, 1930), 288.

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99. See Julien Benda, Du style d’idées: réflexions sur la pensée, sa nature, ses réalisations, sa valeur morale (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 64; and De quelques constantes de l’esprit humain. Critique du mobilisme contemporain: Bergson, Brunschvicg, Boutroux, Le Roy, Bachelard, Rougier (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), 70. 100. See Jean Piaget, Introduction à l’épistémologie génétique. Vol. 2: La pensée physique, 2nd edn (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, [1950] 1974), 313–14. 101. Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, ed. Dominique Séglard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, [1995] 2003), 33–5. 102. Mikel Dufrenne, The Notion of A Priori, trans. Edward S. Casey (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, [1959] 2009), 203. 103. Cf. Raymond Aron, Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay On the Limits of Historical Objectivity, trans. George J. Irwin (London: Widenfeld and Nicolson, [1938] 1961), 34. See also History and the Dialectic of Violence: An Analysis of Sartre’s Critique de la Raison Dialectique, trans. Barry Cooper (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, [1973] 1975), 177. 104. See Pierre Aubenque, Faut-il déconstruire la métaphysique? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009), 44. 105. Vincent Descombes, Puzzling Identities, trans. Stephen A. Schwartz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [2013] 2016), 141. 106. EH, 519–20. Emphasis added. In 1936, Brunschvicg returned on the same logic: The geologist studies the history of the earth. If he cares about the history of geology, it is indirectly and only to avoid slipping back into the illusions and the errors of the past. On the contrary, however, the history of geology will form an integral part of the knowledge of the human mind, which, as the knowledge of life in general, is inseparable from the process of its evolution. (PVP, 3) 1 07. EH, 519. 108. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 29. 109. PC, II, 668–9. 110. Judith E. Schlanger, Penser la bouche pleine (Paris: Mouton, 1975), 36. 111. Quoted in Gabriel Séailles, La philosophie de Lachelier (Paris: Alcan, 1920), 164–5, and reprised in EH, 532–3. 112. Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 35. 113. Georges Canguilhem, ‘La problématique de la philosophie de l’histoire au début des années 1930’, in Raymond Aron, la philosophie de l’histoire et les sciences sociales, ed. Jean-Claude Chamboredon (Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2005), 20.

7 Lessons of science 1. AR, 61: ‘Scientists have made science advance; then science made scientists advance. A warning to the philosophers. / And I did my best as a warned philosopher.’ 2. Paul Valéry, ‘The Outlook for Intelligence’ (1934), in The Outlook for Intelligence, ed. Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 132–3. 3. Ibid., 134–5.

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4. Ibid., 135. 5. Cf. ‘Discours de M. Berthelot’ (1901), in Marcellin Berthelot, Cinquantenaire scientifique, 1851–1901 (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1902), 77. 6. Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind: A Contribution to a Psychoanalysis of Objective Knowledge, ed. Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester: Clinamen, [1938] 2002), 34. 7. Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, ed. Mélanie Frappier and David J. Stump (London: Bloomsbury, [1902] 2018), 163. 8. Quoted in EPM, 562. 9. SR, 144. Cf. also AI, 142: ‘The truth of the universe introduces us to the truth of the mind’. 10. Cf. Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, I, 32. Quoted in Schmaus, ‘Comte’s General Philosophy of Science’, 33. 11. IVE, 148. 12. Cf. ibid., 153. 13. Gualandi, La rupture et l’événement, 245. 14. Cf. Bachelard, ‘La philosophie scientifique de Léon Brunschvicg’ (1945), in L’engagement rationaliste (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 169–70. 15. Cf. PE, 98. 16. SR, 58. Emphasis added. 17. Usually associated with the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle, the notion of ‘scientific philosophy’ was widespread also in France, dating back to Renan, Comte and Bernard. At the turn of the century, it referred in general to the idea that science and philosophy are two sides of the same intellectual enterprise and thus that philosophy has to think through scientific inquiry. A history of this notion is still lacking. For a brief but effective overview, see Anastasios Brenner, ‘From Scientific Philosophy to Absolute Positivism: Abel Rey and the Vienna Circle’, Philosophia Scientiæ 22–3 (2018): 77–95. This did not prevent Brunschvicg from occasionally employing the term ‘philosophy of science’ in its common meaning (cf. EE, 164). 18. For chronological reasons, Brunschvicg never mentioned the works of Luitzen E. J. Brouwer (1881–1966) as a champion of intuitionism. Although Brouwer had already made important contributions to modern topology and developed a first critique of the Principle of the Excluded Middle, the first occurrence of the word ‘intuitionism’ in his writings dates to 1911, one year before the Étapes. More extensive accounts of his research and a full systematisation of the intuitionistic perspective is thus posterior to Brunschvicg’s work. On Brouwer, see Dirk van Dalen, L.E.J. Brouwer: Topologist, Intuitionist, Philosopher. How Mathematics Is Rooted in Life (London: Springer, 2013). Cavaillès hinted at a certain philosophical proximity between Brunschvicg and Brouwer in ‘On Logic and the Theory of Science’ (1947) , trans. Theodore J. Kisiel, in Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences, ed. Joseph K. Kockelman and Theodore J. Kisiel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 367. 19. EPM, 548. 20. Ibid., 359–60. 21. On this point, see Massimo Ferrari, ‘La filosofia matematica di Léon Brunschvicg’, in La filosofia e la sua storia. Studi in onore di Gregorio Piaia, ed. Mario Longo and Giuseppe Micheli (Padova: Cleup, 2017), vol. 2, 191–211. 22. Cf. SR, 85.

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23. Cf. Jules Tannery, Leçons d’arithmétique théorique et pratique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1894). 24. Cf. SR, 72. 25. EPM, 561. 26. A synthetic but extremely clear overview can be found in Giuseppe Bentivegna, ‘L’intuizionismo nella storia della filosofia della matematica di Léon Brunschvicg’, in Léon Brunschvicg, L’intelligenza matematica e la verità. La nozione moderna di intuizione (Acireale: Bonanno, 2016), 7–37. 27. The following pages inevitably reflect Brunschvicg’s partial point of view upon the history of logic, geometry and mathematics. 28. Cf. EPM, 304–10. 29. Cf. ibid., 325–40. For a brief overview, see Ivor Grattan-Guinness, The Search for Mathematical Roots, 1870–1940: Logics, Set Theories and the Foundations of Mathematics from Cantor through Russell to Gödel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 63–74. 30. Cf. ibid., 342. 31. Cf. ibid., 352. 32. Cf. ibid., 346–8. See also RP, 23–4. 33. Cf. EPM, 359. 34. Cf. ibid., 361–2. 35. Brunschvicg explained Renouvier’s mentality on the basis of the atomism that was widespread in early-nineteenth-century chemistry, for example, in John Dalton (1766–1844). Cf. ibid., 364. 36. Cf. Hermann von Helmholtz, Counting and Measuring, ed. Harold T. Davis (New York: Van Nostrand, [1887] 1930). On this aspect of Helmholtz’s work, see Francesca Biagioli, Space, Number, and Geometry from Helmholtz to Cassirer (Cham: Springer, 2016), 81–113. 37. EPM, 367. 38. Cf. ibid., 368. 39. Of Frege, see the Begriffsschrift of 1879, translated in Conceptual Notation and Related Articles, ed. Terrell W. Bynum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); and Basic Laws of Arithmetic, Derived Using Concept-Script, ed. Philip A. Ebert, Marcus Rossberg and Crispin Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1893–1903] 2016). See Giuseppe Peano, Formulario Mathematico, ed. Ugo Cassina (Roma: Cremonese, [1895; 5th edn 1908] 1960). 40. Continuity among these thinkers is emphasised by Corrado Mangione and Silvio Bozzi, Storia della logica. Da Boole ai nostri giorni (Milano: Garzanti, 1993), 116–7. However, Mangione and Bozzi underscore that it is only with Frege, Russell and Whitehead that logic qua analysis of the whole of mathematical language is connected more radically to the issue of the foundation of mathematics (cf. ibid., 193–5). Therefore, Brunchvicg’s all too linear narrative should be nuanced. 41. Cf. EPM, 78. 42. Cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Bviii, 106 [Ak, III, 8]. 43. Cf. EPM, 371. 44. Cf. ibid., 390. 45. See Louis Couturat, Les principes des mathématiques, avec un appendice sur la Philosophie des mathématiques de Kant (Hildesheim: Olms, [1905] 1979). On the relationship between Couturat and Russell, see Bertrand Russell, Correspondance sur

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la philosophie, la logique et la politique avec Louis Couturat: 1897–1913, ed. AnneFrançoise Schmid (Paris: Kimé, 2001). 46. For an excellent contextualisation and exposition of Russell’s thought, see GrattanGuinness, The Search for Mathematical Roots, chap. 6. See chap. 7 for Russell’s work with Whitehead. 47. Cf. Bertrand Russell, Principles of Mathematics (London: Routledge, [1903] 2010), chap. 10. 48. Cf. ibid., 534–40. 49. Ibid., 105. 50. Cf. EPM, 421–4. 51. Ibid., 422. 52. Frege, ‘Afterword’ (1903), in Basic Laws of Arithmetic, 253. 53. MJ, x. 54. EPM, 391. 55. Cf. Russell, Principles of Mathematics, §353, 378–9. See also chap. 58 for Russell’s take on absolute motion and space, which he defended. For a critique of this position, see EPM, 412–19. 56. The quarrel lasted through various phases from 1898 to 1907. See Anastasios Brenner, ‘La réception du logicisme en France en réaction à la controverse Poincaré-Russell’, Revue d’histoire des sciences 67, no. 2 (2014): 231–55; Philippe Nabonnand, ‘La polémique entre Poincaré et Russell au sujet du statut des axiomes de la géométrie’, Revue d’histoire des mathématiques 6 (2000): 219–69. 57. Bertrand Russell, ‘The Philosophical Importance of Mathematical Logic’ (1911), in Collected Papers. Vol. 6: Logical and Philosophical Papers, 1909–13, ed. John G. Slater and Bernd Frohmann (London: Routledge, 1992), 40. 58. Cf. Bertrand Russell, ‘Analytic Realism’ (1911), in ibid., 133. 59. Namely John E. McTaggart (1866–1925) and Francis H. Bradley (1846–1924). On the British idealists, see William J. Mander, British Idealism: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). On Russell’s early allegiance to this tradition, see Peter Hylton, Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). 60. Cf. Russell, ‘Analytic Realism’, 138. 61. Ibid., 133. 62. Ibid., 136. 63. Ibid., 83. 64. Cf. ibid., 396–7. 65. Cf. Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Leibniz (London: Routledge, [1900] 1992). 66. EPM, 210. 67. Brunschvicg tried to defend Leibniz from Russell’s and Couturat’s logicist interpretation in ibid., 201–2. Leibniz’s infinitesimal analysis, he claimed, was not a purely analytical process but rather a synthetic process in the Kantian sense. Brunschvicg insisted in fact on Leibniz’s rupture with Aristotelian logic, seeing in his mathematical philosophy a celebration of the dynamism of the intelligence. In this, he rather sided with Cassirer’s interpretation in Leibniz’ System in Seinen Wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen (1902). See Gregory B. Moynahan, Ernst Cassirer and the Critical Science of Germany, 1899–1912 (London: Anthem, 2013), 85–120. Of course Brunschvicg also detected dogmatic elements in Leibniz’s doctrine, like a sort of realist metaphysics, evident in the notion of the substantiality of the monads, contradicting the ‘logic of the ideal’ (cf. EPM, chap. 11).

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68. Ibid., 420. 69. Ibid., 410. 70. Cf. Russell, Principles of Mathematics, §71, 70–3. 71. Cf. EPM, 403–5. 72. Cf. EH, 459. 73. Cf. EPM, 408. 74. Cf. ibid., 426. 75. Cf. ibid., 431–6. 76. Cf. ibid., 437. 77. Cf. ibid., 443. 78. Cf. ibid., 447. 79. Cf. ibid., 567. 80. Cf. ibid., 457. 81. Ibid., 461. 82. Cf. ibid., 429. 83. Cf. ibid., 448 and 525–6. See also SR, 98–9. 84. Cf. EPM, 455. 85. Cf. ibid., 457. 86. On Klein, see Renate Tobies, Felix Klein: Visionen für Mathematik, Anwendungen und Unterricht (Berlin: Springer Spektrum, 2019) and Hans-Georg Weigand, William McCallum, Marta Menghini, Michael Neubrand and Gert Schubring, eds, The Legacy of Felix Klein (Cham: Springer, 2019). 87. Cf. ibid., 450–1. 88. Cf. ibid., 452. 89. Cf. ibid., 458–9. 90. Cf. ibid., 460. As has been observed, Brunschvicg developed a form of intuitionist constructivism that was closer to the Kantian source than, for example, to the version of Brouwer (cf. Yvon Gauthier, ‘La philosophie des mathématiques’, in Doctrines et concepts, 1937–1987. Rétrospective et prospective: cinquante ans de philosophie de langue française, ed. André Robinet [Paris: Vrin, 1988], 217). 91. Cf. EPM, 463. 92. Ibid., 473. 93. This unambiguously disproves Badiou’s claim that ‘In Brunschvicg’s work, we find a philosophy of the mathematically based concept: the possibility of a philosophical formalism of thought and of the symbolic, which likewise continues throughout the century, most specifically in Lévi-Strauss, Althusser and Lacan’ (Badiou, ‘The Adventure of French Philosophy’, liii). 94. EPM, 476. 95. Ibid., 476. 96. Cf. ibid., 479. 97. Ibid., 480. 98. Cf. ibid., 493. 99. Cf. ibid., 495. 100. Cf. ibid., 470. 101. Ibid., 492. Cf. also MJ, 149: ‘[in mathematics] there are no concepts, only judgements’. 102. Cf. SR, 23. 103. EPM, 471. See also SR, 119–21. 104. Cf. EPM, 550–61.

