In this article, I argue that in his 1838 De l'habitude, Félix Ravaisson uses the analysis of habit to defend a Leibnizian monadism. Recent commentators have failed to appreciate this because they read Ravaisson as a typically post-Kantian philosopher, and underemphasize the distinct context in which he developed his work. I explore three key claims made by interpreters who argue that Ravaisson should be read as a Schellingian, and show [i] that these claims are incompatible with the text of De l'habitude and [ii] how they have obscured from view the monadism at the heart of this work. This article is divided into two sections. First, I explain the importance of Victor Cousin and Maine de Biran for the development of nineteenth-century French philosophy. Second, I argue that to understand the structure of De l'habitude, it should be read as a critique of Cousin's philosophical method and a demonstration of the superiority of Biran's Leibniz-inspired introspective method. Like Biran, Ravaisson believes that the introspective method leads to a pluralist metaphysics of forces, but he uses the introspective analysis of habit to go further back to Leibniz than Biran does and develops a pluralist substance metaphysics.
Nineteenth-century philosophy, especially nineteenth-century European philosophy, is commonly referred to as ‘post-Kantian’. This label emphasizes the revolutionary impact Kant's critical work had on the practice of philosophy and that the problems most frequently engaged with during this time were those left by Kant's Critiques, much in the same way as the problems dealt with in the early modern period were shaped by Descartes. One of the key assumptions of this story of philosophy's historical progress is that rationalist metaphysics, of the kind that Leibniz's monadology represents par excellence, was no longer legitimately pursuable. Vincenzo de Risi sums up this view neatly:
After [Kant], in fact, no thinker seems to me to have effectively discussed Leibniz's metaphysics as a still active inspiration in cultural terms … All the following revivals of Leibniz's thought, from formal logic to Husserl's monads, and beyond, have been local interpretations or antiquarian suggestions. For all of them, monadology irretrievably belongs to the past, and is no longer an enemy to fight, nor an ideal to pursue.
(Geometry and Monadology, xvii)
Risi does not argue for this view because there is no need; it seems so obviously true. It is a well-entrenched historical belief. However, the aim of this article is to show that the practice of philosophy in France during the nineteenth century problematizes this neat view for a number of interesting historical and philosophical reasons. Kant's critical philosophy was not received favourably by France's philosophical community until near the very end of the century and the French philosopher who did the most to promote Kant's views, Charles Renouvier (1815–1903), was not only marginalized, but also believed that the critical philosophy could only be defended once modified by a form of Leibnizianism. Accordingly, he referred to his version of the critical philosophy as a Nouvelle monadologie. However, in this article, for three reasons, I focus on the case of Félix Ravaisson (1813–1900). First, Ravaisson defends a classical (non-critical) form of monadological metaphysics. Second, recent attempts to interpret Ravaisson's metaphysics have failed to recognize this because they have been misled into thinking he is a ‘typically post-Kantian thinker’ (Carlisle, On Habit, 61). And, third, although few in number, Ravaisson's works had an enormous influence over the development of French philosophical thought. As Parodi (La Philosophie contemporaine en France, 29) states, Ravaisson's major works exerted ‘an incontestable authority’ and became the ‘breviaries of every young philosopher’. Through Ravaisson's works, therefore, Leibnizian ideas became deeply engrained into the philosophical culture. The clearest example of this comes from his 1867 La Philosophie en France au XIXe siècle. The book itself was a government-funded report commissioned to celebrate the end of Napoleon III's ten-year suspension of the agrégation. However, the final chapter is a kind of manifesto, a plea for a ‘spiritualist positivism’ whose flourishing would be best ensured by following the principles of a form of Leibnizian monadism. Leibniz's monadism, Ravaisson argued, was an ideal to pursue. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this chapter since the Leibnizian ideas are so explicit, and it became essential reading for all philosophy students taking the agrégation. Bergson explains this well:
No analysis can give an idea of these admirable pages. Twenty generations have learned them by heart. They have counted for a great deal in the influence exercised by the Rapport on philosophy as studied in the universities, an influence whose precise limits cannot be determined, nor whose depth be plumbed, nor whose nature be exactly described, any more than one can convey the inexpressible colouring which a great enthusiasm of early youth sometimes diffuses over the whole life of man … The Rapport of 1867 gave rise to a change of orientation in philosophy in the university.
(‘The Life and Works of Ravaisson’, 284, 290)
In this article, however, I will not discuss the 1867 report,2 but focus instead on his similarly influential 1838 work De l'habitude.3 Although it was written almost thirty years before the report, I argue that despite the trend in the recent secondary literature to overemphasize the influence of Schelling and to present a misleadingly naturalist reading of the text, a correct understanding of De l'habitude must recognize that a form of Leibnizian monadism underlies it also.4
In order to develop my argument, in the first section of this article I discuss the context of De l'habitude. I show that the circumstances surrounding the writing of this work led him to conceal the extent to which it is a powerful critique of the Scottish Common Sense philosophers’ philosophical method as adopted also by Victor Cousin (1792–1867). At the time of writing, Cousin's control over the practice of philosophy in France was such that to make this critique explicit would have been professional suicide. This, I argue, is one of the key reasons why this work is often misread. Although De l'habitude is enigmatic, I show that once read alongside his Philosophie contemporaine, published two years later, the structure of the argument is greatly clarified. As this latter text was written once Ravaisson had given up on a career in academic philosophy, he used the opportunity of its publication to make both the negative and positive arguments in De l'habitude clear. The positive argument, I argue, is a plea for the return to the introspective method developed by Maine de Biran (1766–1824); a method that both Biran and Ravaisson believed was inaugurated by Leibniz. In the second section, via a comparative textual analysis of De l'habitude and Philosophie contemporaine, I present three key claims made in the Schelling-influenced interpretations of the former work and argue that all of them are inconsistent with the text itself. In contrast, I show that Ravaisson's defence of Biran's introspective method leads him to defend, like Biran himself, a Leibnizian pluralistic metaphysics of forces. Unlike Biran, however, he believes this method also shows us that a true metaphysics must resurrect not just a theory of forces, but a Leibnizian theory of substances too. One of the astonishing results of the introspective analysis of habit is, therefore, that it leads us to a monadological metaphysics.
