Charles Renouvier

Charles Renouvier is a Philosophe French, born on January 1st 1815 with Montpellier, dead on September 1st 1903 with Prades.

Biography

His/her father, Jean Antoine Renouvier, was Député of the Herault under the reign of Charles X. Belonging to the opposition, he protested against the ordinances of July 1830. His/her brother Jules was also appointed of Herault.

He entered to the Polytechnic school in 1834, left there in 1836 and renonça to the public office. Study of Mathematical sciences , it passed to that of the Philosophie, to which there constantly remained faithful. It will engage a friendly and formative dialog with Jules Lequier (1814-1862) of which it will publish, in a posthumous way, work which sought to reconcile the any power of God and the absolute freedom of the men. It began in the philosophical career by taking share with the contest opened by the Academy of Science morals and political on the critical history from the Cartésianisme. The work which it presented to the Academy on this occasion and which obtained a honourable mention, appeared in 1842, with important additions, under the title of Manuel of modern philosophy .

This work, writes whereas he was yet only one student in philosophy, presents ideas, designs, visions, that he gave up mainly later. He knew the systems well, analyzed them carefully, presented them with exactitude and with substantial summaries, the range of the solutions suggested saw, but was let dominate by them and, not having the force to take party, was ingéniait to grant them between them.

In 1844, it made appear a Manuel old philosophy which, with the precedent, formed at the time an almost complete history of philosophy. These two handbooks, three very compact, rich volumes of matters, fruit of vast readings, are remarkable especially in what they show the reports/ratios of the philosophical doctrines of each time with the state of sciences and consequently contain a history of the movement and doctrines scientific.

At the same time as he wrote his Manuels , he provided articles to the new Encyclopedia , founded and directed by Pierre Leroux and Jean Reynaud. The articles '' Descartes '', Fatalism , '' Fermat '', '' Fichte '', '' Ficin '', '' Force '', Pantheism and Philosophie are with its hand. This last article is a wide work which could form a volume; he was certainly written after the Manuels , because he marks like an intermediate phase in the history of his thought. It does not manage there yet to deny the conciliation of the Infini and finished and, in general, the discrepancies. But he declares, like Hamilton, that the union of infinite and of finished in God escapes our knowledge, and that God of the Métaphysique exceeds the analytical or categorical use thought. “It will be appropriate, within the limit of the speculations on God which will remain to us allowed, that we replace the rigorous idea of infinite by that of the indefinite one. This one is not withdrawn like the other from imagination and the thought; on the contrary, it extends them on a field increasingly vaster without never their object being lost for it. ” Thus, according to him, one can consider as a God only the anthropomorphic and moral attributes , those which refer to us; the attributes metaphysics are inaccessible to the thought, above the Raison. Later, he will deny straightforwardly these attributes metaphysics like opposites with the reason; he will formally push back the idea of infinite of number, time and space, not only like inaccessible, but like contradictory.

After the revolution of 1848, it made appear, under the auspices of the Minister for the state education Carnot, an opuscule of political and social morals heading Manuel republican of the man and the citizen . This booklet, which contains some socialist proposals, was denounced with the constituent Assembly, and official approval that it had received was the cause or the occasion of the fall of the minister. These socialist proposals were the following ones:

the République must gradually abolish the interest on capital by means of institutions of credit;
the trade (general administration of the exchange) can and must be successively withdrawn with the hands of the individuals and concentrate under the direction of the Republic;
the progressive tax must be the true republican tax as a long time as there will be great incomes in the State and that the Propriété will not be very divided: it is a means of transition from the mode of the inequality to that of the equality.

The first of these proposals is proudhonienne; the second appears inspired by criticism fourierist of the trade; the third expresses an idea which was, in 1848, very widespread in the advanced fraction of the Republican party.

In 1851, it wrote, with several democrats, among whom Frederic Charrassin, Charles Fauvety, Adolphe Louis Chouippe, Alexandre Erdan, a project of communal and central Organization of the republic , which appeared in ten deliveries. The governing idea of this work, the idea of the direct government, the direct legislation, was utopian and dangerous, in what it discredited the representative mode and made, against the intention of the authors, businesses of the Césarisme. But it is many fertile ideas there, in particular that of the canton adopted like element of the administrative and political unit of the nation and chosen to constitute true the Commune Frenchwoman.

After the coup d'etat of December 2nd, to which he had been opposed of all his forces, he devoted himself exclusively to philosophy and started to provide the foundations of what he called the reform of the Kantianism. He collaborated in the philosophical Revue directed by Fauvety; he published there the beginning of a philosophical novel entitled Uchronie , which he completed only in 1876. This neologism, Uchronie, in other words “Utopia in the History”, that it had just invented, became since a common noun indicating a literary kind exploiting this principle. Then it made successively appear its Essais of general criticism , the first in 1854, the second in 1850, the third and the fourth in 1864.

In 1867, it found in François Thomas Pillon a follower of the doctrines criticist reformed, with which it founded the philosophical Year (1868 and 1869). The publication of the philosophical Year was stopped by the events of 1870-1871. In 1872, Renouvier and Pillon transformed this monthly publication into a weekly review, philosophical Criticism , whose object was to develop the principles of critical philosophy, rational morals and the republican policy. It made, moreover, appear in 1869 the Science of morals , where it confirmed its philosophical doctrines, already exposed in the Essais of general Criticism .

