Charles Bernard Renouvier

Charles Bernard Renouvier (Montpellier, 1815 – Prades, 1903) was a French philosopher and writer, usually regarded as the leading neo-Kantian of nineteenth-century France. The system he built, which he called neocriticism, takes Kant as its starting point but reshapes him more than it continues him. In politics he combined support for the republic with socialist sympathies. He was the first French philosopher since Malebranche to develop a complete idealist system, and his ideas reached as far as William James and Octave Hamelin.

He entered the École polytechnique in 1834, where he came under the influence of Auguste Comte, but he left after two years and never took up public office. He devoted himself to mathematics and philosophy while keeping a close eye on national politics. After the 1848 revolution he published a republican manual with socialist leanings, a work that caused him political trouble. Following the coup of 1851 he withdrew from public life and devoted himself to study, first at his estate near Avignon and later in Prades.

His main philosophical project, the Essais de critique générale, began appearing in 1854. Its guiding principle is a rejection of the unknowable in every form. With Kant he accepted that we know only appearances and set aside the thing-in-itself, but he held that human freedom operates within the phenomenal world rather than in an imagined noumenal realm. From this stance he criticised both the substantial soul and the material substrata that naturalism used to explain the world. He also opposed the idea of an actual infinite, which for him was an open-ended project rather than a completed fact. In his theology he proposed a finite, personal God, good but limited in power and knowledge, which allowed him to preserve human freedom.

Renouvier also wrote on the history of philosophy, on Victor Hugo, and on a historical utopia called Uchronie. His influence on later French thought was considerable and, more specifically, on William James's pragmatism and pluralism, which James openly acknowledged.