Victor Emma-Adamah

The originality of Maine de Biran’s philosophy is his discovery of the apperceptive intuition of effort as the basis for the constitution of the conscious (my)self. Yet, although Biran routinely associates this effort with the exercise of force, his late philosophy is often characterized as a philosophy of the renunciation of power for a quietist embrace of passivity. Biran’s life-long struggle with physical debilitation perhaps speaks in support of a philosophy of weakness over strength. However, this paper takes the opposite view and sees in Biran’s personal experience of sickness, not weakness but ‘phenomenology’ of a will to triumphing power. Further, it argues that in this desire for strength is a Biranian theological opening to a power, which impossible to give myself, is the ground for a transcending aspiration into the power of God. The experience of weakness is the experience of a deeper longing for the transformation of effort.

The thought of Maurice Blondel has been read (representatively by Emmanuel Falque) as the theological aspirational movement of human action towards the divine, and therefore as the pre-emptive presence of the infinite to human experience. In this reading, absent has been the appreciation of an original Blondelian account of finitude as the essential experience of a human being-toward-death. Against this approach, this essay explores Blondel’s notion of human finitude as a ‘metaphysical experience’ of the existentially revelatory function of death. To this extent, Blondel’s account of finitude positions the philosopher of Aix, beyond the usual contexts of twentieth-century Catholic apologetic philosophy, squarely within Continental philosophical proposals of finitude as seen in Heidegger, Foucault, and Deleuze. Blondel brings to prominence a French Spiritualist account of the positive value of endurance and resistance against death as the revelatory site of a finitude that is neither determined by an a priori closed boundary nor theologically overdetermined as an aspiration to the infinite.