Background
Fouillée, Alfred Jules Émile was born in 1838 in La Pouèze, Maine-et-Loire, France.
Fouillée, Alfred Jules Émile was born in 1838 in La Pouèze, Maine-et-Loire, France.
Lycée Laval and afterwards Prepared himself for the newly revived agrégé in Philosophy.
Taught at lycées in Emée, Louhans, Dole and Auxerre before becoming Professor of Philosophy at the lycée in Carcassonne. After winning his agrégé, he taught at more Prestigious lycées in Douai, Montpellier and Bordeaux. 1872-1875, taught at l’École Normale Supérieure in Paris, but ill-health forced his retirement.
Went on writing, mostly in the Midi, until his death 37 years later.
Fouillée’s philosophy is built around the notion of ‘idées-forces’ which is found in all his major works. His contention is that ideas are active and that they structure both our lives and the world at large. Since they have a subjective and an objective facet they enable us to understand the interface between our private psychological worlds and the public world of independent objects. Fouillée claimed that this analysis could overcome the traditional central dichotomies of philosophy—rationalism and empiricism, freedom and determinism, materialism and psychical idealism, duty and desire. He applied the same analysis to questions of metaphysics, psychology, politics, morals and the history of philosophy. His discussion of rationalism and empiricism can be used to explain the essence of his contention. Ideas are experienced and enter every experience, however primitive. Even a simple sensation becomes recognizable as a sensation only when it is understood in connection with an idea. Applied to ethics, the same analysis suggests that certain powerful ideas—freedom, love and beauty—have an effect on us. One can examine them simply empirically to find out what is desired and desirable but. again, in the process one becomes involved in the logic of the ideas and one sees that they take on certain universal forms. Fouillée’s metaphysics breaks with all the main traditions of French idealism, although there is a clear sense in which his theory can be connected to certain strands of thought going as far back as Malcbranchc. He was influenced chiefly not by other thinkers but by the problems of the contemporary social sciences, which had failed to come up with concepts and categories needed to distinguish the inner life and the human condition from the world of things. It can be said that his main interest was in the possibilities for a more human social science and a rational political life, although much of his writing is metaphysical and epistemological. Léon Brunschvieg argued that Fouillée’s metaphysics is based on a confusion. His ’idées’ are psychical particulars w'hich Brunschvieg says amount to ‘material spirits', and the term ‘psychical realism' has been suggested as the best description of his position. But some critics think that parts of Fouillée’s project are revivable. In his 1983 study of political liberalism, William Logue argues, just as Fouillée’s notion of idées-forces provided a middle way between most characteristic philosophical disputes, so in politics it makes him a kind of communitarian liberal, standing between the state socialists, who do not understand that in the human sphere ideas work in an individual consciousness, and the right-wing individualists, who do not understand that there is a universal logic and a universal duty implied in the idea of morality itself.