Feeling as a Body: On Maine de Biran’s Anthropological Concept  of Sentiment
10.13125/CH/3901
In this paper I would like to argue that in the context of Maine Bi-ran’s anthropological project – and among many other points of in-terest – one can find a particularly interesting theory of feeling (sen-timent). Since it is impossible, in the short space of this modest arti-cle, to fully deal with such a vast and intricate subject, I will simply try here to formulate the essential terms of this possibility of analy-sis, leaving the more problematic implications, scope and details for further work.
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Luís António Umbelino
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Critical Hermeneutics
Feeling as a Body: On Maine de Biran’s Anthropological Concept of Sentiment
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch
Articles
2019-12-02
2019-12-02
2019-12-02
2019-12-02
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Luís António Umbelino
2019/12/02
10.13125/CH/3901
73
2533-1825
en
84
Feeling as a Body: On Maine de Biran’s Anthropological Concept of Sentiment
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch/article/download/3901/3470
Critical Hermeneutics, special 2 (2019)                  Received: 14/11/2019
Biannual International Journal of Philosophy             Accepted: 14/11/2019
http://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch/index                 Published: 2/12/2019
ISSN 2533-1825 (on line); DOI 10.13125/CH/3901




                              Feeling as a Body:
       On Maine de Biran’s Anthropological Concept
                                   of Sentiment


                             Luís António Umbelino




Abstract
In this paper I would like to argue that in the context of Maine Biran’s
anthropological project – and among many other points of interest –
one can find a particularly interesting theory of feeling (sentiment).
Since it is impossible, in the short space of this modest article, to ful-
ly deal with such a vast and intricate subject, I will simply try here to
formulate the essential terms of this possibility of analysis, leaving
the more problematic implications, scope and details for further work.
Key-words: Maine de Biran, Feeling, Anthropology




1. First remarks
In this paper I would like to argue that in the context of Maine Biran’s
anthropological project - and among many other points of interest -
one can find a particularly interesting theory of feeling (sentiment).
Such a theory, in addition to illustrating the internal coherence of Bi-
ranian thought up to its last developments, still holds today all its in-
terest, as can be confirmed, for example, in comparison to P. Ric-
oeur’s analysis of feeling developed in L’homme faillible (Ricoeur,
1993).
      If we consider Biran’s anthropological project in a global way, it
can be said at the outset that the philosopher definitively removes
Luís António Umbelino, Feeling as a Body




the concept of feeling from the classical horizon of the Treaties of
Passions. It can be argued that, for Biran, feeling seems to play the
role of revealing the various strata of human condition, the various
lives – as Biran puts it – that make our complete human condition.
Since it is impossible, in the short space of this modest article, to ful-
ly deal with such a vast and intricate subject, I will simply formulate
here the essential terms of this possibility of analysis, leaving the
more problematic implications, scope and details for further work.


2. Maine de Biran’s “last philosophy”
In October 1823, Maine de Biran notes in his Journal intime the pro-
ject to return (once again) to the immensity of his unpublished man-
uscripts in order to give them a new coherence and a renewed deep-
ening. The philosopher will die a year later. The results of such a re-
turn to the totality of his work thus remain Biran’s last word on how
to understand the whole of his own philosophical work.
      In the context of this final foray, it is particularly significant that
Biran’s central defining concept for the new coherence discovered in
the maze of his texts is “anthropology”. This is the word that looms
clearly in the title chosen for the book that would spell out the new
internal organization and the ultimate deepening of Biranism: Nou-
veaux essais d’anthropologie ou De la science de l’homme intérieur
(de Biran, 1989: 1–210). Biran justifies this title in his Diary by stat-
ing that he intends to elaborate “the most instructive and most com-
plete treatise on anthropology to date” (de Biran, 1957: 389). In the
text that serves as Avant-propos to the Nouveaux essais he will write
essentially the same: “This title announces that I intend to consider
the totality of man, not just a part or a face of humanity” (de Biran,
1989: 1). It could be said, then, that the “anthropology” is taken by
Biran as the new name for the full scope of the “science of man” (la
Science de l’homme).



