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Oscillatory Ethics and the Vitalism of Jean-Marie Guyau

Posted on May 16, 2025 by admin

The Oscillatory Transcendence in Jean-Marie Guyau’s Ethics: A Study on the Disavowal of Fixed Teleology

Among the many half-submerged figures whose silhouettes flit across the darker corridors of philosophical history, few possess the scintillating inconsistency and lyric vigor of Jean-Marie Guyau (1854–1888). Though his untimely death at the age of 33 cleft the full maturity of his thought from the world, his works—especially *Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction*—reveal an oscillatory dynamic within ethical theory seldom replicated: an ethic that is alive not merely in its subject matter but in its very structure. It is this very structure, namely the implicit rejection of fixed teleology in favor of what may be termed ‘oscillatory transcendence’, that shall occupy us in the present meditation.

At first glance, Guyau’s ethics may appear an effusion of fin de siècle Romanticism, married with a science-worshipping optimism reminiscent of Spencer. Yet such superficial judgments collapse in confrontation with his deeper philosophical mechanism, which posits life itself as the generator of value—not as a passive substrate upon which external obligations may be imposed, but as a creative, self-determining flow. Guyau’s is not merely an ethics *without obligation or sanction*; it is an ethics without terminus, without final cause, without goal. From this radical move springs a host of subtle paradoxes, none more underdiscussed than what I designate the principle of oscillatory transcendence.

This concept, which resides in the interstice between vitality and value, emerges not as a formal postulate but as a methodological drift galvanizing Guyau’s entire moral metaphysic. The essence of oscillatory transcendence in Guyau is this: that life does not strive toward a fixed moral endpoint (a Heaven, a Republic of Ends, a Nirvana, or suchlike Platonic chimera), but rather persists in a ceaseless motion outward from itself, continually regenerating its moral expressions through its immanent creativity. Despite Guyau’s overt biological and psychological commitments, this principle allies him less with the deterministic evolutionism of Darwin or Spencer than with the dynamical monism of Heraclitus or, albeit more enigmatically, with post-Kantian thinkers like Fichte or even certain late Schellingian fragments.

Consider Guyau’s assertion:

> “La vie est expansion: et comme telle, elle est féconde en obligations qu’elle se donne elle-même au lieu de les subir” (Life is expansion: and as such, it is fecund in obligations that it gives itself instead of enduring them).¹

Upon rigorous inspection, this statement contains a profound reversal of teleology. Traditional ethics, particularly those in the deontological or utilitarian camps, presume some fixed locus of moral adjudication—whether in categorical imperatives or aggregate happiness. Yet here, Guyau eschews anchorage: life generates its own imperative, not from reason *per se*, but from an aesthetic fecundity residing in its own overflow. This transcendence—whereby individual vitality births ethical obligations spontaneously, without external compulsion or future reward/punishment—cannot be neatly contained within a formalist schema.

More significantly still, and what critics have failed to adequately address, is that this ‘self-giving’ of life is not unilinear, but oscillates—pressing outward in acts of ethical engagement and folding inward in acts of reflection, recalibration, even refusal. Guyau anticipates, in a disjointed and pre-cognitive register, the kind of ethical temporality later theorized by thinkers like Paul Ricoeur or Levinas, who saw ethical life as unfolding through a dialectic of initiative and response, exposure and retreat.

The oscillatory movement Guyau implies operates through three neglected strata:

1. **Temporal Dynamism**: Unlike Hegel’s dialectic which culminates, or Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence which circles, Guyau’s ethical time is neither culminating nor repeating, but expanding via pulsation. Each ethical act arises in response to the moment’s particular exigencies, and is thereby unrepeatable, though not unrooted. Where fixed teleology demands the same answer to the same moral problem, Guyau’s ethic allows the same problem to evoke diverse acts, depending on the accumulated vitality of the person at that time.

2. **Creative Generativity**: The transcendent motion of life generates not only moral feelings (solidarity, sympathy, love) but also art, science, and play, which themselves feed back into the ethical realm. These are not auxiliary to the moral life but constitutive of it, enabling each person’s ethical trajectory to fluctuate with energetic creativity, rather than mere rational calculation or emotive reaction.²

3. **Absence of Closure**: Perhaps most provocatively, Guyau suggests that moral life remains forever unfinished—not in a despairing Sisyphean sense, but in a quasi-aesthetic exuberance. This absence of finality is not a lack, but a freedom: the freedom to create, to project values anew, to rapidly oscillate from engagement to withdrawal and back, in patterns dictated not by law but by the rhythm of life itself.

