On Jean-Marie Guyau, Immoraliste

Bibliographic Data

ID4456818
AuthorsGeoffrey C Fidler (corresponding author)
Year1994
Volume55
Issue1
Pages75
Publication date1994-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the History of Ideas (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-5037 • E-ISSN: 1086-3222
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2709954
OpenAlexW2319727409
LanguageEN
Citations received8

Unlike Nietzsche and Bergson, with whom he is invariably compared, the philosopher-poet Jean-Marie Guyau (1854-88) is not widely known. But his Esquisse d'une morale sans obligation ni sanction of 1885 was something of a sensation in its day, bringing him a reputation and a measure of notoriety as a sort of French Nietzsche. This was reinforced with the appearance two years later of its quasi-sequel, L'Irre'ligion de l'avenir. By their provocative titles at least, these works seemed to be the epitome of French positivistic aspiration, with a morality disengaged from religion and metaphysics, from obligation and sanction. Yet they came to situate Guyau in the spiritualist or intuitionist school of French philosophy from Maine de Biran through Ravaisson and Lachelier to Fouillee and Bergson, and to earn him, vicariously, the immoralist and psychologist credentials of Nietzsche. To be sure, with its uncommon proposal of anomie morale, his work prefigures-in part provokes-that sense of a crisis of the moral at the fin de siecle, of which Durkheim's more familiar diagnosis of moral anomie was symptomatic. My concern in this essay is to present Guyau as a moralist. While broadly venturing his reconsideration in this regard, I also extend the purview of two recent studies of his work on aesthetics and on the origin of the idea of time.I

Theology · French Literature and Critical Theory · Philosophical and Theoretical Analysis · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology Research

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