The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

Let us seek the happiness in others; but for ourselves, perfection—whether it bri...

Our actions, once we initiate them, seem to follow fixed and invariable laws, but only because we perceive their results through sense, which clothes all that it transmits in the dress of that causal law which our minds themselves have made. Nevertheless, we are beyond and above the laws we make in order to understand the world of our experience; each of us is a center of initiative force and creative power.

“The history of the human race, viewed as a whole, may be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political constitution, internally and externally perfect, as the only state in which all the capacities implanted by her in mankind can be fully developed.”41 If there is no such progress, the labors of successive civilizations are like those of Sisyphus, who again and again “up the high hill heaved a huge round stone,” only to have it roll back as it was almost at the top. History would be then nothing more than an endless and circuitous folly; “and we might suppose, like the Hindu, that the earth is a place for the expiation of old and forgotten sins.”

But after a century of reaction against the absolutism of Kant’s ethics, we find ourselves again in a welter of urban sensualism and immorality, of ruthless individualism untempered with democratic conscience or aristocratic honor; and perhaps the day will soon come when a disintegrating civilization will welcome again the Kantian call to duty.

Beethoven quoted with admiration his famous words about the two wonders of life—“the starry heavens above, the moral law within”;

Not that strife and evil are mere negative imaginings; they are real enough; but they are, in wisdom’s perspective, stages to fulfillment and the good. Struggle is the law of growth; character is built in the storm and stress of the world; and a man reaches his full height only through compulsions, responsibilities, and suffering. Even pain has its rationale; it is a sign of life and a stimulus to reconstruction. Passion also has a place in the reason of things: “nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion”;65 and even the egoistic ambitions of a Napoleon contribute unwittingly to the development of nations. Life is not made for happiness, but for achievement. “The history of the world is not the theatre of happiness; periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony”;66 and this dull content is unworthy of a man. History is made only in those periods in which the contradictions of reality are being resolved by growth, as the hesitations and awkwardness of youth pass into the ease and order of maturity. History is a dialectical movement, almost a series of revolutions, in which people after people, and genius after genius, become the instrument of the Absolute. Great men are not so much begetters, as midwives, of the future; what they bring forth is mothered by the Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age. The genius merely places another stone on the pile, as others have done; “somehow his has the good fortune to come last, and when ...

That new heaven, called Utopia, whose glamour had relieved the twilight of the gods, had receded into a dim future where only young eyes could see it; the older ones had followed that lure long enough, and turned away from it now as a mockery of men’s hopes.

Was it a call to the penitent intellect to bend before the ancient virtues of faith, hope and charity? So Schlegel thought, and Novalis, and Chateaubriand, and De Musset, and Southey, and Wordsworth, and Gogol: and they turned back to the old faith like wasted prodigals happy to be home again. But some others made harsher answer: that the chaos of Europe but reflected the chaos of the universe; that there was no divine order after all, nor any heavenly hope; that God, if God there was, was blind, and Evil brooded over the face of the earth.

“The character or will,” says Schopenhauer, “is inherited from the father; the intellect from the mother.”2 The mother had intellect—she became one of the most popular novelists of her day—but she had temperament and temper too. She had been unhappy with her prosaic husband; and when he died she took to free love, and moved to Weimar as the fittest climate for that sort of life. Arthur Schopenhauer reacted to this as Hamlet to his mother’s re-marriage; and his quarrels with his mother taught him a large part of those half-truths about women with which he was to reason his philosophy.

“He was absolutely alone, with not a single friend; and between one and none there lies an infinity.”

“The more a man belongs to posterity—in other words, to humanity in general—so much the more is he an alien to his contemporaries; for since his work is not meant for them as such, but only in so far as they form part of mankind at large, there is none of that familiar local color about his productions which would appeal to them.”

“Would a musician feel flattered by the loud applause of an audience if he knew that they were nearly all deaf, and that to conceal their infirmity he saw one or two persons applauding? And what would he say if he discovered that those one or two persons had often taken bribes to secure the loudest applause for the poorest player?”—In some men egotism is a compensation for the absence of fame; in others, egotism lends a generous coöperation to its presence.

Sleep is a morsel of death borrowed to keep up and renew that part of life which has been exhausted by the day.”

The marvelous mechanical skill of animals shows how prior the will is to the intellect. An elephant which had been led through Europe, and had crossed hundreds of bridges, refused to advance upon a weak bridge, though it had seen many horses and men crossing it. A young dog fears to jump down from the table; it foresees the effect of the fall not by reasoning (for it has no experience of such a fall) but by instinct. Orangoutangs warm themselves by a fire which they find, but they do not feed the fire; obviously, then, such actions are instinctive, and not the result of reasoning; they are the expression not of intellect but of will.

And first, the law of sexual attraction is that the choice of mate is to a large extent determined, however unconsciously, by mutual fitness to procreate.

To castrate an individual, means to cut him off from the tree of the species upon which he grows, and thus severed, leaves him to wither; hence the degradation of his mental and physical powers.

And fulfilment never satisfies; nothing is so fatal to an ideal as its realization. “The satisfied passion oftener leads to unhappiness than to happiness.

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.

“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.”

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.

Yet it should not be forgotten that, when this passion is extinguished, the true kernel of life is gone, and nothing remains but the hollow shell; or, from another point of view, life then becomes like a comedy which, begun by real actors, is continued and brought to an end by automata dressed in their clothes.

