Louis Lavelle is a Philosophe French (Saint-Martin-of-Villeréal (Lot-et-Garonne), July 15th 1883 - Parranquet, September 1st 1951), and one of the major metaphysicians French of the 20th century. Principal representative of the philosophy of the spirit, his philosophy is an existential spiritualism.
Biography
Born from a father Teacher and a mother owner of a small farm, Louis Lavelle leaves his native area at the seven years age in order to continue his secondary studies with Amiens then in Saint-Etienne. Entered in the faculty of Lyon, it is interested in the thought of Nietzsche, takes part in libertarian demonstrations and follows its courses very little.
Between various substitutions with Laon, it attends the courses of Leon Brunschvicg and Henri Bergson.
Incorporated philosophy with Neufchâteau in 1909, Lavelle is named in Vendôme then in Limoges. From its marriage in 1913, then three girls are born a son.
In 1914, when fall the call to the mobilization, although reformed, Lavelle requires to go to the face. Sent on the Sum in 1915, it will go then in Verdun where there will be made prisoner on March 11th 1916 and will remain held close to twenty-three month: he then writes his future thesis on small notebooks bought with the canteen of the camp of Giessen, like his Carnets of war .
He supports his thesis of fine doctorate of philosophy 1921 in Sorbonne: the Dialectical one of the sensitive world in front of Leon Brunschvicg and the Visual perception the depth in front of Leon Robin.
Appointed professor in Strasbourg, college Fustel de Coulanges, he will play a big role in the trade-union organizations of teachers of Alsace-Lorraine. At that time, is diagnosed in his/her son an osseous disease which will carry it in 1952.
From 1924 to 1940, Louis Lavelle gives private courses and teaches in Paris with the Henri-Iv college and Louis the Large one. Journalist, it holds the philosophical chronicles of the newspaper Time and founds in 1934 with the philosopher Rene the Seine the collection Philosophie of the spirit in the editor Sapwood-Montaigne.
At the time of the armistice of 1940, Lavelle was folded up with its class with Bordeaux and it is named general inspector of the State education in 1941. But at the university, Louis Lavelle is not welcome: Etienne Gilson is opposed to him and, then, the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs will submit a report/ratio against him. Presenting itself against Maurice Pradines, it is named in October 1941, following Edouard Roy, with the pulpit of philosophy of the Collège de France.
Multiplying the congresses abroad as well as the works, the health of the philosopher deteriorates had mainly with problems of Hypertension. Six months before its death, Lavelle had entrusted to a former colleague whom his days were counted but that hardly imported to him. Victim of a Angina pectoris, Lavelle dies out in the night from August 31st to September 1st, 1951.
Louis Lavelle is the author of the vastest system of metaphysics of the twentieth century: the Dialectical one of the eternal present . Unfinished, it is made up of four volumes: To be it (1928), Of the Act (1937), Of Time and Eternity (1945) and Of the Human Heart (1951).
The width of its work, which comprises thousands of pages, knows today a certain renewed interest thanks to the efforts of Jean École, Jean-Louis Old man-Baron (professor with the Université of Poitiers), Michel Adam (professor emeritus of the Université of Bordeaux III) and of Bruno Pinchard (professor with the university of Lyon III).
Were attached to the French philosophy of the spirit whose Lavelle was the leader: Rene the Seine, Gabriel Marcel, Gabriel Madinier, Nicolas Berdiaev, Georges Gusdorf, Aime Forest, Jean Nabert, Maurice Nédoncelle, Jean Nogué. But the topics of the presence, the act, the metaphysical intuition and the participation, fallen in disuse, do not find today any more of " continuateurs". The philosopher Jean-Louis Vieillard Baron prolongs nevertheless the metaphysical questioning towards a new philosophy of the spirit.
