Biran and Schelling: “Contact Points” for a Radical Anthropology

Maesschalck, Marc [UCL]

We know how important Biran’s research on the self’s auto-affection, which constitutes the identity of life, has been for Michel Henry’s radical phenomenology. Of course, many adjustments must be made in order to go from a “hyperorganic” psychology to a science rigorous enough to found an eidetics of affect. Nevertheless, the scope of Biran’s influence does not simply boil down to some genius intuition regarding the reflexivity of affects. Instead, it takes place within the very specific epistemological framework of his era’s philosophy of mind. In this way, he links back up with the main issues of early German Idealism and with the major source of contention separating Fichte and Schelling from Hegel. The philosophy of nature that holds Biran’s attention in his 1812 Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie is a philosophy of mind, one that goes beyond his early texts and extends into his writings on the theme that continue up through to the end of the Identity period. This theory of mind, which can also be found in Ravaisson’s research, corresponds neither with the voluntarism of Romantic subjectivity or with its cosmogonic absorption in an absolute naturalization of life’s selfhood. The theory of mind is a precise epistemological posture whose main function is to determine how self-consciousness reaches life as reflexive identity. In the works of both Biran and Schelling, it mobilizes a specific operation, the “pathetic counter-reduction”, which allows life’s affection to be understood on the level of its self-affirmation, according to main contraction effort, it’s “Archi-passibility”.