RENOUVIER, CHARLES. – Philosopher, born in Montpellier on 1 January 1815 and died at Prades on 1 September 1903. He is considered the founder neocriticism (v.).
R.’s thought is set forth in the 4 vols. of the Essai de critique générale (Paris 1854–64), to which must be added La science de la morale (ibid. 1869), l’Exquisse d’une classification systématique des systèmes philosophiques (ibid. 1882), La nouvelle monadologie (ibid. 1899), Les dilemmes de la métaphysique pure (ibid. 1901), Le personnalisme (ibid. 1903), etc. The organs of neocriticism were first La critique philosophique (1872–90), directed by R., and then, from 1890, L’année philosophique of F. Th. Pilon. R.’s influence on contemporary French philosophy was considerable, LACHELIER, JULES (v.), Hamelin (v.), Boutroux (v.), Bergson (v.), and James (v.).
R. presents himself as a continuer of Kantian criticism, which he wishes to bring to completion through the noumenon (v.). Hence his “critical phenomenalism,” besides drawing on Kant, Hume (v.) positivism (v.) the restriction of the capacities of knowledge to the laws of phenomena. To establish these laws and mark the limits of human knowledge: this, according to R., is the purpose of philosophy, which rejects every metaphysical “illusion” and develops criticism in the direction of the most rigorous identification of “reality” and “representation” (v.). Only in this way are the errors of the twofold naturalistic (positivist) and idealistic (Hegelian) dogmatism avoided. His method is the analysis of experience; the principle from which he proceeds is the reduction of reality to representation, that is, phenomenon (v.). Every phenomenon subsists only in relation to other phenomena, to which it is “relative”; therefore, the affirmation of an absolute or thing-in-itself is contradictory, since it seeks to define, by means of relations, that which is unrelated and cannot be placed in relation. Beings are nothing but “sets of phenomena linked by determinate functions,” and science tends to establish the laws governing the phenomena themselves until it reaches a single synthesis. Thus, among what R. calls the structural laws of experience, or “categories” (v.), relation (v.) is the first category, of which all the others are specifications: number, extension, duration, quality, becoming, force, finality, personality. Therefore, the degrees of the concrete specification of the category of relation culminate in the living specification of personality: “The category of relation, no longer considered abstractly, but in a living manifestation of representations, is the law of consciousness or personality, which embraces together, as its instruments of knowledge and its forms, time and space, quality, quantity, causality, and finality” (Le personalisme, p. vi). Indeed, it is in consciousness (or personality) that all possible relations are defined and coordinated. Hence the name “personalism,” by which R. himself defined his “critical phenomenalism,” which is no longer Kantian criticism, since the two categories of personality and finality have been added. The latter, for R., is as essential as that of causality and serves to justify freedom, the principle of all spiritual life and the foundation of the moral order (the imperative of duty), which postulates the existence of God, a transcendent personality. Once relation has been posited as the mother category and knowledge identified with the system of relations (the “world” is nothing but the total synthesis of relations), R. has no difficulty in eliminating the Kantian antinomies. He accepts their thesis (the finite “world”) and rejects their antithesis (the infinite “world”), because it is absurd to admit an actual infinity that is wholly in act, which is equivalent to admitting the inexhaustible as exhausted. For the same reason, the world, finite in space and time, is also discontinuous and pluralistic.
In the Essais R. excludes the hypothesis “of creation” and accepts that of emanation (pantheism), but his One, or God, is conceived as a consciousness turned toward emerging from itself; hence the plurality of persons or consciousnesses is possible, and the independence of individual centers is guaranteed, each of which is the initiative of new acts, that is, freedom. “We substitute multiple unity, the whole, for the pure One, the idol of metaphysicians, for the sole reason that the world, actually and originally, is a determinate synthesis, not an abstract thesis” (Essais, I, p. 357). Subsequently, in La nouvelle monad., where R. adopts Origen’s (v.) doctrine of a plurality of successive worlds, he conceives God as a perfect Person and creator of a perfect world; but his metaphysical conception (he, an enemy of all metaphysics!) remains pantheistic and, ultimately, phenomenalistic, and as such contradictory.
R. does not realize that actual infinity does not entail contradiction, because it does not mean exhaustion; rather, what entails contradiction is the reduction of the real to the phenomenon, since, if everything were phenomenon, “appearance” itself, representation, would disappear.
Michele Federico Sciacca