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

by Luc Ferry

human being is the only creature who is aware of his limits.

‘to philosophise is to learn how to die’.

Simply, that in his case there is a failure of faith; therefore he must look elsewhere.

one cannot make correct judgements about good and evil unless one understands the whole system of nature,

the good was what was in accord with the cosmic order, whether one willed it or not, and what was bad was what ran contrary to this order, whether one liked it or not.

these changes are from a preceding state into a new and different state; and thus not destruction, but an ordered management and governance of things.

we must not follow those who advise us, being human, to think only of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things; but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with what is best in us.’

the two great ills which prevent us from achieving fulfilment are nostalgia and hope, specifically attachment to the past and anxiety about the future.

hope is the greatest of misfortunes. For it is by nature an absence, a lack, a source of tension in our lives. For we live in terms of plans, chasing after objectives located in a more or less distant future, and believing that our happiness depends upon their accomplishment.

revolutions do not take place without suffering.

‘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.

Christianity left everything up to the individual as to whether something is good or not.

science is no longer a spectacle but a job of work, an activity which consists of making connections between phenomena,

perfectibility’ – broadly speaking, the capacity to improve oneself over the course of a lifetime; whereas the animal is guided from the outset by ‘instinct’ – is, in a manner of speaking, perfect ‘from the start’, from birth.

a human education is unlimited, ending only with death.

Jean-Paul Sartre said that if man is free, there is therefore no ‘human nature’, no human ‘essence’, no definition of humanity which precedes and determines his individual existence.

if we locate virtue in freedom – rather than in nature – all individuals are equal, and democracy becomes inevitable.

when you learn a foreign language you come to establish some distance both from yourself and from your particular point of origin – that of being English, for example. You enter into a larger and more universal sphere,

By learning another language, we can communicate with a greater number of human beings, and we also discover, through language, other ideas and other kinds of humour, other forms of exchange with individuals and with the world.

only by being opposed does it feel necessary; only by being opposed does it become necessary. Our behaviour towards our ‘inner enemy’ is no different: here, too, we have spiritualised enmity; here, too, we have grasped its value.

The will to power is not the will to conquer, to have money and influence, but a profound desire for a maximum intensity of life, for a life that is no longer impoverished and torn apart by self-division, but on the contrary lived to the full.

My doctrine says, the task is to live your life in such a way that you must wish to live it again – for you will anyway! If striving gives you the highest feeling, then strive! If rest gives you the highest feeling, then rest! If fitting in, following and obeying give you the highest feeling, then obey! Only make sure you come to know what gives you the highest feeling, and then spare no means.

‘the innocence of becoming’: ‘to situate oneself beyond every kind of praise and blame, to make oneself independent of everything connected with yesterday and today – so as to pursue my own aim in my own manner’. For it is by this means alone that we can experience salvation. But saved from what? As always: saved from fear. By what means? As always: through serenity.

freeing ourselves from the burdens of past and future, that we shall attain to serenity and to eternity, here and now, because there is nothing else, no more reference to ‘possibility’, which would relativise present existence and would sow in us the poisonous weeds of doubt, remorse or hope.

It is not possible, even were it desirable, to go backwards.

our communitarianism has changed, human aspirations have changed, as have our relations with authority and our habits of consumption;

we can no longer think, write, paint or play music quite as we did before. Poets no longer extol moonlight or sunsets. A certain disenchantment with the world occurred, but was accompanied by new forms of lucidity, and new freedoms.

The modern economy functions like Darwinian natural selection: within the logic of globalised competition, a business which does not ‘progress’ each day is quite simply doomed to extinction. But this advance has no other end than itself – to stay in the race with the other competitors.

For the first time in the history of life, a living species holds the means to destroy the entire planet, and this species does not know where it is going. Its powers of transformation and, if need be, of destruction, are by now unbounded, but like a giant with the faculties of an infant, they are totally dissociated from any capacity for reflection – while at the same time philosophy itself withdraws from engagement with such questions, likewise seized by a passion for the technical.

none of whom had renounced to this extent their responsibility for pondering what is meant by the good life – or persuaded themselves that critical reflection and moral pronouncement were the ultimate horizons of philosophy.

‘Hope a little less, love a little more’

hope is manifestly a misfortune rather than a virtue. In a maxim as encompassing as it is terse Comte-Sponville summarises: ‘To hope is to desire without consummation, without knowledge, without power.’ It is therefore a blight, and not an attitude which can give any zest to life.

But hope also means to desire without knowledge: if we knew when and how the objects of our hopes were to be realised, we would no doubt content ourselves with waiting for them – and waiting has a different meaning to hoping. Finally, hope means to desire without power

Frustration and impotence are the salient properties of hope, from a materialist point of view

weightless happiness, when we experience a sense that the real is in no need of transformation or improvement, through our hard work, but is there to be savoured for the sake of the moment, without past or future – in joy and contemplation rather than in the hope of better days.

the materialist sets forth philosophical theses that are profound, but always for you and me, never for himself. Always, he reintroduces transcendence – liberty, a vision for society, the ideal – because in truth he cannot not believe himself to be free, and therefore answerable to values higher than nature and history.

they have neither created it nor invented it. On the contrary, they discover it as a reality that is external to and superior to them. The word ‘transcendent’ here means in relation to humanity, designating a reality which exceeds us, without however being located elsewhere than in the universe. A transcendence on earth rather than in heaven.

Husserl suggested, on the notion of a horizon. When you open your eyes to the world, objects always offer themselves against a background, and this background, as you proceed further into the world which surrounds us, continually displaces itself rather as the horizon does for a sailor, without ever resolving itself into a final and impassable background. Thus, from background to background, from horizon to horizon, you can never succeed in grasping on to anything which you can hold as a final entity, a supreme Being or a first cause which might guarantee the real in which we are immersed.

that there is transcendence, something which always escapes us at the very core of what we are given, of what we see and touch – at the core of immanence itself.

We need others and otherness in order to understand ourselves; we need their liberty, even their happiness if possible, to accomplish our own lives.

Every great philosophical system epitomises in the form of thought a fundamental human experience, just as every great work of art or literature translates human possibility into the most concrete and sensuous form. Respect for the Other does not after all exclude personal choice. On the contrary, it is its primary condition.