A Brief History of Thought

Luc Ferry

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780062074256
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Deconstrucción en filosofía

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"Ferry's openness, energy, and charm as a teacher burst through on every page." — Wall Street Journal

From the timeless wisdom of the ancient Greeks to Christianity, the Enlightenment, existentialism, and postmodernism, Luc Ferry's instant classic brilliantly and accessibly explains the enduring teachings of philosophy—including its profound relevance to modern daily life and its essential role in achieving happiness and living a meaningful life. This lively journey through the great thinkers will enlighten every reader, young and old.

Chapter 1
What is Philosophy?

I am going to tell you the story as well as the history of philosophy. Not all of it, of course, but its five great moments. In each case, I will give you an example of one or two transforming visions of the world or, as we say sometimes, one or two great ‘systems of thought’. I promise that, if you take the trouble to follow me, you will come to understand this thing called philosophy and you will have the means to investigate it further – for example, by reading in detail some of the great thinkers of whom I shall be speaking.

The question ‘What is philosophy?’ is unfortunately one of the most controversial (although in a sense that is a good thing, because we are forced to exercise our ability to reason) and one which the majority of philosophers still debate today, without finding common ground.

When I was in my final year at school, my teacher assured me that it referred ‘quite simply’ to the ‘formation of a critical and independent spirit’, to a ‘method of rigorous thought’, to an ‘art of reflection’, rooted in an attitude of ‘astonishment’ and ‘enquiry’ … These are the definitions which you still find today in most introductory works. However, in spite of the respect I have for my teacher, I must tell you from the start that, in my view, such definitions have nothing to do with the question.

It is certainly preferable to approach philosophy in a reflective spirit; that much is true. And that one should do so with rigour and even in a critical and interrogatory mood – that is also true. But all of these definitions are entirely non-specific. I’m sure that you can think of an infinite number of other human activities about which we should also ask questions and strive to argue our way as best we can, without their being in the slightest sense philosophical.

Biologists and artists, doctors and novelists, mathematicians and theologians, journalists and even politicians all reflect and ask themselves questions – none of which makes them, for my money, philosophers. One of the principal errors of the contemporary world is to reduce philosophy to a straightforward matter of ‘critical reflection’. Reflection and argument are worthy activities; they are indispensable to the formation of good citizens and allow us to participate in civic life with an independent spirit. But these are merely the means to an end – and philosophy is no more an instrument of politics than it is a prop for morality.

I suggest that we accept a different approach to the question ‘What is philosophy?’ and start from a very simple proposition, one that contains the central question of all philosophy: that the human being, as distinct from God, is mortal or, to speak like the philosophers, is a ‘finite being’, limited in space and time. As distinct from animals, moreover, a human being is the only creature who is aware of his limits. He knows that he will die, and that his near ones, those he loves, will also die. Consequently he cannot prevent himself from thinking about this state of affairs, which is disturbing and absurd, almost unimaginable. And, naturally enough, he is inclined to turn first of all to those religions which promise ‘salvation’.

The Question of Salvation

Think about this word – ‘salvation’. I will show how religions have attempted to take charge of the questions it raises. Because the simplest way of starting to define philosophy is always by putting it in relation to religion.

Open any dictionary and you will see that ‘salvation’ is defined first and foremost as ‘the condition of being saved, of escaping a great danger or misfortune’. But from what ‘great danger’, from what ‘misfortune’ do religions claim to deliver us? You already know the answer: from the peril of death. Which is why all religions strive, in different ways, to promise us eternal life; to reassure us that one day we will be reunited with our loved ones – parents and friends, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, children and grandchildren – from whom life on earth must eventually separate us.

In the Gospel According to St John, Jesus experiences the death of a dear friend, Lazarus. Like every other human being since the dawn of time, he weeps. He experiences, like you or I, the grief of separation. But unlike you or I, simple mortals, it is in Jesus’s power to raise his friend from the dead. And he does this in order to prove that, as he puts it, ‘love is stronger than death’. This fundamental message constitutes the essence of the Christian doctrine of redemption: death, for those who love and have faith in the word of Christ, is but an appearance, a rite of passage. Through love and through faith, we shall gain immortality.

Which is fortunate for us, for what do we truly desire, above all else? To be understood, to be loved, not to be alone, not to be separated from our loved ones – in short, not to die and not to have them die on us. But daily life will sooner or later disappoint every one of these desires, and, so it is, that by trusting in a God some of us seek salvation, and religion assures us that those who do so will be rewarded. And why not, for those who believe and have faith?

But for those who are not convinced, and who doubt the truth of these promises of immortality, the problem of death remains unresolved. Which is where philosophy comes in. Death is not as simple an event as it is ordinarily credited with being. It cannot merely be written off as ‘the end of life’, as the straightforward termination of our existence. To reassure themselves, certain wise men of antiquity (Epicurus for one) maintained that we must not think about death, because there are only two alternatives: either I am alive, in which case death is by definition elsewhere; or death is here and, likewise by definition, I am not here to worry about it! Why, under these conditions, would you bother yourself with such a pointless problem?

