according to Degerando, in the Memoire sur la decomposition de la
pensee40), and he borrowed from them the idea that the will is the condi-
tion of the self. It is incorrect, then, to say that he neglected the thinking subject in favor of the motor subject. This error is due to the fact that Biran first gave an extrinsic and symbolic expose of his thoughts, translating his intuition in psychological terms. On the odier hand, this intuition is expressed in a direct way in the Essai sur les fondements de lapsychologie, where we can read,
If distinct perception is not prior, as I believe it to be, to whatever exer- cise of the will, the will too could not exist before a certain degree of per- ception, and although it is true to say that the thinking being can begin to know only inasmuch as it begins to act and to will, it is nonetheless true, according to ordinary expression, that we cannot want expressly what we do not know in any way.41
In other words, there is mutual implication between will and perception, which is not to say that Biran reduces one to the other. What does this mutual implication mean? That we must recast the theory of perception. Currently, the psychology of form considers the "perceptive sector" and the "motor sector" as elements of some global system. Perceiving is to orient oneself toward a thing, to zero in on it. Acting is to put in motion an inten- tion endowed with a meaning. This requires that knowledge be a "way of behaving in relation to," and that action be integrated with the perceiving self. Biran speaks in the same vein of a case of complete paralysis, in which the individual no longer has the feeling of existing. What he wants us to understand is that there is no difference between moving his body and per- ceiving it. Biran does not want to dismiss consciousness, but rather to rede- fine it.
This is what a page on the experience of freedom shows: "I conclude from this," he writes,
that freedom, considered as the feeling of a power at work, as the intimate feeling of my existence, proves to us its reality. And as Descartes said: I feel myself existing (or I think), therefore I really exist, we will say the same thing with evidence of the same order of primacy: I feel myself free, there- fore I am free. If this feeling of power were to deceive me, if I were still able to doubt, if, at the moment when I determine myself, when I perform an effort, it is another being, another invisible power which is the cause of my determination, which appropriates my effort and executes my will; I could also doubt, when I feel or apperceive my individual existence, whether it is not another being which exists in my place.42
From Malebranche to Maine de Biran 71
Biran only wanted to restore, as this page shows, to the "I think" what he considered its full meaning. Here he speaks as if Descartes accepted with reservation the occasionalist idea, and he affirms the motor capability of the body in terms which are the very ones by which Descartes affirmed the exis- tence of the self. The "I think" is not eliminated, but broadened: if I can call into doubt such and such sensory data relative to the outside world, I must ultimately show how I feel myself situated in this world. Malebranche's cri- tique does not explain to us how we can have the very notion of effective movement: I would not ask a single question about the means of my move- ment if I were not first conscious of moving my body.
Finally, the Essai sur les fondements contains an attempt to introduce the notion of a corporeal spatiality, overcoming the alternative of reflec- tivity and empiricism. There exists, next to exterior space, indefinitely divis- ible, which is the object of sight or of touch, an inner extension of the body, object of immediate apperception. This extension is the locus of all internal impressions:
In considering all the moving parts of the body united in a single mass, sub- ject to the impulse of a single and same will, the subject of the current effort, which distinguishes itself from this composite, which distinguishes itself from that composite which resists by its inertia and obeys the motor capability, this subject will have the apperception of this resisting conti- nuity that is to say of an inner extension, but still without limits or dis- tinction among parts.... In order for the impressions to be localized in the different parts of the interior space of the body itself, these parts must be differentiated or be separated, so to speak, some outside others by the repeated exercise of their own immediate sense. But the general muscular system finds itself naturally divided into several partial systems, which offer as many distinct terms to the motor will. The more these points of division are multiplied, the more the immediate, inner apperception becomes clear and becomes differentiated, the more the individuality or the unity of the permanent subject of the action manifests itself by its very opposition to the plurality and variety of changing terms. By placing oneself outside each of them, the self learns to place them outside each other, to know their common limits and to relate the impressions to this process.45
Correlatively to this spatiality prior to space, Biran introduces a method involving simultaneous analysis of inside and outside:
Our primordial power or the empire of the will over the parts of the body is obviously known, but only in that it is felt and not in that it is repre- sented to the outside as the existence [of] a foreign mechanism could be. In considering only this representation, and considering the exterior move- ment as an effect which the will would be assumed to be the cause of, it is certainly true to say that power cannot be known in the effect and vice