In 1839 Ravaisson wrote to his friend Edgar Quinet that he intended to ‘plough the abandoned field of metaphysics’ (‘Lettres de Ravaisson, Quinet et Schelling’, 500). When first considered, the claim that metaphysics had at this time been abandoned by French philosophy seems questionable. From 1830 the eclecticism of Victor Cousin – the philosopher of the restoration – had come to dominate the French philosophical scene and his philosophy had a metaphysical Absolute at its heart. So what did Ravaisson mean? Ravaisson's implicit claim is that Cousin's metaphysics is not worthy of the name. He believed that Cousin unduly restricted himself to following the philosophical method of the Scottish common sense school. Their method, Ravaisson insists, is the Baconian method of induction and observation, which is entirely unsuitable for enquiry into being qua being. In order to plough the abandoned field of metaphysics, Ravaisson believed it was necessary to turn away from this method and follow instead the introspective method of his recent French ancestor Maine de Biran. I want to show that understanding this point is crucial for properly understanding the structure of De l'habitude’s argument. To make this clear, in this section I introduce some of Cousin's and Biran's key ideas and explain their importance for French philosophy at this time.5 This will form the essential context for the interpretive argument I develop in Section 2.
Although Cousin did not leave behind a particularly impressive philosophical system of his own, his importance for the development of French philosophy during the nineteenth century should not be underestimated. Between 1830 and 1848 he gained almost complete control over the direction of France's philosophical education. He had, as Jules Simon reports first-hand, a ‘despotic authority’ of a kind that Hegel, Leibniz, or Descartes could never have dreamed (Victor Cousin, 142). Cousin referred to the instructors of philosophy as his ‘regiment’ and they formed a regiment over which he had ‘every hold’:
He knew the name and the record of each of his soldiers … If one of these teachers published a review, an edition, an article of any moment, and especially if he published a book, Cousin at once read it … If the performance was worthless, the man was lost; if there was any trace of talent in it, Cousin became at once his tyrant and his protector. From that time such a person knew no rest until he had shown all that was in him, and had, in return, been provided with a position worthy of his talent. In one way or another there was not a teacher … of philosophy – whom Cousin did not know by heart.
(Simon, Victor Cousin, 116)
It is clear then that because of this influence his verdict regarding Kant's philosophy would be of great importance for its reception and his verdict was not good.6 He claimed that Kant's restriction of ‘universal principles’ to ‘impressions of sensibility’ made objective knowledge solely dependent on the individual subject and when combined with the unknowability of external objects led to the worst excesses of scepticism. Although Cousin marketed himself as having exceptional insight into Kant's thought and wrote books on it, he clearly did not. To some degree this is unsurprising, Kant's philosophy is extremely difficult and Cousin primarily studied a poor Latin translation. Nevertheless, this does show that it is important to keep in mind that we should be careful not to assume that all philosophers in Europe were dealing with the same problems from the same orthodox background.
Cousin believed that the consequences of empiricist, materialist, and critical philosophies of the eighteenth century had been disastrous. The ‘age of criticism and destructions’ had ‘let loose tempests’. The aim of the nineteenth, he claimed, should be ‘intelligent restorations’ (Lectures on the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, 31). Such restorations would bring together the ideals of the French revolution, namely freedom and equality, with principles essential for the stability of the nation, such as a belief in immutable principles of truth, beauty, and goodness. To defend such principles, and their existence as universal and necessary, we cannot settle at the individual, but we must argue for the existence of a ground that is as universal and necessary as they are that acts as the source of both these principles and of finite being themselves. This is the ground he refers to as the ‘Absolute’. Although the use of this term is likely to lead the reader to think of the metaphysical systems of Schelling and Hegel, the philosopher whom Cousin draws on most explicitly and quotes from is in fact Leibniz (see Lectures on the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, 98–9 and Leibniz's NE 157, 158, and T§189). The Absolute is, he claims, the theory of the realm of ideas, introduced by Plato, but crowned and completed by Leibniz's theory of God.
Cousin referred to his philosophy as ‘spiritualist’ but his was not the only form of spiritualism on the market. Biran had also developed a form of spiritualist philosophy, but, unfortunately, few of Biran's writings were published during his lifetime and, therefore, the importance of his alternative was only known by a select few. This was in no small part due to Cousin. He inherited Biran's writings after his death and despite the riches reputed to be contained within these manuscripts, delayed publication for ten years. Even then he published at first only one volume; a volume he claimed (falsely) to contain Biran's thought in its entirety (FP III 63). Vermeren (‘Les aventures de la force active en France’, 159) offers two reasons for this delay. First, Cousin wanted to retain the glory of being the philosopher who first overturned eighteenth-century sensualism; and, second, he feared that Biran's spiritualism would contest the hegemony of his own. As I show below, Cousin was right to be afraid. It was exactly by appropriating Biran's method of philosophizing that Ravaisson successfully overthrew Cousin's philosophy.
The writings of Biran available to Ravaisson provide only a partial picture of his thought, and they come from very distinct periods of his philosophical development. In fact, part of Ravaisson's originality comes from his ahistorical treatment of Biran's work and the way he consequently brought the insights from the distinct periods together into a systematic metaphysics of forces. The two texts that I believe were especially important for Ravaisson – Influence de l'habitude sur la faculté de penser (1799) and Exposition de la doctrine philosophique de Leibniz 7 (1819) – exemplify this clearly. In the first, despite its impressive originality, Biran's empiricist and ideological lineage is clear and he maintains that we can know ‘nothing of the nature of forces’ (The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, 52). Nevertheless, he still insists that reflection on the principle of habit reveals an active psychological principle of voluntary attention. For Biran, there is always a mutual correspondence between the active and the passive in our impressions. Yet when activity dominates, we perceive, while when passivity dominates, we merely sense. The law of habit is that with repetition our perceptions become clearer and subtler, but our sensations, on the contrary, degenerate: ‘the less we feel, the more we perceive’ (The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, 87). From this ‘double-law’ of habit, Biran concludes that there must be two distinct perceptual faculties, one active and the other passive, since if we attempted to reduce our explanation to one alone, there should be no reason for why certain impressions degenerate and others increase in clarity. In later works Biran will argue that the active psychological principle is a ‘hyper-organic’ force distinct from physiological workings (see OMB VII 169–70). As we shall see below, this ‘double law’ of habit and the conclusion that its operation requires a hyper-organic cause is crucial for Ravaisson (see RH 37 and 49).