Philosophy lavellienne
The philosophy of Louis Lavelle is, in spite of misleading appearances, difficult of access. This difficulty is related to three essential causes: its influences, the time during which it develops, and the vocabulary which is clean for him. When one seeks to determine the effort lavellien, we generally restrict ourselves to qualify it spiritualism. In truth, this term is correct but vague. One could claim, with the manner of Maurice Halbwachs, that Lavelle professed an insipid and soft spiritualism: pale copy without talent of Henri Bergson or Octave Hamelin. But Lavelle produced neither a bergsonism, nor a synthetic idealism. However, it is not false to say only Lavelle, which is not an eclectic, was very marked by Bergson, Hamelin but also Leon Brunschvicg.
the Being and the participation
With Bergson and Brunschvicg, Lavelle shares the idea of a supremacy of the life of the spirit, rich person and creative:
“the conscience is not only the unit of all the facts which are born in it at a given moment, it perhaps the unit of all the states which followed one another in it. It is all in the present; but at every moment it collects its whole life, it becomes able to revive it. ”
Nevertheless, it is especially against the thought hamelinienne that Lavelle poses the stakes of its metaphysics: the being is not the product of a synthesis of the categories and does not come from a intellectual operation. In its Test on the principal elements of the representations (1907), Hamelin was presented like holding of a radical idealism:
“We thus will constitute the things with reports/ratios? Undoubtedly. Things which would be in themselves originally, of the things whose nature would be the source of the laws, instead of rising from the laws or to be to them identical.”
It is not thus a question for Lavelle of developing an idealism, but of constituting a philosophy well posing the being before knowing it. At Lavelle, the being is “the universal object” (one should not hear here the term “object” within the meaning of “thing”), i.e. first, univocal, and present entire in each point of the universe. This thesis of ontic univocity, exceeding the traditional distinction between subject and object, is supported by the assertion which the being is act, which puts from the start the subject in connection with the totality of the universe:
“the identification to be it and of the act will enable us to define our own being by freedom. We create our spiritual person as God creates the world. But it is necessary that we form part of the world like a thing before being able to link us with God by a free choice. The pure act does not comprise any choice; but it makes possible all the choices at a subject which, participant in his nature, can stick, by an assent which even founds its person, to the interior principle who animates it and the fact being, or to give up itself with the need by which the whole of all the being finished, determined by their mutual terminals, still expresses sufficiency to be it pure”
This interior principle, it is the act of the conscience, the operation by which the individual gives himself the being to itself: it is by the personal act that I appear myself at the same time plain and distinct being to be it pure. I am connected there by the participation, which is a central theme of the dialectical ontology of Lavelle: to take part , it is to take share with the being by the means of my reflexive activity.
This concept of participation takes source, at Lavelle, as of its first work the dialectical one of the sensitive world , in which he proposes a systematic study of significant qualities: the data, the force, the extent, etc It shows whereas it is by a confrontation in the “sensitive world” that the creative activity, and more precisely analytical of the spirit appears:
“the existence applies immediately to the totality of the world, but it do not apply to its parts that thanks to the analysis which distinguishes them from/to each other and determines with an extreme rigor their mutual limits. The unit of the thought will appear by the simplicity of the act characteristic of the analysis; but while applying to totality to be it concrete given this simple act originally will testify to an inexhaustible fruitfulness: it will generate the variety of all the particular forms of the existence. In the acting identity by which the thought distinguishes an unspecified term from very other is expressed to some extent eminently the diversity of all the distinctions realized”
The act of participation, by posing myself to me like being particular, i.e. capable of reflection, poses consequently the world like carrier of direction. It is precisely in our daily experiment of the world, by the analysis that we make of it, that the value is testified to us. Thus, for Lavelle, the starting point of metaphysics is concrete: reality causes an emotion, a “quivering” which reveals an intuition to be it, a pure experiment. The latter is testimony, for Lavelle, of the participation in the absolute, which is an act always renewed, authorized and dug by the reflection.
Human freedom and its methods
Sources
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