A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

by Luc Ferry

To live well, therefore, to live freely, capable of joy, generosity and love, we must first and foremost conquer our fear – or, more accurately, our fears of the irreversible.

Unable to bring himself to believe in a God who offers salvation, the philosopher is above all one who believes that by understanding the world, by understanding ourselves and others as far our intelligence permits, we shall succeed in overcoming fear, through clear-sightedness rather than blind faith.

But at a deeper level the irreversibility of things is a kind of death at the heart of life and threatens constantly to steer us into time past – the home of nostalgia, guilt, regret and remorse, those great spoilers of happiness.

The present moment is the only dimension of existence worth inhabiting, because it is the only one available to us. The past is no longer and the future has yet to come, they liked to remind us; yet we live virtually all of our lives somewhere between memories and aspirations, nostalgia and expectation. We imagine we would be much happier with new shoes, a faster computer, a bigger house, more exotic holidays, different friends … But by regretting the past or guessing the future, we end up missing the only life worth living: the one which proceeds from the here and now and deserves to be savoured.

Democracy promised us the possibility of taking part in the collective construction of a free and fair world. Yet today we are losing almost all control over the course of the world in which we live – a supreme betrayal of the promises of humanism, implicit in democracy, and one which raises many questions.

In the technological world, which from now on means the world as such, since technology is a planetary phenomenon without limits, it is no longer a question of dominating nature or society in order to be more free or more happy, but of mastery for mastery’s sake, of domination for the sake of domination. Why? For no end, precisely, or rather: because it is quite simply impossible to do otherwise, given the nature of societies entirely governed by competition, by the absolute imperative to ‘advance or perish’.

From which you may also see how the notion of singularity links directly to our ideal of an enlarged thought: by uprooting myself to become another, by enlarging the field of my experiences, I become singular – because I go beyond the particularities of my origins to accede, not to pure unmediated universality, but to a broader and richer awareness of the possibilities which are those of humanity as a whole. One simple example: when I settle in another country to learn a foreign language, I enlarge my horizon continually, whether I am aware of it or not. I afford myself the means of entering into communication with a larger number of people; and an entire culture is attached to the language I am discovering, so that I enrich myself incomparably by this new and external addition to my original particularity. In other words, singularity is not merely the primary characteristic of a work of art – this ‘thing’ that is external to me – but is also a subjective and personal attribute of the human individual as such. And it is this attribute, to the exclusion of all others, which is the primary object of our love for each other.