By the time of the (1819) Exposition there had been a great transformation in Biran's interests and he gained a confidence to engage in metaphysical speculation that he did not have twenty years earlier. He postulates the existence of a ‘universal and absolute spiritualism’ and a ‘science of forces’. The shift in Biran's views came from his lengthy engagement with Leibniz's philosophy. Despite the fact that Leibniz is sometimes regarded as one of the clearest examples of a ‘rationalist’ philosopher, it is in his works that Biran believed we could find the key to the reformation and improvement of empiricism. The more he studied Leibniz's philosophy, the more he believed could be gained from the empiricist point of view if experience is understood in its broadest possible sense.
Biran believed that Descartes should be regarded as the true father of metaphysics, since he made the testimony of inner sense the generative principle of all knowledge (OMB VI 17–18). Even so, he argued that Cartesianism is fundamentally flawed insofar as it ultimately leads to pantheism. This is because created Cartesian substances are merely passive. While Descartes is explicit about this in the case of extended substance – the only qualities that belong to its essence are extension, flexibility, and changeability (AT VII 31: CSM II 20) – it follows from his claim that the distinction between creation and preservation is only ‘conceptual’ that, ultimately, thinking substance must be merely passive too. If the same force initially needed to create the world (the infinite force of God) is required at every moment to preserve it (AT VII 48–9: CSM II 33), then whenever it feels as though I voluntarily will an action, it is not the I that wills, but God. I have the desire (itself caused by God), but I am not responsible for the causal action. Biran claims that it is ‘logically certain that all effects are eminently or formally enclosed in their cause’ (OMB XI-I 142), so if God is the sole cause, it follows that every created being is enclosed in God, and there is no real distinction between God and nature. Leibniz's great merit, Biran insists, was to be the only early modern philosopher able to present a true metaphysics of personality in which individuality and freedom need not be undermined by the power of God:
To what did Leibniz grasp onto to keep himself from this dangerous precipice, which, since the origin of philosophy, has led the boldest and most profound speculators towards the empty concept of the great whole, nothingness deified, the devouring abyss that comes to absorb all individual existence? We must say it, the author of the system of monads was saved from this disastrous aberration only by the nature or the proper character of the principle on which he based his system; a principle truly one and individual – the primitive fact of the existence of the I, before having acquired a unique and absolute notion. A system that multiplied or divided the living forces in accordance with the intelligible elements or atoms of nature, would, it seems, prevent or dissipate forever those sad and disastrous illusions of Spinozism, too favoured by Descartes's principle.
(OMB XI-I 140)
Although, on the final analysis, all of Descartes's created substances were ultimately passive, for Leibniz they are all active. Biran saw Leibniz's philosophy as providing a true metaphysics of forces. For Leibniz, rather than substance being a placeholder for forces in which they inhere, force constitutes substance. While Descartes ‘constructed thought with elements borrowed from a passive nature’, Leibniz ‘constructed nature with elements taken from the activity of the I’ (OMDB VIII 223). Biran places a great deal of importance on a 1694 text called ‘On the Corrections of Metaphysics and the Concept of Substance’ (G IV 468–70: L 432–4). Leibniz there claims that active force
contains a certain act or entelechy and is thus midway between the faculty of acting and the act itself and involves a conatus. It is thus carried into action by itself and needs no help but only the removal of an impediment.
This text is so important because in it, as well as in texts like On Nature Itself (see G IV 510: AG 161), Leibniz appears to establish his conception of active force from introspection. We understand the nature of force through a posteriori reflection on our self-activity. Furthermore, he then applies the principle of uniformity. This states, when Leibniz makes it explicit, that ‘all the time and everywhere everything's the same as here’ (G III 343: WFNS 220–1). By reflection on our own activity and then by analogy, therefore, we are not only able to discover truths about the nature of created substances, but even about the ultimate substance: God.8 Biran does of course recognize that there is a clear rationalist side to Leibniz's work, but he argues that this side is in fact incompatible with the empiricist side. When Leibniz argues from introspection we arrive at a dynamic metaphysics of forces capable of providing a real ground for freedom and individuality, but when Leibniz argues from a priori reason he ends up with an all-encompassing God which subsumes all individuality just as surely as the God of Descartes, Malebranche, and Spinoza. Therefore, the empiricist side provides us with a foundation for the true science of the human mind, and the rationalist side must be rejected. This division of Leibniz's philosophy into rationalist and empiricist sides was hugely important for the French Leibniz renaissance that followed, and the influence of Biran's empiricist Leibnizianism can be seen in, amongst many others, the works of Renouvier, Émile Boutroux, Émile Boirac, and, most importantly for this article, Ravaisson. The two-step process of introspection and analogy is the method Ravaisson will use for his metaphysical argument for monads in De l'habitude.
In this section, I argue that in De l'habitude, Ravaisson uses the Biranian introspective method to argue, via an analysis of habit, for a pluralist metaphysics strongly influenced by Leibniz's metaphysics of monads. However, the philosopher whose metaphysics commentators most frequently align Ravaisson's with is not Leibniz, but Schelling. The thought that we should understand Ravaisson's philosophy in terms of Schelling's influence has been the subject of debate in the French literature,9 but it has been consistently adhered to in the Anglo-American commentaries on Ravaisson. Although I do not deny that Schelling had some influence on his work, the attempt to interpret Ravaisson as a Schellingian has been a constant source for the misinterpretation of De l'habitude. I shall now address three particularly important examples to illustrate this. I focus on these because I believe they have played a significant role in obscuring from view the monadism at the heart of Ravaisson's philosophy. I will refer to them as ‘Schelling-Influenced Interpretation’ (SII): 1–3:
SII1: George Boas (1929, 16) suggests that Ravaisson turned Biran's theory of Will into ‘a sort of Schellingian Absolute’.
