The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

we are like Mitya in The Brothers Karamazov

“Seek ye first the good things of the mind,” Bacon admonishes us, “and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.”

“One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.” Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt—particularly to doubt one’s cherished beliefs, one’s dogmas and one’s axioms. Who knows how these cherished beliefs became certainties with us, and whether some secret wish did not furtively beget them, clothing desire in the dress of thought? There is no real philosophy until the mind turns round and examines itself. Gnothi seauton, said Socrates: Know thyself.

The Sophists had destroyed the faith these youths had once had in the gods and goddesses of Olympus, and in the moral code that had taken its sanction so largely from the fear men had for these ubiquitous and innumerable deities; apparently there was no reason now why a man should not do as he pleased, so long as he remained within the law. A disintegrating individualism had weakened the Athenian character, and left the city a prey at last to the sternly-nurtured Spartans.

it was a delight to behold the master deflating dogmas and puncturing presumptions with the sharp point of his questions; Plato entered into this sport as he had in a coarser kind of wrestling; and under the guidance of the old “gad-fly” (as Socrates called himself) he passed from mere debate to careful analysis and fruitful discussion.

He had lost a little of the hot enthusiasms of youth, but he had gained a perspective of thought in which every extreme was seen as a half-truth, and the many aspects of every problem blended into a distributive justice to every facet of the truth.

These dialogues, we are told, were written by Plato for the general reading public of his day: by their conversational method, their lively war of pros and cons, and their gradual development and frequent repetition of every important argument, they were explicitly adapted (obscure though they may seem to us now) to the understanding of the man who must taste philosophy as an occasional luxury, and who is compelled by the brevity of life to read as he who runs may read.

But even democracy ruins itself by excess—of democracy. Its basic principle is the equal right of all to hold office and determine public policy. This is at first glance a delightful arrangement; it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and the wisest courses (588).

But there are others who are temples of feeling and courage, who care not so much what they fight for, as for victory “in and for itself”; they are pugnacious rather than acquisitive; their pride is in power rather than in possession, their joy is on the battle-field rather than in the mart: these are the men who make the armies and navies of the world.

for “can he who is harmoniously constituted ever be unjust? Is not this, Glaucon, why musical training is so powerful, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the secret places of the soul, bearing grace in their movements and making the soul graceful?”

The unconscious sources of human thought are touched and soothed by such methods; and it is in these substrata of behavior and feeling that genius sinks its roots.

Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child

Now since men are by nature acquisitive, jealous, combative, and erotic, how shall we persuade them to behave themselves? By the policeman’s omnipresent club? It is a brutal method, costly and irritating. There is a better way, and that is by lending to the moral requirements of the community the sanction of supernatural authority. We must have a religion.

Granted that none of the beliefs can be demonstrated; that God may be after all only the personified ideal of our love and our hope, and that the soul is like the music of the lyre, and dies with the instrument that gave it form: yet surely (so runs the argument, Pascal-like, of the Phædo) it will do us no harm to believe, and it may do us and our children immeasurable good.

For an oracle says that when a man of brass or iron guards the state, it will be destroyed”

This tree stands, and that tree falls; but the laws which determine what bodies shall fall, and when, and how, were without beginning, are now, and ever shall be, without end.

Let these Ph.D.’s pass down now from the heights of philosophy into the “cave” of the world of men and things; generalizations and abstractions are worthless except they be tested by this concrete world; let our students enter that world with no favor shown them; they shall compete with men of business, with hard-headed grasping individualists, with men of brawn and men of cunning; in this mart of strife they shall learn from the book of life itself; they shall hurt their fingers and scratch their philosophic shins on the crude realities of the world; they shall earn their bread and butter by the sweat of their high brows.

Now men engrossed in the pursuit of money are unfit to rule a state; and our entire plan rests on the hope that if the guardians rule well and live simply, the economic man will be willing to let them monopolize administration if they permit him to monopolize luxury. In short, the perfect society would be that in which each class and each unit would be doing the work to which its nature and aptitude best adapted it; in which no class or individual would interfere with others, but all would coöperate in difference to produce an efficient and harmonious whole (433–4). That would be a just state.

There are only three things worth while in this world—justice, beauty and truth; and perhaps none of them can be defined.

