Methodos (Jan 2016)
Maine de Biran, Leibniz et le virtuel
Abstract
In 1819, Maine de Biran wrote an article entitled Exposition du système de Leibniz. This text gives a central place to virtuality by linking three key elements of Leibniz's system: the monad mirror representing the universe ‘virtually’; the dynamic concept of the substance made up of a virtual trend; innate ideas that, in the eyes of Biran, would result from the use of dynamics and more specifically from the concept of ‘force considered as virtual’. These three references to virtuality have a problematic aspect that the present article attempts to pinpoint, relying on the role that Maine de Biran himself attributed to virtuality in his own philosophical itinerary. In particular, the Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée gives a central role to ‘virtual force’ as a force pre-existing to me, that allows him to avoid substantialism. Virtual force seems to be a malleable concept that helps to reconcile two initially contradictory concepts for Biran, that of substance and that of activity. Yet, this is precisely what Leibniz's dynamics does in his eyes. Therefore, the temptation to attribute this key concept to Leibniz himself is strong, all the more so as Jean Bernoulli, Emilie du Chatelet and D'Alembert had already introduced virtuality in the vocabulary of Leibniz's dynamics to qualify the dead force. Biran is thus led to reconstruct the intellectual itinerary of Leibniz and to consider that Leibniz drew his concept of force from the experience of apperception, in the sense Biran meant it.
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