Maine de Biran’s Physio-Spiritualism

Research talk in philosophy:

Manfred Milz, Maine de Biran’s Physio-Spiritualism: Psycho-Physiological and Psycho-pathological Self-Investigations between 1800 and 1824

The Institute of Philosophy hosts Manfred Milz for a talk on September 28th, at 15:00-16:30, in room A220, in the Main Building of the University of Iceland. The talk is entitled „Maine de Biran’s Physio-Spiritualism: Psycho-Physiological and Psycho-pathological Self-Investigations between 1800 and 1824“. The talk will be in English and is open to the public.

Abstract:

While outlining a genealogy of French existentialist phenomenology, one motive in particular echoes throughout, despite critical differences between the concerned thinkers – from Henri Bergson via Merleau-Ponty to Marc Richir – as a common denominator, that of the embodied or incorporated mind. This historical fact invites us – initially – to a quest for their mutual prospective potential antecedent(s) in deeper layered sediments of French Romanticist philosophy of intériorité, around 1800. Subject of this talk therefore is the groundbreaking notion of the embodied mind, as explored by the yet little known French philosopher François-Gonthier-Pierre Maine de Biran (1766-1824). According to Biran, consciousness is generated through frequent interaction between the voluntary and the spiritual. The conscious, active self is constituted in its sovereign autonomy, as free and undivided, by an inner act of willfull resistance, a physical effort towards its own body and the world. Maine de Biran’s concept of the embodied mind proves to be most suitable to alert our consciousness today, while people are being exceedingly exposed to and submerged by comforting invasive virtual realities of metaverses that essentially minimize their physical and intellectual resistance-potential to generate will and effort through a prothesis culture.

Short bio:

Dr. Manfred Milz, Research Associate at the Institute of Information and Media, Language and Culture; Visiting Associate Professor at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture. Specializing on the reciprocity between visual arts, literature and philosophy between 1800 and the 21st century, Manfred has published books and articles on Alberto Giacometti, Samuel Beckett, Caspar David Friedrich, Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Motherwell, and on Henri Bergson (to name a few). In 2021, he has been appointed by the International Association of Aesthetics as the founding editor-in-chief of its Brill Series Transcultural Aesthetics. Forthcoming in Studies in Mysticism, Idealism, and Phenomenology with Brill is his anthology Towards a New Anthropology of the Embodied Mind, on the French philosopher Maine de Biran, whose psycho-physiological and psycho-pathological self-investigations are also the subject of his following talk.