The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

All that remained was the scientific specialist, who knew “more and more about less and less,” and the philosophical speculator, who knew less and less about more and more.

In this situation the function of the professional teacher was clear. It should have been to mediate between the specialist and the nation; to learn the specialist’s language, as the specialist had learned nature’s, in order to break down the barriers between knowledge and need, and find for new truths old terms that all literate people might understand. For if knowledge became too great for communication, it would degenerate into scholasticism, and the weak acceptance of authority; mankind would slip into a new age of faith, worshiping at a respectful distance its new priests; and civilization, which had hoped to raise itself upon education disseminated far and wide, would be left precariously based upon a technical erudition that had become the monopoly of an esoteric class monastically isolated from the world by the high birth rate of terminology.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom—desire coordinated in the light of all experience—can tell us when to heal and when to kill.

dramatis personae

Men grew bold enough to attempt natural explanations of processes and events before attributed to supernatural agencies and powers; magic and ritual slowly gave way to science and control; and philosophy began.

the Dikasteria, or supreme court, consisted of over a thousand members (to make bribery expensive),

Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt—particularly to doubt one’s cherished beliefs, one’s dogmas and one’s axioms.

There is no real philosophy until the mind turns round and examines itself. Gnothi

seauton, said Socrates: Know thyself.

Nevertheless he bequeathed to philosophy two very definite answers to two of our most difficult problems—What is the meaning of virtue? and What is the best state?

Had he not denied the gods? Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.

and therewith lets loose the dogs of philosophic war.

For nothing is so difficult as definition, nor anything so severe a test and exercise of mental clarity and skill.

universal education. For the first

Plato believes that a nation cannot be strong unless it believes in God. A mere cosmic force, or first cause, or élan vital, that was not a person, could hardly inspire hope, or devotion, or sacrifice; it could not offer comfort to the hearts of the distressed, nor courage to embattled souls.

So with common property: it would mean a dilution of responsibility; when everything belongs to everybody nobody will take care of anything.

Logic means, simply, the art and method of correct thinking. It is the logy or method of every science, of every discipline and every art; and even music harbors it. It is a science because to a considerable extent the processes of correct thinking can be reduced to rules like physics and geometry, and taught to any normal mind; it is an art because by practice it gives to thought, at last, that unconscious and immediate accuracy which guides the fingers of the pianist over his instrument to effortless harmonies.

Aristotle’s little treatise on Definitions shows how his logic found nourishment at this source. “If you wish to converse with me,” said Voltaire, “define your terms.” How many a debate would have been deflated into a paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms!

This is the alpha and omega of logic, the heart and soul of it, that every important term in serious discourse shall be subjected to strictest scrutiny and definition. It is difficult, and ruthlessly tests the mind; but once done it is half of any task.

How shall we proceed to define an object or a term? Aristotle answers that every good definition has two parts, stands on two solid feet: first, it assigns the object in question to a class or group whose general characteristics are also its own—so man is, first of all, an animal; and secondly, it indicates wherein the object differs from all the other members in its class—...

all other animals he i...

“Aristotle, after the Ottoman manner,” says Bacon, “thought he could not reign secure without putting all his brethren to death.”18

Matter, in its widest sense, is the possibility of form; form is the actuality, the finished reality, of matter.

Nature is the conquest of matter by form, the constant progression and victory of life.34

Everything in the world moves naturally to a specific fulfilment. Of the varied causes which determine an event, the final cause, which determines the purpose, is the most decisive and important.

Yet, with his usual inconsistency, Aristotle represents God as self-conscious spirit. A rather mysterious spirit; for Aristotle’s God never does anything; he has no desires, no will, no purpose; he is activity so pure that he never acts. He is absolutely perfect; therefore he cannot desire anything; therefore he does nothing. His only occupation is to contemplate the essence of things; and since he himself is the essence of all things, the form of all forms, his sole employment is the contemplation of himself.40 Poor Aristotelian God!—he is a roi fainéant, a do-nothing king; “the king reigns, but he does not rule.” No wonder the British like Aristotle; his God is obviously copied from their king.

When everybody owns everything nobody will take care of anything.

“That which is common to the greatest number has the least attention bestowed upon it. Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly ever of the public, interest.”65

“If what you have seems insufficient to you,” said the Roman Stoic Seneca (d. 65 A.D.), “then, though you possess the world, you will yet be miserable.”

