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Charles Renouvier (1815–1903)

Renouvier built his philosophical system entirely outside the academy, and called it néo-criticisme — a transformation of Kant rather than a continuation. Two removals define it. The thing-in-itself goes: phenomena are not appearances of something hidden behind them; they are what there is, given in relation. And the actual infinite goes: no completed infinite collection exists, in mathematics or in the world. What remains is a philosophy of phenomena in relation, finite through and through — and, at its centre, a doctrine of freedom not as exemption from causation but as an operation the person performs: the sustaining of a thought among alternatives. Certainty itself, on his account, rests on that operation. “There is no certainty,” he wrote; “there are only men who are certain.”

Life

Born 1 January 1815 in Montpellier. Educated at the École Polytechnique in Paris, where Auguste Comte — then a répétiteur in mathematics — was among his teachers; the early exposure to positivism left marks Renouvier spent a system arguing against. He never held an academic post and never sought one: a private income let him write for fifty years outside the university, and outside its constraints.

In 1848 he served the short-lived Second Republic, writing a civic handbook — the Manuel républicain de l’homme et du citoyen — whose radicalism caused a parliamentary scandal and cost the education minister who had endorsed it his position. After Louis-Napoléon’s coup of 1851 Renouvier withdrew from public life entirely. The withdrawal produced the Essais de critique générale (1854–64), the four-part work in which the system is built.

In 1872 he founded the weekly Critique philosophique with François Pillon, and ran it for nearly two decades as the organ of neo-criticism — a philosophical journal with a public mission, carrying the case for a republic grounded in personal liberty and lay morals. Through it, and through disciples in the education ministry’s orbit, neo-criticism became a shaping influence on the moral instruction of the early Third Republic. Émile Durkheim named Renouvier a formative influence; Octave Hamelin wrote the standard study of the system.

He worked until the end. Dying at Prades in the autumn of 1903, he dictated his final reflections to his student Louis Prat — published posthumously as Les Derniers Entretiens — reasoning about death while undergoing it. He died on 1 September 1903, aged 88.

Neo-criticism: phenomena, relations, and the categories

The Essais de critique générale rebuild Kant’s critical philosophy with the two removals in place. Without the thing-in-itself, phenomena are not representations of an unknowable original — they are the real, given as representations, and the task of philosophy is the analysis of their lawful connection. Knowledge does not reach behind appearance because there is no behind; it articulates the relations in which phenomena stand.

The instrument of that articulation is the table of categories, and Renouvier’s table departs from Kant’s in a decisive way: relation is the first and master category, the one all others presuppose. Number, position, succession, quality, becoming, causality, finality, personality — each is a mode of relation, a way phenomena stand connected. The secondary literature summarises the doctrine as the claim that relationship pervades every category of experience; Renouvier scholarship has pressed the stronger reading that being itself, for him, expresses relation — that to be is to stand in relations, and that a being is known entirely through the relations that constitute it. How strong the claim runs in the primary texts is a live scholarly question, but the direction is not in doubt: neo-criticism is a philosophy in which relation is not a feature of things but the ground on which “thing” is defined at all.

The second removal — the actual infinite — Renouvier codified as the law of number: every number is finite and determinate; a completed infinite collection is a contradiction. The world is therefore finite: a beginning in time, limits in space, no infinitely proceeding chain of causes. The argument is pre-Cantorian, and its mathematics did not survive Cantor’s transfinite arithmetic — but for Renouvier the law was never only mathematics. It was the guarantee that the world is a sum of individuals, not moments of a single absolute whole; finitism was his bulwark against every philosophy of the One.

Freedom and certitude

The doctrine Renouvier is remembered for — where he is remembered — is his account of freedom, developed across the Essais and the Science de la morale (1869). Free will, for Renouvier, is not a metaphysical exemption from causal law and not a faculty of choosing between finished options. It is an operation performed upstream of action: the sustaining of a thought, because I choose to, when other thoughts are available. What the person governs is which contents stay in play. Attention held on one possibility rather than another is where freedom operates, and everything else — decision, act, habit — flows downstream of it.

The doctrine reaches all the way into his theory of knowledge. Certitude, Renouvier argued, is never impersonal: evidence underdetermines the great alternatives, and assent is therefore always in part an act — something a person does, not something a proof compels. And since the choice between freedom and determinism is itself one of the underdetermined alternatives, Renouvier’s resolution takes the form of a wager: neither side can be demonstrated; one must nonetheless live and think from one of them; let the first affirmation of freedom be itself freely made. Critics have pressed the circle in this — and pressed harder on a transcendental strand in his texts, which argues that assent, error, and responsibility all presuppose the freedom the determinist denies. Which of the two arguments carries the system’s weight is a standing question in the scholarship.