Its thought

He admits with Kant that “our knowledge does not exceed the Phénomène S”. Any existence which one imagines in another sphere that of the significant Expérience is in its eyes a pure dream. Things existing in themselves, out of the relations that our directions make known to us, of the substances such as conceive them or believe to conceive them the majority of the metaphysicians, such as they imagine God and the heart S, are only vain Idole S, and metaphysics is not, according to him, that idolology. In the design of something of perfect, of complete, infinite, a pure unit, an intelligence which is considered itself and even order and of a science universal, he does not see only the contradictory one and of absurdity; the continuation of an absolute, whatever it is, does not lead, according to him, that with an abyss of errors or rather of nonsense. These ideas are the same ones as enumerated in not very different terms, if they are not the same ones, Hamilton, Auguste Count, Littré, Alexander Bain, Stuart Mill, Taine and all those which were opposed to metaphysics.

It however does not adhere therefore to the doctrines positivist: it reproaches him its Sensualisme, which appears coarse to him and shown nowhere. It is to be late, in his opinion, not to hold any account of what Kant acquired with the science, namely that the sensitive one is not in the phenomena, in what appears to us, that an element, and that there is another without which under no circumstances would it appear, and which consists in the forms in which we seize it and who are of our fact, these manners of understanding that Kant, after Aristote, named the categories. Positivism, as the doctrines materialists in general, takes the phenomena apart from our Conscience, like sufficient by themselves, and without at all considering what we give them of form and unit. With Kant, Renouvier notices, on the contrary, that the phenomenon is not what it is for us only in the representation that we are done some.

It begins again, after Kant still, the task difficult to enumerate and classify the categories. All being, in his opinion, relative in the representation, it puts in the forefront, like dominating all the other categories, the category of the relation; it places then that of the number, the extent, the time and the quality, which determine the characters under which present in our experiment the phenomenal relations; finally, those which the positivists and who Kant itself claim to eliminate or reduce to the first, the ideas of cause, end and that of personality, which implies them one and the other. We indeed cannot, affirmed it, to conceive that a cause determines a movement without conceiving that she proposes an end; and to propose an end, or to want, belongs only to what, like us, said or can say me, and it is what is called a person. By studying the Me, the person more closely, object of the second of her Tests , Renouvier recognizes there for the characteristic feature essential, dominating, the Liberté. Freedom, for him, is the bottom of the man; it is not only the principle of our actions, it is that even of our convictions. The obviousness for Descartes is the base of any certainty; the obviousness, according to Renouvier, belongs only to the perception of the simple phenomena. For all the remainder, unquestionable being, according to him, is reduced to believe; and what is the base of the belief, it is, among all the desires, the free choice. That of which we are certain, it is, at the bottom, which we approve like in conformity with our moral destination, and this approval is act of freedom.

It applied this thesis of freedom to the historical and social facts. However, in spite of his assertion of the free will and thus of the recognition of the Responsibility, it was an irreducible adversary of the Capital punishment, synonym, according to him, of cruelty. Towards the end of its life, the religious questions worried it more. Of Protestant origin and always savagely anticatholic, it turned over to the dogmatic method , regarding God as a data first and establishing a kind of Personnalisme. However it remained until its death a faithful defender of the Laïcité (cf its small work Petit treaty of morals to the use of the laic Elementary schools ). In the field of political and moral philosophy, Renouvier sought to combine the legitimacy of a double intellectual heritage: on the one hand, that of the individual rights related to the blooming of liberalism and, on the other hand, that “garantist” associated with protections by which the socialist current sought to answer the precariousness of the “working condition”. For him, it was erroneous to refuse the “necessary correlation” of the individual and the “social body”. So since 1879, he proposed to characterize his step by the concept of “ liberal socialism ”, it is within the framework of the new monadology (1899) that this qualifier received all its doctrinal depth. Social justice is declared priority but without never being uncoupled from the practical means of freedom. The aiming of this convergence between requirement liberal and imperative social consists in providing nonto the owners an equivalent of right of the fact that the property, according to John Locke, confers like base on independence. Three major political concerns of the XIX° century, namely: the conditions of individual freedom, the “social question” and the constitution of a democratic republic, are found thus tied by the same reflection.

Works

Manual of modern philosophy (1842)
Manual of old philosophy (1844, 2 vol.)
Manual republican of the man and the citizen (1848 in-18)
Tests of general criticism (1854-64, 4 vol.). I. Treated of general logic and formal logic . II. Treaty of rational psychology according to the principles of the criticism
Uchronie. Utopia in the History (1857, 2nd re-examined and increased edition: 1876)
Science of morals (1869, 2 vol. in-8°))
the philosophical Year (1868 and 1869,2 vol.)
Small treaty of morals to the use of the laic Elementary schools (1882)
Draft of a systematic classification of the philosophical doctrines (1885-86)
analytical Philosophy of the history (1896-97)
History and solution of the problems metaphysics (1901)
Victor Hugo: The Poet (1893)
New Monadologie (1898)
Victor Hugo: The Philosopher (1900)
Dilemmas of pure metaphysics (1901). Text on line:
Personalism (1903)
the last talks (1904)
Critical of the doctrines of Kant (1906)
Correspondence with CH. Secrétan (1910)

; Translations

Psychology of Hume (1878), in collaboration with François Rammer.

principles of human knowledge , (published in 1926) of Georges Berkeley.

External bond

Works on line on Gallica

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