Research Colloquium “Posterities Of Maine De Biran’s Physiospiritualism In The 20th Century”

The pioneering international multidisciplinary research colloquium that is initiated and coordinated
by Dr. Manfred Milz, Research Associate at the Institute of Information and Media, Language and
Culture, is assembling scholars from France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Italy, Japan, Portugal,
Iceland, Ireland, Greece, the United Kingdom, the USA, and Germany. Well funded by the Lucia
and Dr. Otfried Eberz Foundation at the University of Regensburg, its core goal is to establish a
fundament for investigating more recent posterities of French Spiritualism. This group of distin-
guished researchers is in fact the first to enter into a discourse about the writings of the French phi-
losopher François-Pierre Gonthier Maine de Biran (1766-1824) regarding the neglected influence of
his conspicuous “physio-spiritualism” upon phenomenology and postmodernism in general, exper-
imental psychology and physiology, and neurology during the second half of the 20 th century—
within the wider context of the medical humanities. What does “physio-spiritualism” mean? Ac-
cording to Biran’s explicitly anti-Cartesian notion of individual identity, consciousness is constitu-
tively generated through voluntary corporeal effort—by the resistance implied in the very act of
(ap)perception. Biran’s shift from an empiricist and sensualist outward perception to a spiritualist
introspection (sens intime or intériorité) marks the turn from Enlightenment to Romanticism.
It is therefore that this research group comprised of historians, literary scholars, philosophers, and
psychologists turns in a first step to a contextualization of Maine de Biran in Europe around 1800,
by examining on a comparative basis his correlations with and deviations from contemporary think-
ers in France, Germany, and in England, to identify and differentiate formations of discourse. In a
second, mediative, step, the repercussions of this foundational sediment around 1900 in Europe and
North America are being examined. These, in turn, were ultimately revived and evolved particularly
in the latter course of the 20 th century, the project’s focal period, in which primarily French phe-
nomenologists and poststructuralists were to synthesize and transform Biranian notions within their
own conceptual approaches.
Biran’s insistence on the notion of an embodied spirit deserves a revitalization in our contemporary
society that is at a loss, by tending to subordinate the physical to a mind that finds itself, fused with
and occupied by digital technologies, frequently less challenged, though permanently overwhelmed.
In fact, towards this backdrop, phenomenology has become an essential integral part within anthro-
pologically motivated examinations of human-computer interaction: Our inheritance of the post-
revolutionary self constitutes a responsibility for sustaining a balance between the physical and the
spiritual—in order to remain conscious and human(e), as the freedom of the individual will is, once
agein, at stake.