Victor Cousin (1792-1867)

[KALKI]

Victor Cousin (French: [kuzɛ̃]; 28 November 1792 – 14 January 1867) was a French philosopher. He was a proponent of Scottish Common Sense Realism and had an important influence on French educational policy.


The son of a watchmaker, he was born in Paris, in the Quartier Saint-Antoine. At the age of ten he was sent to the local grammar school, the Lycée Charlemagne, where he studied until he was eighteen. "Lycées" being organically linked to the University of France and its Faculties since their Napoleonic institution (the "baccalauréat" was awarded by juries made of university professors) Cousin was "crowned" in the ancient hall of the Sorbonne for a Latin oration he wrote which owned him a first prize at the "concours général", a competition between the best pupils at "lycées" (established under the Ancien Régime and reinstated under the First Empire, and still extant). The classical training of the lycée strongly disposed him to literature, or "éloquence" as it was then called. He was already known among his fellow students for his knowledge of Greek. From the lycée he graduated to the most prestigious of higher education schools, École Normale Supérieure (as it is now called), where Pierre Laromiguière was then lecturing on philosophy. In the second preface to the Fragments philosophiques, in which he candidly states the varied philosophical influences of his life, Cousin speaks of the grateful emotion excited by the memory of the day in 18..,[clarification needed] when he heard Laromiguière for the first time. "That day decided my whole life." Laromiguière taught the philosophy of John Locke and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, happily modified on some points, with a clearness and grace which in appearance at least removed difficulties, and with a charm of spiritual bonhomie which penetrated and subdued." That school has remained ever since the living heart of French philosophy — Henri Bergson, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida are among its past students.

Early influence on Cousin's philosophical thought

Cousin wanted to lecture on philosophy and quickly obtained the position of master of conferences (maître de conférences) in the school. The second great philosophical impulse of his life was the teaching of Pierre Paul Royer-Collard. This teacher, he tells us, "by the severity of his logic, the gravity and weight of his words, turned me by degrees, and not without resistance, from the beaten path of Condillac into the way which has since become so easy, but which was then painful and unfrequented, that of the Scottish philosophy." The "Scottish Philosophy" being the "Common Sense" Philosophy of Thomas Reid and others - which taught that both the external world and the human mind (introspection proving the existence of "free will" by the fact of consciousness) had an objective existence. In 1815–1816 Cousin attained the position of suppliant (assistant) to Royer-Collard in the history of modern philosophy chair of the faculty of letters. Another thinker who influenced him at this early period was Maine de Biran, whom Cousin regarded as the unequalled psychological observer of his time in France.

These men strongly influenced Cousin's philosophical thought. To Laromiguière he attributes the lesson of decomposing thought, even though the reduction of it to sensation was inadequate. Royer-Collard taught him that even sensation is subject to certain internal laws and principles which it does not itself explain, which are superior to analysis and the natural patrimony of the mind. De Biran made a special study of the phenomena of the will. He taught him to distinguish in all cognitions, and especially in the simplest facts of consciousness, the voluntary activity in which our personality is truly revealed. It was through this "triple discipline" that Cousin's philosophical thought was first developed, and that in 1815 he began the public teaching of philosophy in the Normal School and in the faculty of letters.

He then took up the study of German, worked at Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and sought to master the Philosophy of Nature of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, which at first greatly attracted him. The influence of Schelling may be observed very markedly in the earlier form of his philosophy. He sympathized with the principle of faith of Jacobi, but regarded it as arbitrary so long as it was not recognized as grounded in reason. In 1817 he went to Germany, and met Hegel at Heidelberg. Hegel's Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften appeared the same year, and Cousin had one of the earliest copies. He thought Hegel not particularly amiable, but the two became friends. The following year Cousin went to Munich, where he met Schelling for the first time, and spent a month with him and Jacobi, obtaining a deeper insight into the Philosophy of Nature.

[KALKI]

Victor Cousin (1792-1867) eminent French philosopher, whose knowledge of the history of European philosophy was unrivalled, believes that:

"When we read with attention the poetical and philosophical monuments of the East--above all, those of India, which are beginning to spread in Europe--we discover there many a truth, and truths so profound, and which make such a contrast with the meanness of the results at which European genius has sometimes stopped, that we are constrained to bend the knee before the philosophy of the East, and to see in this cradle of the human race the native land of the highest philosophy."

(source: Is India Civilized: Essays on Indian Culture - By Sir John Woodroffe p. 132).

He has observed: “The history of Indian philosophy is the abridge history of the philosophy of the world.”

(source: The Bible in India: Hindoo origin of Hebrew and Christian revelation - By Louis Jacolliot p 9).

" India contains the whole history of philosophy in a nutshell."

(source: India And Her People - By Swami Abhedananda p 11-12).

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Among those influenced by Cousin were Théodore Simon Jouffroy, Jean Philibert Damiron, Garnier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Jules Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, Felix Ravaisson-Mollien, Charles de Rémusat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jules Simon, Paul Janet, Adolphe Franck and Patrick Edward Dove, who dedicated his "The Theory of Human Progression" to him