In a suberbly researched and highly informative introduction to the recent edition of De l’Allemagne, Axel Blaeschke foregrounds the importance of sentiment and religiosity in Germaine de Staël’s presentation of German philosophy in the third section of her best-selling volume. However, A. Blaeschke also emphasizes de Staël’s lack of precision, coherence, and systematic rigor in her approach to German idealism :

Au total, Mme de Staël a retenu de l’idéalisme allemand ce qui lui convenait et l’a instrumentalisé dans le seul objectif de contrecarrer la philosophie française d’Helvétius et de ses disciples qu’elle juge contaminés par le virus de « l’intérêt bien entendu » ; à cette aune, les Idéologues ne constituent que le dernier maillon d’une chaîne condamnée à de stériles controverses esthétiques et sociales. Cette vision réductrice, devenue quasiment obsessionnelle, a sérieusement altéré sa capacité de jugement¹.

In this light, when de Staël is accused of distorting German idealism, it is due to the political and ethical concerns that supposedly cloud her thinking. A similar critique is leveled at her presentation of Kantian philosophy more specifically, although in this case A. Blaeschke focuses on de Staël’s failure to master Kant due to her particular conceptual framework that inflected his ideas in the direction of distinct political and ethical objectives :

La lecture des philosophes allemands dans le texte est effectivement infiniment douteuse. Parlant de Kant, elle évoque certes ses « catégories », ses « antinomies » dans deux notes, mais sans paraître bien en maîtriser le concept. Ce qu’elle attend de la philosophie kantienne, c’est une confirmation de sa propre conception du « sentiment » comme fondement de la morale aussi bien individuelle que sociale,—conception fortement teintée de religiosité et où priment la notion d’« âme » et, à sa suite, celle d’« immortalité² ».

Notwithstanding the implicit judgment of de Staël’s standing as a « serious » thinker, A. Blaeschke’s presentation of de Staël’s concept of « âme » in the context of this passage is noteworthy, as he appears to bind it exclusively to its religious connotations. Although de Staël’s use of this term certainly incorporates these connotations, as we shall see in this essay, restricting it in this way elides significant aspects of her concept of « âme », a concept which not only transcends these religious connotations, but which also extends to a notion of subjectivity.

Interventions that substantially confront de Staël’s approach to Kantian philosophy tend to drift toward an appraisal of her understanding (or lack thereof) of its key concepts. For this reason, pages have been devoted either to dismissing or to vindicating her as a « serious » thinker vis-à-vis her German, as well as French, contemporaries, but these attempts often underscore the ways in which de Staël’s own understanding of Kant was mediated by others—Villers, Degérando, Henry Crabb Robinson, the Schlegel brothers, etc. And while scholars largely vindicate de Staël, it is not without making her pass through the gauntlet of appraisal on Kantian terms³. Pierre Macherey⁴ is one remarkable exception in this regard⁵. His chapter on de Staël transcends this kind of appraisal by highlighting her interpretative practice and textual strategy with respect to philosophy :

On peut considérer que Mme de Staël « joue » la philosophie de Kant, pour en révéler les enjeux, exactement à la manière dont Corinne interprète une pièce de Shakespeare, en comédienne avisée et possédée, complètement habitée par son personnage sur lequel elle maintient pourtant un regard extérieur, qui lui permet d’y entrer en s’en démarquant. C’est ainsi que, d’après Mme de Staël, pour se rapprocher du sens d’une pensée, il faut surtout ne pas se laisser prendre au mode d’expression singulier qui la limite⁶.

