Victor Cousin
Victor Cousin was a French philosopher. He was the founder of "eclecticism", a briefly influential school of French philosophy that combined elements of German idealism and Scottish Common Sense Realism. As the administrator of public instruction for over a decade, Cousin also had an important influence on French educational policy.
Biography
Early years
The son of a watchmaker, he was born in Paris, in the Quartier Saint-Antoine. At the age of ten, he was sent to the local grammar school, the Lycée Charlemagne, where he studied until he was eighteen. Lycées, being organically linked to the University of France and its Faculties since their Napoleonic institution, Cousin was "crowned" in the ancient hall of the Sorbonne for a Latin oration he wrote, which earned him a first prize at the concours général, a competition of the best pupils at lycées. The classical training of the lycée strongly disposed him to literature, or éloquence as it was then called. He was already known among his fellow students for his knowledge of Greek. From the lycée, he graduated to the most prestigious of higher education schools, École Normale Supérieure, where Pierre Laromiguière was then lecturing on philosophy.In the second preface to the Fragments philosophiques, in which he candidly states the varied philosophical influences of his life, Cousin speaks of the grateful emotion excited by the memory of the day when he heard Laromiguière for the first time. "That day decided my whole life." Laromiguière taught the philosophy of John Locke and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, happily modified on some points, with a clearness and grace which in appearance at least removed difficulties, and with a charm of spiritual bonhomie which penetrated and subdued." That school has remained ever since the living heart of French philosophy; Henri Bergson, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida are among its past students.
Influences on Cousin's early philosophical thought
Cousin wanted to lecture on philosophy and quickly obtained the position of master of conferences in the school. The second great philosophical impulse of his life was the teaching of Pierre Paul Royer-Collard. This teacher, he tells us, "by the severity of his logic, the gravity and weight of his words, turned me by degrees, and not without resistance, from the beaten path of Condillac into the way which has since become so easy, but which was then painful and unfrequented, that of the Scottish philosophy ." In 1815–1816, Cousin attained the position of suppliant to Royer-Collard in the history of modern philosophy chair of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Paris. Another thinker who influenced him at this early period was Maine de Biran, whom Cousin regarded as the unequaled psychological observer of his time in France.These men strongly influenced Cousin's philosophical thought. To Laromiguière, he attributes the lesson of decomposing thought, even though the reduction of it to sensation was inadequate. Royer-Collard taught him that even sensation is subject to certain internal laws and principles which it does not itself explain, which are superior to analysis and the natural patrimony of the mind. De Biran made a special study of the phenomena of the will. He taught him to distinguish in all cognitions, and especially in the simplest facts of consciousness, the voluntary activity in which our personality is truly revealed. It was through this "triple discipline" that Cousin's philosophical thought was first developed, and that in 1815 he began the public teaching of philosophy in the École Normale and in the faculty of letters.
He then took up the study of German, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and sought to master the Ideas Concerning a Philosophy of Nature of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, which at first greatly attracted him. The influence of Schelling may be observed very markedly in the earlier form of his philosophy. He sympathized with the principle of faith of Jacobi, but regarded it as arbitrary so long as it was not recognized as grounded in reason. In 1817, he went to Germany and met Hegel at Heidelberg. Hegel's Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline appeared the same year, and Cousin had one of the earliest copies. He thought Hegel was not particularly amiable, but the two became friends. The following year, Cousin went to Munich, where he met Schelling for the first time, and spent a month with him and Jacobi, obtaining a deeper insight into the Philosophy of Nature.
