An Exception

Abstract

French philosophy up to Brunschvicg and Bergson is saturated with works – from Boutroux’s essay on contingency to the question of causes and the possibility of action in Maurice Blondel – similarly tormented by the question of the perforation (trouée) of free will at the heart of English and German scientific and philosophical
systems. France itself emerges as a hope to incarnate some or other exception to Anglo-Saxon and Germanic universality, among the new sciences of Nature or culture, of which it is no longer the main provider. As for French spiritualist works, they frequently consist of inversions of Kant or Hegel, which find in the margins of these systems the very center. They thus hang onto liberty, to the will of the person as to an exception to the thoughts around which French philosophies attempt to reconstruct another universality, neither that of knowledge nor of science, but quite often that of action.