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1 05. Cf. ibid., 561. 106. MJ, 154. 107. Russell, Principles of Mathematics, §149, 158. 108. Cf. ibid., chaps. 49 and 52, where Russell addressed directly Kant’s theory of space, which would be disproved by ‘the modern realisation of Leibniz’s universal characteristic’ (ibid., 467). 109. The personal and theoretical relationships between Brunschvicg and Cassirer are a chapter that is yet to be written. We know that they were friends and that they read each other. Brunschvicg even contributed to a Festschrift for Cassirer with a text entitled ‘History and Philosophy’, in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. Raymond Klibansky and Herbert J. Paton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), 27–34, published in French (‘Histoire and philosophie’) after his death on the Annales de l’Université de Paris 23, no. 2 (1953): 203–11. Brunschvicg relied on the first two volumes of Cassirer’s Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit (1906–7; the third published in 1920 and the last posthumously in English in 1950) while writing the historical chapters of EPM. See Fedi, Kant, une passion française, 652; Massimo Ferrari, ‘Koyré, Cassirer and the History of Science’, in Hypotheses and Perspectives in the History and Philosophy of Science. Homage to Alexandre Koyré, 1892–1964, ed. Raffaele Pisano, Joseph Agassi and Daria Drozdova (Cham: Springer, 2018), 171. 110. Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History Since Hegel, trans. William H. Woglom and Charles W. Hendel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950), 22. 111. Ibid., 24. 112. Cf. ibid., 25. 113. Cf. ibid., 30. See also Ernst Cassirer, ‘Substance and Function’ (1910), in Substance and Function, and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, trans. William C. and Marie C. Swabey (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003), 88–91; Felix Klein, ‘A Comparative Review of Recent Researches in Geometry’ (1872), trans. Mellen W. Haskell, Bulletin of the New York Mathematical Society 2 (1892–3): 215–49. For the German debates that formed the background of Cassirer’s ideas, see Biagioli, Space, Number, and Geometry from Helmholtz to Cassirer. 114. Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge, 35. 115. Cf. EPM, 559. 116. See Cassirer, ‘Substance and Function’, chap. 3. 117. On Poincaré, see Jeremy Gray, Henri Poincaré: A Scientific Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013) and Ferdinand Verhulst, Henri Poincaré: Impatient Genius (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012). On his relation with philosophy, see Anne-Françoise Schmid, Henri Poincaré: les sciences et la philosophie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001). 118. Cf. SR, 153–82. 119. Cf. Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, 80. 120. Ibid., 99. 121. On Poincaré and Kant, see Massimo Ferrari, ‘Henri Poincaré, il kantismo e l’a priori matematico’, Discipline filosofiche 16, no. 2 (2006): 137–54. 122. Cf. SR, 165–6. 123. Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, 68. 124. SR, 173.

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125. Henri Poincaré, ‘The Value of Science’ (1905), in The Foundations of Science, trans. George B. Halsted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 238. 126. Ibid., 276. 127. Cf. Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, chap. 4. 128. EPM, 444. 129. Cf. ibid., 522–4. 130. Cf. ibid., 502. 131. Cf. ibid., 514. 132. Cf. Léon Brunschvicg, ‘Le temps et la causalité’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 29, no. 1 (1922), 1–33. 133. MJ, 174. 134. Cf. Piaget, ‘Étude critique de L’expérience humaine et la causalité physique de Léon Brunschvicg’, 587. 135. Cf. EH, 435. 136. Cf. ibid., ix. 137. Cf. ibid., x. 138. Ibid., 351. 139. Cf. ibid., 352. 140. Cf. ibid., 370. 141. Cf. ibid., 377. 142. Cf. James Ladyman and Don Ross, with David Spurrett and John Collier, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Ladyman’s ‘structural realism’ is indeed partially influenced by Cassirer. 143. Cf. EH, 407. 144. Cf. Ernst Cassirer, ‘Einstein’s Theory of Relativity Considered from the Epistemological Standpoint’ (1921), in Substance and Function, and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, 351–5. Cassirer’s text is referred to only once in EH, 413. 145. Cassirer, ‘Einstein’s Theory of Relativity Considered from the Epistemological Standpoint’, 379. 146. Cf. HMI, 26–7. In EH, 605, Brunschvicg characterised his notion of experience as follows: There is a second type of experience or, if one prefers, a second degree of experience, no longer circumscribed, but inscribed, in the course of thought. This experience appears within the intellectual sphere itself; during the elaboration of abstract relationships, it translates, at unpredictable points, into an unexpected resistance of the matter on which the geometer, the analyst, the algebraist works, in hiatuses and impossibilities, all things that are necessarily of a negative order, which cannot transpose themselves in terms of an object, which manifest their character as irreducible facts, what we have called their objectivity. In RR, 194–5, he opposed the couple ‘refined experience’/‘refined reason’ to the couple ‘pure experience’/‘pure reason’. 147. EH, 398. 148. Ibid., 399. 149. Cf. ibid., 404–5. 150. Ibid., 420–1. As Cassirer analogously wrote, ‘From this mood of “ignorabimus”, into which physics was sinking more and more, only a theory which grasped the problem at its root could free it; and, instead of modifying the previous solutions, transformed

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fundamentally the formulation of the question’ (Cassirer, ‘Einstein’s Theory of Relativity’, 408). 151. Alain, ‘Les valeurs Einstein cotées en bourse (13 juin 1923)’, in Vigiles de l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), 156–9. 152. On Langevin in general, see Martha-Cécilia Bustamante and Catherine Kounelis, eds, La physique de Paul Langevin: un savoir partagé (Paris: Bibliothèque de l’ESPCI, 2005); Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Langevin (1872–1946): science et vigilance (Paris: Belin, 1987). On the twin paradox, see Paul Langevin, Le paradoxe des jumeaux: deux conférences sur la rélativité, ed. Élie During (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, [1911] 2016). 153. Cf. ‘La théorie de la relativité’ (6 April 1922), Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie 22, no. 3 (1922), http://www.sofrphilo.fr/activites-scientifiques-de-la-sfp/ conferences/grandes-conferences-en-telechargement/ (accessed 5 June 2020), 349. 154. That Einstein was a pacifist and had renounced his German citizenship surely helped. The historical, scientific and philosophical importance of his trip to Paris has been widely documented. See Antoine Compagnon and Céline Surprenant, eds, Einstein au Collège de France (Paris: Collège de France, 2020), https://books. openedition.org/cdf/9367 (accessed 3 June 2020); Vincent Borella, L’introduction de la relativité en France, 1905–1922 (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2000); Michel Biezunski, Einstein à Paris: le temps n’est plus (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1991); Michel Paty, ‘Einstein et la philosophie en France: à propos du séjour du 1922’, Cahiers Fundamenta Scientiae 93 (1979): 23–41. 155. Jean Perrin, ‘Le mouvement brownien’, conference (27 January 1910) and discussion (3 March 1910); Paul Langevin, ‘Le temps, l’espace et la causalité dans la physique moderne’ (19 October 1911). These sessions, to which Brunschvicg attended, are available online on the website of the Société française de philosophie, http://www. sofrphilo.fr/activites-scientifiques-de-la-sfp/conferences/grandes-conferences-entelechargement/ (accessed 5 June 2020). 156. Einstein’s popular text Über die spezielle und die allgemeine Relativitätstheorie (1916) had been translated only the year before, in 1921. 157. See Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 158. See Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, ed. Robin Durie (Manchester, CT: Clinamen Press, [1922] 1999). 159. See ‘La théorie de la relativité’, 364. 160. Cf. Paul Langevin, ‘Le temps, l’espace et la causalité’, 335–44. 161. ‘La théorie de la relativité’, 358. 162. Ibid. 163. Ibid., 359. 164. See note 60 to Chapter 3. 165. As Alexandre Koyré put it in an undated manuscript of the 1930s, ‘Meyerson insists on the reality of the irrational, which is impenetrable and opaque to thought to the degree that it is foreign to it; Brunschvicg, by contrast, strives to show that this opacity and impenetrability to reason belongs to the products of reason themselves’ (‘Sur la pensée de Brunschvicg’, EHESS, Centre A. Koyré, Fonds Koyré, ‘Conférences et textes divers’ fold, 3–4; quoted in Stefanos Geroulanos, Transparency in Post-War France: A Critical History of the Present [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017], 67). For a brief biography, see Bernadette

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Bensaude-Vincent and Eva Telkes-Klein, ‘Introduction’, in Émile Meyerson, Lettres françaises, ed. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Eva Telkes-Klein (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2009), 4–23. For in-depth accounts of his thought, see the three books by Frédéric Fruteau de Laclos, Émile Meyerson (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2014); Le cheminement de la pensée selon Émile Meyerson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009); L’épistémologie d’Émile Meyerson: une anthropologie de la connaissance (Paris: Vrin, 2009). Despite their theoretical differences, Brunschvicg and Meyerson were personally very close, having in common also the Jewish origins. For instance, when the latter was ill, Brunschvicg visited him every week. I owe this anecdote to an anonymous reviewer. 166. See Émile Meyerson, Identity and Reality, trans. Kate Loewenberg (London: Allen & Unwin, [1908] 1930). 167. See Émile Meyerson, Explanation in the Sciences, trans. Mary-Alice and David A. Sipfle (Dordrecht: Springer, [1921] 1991). 168. Meyerson, Lettres françaises, 89–90. This critique was repeated also in EH, 358– 62; EE, 179–80; and SR, 109. Brunschvicg’s most important text on Meyerson, however, is ‘La philosophie d’Émile Meyerson’, in SR, 183–207. What Meyerson and Brunschvicg had in common was the idea of a struggle between the mind and reality, as Dominique Parodi outlined (cf. OR, 289). A critical and detailed comparison of the two epistemologies is still lacking. 169. See Ndjate-Lotanga Wetshingolo, La nature de la connaissance scientifique: l’épistémologie meyersonienne face à la critique de Gaston Bachelard (Berne: Peter Lang, 1996). Paradoxically, Meyerson is much more known than Brunschvicg in the Anglophone world, where most of his oeuvre is available in translation. Thomas Ryckman’s beautiful book, The Reign of Relativity: Philosophy in Physics, 1915–1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), discusses Meyerson quite at length (236–42) but completely neglects Brunschvicg. It was Koyré that drew attention on Meyerson when he fled from France to the United States. In particular, Meyerson’s importance was noticed by Quine, Popper and Kuhn. Cf. Steve Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 392–4. 170. See Émile Meyerson, The Relativistic Deduction: Epistemological Implications of the Theory of Relativity, trans. David A. and Mary-Alice Sipfle (Dordrecht: Reidel, [1925] 1985). Einstein’s review and the Einstein–Meyerson exchange is translated in ibid., 252–6 and 257–62 respectively. 171. Cf. ibid., 143–7. 172. Cf. Fruteau de Laclos, L’épistémologie d’Émile Meyerson, 120. 173. Sandra Laugier, ‘Science and Realism: The Legacy of Duhem and Meyerson’, in French Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Contemporary Research in France, ed. Anastasios Brenner and Jean Gayon (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 102. 174. Meyerson, The Relativistic Deduction, 55. 175. Cf. EH, 453. 176. Brunschvicg referred not only to Poincaré but also to the Catholic historian of science Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) (cf. ibid., 451; PC, II, 659; SR, 67–8). Duhem was not actually a conventionalist strictly speaking, yet he was deeply concerned, also for religious reasons, with the problem of the actual objective correspondence of scientific formalisation to natural processes. Accordingly, Brenner has argued for a certain similarity between Poincaré and Duhem in his book Les origines françaises de la philosophie des sciences (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003). In his

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acclaimed 1906 book on The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, Duhem held that physical laws are just meant to ‘save the phenomena’, that is, not to explain things, but rather to represent them, to fix experimental observations. Hence, he concluded that the experimentum crucis is impossible. See Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, trans. Philip P. Wiener (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1906] 1954); Mirella Fortino, Essere, apparire e interpretare. Saggio sul pensiero di Duhem, 1861–1916 (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2005); Anastasios Brenner, Duhem, science, réalité et apparence: la relation entre philosophie et histoire dans l’œuvre de Pierre Duhem (Paris: Vrin, 1991); Stanley L. Jaki, Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem (Dordrecht: Springer, 1987). 177. SR, 125. 178. Ibid., 126. 179. EH, 429–30. 180. Ibid., 429. 181. Bachelard, ‘La philosophie scientifique de Léon Brunschvicg’, 173. 182. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Bxiii, 109 [Ak. III, 10]. Cf. AI, 145–6. 183. EH, 468–9. 184. Ibid., 470. 185. Cf. ibid., 480. 186. Cf. Albert Einstein, The Meaning of Relativity, 3rd edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1922] 1950), 61. 187. Cf. EH, 519–20. 188. Cf. ibid., 506–7. 189. Cf. ibid., 509. 190. Cf. ibid., 557. 191. Cf. ibid., 602. 192. Cf. ibid., 605. 193. This insistence on measurement allows us to draw a parallel with the idealist interpretation of relativity developed by Hermann Weyl (1855–1955) in his masterwork Raum-Zeit-Materie (1918). Although the book is quoted two times in L’expérience humaine, it is difficult to tell how thoroughly Brunschvicg actually studied it. Furthermore, Weyl’s idealism was quite distant from Brunschvicg’s critical one, being inspired rather by Husserl’s phenomenology. However, the proximity lies in the emphasis on measurement and the reference to a coordinate system as the subjective grounds of physical objectivity and as inevitably giving rise to a ‘theory of relativity’ (where ‘relativity’ stands as the opposite of ‘absoluteness’). In particular, as Weyl argued in later works, the coordinate system represented the ‘necessary residuum’ of the acts of a senseconferring consciousness. As Ryckman explained, ‘the very sense of objectivity is constituted within “transcendental subjectivity”, and accordingly, there must indeed be a vestige within the “objective world” represented by the mathematical/ conceptual theories of physics of its “origin” in the “absolute” being of the given-toconsciousness’ (cf. Ryckman, The Reign of Relativity, 135; but see the Chapters 5–6 for an thorough elucidation of Weyl’s theses). 194. EH, 608. 195. For a reading of this sort, cf. Mario Castellana, ‘Léon Brunschvicg e la dimensione storico-filosofica della fisica-matematica’, in Razionalismi senza dogmi. Per un’epistemologia della fisica matematica (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2004): 79–109.

