Ejercicios de lectoescritura y lectura en voz alta

exert. But, my son, is it not obvious that there is some kind of relationship between what you call effort and the determination of nerve impulses in the nerve fibers which allow for the movements you wish to perform?4

And Biran first responds, "Here Malebranche confuses the psychological and ontological points of view."5 Our ignorance would therefore bear on the

ontological level, not on the psychological level, which would be clearly dissociated from the first. Now, several lines further in the text, Biran affirms that my motor power is not only certain for me, but in itself and even for God:

But does it follow from what / am or apperceive myself to be the cause of, that I am truly an absolute, independent cause? Here my inner feeling can not con- firm anything to me since it involves precisely knowing what is in the absolute, independently of my inner feeling, independently of the existing and self- apperceiving self. But why is it important for me to know it and why inquire about it, if once the self is removed—there is no longer anything, no will, no cause, no existence perceived as mine, nor conceived of as foreign?... It is when I strip myself to the essentials or when I want to know whether what is me or true in me and for me, is still true without me and outside me, it is only then that I imagine and that I can ever progress to the point of contradicting the primary conditions of my existence or of denying what constitutes it. I have no need, then, of knowing the relationship of my will to nerve impulses or nerve fibers in order to be inwardly assured that my effort is inefficacious: as soon as it is so for me or in my intimate sense, it is already absolutely ineffi- cacious in itself and in the eyes of God; this is what creates the responsibility of the moral agent.6

Therefore, what appears to us is. What we would conceive of as being in itself could not be so outside the psychological domain, which is coextensive with being. We must therefore reestablish ontology in its legitimate domain, that of the primitive fact. In this regard, Biran is moving toward an original notion of the Cogito, beyond Cartesianism.

If we attempt to follow the practice of this new Cogito in Biran's works, what do we find?

First, a new conception of the "body for me" and, in particular, an orig- inal notion of the senses. My subjective life, in its previous state of "unre- flection," comprises senses which define what Biran refers to as "animality." Biran attempted to describe what the exercise of the senses prior to move- ment, prior to the person, might be. He speaks of a "passive immediate intu- ition,"7 of states in which "the weakness of motor action excludes the apper-

ceptive characteristic."8 (Therefore, it does not exclude it completely.) His

description does not work without a certain amount of mythology: sensation then appears to him "to come ready made from the outside"9 as if the rela-

Biran and the Philosophers of the Cogito (Conclusion) 81

tionship to the object were a property of the impression itself. He points out a sort of passive coordination, in space and in time, between these impres- sions. He is uncertain, moreover, about the reality of this prepersonal apper- ception, of this primitive space and time: what is an apperception which is not apperceived? Yet, he discerns correctly the problem such intuitions raise: do they surround the self? "We could say," he responds to Royer-Collard, "that the self appears as enveloped in sensations from which it distinguishes itself only later.... But this is an hypothesis and in no way a fact of intimate sense."10 A Cartesian would say that the construct, the hypothesis, is this idea

of a sensibility without the "I." For Biran, on the other hand, the hypothesis is to introduce the self, this "outside spectator," into the consciousness that this sensibility has of itself. For Biran, it would be erroneous to say, as Descartes does, "it is the soul which sees, and not the eye."11

He continues by describing a primitive space understood by "contu- ition,"12 a primitive time of which he says,

There is in hearing, as in vision when it is still passive .. ., an organic dis- tinction of different tones which follow one another in time or follow one another harmonically without becoming confused;13

in short, a whole "preworld" that one could make disappear by thinking about it, and about which we cannot ask whether it is of the order of object or of subject. This neutral zone is the "phenomenal reality"14

During this entire description, Biran starts to convince us, then disap- points us. He remains very close to empiricism: for him, the "intimate sense" is limited to making statements based on evidence. He scarcely con- siders the objections that could be raised, and the outcomes do not corre- spond to the promises. Nonetheless, we find in his works intermittent, but genuine, intuitions. He is looking for a path between empiricism and intel- lectualism, precisely in regard to reflection. He would like to show how reflection is carried out by certain mechanisms of a corporeal nature, those of hearing, for example, without being the pure result of them.

In the fourth section of part two of the Essai, chapter 1 (JDe Vorigine

de la reflexion), Biran wonders what is the origin of the fundamental refer-

ences of thought to the object and to the self. These universal traits cannot be ascribed to the sensory organ. How are they connected to one another? By reflection which makes us grasp the underlying framework. Now con- sciousness, influenced by habit, continually forgets its own origin. In order for reflection to be possible and for the senses to discover their proper activity, a corporeal mechanism must intervene, a mechanism which we cannot use without our being aware of it. Now the pair hearing—phonation is an example of this. Here the motor activity perceives itself without becoming lost in its product. "This is the living harp that plucks its own