Victor Cousin packed the Sorbonne like Abelard and then ran French education
A watchmaker's son from Paris, Victor Cousin blended Scottish common sense with German idealism into a philosophy he called eclecticism. Ousted from teaching and briefly jailed in Berlin, he returned in 1828 to lecture halls more crowded than any Paris philosopher had drawn since Abelard, then became minister of public instruction.
Cousin was born in Paris on 28 November 1792 and sent at ten to the Lycée Charlemagne, where a Latin oration won him first prize in the national school competition. At the École Normale he heard Pierre Laromiguière lecture on Locke and Condillac, and later said that day decided his whole life. Pierre Paul Royer-Collard then steered him toward Scottish common sense realism, and Maine de Biran taught him to notice the will at work in even simple acts of awareness. From 1815 he taught philosophy publicly himself.
He also learned German to read Kant, Jacobi and Schelling. In 1817 he met Hegel at Heidelberg, finding him not especially likeable but becoming his friend, and the next year spent a month with Schelling and Jacobi in Munich.
Politics then intervened. In a backlash against liberalism in 1821 and 1822 he lost his posts, as did the historian François Guizot. Travelling in Germany, he was imprisoned in Berlin in 1824 for six months, perhaps at the urging of the French police. These years were productive: his Fragments philosophiques of 1826 set out his eclecticism, and he edited Proclus and Descartes and began a Plato translation that ran to 13 volumes.
Recalled in 1828, Cousin enjoyed three years of triumph, his return seen as a victory for constitutional ideas. His lectures produced ardent followers and influenced readers from Emerson to Poe. After the July revolution the new regime honoured him: he became a Peer of France in 1832 and minister of public instruction in 1840 under Adolphe Thiers, while also directing the École Normale. He died on 14 January 1867.
Source: Victor Cousin
