The Story of Philosophy (Dover Thrift Editions: Philosophy)

by Will Durant

“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.”2 Truth will not; make us rich, but it will make us free.

Philosophy is a hypothetical interpretation of the unknown (as in metaphysics), or of the inexactly known (as in ethics or political philosophy); it is the front trench in the siege of truth. Science is the captured territory; and behind it are those secure regions in which knowledge and art build our imperfect and marvelous world. Philosophy seems to stand still, perplexed; but only because she leaves the fruits of victory to her daughters the sciences, and herself passes on, divinely discontent, to the uncertain and unexplored.

Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

Specifically, philosophy means and includes five fields of study and discourse: logic, esthetics, ethics, politics, and metaphysics.

called “the noblest pleasure, the joy of understanding.”

like Nietzsche, claimed that nature is beyond good and evil; that by nature all men are unequal;; that morality is an invention of the weak to limit and deter the strong; that power is the supreme virtue and the supreme desire of man; and that of all forms of government the wisest and most natural is aristocracy.

he did not claim to have wisdom, but only to seek it lovingly; he was wisdom’s amateur, not its professional.

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.

If one could build a system of morality absolutely independent of religious doctrine, as valid for the atheist as for the pietist, then ;theologies might come and go without loosening the moral cement that makes of wilful individuals the peaceful citizens of a community.

His friends came to his prison and offered him an easy escape;

Crito

I should be sparing and saving a life which is already gone;

“I thank God,” he used to say, “that I was born Greek and not barbarian, freeman and not slave, man and not woman; but above all, that I was born in the age of Socrates.”

He complains of the priests (who go about preaching hell and offering redemption from it for a consideration—cf. The Republic, 364),

“Plato is philosophy, and philosophy Plato,” says Emerson; and awards to The Republic the words of Omar about the Koran: “Burn the libraries, for their value is in this book.”10

“Verily I laughed many a time over the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had lame paws.”

And this I affirm to be natural justice and nobility. But the many cannot do this; and therefore they blame such persons, because they are ashamed of their own inability, which they desire to conceal; and hence they call intemperance base.. . . They enslave the nobler natures, and they praise justice only because they are cowards.

because of greed and luxury. Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others. The result is the encroachment of one group upon the territory of another, the rivalry of groups for the resources of the soil, and then war. Trade and finance develop, and bring new class-divisions. “Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are smaller ones—you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states” (423).

its basic principle. Aristocracy ruins itself by limiting too narrowly the circle within which power is confined; oligarchy ruins itself by the incautious scramble for immediate wealth. In either case the end is revolution.

“Then democracy comes: the poor overcome their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing the rest; and give to the people an equal share of freedom and power” (557).

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).

Mob-rule is a rough sea for the ship of state to ride; every wind of oratory stirs up the waters and deflects the course. The upshot of such a democracy is tyranny or autocracy; the crowd so loves flattery, it is so “hungry for honey,” that at last the; wiliest and most unscrupulous flatterer, calling himself the “protector of the people” rises to supreme power (565). (Consider the history of Rome.)

To devise a method of barring incompetence and knavery from public office, and of selecting and preparing the best to rule for the common good—that is the problem of political philosophy.

Therefore we need not expect to have better states until we have better men; till then all changes will leave every essential thing unchanged. “How charming people are!—always doctoring, increasing and complicating their disorders, fancying they will be cured by some nostrum which somebody advises them to try, never getting better, but always growing worse.. . . Are they not as good as a play, trying their hand at legislation, and imagining that by reforms they will make an end to the dishonesties and rascalities of mankind—not knowing that in reality they are cutting away at the heads of a hydra?” (425).

Human behavior, says Plato, flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge. Desire, appetite, impulse, instinct—these are one; emotion, spirit, ambition, courage—these are one; knowledge, thought, intellect, reason—these are one. Desire has its seat in the loins; it is a bursting reservoir of energy, fundamentally sexual. Emotion has its seat in the heart, in the flow and force of the blood; it is the organic resonance of experience and desire. Knowledge has its seat in the head; it is the eye of desire, and can become the pilot of the soul.

Chariot

And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battle-field to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world.

so in the perfect state the industrial forces would produce but they would not rule; the military forces would protect but they would not rule; the forces of knowledge and science and philosophy would be nourished and protected, and they would rule. Unguided by knowledge, the people are a multitude without order, like desires in disarray; the people need the guidance of philosophers as desires need the enlightenment of knowledge. “Ruin comes when the trader, whose heart is lifted up by wealth, becomes ruler” (434); or when the general uses his army to establish a military dictatorship. The producer is at his best in the economic field, the warrior is at his best in battle; they are both at their worst in public office; and in their crude hands politics submerges statesmanship. For statesmanship is a science and an art; one must have lived for it and been long prepared. Only a philosopher-king is fit to guide a nation. “Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and wisdom and political leadership meet in the same man,. . . cities will never cease from ill, nor the human race” (473).

