The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

Life is evil because “as soon as want and suffering permit rest to a man, ennui is at once so near that he necessarily requires diversion,”73—i.e., more suffering. Even if the socialist Utopia were attained, innumerable evils would be left, because some of them—like strife—are essential to life; and if every evil were removed, and strife were altogether ended, boredom would become as intolerable as pain. So “life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and ennui. . . . After man had transformed all pains and torments into the conception of hell, there remained nothing for heaven except ennui.”74 The more successful we become, the more we are bored. “As want is the constant scourge of the people, so ennui is the scourge of the fashionable world. In middle class the ennui is represented by the Sundays and want by the weekdays.”75 Life is evil because the higher the organism the greater the suffering. The growth of knowledge is no solution. For as the phenomenon of will becomes more complete, the suffering becomes more and more apparent. In the plant there is as yet no sensibility, and therefore no pain. A certain very small degree of suffering is experienced by the lowest species of animal life—Infusoria and Radiata; even in insects the capacity to feel and suffer is still limited. It first appears in a high degree with the complete nervous system of vertebrate animals, and always in a higher degree the more intelligence develops. Thus, in proportion as know...

homo homini lupus.

Every epic and dramatic poem can only represent a struggle, an effort, a fight for happiness; never enduring and complete happiness itself. It conducts its heroes through a thousand dangers and difficulties to the goal; as soon as this is reached it hastens to let the curtain fall; for now there would remain nothing for it to do but to show that the glittering goal in which the hero expected to find happiness had only disappointed him, and that after its attainment he was no better off than before.

To be happy, one must be as ignorant as youth. Youth thinks that willing and striving are joys; it has not yet discovered the weary insatiableness of desire, and the fruitlessness of fulfilment; it does not yet see the inevitableness of defeat.

a life devoted to the acquisition of wealth is useless unless we know how to turn it into joy; and this is an art that requires culture and wisdom. A succession of sensual pursuits never satisfies for long; one must understand the ends of life as well as the art of acquiring means.

“Men are a thousand times more intent on becoming rich than on acquiring culture, though it is quite certain that what a man is contributes more to his happiness than what he has.”92 “A man who has no mental needs is called a Philistine”;93 he does not know what to do with his leisure—difficilis in otio quies;94 he searches greedily from place to place for new sensations; and at last he is conquered by that nemesis of the idle rich or the reckless voluptuary—ennui.

The more we know of our passions, the less they control us; and “nothing will protect us from external compulsion so much as the control of ourselves.”101 Si vis tibi omnia subjicere, subjice te rationi.102 The greatest of all wonders is not the conqueror of the world, but the subduer of himself.

The constant streaming in of the thoughts of others must confine and suppress our own; and indeed in the long run paralyze the power of thought . . . . The inclination of most scholars is a kind of fuga vacui103 from the poverty of their own minds, which forcibly draws in the thoughts of others . . . . It is dangerous to read about a subject before we have thought about it ourselves . . . . When we read, another person thinks for us; we merely repeat his mental process . . . . So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, . . . he gradually loses the capacity for thinking . . . . Experience of the world may be looked upon as a kind of text, to which reflection and knowledge form the commentary. Where there is a great deal of reflection and intellectual knowledge, and very little experience, the result is like those books which have on each page two lines of text to forty lines of commentary.104

“As a rule, a man is sociable just in the degree in which he is intellectually poor and generally vulgar.”

Christianity thought of religion as a deterrent from the useless quest of earthly happiness. In the midst of worldly luxury and power it has held up the ideal of the saint, the Fool in Christ, who refuses to fight, and absolutely overcomes the individual will.136

With young girls Nature seems to have had in view what, in the language of the drama, is called a striking effect; as for a few years she dowers them with a wealth of beauty and is lavish in her gift of charm, at the expense of all the rest of their lives; so that during those years they may capture the fancy of some man to such a degree that he is hurried away into undertaking the honorable care of them . . . as long as they live—a step for which there would not seem to be any sufficient warrant if only reason directed man’s thoughts . . . . Here, as elsewhere, Nature proceeds with her usual economy; for just as the female ant, after fecundation, loses her wings, which are then superfluous, nay, actually a danger to the business of breeding; so, after giving birth to one or two children, a woman generally loses her beauty; probably, indeed, for similar reasons.145

One must have leisure to be a pessimist; an active life almost always brings good spirits in body and in mind.

happiness dies when it is not shared.

The mature man accepts the natural limitations of life; he does not expect Providence to be prejudiced in his favor; he does not ask for loaded dice with which to play the game of life. He knows, with Carlyle, that there is no sense in vilifying the sun because it will not light our cigars. And perhaps, if we are clever enough to help it, the sun will do even that; and this vast neutral cosmos may turn out to be a pleasant place enough if we bring a little sunshine of our own to help it out. In truth the world is neither with us nor against us; it is but raw material in our hands, and can be heaven or hell according to what we are.

“the world,” as Horace Walpole said, “is a comedy for those who think, but a tragedy for those who feel.”

And what if desire, fulfilled, leads only to another desire? Perhaps it is better that we should never be content. Happiness, says an old lesson, lies rather in achievement than in possession or satiation. The healthy man asks not so much for happiness as for an opportunity to exercise his capacities; and if he must pay the penalty of pain for this freedom and this power he makes the forfeit cheerfully; it is not too great a price. We need resistance to raise us, as it raises the airplane or the bird; we need obstacles against which to sharpen our strength and stimulate our growth. Life without tragedy would be unworthy of a man.