SII2: Carlisle and Sinclair (‘Commentary on Of Habit’, 84) claim that for Ravaisson, ‘[t]he development of habit, along with that of life and nature emerges from the inorganic’.
SII3: Sinclair (Ravaisson and the Force of Habit, 8) argues that ‘[r]eflection on motor habits allows Ravaissson in a manner that is doubtless influenced by … Schelling … to conceive freedom not as opposed to nature, but rather as inhabiting or animating the natural body’.10
All three of these claims rely on an assumption that understanding Schelling, who is not cited once in De l'habitude itself, is the key to understanding it. However, I shall show that all three are incompatible with the text itself. It is true that there are many interpretive difficulties involved in reading De l'habitude. Although it is a short text (it takes up less than 30 pages in the most recent edition), it deals with a very broad range of philosophical issues. Crucially, it was Ravaisson's doctoral thesis. As we may understand given Cousin's despotic control, it was necessary for him to ensure that any directly critical points concerning the despot's own work were sufficiently hidden. However, I argue that such critical points are certainly to be found within it, but to identify them De l'habitude should be read alongside his 1840 Philosophie contemporaine. This latter text was published two years later, therefore after he had been awarded his doctorate. By this time he had taken up the position of Inspecteur général des bibliothèques and no longer had any desire to be a part of Cousin's university system. Although ostensibly Philosophie contemporaine is an article on a French translation of some of William's Hamilton's works, Ravaisson uses the opportunity to criticize Cousin's method, to reproach Cousin for failing to understand the importance of Biran's method, and to explain some of his key arguments first expressed, although less explicitly, in De l'habitude. One important aspect of De l'habitude that becomes clear when read alongside Philosophie contemporaine is the distinct aims of its two parts.
De l'habitude is split into two main parts and the second is much longer than the first. Gabriel Madinier (Conscience et mouvement) has helpfully referred to these as the ‘objective analysis’ and the ‘subjective analysis', respectively (hereafter OA and SA). According to my reading the aim of the OA is to establish what knowledge can be acquired about the nature of habit from the external senses, that is, through the Baconian experimental method adhered to by the Scottish school of William Hamilton, Thomas Reid, and Dugald Stewart. According to Ravaisson, this school was ‘founded on the idea that it is necessary to extend Bacon's theory, which relates to the sciences in general and to physics in particular, to philosophy’ (‘Philosophie contemporaine’, 398).11 A critique of this position is important for Ravaisson because he argues that Cousin himself ‘does not at all exceed the limitations of the Scottish speculations’ (‘Philosophie contemporaine’, 408). This theory fails because it limits itself to ‘generalities’ that do not properly constitute science. A proper science should be concerned with the how, the why, and not just the that. Part of the problem is that the Scottish method fails to distinguish between mere perception and apperception. The superiority of Biran's method comes from his clear understanding of this Leibnizian distinction and his introduction of the analysis of inner phenomena as a science of first principles. These are linked because, Ravaisson claims, ‘complete knowledge, human knowledge, is not at all simple perception applied to the external object, as it is in the animal; it is reflective perception, Leibniz's apperception: perception with reflection conjoined’ (‘Philosophie contemporaine’, 419). Apperception is ‘experience of a cause’, and philosophy, if done properly, should be ‘the science par excellence of causes and the spirit of all things, because it is above all the science of inner Mind in its living Causality’ (‘Philosophie contemporaine’, 420). The aim of the SA is to establish how much more can be discovered about habit from this Biranian perspective. It is only from this perspective that we can move from the mere that to the how and the why, and it is Cousin's great fault to have failed to perceive the fecundity of Biran's method. In the language of Leibniz's New Essays, although Cousin had claimed to have been the one who had overturned eighteenth-century sensualism, Ravaisson accuses him of having gone no further than Lockean ‘nominal definitions’ and of having failed to reach Leibnizian ‘real, causal’ definitions which would allow us to understand the ‘structure or inner constitution’ of being (NE 294).
The OA begins with an analysis of the inorganic, and then moves through the stages of being through vegetal, animal, and finally human life. The inorganic realm displays no evidence of habits whatsoever, a very limited form of habit is displayed in vegetal life, a superior degree is found in animal life, but it is when we reach human life that we discover habit proper as directed by activity. Evolutionary interpretations such as SII2 rest on the false assumption that Ravaisson is developing a positive theory of habit in this part and from a failure to distinguish the distinct roles of each analysis.12 However, correctly understood, the aim of this first analysis is to make the inadequacy of the Baconian method clear. Before the OA properly begins, Ravaisson sets out some basic definitions of ‘habit’ and ‘being’ that when combined with his discussion of the inorganic at the beginning of the OA show that he does not regard the inorganic as the foundation for the development of the rest of life, but rather as a realm that has in itself no true being, since true being must be grounded in determinate substances. Reconstructed, his argument appears remarkably similar to Leibniz's famous argument for monads that opens the latter's Monadology. The suspicion that Ravaisson has this argument in mind is further aroused by Ravaisson's support of the ‘Universal Law of Being’, which he attributes to Leibniz, and describes as stating that ‘the fundamental character of being, is the tendency to persist in its way of being’ (RH 27). His argument is as follows:
The primary realm of nature (the inorganic) is one of homogeneous extension.
Extension is divisible to infinity.
Causality, energy, and potential must reside in a determinate substance.
Only a true unity can be a determinate substance.
There are no true unities in the inorganic realm if it is understood as homogenous extension [from 1 and 2]
Without causality, energy, and potential, an entity cannot strive to persist in its own being.