In any case we must give to every child, and from the outset, full equality of educational opportunity; there is no telling where the light of talent or genius will break out; we must seek it impartially everywhere, in every rank and race. The first turn on our road is universal education.

“To require the help of medicine because by lives of indolence and luxury men have filled themselves like pools with waters and winds,. . . flatulence and catarrh—is not this a disgrace?. . . Our present system of medicine may be said to educate diseases,” to draw them out into a long existence, rather than to cure them.

through music the soul learns harmony and rhythm, and even a disposition to justice; 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?” (401; Protagoras, 326).

But when a man’s pulse is healthy and temperate, and he goes to sleep cool and rational,. . . having indulged his appetites neither too much nor too little, but just enough to lay them to sleep,. . . he is then least likely to be the sport of fanciful and lawless visions.. . . In all of us, even in good men, there is such a latent wild beast nature, which peers out in sleep (571-2).

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. 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 (536).

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. But a living God can do all this, and can stir or frighten the self-seeking individualist into some moderation of his greed, some control of his passion. All the more so if to belief in God is added belief in personal immortality: the hope of another life gives us courage to meet our own death, and to bear with the death of our loved ones; we are twice armed if we fight with faith. 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 Phaedo) it will do us no harm to believe, and it may do us and our children immeasurable good.

it would not have been wise to let them “taste the dear delight too early;. . . for young men, when they first get the taste of philosophy in their mouths, argue for amusement, and are always contradicting and refuting,. . . like puppy-dogs who delight to tear and pull at all who come near them” (539). This dear delight, philosophy, means two things chiefly: to think clearly, which is metaphysics; and to rule wisely, which is politics. First then, our young Elite must learn to think clearly. For that purpose they shall study the doctrine of Ideas.

Therefore the essence of a higher education is the search for Ideas: for generalizations, laws of sequence, and ideals of development; behind things we must discover their relation and meaning, their mode and law of operation, the function and ideal they serve or adumbrate; we must classify and coördinate our sense experience in terms of law and purpose; only for lack of this does the mind of the imbecile differ from the mind of Caesar.

the girl shall have the same intellectual opportunities as the boy, the same chance to rise to the highest positions in the state. When Glaucon objects (453 f) that this admission of woman to any office, provided she has passed the tests, violates the principle of the division of labor, he receives the sharp reply that division of labor must be by aptitude and ability, not by sex; if a woman shows herself capable of political administration, let her rule;

But trade and industry will be regulated by the guardians to prevent excessive individual wealth or poverty; any one acquiring more than four times the average possession of the citizens must relinquish the excess to the state (Laws,; 714 f).

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. IX. THE ETHICAL SOLUTION

“Justice,” he says, “is the having and doing what is one’s own” (433).

Truth changes her garments frequently (like every seemly lady), but under the new habit she remains always the same.

with unrivaled eloquence he sawed off the branch on which he sat.

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.”

“For a while,” says Plutarch, “Alexander loved and cherished Aristotle no less than as if he had been his own father; saying that though he had received life from the one, the other had taught him the art of living.” (“Life,” says a fine Greek adage, “is the gift of nature; but beautiful living is the gift of wisdom.”) “For my part,” said Alexander in a letter to Aristotle, “I; had rather excel in the knowledge of what is good than in the extent of my power and dominion.”

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. Nothing is so dull as logic, and nothing is so important.

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 maningeneral, or the universal man, does not exist, except in thought; he is a handy mental abstraction, not an external presence or re-ality.

As Brutus loved not Cæsar less but Rome more, so Aristotle says, Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas—“Dear is Plato, but dearer still is truth.”

There was, in the SocraticPlatonic demand for definitions, a tendency away from things and facts to theories and ideas, from particulars to generalities, from science to scholasticism; at last Plato became so devoted to generalities that they began to determine his particulars, so devoted to ideas that they began to define or select his facts. Aristotle preaches a return to things, to the “unwithered face of nature” and reality; he had a lusty preference for the concrete particular, for the flesh and blood individual.

syllogism is a trio of propositions of which the third (the conclusion) follows from the conceded truth of the other two (the “major” and “minor” premisses).

“Through strife,” says Heraclitus, “all things arise and pass away.. . . War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves, and some free.” Where there is no strife there is decay: “the mixture which is not shaken decomposes.”

Empedocles (fl. 445 B. C., in Sicily) developed to a further stage the idea of evolution.17 Organs arise not by design but by selection. Nature makes many trials and experiments with, organisms, combining organs variously; where the combination meets environmental needs the organism survives and perpetuates its like; where the combination fails, the organism is weeded out; as time goes on, organisms are more and more intricately and successfully adapted to their surroundings. Finally, in Leucippus (fl. 445 B. C.) and Democritus (460–360 B. C.), master and pupil in Thracian Abdera, we get the last stage of preAristotelian science—materialistic, deterministic atomism.