This line of reasoning, in my view, is a little too brutal to be honest. On the contrary, death has many different faces. And it is this which torments man: for only man is aware that his days are numbered, that the inevitable is not an illusion and that he must consider what to do with his brief existence. Edgar Allan Poe, in one of his most famous poems, ‘The Raven’, conveys this idea of life’s irreversibility in a sinister raven perched on a window ledge, capable only of repeating ‘Nevermore’ over and over again.

Poe is suggesting that death means everything that is unrepeatable. Death is, in the midst of life, that which will not return; that which belongs irreversibly to time past, which we have no hope of ever recovering. It can mean childhood holidays with friends, the divorce of parents, or the houses or schools we have to leave, or a thousand other examples: even if it does not always mean the disappearance of a loved one, everything that comes under the heading of ‘Nevermore’ belongs in death’s ledger.

In this sense, you can see how far death is from a mere biological ending. We encounter an infinite number of its variations, in the midst of life, and these many faces of death trouble us, even if we are not always aware of them. To live well, therefore, to live freely, capable of joy, generosity and love, we must first and foremost conquer our fear – or, more accurately, our fears of the irreversible. But here, precisely, is where religion and philosophy pull apart.

Philosophy versus Religion

Faced with the supreme threat to existence – death – how does religion work? Essentially, through faith. By insisting that it is faith, and faith alone, which can direct the grace of God towards us. If you believe in Him, God will save you. The religions demand humility, above and beyond all other virtues, since humility is in their eyes the opposite – as the greatest Christian thinkers, from Saint Augustine to Pascal, never stop telling us – of the arrogance and the vanity of philosophy. Why is this accusation levelled against free thinking? In a nutshell, because philosophy also claims to save us – if not from death itself, then from the anxiety it causes, and to do so by the exercise of our own resources and our innate faculty of reason. Which, from a religious perspective, sums up philosophical pride: the effrontery evident already in the earliest philosophers, from Greek antiquity, several centuries before Christ.

Unable to bring himself to believe in a God who offers salvation, the philosopher is above all one who believes that by understanding the world, by understanding ourselves and others as far our intelligence permits, we shall succeed in overcoming fear, through clear-sightedness rather than blind faith.

In other words, if religions can be defined as ‘doctrines of salvation’, the great philosophies can also be defined as doctrines of salvation (but without the help of a God). Epicurus, for example, defined philosophy as ‘medicine for the soul’, whose ultimate aim is to make us understand that ‘death is not to be feared’. He proposes four principles to remedy all those ills related to the fact that we are mortal: ‘The gods are not to be feared; death cannot be felt; the good can be won; what we dread can be conquered.’ This wisdom was interpreted by his most eminent disciple, Lucretius, in his poem De rerum natura (‘On the Nature of Things’):

The fear of Acheron [the river of the Underworld] must first and foremost be dismantled; this fear muddies the life of man to its deepest depths, stains everything with the blackness of death, leaves no pleasure pure and clear.

And Epictetus, one of the greatest representatives of another of the ancient Greek philosophical schools – Stoicism – went so far as to reduce all philosophical questions to a single issue: the fear of death. Listen for a moment to him addressing his disciple in the course of his dialogues or Discourses:

Keep well in mind, then, that this epitome of all human evils, of mean-spiritedness and cowardice, is not death as such, but rather the fear of death. Discipline yourself, therefore, against this. To which purpose let all your reasonings, your readings, all your exercises tend, and you will know that only in this way are human beings set free. (Discourses, III, 26, 38–9)

The same theme is encountered in Montaigne’s famous adage – ‘to philosophise is to learn how to die’; and in Spinoza’s reflection about the wise man who ‘dies less than the fool’; and in Kant’s question, ‘What are we permitted to hope for?’ These references may mean little to you, because you are only starting out, but we shall come back to each of them in turn. Bear them in mind. All that matters, now, is that we understand why, in the eyes of every philosopher, fear of death prevents us from living – and not only because it generates anxiety. Most of the time, of course, we do not meditate on human mortality. But at a deeper level the irreversibility of things is a kind of death at the heart of life and threatens constantly to steer us into time past – the home of nostalgia, guilt, regret and remorse, those great spoilers of happiness.

Perhaps we should try not to think of these things, and try to confine ourselves to happy memories, rather than reflecting on bad times. But paradoxically those happy memories can become transformed, over time, into ‘lost paradises’, drawing us imperceptibly towards the past and preventing us from enjoying the present.

