Jean-Marie Guyau
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"From Sidgwick [ G. E. Moore ] might have learnt that good is ever our good, and from Spencer and Guyau that what we can and do perceive as good is not remote from the background of life which nurtures us. And so, having disposed of his intrinsic good, we might take courage against that fearsome naturalistic fallacy to seek into the conditions of, and therfore to ask what is, the meaning of good."--"G. E. Moore and Intrinsic Goodness" (1928) by Edward F. Mettrick. "Parmi les travaux récents sur la morale, les trois qui, à divers titres, nous ont paru les plus importants sont en Angleterre, les Data of Ethics, de Spencer ; en Allemagne, la Phénoménologie de la conscience morale, de M. de Hartmann ; en France, la Critique des systèmes de morale contemporains, de M. Alfred Fouillée."--Esquisse d'une morale sans obligation ni sanction (1884) by Jean-Marie Guyau |
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Jean-Marie Guyau (October 28, 1854, Laval, Mayenne - March 31, 1888) was a French philosopher and poet.
Guyau was inspired by, amongst others, the philosophies of Epicurus, Epictetus, Plato, Immanuel Kant, Herbert Spencer, and Alfred Fouillée, and the poetry/literature of Pierre Corneille, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset.
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Life
Guyau got his first exposure to Plato and Kant, as well as the history of religions and philosophy in his youth via his stepfather, the noted French philosopher Alfred Fouillée. With this background, he was able to attain his Bachelor of Arts at only 17 years of age, and at this time, translated the Handbook of Epictetus. At 19, he published his 1300-page "Mémoire" that, a year later in 1874, won a prize from the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and helped to earn him a philosophy lectureship at the Lycée Condorcet. However, this was short-lived, as he soon began to suffer from pulmonary disease. Following the first attacks of his disease, he went to southern France where he wrote philosophical works and poetry. He remained there until his early death at 33 years of age.
His mother, Augustine Tuillerie (who would marry Fouillée after Guyau's birth), published Le Tour de France par deux enfants in 1877 under the pseudonym G. Bruno.
Guyau's wife published short novels for young people under the pseudonym of Pierre Ulric.
Philosophy
Guyau's works are primarily directed towards critically analyzing modern philosophy, especially moral philosophy. Largely seen as an Epicurean, he viewed English utilitarianism as a modern version of Epicureanism. Although an enthusiastic admirer of the works of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, he did not spare them a careful scrutiny of their approach to morality.
In his Esquisse d'une morale sans obligation ni sanction, probably his most important work on moral theory, he begins from Fouillée, maintaining that utilitarian and positivist schools, despite admitting the presence of an unknowable in moral theory, wrongly expel individual hypotheses directed towards this unknowable. He states that any valid theory of ethics must consider the moral sphere as consisting not merely of moral facts (the utilitarian approach) but also, and more importantly, of moral ideas. On the other hand, in contrast to Fouillée, he does not see this unknowable itself as able to contribute a "principle practically limiting and restricting conduct," i.e. of "mere justice" which, he states, comes too close to Kantian notions of duty; for this, in turn, would bring us back to a theory of moral obligation, which, as the title suggests, he wishes to free moral theory from. Much of his treatise is dedicated to arguing what moral theory can be based upon that relieves moral theorists from relying on e.g. duty, sanctions, and obligations. For example,
The only admissible "equivalents" or "substitutes" of duty, to use the same language as the author of "La Liberté et le Determinisme" appear to us to be:–
- The consciousness of our inward and superior power, to which we see duty practically reduced.
- The influence exercised by ideas over actions.
- The increasing fusion of the sensibilities, and the increasingly social character of our pleasures and sorrows.
- The love of risk in action, of which we will show the importance hitherto ignored.
- The love of metaphysical hypothesis, which is a sort of risk of thought.
Influence
Though Guyau is a relatively obscure philosopher, his approach to philosophy earned him much praise from those who knew of him and his philosophy.
He is the original source of the notion of anomie, which found much use in the philosophy of Guyau's contemporary Émile Durkheim, who stumbled upon it in a review of "Irréligion de l'avenir". Petr Kropotkin devotes an entire chapter to Guyau in his "Ethics: Origin and Development", describing Guyau's moral teaching as "so carefully conceived, and expounded in so perfect a form, that it is a simple matter to convey its essence in a few words", whilst the American philosopher Josiah Royce considered him as "one of the most prominent of recent French philosophical critics."
Bibliography
- Essai sur la morale littéraire. 1873.
- Mémoire sur la morale utilitaire depuis Epicure jusqu'à l'ecole anglaise. 1873
- Première année de lecture courante. 1875.
- Morale d'Epicure. 1878.
- Morale anglaise contemporaine. 1879.
- Vers d'un philosophe.
- Problèmes de l'esthétique contemporaine. 1884.
- Esquisse d'une morale sans obligation ni sanction. 1884.
- Irréligion de l'avenir. 1886, engl. The Non-religion of the future, New York 1962
- Education et Heredite. Etude sociologique. Paris 1902.
