Eternal dilemmas and divergent beliefs: Charles Renouvier’s agonistic history of philosophy

ABSTRACT

This article canvasses the model of history of philosophy developed by the French philosopher Charles Renouvier in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such a model rested on a precise assumption: the entire history of philosophy would be nothing more than the diachronic embodiment of sets of contradictory conceptual pairs, which Renouvier calls “dilemmas” and whose solution would only be practical. The aim of this article is not only to lay out the distinctive traits of Renouvier’s history of philosophy but also to highlight the militant nature of his historiography. In fact, the theory of dilemmas was pitted against the historiographical model that was dominant in Renouvier’s formative years, namely the eclectic spiritualism of Victor Cousin, who rather sought to distil from each philosophical system its truth content. In this context, the history of philosophy, far from being the philological discipline it is for us today, has in fact a primarily instrumental and polemical, if not political, value.

KEYWORDS:

• Charles Renouvier
• history of philosophy
• dilemma
• belief
• Victor Cousin
• Pierre Leroux

Notes

1 König-Pralong, La colonie philosophique.

2 See, at least, Schmaus, Liberty and the Pursuit of Knowledge; Amet, Le néocriticisme de Renouvier; Fedi, Le problème de la connaissance; Blais, Au principe de la république.

3 See Gueroult, Dianoématique, 771–830.

4 See Santinello and Piaia, Storia delle storie generali della filosofia, 489–500.

5 See Lærke, “Structural Analysis and Dianoematics”.

6 Renouvier, Dilemmes de la métaphysique pure, 11–2.

7 Logue, Charles Renouvier, 33; Amet, Le néocriticisme de Renouvier, 259–62.

8 Renouvier, “Ce que c’est que le criticisme”, 1.

9 H.S.P.M., 436.

10 See Vermeren, Victor Cousin, and, König-Pralong, La colonie philosophique, 70–7, 192–6.

11 See Billard, De l’école à la République.

12 See Moreau and Vermeren, “Les dernières heures de Victor Cousin”, 172.

13 See Antoine-Mahut, “Experimental Method and the Spiritualist Soul”; Antoine-Mahut, “Une philosophie française”.

14 Ragghianti, La tentazione del presente, 12.

15 The coherent Cousinian self was, in fact, opposed to the scattered self of sensationalism: “sensationalism built up a self … through the accumulation of atomistic sensations […] Such a psychology could not ground a durable, unified self – one that, animated by an active spiritual principle, would bear moral responsibility […] The fragmented sensationalist self had instead opened the door to the exaggerated, reckless idealism and the antisocial violence that had characterized the Revolution […] repairing the self by philosophical means was therefore the linchpin in the project of the post-Revolutionary stabilization of France” (Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self, 157).

16 Cousin, Cours d’histoire de la philosophie, vol. 2, 27.

17 Cousin, “Avertissement de 1845”, 6.

18 Cousin, “Avant-propos de la quatrième édition”, xiii.

19 Cousin, Histoire générale de la philosophie, 21.

20 Cousin, “Avant-propos de la quatrième édition”, xiii.

21 Cousin, Histoire générale de la philosophie, 5.

22 Cf. ibid., 4.

23 Cousin, Histoire générale de la philosophie, 28.

24 Cousin, “Avant-propos de la quatrième édition”, xiii.

25 Cousin, Histoire générale de la philosophie, 28.

26 Cf. ibid., 6.

27 Ibid., xiv. Eclecticism was thus the “consciousness of the consciousness of the world” (König-Pralong, La colonie philosophique, 193; Rey, Les enjeux de l'histoire de la philosophie, 61–2).

28 Cf. Cousin, Histoire générale de la philosophie, xiv.

29 Cf. Ragghianti, La tentazione del presente, 60. Furthermore, over the years, Cousin’s eclecticism became less and less conciliatory and more overtly pitted against his archenemy, “atheism in all its forms” (Rey, Les enjeux de l'histoire de la philosophie, 449).

30 Rey, Les enjeux de l’histoire de la philosophie.

31 See Tega, Tradizione e rivoluzione, 269–337. On his place in the socialist galaxy, see Breckman, Adventures in the Symbolic, 57–74.

32 See Forcina, I diritti dell'esistente.

33 Leroux, Réfutation de l’éclectisme, 253–4.

34 Leroux, Du Christianisme, 89.

35 See Leroux, Réfutation de l’éclectisme, 255.

36 Ibid., 259.

37 Ibid., 257.

38 Cf. Rey, Les enjeux de l’histoire de la philosophie, 37.

39 Leroux, Réfutation de l’éclectisme, 5.

40 Ibid., 265.

41 Ibid., 60.

42 Cf. ibid., 5–6.

43 Cf. ibid., 40–9.

44 Cf. ibid., 10.

45 Cf. ibid., 21–2.

46 E.C.S., vol. 2, 370.

47 Renouvier, “Philosophie”, 535.

48 Ragghianti, La tentazione del presente, 41.

49 Cf. ibid., 42. Cf. also Cousin, “Avant-propos de la quatrième édition”, ix–x.

50 Rey, Les enjeux de l’histoire de la philosophie, 123–44. Rey argues that “on the one hand we find the notion of an a priori synthesis of the history of philosophy, conceived of as the creation of a new philosophical fact; on the other hand, we find the a posteriori synthesis [ … ] capable only of combining given facts” (ibid., 144).

