L'Art au point de vue sociologique

by Jean-Marie Guyau

Reprint of the ed. published by F. Alcan, Paris.

L’Art au point de vue sociologique conteste à sa façon l’idée très répandue que l’expérience esthétique n’est jamais qu’une expérience privée. Sous la plume de Jean-Marie Guyau (1854-1888), l’auteur de la fameuse Morale sans obligation ni sanction, on y voit la philosophie d’inspiration vitaliste, celle-là même dont la vigueur émouvait Nietzsche, se saisissant de la littérature française du XIXe siècle, pour nous proposer des principes de critique littéraire nouveaux, discutables sans doute, méprisables jamais. Cette œuvre témoigne des premiers effets du concept de sociologie dans les sciences philosophiques et d’une perspective critique ouverte par les hypothèses scientifiques audacieuses de la fin du XIXe siècle. Pour l’offrir au travail scientifique, la présente édition est exactement conforme à la première édition posthume (1889), accompagnée des seuls éléments d’information utiles à la lecture contemporaine.

388 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1975

About the author

Jean-Marie Guyau was a french philosopher and poet. Through his stepfather, the noted French philosopher Alfred Fouillée, he soon knew about Plato and Kant, who strongly influenced him. With this background, he was able to attain his Bachelor of Arts at only 17 years of age, and at this time, translated the Handbook of Epictetus. At 19, he published his 1300-page Mémoire that, a year later in 1874, won a prize from the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and helped to earn him a philosophy lectureship at the Lycée Condorcet.

Guyau's works primarily analyze and respond to modern philosophy, especially moral philosophy. Largely seen as an Epicurean, he viewed English utilitarianism as a modern version of Epicureanism. Although an enthusiastic admirer of the works of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, he did not spare them a careful scrutiny of their approach to morality.

In his Esquisse d'une morale sans obligation ni sanction, probably his most important work on moral theory, he begins from Fouillée, maintaining that utilitarian and positivist schools, despite admitting the presence of an unknowable in moral theory, wrongly expel individual hypotheses directed towards this unknowable. He states that any valid theory of ethics must consider the moral sphere as consisting not merely of moral facts (the utilitarian approach) but also, and more importantly, of moral ideas. On the other hand, in contrast to Fouillée, he does not see this unknowable itself as able to contribute a "principle practically limiting and restricting conduct," i.e. of "mere justice" which, he states, comes too close to Kantian notions of duty; for this, in turn, would bring us back to a theory of moral obligation, which, as the title suggests, he wishes to free moral theory from.

(Rephrased from Wikipedia)