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196.   If one accepts, as Poincaré still did, the superiority of the supposedly intangible and impermeable mathematical frames over the content of physical experience, the diversity of these frames will make it impossible to see anything but conventions … all equally artificial and among which, theoretically, the choice is free. Hypotheses non nisi fingo, mathematical physics will now say. (SR, 124) This is why Brunschvicg often called intuitionism a ‘semi-scepticism’. 197. Desanti, ‘Préface’, v. 198. SR, 128–9. 199. PC, II, 666–7. 200. Ibid., 667. 201. Cf. ibid., 664–5. 202. Ibid., 665. 203. Cf. Cassirer, ‘Einstein’s Theory of Relativity’, 382. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche famously proclaimed that Boscovich ‘taught us to renounce belief in the last bit of earth that did “stand still”, the belief in “matter”, in the “material”, in the residual piece of earth and clump of an atom [an das Erdenrest- und Kluempchen-Atom]: it was the greatest triumph over the senses that the world had ever known’ (Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1886] 2002, 14). In his book, Cassirer uses precisely the term ‘Erdenrest’. 204. EH, 612. 205. PC, II, 685. 206. Fruteau de Laclos, L’épistémologie d’Émile Meyerson, 121. 207. Cf. Louis de Broglie, ‘Léon Brunschvicg et l’évolution des sciences’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 50, nos 1–2 (1945): 75. 208. Cf. SR, 136–9. 209. Cf. Léon Brunschvicg, ‘Finesse et géométrie’, in L’évolution de la physique et de la philosophie. IVe Semaine internationale de Synthèse (Paris: Alcan, 1935), 103–27. 210. Cf. SR, 143. 211. PVP, 5. 212. Ibid. 213. Ibid., 6. 214. Ibid., 25. See also SR, 66–7. 215. De Broglie, ‘Léon Brunschvicg et l’évolution des sciences’, 75–6. 216. PVP, 22. 217. Cf. ibid., 24; HMI, 31–2. 218. Cf. SR, 46–7. 219. Cf. ibid., 53, 142, 150; PVP, 26; HMI, 29. 220. Werner Heisenberg, ‘The Physical Content of Quantum Kinematics and Mechanics’ (1927), in Quantum Theory and Measurement, ed. John A. Wheeler and Wojciech H. Zurek (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 83. 221. Fruteau de Laclos has seen a limit in Brunschvicg’s incapacity to understand the crisis of determinism (cf. Fruteau de Laclos, L’épistémologie d’Émile Meyerson, 121). 222. Cf. EH, 527. 223. Albert Einstein, ‘On the Method of Theoretical Physics’ (1933), in Ideas and Opinions, trans. Sonja Bargmann (New York: Bonanza Books, 1954), 276. Emphasis added.

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224. Cf. Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: Harper, 1958), 82–3. 225. PE, 97. 226. On these debates, see Ryckman, The Reign of Relativity. 227. See Werner Heisenberg, ‘Quantum Mechanics and a Talk with Einstein’ (1925–6), in Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 58–69. 228. Cf. PC, II, 683.

8 The last years: From the Sorbonne to Exile 1. AR, 213: ‘For those who accept life, with all its consequences, idealism is just a cover, unless it becomes a mask. / And what becomes of life for those who profess idealism for good, with all its consequences?’ 2. OR, 185–6. 3. Cf. ‘Témoignage de M. Jean Devolvé’, Les Études philosophiques 20 (1945): 18. 4. Nizan, The Watchdogs, 56. 5. SR, 7. 6. PC, II, 657. 7. Cf. Henri Bergson, ‘Discours prononcé à l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques le 8 août 1914’, in Mélanges, 1102. 8. PC, II, 658. 9. Ibid. 10. Cf. PC, II, 664–5. 11. AI, 124. 12. Cf. PC, II, 673. 13. Cf. ibid., 714–17. 14. Cf. GP, 53. 15. Cf. MEN, 54, 78. See also NL, 120–1; HMI, 2; and OR, 40. 16. GP, 53. 17. VFC, 16. 18. Cf. PC, II, 679. 19. Cf. ibid., 696–701 and 705–8. On the role of aesthetic experience in Brunschvicg, see also MJ, xi, the third part of IVE, entitled ‘La vie esthétique’, or PE, 155–6. 20. Cf. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics’ (1971), in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1972] 1982), 187; Geroulanos, Transparency in Post-War France, 52 and 240. 21. PC, II, 714. 22. Cf. CS, x. 23. Cf. ibid., xi. 24. Elsewhere (AI, 129), Brunschvicg speaks of a ‘substratum’ made of habits that is opposed to the ‘rule’, that is, to the ‘élan of the intelligence’. 25. SR, 55–6. 26. Cf. Gueroult, Dianoématique. Livre 1: Histoire de l’histoire de la philosophie. Vol. 3: En France, de Condorcet à nos jours, 898. 27. See RP, 12–20. Cf. also AI, chap. 2. 28. Cf. SR, 55.

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29. David L. Schalk, The Spectrum of Political Engagement: Mounier, Benda, Nizan, Brasillach, Sartre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 15. Quoted in Steven Vincent, Élie Halévy, 232. 30. AI, first page without number. 31. Cf. e.g., PC, II, 731. 32. AI, first page without number. 33. Cf. ibid., chap. 1. 34. Cf. Georges Politzer, ‘La fin d’une parade philosophique: le bergsonisme’ (1929), in Contre Bergson et quelques autres. Écrits philosophiques, 1924–1939, ed. Roger Bruyeron (Paris: Flammarion, 2013), 131. 35. Cf. Jean Wahl, Vers le concret: études d’histoire de la philosophie contemporaine (William James, Whitehead, Gabriel Marcel), ed. Mathias Girel (Paris: Vrin, [1932] 2004). 36. Cf. Jean Wahl, The Pluralist Philosophies of England and America, trans. Fred Rothwell (London: Open Court, [1920] 1925). 37. Cf. Jean Wahl, Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel, 2nd edn (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, [1929] 1951). For an introduction to his life and work, see Moore and Schrift, ‘Existence, Experience and Transcendence: An Introduction to Jean Wahl’, 1–31. 38. On the ‘Hegel renaissance’, see Andrea Bellantone, Hegel en France (Paris: Hermann, 2011), vol. 2, chap. 5; Bruce Baugh, French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2003); Gwendoline Jarczyk, Pierre-Jean Labarrière, De Kojève à Hegel: 150 ans de pensée hégélienne en France (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996), chap. 1; Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). 39. He read the drafts of many of Brunschvicg’s late works, as we learn from the acknowledgements, and wrote a penetrating preface to the Agenda retrouvé. In 1930, Brunschvicg worked behind the scenes to have him appointed at the Sorbonne – unsuccessfully (cf. The Malebranche Moment: Selections from the Letters of Étienne Gilson and Henri Gouhier (1920–1936), ed. Richard J. Fafara [Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2007], 77 n. 123). 40. Celebrated as a promoter of new theoretical trends by Levinas and Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), Wahl was indeed a peculiar figure: unlike Politzer, he would have played a pivotal institutional role, as professor at the Sorbonne (1936), the editor of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale (1950–74) and president of the Société française de philosophie (1960–74). In this, he comes across as a university ‘mandarin’ of Brunschvicg’s kind. See, for example, his intervention at the session of the Société française de philosophie dedicated to the Étapes where he declared feeling close to Brunschvicg’s philosophy: ‘Commémoration du cinquantenaire de la publication des Étapes de la philosophie mathématique de Léon Brunschvicg’, 22–6. Collaterally, though, he frequented more marginal or even extra-academic circles, like those of the young journals Philosophies, Esprit and Recherches philosophiques or the Collège de sociologie of Georges Bataille (1897–1962). Furthermore, he also founded the Collège philosophique, a non-academic philosophical training space regularly attended by young thinkers such as Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty or Jacques Lacan (1901–1981). 41. Wahl, The Pluralist Philosophies of England and America, 316. 42. Ibid., 300.

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43. Cf. Mathias Girel, ‘Jean Wahl d’Angleterre et d’Amérique: contribution à l’étude du contexte et de la signification des Philosophies pluralistes (1920)’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 81, no. 1 (2014): 119–20. 44. Quoted in ibid., 123. 45. Cf. Bianco, Après Bergson, 30. 46. Jean Wahl, ‘Preface to Toward the Concrete’ (1932), trans. Leonard Lawlor, in Transcendence and the Concrete, 36. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 37. This entanglement of continuity and discontinuity, which for Wahl introduces an element of negativity, marks the difference with Bergson, who nonetheless is the archetype of the entire philosophy of the concrete. 49. Ibid., 39. 50. Ibid., 47. 51. Cf. Bianco, Après Bergson, 31. We have to bear in mind that, after the war, Wahl would become the secretary of the Société française de philosophie and editor of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, weaving a connection with the generation of their founders. 52. Wahl, ‘Preface to Toward the Concrete’, 51. 53. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Alfred Knopf, [1957] 1968), 19. 54. SR, 219. 55. Cf. HMI, 83. 56. RR, 140. 57. Paul Valéry, ‘Analecta’ (1926), in Collected Works. Volume 14: Analects, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 300. Translation modified. 58. AI, 131. 59. Cf. PC, II, 689–90. 60. Cf. AI, 131. 61. Cf. ibid., 133–4. 62. Gottfried W. von Leibniz, New Essays in Human Understanding, ed. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1703] 1996), Book II, chap. 4, 127. He probably borrowed this example, also present in EH, 206, and HMI, 21, from Cassirer, who mentioned it in ‘Einstein’s Theory of Relativity’, 419. 63. Cf. AI, 137. 64. Cf. SR, 127. 65. Cf. AI, 133. 66. SR, 10. 67. Cf. Bréhier, ‘L’idéalisme de Léon Brunschvicg’, 3. 68. PC, II, 675. 69. AI, 148. 70. PE, 139–40. 71. Cf. ibid., 140. 72. Barrès was one of the most influential writers of his generation and a foremost advocate of right-wing republican nationalism. The saga of the ‘Cult of the Self ’ includes Barrès’s first three novels: Sous l’œil des barbares (1888), Un homme libre (1889) and Le jardin de Bérénice (1891). Its poetics consists in an exaltation of individuality and vitalism against the decadence and the barbarism of society. In his more mature works, most notably in the ‘Novel of National Energy’ – Les Déracinés (1897), L’appel au soldat (1900) and Leurs figures (1902) – Barrès articulated a

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systematic critique of philosophical Kantianism, parliamentarism, cosmopolitism and liberalism in the name of an aesthetical traditionalism imbued with anti-Semitic tones. On Barrès, see Zeev Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français (Bruxelles: Complexe, 1985). 73. Cf. PE, 148. 74. Cf. PC, II, 724–6; VFC, 209. 75. Cf. SR, 219. 76. Ibid., 243. 77. Ibid., 213. 78. Lévinas, ‘The Diary of Léon Brunschvicg’, 44. See also IC, 92–3. 79. SR, 231. 80. VFC, 214. 81. Cf. ibid., 217; Shook, Étienne Gilson, 181–2. 82. Actually Marcel rejected this label, as can be seen in Gabriel Marcel, Awakenings, trans. Peter S. Rogers (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, [1971] 2002), 191–3. 83. Gabriel Marcel, ‘Some Remarks on the Irreligion of Today’ (1930), in Being and Having, trans. Katharine Farrer (Westminster: Dacre Press, [1935] 1949), 185. 84. On their relationship, see Emmanuel Lévinas, Xavier Tilliette and Paul Ricœur, Jean Wahl et Gabriel Marcel (Paris: Beauchesne, 1976). 85. Cf. Marcel, Awakenings, 64. The tragedy of the First World War, in which he served as head of the information service of the Red Cross, was crucial in shaping Marcel’s sense of life, leading to his conversion to Catholicism in 1929. The experience of the families of missing soldiers coming to him asking for information about their beloved ones directly informed Marcel’s philosophical concerns for the conditions and the limits of ‘questioning’ and for ‘metaphysical experience’ (cf. ibid., 93–4). All this, along with Marcel’s proximity to the literary circles of the anti-intellectualist writer Charles Du Bos, converged into a strong feeling for first-person ‘liminal’ or ‘ultimate situations’ (Grenzsituationen), as Jaspers would have said, irreducible to the neutral order of knowledge. On Jaspers’s influence, see Gabriel Marcel, ‘The Fundamental and Ultimate Situation in Karl Jaspers’ (1932–3), in Creative Fidelity, trans. Robert Rosthal (New York: Fordham University Press, [1940] 2002), 222–56; Paul Ricœur, Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers (Paris: Éditions du Temps Présent, 1947). 86. Cf. Marcel, Awakenings, 126–7. 87. A translation of this 1933 play can be found in Gabriel Marcel’s Perspectives on a Broken World, ed. Katharine R. Hanley (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1998), 31–152. 88. Marcel, Awakenings, 134. 89. Cf. Gabriel Marcel, Metaphysical Journal, trans. Bernard Wahl (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery, [1927] 1956); Being and Having, as well as Homo Viator (1945), appeared in the series ‘Philosophie de l’esprit’ directed by the Christian thinkers René Le Senne and Louis Lavelle, who both studied under Brunschvicg, for the publisher Aubier-Montaigne. 90. Gabriel Marcel, ‘A Metaphysical Diary (1928–1933)’, in Being and Having, 27. 91. Cf. Katharine R. Hanley’s foreword to Gabriel Marcel, ‘Concrete Approaches to Investigating the Ontological Mystery’, in Gabriel Marcel’s Perspectives on a Broken World, 166. 92. Marcel, ‘Concrete Approaches’, 175. 93. Ibid., 178.

284 9 4. 95. 96. 97. 98.