The moral science and its opponents

The freedom doctrine exists for the sake of morality. The Science de la morale (1869) builds ethics on the person: a free agent capable of obligation, entitled to respect, bound to others as an equal. Its signature move is the separation of pure from applied ethics. The pure science describes the mutual duties of free persons in an ideal state of peace; applied ethics begins from the actual state of war — a world already unjust, where duties must be worked out among agents who wrong one another and institutions that entrench the wrong. The politics followed from the ethics, and Renouvier argued for it in print for decades: republican government, secular moral education, workers’ rights and workers’ education, the fraternity of classes against both reaction and revolutionary violence.

The system also had named opponents. Hegel and every philosophy of the Absolute, in which the many are demoted to moments of the One. The positivism of his teacher Comte, which he judged to abolish the person in favour of humanity-as-organism. Naturalistic monism and the determinism it carried into psychology and history. The pessimists, for whom freedom was an illusion. The Critique philosophique carried these disputes — a weekly that fought neo-criticism’s corner in philosophy and in Third Republic politics at once.

Uchronie and the philosophy of history

In 1876 Renouvier published Uchronie — a word he coined, on the model of “utopia”: not no-place but no-time, history as it did not happen. The book runs a sustained counterfactual: Marcus Aurelius secures a successor who keeps Christianity from capturing the Roman state, and European history unfolds otherwise. The instrument is philosophical, not literary. Against the organicist and providential historiography of his century — history as the necessary unfolding of a plan, a destiny, a development — the counterfactual makes contingency visible: at the joints of history stand acts that could have gone otherwise, and what followed them was decided, not destined. Written in the shadow of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, Uchronie extends the doctrine of freedom to the collective scale; the Philosophie analytique de l’histoire (1896–97) gives the position its systematic form, and his critique of utopianism — the perfect society as a licence for despotism — its political edge. The coinage outlived the system: uchronia survives as the name of a genre — history rewritten at its joints — long after the philosophy it was made to serve was forgotten.

The late personalism

The system’s last phase turns constructive. La Nouvelle Monadologie (1899) rebuilds the world as a society of monads — individual centres of experience in relation — and Le Personnalisme (1903) names the final position: the person is the ultimate category, the highest form under which reality can be thought. The God of this system is finite — “the permanent personality in the world,” bounded in power and knowledge, a member of the moral order rather than its infinite ground; Renouvier held an infinite deity to be both contradictory (by the law of number) and morally intolerable (by the problem of evil), and said plainly that he preferred atheism to the infinite God of the theologians. How the late personalism relates to the earlier doctrine — culmination, revision, or overlay — is contested in the scholarship.

Standing and eclipse

Historians of French philosophy, looking back, rank Renouvier with Comte and Bergson among the century’s philosophers; at his death he was called the first Frenchman since Malebranche to have built a complete idealist system. Today his obscurity is nearly total, and the school he founded was extinct within decades of his death. One line of influence, however, did not go dark.

Renouvier and William James

William James had been reading Renouvier since 1868, first in the pages of the Année philosophique. On 30 April 1870 — twenty-eight, medically trained, directionless, months into a depression that had brought him near suicide — he recorded in his diary that he had finished the second of Renouvier’s Essais and found in it a definition of free will he saw no reason to call an illusion: the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts. “My first act of free will,” James wrote, “shall be to believe in free will.” The entry marks the turn of James’s life, and he said so for the rest of it. In Some Problems of Philosophy, the systematic work left unfinished at his death, he credited Renouvier’s “masterly advocacy of pluralism” with freeing him from “the monistic superstition under which I had grown up,” and closed: “I dedicate this text-book to the great Renouvier’s memory.”

The relation ran both ways. Renouvier acted as James’s translator — the older and far more famous man rendering an unknown American into French for his own Critique philosophique, where James’s early essays appeared before he had an American philosophical reputation — and engaged his work in its pages; the two corresponded for decades. James, for his part, taught the first of the Essais in a Harvard course in 1879–80, and dedicated the Principles of Psychology to Pillon. His mature doctrine of will as effort of attention in that book is the developed form of the definition he took from Renouvier in 1870. The inheritance was not total: James’s radical empiricism, with relations given directly in experience, sits uneasily beside Renouvier’s apparatus of representations and categories, and James’s pluralism grew looser and more experiential than the finitist system it descended from. But on the two doctrines that mattered most to both — the reality of freedom and the refusal of the absolute One — the line from Renouvier to James is direct, and acknowledged.

Where Renouvier stops

Renouvier defines freedom as the sustaining of a thought and stops there: the Essais give no account of what the sustaining consists in — no mechanism, no psychology of the holding. It was James, not Renouvier, who carried the definition into a working psychology of attention and effort; in Renouvier’s own texts the operation that bears the whole system remains a primitive.

The law of number tied the system to a mathematics that failed. Cantor’s transfinite arithmetic gave completed infinities a consistent treatment, and the argument that an infinite number is a contradiction lost its footing in Renouvier’s own lifetime. What survives the failure — whether the finitist motive can stand without the finitist proof — is a question his system never had to face and his successors did not resolve on his behalf.

Key works

See also: Kant · James · Bergson