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    There is something particularly suggestive about this late project
of organization and development: Biran confirms that a shadow of
thoughtlessness remained present throughout the first stages of his
philosophical project. The philosopher assumes it in these terms: “I
felt that if I adopted the title of psychology according to my first in-
tention, this would not indicate my goal better than that of physiology
[…]” (1989: 1). This is a surprising statement: the psychology of ef-
fort – the basis and central axis of Biranism – would in itself be a par-
tial approach to the human, just as any strictly physiological ap-
proach to the human has also always remained segmental. What,
then, was left to consider of man’s defining condition? What face of
the human remains to be considered beyond the detailed description
of the life of consciousness, beyond the account of the repercussions
suffered under de power of affective life, beyond the portrayal of an
ontological quest?
    Here is Biran’s answer: a third life must be recognized as consti-
tutive of man’s complete way of being, a life that is heralded in the
peculiar “spiritual” experiences in which we seem to suffer the trans-
forming effect of a transcendent, excessive, decentralizing force – a
force that is not our own and seems capable of awakening the most
noble and authentic of the human spirit. In other words, a complete
treatise on anthropology must include the consideration of three de-
fining or constitutive dimensions, strata or lives of the humanity of
man: human life (based on aperceptive consciousness), animal life
(grounded on the fluxes of affectivity) and spiritual life (connected to
moral and religious experiences).


3. Three lives, three circles of feeling
3.1. Human life and the feeling of oneself
In the context of Maine de Biran’s anthropological project, human life
(vie humaine) is defined on the basis of his famous theory of effort.



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Luís António Umbelino, Feeling as a Body




Although the late texts of Biran on this subject provide important de-
tails and transformations in this regard (Azouvi, 1995: 371 ss), it can
be generally stated that in the context of Biranian anthropology hu-
man life is shaped by the presence of the conscious I, that is, the
state of conscium or compos sui that is born out of the inner relation
of effort with its two constitutive elements: the so called hyper-
organic force of will and the continuity of internalized resistance con-
stituted by the own body. More precisely, such an aperceptive I (Moi)
is confirmed, in the persevering exercise of the dual (non-dualistic)
inner and immediate relation of effort, as a cause recovered in its
embodied effect and as an embodied effect enlivened in its voluntary
cause. The I of the biranian volo is thus a dynamism, an act that re-
mains a unity in duality, a non-separated difference made of will and
continuity of internalized resistance (de Biran, 2000: 2).
      The bodily dimension of the aperceptive I is decisive in that self-
awareness is inseparable from the docile inner resistance of the so-
called inner resisting (and non-representable) body. The Cartesian
distinction between res cogitans and “machine-body” is definitively
discarded, precisely because the unity in the duality of effort is
“manifested” by a “feeling”: the feeling of oneself (le sentiment de
soi) – an immediate feeling forged as the relation itself of effort. I feel
myself as an incarnated, consisting I; and only for this reason can I
act upon my body (de Biran, 1989: 10) and feel other things.
      In considering the sentiment de soi as a real, current, and living
feeling I have of myself - and of which only concentrated reflection
will reveal its distinct but not separate terms: the elements of primi-
tive effort – Biran thus identifies a first stratum or circle of feeling.
This layer is defined by Biran in a way that distinguishes his approach
either from the perspectives of a philosophy of understanding (which
always reduces feeling to a remnant that reason must discard), and
from the complacent considerations of a philosophy of feeling (which



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sees feeling as an almost magical source of intuitive knowledge): in
the sentiment de soi Biran finds the enigmatic circumstance that the
very fact of consciousness as self, aperceptive consciousness is an
“identical and constant feeling that we invariably have of our personal
existence” (Ib.).
     To this extent, the sentiment de soi remains, as Biran points out,
a sui generis feeling. This is why; feeling is generally defined by its
“intentional” (Ricoeur, 1959: 261) dimension, that is to say, feeling is
always a feeling about something (love is the feeling of what is lova-
ble, hate the feeling of what is hateful, etc.) and always aims, there-
fore, at felt qualities of objects or people; the Biraninan sentiment de
soi, however, remains a non-intentioned sphere and, in a certain
way, also non-intentional: it is a feeling that accompanies one’s own
aperceptive effort and thus corresponds to the architectural plan of
one’s own primitive certainty of oneself: it is the feeling of being born
to oneself; it is not a feeling of a quality, of a thing, or of another
person. It is the attestation of the primitive fact of apperception itself,
and, in this sense, is what allows all other “feelings” to be unfold. In
this sense it is a condition of possibility: a subjective, conscious, bodi-
ly condition. I know it is I I’m aperceptively certain of, because it
feels.


