RENOUVIER, CHARLES. - Philosopher, b. at Montpellier on 1 Jan. 1815 and d. at Prades on 1 Sept. 1903. He is considered the founder and the leading representative of French neo-criticism (v.).
R.'s thought is set out in the 4 vols. of the Essais de critique générale (Paris 1854-64), to which must be added La science de la morale (ibid. 1869), the 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 neo-criticism were first La critique philosophique (1872-90) directed by R. and then, from '90, L'année philosophique of F. Th. Pilon. R.'s influence on contemporary French philosophy was notable, and above all on Lachelier (v.), Hamelin (v.), Boutroux (v.), Bergson (v.) and also on the North American James (v.).
R. presents himself as a continuator of Kantian criticism, which he wishes to bring to completion through the elimination of the thing in itself or noumenon (v.). Therefore his "critical phenomenism," besides referring back to Kant, also refers back to Hume (v.) and accepts from positivism (v.) the limitation of the capacities of knowledge to the laws of phenomena. To establish these laws and to mark the limits of human knowing — this is the aim of philosophy, according to R., who rejects every metaphysical "illusion" and develops criticism in the sense of the most rigorous identification of "reality" and "representation" (v.). Only thus are the errors of the twofold dogmatism, naturalistic (positivism) and idealistic (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"; therefore the affirmation of an absolute or thing in itself is contradictory, inasmuch as it seeks to define, by means of relations, that which is unrelated and unrelatable. Beings are nothing but "sets of phenomena bound by determinate functions," and science tends to establish the laws among the phenomena themselves until it reaches a single synthesis. Therefore, among those which 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. Thus the degrees of the concrete specification of the category-relation culminate in the living specification of personality: "The category of relation, no longer considered abstractly, but in a living manifesting of representations, is the law of consciousness or of personality, which embraces together, as its instruments of knowledge and its forms, time and space, quality, quantity, causality, finality" (Le personnalisme, p. vi). In fact, it is in consciousness (or personality) that all possible relations are found defined and coordinated. Hence the name "personalism," with which R. himself defined his "critical phenomenism," which is no longer Kantian criticism, inasmuch as 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 (imperative of duty), which postulates the existence of God, 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 R. to eliminate the Kantian antinomies, of which he accepts the thesis (the finite "world") and rejects the antithesis (the infinite "world"), because it is absurd to admit an infinite wholly in act, which is like admitting the inexhaustible to be 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 the other of emanation (pantheism), but his One or God is conceived as a consciousness bent on going outside itself; therefore the plurality of persons or consciousnesses is possible and the independence of the 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, idol of the 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, the enemy of all metaphysics!) remains pantheistic and, in the final analysis, phenomenistic, and as such contradictory.
R. does not notice that the infinite in act does not imply contradiction, because it does not mean exhausted, but that the reduction of the real to phenomenon does imply contradiction, inasmuch as, were everything phenomenon, the very "appearing," the representation, would fail.
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Michele Federico Sciacca