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Cf. OR, 301. Marcel, ‘Concrete Approaches’, 183. Cf. Marcel, Awakenings, 70. Cf. OR, 305–6. Cf. Léon Brunschvicg, Gabriel Marcel, ‘La religion du philosophe, surnaturel ou spirituel?’, Correspondance de l’Union pour la Vérité 36, no. 2 (1928): 75–112. Marcel provides a brief summary of his main arguments in the introduction to Creative Fidelity, 5–9. 99. Cf. the texts gathered in J. G. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute (1798–1800), ed. Yolanda Estes and Curtis Bowman (London: Routledge, 2016). 100. Cf. VFC, 221. 101. Ibid., 222. 102. Cf. ibid., 247. 103. Cf. Gabriel Marcel, ‘Carence de spiritualité’, Nouvelle revue française 16, no. 186 (March 1929): 376. 104. Cf. ibid., 378. 105. Cf. VFC, 123. 106. Cf. ibid., 125. 107. OR, 306. 108. Cf. Marcel, ‘Carence de spiritualité’, 376. 109. Cf. Marcel, Awakenings, 140. 110. Gabriel Marcel, ‘The Transcendent as Metaproblematic’ (1937), in Creative Fidelity, 142. 111. Ibid. 112. Lévinas, ‘The Diary of Léon Brunschvicg’, 44. 113. Gabriel Marcel, ‘Creative Fidelity’, in Creative Fidelity, 152. 114. PE, 151. 115. Quoted in Giovanni Botta, Jacques Maritain e Gabriel Marcel. Un’amicizia attraverso la corrispondenza (1928–1967) (Rome: Studium, 2016), 127. 116. Cf. Marcel, Gabriel Marcel interrogé par Pierre Boutang, 78–9. 117. Quoted in Botta, Jacques Maritain e Gabriel Marcel, 140. 118. VFC, 224. 119. OR, 162. 120. Poincaré, ‘The Value of Science’, 355. 121. Cf. RR, 52. 122. Cf. ibid., 200. 123. SSC, 231–2. 124. RR, 200–1. 125. Cf. Leterre, ‘Préface’. 126. Cf. EE, 7–8. 127. Ibid., 16. 128. Cf. Paul Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind: 1680–1715, trans. James Lewis May (New York: New York Review of Book Classics, [1935] 2013). Brunschvicg discussed this text in the Bulletin de l’Union pour la Vérité 43, no. 5–6 (July 1936): 304, 312, 313–16. Hazard belonged to a lineage of historians of literature and ideas that was obscured by the achievements of the socio-economic oriented school of the Annales, which developed first in Strasbourg and then in Paris around personalities like Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch (1886–1944) during the 1920s and the 1930s. At the Sorbonne, Gustave Lanson (1857–1934) studied the history of literature on

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a sociological basis, while his pupil Daniel Mornet (1878–1954) focused on the intellectual origins of the French Revolution. Cf. Anthony Grafton, ‘Introduction’, in Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, vii–xii. The reader can find in Grafton’s text a concise overview of Hazard’s life and works. Hazard, a disciple of Lanson himself, made his name as a scholar of the Franco-Italian literary connections. 129. Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, 440–1. 130. Ibid., 236. 131. Which is why the English translation of the title is perhaps inappropriate. 132. EE, 7. 133. VFC, 258. 134. Cf. EE, 183–4. 135. Cf. ibid., 187. 136. Lucien Febvre, ‘Esprit européen et philosophie. Un cours de Léon Brunschvicg’ (1947), in Combats pour l’histoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1992), 289. 137. Ibid., 289–90. 138. Cf. ibid., 291. 139. Cf. ibid., 289. 140. Cf. ibid., 290. 141. One of the main mountains in the Bernese Alps. 142. Cf. ibid., 292. More favourable will be Febvre’s review of DPM, in Annales 6, no. 1 (1951): 115–7. 143. Paul Valéry, ‘The Crisis of the Mind’ (1919), in Collected Works. Vol. 10, 31. 144. Cf. L’avenir de l’esprit européen, 71–80. See Paola Cattani, ‘Europe as a Nation? Intellectuals and Debate on Europe in the Inter-War Period’, History of European Ideas 43, no. 6 (2017): 674–82; Annemarie van Heerikhuizen, ‘Paris 1933: A “Société des Esprits” Chaired by Paul Valéry’, European Studies 32 (2014): 139–54. 145. Paul Valéry, ‘The European’ (1922), in ibid., 307–23. 146. Paul Valéry, ‘The European Spirit’ (1935), in ibid., 327. 147. Cf. e.g., Francisco J. H. Hernández, De Husserl a Levinas: un camino en la fenomenología (Salamanca: Publicaciones Universidad Pontificia, 2005), 63; Bernard Wandelfels, Phänomenologie in Frankreich (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1983), 19– 33); Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982), 428–30. 148. It has been recently argued, for example, that ‘Thanks to the Brunschvicgian heritage, the French academic world, especially the epistemological world, was spiritually prepared to welcome an epistemological approach to phenomenology in which the historical study of rationality and its legitimacy as a way of life was presented as necessary’ (Jimmy H. Marcelo, ‘Léon Brunschvicg y la fenomenología francesa. La receptibilidad epistemológica’, Disputatio 8, no. 11 [2019]: 344). 149. Cf. Knox Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 25; Alan D. Schrift, ‘Is There Such a Thing as “French Philosophy”? or Why Do We Read the French So Badly’, in After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France, ed. Julian Bourg (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 27. Léon’s introductory remarks are reported in the ‘Avertissement’ to Edmund Husserl, Méditations cartésiennes: introduction à la phénoménologie, trans. Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: Vrin, 1966), v–vii. 150. Cf. Jan Patočka, ‘Erinnerungen an Husserl’, in Die Welt des Menschen – Die Welt der Philosophie: Festschrift für Jan Patočka, ed. Walter Biemel (Dordrecht: Springer,

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1976), viii. Brunschvicg and Husserl eventually met when the latter attended Koyré’s doctoral defence at the Sorbonne in 1929. 151. The 1931 French Méditations cartésiennes were actually different from the German Cartesianische Meditationen, consisting rather in the translation of a revised version of Husserl’s lectures titled ‘Introduction to Transcendental Phenomenology’, which usually goes under the name of Pariser Vorträge. 152. Cf. Victor Delbos, ‘Husserl: sa critique du psychologisme et sa conception d’une logique pure’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 19, no. 5 (1911): 695–6. 153. Cf. Christian Dupont, Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 107. 154. See ibid., 109–22. 155. See Emmanuel Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. Andre Orianne (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, [1930] 1973); Léon Brunschvicg, ‘Rapport sur le concours pour le prix Jules et Louis Jeanbernat et Barthélémy de Ferrari Dorin’, Séances et travaux de l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques 92 (July–December 1932): 186–8. 156. Léon Brunschvicg, ‘Préface’, in Georges Gurvitch, Les tendances actuelles de la philosophie allemande: E. Husserl, M. Scheler, E. Lask, M. Heidegger, 2nd edn (Paris: Vrin, [1930] 1949), 3. In VFC, 10, Brunschvicg had already spoken of ‘Hamelin’s phenomenology’. 157. Cf. Brunschvicg, ‘Préface’, 3. 158. The difference between the two approaches can be grasped by reading what Jean Cavaillès, a student of both, declared: ‘I continue to read his [Husserl’s] logic. Yet unfortunately, if his general method of philosophy is perhaps useful, the system from which he derives it is so distant from everything Brunschvicg’s et al. impregnated in me that I’m afraid that unless I were converted, I could only look at it from afar as a foreign thing’ (quoted in Dupont, Phenomenology in French Philosophy, 28 n.19). 159. SR, 8. 160. EE, 8. 161. Ibid., 180. 162. Cf. Dermot Moran, Husserl’s ‘Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology’: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 31. An excellent discussion of Husserl’s conception of Europe can be found in Timo Miettinen, Husserl and the Idea of Europe (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020). In Prague, Brunschvicg delivered the lecture on ‘Religion and philosophy’, now in SR, 235–47 – a ‘pale homily’, as was caustically defined by a contemporary observer (cf. ‘Le Congrès de Prague’, Revue philosophique de Louvain 44 [1934]: 477). 163. Cf. Edmund Husserl, ‘An den Präsidenten des VIII. Internationalen PhilosophenKongresses, Herrn Professor Dr. Rádl in Prag’ (1936), in Gesammelte Werke. Husserliana, Band XXVII: Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937), ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans R. Sepp (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), 240–1. 164. Ibid., 241. 165. Edmund Husserl, ‘The Vienna Lecture. Appendix I: Philosophy and Crisis of European Humanity’ (1935), in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, ed. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, [1954] 1970), 290. 166. Ibid., 274.

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1 67. Ibid., 299. 168. Ibid., 291. 169. Ibid., 297. 170. Ibid., 299. 171. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Other Heading: Memories, Responses, and Responsibilities’ (1990), in The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale A. Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, [1991] 1992), 28. 172. Cf. ibid., 34.

Epilogue 1. AR, 80. ‘There is an art of living and a science of dying. / An art that necessarily remains unfinished, a science that will inevitably find its fulfillment.’ 2. Deschoux, Léon Brunschvicg, 181. The cause of death was probably prostatic cancer. Indeed, Brunschvicg mentioned having gone through two prostatic surgeries in a letter to Henri Gouhier dictated to Cécile four months before his death, on 25 September 1943, when he was already bedridden (cf. ‘Quelques lettres inédites de Léon Brunschvicg’, 31). After the death of her husband, Cécile took shelter in Valence, where she taught under the false name of Madame Léger at the École des Baumes until the Liberation. Back in Paris, in October 1944, she resumed her feminist militancy, serving in the Association française pour les Nations Unies and on the board of the Women’s International Democratic Federation. She died in Neuilly-sur-Sein on 5 October 1946 after an illness. See Laure Guillot, En mémoire de Madame C. L. Brunschvicg (Paris: Durand, 1947). 3. Bergson, Correspondances, 1665. 4. The anecdote about the yellow star, spread by Radio London, is reprised in the most authoritative biography of Bergson: Philippe Soulez and Frédéric Worms, Bergson: Biographie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), 302. 5. See Jean Beaufret, ‘Hommage à un philosophe: Léon Brunschvicg’, Confluences 30 (March 1944): 268–75; Raymond Aron’s obituary was published instead on La France libre, the review he edited in London, where he had taken refuge after the Nazi invasion. See Raymond Aron, ‘Léon Brunschvicg’ (1944), in Croire en la démocratie, 1933–1944, ed. Vincent Duclert and Christian Bachelier (Paris: Fayard, 2017), chap. 10. 6. Cf. Beaufred, ‘Hommage à un philosophe’, 268. 7. Cf. ibid., 270–1. 8. Cf. ibid., 272. 9. Cf. ibid., 275. 10. Cf. François Chaubet, ‘Léon Brunschvicg, destin d’un philosophe sous l’Occupation’, a talk at the conference Déplacements, dérangements, bouleversement: artistes et intellectuels déplacés en zone sud (1940–1944), which took place in Marseille in June 2005. I thank the author for sending me his text and granting me permission to quote it. All the following information is taken from Chaubet’s account. 11. After the end of the war, the Red Army took possession of the archives, which returned to France after a lengthy negotiation. Cf. the text of the speech of Marc-Olivier Baruch in ‘Témoignages familiaux sur Cécile Brunschicg’, Archives du féminisme, no. 2 (2001), https://www.archivesdufeminisme.fr/

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sommaires-des-bulletins/bulletin-02/temoignages-familiaux-cecile-brunschvicg/ (accessed 21 March 2020). 12. ‘Quelques lettres inédites de Léon Brunschvicg’, 25. 13. AR, 122. 14. Ibid., 161. 15. Quoted in Jankélévitch, ‘Léon Brunschvicg’, 138. 16. Cf. DPM, 9. 17. Quoted in Thierry Leterre’s preface to DPM, available online at the address http:// classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/brunschvicg_leon/descartes_et_pascal/descartes_et_ pascal_preface.html (accessed 27 October 2020). See this excellent preface, to which I am indebted for these pages, for a broader assessment of DPM. 18. Cf. DPM, 76–7. 19. Cf. Leterre, ‘Préface’. 20. Cf. DPM, 187–8. 21. Leterre, ‘Préface’. 22. Cf. DPM, 148–9. 23. Cf. ibid., 200. 24. Cf. EE, 86. 25. Cf. DPM, 59–60. 26. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, III, 9, ‘On Vanity’, 734: ‘Now let us turn our eyes in all directions: everything is crumbling about us; in all the great states that we know, whether in Christendom or elsewhere, take a look: you will find an evident threat of change and ruin.’ 27. DPM, 114. 28. Cf. ibid., 9. Raymond Aron wrote a review of the book, praising its clarity and Brunschvicg’s presence of mind (‘lucidité’). See ‘Aux sources de la pensée française’, La France libre 4, no. 24 (1942), 441–8. 29. HMI, 77. 30. Cf. ‘Lettre de M. Arnold Reymond’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 50, no. 1–2 (1945), 10. 31. ‘Quelques lettres inédites de Léon Brunschvicg’, 27. 32. Cf. Georges Politzer, ‘Lettre à L. Brunschvicg (16 mars 1927)’, in Politzer, le concret et sa signification, ed. Giuseppe Bianco (Paris: Hermann, 2016), 235. 33. See his 1926 ‘Introduction’ to the first issue of Esprit in Contre Bergson et quelques autres, 67. 34. Cf. Henri Lefebvre, La somme et le reste (Paris: La Nef, 1959), vol. 2, 343. 35. On Politzer’s life, see Nicole Racine-Furlaud, ‘Georges Politzer (1903–1942)’, in Politzer, le concret et sa signification, 219–31, and Michel Politzer, Les trois morts de Georges Politzer (Paris: Flammarion, 2013). 36. Georges Politzer, ‘Un pas vers la vraie figure de Kant’ (1924), in Contre Bergson et quelques autres, 53. 37. Ibid., 52. 38. Cf. Georges Politzer, Critique des fondements de la psychologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, [1928] 2003), 250. 39. Cf. Politzer, ‘Introduction’, 61. 40. See Georges Politzer, ‘Le tricentenaire du Discours de la méthode’ (1937), in Contre Bergson et quelques autres, 103–11. 41. Cf. Politzer, ‘Introduction’, 72.

