The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

But if the world is will, it must be a world of suffering.

And first, because will itself indicates want,

For every wish that is satisfied there remain ten that are denied. Desire is infinite, fulfilment is limited—“it is like the alms thrown to a beggar, that keeps him alive today in order that his misery may be prolonged tomorrow . . . . As long as our consciousness is filled by our will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with their constant hopes...

And fulfilment never satisfies; nothing is so fatal to an ideal as its realization. “The satisfied passion oftener leads to unhappiness than to happiness. For its demands often conflict so much with the pers...

“At the bottom this results from the fact that the will must live on itself, for there exists nothing besides it, and it is a hungry will.”70

life is evil because pain is its basic stimulus and reality,

Aristotle was right: the wise man seeks not pleasure, but freedom from care and pain.

All satisfaction, or what is commonly called happiness, is, in reality and essence, negative only . . . . We are not properly conscious of the blessings and advantages we actually possess, nor do we prize them, but think of them merely as a matter of course, for they gratify us only negatively, by restraining suffering. Only when we have lost them do we become sensible of their value...

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.

strife—are essential to life; and if every evil were removed, and strife were altogether ended, boredom would become as intolerable as pain.

Life is evil because the higher the organism the greater the suffering.

Even memory and foresight add to human misery; for most of our suffering lies in retrospect or anticipation; pain itself is brief.

Finally, and above all, life is evil because life is war.

But the bull-dog ant of Australia affords us the most extraordinary example of this kind; for if it is cut in two, a battle begins between the head and the tail. The head seizes the tail with its teeth, and the tail defends itself bravely by stinging the head; the battle may last for half an hour, until they die or are dragged away by the other ants.

Yet even the human race . . . reveals in itself with most terrible distinctness this conflict, this variance of the will with itself; and we find homo homini lupus.

The total picture of life is almost too painful for contemplation; life depends on our not knowing it too well.

For whence did Dante take the materials of his hell but from our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell out of it. But when, on the other hand, he came to describe heaven and its delights, he had an insurmountable difficulty before him, for our world affords no materials at all for this . . . .

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 disappo...

nothing at all is worth our striving, our efforts and struggles;

that all good things are vanity,

world in all its ends...

life a business which does not cover...

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 fulfilmen...

when we are ascending the hill of life, death is not visible; it lies down at the bottom of the other side . . . .

Towards the close of life, every day we live gives us the same kind of sensation as the criminal experiences at every step on his way to the gallows . . . .

thirty-six...

age of thirty-six

At the end, we meet death. Just as experience begins to coördinate itself into wisdom, brain and body begin to decay.

“It is clear that as our walking is admittedly nothing but a constantly-prevented falling, so the life of our bodies is nothing but a constantly-prevented dying, an ever-postponed death.”

The fear of death is the beginning of philosophy, and the final cause of religion.

The average man cannot reconcile himself to death; therefore he makes innumerable philosophies and theologies; the prevalence of a belief in immortality is a token of the awful fear of death.

The final refuge is suicide.

But this triumph is merely individual; the will continues in the species.

“Suicide, the wilful destruction of the single phenomenal existence, is a vain and foolish act, for the thing-in-itself—the species, and life, and will in general—remains unaffected by it, even as the rainbow endures however fast the drops which support it for the moment may chance to fall.”

There can be no victory over the ills of life until the will has been utterly subordinated to knowledge and intelligence.

Everything else can satisfy only one wish; money alone is absolutely good, . . . because it is the abstract satisfaction of every wish.”

“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.”

The greatest of all wonders is not the conqueror of the world, but the subduer of himself.

So philosophy purifies the will. But philosophy is to be understood as experience and thought, not as mere reading or passive study.

What one human being can be to another is not a very great deal; in the end everyone stands alone; and the important thing is, who it is that stands alone . . . . The happiness which we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we obtain from our surroundings . . . . The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it . . . . Since everything which exists or happens for a man exists only in his consciousness, and happens for him alone, the most essential thing for a man is the constitution of his consciousness . . . . Therefore it is with great truth that Aristotle says, “To be happy means to be self-sufficient.”

The way out of the evil of endless willing is the intelligent contemplation of life, and converse with the achievements of the great of all times and countries;

but to see things purely as objects of understanding is to rise to freedom.

It is the painless state which Epicurus prized as the highest good and as the state of the gods; for we are for the moment set free from the miserable striving of the will; we keep the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still.

The object of science is the universal that contains many particulars; the object of art is the particular that contains a universal.

“to artistic perception it is all one whether we see the sunset from a prison or from a palace.”

differs too from the other arts because it affects our feelings directly,130 and not through the medium of ideas; it speaks to something subtler than the intellect.

What symmetry is to the plastic arts, rhythm is to music; hence music and architecture are antipodal; architecture, as Goethe said, is frozen music; and symmetry is rhythm standing still.

Buddhism is profounder than Christianity, because it makes the destruction of the will the entirety of religion, and preaches Nirvana as the goal of all personal development. The Hindus were deeper than the thinkers of Europe, because their interpretation of the world was internal and intuitive, not external and intellectual; the intellect divides everything, intuition unites everything; the Hindus saw that the “I” is a delusion; that the individual is merely phenomenal, and that the only reality is the Infinite One—“That art thou.” “Whoever is able to say this to himself, with regard to every being with whom he comes in contact,”—whoever is clear-eyed and clear-souled enough to see that we are all members of one organism, all of us little currents in an ocean of will,—he “is certain of all virtue and blessedness, and is on the direct road to salvation.”137 Schopenhauer does not think that Christianity will ever displace Buddhism in the East: “it is just the same as if we fired a bullet against a cliff.”138 Rather, Indian philosophy streams into Europe, and will profoundly alter our knowledge and our thought. “The influence of the Sanskrit literature will penetrate not less deeply than did the revival of Greek letters in the fifteenth century.”139

Spinoza’s lesson, that our terms of moral censure and approbation are merely human judgments, mostly irrelevant when applied to the cosmos as a whole.