The Man Who Sustained a Thought

Sometime in the late 1870s, the most systematic philosopher in France sat down to translate an unknown American. Charles Renouvier was past sixty: four volumes of the Essais de critique générale behind him, a weekly journal in his hands that fought his corner in philosophy and Third Republic politics at once. William James was a Harvard instructor with no philosophical reputation to speak of. Renouvier translated his essays into French and printed them in his own journal. Sit with that for a moment — the famous man did the translating.

He had built the fame from outside. In 1848 he wrote a civic handbook for the Second Republic radical enough to cost the education minister who endorsed it his position. When Louis-Napoléon took power by coup, Renouvier withdrew from public life and stayed withdrawn: no chair, no post, no students — fifty years of writing on a private income. The system he built in that exile ran on two refusals. No unknowable reality hiding behind the world we experience: what there is, is what appears, standing in relations. And no completed whole gathering it all into One: the world is finite, many, unfinished.

At the centre of the system sits a definition. Freedom, for Renouvier, is not an exemption from the laws of nature, and not a mystery lodged in the soul. It is the sustaining of a thought — holding one possibility in play, because I choose to, when others are available. Everything else flows downstream: the decision, the act, the habit, the life. Even knowledge bends to it. Evidence never settles the great questions on its own; assent is something a person does. “There is no certainty,” he wrote. “There are only men who are certain.”

The definition crossed the Atlantic. In the spring of 1870 a young, depressed, directionless William James finished the second of the Essais and found in that definition something he saw no reason to call an illusion — the wager that turned his life, told earlier on this blog. What the rescue looks like from the other shore: Renouvier gained his most consequential reader, translated him, published him, corresponded with him for thirty years. James taught the Essais at Harvard and dedicated his last, unfinished book “to the great Renouvier’s memory.”

Then Renouvier vanished. Looking back, historians rank him with Comte and Bergson; at his death in 1903 he was called the first Frenchman since Malebranche to have built a complete idealist system. Within a few decades: nothing. The school dissolved, the books stayed untranslated, the name dropped out of the story philosophy tells about itself. Almost nothing of the system survived — except what he had held in play. The definition lived on in James, who turned it into a psychology of attention and effort, and through James into pragmatism, which carried it further than the system ever reached. The word he coined for history-that-might-have-been — uchronie — still names a genre, a century after the philosophy it served was forgotten. The whole disappeared; the sustained thought kept going.

He practised the definition to the last. Dying at Prades in the autumn of 1903, he dictated final reflections to his student, reasoning about death while undergoing it — holding the thread while it ran out. There is a neat justice in how the story ends, because it is his own doctrine enacted at the scale of a life: what stays real is what someone keeps in play. On his own definition, Renouvier was free to the end.

This post is part of the positioning series. See also the reference entry on Charles Renouvier.

Photo: ian dooley / Unsplash