But for justice Plato ventures a definition. “Justice,” he says, “is the having and doing what is one’s own” (433). This has a disappointing sound; after so much delay we expected an infallible revelation. What does the definition mean? Simply that each man shall receive the equivalent of what he produces, and shall perform the function for which he is best fit. A just man is a man in just the right place, doing his best, and giving the full equivalent of what he receives.

Nature will have it so, and her judgment is always final; a group survives, in competition or conflict with another group, according to its unity and power, according to the ability of its members to coöperate for common ends. And what better coöperation could there be than that each should be doing that which he can do best? This is the goal of organization which every society must seek, if it would have life. Morality, said Jesus, is kindness to the weak; morality, said Nietzsche, is the bravery of the strong; morality,

says Plato, is the effective harmony of the whole.

Much of the politics of Catholicism was derived from Plato’s “royal lies,” or influenced by them: the ideas of heaven, purgatory, and hell, in their medieval form, are traceable to the last book of the Republic; the cosmology of scholasticism comes largely from the Timæus; the doctrine of realism (the objective reality of general ideas) was an interpretation of the doctrine of Ideas; even the educational “quadrivium” (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music) was modeled on the curriculum outlined in Plato.

With this body of doctrine the people of Europe were ruled with hardly any resort to force; and they accepted this rule so readily that for a thousand years they contributed plentiful material support to their rulers, and asked no voice in the government. Nor was this acquiescence confined to the general population; merchants and soldiers, feudal chieftains and civil powers all bent the knee to Rome. It was an aristocracy of no mean political sagacity; it built probably the most marvelous and powerful organization which the world has ever known.

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

He admits that he has described an ideal difficult of attainment; he answers that there is nevertheless a value in painting these pictures of our desire; man’s significance is that he can image a better world, and will some part of it at least into reality; man is an animal that makes Utopias. “We look before and after and pine for what is not.” Nor is it all without result: many a dream has grown limbs and walked, or grown wings and flown, like the dream of Icarus that men might fly. After all, even if we have but drawn a picture, it may serve as goal and model of our movement and behavior; when sufficient of us see the picture and follow its gleam, Utopia will find its way upon the map. Meanwhile “in heaven there is laid up a pattern of such a city, and he who desires may behold it, and beholding, govern himself accordingly. But whether there really is or ever will be such a city on earth, . . . he will act according to the laws of that city, and no other” (592). The good man will apply even in the imperfect state, the perfect law.

One of his pupils, facing that great abyss called marriage, invited the Master to his wedding feast. Plato came, rich with his eighty years, and joined the merry-makers gladly. But as the hours laughed themselves away, the old philosopher retired into a quiet corner of the house, and sat down on a chair to win a little sleep. In the morning, when the feast was over, the tired revellers came to wake him. They found that during the night, quietly and without ado, he had passed from a little sleep to an endless one. All Athens followed him to the grave.

With this wealth of material he was enabled to establish the first great zoological garden that the world had seen.

About this matter there rages a sort of Homeric question, of almost epic scope, into which the busy reader will not care to go, and on which a modest student will not undertake to judge.10 We may at all events be sure that Aristotle is the spiritual author of all these books that bear his name: that the hand may be in some cases another’s hand, but that the head and the heart are his.

A universal, to Aristotle, is any common noun, any name capable of universal application to the members of a class: so animal, man, book, tree, are universals. But these universals are subjective notions, not tangibly objective realities; they are nomina (names), not res (things); all that exists outside us is a world of individual and specific objects, not of generic and universal things; men exist, and trees, and animals; but man-in-general, or the universal man, does not exist, except in thought; he is a handy mental abstraction, not an external presence or re-ality.

Now Aristotle understands Plato to have held that universals have objective existence; and indeed Plato had said that the universal is incomparably more lasting and important and substantial than the individual,—the latter being but a little wavelet in a ceaseless surf; men come and go, but man goes on forever.

So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.

that there has been an increasing specialization of function, and a continuous centralization of physiological control.22 Slowly life created for itself a nervous system and a brain; and mind moved resolutely on towards the mastery of its environment.

God does not create, but he moves, the world; and he moves it not as a mechanical force but as the total motive of all operations in the world; “God moves the world as the beloved object moves the lover.”