The ‘Universal Law’ states that only those entities that strive to persist in their own being possess the ‘fundamental character of being’.
Therefore, the inorganic does not possess the fundamental character of being. [by 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7]
Habits cannot belong to mere extension alone because a necessary condition of habit is change. Ravaisson claims that habit ‘supposes a change in the disposition, in the potential, in the internal virtue of that which does not change’ (RH 25). As completely homogeneous, extension is incapable of real change. Habit requires an ‘individual being’ as its ground, that is, a determinate heterogeneous whole that cannot, unlike extension, be divided; in other words, a substance. Therefore, this blocks SII2 because habits must belong to substances, and substances cannot ‘emerge’ from the inorganic. Habits require time and change, and these must be grounded in determinate substances that do not change. Substances cannot ‘emerge’ from the inorganic because the emergence of substances from the inorganic in Ravaisson's system would be as absurd as the emergence of monads from their phenomena in Leibniz's. Furthermore, such a view anachronistically attributes a view of the evolution of life that Ravaisson simply does not hold. In fact, in an undated fragment, he wrote that ‘one would search in vain to prove by experience that which we call the spontaneous generation’ of beings endowed with ‘life, feeling, and thought’ from inert bodies (Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique, 243).
If the inorganic realm lacks true being, what kind of reality does extension have? Ravaisson is quite clear about this. Extension, like time, is one of the conditions under which we represent substances (RH 27). We represent substances through the phenomenal forms of space and time as ‘extended mobiles’, but extension itself has no independent existence outside of the substances themselves. Extension is a ‘sensible form’ that is necessary so that the understanding may represent quantity to itself (RH 41).13 As he puts it explicitly in the SA:
In order to represent the synthesis of diversity in space, it is necessary not only that I be a substantial subject accomplishing movement, at least in the imagination, but also that I conceive it, that I mark its end, and that I will its direction.
(RH 41)
Now we can see why SII3 is also blocked as an interpretation of Ravaisson's philosophy of nature. Freedom cannot be a force inhabiting a natural body, because body is not the sort of thing that can be inhabited or animated. Ravaisson is an idealist about bodies in the way that certain commentators refer to Leibniz as an idealist. For Ravaisson, bodies are well-founded phenomena. We represent non-spatial substances to ourselves via the sensible form of extension. When we represent these substances to ourselves as extended mobiles, these mobiles are expressions of the true metaphysical substances. This is the sense to his claim that ‘the Mind is not invisible, but the only visible’ (‘Philosophie contemporaine’, 427). Leibniz scholars who reject the idealist interpretation of his metaphysics sometimes turn to his relationship to Aristotelian metaphysics in order to stress the importance of the coexistence of entelechies and bodies (see, for example, Phemister, Leibniz and the Natural World, 20–1). Those who may wish to reject my idealist interpretation of Ravaisson might be tempted to use this strategy, since he wrote several volumes on Aristotle's philosophy. However, this approach would not work because Ravaisson reads Aristotle's matter as neither physical nor corporal but rather reducible to ‘pure logical possibility’.14 In his unpublished academy prize winning 1834 memoire15 on Aristotle's philosophy, he claimed that:
matter is only a relative term without reality in itself, and by descending by continual degrees we would reduce it to pure abstract possibility, which is no longer anything more than a moment of being, a point of view under which it [being] is considered.
(1834, 164, cited in Dopp, Félix Ravaisson, 98)
Therefore, to understand the true nature of beings, we must turn away from the evidence of the external senses and reflect on our own essence. We must turn to the ‘subjective’ analysis. At the end of the OA, following the first reference to Biran, Ravaisson tells us that:
Up to this point, nature is for us a spectacle that we can only see from the outside. We see only the exteriority of the actuality of things; we do not see their dispositions or powers. In consciousness, by contrast, the same being at once acts and sees the act; or better, the act and the apprehension of the act are fused together. The author, the drama, the actor, the spectator are all one. It is, therefore, only here that we can hope to discover the principle of actuality.
(RH 39)
The superiority of the SA over the OA is a point that Ravaisson further clarifies in Philosophie contemporaine where he tells us that a true understanding of unity, causality, and substance could only be obtained through the Biranian introspective method. ‘To remain any longer submitted to the foreign doctrine [the Baconian method]’, he says, ‘would truly be inventa fruge, glandibus vesci [to feed on acorns, when corn has been discovered]’16 (‘Philosophie contemporaine’, 423). Crucially, Ravaisson believes that the Biranian method shows that what he calls the ‘Scottish Axiom’ – that ‘experience attains neither causes nor substance’ – is false. However, it is important to note that, unlike Ravaisson, Biran would have agreed with the second half of this axiom. Although Biran believed that introspection provided us with evidence of force and causality, he did not believe that the concept of ‘substance’ had any further meaning beyond these forces. He thought of substance as a ‘passive subject of modifications’ and Biran rejected the existence of anything passive in his metaphysics. Ravaisson, on the contrary, argued that the rejection of substance would lead to a metaphysics of the soul where beyond the knowledge of our immediate willings, we are left with an impenetrable abyss. When separated from substantial reality, he claims, the will is ‘only an abstraction’ (‘Philosophie contemporaine’, 425). The will is not groundless, but is the product of anterior tendencies grounded in a true substantial unity. Ravaisson backs this Leibnizian point up by two quotes from Leibniz that are very telling. The first is from Of Nature Itself:
We must add a soul or a form analogous to a soul, or a first entelechy, that is a certain urge [nisus] or a primitive force of acting, which is itself an inherent law [lex insita], impressed by divine decree.
