Further, he does not find it difficult to show that much unthinking utterance on the part of the optimists may be somewhat checked by calm reflection on even one or two questions. For example, Was progress involved in the change from ancient slavery to the wage-slavery of modern industrialism? Was Christianity, as Nietzsche and others have attempted to maintain, a retrogression? Or, again, Was the change from Greek city life to the conditions of the Middle Ages in any way to be regarded as a progress?
Renouvier considers it quite erroneous to assert, as did Comte, that there is a steady and continuous development underlying the oscillations, and that the variations, as it were, from the direct line of progress cancel one another or balance each other, leaving, as Renan claimed, a balance always and inevitably on the side of goodness.
Such a confidence in the great world banking concern Renouvier does not possess. There is no guarantee that the account of goodness may not be overdrawn and found wanting. He reminds us sternly and solemnly of the terrible solidarity which characterises evil. Deceit, greed, lust, violence and war have an enormous power of breeding each other and of supporting one another increasingly. The optimistic doctrines of progress are simply untrue statements of the facts of history, and falsely coloured views of human nature. It is an appalling error in “social dynamics” to overlook the clash of interest, the greed of nation and of class, the fundamental passionate hate and war. With it is coupled an error in “social statics,” in which faith is put in institutions, in the mechanism of society. These, declares Renouvier, will not save humanity; they will, indeed, ruin it if it allow itself, through spiritual and moral lethargy, to be dominated by them. They have been serviceable creations of humanity at some time or other, and they must serve men, but men must not be bound down to serve them. This servitude is evil, and it has profoundly evil consequences.
Having attacked Comte’s view of progress and of order in its static and dynamic point of view, Renouvier then brings up his heavy artillery of argument against Comte’s idealisation of the Middle Ages. To assert that this period was an advance on the life of the Greek city, Renouvier considers to be little short of impudence. The art and science and philosophy of the Greeks are our best heritage, while the Middle Ages, dominated by a vicious and intolerant Church, with its infallible theology and its crushing power of the clergy, was a “dead hand” upon the human spirit. While it provided an organic society, it only succeeded in doing so by narrowing and crushing the human intellect. The Renascence and the Reformation proved that there were essential elements of human life being crushed down. They reached a point, however, where they exploded.
Not only does Renouvier thus declare the Middle Ages to be a regress, but he goes the length of asserting that the development of European history could have been different. This is his doctrine of freedom applied to history. There is no reason at all for our regarding the Middle Ages or any such period as necessitated in the order of mankind’s development. There is no law governing that development; consequently, had mankind, or even a few of its number, willed and acted upon their freedom differently, the whole trend of the period we call the Dark Ages might have been quite other than it was. Renouvier does not shirk the development of this point, which is a central one for his purpose. It may seem fantastic to the historians, who must of course accept the past as given and consequently regard reflection on “what might have been” as wasted time. Certainly the past cannot be altered—that is not Renouvier’s point. He intends to give a lesson to humanity, a stern lesson to cure it of its belief in fatalism in regard to history. This is the whole purpose of the curious volume he published in 1876, entitled Uchronie, which had as its explanatory sub-title L’Utopie dans l’Histoire, Esquisse historique du Développement de la Civilisation européenne, tel qu’il n’a pas été, tel qu’il avail pu être. The book, consisting of two manuscripts supposed to be kept in the care of an old Dutch monk, is actually an imaginary construction by Renouvier himself of European history in the period 100 to 800 A.D., written to show the real possibility that the sequence of events from the Emperor Nerva to the Emperor Charlemagne might have been radically different from what it actually was.
All this is intended by Renouvier to combat the “universal justification of the past.” He sees that the doctrine of progress as usually stated is not only a lie, but that it is an extremely dangerous one, for it justifies the past, or at least condones it as inevitable, and thus makes evil a condition of goodness, demoralises history, nullifies ethics and encourages the damnation of humanity itself. This fatalistic doctrine, asserts Renouvier with great earnestness, must be abandoned; freedom must be recognised as operative, and the human will as making history.There is no law of progress, and the sooner humanity can come to realise this the better it will be for it. Only by such a realisation can it work out its own salvation. “The real law lies”, declares Renouvier,”only in an equal possibility of progress or deterioration for both societies and individuals.” If there is to be progress it can only come because, and when, humanity recognises itself as collectively responsible for its own history, and when each person feels his own responsibility regarding that action. No acceptance of events will avail; we must will progress and consciously set ourselves to realise it. It is possible, but it depends on us. Here Renouvier’s considerations lead him from history to ethics. “Almost all the Great Men, men of great will, have been fatalists. So slowly does humanity emerge from its shadows and beget for itself a just notion of its autonomy. The phantom of necessity weighs heavily,” he laments, “over the night of history.”[[9]] With freedom and a recognition of its freedom by humanity generally we may see the dawn of better things. Humanity will then consciously and deliberately make its history, and not be led by the operations of herd-instinct and fatalistic beliefs which in the past have so disgraced and marred its record.
[9] Psychologie ralionnelle, vol. 2, p. 91.
The existing condition of human society can only be described frankly, in Renouvier’s opinion, as a state of war. Each individual, each class, each nation, each race, is actually at war with others. It matters not whether a diplomatic state of peace, as it is called, exists or not; that must not blind us to the facts. By institutions, customs, laws, hidden fraud, diplomacy, and open violence, this conflict is kept up. It is all war, says Renouvier. Modern society is based on war, economic, military or judicial. Indeed, military and naval warfare is a clear issue, but only a symbol of what always goes on. Might always has the upper hand, hence ordinary life in modern society is just a state of war. Our civilisation does not rest on justice, or on the conception of justice; it rests on power and might. Until it is founded on justice, peace, he urges, will not be possible; humanity will be enslaved in further struggles disastrous o itself. This doctrine of the état de guerre, as descriptive of modern society, he makes a feature of his ethics, upon which we must not here encroach, but may point out that he insists upon justice as the ultimate social criterion, and claims that this is higher than charity, which is inadequate as a basis for society, however much it may alleviate its ills. One of the chief necessities, he points out, an essential to any progressive measure would be to moralise our modern notion of the state.[[10]] In the notes to his last chapter of the Nouvelle Monadologie Renouvier attacks the Marxian doctrine of the materialistic determination of history.
[10] This point was further emphasised by Henri Michel in his work, L’Idée de l’Etat.
This same book, however, we must note, marks a stage in Renouvier’s own thought different from his doctrines in the earlier Essais de Critique générale, and this later philosophy, of which the Monadologie and Personnalisme are the two most notable volumes, displays an attempt to look upon progress from a more ultimate standpoint. His théodicée here involves the notion, seen in Ravaisson, of an early perfection, involving a subsequent “fall,” the world now, with its guerre universelle, being an intermediate stage between a perfect or harmonious state in the past and one which lies in the future.