“The Only, the True French Metaphysician of the Eighteenth Century”

The place given by Cousin to Condillac in the project of founding a new “French philosophy” in the first half of nineteenth-century France seems eminently paradoxical. On the one hand, Condillac is designated as one of the main representatives of this specifically eighteenth-century sensualism that has to be fought by all means. But on the other hand, Cousin recognises that in Condillac “the metaphysician dominates.” What is more, he does not hesitate to present Condillac as “the only, the true French metaphysician of the eighteenth century.” This Condillac is thus likely to constitute a positive reference. Shedding light on a very little known intertextuality between Cousin, Saphary and Degérando, this chapter attests to the crucial importance of the identification of the true philosophical lineage connecting the new French spiritualist school and Condillac in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The paradoxical dimension of Condillac’s philosophy can thus be found in the empirical nature and the eminently practical vocation of this metaphysics, which must enable the founding of a new psychology, different morals and different politics, and act as a great leverage used to shatter the philosophical dualisms and antagonisms structuring the official historiography of modernity we mainly inherit from nineteenth-century France.