(G IV 512: AG 162–3)
The second is from a letter to Bayle where Leibniz writes that ‘the nature of substance consists, in my opinion, in this ruled tendency from which phenomena arise in order’ (G III 58). These two passages are crucial because they clarify exactly what Ravaisson thinks is missing from Biran's account, and this is necessary since Leibniz himself does at times seem to suggest that substance is nothing over and above force; he writes that force is ‘what constitutes substance, since it is the very principle of action, which is its characteristic feature’ (G IV 472: WFNS 22). Nonetheless, Leibniz makes a distinction between primitive and derivative forces, which constitute the atemporal and temporal sides of a substance respectively. Primitive active force, limited by primitive passive force, together forms a complete monad (LDV 261 and 265). If a monad were purely primitive active force, it would be exactly like God. Primitive passive force limits a monad's nature, and is the reason why it is distinct and inferior to God. Together, Leibniz tells us, these forces form the ‘complete monad’ because they constitute the non-temporal foundation from which the temporal series of perceptions arise. The relationship between the primitive forces in a monad does not change: ‘the soul remains the same’ (LDV 77). As Leibniz writes ‘primitive force is like the law of a series, and derivative force is like a determination that designates some term in the series’ (LDV 287). For Ravaisson, Biran eliminates primitive force leaving us with the derivative forces alone, but he leaves these latter ungrounded. As we have already seen, for Ravaisson that which changes requires a ground which does not change, and this is what exactly Leibniz's primitive forces provide. In De l'habitude Ravaisson refers to this as ‘primitive nature’ and argues that it is in this nature that our voluntary nature has its ‘source and origin’ (RH 61). Ravaisson's defence of this aspect of Leibniz's philosophy shows how far Ravaisson was from the true voluntarist French philosophers of the nineteenth century like Biran and Renouvier, but also how far he was, at least in terms of this fundamental metaphysical belief, from Schelling. In fact, Schelling says that ‘the person who cannot think activity or opposition without a substrate cannot philosophize at all’ (First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, 219).
Although the discussion in Section 2.2 provides sufficient evidence to undermine SII1, if understood in its strictest sense, Boas actually only claims that Ravaisson transforms Biran's will into a sort of Schellingian Absolute. Charitably understood then, he may just be claiming that Ravaisson has developed a form of monism. However, in what I think is the most interesting part of the SA, he presents an introspective argument for a substance pluralism. In this final section, I show that this conclusively undermines SII1. The analysis of habit, Ravaisson argues, leads to a pluralist metaphysics of monads. This analysis is original to Ravaisson, but it leads him to a Leibnizian metaphysics.
When introducing the SA and its importance for a full understanding of habit, Ravaisson writes that:
[i]t is in consciousness alone that we can find the archetype of habit; it is only in consciousness that we can aspire not just to establish its apparent laws but to learn its how and its why, to illuminate its generation and, finally, to understand it cause.
(RH 39)
This is a dense passage. First, it distinguishes the OA, which established that there are laws of habit (especially the ‘double law’ discussed in Section 1), from the SA that will seek their how and why. Second, by emphasizing this distinction it points to Schelling's critique of Cousin who wrote of the latter's philosophy that ‘it is limited to generalities that do not promise in the least … a science properly speaking’ ([1835] 1988, 38). ‘It is content with the that without struggling for the how’ ([1835] 1988, 72). Ravaisson certainly was influenced by Schelling's critique of Cousin and maintained in line with it that to settle at the that would be ‘to banish from philosophy the very object of any philosophy worthy of the name’ (‘Philosophie contemporaine’, 402). However, in the SA we not only learn about the how and the why of habit, but also that habit itself is ‘the most powerful of all analogies’ (RH 65). This is because its analysis connects our conscious activities with our most elementary mental activities and even the most elementary modes of existence. Understanding habit leads us to an understanding of our primitive nature.
Following Biran, Ravaisson argues that the double law of habit – which states that ‘continuity or repetition dulls sensibility, whereas it excites the power of movement’ (RH 53) – demands a hyper-organic cause to explain its how. Consider, for example, attempting to learn to play a thirteenth-century piece Como Somos per Consello on the mandolin and trying to perfect its haunting melody. If I tried to do this, at first the result would be disappointing. It would take a while for my hands to correspond in the correct way to play the tune as well as I would like. As I actively practice the tune, my playing will become more precise. I will be able to notice more distinctly the slight variations in the length of the notes, which help to provide the tune with a haunting feeling. Over time I will become increasingly sensitive to the ways I can express the emotive nature of the tune in a consistent manner. The force of habit in relation to our active and willed movements reinforces these actions and allows us to act in a way that is more prompt and precise. At a certain point, I will be able to play the song without concentrating on it. In fact, I will play the song better if I do not. Such an ability will be necessary to acquire if I wish to be able to sing a melody at the same time as playing the mandolin. At this point, effort has faded and habit has taken over. For Ravaisson, this ‘acquired tendency, the inclination whose progress coincides with the degradation of sensation and effort’, is exactly what cannot be explained by any ‘organic modification’ (RH 53). As he goes on to explain, this is because even when I play the tune without consciously focusing on it, there is still an intelligent process going on. The distinction between ‘goal’ and ‘action’ has been effaced, but intelligence has not been eliminated, it is still the necessary condition for the behaviour to be manifested because it is an intentional action and it acts in accordance with an idea, even if this idea is being perceived below the level of consciousness.
This process is similarly reflected and Ravaisson's argument can be made clearer in cases of ‘bad habits’ like a compulsive cough or clearing of the throat. At first this may begin because of an irritation of the throat, but frequent repetition may form a habit that becomes an agonizing psychological nightmare to attempt to resist; it will feel as if one had no choice but to do it. At a certain point this behaviour may become almost completely concealed from the subject, to such a point that they would be shocked to hear an audio recording of themselves. In such behaviour what had begun as voluntary behaviour guided by the will has been transformed by habit into inclinations, perhaps even instincts, which precede the will and consciousness. For Ravaisson, ‘[c]onsciousness implies knowing, and knowing implies intelligence’ (RH 39), but intelligence implies neither knowing nor consciousness, and this means that intelligent processes may occur without conscious awareness. However, it is still goal-orientated behaviour and he claims that even if it does not occur consciously, ‘every inclination towards a goal implies intelligence’ (RH 53). Since he argues that there is only a difference in degree between instinct, inclinations, and our goal-directed conscious behaviour, even in our primitive instincts there is a kind of obscure perception of an idea that directs their activity and determines them as tendencies.
