Mecanismos de generación y pérdida de calor

branche did, to the amputees' illusion in order to discredit "the subjectivity of feeling."2^ Now, to agree with Malebranche that we feel pain in ampu-

tated limbs "because if the corresponding fQaments of the brain are dis- turbed in the same way as if these parts had been injured, the soul feels a very real pain in these imaginary parts,"24 is not to invoke evidence but to

adopt a theory which forms a system with Cartesian physiology. Today we cannot accept this sensorial theory of the "phantom limb" which replaced the theory that we maintain in us an implicit and global consciousness of the body, an "image of the body" subsisting after amputation. Therefore it is impossible to use it against the perception of the movement of the body itself, unless we condemn, on the pretext of saving philosophy, any devel- opment of effective knowledge. Is the authentic respect of science on the side of a philosophy which is only maintained at its expense? (It is also not a question of subordination, in the relationships between psychology and philosophy, psychology and science. Science is only a part of our experi- ence, and philosophy must be able to concern itself with all experience.)

The real question we can ask is the following: did Biran succeed in being a philosopher, or did he only contrast the exigencies of a psychology with philosophy? Is what he contrasted with Cartesianism a philosophy, a conception of Being, or only a psychology, a simple thematic ordering of an aspect of Being? Biran often gives the impression of leaning toward psy- chologism, for example, when he declares that he is elaborating a philos- ophy of touch and not of sight: this is an imprudent statement, because it is not a question of conceiving of the whole being as tactile, and the con- sciousness of vision is not challenged by the primitive fact. If Biran often did not measure up to philosophy, it is not for having questioned the evidence of the idea (because this inquiry is philosophy itself), but, on the contrary, for not having questioned Being itself.

Let us now examine the introduction to the Essai sur les fondements de

la psychologie in order to discover what corresponds to the problem which

we are posing. (We will consider other texts later on.)

Let us first take a look at the role played by the notion of fact in this work. Biran criticizes Condillac for taking one term as his point of depar- ture—sensation—which does not yet possess this characteristic:

Sensation, such as Condillac and Bonnet both viewed it, each from his own point of view, when they wanted to situate themselves at the origin of knowledge, simple sensation, I say, is not yet a fact.25

Biran, for his part, starts with thought, and in this sense he is Cartesian. (There are abstractions derived from the adjective and abstractions "derived from verbs"; the former have only a conventional value; the latter "express action with intense power"26 and thought is of this nature, different from

From Malebranche to Maine de Biran 67

sensation.) But beginning with this notion of fact, his position deviates from Descartes's position.

"All that which exists for us, all that we can perceive outside ourselves, feel in ourselves, conceive of in our ideas, is only given to us as fact."27 And,

Biran adds,

There is a fact for us only to the degree that we have the feeling of our indi- vidual existence and the feeling of something, object or modification, which confirms this existence and is distinct or separated from it. Without this feeling of individual existence that we refer to in psychology as conscious-

ness (conscium sui, compos sui), there is no fact that we can say is known,

no knowledge of any sort: for a fact is nothing if it is not known, that is to say, if there is not an individual and permanent subject who knows.28

There is, then, a fact only for a witness. The fact contains a reference to someone to whom it occurs. It is this notion, and not immediately con- sciousness, that Biran takes for his point of departure. Consciousness is an "existence For Itself" (a notion that Biran rediscovers free from any Hegelian influence). Biran does not begin with a being which exhausts itself in the consciousness that it has of itself, but with a being which is in the process of becoming conscious that it exists, struggling for this consciousness against a pre-existing opaqueness, with a being which seeks to "become self." In the expression "fact of consciousness," the word fact (in the singular) is no longer understood the way psychologists understand it (as a world event). It denotes essential "facticity" of consciousness, a synthesis of inte- riority and exteriority.

This fact translates a relationship:

Every fact implies necessarily with it a relationship between two terms or two elements which are thus given in connection, without any one of these terms being able to be conceived in itself separately. Thus the self can know itself only in an immediate relationship with some impression which modifies it, and, reciprocally, the object or whatever the mode can be conceived only under the relationship to the subject which perceives or which feels. This is the origin of the very expressive title of primitive

duality.2?

This duality is irreducible: "any evocation of the two elements to unity is absurd and implies a contradiction."30 And Biran writes a little further on in

regards to categories,

Will we say that they are innate in the sense in which, as Leibniz says, the thinking subject is innate to itself? We will respond that this subject itself is not innate, but it is constituted as such in a fact or primitive relationship.31