Unlike A. Blaeschke’s introduction, which judges the apparent contradictions and inconsistencies in de Staël’s thought, P. Macherey aptly frames the discussion in terms of the « enjeux », or the immediate political and ethical concerns of the historical moment in which de Staël was writing. While P. Macherey focuses on de Staël’s attempt to identify « les éléments ou les signes annonciateurs d’une culture ouverte, authentiquement cosmopolite7 » in German thought, he alludes to another key concern of de Staël’s in the following lines :

L’idée directrice qui guida cette interprétation pourraient être résumée ainsi : contrairement aux apparences qui font de lui un penseur spécialisé, dont l’originalité dépend spécifiquement de catégories et de procédures de raisonnement particulières, celles-ci en conditionnant étroitement la compréhension, Kant, philosophe unanime, a exercé principalement un rôle de conciliation et de synthèse, qui a élargi le domaine de l’esprit en y rassemblant des activités présentées auparavant comme exclusives. Dans la logique de cette présentation, il devenait possible de dire que « Kant qui semblait appelé à conclure toutes les grandes alliances intellectuelles a fait de l’âme un seul foyer où toutes les facultés sont d’accord entre elles ». Et c’est ainsi que, si étonnant que cela puisse paraître, Mme de Staël a été conduite à faire de Kant, davantage même qu’un philosophe éclectique, le doctrinaire par excellence de l’éclectisme⁸.

Just as de Staël seeks to translate, or open up, Kantian philosophy by adapting it to new forms of expression, on a conceptual level de Staël imagines another possible opening : it is related to the question of subjectivity. If de Staël’s political and ethical concerns in De l’Allemagne are evoked, they are most often framed in terms of her opposition to Bonaparte and the politico-ethical regime of « calcul9 » that buttressed his imperial system, or in terms of her polemical critique of French materialism and the ethics of exteriority and self-interest that such philosophy grounded. These two features of de Staël’s critique are bound together by her underlying concern with articulating a post-Revolutionary subjectivity. In order to delineate this connection, it is necessary to identify two organizing frameworks that ground de Staël’s thought. The first of these is the analogy that she draws between the political and the ontological. In this context I define the ontological as the existential disposition, or state of being, of an entity, whether that entity be the nation-state or the political subject. The second is related to de Staël’s phenomenological approach to and understanding of philosophy and philosophical systems. By this I mean the ways in which de Staël herself internalizes and performs philosophical ideas, as well as her understanding of the ways in which philosophical systems are internalized across the broader culture.

De Staël’s analogy between the political and the ontological acknowledges a correspondence between the state of a nation’s political order and the state of the political subject within that order. An iteration of this analogy appears as early as her 1796 De l’influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations. In this text, if de Staël advances a notion that the freedom, or autonomy, of the political subject is the necessary precondition of a free polity, she also insists on identifying and interrogating the despotic power of psychosocial forces vis-à-vis the ethical conscience and will of political subjects. These psychosocial forces include the very passions that operate on both an individual as well as a collective level ; in addition, individual character and national character are inextricably linked through the cultivation and expression of such passions. De Staël opens De l’influence des passions with an analysis of individual character « in relation to what Valéry would call a ‘politique intérieur’, a kind of power struggle between the inner faculties of reason and the passions¹⁰ ». In the subsequent chapters, de Staël illustrates the ways in which this psychic physics of power is reproduced socially : that is, whereas the body politic bears down on the psyche, the internal dynamics of the psyche find their analogous expression in the body politic¹¹. Written largely during the Jacobin Terror, De l’influence des passions is preoccupied with questions related to the governance or regulation of the passions in the wake of revolutionary violence, referring to the passions as « la plus grande difficulté des gouvernements¹² ». In ways that clearly prefigure the work on national character later undertaken in De la littérature, de Staël explicitly connects the psychic disposition, or constitution, of political subjects to the constitution, or configuration, of governments :

On voit aisément que toutes les combinaisons sociales les plus despotiques conviendraient également à des hommes inertes qui seraient contents de rester à la place que le sort leur aurait fixée et que la théorie démocratique la plus abstraite serait praticable au milieu d’hommes sages uniquement conduits par leur raison. Le seul problème des constitutions est donc de connaître jusqu’à quel degré on peut exciter ou comprimer les passions, sans compromettre le bonheur public¹³.