In the SA and in Philosophie contemporaine, Ravaisson is concerned to show that this development of tendencies is dependent on our non-organic substantial being. To explain how Ravaisson conceives this, let us analyse the mandolin example further. To begin to learn how to play the song, we must begin with an idea of it as a worthy end to attain. However, before we have developed the desirable feeling towards this idea and it has become a ‘motive’, it must, he insists, have previously existed as
some kind of unreflective and indistinct idea, which occasions reflection and constitutes its matter, its beginning and its basis … It is in the uninterrupted current of involuntary spontaneity, flowing noiselessly in the depths of the soul, that the will draws limits and determines forms.
(RH 73–5)
Ravaisson calls these unreflective and indistinct ideas mobiles, since they have an active influence on our behaviour, but he claims that they are mobiles that ‘do not differ from the soul itself’. Before we act through thought, they act by being (‘Philosophie contemporaine’, 425). We know from Ravaisson's ‘ultimate law’ that the very character of being is the tendency to persist in its own being, so this primitive striving is a primitive force. Therefore, our decision to choose to learn to play Como Somos per Consello requires the actualization of an idea that previously had an active and effectual virtual existence in our primitive nature. However, the full actualization of this idea requires that we ‘make it flesh’ through practice and effort. At first my idea of myself playing this tune is a mere virtuality, then I consciously represent the idea of playing it to myself, and once I have decided to learn how to play it, and I practice and slowly become better at playing it, I approach this idea more closely. As Ravaisson writes, ‘the end becomes fused with the movement, and the movement with the tendency’, when this occurs, ‘the ideal is realised in it’ (RH 55). Through habit, the idea will have become ‘more and more a substantial idea’ (ibid.). What Ravaisson means by this is that the gap between the ‘idea’ of playing the tune and my effort will have become effaced, our second nature will have fully realized our primitive nature: ‘the final degree of habit meets nature itself’ (RH 61). This is the actualization of what Ravaisson calls ‘prevenient Grace’. Our ‘primitive nature’, he says, is ‘God within us’ (RH 71); it is the extent to which our own limited essence reflects God's. Here Ravaisson is expressing what Nadler (Spinoza's Ethics, 118) calls an immanentist pantheism. He believes that God is ‘ontologically distinct’ from the rest of the substances which make up his universe, yet at the same time God is ‘ubiquitously contained’ within all of them. Ravaisson's metaphysics is in complete agreement with Leibniz's statement in §47 of the Monadology that all created substances ‘originate, so to speak, through continual fulgurations of the divinity from moment to moment, limited by the receptivity of the created being, to which it is essential to be limited’ (cf. T §382–91, 395, 398). God is the primitive unity from which the created substances derive their power. Insofar as they are active, they reflect God's essence. Insofar as they are passive, they are distinguished from God's perfection.
Ravaisson's argument is that reflection on habit leads us to postulate the existence of a unique centre that unites the set of innate ideas which exist as part of our atemporal essence and that are necessary for the formation of our temporal ideas and permanent habits. As there is only a difference in degree between conscious reflection, inclinations, and instincts, habit leads us from our conscious experience to our very primitive nature. However, habit is the ‘most powerful of all analogies’ because following the use of the Leibnizian principle of uniformity crucial to Biran's method, Ravaisson argues that we can analogously understand the essence of all created beings to share these essential characteristics. Reflection on our organic nature leads us to recognize that in addition to our ‘cerebral unity’, life diffuses into a ‘plethora of independent centres’. These centres are able to develop their own habits and alter their instincts. For example, our muscles become stronger and more agile. Such behaviour would be impossible, he believes, unless there was in these centres a form of obscure perception of ideas. Furthermore, the analogy of habit allows us to descend through the chain of life and form the same conclusions even in the ‘deepest heart of nature’ and in ‘abnormal’ and ‘parasitic’ life (RH 63):
The most elementary mode of existence, with the most perfect organization, is like the final moment of habit, realized and substantiated in space under a sensible form. The analogy of habit penetrates its secret and delivers its sense over to us. All the way down to the confused and multiple life of the zoophyte, down to plants, even down to crystals, it is thus possible to trace, in this light, the last rays of thought and activity as they are dispersed and dissolved without yet being extinguished, far from any possible reflection, in the vague desires of the most obscure instincts.
(RH 67, translation modified)
In conclusion, if habit is a phenomenon which is found in every part of living nature and is in fact contiguous with being, and habit implies obscure perception of an idea, it follows that ideas are not innate in the minds of human beings alone but innate in the substantive essence of every being. The argument from habit in Ravaisson's De l'habitude is an argument for a deep innateness throughout nature. Every being is in possession of its own set of innate ideas which it strives towards and attempts to actualize according to the rule of the best, that is, it aims to actualize as much of the divine as possible given its limitations. Every being is, for Ravaisson, a monad.
ABBREVIATIONS
AG: Leibniz, G. W. (1989) Leibniz: Philosophical Essays. Translated by R. Ariew and D. Garber. Indianapolis: Hackett.
AT: Descartes, R. (1974–89) Oeuvres de Descartes. Edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery. Paris: J. Vrin.
CSM: Descartes, R. (1984–91) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. 3 Vols. Translated by J. Cottingham, D. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
FP: Cousin, V. (1838, tome I; 1840, tome III) Fragments philosophiques. Paris: Ladrange.
G: Leibniz, G. W. (1875–90) Die Philosophischen Scrhiften von Leibniz. 7 vols. Edited by C. I. Gerhardt. Berlin: Weidmann.
L: Leibniz, G. W. (1989) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters. Translated by L. Loemker. London: Kluwer.
LDV: Leibniz, G. W. (2014) The Leibniz-De Volder Correspondence. Translated by P. Lodge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
MDS: Staël-Holstein, A. L. G. ([1810] 1814) Germany. Translator Unknown. London: John Murray.