To produce works, one must have knowledge. “Nature cannot be commanded except by being obeyed.”49 Let us learn the laws of nature, and we shall be her masters, as we are now, in ignorance, her thralls; science is the road to utopia.

But the surest key for unlocking the minds of others turns upon searching and sifting either their tempers and natures, or their ends and designs; and the more weak and simple are best judged by their temper, but the more prudent and close by their designs

It was well answered by him who was shown in a temple the votive tablets suspended by such as had escaped the peril of shipwreck, and was pressed as to whether he would then recognize the power of the gods . . . . “But where are the portraits of those that have perished in spite of their vows?” All superstition is much the same, whether it be that of astrology, dreams, omens, retributive judgment, or the like, in all of which the deluded believers observe events which are fulfilled, but neglect and pass over their failure, though it be much more common.82

“if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties”

Of theory and of practice; one without the other is useless and perilous; knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind. We strive to learn the forms of things not for the sake of the forms but because by knowing the forms, the laws, we may remake things in the image of our desire.

So we study mathematics in order to reckon quantities and build bridges; we study psychology in order to find our way in the jungle of society. When science has sufficiently ferreted out the forms of things, the world will be merely the raw material of whatever utopia man may decide to make.

Those who wish to seek out the causes of miracles, and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adore as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.9

we do not desire things because they give us pleasure; but they give us pleasure because we desire them;66 and we desire them because we must.

Spinoza does not ask a man to sacrifice himself to another’s good; he is more lenient than nature. He thinks that egoism is a necessary corollary of the supreme instinct of self-preservation; “no one ever neglects anything which he judges to be good, except with the hope of gaining a greater good.”80 This seems to Spinoza perfectly reasonable. “Since reason demands nothing against nature, it concedes that each man must love himself, and seek what is useful to him, and desire whatever leads him truly to a greater state of perfection; and that each man should endeavor to preserve his being so far as in him lies.”81 So he builds his ethic not on altruism and the natural goodness of man, like utopian reformers; nor on selfishness and the natural wickedness of man, like cynical conservatives, but on what he considers to be an inevitable and justifiable egoism. A system of morals that teaches a man to be weak is worthless; “the foundation of virtue is no other than the effort to maintain one’s being; and man’s happiness consists in the power of so doing.”82

Like Nietzsche, Spinoza has not much use for humility;83 it is either the hypocrisy of a schemer or the timidity of a slave; it implies the absence of power—whereas to Spinoza all virtues are forms of ability and power.

“Men who are good by reason—i.e., men who, under the guidance of reason, seek what is useful to them—desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of mankind.”100

To be great is not to be placed above humanity, ruling others; but to stand above the partialities and futilities of uninformed desire, and to rule one’s self.

The last end of the state is not to dominate men, nor to restrain them by fear; rather it is so to free each man from fear that he may live and act with full security and without injury to himself or his neighbor. The end of the state, I repeat, is not to make rational beings into brute beasts and machines. It is to enable their bodies and their minds to function safely. It is to lead men to live by, and to exercise, a free reason; that they may not waste their strength in hatred, anger and guile, nor act unfairly toward one another. Thus the end of the state is really liberty.126

Philosophy is to history as reason is to desire: in either case an unconscious process determines from below the conscious thought above.

“Books rule the world,” said Voltaire, “or at least those nations in it which have a written language; the others do not count.”

“Literature,” said M. Arouet, “is the profession of the man who wishes to be useless to society and a burden to his relatives, and to die of hunger”;—one

Woe to philosophers who cannot laugh away their wrinkles. I look upon solemnity as a disease.”25

“Battles and revolutions are the smallest part of the plan; squadrons and battalions conquering or being conquered, towns taken and retaken, are common to all history . . . . Take away the arts and the progress of the mind, and you will find nothing” in any age “remarkable enough to attract the attention of posterity.”44 “I wish to write a history not of wars, but of society; and to ascertain how men lived in the interior of their families, and what were the arts which they commonly cultivated . . . . My object is the history of the human mind, and not a mere detail of petty facts; nor am I concerned with the history of great lords . . .; but I want to know what were the steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilization.”45

The King decreed that this Frenchman who dared to

think of himself as a man first and a Frenchman afterward should never put foot upon the soil of France again.