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42. This is what Brunschvicg said, e.g., in his article on ‘L’idée critique et le système kantien’ (cf. HO, 229). 43. Cf. Politzer, ‘Introduction’, 81. 44. Ibid. 45. Cf. ibid., 68. 46. For a first attempt, see Giuseppe Bianco, ‘Georges Politzer’s Fortune in French Psychology and Psychiatry (1930–1980)’, History of Psychology, forthcoming. 47. Cf. Politzer, ‘Introduction’, 85. 48. Cf. ibid. 49. See Politzer, Critique des fondements de la psychologie, chap. 4. 50. Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Fourth Notebook. April 17 – October 21, 1927’, in Diary of a Philosophy Student. Volume 1, 1926–27, ed. Barbara Klaw, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir and Margaret A. Simons, with Marybeth Timmermann (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 231. 51. Cf. Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, trans. James Kirkup (Cleveland, OH: World, [1958] 1959), 219 and 247. 52. Cf. ibid., 280–1. 53. Cf. ibid., 324. 54. Ibid., 243. 55. Simone de Beauvoir, When the Things of the Spirit Come First, trans. Patrick O’Brian (New York: Pantheon Books, [1979] 1982), 5. 56. Simone de Beauvoir, Quand prime le spirituel (Paris: Gallimard, 1979): vii. Quoted in Eleanore Holveck, Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Lived Experience: Literature and Metaphysics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 45. The title of the book is a reference to Maritain’s La primauté du spirituel (1927). 57. Ibid. 58. On Delacroix and Sartre’s relationship with him, see Frédéric Fruteau de Laclos, La psychologie des philosophes: de Bergson à Vernant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2012), chaps. 1 and 9. 59. Cf. Raymond Aron, Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Reflection, trans. George Holoch (New York: Holmes & Meier, [1983] 1990), 24. 60. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Departure and Return’ (1944), in Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 176. 61. See Jean-Paul Sartre, War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War, 1939–40, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, [1983] 1999), 337. 62. Ibid., 338. 63. See Alain Flajoliet, La première philosophie de Sartre (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008), 75–6, 411, 416. 64. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘What Is Literature?’ (1947), in ‘What Is Literature?’ and Other Essays, ed. Steven Ungar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 177. 65. Cf. ibid., 166–7. 66. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology’ (1939), trans. Joseph P. Fell, in Edmund Husserl: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, ed. Rudolf Bernet, Donn Welton and Gina Zavota, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 2005), vol. 1, 257. 67. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: A Sketch for a Phenomenological Description, trans. Andrew Brown (London: Routledge, [1936] 2004), 29. 68. Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Le fonctionnement du champ intellectuel’, Regards sociologiques 17–18 (1999), 21–2.

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69. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Philosophy of Existence’ (1959), in Texts and Dialogues: On Philosophy, Politics, and Culture, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and James Barry Jr. (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1992), 130. 70. Cf. ibid., 130–1. 71. PC, II, 689. 72. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, [1945] 2012), lxx. 73. Cf. Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Le scénario cartésien: recherches sur la formation et la cohérence de l’intention philosophique de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Vrin, 2005), 60–70. 74. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, lxxii. 75. Of course, Brunschvicg was not the only one Merleau-Ponty contested: Alain and the idealist Catholic philosopher Pierre Lachièze-Rey (1885–1957) were also among his targets. 76. Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Merleau-Ponty’ (1961), in Situations, trans. Benita Eisler (London: Hamish Hamilton, [1964] 1965), 229. 77. Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Philosophy of Existence’, 132. See also ‘Bergson in the Making’ (1959), in Signs, 185: ‘Never had the brute being of the perceived world been so described.’ 78. Cf. Saint Aubert, Le scénario cartésien, 56–99. On Maritain, see Yves Floucat, Maritain ou Le catholicisme intégral et l’humanisme démocratique (Paris: Téqui, 2003) and Pour une restauration du politique: Maritain l’intransigeant, de la ContreRévolution à la démocratie (Paris: Téqui, 1999) On Cerf, see Étienne Fouilloux), in collaboration with Tangi Cavalin and Nathalie Viet-Depaule, Les Éditions dominicaines du Cerf, 1918–1965 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2018). On Mounier, see Jean-Marie Domenach, Emmanuel Mounier (Paris: Seuil, 2014). On Esprit, see Michel Winock, ‘Esprit’, des intellectuels dans la cité, 1930–1950, 2nd edn (Paris: Seuil, [1975] 1996). For a broader contextualisation of the political crisis of the 1930s, see the classic study by Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les nonconformistes des années 1930: une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française, 2nd edn (Paris: Seuil, [1969] 2001). 79. Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Philosophy of Existence’, 132. 80. Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Christianity and Ressentiment’ (1935), in Texts and Dialogue, 100. Merleau-Ponty also wrote a review of Marcel’s Being and Having in 1936 (see ibid., 101–7). 81. Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘L’agrégation de philosophie’ (1938), in Parcours, 1935– 1951, ed. Jacques Prunair (Paris: Verdier, 1997), 55–9. 82. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, [1942] 1983), 206–7. 83. Ibid., 208. 84. Cf. ibid., 216. 85. On Aron, besides his Memoirs, see most recently Iain Stewart, Raymond Aron and Liberal Thought in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 86. Cf. Aron, Memoirs, 14. 87. Ibid., 26. 88. Ibid., 26–7. 89. Ibid., 27. 90. Cf. Raymond Aron, Le spectateur engagé: entretiens avec Jean-Louis Missika et Dominique Wolton, 2nd edn (Paris: Fallois, [1983] 2004), 32–3.

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9 1. See Aron, ‘La pensée de M. Léon Brunschvicg. À propos de son dernier ouvrage’. 92. Cf. Aron, Le spectateur engagé, 49. The full anecdote is recounted in the unabridged edition of the Memoirs, which appeared only in French. Cf. Raymond Aron, Mémoires: édition intégrale inédite (Paris: Laffont, 2010), 107–8. 93. Cf. ibid., 35. Aron recalled that in 1935 he met Brunschvicg on the boulevard Saint-Michel and tried, unsuccessfully, to explain to him the terrible situation into which they were slipping and the implications of their incapacity to restrain the imperialism of Nazism (cf. Aron, Memoirs, 96). 94. Cf. Henri Lefebvre, Henri Lefebvre: la ville – À voix nue: grands entretiens d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (1970), interview by Gilbert-Maurice Duprez, rebroadcasted on France Culture, 1–4 March 1994. Quoted in Lukasz Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space, Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 133. 95. ‘Quelques lettres inédites de Léon Brunschvicg’, 24. 96. Ibid., 24–5. 97. Aron, Memoirs, 39. 98. Aron, Le spectateur engagé, 33. 99. As Aron later recalled in his 1971 inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, it was Brunschvicg who actually insisted on presenting as a primary thesis an original work of philosophy, and not another expository book, as Aron originally planned to do. See Raymond Aron, De la condition historique du sociologue: leçon inaugurale au Collège de France (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 23. 100. See Raymond Aron, Essai sur la théorie de l’histoire dans l’Allemagne contemporaine: la philosophie critique de l’histoire (Paris: Vrin, 1938). 101. Cf. Aron, Memoirs, 43. The English translation erroneously states ‘historical universalism’. 102. Cf. Aron, Mémoires, 158. 103. Aron, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, 12. 104. Cf. Aron, Mémoires, 107. 105. Aron, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, 79. 106. Cf. ibid., 265. 107. Cf. Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927– 1961 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 93. 108. Cf. Aron, ‘La philosophie de Léon Brunschvicg’, 128–9. 109. Cf. Aron, Mémoires, 414–16. 110. Cf. De Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, 365. 111. On Nizan, see Yves Buin, Paul Nizan: la révolution ephèmere (París: Denöel, 2012); Pascal Ory, Nizan, destin d’un révolté, 2nd edn (Bruxelles: Complexe, [1980] 2005). 112. Paul Nizan, Aden, Arabie, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, [1931] 1960), 63. 113. Cf. Nizan, The Watchdogs, 28–9. 114. Cf. ibid., 89–90. 115. Cf. ibid., 40. 116. On Berl, see Olivier Philipponnat, Patrick Lienhardt, Emmanuel Berl: cavalier seul (Paris: La Libraire Vuibert, 2017). 117. Emmanuel Berl, Mort de la pensée bourgeoise (Paris: Robert Laffont, [1929] 1970), 33. 118. Emmanuel Berl, Mort de la morale bourgeoise (Paris: Gallimard, 1930), 52–7.

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1 19. Ibid., 156. 120. Cf. ibid., 159–60. 121. Ibid., 94. 122. Ibid. 123. Cf. Walter D. Redfern, Paul Nizan: Committed Literature in a Conspiratorial World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 20–1. 124. Cf. Berl, Mort de la pensée bourgeoise, 98–100. 125. Nizan, The Watchdogs, 57. 126. Ibid., 59. 127. Ibid., 57. 128. Ibid., 59. 129. Ibid., 59–60. 130. Ibid., 72. 131. Cf. ibid., 73–5. 132. Ibid., 78. 133. For his part, Brunschvicg did not really know who Nizan was. In 1939, he ran into Nizan and Sartre at Gallimard’s offices, erroneously congratulating the latter on the success of the Watchdogs (cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Foreword’ [1960], in Nizan, Aden, Arabie, 18; War Diaries, 270–1). He seemed to have no hard feelings towards the young communist, to the point that, reading the virulent portrait of his life contained in the pamphlet, he allegedly quipped: ‘Well, he really liked the petit fours of my wife, though’ (quoted in Marie-Anne Lescourret, Emmanuel Lévinas [Paris: Flammarion, 1994], 101). 134. On Lavelle, see Sébastien Robert, La philosophie de Louis Lavelle: liberté et participation (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007) and Autour de Louis Lavelle: philosophie, conscience, valeur, ed. Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron and Alain Panero (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006). 135. See, e.g., René Le Senne, Obstacle et valeur (Paris: Aubier, 1934). On Le Senne, see Jean Paumen, Le spiritualisme existentiel de René Le Senne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949). 136. Louis Lavelle, ‘L’idéalisme de Léon Brunschvicg’, in La philosophie française entre les deux guerres (Paris: Montaigne, 1942), 188. 137. Cf. ibid., 191. 138. Cf. Louis Lavelle, ‘La structure du réel’ (1932), in Chroniques philosophiques. Science, esthétique, métaphysique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1967), 22. 139. On Nabert, see Jean Nabert, l’affirmation éthique, ed. Stéphane Robilliard and Frédéric Worms (Paris: Beauchesne, 2010). 140. Ricœur studied in Rennes, thus away from the Parisian environment dominated by Bergson and Brunschvicg. His high school teacher, Roland Dalbiez (1893– 1976), who had been among the first in France to write a thesis on Freud, was anything but fond of Brunschvicg’s critical idealism (cf. Paul Ricœur, Réflexion faite: autobiographie intellectuelle [Paris: Éditions Esprit, 1995], 12). It was only when he moved to university, also in Rennes, that he discovered the tradition of reflective philosophy, writing in 1934 a mémoire on Le problème de Dieu chez Lachelier et Lagneau supervised by Brunschvicg himself. On finally relocating to Paris the following year, he approached phenomenology and came into contact with Gabriel Marcel, embracing his opposition to Brunschvicg’s idealism. On Ricœur and Nabert, see Jean-Luc Amalric, ‘Act, Sign and Objectivity: Jean Nabert’s Influence on the Ricœurian Phenomenology of the Will’, in A Companion

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to Ricœur’s Freedom and Nature, ed. Scott Davidson (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), 17–35; Jean-Philippe Pierron, ‘Paul Ricœur, lecteur de Jean Nabert’, Revue philosophique de Louvain 108, no. 2 (2010): 335–59. 141. Jean Nabert, ‘L’expérience interne chez Kant’, in L’expérience intérieure de la liberté, 252. 142. Cf. Paul Ricœur, ‘L’arbre de la philosophie réflexive’, in ibid., viii. 143. Jean Nabert, ‘La philosophie réflexive’, in ibid., 399. Shortly after, Nabert speaks of the ‘progress of an inner experience which is nothing less than a constant reflective return of the self [moi] upon its acts in order to verify the degrees and quality of a spiritual causality’ (ibid., 405). 144. Ricœur, ‘L’arbre de la philosophie réflexive’, x. 145. Cf. Nabert, ‘La philosophie réflexive’, 406. 146. Cf. ibid., 404. 147. Ibid., 407. 148. Nabert, ‘La raison et la religion selon Léon Brunschvicg’, 375. 149. Cf. ibid., 395–6. 150. See, e.g., Massimo Ferrari, ‘Il giovane Jankélévitch tra Simmel e Bergson’, Trans/ Form/Ação 37 (2014): 209–18, https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&p id=S0101-31732014000400209 (accessed 5 September 2020). 151. Cf. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Une vie en toutes lettres: lettres à Louis Beauduc, 1923– 1980, ed. Françoise Schwab (Paris: Levi, 1995), 172. 152. A clear introduction is provided in the ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to Vladimir Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, trans. Andrew Kelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1951] 2015), vii–xx. 153. Ibid., 1–2. 154. Cf. e.g., ibid., 21. 155. Cf. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Du mensonge (Lyon: Confluences, 1942), 111. 156. ‘Quelques lettres inédites de Léon Brunschvicg’, 29–30. 157. Jankélévitch, Une vie en toutes lettres, 299. 158. Cf. Kelley, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, vii. See also Yves Charles Zarka, ‘Jankélévitch ironiste: contre Heidegger’, Cités 70, no. 2 (2017): 3–6. 159. Cf. Lescourret, Emmanuel Lévinas, 90. 160. Indeed, the relationship to otherness remains undetermined in Brunschvicg. His treatment of alterity at a meeting of the Société française de philosophie in 1921 is paradigmatic in this regard. When Cresson asked him about the existence of others, he somehow dodged the question by reducing the other to a mental representation, to a ‘judgement of existence’ (cf. OR, 298). 161. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Meaning and Sense’ (1964), in Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 58. 162. Ibid., 57–8. 163. This is the opinion of Lescourret in ibid., 100–9. 164. On this question, see also Hanoch Ben-Pazi, ‘ “A Fall of Snow Maintains the Warmth of the Earth”: Léon Brunschvicg in the Eyes of Emmanuel Levinas and the Search for Universalism in Judaism’, European Journal of Jewish Studies 14 (2020): 54–72. 165. Levinas, ‘The Diary of Léon Brunschvicg’, 44. 166. Ibid.

