Le Roy, ÉDouard(1870–1954)
Édouard Le Roy, the French philosopher of science, ethics, and religion, was born in Paris and studied science at the École Normale Supérieure. He passed the agrégation examination in mathematics in 1895 and took a doctorate in science in 1898. Le Roy became a lycée teacher of mathematics in Paris but was soon drawn to philosophical problems through an interest in the philosophy of Henri Bergson. He succeeded Bergson, to whose thought his own was deeply indebted, as professor of philosophy at the Collège de France in 1921 and was elected to the French Academy in 1945.
In a series of articles titled "Science et philosophie" (Revue de métaphysique et de morale 7 [1899]: 375–425, 503–562, 706–731, and 8 [1900]: 37–72), Le Roy took a pragmatic view of the nature of scientific truth, a view more or less shared by his contemporaries Bergson, Jules Henri Poincaré, and E. Wilbois. Scientific laws and even scientific "facts," Le Roy maintained, are arbitrary constructs designed to meet our needs and to facilitate effective action in pursuit of those needs. Scientific reason, in other words, distorts reality in the interests of practical action. The scientific facts on which induction is based are artificially extracted from the continuous flow of happenings and experiences and built up into convenient (rather than "true") thought structures, which constitute "the grammar of discourse" and enable us to talk about, and deal with, what would otherwise be "the amorphous material of the given." Thus, in reacting against scientific mechanism, Le Roy presented an extreme view of mind as the creator of its own reality.
Le Roy took the same pragmatic view of discursive religious truth in Dogme et critique (Paris, 1906). His views were supported by the Catholic modernists and condemned as dangerous in a papal encyclical. Le Roy held that the validity of dogmas cannot be proved, nor do they profess to be provable; they depend upon a rigid and externally imposed authority; their expression and frame of reference is that of medieval philosophy; and they are alien to, and incompatible with, the body of modern knowledge. For these four reasons they are unacceptable to the modern mind as truths. Nevertheless, they possess a pragmatic value; they fulfill a purpose, in this case a moral one. "Although mysterious for the intelligence in search of explanatory theories," Le Roy held, "these dogmas lend themselves nonetheless to perfectly specific formulation as directives for action." Christianity is thus not a system of speculative philosophy, but a set of stated or implied injunctions, a way of life. For example, the belief in a personal God demands that our relation to him resemble our relation to a human person. The doctrine of the resurrection of Christ teaches that we should behave in relation to him as if he were alive today.
Le Roy's misgivings concerning religious dogmas arose because the dogmas seemed to him irreconcilable with a homogeneous system of rational knowledge. In a pragmatic and relativist conception of truth such incompatibility should not be significant. However, the criterion of truth, for Le Roy, was neither use nor coherence, but "life" itself, dynamic and self-developing. Scientific theory is useful distortion, religious teaching a source of moral action, and both are arbitrary in their choice of concepts and symbols. Genuine knowledge is a kind of self-identification with the object in its primitive reality, uncontaminated by the demands of practical need. Intuition, not discursive thought, is the instrument of such knowledge, and the criterion of truth is that one should have lived it; otherwise, according to Le Roy, one ought not to understand it. This, as L. Susan Stebbing rightly pointed out, altogether removes the criterion from rational criticism, since life is both truth and the criterion of truth.
Le Roy's philosophy culminated in moral and religious concerns, as is seen in Volume 2 of his posthumously published Essai d'une philosophie première (2 vols., Paris, 1956–1958). His position is similar to Bergson's in Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion. The élan vital that animates us takes the form of an "open," that is, indeterminate, moral demand. This generalized obligation is the essence of the self as a free and self-creating agent. Le Roy stated that "to believe is to perceive a spiritual exigency and to act under its inspiration." The open nature of the exigency "beyond any ideal capable of being formulated" places Le Roy's view in the same category as much recent morality of authenticity. The agent is constantly transcending the determinate in the direction of some necessarily unspecified self-fulfillment. Because morality implies precepts and precepts imply universalizability, the notion of a morality that cannot be formulated would seem to be self-defeating. In his conception of a moral quest Le Roy, in fact, seemed to presuppose the Christian values to which he subscribed.
Bergson, Henri; Laws, Scientific; Modernism; Philosophy of Science; Poincaré, Jules Henri; Religion; Stebbing, Lizzie Susan.
Bibliography
Additional Works by Le Roy
Une philosophic nouvelle: Henri Bergson. Paris: Alcan, 1912.
L'exigence idéaliste et le fait de l'évolution. Paris: Boivin, 1927.
Les origines humaines et l'évolution de l'intelligence. Paris: Boivin, 1928.
Le problème de Dieu. Paris, 1929.
La pensée intuitive. 2 vols. Paris: Boivin, 1929–1930.
Introduction à l'étude du problème religieux. Paris, 1944.
La pensée mathématique pure. Paris, 1960.
Works on Le Roy
Gagnebin, S. La philosophie de l'intuition. Essai sur les idées d'Édouard Le Roy. Paris, 1912.
Olgiati, F. Édouard Le Roy e il problema di Dio. Milan, 1929.
Stebbing, L. Susan. Pragmatism and French Voluntarism. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1914.
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