Abstract

Victor Cousin's thought flourished during the Restoration period. Cousin himself attempted to restore the value of past philosophies by combining them into a modern synthesis, which he called Eclecticism. As part of this aim, Cousin wrote various critiques of post-Cartesian philosophy. In these he strove to combat the "false" elements of Lockean empiricism, and of German idealism, and to preserve their valid elements. The resultant Cousinian philosophy asserted the ontological reality of the self, of the external world, and of the realm of spiritual truths. ;In contrast to his metaphysics, which is highly abstract, Cousin's esthetics preserves some qualitative closeness to reality. One reason for this difference is that Cousin's esthetics reflects an esthetic tradition, chiefly Platonic, which emphasized the vital significance of the experience of beauty. But Cousin's relation to this tradition, as to that of German esthetic idealism, is often inconsistent. Because he had a neoclassic prejudice for the "beau-ideal," Cousin failed to understand the organic conception of beauty as it was held by Plotinus or Shaftesbury. This misunderstanding can be traced back to Cousin's fundamental confusion of the Platonic "idea" with the esthetic "ideal" of the eighteenth century. ;The influence of Cousin's esthetics is hard to assess apart from that of his entire philosophy. Lamartine and Hugo may express some of Cousin's ideas in their poetry. Flaubert acknowledges Cousin's critical acumen. But Cousin's restoration of philosophical "idealism" is so characteristic of his period that his peculiar contributions to it must have exceeded what is evident to us now