OMB: Maine de Biran (1984–2001) Œuvres de Maine de Biran. 20 Vols. Edited by F. Azouvi et al. Paris: Vrin.
OMDB: Maine de Biran Œuvres de Maine de Biran. Edited by P. Tisserand. Paris: Félix Alcan.
RH: Ravaisson, F. ([1838] 2008) Of Habit. Translated by C. Carlisle and M. Sinclair. London: Continuum.
T: Leibniz, G. W. (1985) The Theodicy. Translated by E. M. Huggard. Chicago: Open Court.
WFNS: Woolhouse, R. S., and Francks, R. (1997) Leibniz's ‘New System’. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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1 I am very grateful to audiences in Aberdeen, Dundee, and Edinburgh for feedback on earlier versions of this paper. In particular, I must thank Mogens Laerke, Paul Lodge, Beth Lord, and Pauline Phemister. I am also very grateful to Iain Hamilton Grant and Andrew Pyle for their comments, advice, and encouragement on earlier drafts of this article. Finally, I would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their very insightful and encouraging comments, many of which will greatly influence my future research projects. This research was supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship award from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, and an Early Career Fellowship awarded by the Leverhulme Trust and the University of Sheffield.
2 The Leibnizianism in the 1867 report is absolutely clear. However, as this was written almost 30 years after De l'habitude I will not refer to it in my reading.
3 Carlisle and Sinclair's excellent recent translation of and commentary on De l'habitude and the series of articles they have individually written following its publication have been responsible for a small Ravaisson renaissance.
4 I doubt anyone will find my reading more appealing as a contemporary philosophical position, but it is, I believe, historically more accurate. Crucially, it allows us to better understand the importance of the contributions of later French philosophers, such as Émile Boutroux and Léon Dumont, who do develop Ravaisson's theory of habit in a more naturalist direction.
5 I have written on the relationship between Cousin and Biran in further depth elsewhere. See Dunham, ‘Universal and Absolute Spiritualism’.
6 Kant's philosophy had up to this point received a mixed reception in France. While there were philosophers who took great interest in his work (such as Joseph Marie Degérando), few had any real grasp of its full importance. In Madame de Staël's pioneering and influential work De l'Allemagne, she wrote that ‘[n]o one in France would give himself the trouble of studying works so thickly set with difficulties as those of Kant’ (MDS III 96). Certainly, Biran for the most part ignored it and the only work of Kant he read was the 1770 inaugural dissertation.
7 In De l'habitude itself Ravaisson references Influence de l'habitude and Biran passim. However, we know that Ravaisson knew the Exposition well and that it was important for the development of his thought from his 1834 Mémoire on Aristotle.
8 Biran is right to highlight these often-neglected a posteriori arguments found in Leibniz's metaphysics. For further details of these arguments in Leibniz's philosophy, see Lodge, ‘Leibniz on Created Substance and Occasionalism’ and Phemister, ‘All the Time and Everywhere Everything's the Same as Here’. I address Biran's use of Leibniz, how the infusion of Leibniz into French philosophy came about, and the particular distinctive character it developed from this infusion in more depth in Dunham, ‘Universal and Absolute Spiritualism’.
9 See, for example, Dopp, Félix Ravaisson; Janicaud, ‘Victor Cousin et Ravaisson, Lecteurs de Hegel et Schelling’; Mauve, ‘Ravaisson lecteur et interprète de Schelling’; Guibert (2006).
10 This is on the list of Schelling-influenced interpretations because the commentator has referred to it as such. However, I am not only sceptical with regard to the claim that there is something corresponding to a force inhabiting or animating a natural body in Ravaisson's ontology, but also sceptical about the claim that there is something corresponding to this in Schelling's. Schelling even writes that ‘Life-force, taken in this sense, … is a completely contradictory concept’ ([1803] 1988, 37). He rejects the idea of ‘Life-force as a spiritual principle’ because ‘how a mind can act physically we have not the slightest idea’ ([1803] 1988, 38). For a summary of Schelling's non-Aristotelian metaphysics of an antithesis of forces, see Dunham, Grant, and Watson (2014, 129–43).
11 All translations of Ravaisson's ‘Philosophie contemporaine’ are by Jeremy Dunham and Mark Sinclair and taken from Ravaisson, ‘Contemporary Philosophy’.
12 If we fail to identify the distinct roles of each analysis, then Ravaisson would appear to make contradictory statements. For example, as Bruyeron, ‘Remarques sur un passage du texte de Ravaisson’ has noted, in the OA Ravaisson writes that habit is not possible in the inorganic realm (RH 29), but in the SA he writes that habit, thought, and activity are traceable even in crystals (RH 67). However, instead of recognizing the distinct roles of each analysis, Bruyeron provides a highly speculative attempt to make the two claims consistent. I cannot see how any such attempt could work.
13 Ravaisson's use of Kantian language such as the ‘intuition of space’ or ‘sensible form’ has understandably led commentators to interpret him as very close to Kant on these points (see Lovejoy, 1913, 469–70). However, we will not learn much about Ravaisson from such comparisons. He is dismissive of Kant's critical philosophy and claims that ‘[i]n Kant's system, being is the deceptive image of the empty form that we call time, and it is the dream of the intellect that takes this nothing for a thing’ (‘Philosophie Contemporaine’, 412). As Bellantone, ‘Ravaisson: le ‘champ abandonné de la métaphysique’’ notes, one point on which both Cousin and Ravaisson were agreed on is their rejection of Kant and his ‘scepticism’. It is important for Ravaisson that through time and space we represent things in themselves.
14 See Cousin, De la Métaphysique d'Aristote, 96–7 and Dopp, Félix Ravaisson, 97–8.
15 Although the whole text is unpublished, selections have been published in Cousin's 1838 report on the contest (90–119) and in Dopp, Félix Ravaisson, 80–124).
16 This is a nod to Leibniz's fifth letter to Samuel Clarke (AG 344).