Modern French Philosophy: a Study of the Development Since ComteGunn, John Alexander
Philosophy
Modern French Philosophy: a Study of the Development Since Comte
Gunn, John Alexander
Philosophy, French; Philosophy, Modern
If we subordinate the individual to the species, sacrificing his
inherent worth and unique value, and then subordinate species to genus
and all genera to the All, we lose ourselves in the Infinite substance
in which everything is swallowed up. Again, Pantheism tends to speak of
the perfection of individuals, and speaks loudly of progress from one
generation to another. But it tells only of a future which involves the
entire sacrifice of all that has worth or value in the past. It shows
endless sacrifice, improvement too, but all for naught. “What does it
matter to say that the best is yet to be, if the best must perish as
the good, to give place to a yet better ‘best’ which will not have the
virtue of enduring any more than the others? Do we offer any real
consolation to Sisyphus,” asks Renouvier, “by promising him
annihilation, which is coupled with the promise of successors capable
of lifting his old rock higher and still higher up the fatal slope, by
offering him the eternal falling of this rock and successors who will
continually be annihilated and endlessly be replaced by others?” The
rock is the personal life. On this theory, however high the rock be
pushed, it always is destined to fall back to the same depth, as low as
if it had never been pushed up hill at all. We refuse to reconcile a
world containing real ends and purposes within it with such a game,
vast and miserable, in which no actor plays for his own sake, and all
the false winners lose all their gains by being obliged to leave the
party while the play goes on for ever. This is to throw away all
individual worth, the value of all personal work and effort, to declare
individuality a sham, and to embrace fatality. It is this mischievous
Pantheism which is the curse of many religions and many philosophies.
Against it Renouvier wages a ceaseless warfare. The individuals, he
asserts exist both for their own sake and worth, also for the sake and
welfare of others. In the person, the law of finality finds its highest
expression. Personality is of supreme and unique value.
This being so, it becomes a necessary postulate of our philosophy, if
we really believe in the significance of personalities and in progress
(which Renouvier considers to have no meaning apart from them), to
conclude that death is but an event in the career of these
personalities. They are perpetuated beyond death.
For Renouvier, as for Kant, the chief arguments for survival are based
on considerations of a moral character, upon the demands of the moral
ideal for self- realisation, for the attainment of holiness or, more
properly, “wholeness.” This progress can only be made possible by the
continued existence after bodily death of the identical personality,
unique and of eternal worth in the scheme of things, capable of further
development than is possible amid the conditions of life as we know it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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