Part of the rational power of the human soul is passive: it is bound up with memory, and dies with the body that bore the memory; but the “active reason,” the pure power of thought, is independent of memory and is untouched with decay. The active reason is the universal as distinguished from the individual element in man; what survives is not the personality, with its transitory affections and desires, but mind in its most abstract and impersonal form.43 In short, Aristotle destroys the soul in order to give it immortality; the immortal soul is “pure thought,” undefiled with reality, just as Aristotle’s God is pure activity, undefiled with action.

Artistic creation, says Aristotle, springs from the formative impulse and the craving for emotional expression. Essentially the form of art is an imitation of reality; it holds the mirror up to nature.44 There is in man a pleasure in imitation, apparently missing in lower animals. Yet the aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance; for this, and not the external mannerism and detail, is their reality. There may be more human verity in the sternly classic moderation of the Œdipus Rex than in all the realistic tears of the Trojan Women.

between Hamlet’s indecisiveness and Quixote’s impulsiveness is self-control.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; “these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions”;50 we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: “the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life; . . . for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.”

But unconscious extremists look upon the golden mean as the greatest vice; they “expel towards each other the man in the middle position; the brave man is called rash by the coward, and cowardly by the rash man, and in other cases accordingly”;54 so in modern politics the “liberal” is called “conservative” and “radical” by the radical and the conservative.

Fine friendship requires duration rather than fitful intensity; and this implies stability of character; it is to altered character that we must attribute the dissolving kaleidoscope of friendship.

“the habit of lightly changing the laws is an evil; and when the advantage of change is small, some defects whether in the law or in the ruler had better be met with philosophic toleration.

The power of the law to secure observance, and therefore to maintain political stability, rests very largely on custom; and “to pass lightly from old laws to new ones is a certain means of weakening the inmost essence of all law whatever.”

communism breaks down because it provides no adequate incentive for the exertion of superior abilities. The stimulus of gain is necessary to arduous work; and the stimulus of ownership is necessary to proper industry, husbandry and care. 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.”

“Man, when perfected, is the best of animals; but when isolated he is the worst of all; for injustice is more dangerous when armed, and man is equipped at birth with the weapon of intelligence, and with qualities of character which he may use for the vilest ends. Wherefore if he have not virtue he is the most unholy and savage of animals, full of gluttony and lust.” And only social control can give him virtue. Through speech man evolved society; through society, intelligence; through intelligence, order; and through order, civilization. In such an ordered state the individual has a thousand opportunities and avenues of development open to him which a solitary life would never give. “To live alone;” then, “one must be either an animal or a god.”

Hence the best practicable polity is aristocracy, the rule of the informed and capable few. Government is too complex a thing to have its issues decided by number, when lesser issues are reserved for knowledge and ability. “As the physician ought to be judged by the physician, so ought men in general to be judged by their peers

Alexander himself, in the hour of his triumph, was conquered by the soul of the East; he married (among several ladies) the daughter of Darius; he adopted the Persian diadem and robe of state; he introduced into Europe the Oriental notion of the divine right of kings; and at last he astonished a sceptic Greece by announcing, in magnificent Eastern style, that he was a god. Greece laughed; and Alexander drank himself to death.

“Seek not to have things happen as you choose them, but rather choose that they should happen as they do;

Above all, if any man could succeed—not merely in bringing to light some one particular invention, however useful—but in kindling in nature a luminary which would, at its first rising, shed some light on the present limits and borders of human discoveries, and which afterwards, as it rose still higher, would reveal and bring into clear view every nook and cranny of darkness, it seemed to me that such a discoverer would deserve to be called the true Extender of the Kingdom of Man over the universe, the Champion of human liberty, and the Exterminator of the necessities that now keep men in bondage.

His almost begging letters had small result, considering the grace and vigor of their style, and the proved ability of their author. Perhaps it was because Bacon did not underrate this ability, and looked upon position as his due, that Burghley failed to make the desired response; and perhaps, also, these letters protested too much the past, present and future loyalty of the writer to the honorable Lord: in politics, as in love, it does not do to give one’s self wholly; one should at all times give, but at no time all. Gratitude is nourished with expectation.

“To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor of a scholar . . . . Crafty men condemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation.”