Maine de Biran. The Hermeneutic Path of the Medical Art

Although phenomenology’s interest in the work of Maine de Biran is well known, the French philosopher’s work also marks an important path in hermeneutics, namely in what we can call “medical hermeneutics.” To paraphrase the famous phrase of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, “to explain more in order to understand better,” medical hermeneutics would consist in explaining an illness in order to understand the body better. However, since there is an ambivalence of illness and health in a single body, it is precisely this duality or coexistence of principles that the treatment of illness in the body reveals to us. Thus, by developing Hermann Boerhaave’s phrase “homo simplex in vitalitate, duplex in humanitate,” Maine de Biran makes it possible to discover a radical duality in the unique human being, i.e. a radical and unconscious passivity and a conscious psychological state characterised by effort. This duality constitutes the complexity of the human being, which our philosopher also discovers thanks to his dialogue with the physicians of his time. Finally, thanks to this dialogue, Biran’s work can be inscribed in the history of the relationship between philosophy and medicine.