Just as theology is a refuge from death, so insanity is a refuge from pain. “Madness comes as a way to avoid the memory of suffering”;88 it is a saving break in the thread of consciousness; we can survive certain experiences or fears only by forgetting them.

Yet the madness which has thus arisen is the lethe of unendurable suffering; it was the last remedy of harassed nature, i.e., of the will.

money alone is absolutely good, . . . because it is the abstract satisfaction of every wish.”

Marvelous to say, knowledge, though born of the will, may yet master the will.

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

“Unselfish intellect rises like a perfume above the faults of follies of the world of Will.”108 Most men never rise above viewing things as objects of desire—hence their misery; but to see things purely as objects of understanding is to rise to freedom.

Therefore the expression of genius in a face consists in this, that in it a decided predominance of knowledge over will is visible. In ordinary countenances there is a predominant expression of will, and we see that knowledge only comes into activity under the impulse of the will, and is directed merely by motives of personal interest and advantage.

partly, the unsociability of the genius; he is thinking of the fundamental, the universal, the eternal; others are thinking of the temporary, the specific, the immediate; his mind and theirs have no common ground, and never meet.

“The pleasure which he receives from all beauty, the consolation which art affords, the enthusiasm of the artist, . . . enable him to forget the cares of life,” and “repay him for the suffering that increases in proportion to the clearness of consciousness, and for his desert loneliness among a different race of men.”

“the doctrine of original sin (assertion of the will) and of salvation (denial of the will) is the great truth which constitutes the essence of Christianity.”

Fasting is a remarkable expedient for weakening those desires that lead never to happiness but either to disillusionment or to further desire.

It was probably the luxury and extravagance of the women of Louis XIII’s court that brought on the general corruption of government which culminated in the French Revolution.

Let men recognize the snare that lies in women’s beauty, and the absurd comedy of reproduction will end. The development of intelligence will weaken or frustrate the will to reproduce, and will thereby at last achieve the extinction of the race. Nothing could form a finer dénouement to the insane tragedy of the restless will;—why should the curtain that has just fallen upon defeat and death always rise again upon a new life, a new struggle, and a new defeat?

Perhaps the tendency of philosophers toward melancholy is due to the unnaturalness of sedentary occupations; too often an attack upon life is merely a symptom of the lost art of excretion.

Is pleasure negative? Only a sorely wounded soul, drawing itself in from contact with the world, could have uttered so fundamental a blasphemy against life. What is pleasure but the harmonious operation of our instincts?—and how can pleasure be negative except where the instinct at work makes for retreat rather than for approach? The pleasures of escape and rest, of submission and security, of solitude and quiet are no doubt negative, because the instincts that impel us to them are essentially negative—forms of flight and fear; but shall we say the same of the pleasures that come when positive instincts are in command—instincts of acquisition and possession, of pugnacity and mastery, of action and play, of association and love? Is the joy of laughter negative, or the romping of the child, or the song of the mating bird, or the crow of Chanticleer, or the creative ecstasy of art? Life itself is a positive force, and every normal function of it holds some delight.

“We too often forget,” says Spencer at the outset, “that not only is there ‘a soul of goodness in things evil,’ but generally also a soul of truth in things erroneous.” He proposes, therefore, to examine religious ideas, with a view to finding that core of truth which under the changing form of many faiths, has given to religion its persistent power over the human soul.

Will is an abstract term which we give to the sum of our active impulses, and a volition is the natural flow of an unimpeded idea into action.

An idea is the first stage of an action, an action is the last stage of an idea.

He foresees a time when industry will no longer be directed by absolute masters, and men will no longer sacrifice their lives in the production of rubbish. “As the contrast between the militant and the industrial types is indicated by inversion of the belief that individuals exist for the benefit of the state into the belief that the state exists for the benefit of individuals; so the contrast between the industrial type and the type likely to be evolved from it is indicated by inversion of the belief that life is for work into the belief that work is for life.”

The professed ethic of Europe and America is a pacifistic Christianity; the actual ethic is the militaristic code of the marauding Teutons from whom the ruling strata, almost everywhere in Europe, are derived.

The practice of duelling, in Catholic France and Protestant Germany, is a tenacious relic of the original Teutonic code.

The only justification for the analogy between parent and child, and government and people, is the childishness of the people who entertain the analogy.

Besides these economic rights, political rights are unimportant unrealities. Changes in the form of government amount to nothing where economic life is not free; and a laissez-faire monarchy is much better than a socialistic democracy.

But with such humanity as now exists, and must for a long time exist, the possession of what are called equal rights will not insure the maintenance of equal rights properly so-called.

Since political rights are a delusion, and only economic rights avail, women are misled when they spend so much time seeking the franchise.

Spencer fears that the maternal instinct for helping the helpless may lead women to favor a paternalistic state.

They ceased to be Anglicans, or Catholics, or Lutherans; but they did not dare cease to be Christians.—So argued Friedrich Nietzsche.

Men who could think clearly soon perceived what the profoundest minds of every age had known: that in this battle we call life, what we need is not goodness but strength, not humility but pride, not altruism but resolute intelligence; that equality and democracy are against the grain of selection and survival; that not masses but geniuses are the goal of evolution; that not “justice” but power is the arbiter of all differences and all destinies.—So it seemed to Friedrich Nietzsche.