The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

There is a Pleasure in philosophy, and a lure even in the mirages of metaphysics, which every student feels until the coarse necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain.

“Life has meaning,” we feel with Browning—“to find its meaning is my meat and drink.”

we are like Mitya in The Brothers Karamazov—“one of those who don’t want millions, but an answer to their questions”;

“To be a philosopher,” said Thoreau, “is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.” We may be sure that if we can but find wisdom, all things else will be added unto us. “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. Some ungentle reader will check us here by informing us that philosophy is as useless as chess, as obscure as ignorance, and as stagnant as content.

Some ungentle reader will check us here by informing us that philosophy is as useless as chess, as obscure as ignorance, and as stagnant as content.

Science seems always to advance, while philosophy seems always to lose ground. Yet this is only because philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous task of dealing with problems not yet open to the methods of science—problems like good and evil, beauty and ugliness, order and freedom, life and death; so soon as a field of inquiry yields knowledge susceptible of exact formulation it is called science. Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement. 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 analytical description, philosophy is synthetic interpretation.

The scientist is as impartial as Nature in Turgenev’s poem: he is as interested in the leg

Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom—desire coordinated in the light of all experience—can tell us when to heal and when to kill.

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.

These are the parts of philosophy; but so dismembered it loses its beauty and its joy.

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

“Do you know,” asks Emerson,

“the secret of the true scholar? In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him; and In that I am his pupil.” Well, surely we may take this attitude to the mas...

So let us listen to these men, ready to forgive them their passing errors, and eager to learn the lessons which they are so eager to teach.

travel and communication were far more difficult and dangerous then than now; every valley therefore developed its own self-sufficient economic life, its own sovereign government,

Look at the map a last time, and observe the position of Athens: it is the farthest east of the larger cities of Greece.

Traditions and dogmas rub one another down to a minimum in such centers of varied intercourse; where there are a thousand faiths we are apt to become sceptical of them all.

the first Greek philosophers were astronomers.

At first this philosophy was physical; it looked out upon the material world and asked what was the final and irreducible constituent of things. The natural termination of this line of thought was the materialism of Democritus (460–360 B.C.)—“in reality there is nothing but atoms and space.” This was one of the main streams of Greek speculation; it passed underground for a time in Plato’s day, but emerged in Epicurus (342–270), and became a torrent of eloquence in Lucretius (98–55 B.C.). But the most characteristic and fertile developments of Greek philosophy took form with the Sophists, travelling teachers of wisdom, who looked within upon their own thought and nature, rather than out upon the world of things.

One, like Rousseau, argued that nature is good, and civilization bad; that by nature all men are equal,

Another school, like Nietzsche, claimed that nature is beyond good and evil; that by nature all men are unequal;

During the great generation-long Peloponnesian war (430–400 B.C.), in which the military power of Sparta fought and at last defeated the naval power of Athens, the Athenian oligarchic party, led by Critias, advocated the abandonment of democracy on the score of its inefficiency in war, and secretly lauded the aristocratic government of Sparta.

they declared a rich man’s revolution against the “democratic” party that had ruled during the disastrous war. The revolution failed, and Critias was killed on the field of battle. Now Critias was a pupil of Socrates, and an uncle of Plato.

They were a motley crowd, these youths who flocked about him and helped him to create European philosophy. There were rich young men like Plato and Alcibiades, who relished his satirical analysis of Athenian democracy; there were socialists like Antisthenes, who liked the master’s careless poverty, and made a religion of it; there was even an anarchist or two among them, like Aristippus, who aspired to

a world in which there would be neither masters nor slaves, and all would be as worrilessly free as Socrates.

Every school of social thought had there its representative, and perhaps its origin.

He was not so welcome at home, for he neglected his wife and children; and from Xanthippe’s point of view he was a good-for-nothing idler who brought to his family more notoriety than bread.

But no doubt they liked best in him the modesty of his wisdom: he did not claim to have wisdom, but only to seek it lovingly; he was wisdom’s amateur, not its professional.

There had been philosophers before him, of course: strong men like Thales and Heraclitus, subtle men like Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, seers like Pythagoras and Empedocles; but for the most part they had been physical philosophers;

Nevertheless he bequeathed to philosophy two very definite answers to two of our most difficult problems—What is the meaning of virtue? and What is the best state?

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.

But if the government itself is a chaos and an absurdity, if it rules without helping, and commands without leading,—how can we persuade the individual, in such a state, to obey the laws and confine his self-seeking within the circle of the total

Surely the management of a state is a matter for which men cannot be too intelligent, a matter that needs the unhindered thought of the finest minds. How can a society be saved, or be strong, except it be led by its wisest men?

When the democracy won, the fate of Socrates was decided: he was the intellectual leader of the revolting party, however pacific he might himself have been; he was the source of the hated aristocratic philosophy; he was the corrupter of youths drunk with debate.

Had he not denied the gods? Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.

it led him to a Catonic resolve that democracy must be destroyed, to be replaced by the rule of the wisest and the best. It became the absorbing problem of his life to find a method whereby the wisest and the best might be discovered, and then enabled and persuaded to rule.

He seems to have gone first to Egypt; and was somewhat shocked to hear from the priestly class which ruled that land, that Greece was an infant-state, without stabilizing traditions or profound culture, not yet therefore to be taken seriously by these sphinxly pundits of the Nile.

even that he found his way to the banks of the Ganges, and learned the mystic meditations of the Hindus. We do not know.

Let us confess, too, that Plato has in sufficient abundance the qualities which he condemns. He inveighs against poets and their myths, and proceeds to add one to the number of poets and hundreds to the number of myths.

This, of course, is the doctrine which our own day more or less correctly associates with the name of Nietzsche. “Verily I laughed many a time over the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had lame paws.”11 Stirner expressed the idea briefly when he said that “a handful of might is better than a bagful of right.”

Sophist Callicles denounces morality as an invention of the weak to neutralize the strength of the strong.

They enslave the nobler natures, and they praise justice only because they are cowards.

This justice is a morality not for men but for foot-men (oude gar andros all’ andrapodou tinos) it is a slave-morality, not a hero-morality; the real virtues of a man are courage (andreia) and intelligence (phronesis).12 Perhaps this hard “immoralism” reflects the development of imperialism in the foreign policy of Athens, and its ruthless treatment of weaker states.

How does Socrates—i.e., Plato—meet the challenge of this theory? At first he does not meet it at all. He points out that justice is a relation among individuals, depending on social organization; and that in consequence it can be studied better as part of the structure of a community than as a quality of personal conduct.

Justice would be a simple matter, says Plato, if men were simple; an anarchist communism would suffice.

Observe here the passing reference to the control of population (by infanticide, presumably), to vegetarianism, and to a “return to nature,” to the primitive simplicity which Hebrew legend pictures in the Garden of Eden.

But he is a little more sceptical than these men of kindly faith; he passes quietly on to the question, Why is it that such a simple paradise as he has described never comes?—why is it that these Utopias never arrive upon the map? He answers, 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;