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167. Cf. Jean-François Braunstein, ‘Historical Epistemology, Old and New’, in Epistemology and History: From Bachelard and Canguilhem to Today’s History of Science, ed. Jean-François Braunstein, Peter Schöttler and Henning Schmidgen (Berlin: Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte Preprints, 2012), 35; ‘Abel Rey et les débuts de l’Institut d’histoire des sciences’, in L’épistémologie française, 1830–1970, ed. Michel Bitbol and Jean Gayon (Paris: Éditions Matériologiques, 2006), 163–80. 168. See Dominique Lecourt, ‘Gaston Bachelard’s Historical Epistemology’ (1969), in Marxism and Epistemology: Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1975), 23–116. 169. Dominique Lecourt, La philosophie des sciences (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001), 90. 170. Cf. Jean-François Braunstein, ‘Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault. Le “style français” en épistémologie’, in Les philosophes et la science, ed. Pierre Wagner (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 920–63. 171. Cf. Braunstein, ‘Historical Epistemology, Old and New’, 38–9. 172. Cf. Cristina Chimisso, ‘Aspects of Current History of Philosophy of Science in the French Tradition’, in The Present Situation in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Friedrich Stadler (Heidelberg: Springer, 2010), 41–56. 173. Cf. Chimisso, Writing the History of the Mind. 174. On Piaget’s formation, see Laurent Fedi, Piaget et la conscience morale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008) and Jean-Jacques Ducret, Jean Piaget, savant et philosophe. Les années de formation (1907–1924), 2 vols (Genève: Droz, 1984). 175. Cf. Marylène Bennour and Jacques Vonèche, ‘The Historical Context of Piaget’s Ideas’, in The Cambridge Companion to Piaget, ed. Ulrich Müller, Jeremy I. M. Carpendale and Leslie Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 45–63. 176. Jean Piaget, Genetic Epistemology, trans. Eleanor Duckworth (New York: W. W. Norton, [1970] 1971), 77. 177. Cf. ibid., 2. 178. Ibid., 13. 179. Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child, trans. Marjorie Gabain (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, [1932] 1975), 402. 180. Cf. Jean Piaget, The Child’s Conception of Physical Causality, trans. Marjorie Gabain (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, [1927] 1930), 282 and 305. At page 305, one can read: ‘Just as with Aristotle the logic of subject and predicate leads to the substantialism of substance and attribute and to the dynamism of form and matter, so with the child conceptualism leads him to “reify” everything, and consequently to see active and living substances all around him.’ 181. Cf. Jean Piaget, The Child’s Conception of the World, trans. Joan and Andrew Tomlinson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, [1926] 1964), 253–4. But see also Judgment and Reasoning in the Child, 203. 182. Ibid., 15. 183. Cf. Piaget, The Child’s Conception of Physical Causality, 287. 184. Piaget, Introduction à l’épistémologie génétique. Vol. II: La pensée physique, 328. 185. See Alexandre Koyré, La philosophie de Jakob Böhme (Paris: Vrin, 1929) and La philosophie et le problème national en Russie au début du XIXe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1929).

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186. Cf. Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 58–60. On Koyré’s life, see Paola Zambelli, Alexandre Koyré in incognito (Firenze: Olschki, 2016). 187. Cf. Koyré, ‘Sur la pensée de Brunschvicg’, 3–4. Quoted in Geroulanos, An Atheism that is not Humanist Emerges in French Thought, 344, n. 122. 188. Alexandre Koyré [Alexandre Kojève], ‘Review of L’orientation actuelle des sciences’, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 114, no. 9–10 (1931): 315–18. A possible rationale for why Kojève ghostwrote for Koyré has been put forward by Geroulanos (cf. An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought, 335, n. 48), for whom Koyré could attack Brunschvicg due to his credentials as a student and protégé of Gilson, whereas Kojève had no established position. 189. Cf. Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1957), 2. See also Newtonian Studies (London: Chapman & Hall, 1965), 5–6. 190. Cf. Alexandre Koyré, ‘Orientation et projets de recherche’ (1951), in Études d’histoire de la pensée scientifique, 11–15. 191. For Pietro D. Omodeo, Koyré ‘intentionally construed an immaterial and spiritualist alternative to the “dangerous” social and material historiography of science’. Indeed, his ‘intellectualism’, for which ‘science cannot be anything else than a progression of the mind’, ‘mirrors conservative political attitudes’ (Political Epistemology: The Problem of Ideology in Science Studies [Cham: Springer, 2019], 83). 192. Cf. Alexandre Koyré, ‘Perspectives sur l’histoire des sciences’ (1961), in Études d’histoire de la pensée scientifique, 395–9. 193. Cf. Alexandre Koyré, Galileo Studies, trans. John Mepham (Hassocks: Harvester Press, [1939] 1978), 1. 194. See the already mentioned book by Wetshingolo, La nature de la connaissance scientifique. 195. Cf. François Dagognet, ‘Brunschvicg et Bachelard’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 70, no. 1 (1965): 43–54. 196. Cristina Chimisso has argued that Bachelard’s choice of Brunschvicg as his supervisor, together with Rey, who directed his complementary thesis in the history of physics, likely compensated for his anomalous background (cf. Gaston Bachelard, 108). 197. Bachelard, ‘La philosophie de Léon Brunschvicg’, 169–70. 198. Chimisso, Gaston Bachelard, 121. 199. Cf. Dagognet, ‘Brunschvicg et Bachelard’, 53. 200. Cf. Gaston Bachelard, Le rationalisme appliqué, 3rd edn (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, [1949] 1966), 10. 201. Dagognet, ‘Brunschvicg et Bachelard’, 50. 202. Cf. Léon Brunschvicg, ‘Review of Gaston Bachelard, Essai sur la connaissance approché’, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 107 (1929), 98–101. 203. Cf. Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, [1934] 1985), 173. The English translation says ‘open-minded rationalism’, which I consider too colloquial a rendition of the French ‘ouvert’. This need for an open rationalism was also shared by another disciple of Brunschvicg, the Swiss philosopher of mathematics Ferdinand Gonseth (1890–1975). On him, see Eric Emery, Ferdinand Gonseth. Pour une philosophie dialectique ouverte à l’expérience (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 1985).

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2 04. Cf. Gaston Bachelard, ‘Le surrationalisme’ (1936), in L’engagement rationaliste, 7–12. 205. Gaston Bachelard, Essai sur la connaissance approchée, 3rd edn (Paris: Vrin, [1927] 1969), 25. 206. Cf. ibid., 276. 207. Cf. Gaston Bachelard, The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the New Scientific Mind, trans. G. C. Waterston (New York: Orion Press, [1940] 1968), 11. 208. Cf. ibid., 12. 209. On this, see the remarkable book by Xavier Roth, Georges Canguilhem et l’unité de l’expérience: juger et agir (1926–1939) (Paris: Vrin, 2013). 210. Cf. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett and Robert S. Cohen (New York: Zone Books, [1943] 1991), 127: ‘We do not ascribe a human content to vital norms but we do ask ourselves how normativity essential to human consciousness would be explained if it did not in some way exist in embryo in life.’ 211. Cf. Aron, ‘La pensée de M. Léon Brunschvicg. À propos de son dernier ouvrage’, 197–9; Hyppolite, ‘Préface’, vii. 212. Jacques Lautman, ‘Un stoïcien chaleureux’, Revue d’histoire des sciences 53, no. 1 (2000): 31. 213. IC, 81. 214. Georges Canguilhem, ‘On the Normative Character of Philosophical Thought’, in A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem, ed. François Delaporte (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 384. This is an excerpt from a lecture course he gave in 1942–3 on ‘Les normes et le normal’. 215. Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 35. 216. Georges Canguilhem, ‘Le statut épistémologique de la médecine’ (1988), in Études d’histoire de la philosophie des sciences concernant les vivants et la vie, 7th edn (Paris: Vrin, [1968] 2002), 426. 217. Canguilhem found indeed that Bachelard’s epistemology was still too dependent on the old theory of knowledge. Cf. his article ‘Dialectique et philosophie du non chez Gaston Bachelard’, in ibid., 196–210. 218. Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 33. 219. NL, 123. I owe this suggestion to Giuseppe Bianco. 220. Quoted in Henri Mougin, ‘Jean Cavaillès’, La Pensée 7 (1945): 79 . 221. Cf. Gabrielle Ferrières, Jean Cavaillès: un philosophe dans la guerre, 1903–1944 (Paris: Felin, 2003). 222. Cf. Pierre Cassou-Noguès, Un laboratoire philosophique: Cavaillès et l’épistémologie en France (Paris: Vrin, 2017), 8. 223. Cf. Alain Michel, ‘Jean Cavaillès dans l’héritage de Brunschvicg: la philosophie mathématique et les problèmes de l’histoire’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 105, no. 1 (2020): 9–36; Andrea Angelini, ‘Filosofia del concetto e soggettività: Jean Cavaillès tra fenomenologia e dialettica’, Discipline filosofiche 25, no. 2 (2015): 197–215; Pierre Cassou-Noguès, ‘Conscience et réflexivité dans la philosophie mathématique de Cavaillès’, Methodos 1 (2001), http://journals.openedition.org/methodos/55 (accessed 14 October 2020). 224. Cf. Iofrida, ‘Nello specchio di Spinoza’, 193. 225. EPM, 141–2. 226. Cf. Jean-Cavaillès, ‘Méthode axiomatique et formalisme’ (1938), in Œuvres complètes de philosophie des sciences (Paris: Hermann, 1994), 177–80.

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2 27. Cf. Jean Cavaillès, ‘Transfini et continu’ (1947), in ibid., 470. 228. Cf. Ferrières, Jean Cavaillès, 141. 229. Cavaillès, ‘On Logic and the Theory of Science’, 372. 230. Cf. Cassou-Noguès, ‘Conscience et réflexivité dans la philosophie mathématique de Cavaillès’. 231. Cf. their interventions at the Société française de philosophie: Jean Cavaillès and Albert Lautman, ‘La pensée mathématique. Séance du 4 février 1939’, in Œuvres complètes de philosophie des sciences, 583–630; and the letters published by Hourya Bénis-Sinaceur: ‘Lettres inédites de Jean Cavaillès à Albert Lautman’, Revue d’histoire des sciences 40, no. 1 (1987): 117–28. 232. Cf. Albert Lautman, ‘Essay on the Notions of Structure and Existence in Mathematics’ (1937), in Mathematics, Ideas and the Physical Real, ed. Jacques Lautman, trans. Simon B. Duffy (London: Continuum, [2006] 2011), 189. 233. Cf. Catherine Chevalley, ‘Albert Lautman et le souci logique’, Revue d’histoire des sciences 40, no. 1 (1987): 50. 234. Lautman, ‘Essay on the Notions of Structure and Existence in Mathematics’, 187. 235. Ibid., 187–8. 236. Cf. ibid., 188. 237. Albert Lautman, ‘On the Reality Inherent to Mathematical Theories’ (1937), in Mathematics, Ideas and the Physical Real, 28. 238. Cf. Lautman, ‘Essay on the Notions of Structure and Existence in Mathematics’, 137. 239. Albert Lautman, ‘The Axiomatic and the Method of Division’ (1937), in ibid., 41. 240. Fernando Zalamea, ‘Albert Lautman and the Creative Dialectics of Modern Mathematics’, in ibid., xxxiii. 241. Cf. Albert Lautman, ‘New Researches on the Dialectical Structure of Mathematics’ (1939), in Mathematics, Ideas and the Physical Real, 199. The Heideggerian distinction between the ontological and the ontic was also a crucial reference for Lautman, as is evinced by the first chapter of the ‘New Researches’. 242. On this, see Simon B. Duffy, ‘Lautman on Problems as the Conditions of Existence of Solutions’, Angelaki 23, no. 2 (2018): 79–93. 243. Cf. Lautman, ‘New Researches on the Dialectical Structure of Mathematics’, 204. 244. Cf. Lautman, ‘Essay on the Notions of Structure and Existence in Mathematics’, 189. 245. Lautman, ‘New Researches on the Dialectical Structure of Mathematics’, 219. 246. Cf. Cavaillès and Lautman, ‘La pensée mathématique’, 605: ‘It seems to me that Cavaillès, in what he calls mathematical experience, attributes a considerable role to the activity of the mind, determining in time the object of experience. There are therefore no general characteristics that constitute mathematical reality; on the contrary, the latter asserts itself, at each moment in the history of mathematics, as an event that is both necessary and singular’. According to Mario Castellana, on the contrary, Cavaillès is the one who is actually free from any Brunschvicgian speculative influence and more attentive to the autonomy of the sciences, which explains his relative popularity compared to the oblivion into which Lautman has fallen after his death (cf. ‘La philosophie mathématique chez Albert Lautman’, Il Protagora 115 [1978]: 12–24). 247. ‘One can envisage abstractly the Idea of knowing whether relations between abstract notions exist, e.g., the container and the content, but it happens that any effort whatsoever to outline a response to this problem is ipso facto the fashioning of