Though the second part of her work on the happiness of nations was never written, de Staël connects the passions of the individual to those of the nation in the opening pages. Unregulated passions and despotism are opposed to reason and freedom. As she writes, « toutes les combinaisons sociales les plus despotiques » are suitable to a political subject whose defining quality is inertia. Drawing on the lexicon of physics, de Staël’s reference to inertia evokes a longstanding association of the passions with passivity : that is, a subject ruled entirely by the passions is a passive subject, a subject that is also object, acted on by forces both internal and external14. Such a subject is thus ruled by two despots : the passions and what de Staël calls « toutes les combinaisons sociales les plus despotiques ». It is noteworthy that, in this case, de Staël does not connect despotism to a specific institution, but instead to an array of despotic « social combinations », thus indicating a capacious definition of despotism. In this light, despotism is an all-encompassing system—a way of life—that extends beyond the form of government tout court. It subsumes not only a psychosocial regime cultivated by a historically constituted array of institutions and circumstances, but also the prevailing concepts of a particular philosophical system internalized by subjects within the body politic—this conceptualization of despotism resurfaces in her sustained critique of French materialism in De l’Allemagne. In contrast, « la théorie démocratique la plus abstraite » is feasible among political subjects guided wholly by their reason. In this ideal scenario, the subject is an active, autonomous subject, one that participates actively in the life of the body politic. Whereas the passions act on the subject, the subject uses reason, thus implying that such a subject possesses a will. Associating the use of reason with an active will, de Staël thus connects reason to freedom : that is, if the passions themselves possess the absolute power of a despot, then the freedom of the political subject hinges on their mastery through the use of reason. Therefore, de Staël elaborates these two abstract theoretical positions as the organizing categories of her study of the passions in relation to the political.

A comparable model resurfaces in De l’Allemagne, in which the categories of passivity and activity are of particular interest. In the closing lines of her 1813 preface of De l’Allemagne, de Staël places two existential dispositions in relation to each other—the état of the nation-state and the état of the political subject. Explicitly linking them together is a concept of autonomy :

Il y a trois ans que je désignais la Prusse et les pays du nord qui l’environnent comme la patrie de la pensée ; en combien d’actions généreuses cette pensée ne s’est-elle pas transformée ! ce que les philosophes mettaient en système s’accomplit, et l’indépendance de l’âme fondera celle des États¹⁵.

Beyond its frequently cited religious connotations and, in particular, its association with the idea of immortality, here de Staël’s « âme » incorporates a concept of the self, otherwise referred to in modern parlance as the « moi ». However, de Staël’s « âme » is a capacious concept that also signifies a certain kind of self—the self of enthusiasm. In the context of De l’Allemagne, although the later chapters on enthusiasm illustrate further this concept of the self, de Staël’s « âme » expresses its most expansive capacity as a concept in the chapter on English philosophy :

L’âme est un foyer qui rayonne dans tous les sens ; c’est dans ce foyer que consiste l’existence ; toutes les observations et tous les efforts des philosophes doivent se tourner vers ce moi, centre et mobile de nos sentiments et de nos idées. Sans doute l’incomplet du langage nous oblige à nous servir d’expressions erronées, il faut répéter, suivant l’usage : tel individu a de la raison, ou de l’imagination, ou de la sensibilité, etc. ; mais si l’on voulait s’entendre par un mot, on devrait dire seulement : Il a de l’âme, il a beaucoup d’âme. C’est ce souffle divin qui fait tout l’homme¹⁶.