3.2. Animal life and the feeling of existence
A second life of Maine de Biran’s anthropology is animal life (la vie
animal). Here another stratum or circle of feeling is to be found: the
properly affective layer, that is, the “intentional” dimension by which
the feeling remains at the same time certainty of oneself, self-
awareness of being intimately affected by what can be felt and a feel-
ing of something.
     On the basis of what Biran calls, in the context of his anthropolo-
gy, animal life are somehow the main achievements of his theory of



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Luís António Umbelino, Feeling as a Body




affectivity. This theory is developed from the description of what Bi-
ran calls the “affective or sensitive simplicity system”. Such a system
“comprises all internal or external affections of sensibility without re-
course to will and without the active participation of the self” (de Bi-
ran, 1995: 138). There is, therefore, according to Biran, an “affective
life” under the line of aperceptive conscience, a life that has its own
laws and, as it is impossible to control it by means of consciousness,
often imposes itself to human life in a disturbing way. In other words,
Biran argues that it is part of the human condition not only to know
itself actively, but also to passively suffer the flow of a life operating
in us without us - a life whose origin (blind to consciousness and out-
side of the aperceptive I), although it seems to be rooted in the im-
personal and unpresentable inwardness of the body’s fatum (of the
affective body that resists becoming resistance in effort), “it matters
little that it is in us or outside us” (de Biran, 1988: 92). This is a cru-
cial statement. Indeed, it is not clear where affectivity “begins”. The
affective dimension of the body brings to the heart of human condi-
tion the strangeness and bizarre reverberations of a life that con-
stantly crosses consciousness without our being able to identify its
nature, its causes, its origins. In a sense, it is an unconscious layer of
the humanity of man that is outlined here: not the layer of a psycho-
logical unconscious, because for Biran the pure affections are outside
the aperceptive I (which is the reference of the psychological), but of
a somatic unconscious: there is an anonymous stratum of lived cor-
poreality whose power to anonymously disturb the level of apercep-
tive consciousness can only be confirmed by all sorts of fluctuations
in temperament, that is to say, by the inexplicable alternations in the
way we feel our existence. Here is the new layer of feeling.
      The repercussions of the vie animal (or affective live, vie affec-
tive) take the concrete form of intersubjective attractions and repug-
nance without reason, of inexplicable sympathies and antipathies, of



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hallucinations and wild images that make our temperament, our hu-
mour fluctuate inexplicably (alienation itself has the same source).
This is an important aspect: as we suffer the reverberations of affec-
tive life, we feel exactly at what point being an aperceptive I is not all
that I am. I also can become the melancholic variations of a particu-
lar layer of feeling Biran calls the sentiment d’existence (the feeling of
existence) – a name for the dramatic inner rhythm of human condi-
tion that flows under the layer of the aperceptive I, but constantly
crosses it and deranges it.
     Because I never know the origins or causes of the sentiment
d’existence (de Biran, 1957: 123–124) referred to by Biran, I cannot
know where it begins: in me? Outside me? It doesn’t matter, really: I
feel in the variations of the tone of my existence, something that can
be felt. The sentiment d’existence remains a feeling of “something”
that, in us or outside us, anonymously makes us change. Such a feel-
ing thus corresponds to the certainty that my interior landscapes –
my inner meteorology – are drawn by virtue of pre-predicative, pre-
reflexive, pre-objective links established between the affective body
and the world. In this context, to feel our existence is the inverse of
the act of objectifying: the sentiment d’existence does not objectify,
but simply attests to affinities, to “orbital” influences of others, of
places, of actions over me. This feeling thus becomes the veil that
makes me suffer without reason elective preferences, funeral dis-
gusts, strong sympathy or inescapable repulsions. And this is precise-
ly a key function of feeling: to manifest a co-natural (Ricoeur, 1959:
263) identification between my “inner meteorology” and the world,
the others and the fluxes of life.