Greek philosophers looked upon the past and the future as the primary evils weighing upon human life, and as the source of all the anxieties which blight the present. The present moment is the only dimension of existence worth inhabiting, because it is the only one available to us. The past is no longer and the future has yet to come, they liked to remind us; yet we live virtually all of our lives somewhere between memories and aspirations, nostalgia and expectation. We imagine we would be much happier with new shoes, a faster computer, a bigger house, more exotic holidays, different friends … But by regretting the past or guessing the future, we end up missing the only life worth living: the one which proceeds from the here and now and deserves to be savoured.

Faced with these mirages which distract us from life, what are the promises of religion? That we don’t need to be afraid, because our hopes will be fulfilled. That it is possible to live in the present as it is – and expect a better future! That there exists an infinitely benign Being who loves us above all else and will therefore save us from the solitude of ourselves and from the loss of our loved ones, who, after they die in this world, will await us in the next.

What must we do to be ‘saved’? Faced with a Supreme Being, we are invited to adopt an attitude framed entirely in two words: trust (Latin fides, which also means ‘faith’) and humility. In contrast, philosophy, by following a different path, verges on the diabolical. Christian theology developed a powerful concept of ‘the temptations of the devil’. Contrary to the popular imagery which frequently served the purposes of a Church in need of authority, the devil is not one who leads us away from the straight and narrow, morally speaking, by an appeal to the weaknesses of the flesh. The devil is rather one who, spiritually speaking, does everything in his power to separate us (dia-bolos in Greek meaning ‘the who who divides’) from the vertical link uniting true believers with God, and which alone saves them from solitude and death. The diabolos is not content with setting men against each other, provoking them to hatred and war, but much more ominously, he cuts man off from God and thus delivers him back into the anguish that faith had succeeded in healing.

For a dogmatic theologian, philosophy is the devil’s own work, because by inciting man to turn aside from his faith, to exercise his reason and give rein to his enquiring spirit, philosophy draws him imperceptibly into the realm of doubt, which is the first step beyond divine supervision.

In the account of Genesis, with which the Bible opens, the serpent plays the role of Devil by encouraging Adam and Eve – the first human beings – to doubt God’s word about the forbidden fruit. The serpent wants them to ask questions and try the apple, so that they will disobey God. By separating them from Him, the Devil can then inflict upon them – mere mortals – all the torments of earthly existence. The ‘Fall’ of Adam and Eve and their banishment from the first Paradise is the direct consequence of doubting divine edicts; thus, men became mortal.

All philosophies, however divergent they may sometimes be in the answers they bring, promise us an escape from primitive fears. They possess in common with religions the conviction that anguish prevents us from leading good lives: it stops us not only from being happy, but also from being free. This is an ever present theme amongst the earliest Greek philosophers: we can neither think nor act freely when we are paralysed by the anxiety provoked – even unconsciously – by fear of the irreversible. The question becomes one of how to persuade humans to ‘save’ themselves.

Salvation must proceed not from an Other – from some Being supposedly transcendent (meaning ‘exterior to and superior to’ ourselves) – but well and truly from within. Philosophy wants us to get ourselves out of trouble by utilising our own resources, by means of reason alone, with boldness and assurance. And this of course is what Montaigne meant when, characterising the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, he assured us that ‘to philosophise is to learn how to die’.

Is every philosophy linked therefore to atheism? Can there not be a Christian or a Jewish or a Muslim philosophy? And if so, in what sense? In other words, what are we to make of those philosophers, like Descartes or Kant, who believed in God? And you may ask why should we refuse the promise of religion? Why not submit with humility to the requirements of salvation ‘in God’?

For two crucial reasons, which lie at the heart of all philosophy. First and foremost, because the promise of religions – that we are immortal and will encounter our loved ones after our own biological demise – is too good to be true. Similarly hard to believe is the image of a God who acts as a father to his children. How can one reconcile this with the appalling massacres and misfortunes which overwhelm humanity: what father would abandon his children to the horror of Auschwitz, or Rwanda, or Cambodia? A believer will doubtless respond that that is the price of freedom, that God created men as equals and evil must be laid at their door. But what about the innocent? What about the countless children martyred in the course of these crimes against humanity? A philosopher begins to doubt that the religious answers are adequate. (Undoubtedly this argument engages only with the popular image of religion, but this is nonetheless the most widespread and influential version available.) Almost invariably the philosopher comes to think that belief in God, which usually arises as an indirect consequence, in the guise of consolation, perhaps makes us lose in clarity what we gain in serenity. He respects all believers, it goes without saying. He does not claim that they are necessarily wrong, that their faith is absurd, or that the non-existence of God is a certainty. (How would one set about proving that God does not exist?) Simply, that in his case there is a failure of faith; therefore he must look elsewhere.

Wellbeing is not the only ideal in life. Freedom is another. And if religion calms anguish by making death into an illusion, it risks doing so at the price of freedom of thought. For it demands, more or less, that we abandon reason and the enquiring spirit in return for faith and serenity. It asks that we conduct ourselves, before God, like little...