These lines articulate the most complete, dynamic definition of the Staëlien self ; this is apparent in the very structure of the passage. For instance, the term « âme » is at first displaced by « foyer », and subsequently by the terms « moi », « centre », and finally « mobile » : that is, if de Staël’s use of the term « âme » evokes the religious connotations, « ce souffle divin qui fait tout l’homme » also opens up a space for thinking of the self in terms of a whole, autonomous, actively willing subject in the political realm. The shift apparent in this passage also echoes the broader linguistic shift from « âme » to « moi » carefully detailed in Jan Goldstein’s The Post-Revolutionary Self : Politics and Psyche in France, 1750-1850. As Goldstein writes, in the second half of the eighteenth century, « French sensationalists participated in the linguistic shift that replaced the premodern âme with the modern moi¹⁷ ». By the early years of the Bourbon Restoration, according to J. Goldstein, the concept of the « moi » as a whole, autonomous, actively willing self constituted the core feature of Victor Cousin’s eclecticism¹⁸. J. Goldstein thus constructs a narrative not only of this linguistic—and ultimately conceptual—shift from « âme » to « moi », but also of the triumph and institutionalization of Victor Cousin’s eclecticism and, more specifically, his distinct concept of a whole, autonomous, actively willing subject, or « moi », a doctrine that he and his disciples propagated through the emerging French national educational system, and that consequently filtered through French society, more broadly. However, before this development, in the waning years of the Empire, de Staël had already disseminated an open, dynamic, capacious concept of the « moi » with neither the restrictions later imposed by Cousin, nor his reactionary politics to which it was pinned¹⁹. And viewed in another light, J. Goldstein’s compelling narrative points to the political, social, and cultural power of internalized philosophical systems, a phenomenon with which de Staël was profoundly concerned.

In this regard, it is necessary to return to the aforecited passage that concludes the 1813 preface of De l’Allemagne. When read alongside de Staël’s concept of « âme » as it is fully articulated in the chapter on English philosophy, its significance touches on both ontological as well as phenomenological questions whose political implications shed light on how to approach her chapters on German philosophy. As that passage indicates, the freedom, or autonomy, of the political subject grounds the freedom, or autonomy of the nation-state ; moreover, the perpetual quest for equilibrium between these two states—much like that « réunion de tous les contraires²⁰ » imagined in De l’influence des passions—lies at the very heart of de Staël’s conceptual framework. In this regard, de Staël establishes a direct correspondence between the two states of being that comprise her unique vision of Germany : on the one hand, there is the passive Germany of her imagination evoked in the 1810 text ; on the other, there is the active Germany emerging after 1812, when the forces arrayed against Bonaparte reclaimed the momentum in response to his disastrous invasion of Russia. Therefore, from a post-1812 vantage point, de Staël sees this « patrie de la pensée²¹ », that realm of pure interiority initially depicted in De l’Allemagne, finally actualizing—collectively—its idealist conception of an actively willing self through its very activity. When Staël declares that « ce que les philosophes mettaient en système s’accomplit²² » through the conversion of thought into « actions généreuses23 », she is in fact articulating her phenomenological grasp of the political, social, and cultural power of philosophy, in general, and of philosophical systems, in particular. The subtle yet formative power of specific philosophical systems operate by means of the internalization of the spirit of an idea over the letter. De Staël describes this specific power in the opening lines of De l’Allemagne’s chapter, « Du persiflage introduit par un certain genre de philosophie » :

Le système philosophique adopté dans un pays exerce une grande influence sur la tendance des esprits : c’est le moule universel dans lequel se jettent toutes les pensées ; ceux même qui n’ont point étudié ce système se conforment sans le savoir à la disposition générale qu’il inspire²⁴.

Within the context of the nation, de Staël suggests that the collective internalization of philosophical systems is a non-specific and unconscious social process. It is the spirit of a philosophical system that, as it filters through the body politic, guides and cultivates the « disposition générale » of the nation. With these remarks, de Staël keenly perceives philosophical systems as both living and lived things ; philosophical positions are internalized, inhabited, and performed as much as they are formulated, refined, and defended : philosophy is not only theory, it is practice. In other words, for de Staël, philosophy and philosophical systems are practices as such, socially and historically embedded, mediating the political and ethical life of the nation. It is with this in mind that de Staël understands the « enjeux25 » of Kantian philosophy, and therefore seeks to render their ideas intelligible to the French reading public.

