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We’ve recovered what we see as the important ideas in our chosen thinkers by following a number of principles:
This peculiar but fascinating Greek word is a little hard to translate. It almost means ‘happiness’ but is really closer to ‘fulfilment’, because ‘happiness’ suggests continuous chirpiness – whereas ‘fulfilment’ is more compatible with periods of great pain and suffering – which seem to be an unavoidable part even of a good life.
Plato proposed that our lives go wrong in large part because we almost never give ourselves time to think carefully and logically enough about our plans.
The centres thrived for generations – until they were brutally suppressed by a jealous and aggressive Christian Church in the 5th century.
Epicurus’s influence continues into the modern age. Karl Marx did his PhD thesis on him and thought of him as his favourite philosopher.
An extraordinary number of adverts focus on the three very things that Epicurus identified as false lures of happiness: romantic love, professional status and luxury.
It was Augustine who came up with the idea of ‘Original Sin’. He proposed that all humans, not merely this or that unfortunate example, were crooked, because all of us are unwitting heirs to the sins of Adam.
Aquinas’s monumental contribution was to teach Western European civilisation that any human being – not just a Christian – could have access to great truths whenever they made use of God’s greatest gift to human beings: reason.
Many great philosophers were pagans, Aquinas knew, but this did not bar them from insight because, as he now proposed, the world could usefully be explored through reason alone.
Aquinas read Averroës and saw that he and the Muslim scholar were engaged on similar projects. He knew that the Muslim world’s increasingly radical rejection of reason was harming what had once been its thriving intellectual culture. It was partly thanks to Aquinas’s ideas that Christianity did not suffer the same process of stultification as Islam.
We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others.
Voltaire said that La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims was the book that had most powerfully shaped the character of the French people, giving them their taste for psychological reflection, precision and cynicism.
In the Ethics, Spinoza directly challenged the main tenets of Judaism in particular and organised religion in general:
Spinoza’s God is wholly impersonal and indistinguishable from what we might variously call nature, or existence, or a world soul: God is the universe, and its laws; God is reason and truth; God is the animating force in everything that is and can be. God is the cause of everything, but he is the eternal cause. He doesn’t participate in change. He is not in time. He cannot be individuated.
Spinoza makes a famous distinction between two ways of looking at life. We can either see it egoistically, from our limited point of view, as he put it: Sub specie durationis – under the aspect of time. Or we can look at things globally and eternally: Sub specie aeternitatis – under the aspect of eternity.
Spinoza failed to understand – like so many philosophers before and since – that what leads people to religion isn’t just reason, but, far more importantly, emotion, belief, fear and tradition.
Schopenhauer was the first serious Western philosopher to get interested in Buddhism – and his thought can best be read as a Western interpretation of, and response to, the enlightened pessimism found in Buddhist thought.
Of course, we rarely think of future children when we are asking someone out on a date. But in Schopenhauer’s view, this is simply because the intellect ‘remains so much excluded from the real resolutions and secret decisions of its own will.’
The Will-to-Life’s ability to further its own ends rather than our happiness may, Schopenhauer’s theory implies, be sensed with particular clarity in that rather scary, lonely moment just after orgasm: ‘Directly after copulation the devil’s laughter is heard’.
Hegel has had a terrible influence on philosophy. He writes horribly. He is confusing and complicated when he should be clear and direct. He tapped into a weakness of human nature: to be trustful of grave-sounding, incomprehensible prose. He made it seem as if the mark of reading deep thought is that one cannot quite understand what is going on. This has made philosophy much weaker in the world than it should be. And the world has paid another heavy price for Hegel’s problems with communication. It has made it much harder to hear the valuable things he has to say to us.
That’s the view that each era contains an important insight that is (unfortunately) mired in a confused set of errors. So, of course, it would be terrible to go back in total, but the nostalgia is latching onto what was good. And that good aspect is something we still need to pay attention to in the present. Hegel imagined an ideal history in which gradually all the good aspects of the past would be liberated from the unfortunate things that accompanied them.
Hegel was a great believer in learning from one’s intellectual enemies, from points of view we disagree with or that feel alien. That’s because he held that bits of the truth are likely to be scattered even in unappealing or peculiar places – and that we should dig them out by asking always, ‘What sliver of sense and reason might be contained in otherwise frightening or foreign phenomena?’
Hegel is a hero of the thought that really important ideas may be in the hands of people you regard as beneath contempt.
Hegel believed that the world makes progress, but only by lurching from one extreme to another as it seeks to overcompensate for a previous mistake. He proposed that it generally takes three moves before the right balance on any issue can be found, a process that he named the ‘dialectic’.
Hegel took a very positive view of institutions and of the power they can wield.
position in the world, sex, intellectual mastery, creativity) but had been too inept to get them. They had therefore fashioned a hypocritical creed denouncing what they wanted but were too weak to fight for – while praising what they did not want but happened to have.
He hated alcohol for the very same reasons that he scorned Christianity: because both numb pain, and both reassure us that things are just fine as they are, sapping us of the will to change our lives for the better.
Religious beliefs were false, he knew; but he observed that they were in some areas very beneficial to the sound functioning of society. Giving up on religion would mean that humans would be left to find new ways of supplying themselves with guidance, consolation, ethical ideas and spiritual ambition. This would be tricky, he predicted.
We know it in theory, of course, but we aren’t day-to-day properly in touch with the sheer mystery of existence, the mystery of what Heidegger called ‘das Sein’ or ‘Being’. Much of his philosophy is devoted to trying to wake us up to the strangeness of existing on a planet spinning in an otherwise seemingly silent, alien and uninhabited universe.
It is honour and respect.
