Background
Renouvier, Charles Bernard was born in 1815 in Montpellier, France.
Renouvier, Charles Bernard was born in 1815 in Montpellier, France.
École Polytechnique. 1nf/s: Kant. Descartes, Antoine Cournot and Auguste Comte.
Founded the monthly Journal L'Année philosophique in 1867 and supported himself by his philosophical writings.
Renouvier, Paris: Vrin. Vemeaux. R. (1945) L’Idéalisme de Renouvier. Paris: Vrin. Renouvier disagreed with Kant’s view that there are things-in-themselves behind the phenomena of which we are aware. He asserted that the latter are all that we do and can know, and are appearances of nothing but themselves. He rejected both the extreme empiricist position that phenomena are simply given, and the extreme idealist theory that they are totally dependent on the mind which perceives them. Instead, he took a Kantian ‘middle way’ by maintaining that phenomena are represented through and take their form from the intersubjectively invariable categories which constitute the framework of our knowledge and judgements about the world, and which are found within the individual consciousness. Renouvier replaces Kant’s original twelve categories with a list of only nine: relation, number, position, succession, becoming, quality, causation, end or purposiveness and individuality or personality. Knowledge, according to Renouvier, is a relationship between the representer, or individual knower, and the represented, or phenomena. All knowledge contains judgements that something is or is not the case, and Renouvier considered that all judgements contain the element of will: hence, his position on knowledge is one of voluntarism. The relation of causation can also only fully be accounted for by taking the role of the will into consideration. Phenomenal events alone explain the mechanistic aspect of this relation, but what is injected into every such event is the will, which cannot help but impose a purpose or end on to the phenomena perceived. The phenomenal world thus presents itself to us through the mediating factor of the will. It is this element, and the view put forward by Renouvier that each phenomenon is different from and irreducible to any other, which rescues the whole scheme of things from complete determinism and introduces the considerations of freedom and chance. Both freedom of choice and the perception of events in the world are limited by the categories, and thus not completely random, but our choices and the perception of different and discrete phenomena ensure that there is no complete uniformity in the world. Renouvier applied his theory about the lack of complete uniformity in events to history. Since history is the study of human behaviour, which is at least partly governed by choice, and of human concern with individual events irreducible one to another, it is an arena to which any alleged deterministic general laws, such as those said to have been discovered by Comte and Hegel, are inapplicable. According to Renouvier, it is incorrect to think of historical events as completely or even partially explicable by the actions of cohesive social groups considered as one agent; social groups are composed of individual people who make individual decisions. The relationship between ethics and history is one of dependence of the latter on the former. Moral choices provide the source for historical change, and such change is to be judged by moral criteria. There is no guarantee of betterment through the historical process: societies whose members live in fellowship with each other can develop only if there are decisions reached by enlightened people who respect the individuality and autonomy of others. Renouvier rejected the metaphysical attributes of God as unintelligible, and instead he asserted that the only meaningful conception of God was as a being endowed with moral and anthropomorphic qualities. He was hostile to the Catholic Church, which he viewed as trying to impose a uniform set of beliefs and a metaphysical God on to its adherents, and sympathetic to Protestantism, which he saw as a movement based on individual belief and conscience. One criticism of Renouvier is his own admission that no part of his elaborate structure, and in particular his view of freedom, can be proved. Instead, he defended his theories by saying that they at least provided a consistent framework which made knowledge possible; but the satisfaction of these two requirements is not a sufficient foundation for philosophical system-building.