De Staël’s phenomenological approach to and understanding of philosophy and philosophical systems goes one step further, and this has to do with her awareness of the ontological space in which the notion of an existential disposition, or state of being, is imagined. In the aforecited passage in which de Staël offers that textured concept of the self (from the chapter on English philosophy), her evocation of the idea of « existence » is central. When de Staël writes that « c’est dans ce foyer que consiste l’existence26 », she is also imagining a space where being resides27. With the use of the term « foyer », de Staël also elicits in our imagination not only a hearth, from which the light of fire—a symbol of creative genius—« rayonne dans tous les sens28 », but also a sanctuary, a refuge, as well as a point of origin. When the second half of the aforecited passage then turns to the question of language, it speaks back to the first half : that is, what de Staël calls « l’incomplet du langage29 » is performed by the rehearsal of terms deployed to give full meaning to the concept of « âme ». However, as with all the « expressions erronées30 » that follow, the full meaning of « âme » remains elusive, and therefore only the term of « âme » itself is capable of filling the gaps. It is in these gaps apparent in the passage that de Staël seeks to carve out space for a concept of being. In a similar vein, John Isbell argues that de Staël « follows Kant as would Wittgenstein a century later, in marking off whole areas of metaphysics as territory where verbal argument is necessarily nonsense ; areas where men have no better guide than faith³¹ ». I would add that, with her ontology, de Staël more precisely marks off the self as an entity beyond language ; the Staëlien self is thus a living and lived concept ; it is a whole, autonomous, actively willing self that cannot be captured in discourse. Finally, by marking off the self in this way, the political implications of de Staël’s rhetorical strategy become clear : she symbolically positions the self as an end in itself. In this respect, to borrow that fitting expression from P. Macherey, de Staël « ‘joue’ la philosophie de Kant32 » once more. Furthermore, in the opening passage of her initial chapter on Kant, de Staël reinforces this symbolic positioning of the self as an end in itself with a remarkable depiction of Kant playing such a self :

Kant a vécu jusque dans un âge très avancé, et jamais il n’est sorti de Koenigsberg ; c’est là qu’au milieu des glaces du Nord il a passé sa vie entière à méditer sur les lois de l’intelligence humaine. Une ardeur infatigable pour l’étude lui a fait acquérir des connaissances sans nombre. Les sciences, les langues, la littérature, tout lui était familier ; et sans rechercher la gloire dont il n’a joui que très tard, n’entendant que dans sa vieillesse le bruit de sa renommée, il s’est contenté du plaisir silencieux de la réflexion. Solitaire, il contemplait son âme avec recueillement ; l’examen de la pensée lui prêtait de nouvelles forces à l’appui de la vertu, et quoiqu’il ne se mêlait jamais avec les passions ardentes des hommes, il a su forger des armes pour ceux qui seraient appelés à les combattre³³.

That this passage serves as de Staël’s introductory presentation of Kant is especially noteworthy in that it functions as a mise en abyme of de Staël’s conceptualization of a post-Revolutionary subjectivity, one in which a whole, autonomous, actively willing self is actualized through practice. Additionally, this image of Kant evokes that capacious concept of the self—the self of enthusiasm—, one whose « ardeur infatigable pour l’étude » is complemented by a « plaisir silencieux de la réflexion » : that is, for de Staël, Kant represents a self that incorporates all the faculties related to reason and sentiment. However, such an enumeration of qualities reveals an attempt to encompass the wholeness of being that, for de Staël, cannot be captured entirely by language. The elusive and inaccessible « âme » of Kant that is contemplated « avec recueillement » discloses de Staël’s concept of being, a concept which grounds her efforts to theorize an independent post-Revolutionary self.