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mathematical theories’ (Albert Lautman, ‘Letter to Mathematician Maurice Fréchet’ [1939], in Mathematics, Ideas and the Physical Real, 223). Chevalley has seen this as an attempt to reconcile Brunschvicg and Hilbert (cf. ‘Albert Lautman et le souci logique’, 67). 248. Cf. Lautman, ‘Letter to Mathematician Maurice Fréchet’, 224. 249. Quoted in Chevalley, ‘Albert Lautman et le souci logique’, 71. 250. See Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Les Idéalités mathématiques: recherches épistémologiques sur le développement de la théorie des fonctions de variables réelles (Paris: Seuil, 1968). See also the writings gathered in Mathesis, idéalité et historicité, ed. David Wittmann and Jacques Deschamps (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2014). 251. See Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Introduction à l’histoire de la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, [1956] 2006). 252. See Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Phénoménologie et praxis (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1963). Republished in 1976 by Gallimard with the title Introduction à la phénoménologie. 253. See Dominique Desanti, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, with Roger-Pol Droit, La liberté nous aime encore (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2002). 254. See Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, chap. 3. What follows on Desanti is to some extent a condensation of Peden’s extremely informative chapter. 255. Ibid., 106–7. Cf. Desanti, Introduction à l’histoire de la philosophie, 39–40. 256. Cf. Terzi, La philosophie française au miroir de Kant, chap. 11.4. 257. Louis Althusser, ‘Marx dans ses limites’ (1978), in Écrits philosophiques et politiques. Tome I, ed. François Matheron (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1994), 478–9. 258. Althusser, ‘Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists’, 124. 259. Ibid. 260. Louis Althusser, ‘Lenin and Philosophy’ (1968), in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays, 193. 261. Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, 145. 262. Althusser, ‘Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists’, 124. 263. Jacques Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson, trans. Emiliano Battista (London: Continuum, [1974] 2011), 42. Quoted in ibid., 142. 264. Althusser, ‘L’enseignement de la philosophie’, Esprit 22 (1954): 860. I owe these remarks on Althusser’s relation to Brunschvicg to Iofrida, ‘Nello specchio di Spinoza’, 198–201. 265. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations’, in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1990] 2004), 117. 266. Althusser, ‘L’enseignement de la philosophie’, 860. 267. Althusser, ‘Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists’, 111–12. 268. Cf. Louis Althusser, ‘Conjoncture philosophique et recherche théorique marxiste’ (1966), in Écrits philosophiques et politiques. Tome II, ed. François Matheron (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1995), 400. 269. Cf. ibid., 401. 270. Cf. ibid., 403. 271. Cf. Althusser, ‘Lenin and Philosophy’, 172: Indeed, it takes some courage to admit that French philosophy, from Maine de Biran and Cousin to Bergson and Brunschvicg, by way of Ravaisson, Hamelin, Lachelier and Boutroux, can only be salvaged from its own history by the few great minds against whom it set its face, like Comte and Durkheim, or buried

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in oblivion, like Cournot and Couturat; by a few conscientious historians of philosophy, historians of science and epistemologists [like Gueroult, Cavaillès and Bachelard] who worked patiently and silently to educate those to whom in part French philosophy owes its renaissance in the last thirty years. 2 72. Althusser, ‘L’enseignement de la philosophie’, 859. 273. Cf. Althusser, ‘Marx dans ses limites’, 479. 274. MEN, 54. 275. Cf. ibid. 276. Cf. PC, II, 753. 277. Cf. ibid., 756. 278. Cf. Vincent, Élie Halévy, 251. 279. See Georges Gusdorf, Traité de métaphysique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1956), 91– 3, 161–2. 280. Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (LondonNew York: Routledge, 2004), xx. 281. Paul Valéry, ‘Some Fragments from Poe’s Marginalia’ (1927), in Collected Works. Volume 8: Leonardo, Poe, Mallarmé, trans. Malcolm Cowley and James R. Lawler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 182. 282. Alexandre Koyré, ‘Present Trends of French Philosophical Thought’ (1946), Journal of the History of Ideas 59, no. 3 (1998): 534. 283. Nizan, The Watchdogs, 160. 284. Raymond Aron, ‘Preface to the English Edition’, in History and the Dialectic of Violence, x. 285. The plaque was later destroyed and replaced in 2013. 286. IVE, 184. Cf. Jacques Lautman, ‘Restauration de mémoire: Léon Brunschvicg’, L’Archicube 16 (2014): 234. The issue also features the interventions of Bertrand Saint-Sernin, Frédéric Worms and Perrine Simon-Nahum at the inauguration of the new plaque in 2013 (‘Avancer seul, muni de la seule raison’, 234–8; ‘Léon Brunschvicg: le moment critique de la philosophie française au XXe siècle’, 238–43; ‘L’agenda retrouvé’, 243–6 respectively).

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Index a priori Kantian apriorism  31, 35, 40, 64–5, 73, 83–6, 130, 135, 147, 150–1, 157, 159–61, 163, 218–19 historical 120–1 abstract vs. concrete  43, 53, 174–8, 180, 196, 200, 222 Agathon 15–16 Alain (Émile Chartier)  13, 17, 30, 100–1, 155, 196–8, 217–18, 234 n.46 Althusser, Louis  1, 222–6 Amour propre  42 Andler, Charles  16, 69 anthropomorphism 47–8, 55, 149, 161, 181, 208 Aristotle  3, 14, 35, 37–8, 46–51, 53, 56, 62, 66, 70, 73, 77, 79, 84, 86–7, 94–100, 102, 104, 124–6, 128, 138, 141–2, 153, 171, 185, 188, 213 Aron, Raymond  2, 25, 36, 68, 128, 190, 201–3, 217, 227 atheism controversy 181–4 Aubenque, Pierre  128 Bachelard, Gaston 2–4, 29, 33, 80, 127, 135, 157, 159, 162, 192, 212, 215–18, 221, 223, 225 Bacon, Francis  114 Badiou, Alain  1, 229 n.2 Barrès, Maurice  178 Basch, Victor  17 Baur, Christian  119 Bayle, Pierre  60 Beaufret, Jean 191–2 Beltrami, Eugenio  147 Benda, Julien  127, 218 Berger, Gaston  192 Bergson, Henri  2, 5, 8, 12, 16–8, 27–45, 57–8, 70, 75–7, 86, 102, 117, 127, 143–4, 156, 170, 174–6, 179, 185,

188, 191, 195–7, 200, 207, 209–10, 213–14, 216, 227 Bergsonism (as a popular doctrine)  40, 43, 195, 214, 245–6 n.133, 246 n.136 Berl, Emmanuel 204–5 Bernard, Claude 79–80 Berr, Henri  117 Berthelot, Marcellin  133, 165 Berthelot, René  116 Bertrand, Joseph  143 biology biological vs spiritual life  182–3 as a science  81, 83, 85, 213, 217 Blondel, Maurice  8, 16, 179, 192, 208 Blum, Léon  23 Bohr, Niels  166 Boltzmann, Ludwig  153 Bolyai, János  147 Boole, George  138, 142 Borel, Émile  80 Bourdieu, Pierre  18, 198 Boutroux, Émile  13, 16–8, 37, 45, 47, 55–6, 69, 73, 76–8, 80–2, 84–7, 89, 91, 93, 100, 117, 119–21, 125, 148, 165, 174, 181, 212 Boutroux, Pierre  55 Bréhier, Émile  44, 80, 117, 177, 187, 200 Brentano, Franz  101 Bréton, Guillaume  55 Brochard, Victor 13–14, 80, 94, 99, 108 Brunschvicg, Cécile (born Kahn)  14, 22–3, 235 n.56, 287 n.2 Canguilhem, Georges  2–3, 131, 192, 212, 215, 217–18, 223, 225 Cantor, Georg  91, 139–40, 163, 219 Carcopino, Jérôme  209 Cassirer, Ernst  2, 6, 18, 147–8, 154, 158, 163

330 categories (doctrine of)  66, 82, 86–90, 93, 103, 127,163, 262 n.63 Cauchy, Augustin-Louis  85, 136–8, 163 causality  65, 75, 78–9, 83, 91, 129, 152, 159–60, 166 Cavaillès, Jean  2, 18, 202, 218–23, 225, 297 n.246 Christian philosophy  49, 180 Claparède, Édouard  123 Clemenceau, Georges  23 Cohen, Hermann  6, 8, 154, 195 Comte, Auguste 29–30, 42, 78, 80–1, 84, 87, 119, 124–5, 134–5, 137, 143–4, 153, 155, 161, 170, 185, 212, 214 Condorcet (lycée)  11 contingency in history  73, 83–4, 119–21, 131 in physics  36, 84–5, 166 conventions and conventionalism  138, 144, 149–50, 158, 162 conversion (intellectual)  38, 47, 165, 179, 183, 211 Cournot, Antoine A.   61, 80–4, 91, 125, 129, 212 Cousin, Victor  13, 60, 76–8, 81, 119 Couturat, Louis 11–13, 16, 67, 80–1, 139–40 Cresson, André 11–12 crisis  57, 165–6, 172–3, 185, 189 criticism critique of science  80–3, 87–91 in Kant and Fichte  83, 101 Renouvier’s neo-criticism  83–91 and Spinozism in Brunschvicg  67–70, 79, 112, 174, 219 Daladier, Édouard  23 Darlu, Alphonse 10–11, 13–15, 17, 60, 67, 76, 93, 100, 114, 116 Daston, Lorraine  3 de Beauvoir, Simone  1, 25, 196, 199 de Broglie, Louis 164–6 de Caillavet, Arman  11 de Condillac, Étienne B.   74 de Condorcet, Nicolas  121, 226 de Gandillac, Maurice  18 de Maistre, Joseph  81 de Montaigne, Miguel  45, 49, 51–2, 55–6, 70, 100, 176, 185, 192–4

Index Dedekind, Richard  219 Delacroix, Henri  197 Delbos, Victor 15–17, 69, 117, 187–8 Deleuze, Gilles  29, 33, 281 n. 40 Democritus  166 Derrida, Jacques  190, 222, 224 Desanti, Jean-Toussaint  162, 221–4 Descartes, René  3, 4, 6, 30, 34, 37, 44–6, 49–59, 64, 73, 75, 81, 85, 94, 99– 101, 108, 124–6, 141–2, 144, 153, 170–1, 185, 187, 192–6, 199, 225 Descombes, Vincent  128 Desjardins, Paul  10, 20, 23–4, 100 determinism indeterminism 36–7, 91, 165–7 in history  119 in science  60, 77, 79, 82, 84–5, 87–9, 129, 160, 166 dialectic  33, 37, 43, 47–8, 63–4, 68, 105, 264 n.105 Dilthey, Wilhelm  202 Dreyfus (Affair) 7–12, 15, 19, 60, 100, 198 Du Bos, Charles  24 Dufrenne, Mikel  2, 128 Duhem, Pierre  3, 80–2, 277 n.176 Durkheim, Émile  8, 10, 15, 90, 124, 143, 198 Einstein, Albert  6, 17–8, 35, 113, 122, 129, 133, 147, 153–9, 163–4, 166–7, 171, 181, 195, 206 empiricism 34–5, 54, 152, 175 epistemology historical epistemology  1, 3, 212 ‘scientific philosophy’  10, 80–7, 135, 161–2, 267 n.63, 270 n.17 Erdmann, Benno  101 Euclid  147, 150–1, 153, 171 Europe (as an ideal and a culture)  24, 184–90 event  114, 120, 123, 125, 131, 135, 216 evolutionism  12, 28, 80, 150, 153 existentialism  131, 175, 179–80, 183, 187–8, 195–206, 224 Febvre, Lucien  117, 186, 284 n.128 feminism  8, 14, 22–3 Ferry, Jules  23

Index Fichte, Johann G.   4, 17, 44–5, 60, 63, 67–70, 73–5, 78, 80, 90–1, 93, 105, 107, 114, 124, 162, 174–5, 180–1, 185, 189, 204, 208, 210, 226 First World War  10, 16–7, 24–5, 69, 172, 178 Foucault, Michel  1, 3, 212, 222, 224 Fouillée, Alfred  67, 77 France, Anatole  12, 16, 205 freedom  25, 28, 33–4, 36–7, 51, 56, 60, 66, 68–9, 79, 85, 88–9, 91, 111, 129, 169, 172, 182, 196 Frege, Gottlob  101, 138–40 Frossart, Ludovic  23 Gambetta, Léon  23 Gazier, Augustin  56 Gazier, Félix 55–6 Gide, André  24 Gilson, Étienne 49–50, 52, 55, 116, 126–7, 179–80, 187 god 52–3, 55–6, 62, 67, 179, 181 Gonseth, Ferdinand  295, n.203 Gouhier, Henri  192, 287 n.2 Gramsci, Antonio  1 Groethuysen, Bernard  187 Gueroult, Martial  2, 123, 267 n.74 Guesde, Jules  23 Guitton, Jean  29, 76 Gurvitch, Georges  187 Gusdorf, Georges  226 Guterman, Norbert  195 Hacking, Ian  3 Haeckel, Ernst  119 Hakel, Hermann  143 Halévy, Élie 10–14, 17, 20, 24, 29, 62, 94, 192, 203, 205, 226, 233 n.31 Halévy, Ludovic  205, 233 n.31 Hamelin, Octave  50, 89–90, 93, 116, 188, 197, 207 Hamilton, William  102 Hannequin, Arthur 80–1 Hazard, Paul  185, 284 n.128 Hegel, Georg W. F.  17, 20, 35, 53, 58, 60, 68, 70, 73, 84, 90, 105, 118–21, 123, 161, 174–8, 180, 188–89, 196, 214, 224–5, 267 n.74

