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

by Luc Ferry

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.