Maine de Biran and Marc Richir

Abstract

Maine de Biran, the initiator of the so-called French spiritualist philosophy, is the discoverer of inner touch. The tactile opposes the visual and is the deep source of intuition. Marc Richir enthusiastically welcomes this philosophical idea of inner touch, and explains that it is an incorporeal contact, immaterial, without space or time; it is the non-adherence of himself to things themselves, as a result demanded by absolute transcendence. A parallel is then drawn between Maine de Biran and Marc Richir, as philosophers opposed to each other on the two sides of an intermediate phenomenological level: the level of perceptive fantasies and the identity of the transposable. It is the middle level that Ovid predicted in ancient times in a famous verse: «Medio tutissimus ibis», («You’ll go safer in between»).