331

Heidegger, Martin  18, 46, 128, 135, 175–6, 189–91, 203, 214, 297 n.241 Heisenberg, Werner  164, 166–7 Heraclitus  166 Héring, Jean  187 Hermite, Charles  143 Herr, Lucien  19 Hilbert, David  102, 147–8, 214, 219–20, 297 n.247 history as a discipline  15–16, 203 historicism  116 as a ‘laboratory’  4, 16, 43, 87, 115, 121–3, 152, 218 philosophy of  118–19, 130, 190, 203 of science  116–17, 123, 129, 134–5, 162, 191, 214–15, 218 humanism in philosophy  46, 49, 70, 176, 178 and science  163–4, 167–72, 183–4, 186, 189, 225 Hume, David  64, 75, 88, 90, 185, 188 Husserl, Edmund  160, 175, 187–90, 199–200, 214, 219–20, 222, 224 Hyppolite, Jean  2, 51, 192, 217 idealism critical idealism  3, 5–6, 25, 31–3, 65, 68–70, 87, 90, 101, 104–5, 108, 110, 114, 116, 153, 159, 163–4, 167, 172, 178, 192, 194, 225 French idealism  1, 45, 79, 83, 87 German idealism  60, 68 and the real  4, 105, 107–8, 110–14, 123, 130–1, 140, 151–2, 154, 159, 161–3, 166–7, 175, 264 n.121, 275 n.146 Western idealism  74 Idéologie (philosophical current)  74–5 imagination  54, 63, 79, 167, 198, 216 immanence  48, 51, 55, 60–4, 67–8, 79, 114, 135, 145, 168, 172, 174, 179, 194 intellect as collective intelligence  24, 101, 113, 164, 172, 174, 178–9, 183, 194, 208, 226 as a faculty  34, 36–40, 43 intellectualism Bergson’s and Le Roy’s critiques  38, 43

332

Index

in Brunschvicg  19, 32, 39, 60, 80, 83, 91, 102, 175–6, 246 n.133 as dogmatic rationalism/ conceptualism 37–8, 51, 66, 68–9, 74, 84, 90, 102, 104, 125, 153, 159 intelligence, see intellect intersubjectivity  52, 150 intuition in Bergson and Bergsonism  3, 31, 34, 36–40, 43, 75, 102, 144, 146 in mathematics  53, 58, 135, 143–4, 270 n.18, 278–9 n.196 Jacobi, Friedrich H.   60, 68 James, Williams  35, 89, 124, 143, 175 Janet, Paul  14, 76–8, 94 Jankélévitch, Vladimir  2, 13, 29, 192–3, 195, 209–10 Jaspers, Karl 175–6 Jaurès, Jean  12, 19, 23–4 Jewishness 7–8, 11, 13 judgement determinant vs. reflective  66, 79, 101, 104 experimental/scientific 161–2 modalities of 35–6, 93, 103–11, 175 power of  32, 47, 51, 66, 76, 83, 90, 99–103, 111, 145, 148, 173, 203, 213 Kant, Immanuel 4–6, 12, 17, 24–5, 32, 35– 7, 40, 43–5, 60, 63–70, 73–9, 81–91, 100–1, 103–7, 112–13, 118–19, 122, 127, 131, 135, 137–8, 141–3, 145, 147, 150–4, 156–9, 161–2, 165, 167, 174, 185, 188, 195–6, 199–201, 203, 206–8, 216–17, 219–20, 227 neo-Kantianism  1, 5, 195 Kierkegaard, Søren 175–6, 181 Klein, Félix  134, 144, 147–8 Kojève, Alexandre  174, 203, 214 Koyré, Alexandre  3, 117, 174, 187, 192, 214–15, 225, 227 Lachelier, Jules  13, 45, 73–80, 84–8, 91, 93, 95, 98, 100, 105, 131, 181, 207–8 Lagneau, Jules  10, 45, 93, 100–1, 104, 207–8 Lagrange, Joseph-Louis  137, 153 Lalande, André  11, 32, 117, 192, 198, 213

Langevin, Paul 154–6 language 102–4, 140, 152, 172, 179, 185 Laporte, Jean  117 Lautman, Albert  2, 36–37, 192, 220–1, 297 n.246 Lavelle, Louis  207 Le Roy, Édouard  43, 114, 146, 149, 179, 207, 245–6 n.133 Le Senne, René  207 Leconte de Lisle, Charles  12, 205 Lecourt, Dominique  212 Lefebvre, Henri  195, 202 Lemaître, Jules  12, 205 Léon, Xavier 10–11, 55, 67, 69, 155, 180, 205 Leroux, Pierre  60 Lessing, Gotthold E.  60, 68 Levinas, Emmanuel  2, 8, 10, 18, 179, 177–8, 210–1 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien  15, 17–18, 50, 55, 117, 124–5, 128, 136, 174, 184, 213–14 Liard, Louis 80–1, 259 n.98 Lie, Sophus  147 Lippmann, Léontine  12 Littré, Émile  78 Lobachevsky, Nikolai  85, 147 logic Aristotelian 48–9, 53, 66, 84, 94–100, 138, 141 of classes  142, 146, 148 formal and deductivist  57, 102, 105, 142, 144 logicism  3, 135–6, 138, 142–4, 146 panlogism  35, 68, 152, 177 of relations  54, 65, 126, 146–8 Russell’s paradox  139–40, 143 Lorentz, Hendrik  134, 155 Lyon, Georges  13 Maine de Biran  30, 37, 40, 45, 74–5, 77–8, 152, 208, 255 n.15 Malebranche, Nicolas  55, 81, 183 Mallarmé, Stéphane  11 Malraux, André  21 Marcel, Gabriel  170, 175, 179–82, 186, 188, 200, 204, 206, 208, 218, 283 n.85 Maret, Henri  60

Index Maritain, Jacques  116, 126–7, 180, 182, 200, 208, 218 Marx, Karl  20, 23, 205, 225–6 Marxism 20–1, 195, 222–3, 225 mathematics algebra  54, 57, 59, 136–7, 143, 146–7, 220–1 analysis  136–7, 220–1 arithmetic  91, 137, 145–6 geometry  54, 85, 57, 59, 147–8, 150 group theory  135, 147–8, 221 mathematical philosophy, 136, 138, 218–22 meta-geometry  64, 137, 147–51, 220 and physics  38, 86, 151, 158, 161 projective geometry  143 as a rational ideal  39, 47, 53, 59, 137, 171, 190 set theory  139–40 Maxwell, James C.  153, 155 Medieval philosophy  49–50 Mendelssohn, Moses  60 mentality  50, 124–6, 174, 216, 267–8 n.78 Méray, Charles  137 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  1–2, 128–9, 131, 159, 198–201, 222, 224, 227 Mesnard, Pierre  192 metaphysics Aristotelian/Scholastic  68, 94, 126 in Bergson  34–5, 39 finalistic 76–7, 79, 85–6 as a theory of knowledge  67, 104, 109 Metzger, Helène  3, 117, 124 Meyerson, Émile  3, 80, 156–8, 164, 167, 198, 214–16 Mieli, Aldo  117 Milhaud, Gaston  3, 80–1, 117 Mill, John S.  35, 38, 78, 102, 152 modernity 50–3, 56, 70 Monism  34, 108, 112, 135 Morhange, Pierre  195 Mounier, Emmanuel  200 Mouy, Paul  192 Nabert, Jean  2, 207–9 Nathan, Roger  192 Newton, Isaac  28, 31, 53, 64, 66, 83, 86, 113, 122, 140, 142, 153, 160, 164, 167

333

Nietzsche, Friedrich  17, 34, 163, 176, 181, 194, 196–7 Nizan, Paul  1, 170, 197, 199, 201, 203–6, 226–7 objectivity  69, 78, 82–3, 141, 159, 161–3, 165 Ollé-Laprune, Léon  13 ontology 48–9, 54–5, 64, 101, 125, 138, 142, 188 Parodi, Dominique  11, 16–17, 61, 82, 116, 127, 192 Pascal, Blaise  14, 30, 49–50, 55–8, 124, 143, 179, 193–4, 224 Patočka, Jan  187 Paulhan, Jean  198 Peano, Giuseppe  102, 138–9 Péguy, Charles  15 perception  33, 35, 42, 53, 65, 101, 126, 134, 137, 146, 159–60, 164–5, 171, 176–7, 199 Perrin, Jean  155 philosophia perennis  70, 117 philosophy of culture  116, 226 philosophy of nature romantic Naturphilosophie  34, 73 and spiritualism  34, 77–9 vs. philosophy of mind  33–4, 49, 62, 64, 87, 161, 167 physics classic mechanism  85, 136, 153 electrodynamics  134 ,155 Newtonian  53, 83 quantum theory  85, 153, 164, 166–7 rational mechanics  83 relativity  134, 152–64, 167, 171 statistical mechanics  153 thermodynamics  65, 85, 136, 153 Piaget, Jean  2, 36, 41, 50, 123–4, 126–7, 152, 174, 194, 201, 213, 215, 217 Planck, Max  163 Plato  22, 28, 46–51, 53, 73, 100, 102, 105, 125, 141, 179, 185, 188, 193, 197, 208, 221 Poincaré, Henri  3, 16, 43, 81–2, 133–5, 140, 144, 148–51, 155, 157, 162, 183, 220 Politzer, Georges  2, 174, 195–6, 199, 203

334

Index

Poncelet, Jules  143 positivism 12–14, 42, 76, 78, 80–1, 83 practical reason 46–8, 50, 69, 89–90, 177 pragmatism  89, 144, 146, 150, 160, 176, 181 probability 82–3, 166–7 progress in history  9, 163, 173–4, 190, 226 of the mind/consciousness  73, 126, 135–6, 147, 165, 171–3, 177, 179, 184–5, 194, 209 Proust, Marcel  2, 12–13, 24, 41, 205, 244 n.113 psychology as interiority  36, 40–3, 63, 115, 178 philosophical (psychology of intelligence)  49, 102, 135, 152, 154, 161 psychoanalysis  196 psychologism  39, 101, 164, 262 n.50 as a science  196, 213 Pythagoras  48, 91, 137, 144, 154, 166, 173, 185 Ravaisson, Félix  34, 50, 76–80, 98, 182 realism 33–5, 48–50, 55, 82–3, 90–1, 107, 113, 116, 126, 137–8, 140–2, 153, 158–9, 161, 165, 167, 171, 176 reflection as a faculty  38–9, 43–5, 47, 63, 65, 78, 83, 87, 101–2, 104–5, 109, 114–15, 130, 161, 208 French reflective philosophy  13, 45, 61, 70, 74–6, 80–1, 91, 100–1, 105, 116, 134, 206–9, 217 Reichenbach, Hans  167 Reinhold, Karl L.   88, 91 religion 178–9, 181–2, 208–9 Renan, Ernest  12, 169, 205, 270 n. 17 Renouvier, Charles  14, 31, 60, 62, 67, 80, 83, 87–91, 93, 124–5, 127, 137–8, 188, 259 n.99 representation  28, 32, 35, 42–3, 49, 52–4, 62–3, 87–91, 113–14, 125–6, 129, 131, 137, 145, 149–50, 155, 159, 160–2, 167, 171, 177 republicanism  11, 13, 15, 20–3, 51 Revue de métaphysique et de morale 13–14, 17, 50, 60, 69, 100, 117, 205

Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger  14, 117 Rey, Abel  117, 212, 215 Reymond, Arnold  194 Ribot, Théodule  14 Rickert, Heinrich  202 Ricœur, Paul  292 n.140 Riehl, Alois  195 Riemann, Bernhard  147 Rivaud, Albert  117 Robin, Léon  117 Rodier, Louis  117 Rosenberg, Paul  16 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  30 Russell, Bertrand  6, 16, 102, 135–6, 139–43, 147–8, 165 Ruyer, Raymond  127 Sadi Carnot, Nicolas L.   85 Saisset, Émile  60 Sarton, George  117 Sartre, Jean-Paul  1, 2, 175–6, 197–203, 224, 227 Satie, Erik  16 scepticism  51, 68, 137–8, 158, 173 Scheler, Max  187, 199, 236 n.69 Schelling, Friedrich  34, 60, 68, 73, 76–7, 98, 161, 196 Schlanger, Judith  130 Schlick, Moritz  167 Schlumberger, Jean  193 scholastics  22, 50, 53, 55–6, 59, 126 Schulze, Gottlob E.   91 Séailles, Gabriel  14, 94, 100, 111 Second World War  10, 25, 170, 185, 187, 191–5 Segond, Joseph  43, 245–6 n.133 sentiment 3–4, 12, 42, 57–8, 102, 178–9 Shestov, Lev  187 socialism  19, 22, 87 Société française de philosophie  11, 14–15, 31, 56, 69, 117, 187 sociology 81–3, 90, 176, 181 Socrates  42, 45–51, 73, 80, 98–9, 101, 167, 176 Souvarine, Boris  23 space  64, 149, 156, 158–60 Spencer, Herbert  12, 31, 38, 80, 84, 119, 150

Index Spinoza, Baruch  4, 13, 21, 34, 37, 39, 42, 45, 55–6, 58–65, 67–8, 88, 100, 108, 112, 124, 143, 167, 183, 185, 205, 222–3 spiritualism (philosophy) in Brunschvicg 32–3 in Bergson 34–5 old vs. new  37, 73, 76–7 Stirner, Max  194 Strauß, David F.   119 Strauss, Leo  47 Taine, Hippolyte  31, 35, 37–8, 60, 75, 80, 84, 124 Tannery, Jules  136 Thibaudet, Albert  11, 30 Thomas Aquinas  49–50, 55, 70, 124–6 Neo-Thomism 125–6, 180 time 35–6, 65, 156, 158 transcendence  51, 67, 1 truth  51, 57, 59–60, 65, 91, 105, 123, 125–6, 145–8, 150, 160–3, 172, 174 Tylor, Edward B.   136 Union pour l’action morale/Union pour la vérité  10, 20, 23, 100

335

Vaihinger, Hans  195 Valéry, Paul  116, 133, 163, 173, 176, 186–7, 190, 192, 226–7 verification  35, 38, 136, 145, 147, 152, 167 vitalism  34, 176 von Helmholtz, Hermann 83–4, 138 von Leibniz, Gottfried W.   45, 63–4, 67, 74, 85–6, 122, 138, 141–2, 171, 177, 185, 196–7, 252 n.146 von Sigwart, Christoph  101 Wahl, Jean  2, 26, 170, 174–6, 179, 192–3, 198, 204, 281 n.40 Weber, Louis  80 Weber, Max  202, 226 Weierstrass, Karl  136, 143 Weil, Simone  1 Weyl, Hermann  278 n.193 Whitehead, Alfred N.   139, 175 Wolff, Christian  67, 73–4, 118 Xenophon 46–7 Zeller, Eduard  84, 119–20 Zeno of Elea  91

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