Political troubles disrupt career
France's political troubles interfered with his career. In the events of 1814–1815, he took the royalist side. He adopted the views of the party known as doctrinaire, of which Royer-Collard was the philosophical leader. He seems to have gone further and to have approached the extreme Left. Then came a reaction against liberalism, and in 1821–1822, Cousin was deprived of his offices in the faculty of letters and in the École Normale. The École Normale was swept away, and Cousin shared the fate of François Guizot, who was ejected from the chair of history. This enforced abandonment of public teaching was a mixed blessing: he set out for Germany with a view to further philosophical study. While at Berlin in 1824–1825 he was thrown into prison, either on some ill-defined political charge at the instance of the French police, or as a result of an indiscreet conversation. Freed after six months, he remained under suspicion of the French government for three years. It was during this period that he developed what is distinctive in his philosophical doctrine. His eclecticism, his ontology and his philosophy of history were declared in principle and in most of their salient details in the Fragments philosophiques. The preface to the second edition and the third aimed at a vindication of his principles against contemporary criticism. Even the best of his later books, the Philosophie écossaise, the Du vrai, du beau, et du bien, and the Philosophie de Locke, were simply matured revisions of his lectures during the period from 1815 to 1820. The lectures on Locke were first sketched in 1819 and fully developed in the course of 1829.During the seven years when he was prevented from teaching, he produced, besides the Fragments, the edition of the works of Proclus, and the works of René Descartes. He also commenced his Translation of Plato, which occupied his leisure time from 1825 to 1840. One sees in the Fragments very distinctly the fusion of the different philosophical influences by which his opinions were finally matured. For Cousin was as eclectic in thought and habit of mind as he was in philosophical principle and system. It is with the publication of the Fragments of 1826 that the first great widening of his reputation is associated. In 1827, followed the Cours de l'histoire de la philosophie.
Reinstatement at the university
In 1828, Antoine Lefebvre de Vatimesnil, Minister of Public Instruction in Martignac's ministry, recalled Cousin and Guizot to their professorial positions at the university. The three years which followed were the period of Cousin's greatest triumph as a lecturer. His return to the chair was the symbol of the triumph of constitutional ideas and was greeted with enthusiasm. The hall of the Sorbonne was crowded, as the hall of no philosophical teacher in Paris had been since the days of Pierre Abélard. The lecturer's eloquence mingled with speculative exposition, and he possessed a singular power of rhetorical climax. His philosophy showed the generalizing tendency of the French intellect and its logical need for grouping details around central principles.There was a moral elevation in Cousin's spiritual philosophy which touched the hearts of his listeners, and seemed to be the basis for higher development in national literature and art, and even in politics, than the traditional philosophy of France. His lectures produced more ardent disciples than those of any other contemporary professor of philosophy. Judged on his teaching influence, Cousin occupies a foremost place in the rank of professors of philosophy, who like Jacobi, Schelling and Dugald Stewart have united the gifts of speculative, expository and imaginative power. The taste for philosophy—especially its history—was revived in France to an extent unknown since the 17th century.
Influence on others
Among those influenced by Cousin were Edgar Allan Poe, Théodore Jouffroy, Jean Philibert Damiron, Adolphe Garnier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Jules Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, Felix Ravaisson-Mollien, Charles de Rémusat, Orestes Brownson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jules Simon, Paul Janet, Adolphe Franck and Patrick Edward Dove, who dedicated his book The Theory of Human Progression to him—Jouffroy and Damiron were first fellow-followers and then disciples. Jouffroy always kept firm to the early—the French and Scottish—impulses of Cousin's teaching. Cousin continued to lecture for two and a half years after his return to the chair. Sympathizing with the revolution of July, he was at once recognized by the new government as a friend of national liberty. Writing in June 1833, he explains both his philosophical and his political position:"I had the advantage of holding united against me for many years both the sensational and the theological school. In 1830, both schools descended into the arena of politics. The sensational school quite naturally produced the demagogic party, and the theological school became quite as naturally absolutism, safe to borrow from time to time the mask of the demagogue in order to better reach its ends, as in philosophy it is by scepticism that it undertakes to restore theocracy. On the other hand, he who combated any exclusive principle in science was bound to reject also any exclusive principle in the state, and to defend representative government."