French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

French philosophy from (roughly) 1890 to 1990 is open to a number of philosophically illuminating perspectives. An instructive story can be told, for example, in terms of the problems of freedom and of consciousness.1 Here, however, I will take the relation of philosophy to science as my leitmotif, showing how French thought from Poincare and Bergson to Foucault and Derrida can be understood in terms of opposing views of the cognitive authority of science in relation to philosophical inquiry. At the beginning of the twentieth century, French philosophers were fundamentally concerned with the question of how to reconcile the authority of a scientic worldview with the centrality of the free individual subject. Reection on this issue operated between two poles: positivism, originating with Auguste Comte (1798-1857) in the nineteenth century, saw science as the sole legitimate cognitive authority and reduced all reality to the material world of science; spiritualism, traceable back to Maine de Biran (1766-1824) in the eighteenth century and in a sense to Rene Descartes (1596-1650) himself, insisted that our autonomy as free subjects in a world created by God showed the need to complement science with distinctively philosophical knowledge of the world. It is plausible to read the subsequent development of French philosophy in terms of the conict of positivist and spiritualist positions. This may seem an odd claim, since both the radical empiricism of positivism and the religious metaphysics of spiritualism quickly became distinctly marginal in twentieth-century French thought. We shall see, however, that thinkers who reject the specic doctrines of classical positivism and spiritualism nonetheless are generally oriented to a worldview centered either on the objective concepts of science or on our experience of ourselves as free existents. In Michel Foucault’s terminology, French thought has been divided into the philosophy of the concept and the philosophy of experience. In the same vein I will speak of a positivist orientation and a spiritualist orientation, and will trace the development of the positivist orientation from Poincareand Duhem, through Brunschvicg, Bachelard, and Canguilhem, to Michel Foucault. Correspondingly, I will follow the spiritualist orientation from Bergson, through Blondel, Marcel, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, to Derrida and Levinas. These two interweaving threads will guide us through the history of twentieth-century French philosophy, leading to some conclusions about the value of the French experience for Anglophone philosophers. In the early years of the twentieth century, even French philosophers who most rmly rejected positivism recognized the centrality of science for philosophical reection. Jules Lachelier (1832-1918) and Emile Boutroux (1845-1921), for example, offered unied accounts of nature that tried to synthesize the truths of science and of human freedom into a coherent whole. Their accounts presented science as limited by, for example, its indeterminism and failure to take account of nality, limitations that make it fall short of full concreteness and require supplementation by philosophy. The philosophy (or metaphysics) of nature they sought could not, however, be developed in a scientic vacuum. It required reection on actual scientic achievements and, therefore, familiarity with the methods and results of contemporary science. This philosophical approach to science also incorporated Comte’s conviction that science had to be studied through its history. The convergence of these desiderata led to the rapid development in France of what came to be known as the “epistemology of science,” a philosophico-historical effort to understand the cognitive structure of science. As the effort developed, however, it moved away from Lachelier’s and Boutroux’s subordination of science to philosophy and towards an autonomous study of science in its own terms. The new “philosophers of science,” as they came to be known, no longer tried to incorporate scientic truth into a synthetic metaphysical view of nature as a concrete whole.