Le Lannou, Jean-Michel
Representation of the mind
- 2021.
98
Despite the ample emancipation of the power of thought operative in Léon Brunschvicg’s work, we must acknowledge that the liberation he is seeking remains incomplete. Why is this so? This is the question that this article addresses. The article begins by showing what restrictive modalities the life of consciousness confronts. The two unresolved stumbling blocks—the identification of thought and consciousness, and the identification of the “us” and the “for us”—come directly from Brunschvicg’s implicit resumption of the Aristotelian tradition. In a real ambiguity, Brunschvicg denounces certain Aristotelian theses, but takes up others, in fact the most fundamental ones. The article ends by sketching the conditions of a real rupture with neo- Aristotelianism, and defines what the liberation of the thinking power really means as a way of exceeding representation.