RENOUVIER, CHARLES. - Philosopher, born in Montpellier on 1 January 1815 and died in Prades on 1 September 1903. He is considered the founder and leading representative of French neocriticism (v.).
Renouvier’s thought is expounded in the four volumes of *Essais de critique générale* (Paris 1854–64), to which should be added *La science de la morale* (ibid. 1869), *Esquisse 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), and others. The organs of neocriticism were first *La critique philosophique* (1872–90), edited by Renouvier, and then, from 1890 onward, *L’année philosophique* by F. Th. Pillon. Renouvier exerted notable influence on contemporary French philosophy, LACHELIER, JULES (v.), Hamelin (v.), Boutroux (v.), Bergson (v.), and James (v.).
Renouvier presents himself as the continuer of Kantian criticism, which he seeks to bring to completion by eliminating the thing-in-itself or noumenon (v.). Thus his “critical phenomenism,” besides drawing on Kant, Hume (v.) and, from positivism (v.), accepts the limitation of knowledge to the laws of phenomena. Establishing these laws and marking the limits of human knowing is, according to Renouvier, the purpose of philosophy, which rejects every “illusion” of metaphysics and develops criticism in the direction of a more rigorous identification of “reality” and “representation” (v.). Only thus, he argues, are the errors of both naturalistic dogmatism (positivism) and idealistic dogmatism (Hegel) avoided. His method is the analysis of experience; the principle from which he starts is the reduction of reality to representation, that is, to phenomenon (v.). Every phenomenon subsists only in relation to other phenomena to which it is “relative”; hence the affirmation of an absolute or thing-in-itself is contradictory, since it attempts, by means of relations, to define what is unrelational and non-relational. Beings are nothing but “ensembles of phenomena bound by determinate functions,” and science aims to establish the laws among phenomena themselves until it attains a single synthesis. Thus, of what Renouvier calls the structural laws of experience or “categories” (v.), relation (v.) is the primary category, of which all others are specifications: number, extension, duration, quality, becoming, force, finality, personality. Hence the degrees of concrete specification of the category-relation culminate in the living specification of personality: “The category of relation, no longer considered abstractly but in the living manifestation of representations, is the law of the consciousness of personality, which embraces together, as its instruments of knowledge and its forms, time and space, quality, quantity, causality, finality” (*Le personnalisme*, p. VI). Indeed, it is in consciousness (or personality) that all possible relations are defined and coordinated. From this comes the name “personalism” with which Renouvier himself designated his “critical phenomenism,” which is no longer Kantian criticism, since it has added the two categories of personality and finality. The latter, for Renouvier, is as essential as causality and serves to justify freedom, the principle of all spiritual life and the foundation of moral order (the imperative of duty), which postulates the existence of God as a transcendent personality. Once relation is posited as the mother category and knowledge is identified with the system of relations (the “world” is nothing but the total synthesis of relations), it is not difficult for Renouvier to eliminate Kant’s antinomies, of which he accepts the thesis (the world is finite) and rejects the antithesis (the world is infinite), because it is absurd to admit an infinite actual in its entirety, which would be like admitting the inexhaustible exhausted. For the same reason, the world, finite in space and time, is also discontinuous and pluralistic.
In the *Essais* Renouvier excludes the hypothesis of creation and accepts instead that of emanation (pantheism), but his One or God is conceived as a consciousness striving to go beyond itself; hence the plurality of persons or consciousnesses is possible, and the independence of individual centers is guaranteed, each of which is an initiative of new acts, that is, freedom. “We substitute multiple unity, the whole, for the pure One, the idol of the metaphysicians, solely because the world, both currently and originally, is a determinate synthesis, not an abstract thesis” (*Essais*, I, p. 357). Later, in *La nouvelle monadologie*, where Renouvier 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 (of one who is an enemy of all metaphysics!) remains, in the end, pantheistic, indeed phenomenistic, and as such contradictory.
Renouvier does not perceive that the actual infinite does not imply contradiction, because it does not mean “exhausted,” but that contradiction arises from the reduction of the real to phenomenon, since if all were phenomenon, “appearance” itself, representation, would vanish.