Paul Masson-Oursel

Paul Masson-Oursel: The Man Who Refused to Philosophize Alone

In 1923, a Paris-trained agrégé de philosophie defended a doctoral thesis arguing that philosophy itself could never achieve genuine objectivity as long as it confined its evidence to the thought of a single civilization. The claim was, for French academic philosophy at the time, close to heretical: it meant that Descartes and Kant could not be understood in isolation from the logicians of classical India or the metaphysicians of China. Paul Masson-Oursel spent the rest of his career trying to build the discipline that claim required — comparative philosophy — almost entirely from outside the institutions that trained him.

An Education Built From Every Corner of the Sorbonne

Masson-Oursel was born in Paris on 5 September 1882 and died in the same city on 18 March 1956. He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1906, the standard credential for a career teaching in the French lycée and university system, but his real formation came from an unusually wide circle of teachers who rarely shared a classroom in early twentieth-century Paris. He studied philosophy under Henri Bergson and André Lalande, sociology under Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, psychology under Pierre Janet, and — decisively for the direction his career would take — Indology under Sylvain Lévi and Alfred Foucher and sinology under Édouard Chavannes. He learned Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese and Arabic directly from specialists rather than absorbing Asian thought secondhand through translation, an unusual level of linguistic commitment for a philosopher of his generation. In 1923 he completed his doctorat ès lettres with the dissertation *La philosophie comparée*, the work that gave his life's project its name.

Building Comparative Philosophy From the Margins

Masson-Oursel's central argument, laid out in *La philosophie comparée* and developed across decades of subsequent writing, was that no philosophical tradition — including the European one that French academic philosophy treated as the default — could claim to represent human thought as such. "Philosophy cannot achieve positivity," he wrote, "so long as its investigations are restricted to the thought of our own civilization." His method borrowed the comparative, quasi-positivist spirit of Auguste Comte and applied it not to stages of Western intellectual history but across the full breadth of the world's philosophical traditions, treating Indian, Chinese and European systems of thought as data to be set alongside one another rather than ranked against a single standard. He extended the same comparative instinct to mysticism and religious psychology, and stated his hope for the discipline in openly humanistic terms: that a generalized comparative study of thought "will allow people to meet without hatred, knowing each other better."

His major publications carried this program forward steadily rather than spectacularly: *Esquisse d'une histoire de la philosophie indienne* (1923) offered French readers one of the first serious scholarly surveys of Indian philosophical history; later books, including a study of yoga published in 1954, near the end of his life, continued to translate specialist Indological and Buddhological research into terms a broader philosophical audience could use.

A Career Built Outside the Sorbonne's Chairs

Despite his Sorbonne training, Masson-Oursel's institutional career unfolded almost entirely at the École pratique des hautes études, the research-oriented institution parallel to, but distinct from, the university proper. He began there in 1919–1920 as a substitute lecturer covering for Alfred Foucher, and in 1927 was appointed director of studies for the chair on Indian religions — a position he held for over a quarter-century, until October 1953, working alongside two of his own teachers, Sylvain Lévi and Foucher. He never obtained a chair at the Sorbonne itself, a fact later scholarship has read as significant: for all the seriousness of his scholarship, comparative philosophy as Masson-Oursel conceived it remained an outsider's project relative to the discipline's central institutional seat, sustained through the EPHE and through his own editorial and organizational labor rather than through mainstream academic philosophy's structures.

That labor was considerable. Following the death of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl in 1939, Masson-Oursel became secretary and then co-director, alongside Émile Bréhier, of the *Revue philosophique de la France et de l'étranger*, one of French philosophy's most established journals — a position that gave him real influence over what counted as serious philosophical work in France even without a Sorbonne chair. He also directed the monthly *La Psychologie et la Vie* and, in 1939, served as president of the Société française de psychologie, reflecting the breadth of his interests across philosophy, psychology and Asian studies simultaneously.

Personal Catastrophe

Masson-Oursel's later career unfolded against a personal history marked by severe wartime loss. During the Second World War his elder son was captured by the Gestapo; Masson-Oursel himself was imprisoned and returned from captivity, in the words of his EPHE biographical record, "greatly weakened and with frozen feet." His wife and younger son both died in 1953, the same year he stepped down from his EPHE chair after twenty-six years. He continued publishing until close to the end, and died in Paris in 1956 at seventy-three.

Why Paul Is Called a Genius

The case for the word rests on a specific act of intellectual courage rather than raw technical brilliance: Masson-Oursel built, almost single-handedly and from outside the Sorbonne's philosophy establishment, a working method for comparing philosophical traditions across civilizations at a moment when French academic philosophy treated European thought as effectively synonymous with philosophy itself. That required a rare combination — real competence in Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan and Arabic alongside formal training under Bergson, Durkheim and Janet — that let him move between primary Asian sources and Western philosophical method without relying on intermediaries, an unusual range even among orientalists of his era. His influence over the *Revue philosophique*, one of the era's central philosophical journals, shows that mainstream French philosophy took his editorial judgment seriously even when it did not grant him its most prestigious teaching chair.

The honest counter-case is equally clear: Masson-Oursel never held a Sorbonne professorship, spent his career at the EPHE rather than at philosophy's institutional center, and later historians of the discipline have specifically framed him as a figure working "inside and outside the academy" — respected, but never fully absorbed into the mainstream he sought to reform. Comparative philosophy as a recognized subfield also did not fully consolidate in France in his own lifetime the way he had hoped; his ambition outran his era's institutional appetite for it.

Legacy

Masson-Oursel is remembered today less for any single doctrine than for having named and attempted, decades before "comparative philosophy" became an accepted subfield internationally, the basic argument the field still makes: that philosophy conducted in ignorance of non-Western traditions is provincial rather than universal. His decades of editorial stewardship at the *Revue philosophique* and his long tenure teaching Indian religions at the EPHE quietly shaped two generations of French orientalist and philosophical scholarship, even as his signature project remained, in his own lifetime, more a personal crusade than an established discipline.

Achievements

• Held posts at École pratique des hautes études
• Fields: philosophy, history and oriental studies