These strata converge in the image of the ethical subject as a “poet of his own values”—not merely because he invents norms, but because he lives them rhythmically. Guyau’s ethical agent resembles less the lawgiver or rational chooser and more the dancer: never alighting permanently at any one point, but rather sketching an orbit of beauty whose truth is found not in stillness but in motion.

What are the implications? Firstly, Guyau offers a robust criticism of moral systems that seek permanence in codes, canons, or conditions of salvation. His fluid ethics also poses a stern challenge to the fixed-identity assumptions underlying contemporary moral psychology. The self is not an unchanging locus of choice, but a fluctuating field of energies—ethical energies—that require rhythm, not calibration.

Secondly, Guyau’s oscillatory transcendence anticipates, though with greater literary flair, some aspects of process philosophy, particularly Whitehead’s ‘concrescence’ of actual occasions. However, unlike Whitehead, Guyau derives morality not from metaphysical necessity, but from the exuberance of existence itself: morality, as such, is the lateral outpouring of life’s intensities, not their governance.

It is curious that contemporary French philosophy, having lavished attention upon Deleuze, neglects to trace his doctrines of becoming and virtuality back to this lesser-known precursor. But perhaps such is the fate of Guyau, whose brief life was like his ethics: without fixed endpoint, without sanction… only movement. The oscillations endure.

In closing, Jean-Marie Guyau’s subtle disavowal of fixed teleology does not deny morality, it liberates it from the metaphysical crutches that cripple its vitality. Ethics becomes not an obligation imposed, but a song sung—improvised, interrupted, resumed—within the theater of being. To live, in Guyau’s terms, is to participate in transcendence not by climbing, but by expanding—ceaselessly.

By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium

existential ethics, French philosophy, oscillation, teleology, value creation, life, rhythm

—

¹ Guyau, Jean-Marie. *Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction.* Paris: Félix Alcan, 1885, p. 12.

² For a comprehensive treatment of this dynamic, see Ansell-Pearson, Keith. *Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze.* London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 106–113. Though Deleuze is not interpreting Guyau directly, the valuation of creative difference as ethical event resonates profusely.

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Castles Get Kicked in the Bricks each Summer

Let’s face it: some backpacks just carry your stuff. This one tells your entire life philosophy in one ridiculous, multilingual joke. Imagine strolling into a museum, a bus stop, or your ex's new wedding—with a bag that declares, in ten languages, that castles are always the losers of summer.

Why? Because deep down, you know:

  • Tourists always win.
  • History has a sense of humor.
  • And you, my friend, are not carrying your lunch in just any nylon sack—you’re carrying it in a medieval meltdown on your shoulders.

This backpack says:

  • “I’ve been to four castles, hated three, and got kicked out of one for asking where the dragons were.”
  • “I appreciate heritage sites, but I also think they could use a bit more slapstick.”
  • “I’m cute, I’m moopish, and I will absolutely picnic on your parapet.”

It’s absurd.
It’s philosophical.
It holds snacks.

In short, it’s not just a backpack—it’s a mobile monument to glorious collapse.

And honestly? That’s what summer’s all about.

Philosophy thirts

Feeling surveilled? Alienated by modernity? Accidentally started explaining biopolitics at brunch again? Then it’s time to proudly declare your loyalties (and your exhaustion) with our iconic “I’m with Fuckold” shirt.

This tee is for those who’ve:

  • Said “power is everywhere” in a non-BDSM context.
  • Tried to explain Discipline and Punish to their cat.
  • Secretly suspect the panopticon is just their neighbour with binoculars.

Wearing this shirt is a cry of love, rebellion, and post-structural despair. It says:
“Yes, I’ve read Foucault. No, I will not be okay.”

Stay tuned for more philosophical shirts and backpacks, as we at Benders are working on an entire collection that will make even the ghost of Hegel raise an eyebrow.

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