A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living (Learning to Live)

by Luc Ferry

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’.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Philosophy wants us to get ourselves out of trouble by utilising our own resources, by means of reason alone, with boldness and assurance.

(Note: ‘Morals’ and ‘ethics’: what difference is there between these terms? The simplest answer is: none whatsoever. The term ‘morals’ derives from the Latin word for ‘manners, customs’, and ‘ethics’ derives from the Greek term for ‘manners, customs’. They are therefore perfectly synonymous. Having said this, some philosophers have assigned different meanings to the two terms. In Kant, for example, ‘morals’ designates the ensemble of first principles, and ‘ethics’ refers to their application. Other philosophers refer to ‘morals’ as the theory of duties towards others, and to ‘ethics’ as the doctrine of salvation and wisdom. Indeed, there is no reason why different meanings should not be assigned to these terms, but, unless I indicate otherwise, I shall use them synonymously in the following pages.)

This thought process has three distinct stages: a theoretical stage, a moral or ethical stage, and a crowning conclusion as to salvation or wisdom.

These two questions – the nature of the world, and the instruments for understanding it at our disposal as humans – constitute the essentials of the theoretical aspect of philosophy.

How do we co-exist with others,what rules of the game must we learn, and how should we conduct ourselves – to be helpful, dignified and ‘fair’ in our dealings with others? This question is addressed by the second part of philosophy; the part which is not theoretical but practical, and which broadly concerns ethics.

But why should we learn about the world and its history, why bother trying to live in harmony with others? What is the point of all this effort? And does it have to make sense? These questions, and some others of a similar nature, bring us to the third dimension of philosophy, which touches upon the ultimate question of salvation or wisdom. If philosophy is the ‘love’ (philo) of ‘wisdom’ (sophia), it is at this point that it must make way for wisdom, which surpasses all philosophical understanding. To be a sage, by definition, is neither to aspire to wisdom or seek the condition of being a sage, but simply to live wisely, contentedly and as freely as possible, having finally overcome the fears sparked in us by our own finiteness.

To find one’s place in the world, to learn how to live and act, we must first obtain knowledge of the world in which we find ourselves. This is the first task of a philosophical ‘theory’.

In English, the term cosmos has resulted in, among other words, ‘cosmetic’. Originally, this science of the body beautiful related to justness of proportions, then to the art of make-up, which sets off that which is ‘well-made’ and, if necessary, conceals that which is less so. It is this order, or cosmos, this ordained structure of the universe in its entirety that the Greeks named ‘divine’ (theion), and not – as with the Jews and Christians – a Being apart from or external to the universe, existing prior to and responsible for the act of its creation.

It was this same idea, that the world possesses a soul of sorts, like a living being, which would later be termed ‘animism’ (Latin anima, meaning soul ). This ‘cosmology’(or conception of the cosmos) was also described as ‘hylozoism’, literally meaning that matter (hyle) is analogous to what is animal (zoon): that it is alive, in other words. The same doctrine would also be described by the term ‘pantheism’ (the doctrine that nature and the physical universe are constituents of the essence of God; from Greek pan, ‘all’, and theos, meaning ‘God’): that all is God, since it is the totality of the universe that is divine, rather than there being a God beyond the world, creating it by remote control, so to speak.

For if nature as a whole is harmonious, then it can serve as a model for human conduct, and the order of things must be just and good, as Marcus Aurelius insists in his Meditations: ‘All that comes to pass comes to pass with justice.’ You will find this to be so if you watch carefully. I do not mean only in accordance with the ordered nature of events, but in accordance with justice and as it were by someone who assigns to each thing its value. (IV.10) What Marcus Aurelius suggests amounts to the idea that nature – when it functions normally and aside from the occasional accidents and catastrophes that occur – renders justice finally to each of us. It supplies to each of us our essential needs as individuals: a body which enables us to move about the world, an intelligence which permits us to adapt to the world, and natural resources which enable us to survive in the world. So that, in this great cosmic sharing out of goods, each receives his due.

According to the Stoics, the sage is one who, thanks to a just exercise of thought and action, is able to attain a human version – if not of immortality – then at least of eternity. Admittedly, he is going to die, but death will not be for him the absolute end of everything. Rather it will be a transformation, a ‘rite of passage’, if you like, from one state to another, within a universal order whose perfection possesses complete stability, and by the same token possesses divinity.

Or, according to Marcus Aurelius: ‘You came into this world as a part: you will vanish into the whole which gave you birth, or rather you will be gathered up into its generative principle by the process of change.’ (Meditations, IV,14) What do such texts mean? They mean simply this: that having reached a certain level of wisdom, theoretical and practical, the human individual understands that death does not really exist, that it is but a passage from one state to the next; not an annihilation but a different state of being. As members of a divine and stable cosmos, we too can participate in this stability and this divinity. As soon as we understand this, we will become aware simultaneously how unjustified is our fear of death, not merely subjectively but also – in a pantheistic sense – objectively. Because the universe is eternal, we will remain for ever a fragment – we too will never cease to exist!

