Delimitación del problema y objetivos

intuitions intervenes: all the possible developments that I allow myself by saying that I see blue or red, potential intuitions which arise to obscure the Cogito and to include in it a series of relationships of the self with the world, relationships which are not made explicit and which lack complete trans- parence. The Cogito becomes certitude in the presence of certain results. Has it not been said, "The more one thinks, the less certitude one has"? On the contrary, certainty is a prerequisite for analyses and reflections: it is cer- tainty that makes them possible. This experience of truth must be there first: if I call it into question, my search for truth loses all meaning. Thinking is grasping at results for which we do not have all the premises. We should not base actual thought on possible thought, but rather just the opposite. Step by step, for example, my certitude of the color red or of the shape tri- angle becomes part of a system of certainties called the world, and in which I find myself involved from the moment I exist.

We could thus conceive of the abandonment of criterio-logical philos- ophy based on the experience of error, in favor of a philosophy supported by the experience of truth, supported by current certainty. Doubt must not be understood as the resolve to deny as long as possible, but rather as a break with our immediate certitude, destined to make us examine our certitude in depth: an awe rather than a mistrust. The evil genius, as the possibility of error, would still be present, but with a different demeanor: the idea that we are threatened by error as soon as we devote our attention to something our thought cannot fully embrace, instead of being a hypothesis onerous to the point of leaving us only intimacy with ourselves, would reveal, rather, the inti- macy of my thought with itself in its transcendence toward the object. To doubt would be to rejoin one's self at a distance, to anticipate one's self.

We should ask ourselves if the certitude described by Descartes, exam- ined more closely, does not already contain a transcendence of itself. If we look for what lies behind the words of the Cogito, we see that this identity of thought with itself is grasped only in its transcendence. The "I" would no longer be a cautiousness, but a possible success. Likewise, the subject of freedom would be understood less as choice and power to make multiple choices than as choice already made, an exercise following from choices already accomplished.

Such is the direction indicated by the Biranian concept of the identity of thought with willful motility: although we are consciousness and freedom, we have to become them, to manifest them, to make ourselves consciousness and freedom. We must then accept thinking of ourselves as a living antithesis. We could thus transcend the alternative of spiritual interi- orization and psychologism. Brunschvicg writes in this regard,

In the description [that Biran] presents of a fact of feeling, there is some- thing which clearly contradicts the constitutive nature of a fact as fact:

Biran and the Philosophers of the Cogito 75

feeling should be capable of transcending the immediacy of the moment at which it actually takes place in order to attain, beyond the present of the immediate apperception, the virtuality which preceded the data of the inti- mate sense and which is destined to survive it. In other words, and before recognizing that Biran's affirmations are open—I would not even say to truth, but to meaning—it would be necessary to allow for an experience which would assure us the possession both of self and the beyond self, an experience which would seem as if it could at the same time be, both on its own level of transitory manifestation and on a higher level of persistent entity, taking place in time and retaining, nevertheless, the plenitude of time. Such an experience is a psychological monster, whose paternity Biran, understandably, hesitated to claim.1

"Psychological monster"? Perhaps, but we become monsters precisely because we temporalize ourselves. In fact, Biran most often wavered between the terms of these various alternatives. He foresaw, for example, the priority of the actual over the possible, of existence over essence. At least once he criticized Descartes for having questioned whether the world was real instead of seeking to see the world. He foresaw a spatiality of the body prior to objective spatiality, a presence of the outside world within the consciousness of self. He saw that consciousness of self is at the same time consciousness of the body. He correctly stated that although we are con- sciousness, we have to transform this consciousness of ourselves into knowledge of ourselves by means of signs. But all Of this is constantly com- promised. At the same time that he roots the self in a body brought closer to the self, he lapses again into physiologism (second and third parts of the

Essat). He resumes, in dealing with the self, the position of an outside

observer, and he treats the self as something that can be explained. He con- ditions the primitive fact from the outside and comes back to the point of view of an outsider, thus risking falling outside the confines of philosophy and becoming a psychologist.

Biran would have abandoned psychology only if he had discovered cor- poreality, the lived world, and others in this new dimension, instead of dealing merely with a portion of being. Most often he will oppose discipline to discipline, psychology to ontology. Speaking of Malebranche, he will criticize him for having assumed the ontological point of view, which implies that he considers himself a simple psychologist and admits to not engaging in philosophy.

Let's verify all this briefly by reviewing first the texts in which Biran coinpares himself to the philosophers of the Cogito: Descartes, Male- branche, Kant; and then those texts in which he treats the problem in a related fashion in regards to space and time, to the senses, and to signs. These latter texts assume the main problem to be solved and show how Biran conceived of consciousness.