When the senses cease to satisfy, it is something to have won access, however arduously, to comradeship with those artists, poets and philosophers whom only the mature mind can comprehend. Wisdom is a bitter-sweet delight, deepened by the very discords that enter into its harmony.

terrible. Much of its terror disappears if one has lived a normal life; one must have lived well in order to die well. And would deathlessness delight us? Who envies the fate of Ahasuerus, to whom immortal life was sent as the heaviest punishment that could be inflicted upon man?

struggle for existence leads to a survival of the fittest, and coined those historic phrases.

Herbert Spencer

Memento mori is written upon the face of life; and every birth is a prelude to decay and death.

Spencer - First Principles

Religion is probably the central feature in the life of primitive men; existence is so precarious and humble among them that the soul lives rather in the hope of things to come than in the reality of things seen.

Industry makes for democracy and peace: as life ceases to be dominated by war, a thousand centers of economic development arise, and power is beneficently spread over a large portion of the members of the group. Since production can prosper only where initiative is free, an industrial society breaks down those traditions of authority, hierarchy, and caste, which flourish in military states, and under which military states flourish. The occupation of the soldier ceases to be held in high repute; and patriotism becomes a love of one’s country rather than a hatred of every other.62 Peace at home becomes the first need of prosperity, and as capital becomes international, and a thousand investments cross every frontier, international peace becomes a necessity as well. As foreign war diminishes, domestic brutality decreases; monogamy replaces polygamy because the life-tenure of men becomes almost equal to that of women; the status of women rises, and the “emancipation of women” becomes a matter of course.63 Superstitious religions give way to liberal creeds whose focus of effort is the amelioration and ennoblement of human life and character on this earth. The mechanisms of industry teach men the mechanisms of the universe, and the notion of invariable sequences in cause and effect; exact investigation of natural causes replaces the easy resort to supernatural explanation.64 History begins to study the people at work rather than the kings at war; it ceases to be a record of pers...

It is a sign of the inferiority of nineteenth century culture that the man of money should be the object of so much worship and envy. But these business men too are slaves, puppets of routine, victims of busy-ness; they have no time for new ideas; thinking is taboo among them, and the joys of the intellect are beyond their reach. Hence their restless and perpetual search for “happiness,” their great houses which are never homes, their vulgar luxury without taste, their picture-galleries of “originals,” with cost attached, their sensual amusements that dull rather than refresh or stimulate the mind. “Look at these superfluous! They acquire riches and become poorer thereby”; they accept all the restraints of aristocracy without its compensating access to the kingdom of the mind. “See how they climb, these swift apes! They climb over one another, and thus drag themselves into the mud and depths . . . .

“When the instincts of a society ultimately make it give up war and conquest, it is decadent; it is ripe for democracy and the rule of shop-keepers.” Yet the causes of modern war are anything but noble; dynastic and religious wars were a little finer than settling trade disputes with guns.95 “Within fifty years these Babel governments” (the democracies of Europe) “will clash in a gigantic war for the markets of the world.”96 But perhaps out of that madness will come the unification of Europe;—an end for which even a trade-war would not be too great a price to pay. For only out of a unified Europe can come that higher aristocracy by which Europe may be redeemed.

“for a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating one’s self endlessly.” What if this is true of all things? Perhaps all reality is time and duration, becoming and change?1

If determinists were right, and every act were the automatic and mechanical resultant of pre-existent forces, motive would flow into action with lubricated ease. But on the contrary, choice is burdensome and effortful, it requires resolution, a lifting up of the power of personality against the spiritual gravitation of impulse or habit or sloth. Choice is creation, and creation is labor. Hence the worried features of men; and their weary envy of the choiceless routine of animals, who “are so placid and self-contained.”

Bergson

Instinct comes ready-made, and gives decisive—and usually successful—responses to stereotyped and ancestral situations; but it does not adapt the organism to change, it does not enable man to meet flexibly the fluid complexities of modern life. It is the vehicle of security, while intellect is the organ of an adventurous liberty. It is life taking on the blind obedience of the machine.

Man exists by instinct, but he progresses by intelligence.

“It is always our own intuition we express when we are enjoying a beautiful work of art . . . . It can only be my own intuition when, reading Shakespeare, I form the image of Hamlet or Othello.”33 Both in the

The distinctive feature of the unintelligent man is the hastiness and absoluteness of his opinions;

We produce too much, and are swamped with the things we make; “things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” as Emerson put it.

“What is the part of wisdom?” he asks; and answers—“To dream with one eye open; to be detached from the world without being hostile to it; to welcome fugitive beauties and pity fugitive sufferings, without forgetting for a moment how fugitive they are.”

Santayana

And to be good does not merely mean to be obedient and harmless; goodness without ability is lame; and all the virtue in the world will not save us if we lack intelligence. Ignorance is not bliss, it is unconsciousness and slavery; only intelligence can make us sharers in the shaping of our fates. Freedom of the will is no violation of causal sequences, it is the illumination of conduct by knowledge. “A physician or engineer is free in his thoughts or his actions in the degree in which he knows what he deals with. Perhaps we find here the key to any freedom.”75 Our trust must after all be in thought, and not in instinct;—how

34Half of our readers will be pleased, and the other half amused, to learn that among Aristotle’s favorite examples of matter and form are woman and man; the male is the active, formative principle; the female is passive clay, waiting to be formed. Female offspring are the result of the failure of form to dominate matter (De Gen. An., i, 2).

92To phrase it in later terms: reflex action is a local response to a local stimulus; instinctive action is a partial response to part of a situation; reason is total response to the whole situation.