Let us begin with the essentials: in the eyes of the Stoics, the two great ills which prevent us from achieving fulfilment are nostalgia and hope, specifically attachment to the past and anxiety about the future. These block our access to the present moment, and prevent us from living life to the full.

There are moments when we seem to be here not to transform the world, but simply to be part of it, to experience the beauty and joy that it offers to us.

As you have probably noticed, the Stoic doctrine of salvation is resolutely anonymous and impersonal. It promises us eternity, certainly, but of a non-personal kind, as an oblivious fragment of the cosmos: death, for the Stoic, is a mere rite of passage, which involves a transition from a state of individual consciousness – you and I, as living and thinking beings – to a state of oneness with the cosmos, in the course of which we lose everything that constitutes our self-awareness and individuality.

Religion is the prime example of a non-philosophical quest for salvation – given its assumption of God and a need for faith – rather than by means of human reason.

For Christians, truth is no longer accessed through the exercise of a human reason which can grasp the rational and ‘logical’ order of the cosmic totality by virtue of its being an eminent component of that same order. From now on, what will permit man to approach the divine, to know it and to contemplate it, belongs to a quite different order. What will count here, above all, is no longer intelligence but trust in the word of a man, the Man-God, Christ, who claims to be the son of God, the Logos incarnate. We are going to believe Him, because He is worthy of this act of faith – and the miracles He accomplishes will play their part in the credit which is accorded to Him. You will recall that trust originally meant ‘faith’. To contemplate God, the appropriate theoretical instrument is faith, not reason, and this means placing all our confidence in the words of Christ announcing the ‘good news’: according to which we shall be saved by faith and not by ‘works’; in other words, our all too human actions, however admirable these might be. It is no longer a case of thinking for oneself, but rather of placing trust in another. And in that, no doubt, lies the most profound and significant difference between philosophy and religion.

You can see now why one might say that there both is and is not a Christian philosophy. There must clearly be a place for rational activity – to interpret Scripture and comprehend the natural order sufficiently to draw the correct conclusions as to the Christian divinity. But the doctrine of salvation is no longer the prerogative of philosophy, and, even if they do not in principle contradict one another, the truths revealed by faith take precedence over those deduced by reason.

The Christian argument is at once very simple and very powerful. It says the following: there is indisputable proof that the talents bestowed by nature are not intrinsically virtuous, that they are in no sense inherently moral, because, without exception, they can be employed as much for ill as for good. Strength, beauty, intelligence – all natural gifts received at birth – are self-evidently qualities, but not on a moral plane. You can use your strength, your beauty or your intelligence to commit the most wicked crime, and you demonstrate by this alone that there is nothing inherently virtuous about natural gifts. Therefore, you can choose what use to make of them, whether good or bad, but it is the use that is moral or immoral, not the gifts themselves. ‘Free will’ becomes the determining factor of the morality of an action. With this idea, Christianity revolutionised the history of thought. For the first time in human history, liberty rather than nature had become the foundation of morality. At the same time, the idea of the equal dignity of all human beings makes its first appearance: and Christianity was to become the precursor of modern democracy.

It is difficult at first to grasp the immense novelty of Christianity, not merely in relation to Greek thought, but even more so perhaps in relation to the Jewish world. Because Christianity placed so much weight on conscience, on the spirit over the letter, it imposed almost no jurisdiction over everyday life. Rituals such as eating no fish on Fridays are mostly modern, dating back no further than the nineteenth century and having no origins whatsoever in the Gospels. You can read and re-read the Gospels, and find next to nothing about what you should or should not eat, how and to whom you should get married; there are hardly any rituals required for proving to yourself and others that you are a good and committed believer. While the lives of Orthodox Jews and Muslims are filled with duties to be carried out in civil society, Christianity left everything up to the individual as to whether something is good or not. This attitude smoothed the passage to democracy, and the arrival of secular rather than religious societies: as morality was essentially a matter of internal conscience, it had less reason to come into conflict with external conventions. It mattered little whether one prayed once or a hundred times daily, or that one was forbidden to eat this or that: all laws, more or less, became acceptable if they did not infringe the spirit of the Christian message.

In a wholly unprecedented manner, Christianity responded forcefully to the fundamental question of how to conquer the fears aroused in man by the sense of his own mortality. Whereas the Stoics represent death as a transition from a personal to an impersonal state of existence (from a condition of individual consciousness to that of a cosmic fragment without consciousness), the Christian version of salvation promises us nothing less than individual immortality. The idea of which is not easy to resist.

