Maurice Pradines

Maurice Pradines (1874 - 1958) is a Philosophe French. Pradines, although original, falls under the line of the philosophers of the spirit of the inter-war period. Also professor, it will develop a philosophy of knowledge in the light of problems of the Sensation.

The thought pradinésienne

The problem of the feeling is returned, at Pradines, with that of the union of the heart and the body. Numbers of classic authors (Descartes and Malebranche) thought theoretically their separation. Pradines poses the opposite thesis: that of the immanence of the spirit to the body. Indeed, any psychic phenomenon that it is primary or elaborate is before all that of alive. How then the body proceeds of the spirit? Pradines shows that to explain this report/ratio, it is necessary to constitute a history or a genesis of the life of the spirit.

If the spirit is that of alive, then it is necessary to answer this question: what life? Pradines distinguishes two methods from them: needy life and defensive life . They are characterized by respective movements :

the movement of involution defines a tendency to be preserved. Alive perdure while car-organizing itself. On the one hand, it is able to be folded up on oneself and on the other hand to persevere in the distinction with respect to what is not him.

the movement of evolution defines confrontation and collaboration with the otherness which constitutes reality.

It is that at the beginning, the man with an egoistic tendency: he likes oneself. However, for perdurer, it is necessary well that it finds means of being preserved. Consequently, it will have choice only to be confronted with the world. This contact with the externality is capital: it is him which will make possible the distinction between heart and spirit.

It is that like tendency first to conservation, like originating tension towards oneself and the other like oneself, the life is love, animation , heart. The heart is the first degree of spiritualization of alive, like tendency towards something .

Consequently, how the heart constitutes spirit?

It is there that the feeling intervenes like point of haste of the thought pradinésienne and is distinguished in two categories:

the needy sensitivity by which the body seeks what is useful.

the defensive sensitivity which consists in fleeing what threatens.

Philosophy, according to Pradines, never correctly wondered about the problem of the feeling. From the start, it aims at the empirists as those which missed essence: they held the feeling only like starting point of knowledge. Actually, philosophy almost always sticks to the causes and never to the function. It is that the feeling, in its function, is precisely paramount since somebody who causes it in an alive body makes it only if that interests it and acquires a direction for its life. The feeling is this phénomème psychic by which the life gives itself something to include/understand reality with which she confronts herself. However, if it proves to be paramount, it is not the data first of the spirit.

What precedes it, it is the affectivity : because it is necessary well to test to feel. There still, Pradines distinguishes two occurrences:

the emotional sensitivity or sensitive : impersonal, it does not provide knowledge of the object but just of the states of pain or pleasure with respect to him. It is not located in any precise part of the body.

the sensory sensitivity or sensoriality : it is the perceptive function of given bodies: it generates more or less precise information.

The sensoriality makes possible the direction of the need and defense. But, it is not more or less emotional . Because the affectivity which fuzzy and vague is perhaps graduated. the sensoriality is rather more or less representative .

If affectivity (emotional sensitivity) is not characterized the pleasure or the pain, it is between these two extremes that the sensoriality will be able to be exerted. At this point in time the feeling becomes a perception or what one could call an insensitive feeling.

What is it then of this apparent paradox?

It is the space which is constituted in the sensoriality: we always perceive what is not us according to our adapation with reality. This, these is the directions of the defense which allow it to us (tactility thermal, mechanical, hearing, sight…) because if there is not escape there is, by the remote setting, forecast of the possible pain. These directions are specific to space and thus with the spirit because they do not include reality blindly but allow a intellectual knowledge by the depth which they founds in our relations with the objects. While being made deploy space, living it reaches the world of the spirit i.e. to the intelligence and knowledge.

Works (lists nonexhaustive)

Philosophy of the feeling : I. Directions of the need, Paris, Beautiful Letters, 1932. II. the Directions of defense , Paris, Beautiful Letters, 1934.
Treated general psychology , PUF, coll Dito, Paris, republication 1986.
the perceptive Function , Course of the Sorbonne (1941), Paris, Delanoël-Gonthier, 1981.
the Adventure of the spirit in the species , Paris, Flammarion, 1954.
the Beautiful Travels , Paris, the Stag, 1982.

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