Victor Cousin

Born Nov. 28, 1792, in Paris; died Jan. 14, 1867, in Cannes. French idealist philosopher and politician.

Cousin taught philosophy at the Ecole Normale from 1814 to 1820 and later was its director. He visited Germany in 1817–18 and in 1824 and became personally acquainted with G. Hegel and F. W. von Schelling. He was professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1828 to 1851. An advocate of constitutional monarchy, Cousin was a member of the Conseil d'Etat under Louis Philippe and was a peer of France. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1830 and to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in 1832. As minister of education in 1840 he introduced reforms aimed at a rapprochement of the universities with the church.

Cousin's philosophical views were formed under the direct influence of P. P. Royer-Collard and M. F. Maine de Biran and were on the whole eclectic. He affirmed that all philosophical truths had already been expressed and that therefore the only task of philosophy was the critical selection of truths from previous philosophical systems on the basis of common sense. Cousin attacked materialism, especially 18th-century French materialism, which was based, in his view, on the sensualism of E. de Condillac. Cousin contributed to the popularization of history of philosophy. He translated Plato into French, edited works of Plato, Proclus, Abelard, Pascal, and Descartes, and acquainted French readers with the philosophy of Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. Marx classified Cousin among the “true interpreters” of the “sober reality” of bourgeois society (K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 8, p. 120) and called him a “weak eclectic” (ibid., vol. 27, p. 376).