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Beyond Obligation? Jean-Marie Guyau on Life and Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Keith Ansell-Pearson
Keith Ansell-Pearson*
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
*
[email protected]
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Extract

There is a tradition of modern French philosophy that contains valuable resources for thinking about the nature and limits of obligation and how a higher calling of life beyond obligation might be conceived. This is a tradition of an ethics of generosity whose best exemplar is perhaps Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and that extends in our own time to the writing of Gilles Deleuze (1925–95).

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 77: Supererogation , October 2015 , pp. 207 - 225
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2015 

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References

1 H. Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946), 252.

2 For the purposes of this essay I have been able to consult the fourth edition of the French from 1896 and the English translation of 1898 based on the second edition. The differences between the different editions are slight. In the citations that follow in the essay the first page reference given is to the French edition, the second to the English translation. Esquisse d'une morale sans obligation, ni sanction (Elibron 2006, based on the edition of 1896); A Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or Sanction, trans. Gertrude Kapteyn (London, Watts & Co., 1898).

3 J. M. Guyau, Education and Heredity, trans. W. J. Greenstreet (London: Walter Scott, 1891), 182.

4 Marco Orru, ‘The ethics of anomie: Jean-Marie Guyau and Émile Durkheim’, The British Journal of Sociology (1983) 34: 4, 499–518, 503–4.

5 Esquisse d'une morale sans obligation, ni sanction, 6; A Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or Sanction, 4.

6 Ibid., 63; 54.

7 Ibid., 83; 71.

8 Ibid., 87; 74.

9 Ibid.,135; 114.

10 57; 48.

11 Ibid.

12 I. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 128.

13 Guyau, 59; 50.

14 Ibid., 52.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), section 5.

18 Guyau 67; 57. In The Gay Science section 335 Nietzsche seeks to show that any attempt to truly know ourselves must have recourse to the intellectual conscience which works as a conscience behind our moral conscience and which may be little more than the product of habitually acquired opinions and valuations.

19 Ibid. 102–3; 89. See also Nietzsche on ‘the automaton of duty’ in The Anti-Christ section 12.

20 Ibid., 21; 101.

21 Ibid., 170; 144.

22 90; 77.

23 Ibid., 247; 211.

24 92; 79.

25 88; 75.

26 Ibid.

27 42; 35.

28 248; 211.

29 113; 94–5.

30 114; 95.

31 114; 95.

32 115; 96.

33 101; 86–7.

34 98; 84.

35 98; 84.

36 99; 85.

37 76; 65.

38 81; 70.

39 81; 70.

40 89; 76.

41 90; 77.

42 90; 77.

43 90; 77.

44 91; 78.

45 92; 79.

46 F. Nietzsche, Nietzsche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Walter de Gruyter, 1977), volume 11, 35 [34], p. 525. This note is from May-July of 1885. It begins with Nietzsche noting the deplorable condition of literature on morality in today's Europe and then reviews contributions in the area from England, France, and Germany. Nietzsche singles out Guyau's book for special praise along with Paul Rée's The Origin of Moral Sensations (1877) and W. H. Rolph's Biological Problems (1881). He regards these three texts as the strongest in contemporary ethics.

47 Fidler, Jeffrey C., ‘On Jean-Marie Guyau, Immoraliste’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 55, 1995, 75–98, 77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Guyau 247; 210.

49 Ibid.

50 101; 87.

51 F. Nietzsche, Dawn: Thoughts on the Presumptions of Morality, trans. Brittain Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), section 174.

52 F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 338.

53 244; 208.

54 246; 209.

55 247; 211.

56 ; 212.

57 ; 212.

58 250; 213.

59 See chapter one of Bergson's Two Sources of Morality and Religion for the distinction between the closed and open moralities.

60 Fidler, 83.

61 Josiah Royce cited in Fidler 85.

62 Fidler 92.