4. Spiritual life of religious feeling.
According to Biran, it still remains to consider, as part of a complete
anthropological treatise, a third life. Biran calls it la vie de l’esprit, the



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Luís António Umbelino, Feeling as a Body




life of the spirit. It is as the metaphysical Columbus of the continent
of inner experience that Biran, amazed at a whole host of new moods
plaguing him in old age, wonders about the full meaning of his an-
thropology. Biran feels progressively more fragile at the end of his
life, less free and less secure of any one of his philosophical ideas,
values and opinions. He is aging. And everything seems to be con-
stantly changing around him. He feels like losing depth. And if he
feels it, it must be “human”, it must be anthropological. As a philoso-
pher he thus must question these experiences, these new prevailing
feelings and new ideas that came along them; and as Biran does
that, he finds it increasingly adequate and justified to ask about the
constitutive and defining human need to look for – and to hope for –
an absolute foothold of security.
      Biran finds the pertinence of this search to be confirmed by the
texts of Saint Paul, of Bousset or Fénelon. The project of a complete
anthropology is partly motivated by this authors which Biran, as al-
ways, meditates as a philosopher: it is not the case that a truly com-
plete science of man should include, as a properly human trait, the
spiritual experience of hoping for the grace of Love, of Beauty, of
Peace and serenity, of hoping for the grace of God? This is an im-
portant philosophical question for Maine de Biran: a complete anthro-
pology would remain incomplete without the consideration of what we
would today call religious experience, since religious experience rep-
resents the defining human thirst for a fixed and absolute foothold,
for something grater then us that can deliver us from harm, for
something grand that one can only glimpse in graceful soothing mo-
ments.
      The most curious feature of what Biran understands to be “the
experience of grace” is this: in such an experience, we “tend to be
absorbed in God by the loss of self-feeling and the identification of
self with its real, absolute, unique object” (de Biran, 1989: 322). For



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Biran such “identification” corresponds to a new form of passivity, in
some way symmetrical of the passivity that characterizes affectivity:
in both cases there is an identification or a kind of dissolution of the
aperceptive I under the influence of forces that are independent of
the line of effort and exterior to the forces of conscious thought. In
fact, in both cases we can even talk of a kind of “alienation” of the I,
in the sense that it seems that something other than aperceptive cer-
tainty takes its place as certainty of something else.           It is in this
sense that Biran speaks of “absorption into God”.
    Now, in this context, a third dimension or circle of feeling must
be considered since the experience of grace (Gouhier, 1966: 94) does
not correspond to a divine illumination that would make God more in-
telligible to intelligence, but rather to the idea that something divine -
something sublime, elevated, beautiful, good - becomes more sensi-
tive to the heart (102) (we cannot help thinking here in the platonic
thumos and, also, in another way, of Pascal’s coeur). As we suffer the
influence of something greater then ourselves, we feel its truth.
    But what exactly does this third layer of feeling correspond to?
Consider this hypothesis: perhaps it corresponds to the attestation
(precisely as feeling and through feeling) of the controversial media-
tion (and thus also of the disproportion) of the two impersonal or
passive dimensions of human life which, by virtue of the spirals or
circles of feeling, will somehow intersect, enlarge and decentre the
sentiment de soi. Maybe this is what we are: a sentiment de soi
somehow always touched, crossed and haunted by stratified and
mixed layers of feeling: the layer affectivity, with its blind connec-
tions to bodily, mundane, intersubjective and earthly things (that are
felt by the sentiment d’existence) and the plane of the vie de l’esprit,
with its connection to “divine things” (de Biran, 1989: 322–333)
(which illuminates the “restless heart” of religious feeling).




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Luís António Umbelino, Feeling as a Body




5. Final remarks
It should be noted that the third life of Biran’s anthropology is not
meant to deny the achievements of the theory of effort (de Biran,
1989: 225). Aperceptive consciousness, in a way, is born along the
feeling of being an I; it then has always something to teach feeling,
namely that feeling belongs to the one who knows what to feel is. But
feeling has also something to teach aperceptive conscience: that all
that I suffer in my life is in fact suffered by me, in my life.
      This is the definitive teaching of feeling to aperceptive certainty:
to be self-consciousness is not all human existence is; to be human is
also to give room to what, in us, is not ourselves. Better still: to be
human is to risk being more and being less than oneself: be it by
identification to the orbit of others and the forces of the earth, be it
by losing ourselves in the real, absolute and unique object of grace.




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