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

by Luc Ferry

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.