The resurrection is, so to speak, the alpha and omega of the Christian doctrine of salvation: it stands not only at the end of our earthly life, but equally so at the beginning, in the liturgy of the baptism, considered as a first death and symbolised as such by immersion in water, and as a first entrance to true life, one of a community wedded as individuals to eternity. This cannot be emphasised too much: that it is not merely the soul that is resuscitated, but the ‘soul-body’ in its entirety; and therefore the individual. When Jesus reappears to his disciples after his death, he suggests – to remove all doubts – that they touch him, and, as proof of his ‘materiality’, he asks for a little food, which he eats before them: So that if the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you. (Romans, 8:11)

a priori (not supported by fact; based on hypothesis or theory rather than experiment)

Animals have an ‘essence’, common to their entire species, which precedes their existence as individuals: there is a cat essence, an essence of pigeon – and this instinct or ‘essence’ is common to the entire species, so much so that the individual identity and existence of each individual is wholly determined by it: no cat, no pigeon, can swerve away from this essence which suppresses all individual action. But, with humans, the opposite is true: no essence predetermines it, no programme can ever succeed in entirely hemming it in; no system can imprison it so absolutely that it cannot emancipate itself. I am born into a society: as a man or woman, native or immigrant, rich or poor, aristocrat or labourer, but these initial categories do not define me for the rest of my life. I can be a woman and decide not to have children; I can be born poor and underprivileged, but become rich; I can be born French, but adopt another language and change nationality, and so on.

One could say that the revolutionaries repeated in the historical and political sphere what Descartes had initiated in the sphere of abstract thought. The latter declared that all past beliefs, all ideas inherited from family or state, or indoctrinated from infancy onwards by ‘authorities’ (masters, priests) must be cast in doubt, and examined in complete freedom by the individual subject. He alone is capable of deciding between true and false. In the same way, the French revolutionaries declared that we must cast aside all the paraphernalia of the Ancien Regime; as one of them, Rabaut Saint-Etienne, declared, in a wholly ‘Cartesian’ maxim which came to stand out as a milestone, the Revolution could be encapsulated in a single sentence: ‘Our history is not our destiny.’ Just because we have lived since time immemorial in a regime that is an aristocracy and a monarchy, with established privileges and inequalities, we are not for ever obliged to continue doing so. Nothing compels us to continue to observe traditions for ever. On the contrary, when they are not good, we must reject them and change them. We must know how to ‘make a blank slate of our past’ in order to create from scratch – just as Descartes, having cast all prior beliefs in doubt, undertook the total reconstruction of philosophy upon a solid basis: namely an immovable certitude, that of a subject who takes responsibility for himself, and who trusts henceforth to himself alone.

In contemporary philosophy, we call ‘postmodern’ those ideas which, from the mid-nineteenth century, were to set about dismantling the humanist creed of modernity, in particular the philosophy of the Enlightenment. In the same way that the latter broke with the grand cosmologies of Antiquity and brought about a new critique of religion, so too postmodernity was to set about demolishing the two strongest convictions of the Moderns from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries: the belief that the human individual is at the centre of the world – which came to form the basis of all moral and political values; and the belief that reason is an irresistible force for emancipation and that, thanks to the progress of ‘Enlightenment’, we are going to become ever freer and happier.

Contrary to the ‘theoretical man’ – the philosopher or scientist of whom we have been speaking – the artist is the figure who, above all others, imposes values without discussion, opens up perspectives and invents worlds without needing to demonstrate the legitimacy of his propositions, still less to prove them by a refutation of those works which preceded his own. Like the aristocracy, the artist commands without arguing with anyone or anything – and note that it is in this sense that Nietzsche declares: ‘Whatever needs first to have itself proved to be believed is of little value.’

Contrary to the Stoic conception of divinity, which merges with the harmony of the natural order, and is consequently not located outside of it, the God of the Jews, Christians and Muslims is entirely ‘supernatural’. Here is a transcendence not merely relative to humanity (like that of the Greeks), but also relative to the universe itself, conceived entirely as a creation whose existence depends upon a Being exterior to it.

Like the cube, whose several faces I can never see simultaneously, the reality of the world is never presented to me as transparency, as mastery. In other words, if we confine ourselves to the point of view of human finiteness, to the idea – as expressed by Husserl, again – that ‘all consciousness is a consciousness of something’, that all consciousness is therefore limited by a world external to itself and consequently, in this sense, finite; then we must correspondingly admit that human knowledge can never attain to omniscience, can never coincide with the point of view which Christians accord to God.

Consider for a moment the four great settings in which the fundamental values of human existence are played out: truth, beauty, justice and love. All four of which, whatever the materialists say, remain fundamentally transcendent for the particular individual, for you and me, as for everyone else. Let us simplify a little more: I cannot invent mathematical truths, nor the beauty of a work of art, nor the imperatives of the moral life; and when I ‘fall’ in love, as the phrase so accurately describes it, I cannot choose deliberately to do this. The transcendence of values is in this sense patently real. But it is also housed in concrete experience, not in a metaphysical fiction, nor in the form of an idol such as ‘God’ or ‘Paradise’ or ‘Republic’, or ‘Socialism’. We can construct a ‘phenomenology’ of this experience, a simple description which starts from the sense of an inescapable necessity, from the awareness of not being capable of thinking or feeling differently on a particular subject: I can do nothing about it, 2 + 2 = 4, and this is not a matter of taste or subjective choice. The necessities of which I speak impose themselves on me as if they come from elsewhere, and yet, it is inside myself that this transcendence is present, and palpably so.

I remember my friend, the atheist and historian François Furet, being asked on television what he would wish God to say to him were they ever to meet. To which he gave an immediate answer: ‘Come quickly, your loved ones are waiting for you!’ I would have given the same answer, and with the same undertow of disbelief.