51 Gueroult, Dianoématique, 778.

52 See Foucher, La jeunesse de Renouvier.

53 Renouvier, “Philosophie”, 527–34.

54 E.C.S., vol. 2, 368 ff.

55 Renouvier, Manuel de philosophie moderne, 390.

56 Ibid., 391.

57 E.C.S., vol. 2, 369.

58 Cf. Renouvier, “Philosophie”, 487.

59 Ibid., 560. Cf. Gueroult, Dianoématique, 778.

60 Cf. ibid., 533–4.

61 Cf. ibid., 534.

62 E.C.S., vol. 2, 369.

63 Renouvier’s views on morality and society are best articulated in his Science de la morale (1869).

64 Fedi, Kant, une passion française, 141–2.

65 Cf. e.g. Renouvier, “Philosophie”, 479, 508, 516.

66 Cf. Gueroult, Dianoématique, 813.

67 Cf. ibid., 781.

68 E.C.S., vol. 2, 1.

69 Ibid., 2.

70 Ibid., 3.

71 Cf. ibid., 2.

72 Cf. H.S.P.M., 416–18.

73 E.C.S., vol. 2, 3.

74 Cf. ibid., 2; H.S.P.M., 433.

75 Cf. E.C.S., vol. 2, 150–2.

76 Cf. Ibid., 130–1. On Zeller, see Hartung, Eduard Zeller.

77 See Zeller, La philosophie des Grecs.

78 Cf. Boutroux, “Édouard Zeller et sa théorie de l’histoire de la philosophie”, 20.

79 Zeller, The History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 1, 11.

80 For deeper analyses, see Capeillères, “Émile Boutroux’s Reading of Zeller in its Historical and Conceptual Context”.

81 Cf. E.C.S., vol. 2, 138–42.

82 Cf. ibid., 19.

83 Cf. D.M.P., 256.

84 Ibid., 20. For example, Renouvier argues that “There exists no [logical] argument which is capable of imprint [moral] obligation […] in a mind that refuses to acknowledge its imprint”.

85 The centrality of belief was one of Renouvier’s most important contributions to the intellectual history of the Third Republic. As Giovanni Paoletti has shown, this notion became, in fact, a widely discussed subject across different disciplines, some of which were emerging, precisely in the late nineteenth century, as sociology and ethnology (see Paoletti, “Representation and Belief”).

86 Cf. ibid., 277–8.

87 This title is given on the occasion of the second edition. The original title was simply L’homme.

88 Renouvier, Traité de psychologie rationnelle, vol. 1, 353.

89 Ibid., 357.

90 Ibid., 366.

91 Dunham, “Idealism, Pragmatism, and the Will to Believe”, 764. As an anonymous reviewer pointed out, the risk here is to give too individualistic an image of Renouvier’s philosophy. For Renouvier, in politics as in science, the intersubjective, (semi-)contractualist/conventionalist element, which defines both the social order and the system of knowledge, plays a predominant role. See, in this regard, Schmaus, Liberty and the Pursuit of Knowledge, 99–119. However, here we wanted to emphasise the primacy of individual responsibility and belief over all other levels.

92 Cf. E.C.S., vol. 2, 231.

93 Cf. Gueroult, Dianoématique, 801–4.

94 Ibid., 801.

95 Cf. ibid., 827.

96 Cf. ibid., 785–6.

97 Cf. Pillon, “Les deux premières antinomies de Kant et les dilemmes de Renouvier”, 36–9. The critique of the Kantian antinomies – not only of the notion of “antinomy” itself, but also of Kant’s account of its four instantiations – is a centrepiece of Renouvier’s neocriticism. It went through different stages across Renouvier’s long life, from the first Essai (cf. Renouvier, Traité de logique générale et de logique formelle, vol. 1, 133–42) to the first chapters of his posthumous Critique de la doctrine de Kant (cf. 29–90).

98 On this still poorly studied thinker, see Clair, Métaphysique et existence; Grenier, La philosophie de Jules Lequier; Tilliette, Jules Lequier ou le tourment de la liberté.

99 See Renouvier, Traité de psychologie rationnelle, 369–74; H.S.P.M., 459–60.

100 Cf. D.M.P., 97.

101 E.C.S., vol. 2, 243. Our emphasis.

102 Cf. D.M.P., 12.

103 Cf. H.S.P.M., 432.

104 E.C.S., vol. 2, 154.

105 Ibid., 150.

106 Ibid., 155. Our emphasis.

107 Gueroult, Dianoématique, 791.

108 E.C.S., vol. 2, 355.

109 Cf. ibid., 1 ff., 20.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pietro Terzi

Pietro Terzi is associate researcher at the Institut de Recherches Philosophiques at the Université Paris Nanterre. He holds a PhD from the Fondazione Collegio San Carlo in Modena (Italy) and the Université Paris Nanterre.