The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers

“Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt—particularly to doubt one’s cherished beliefs, one’s dogmas and one’s axioms. Who knows how these cherished beliefs become certainties with us, and whether some secret wish did not furtively beget them, clothing desire in the dress of thought? There is no real philosophy until the mind turns round and examines itself. Gnothe seauton, said Socrates: know thyself.”

Philosophy, or the pursuit of true wisdom, is often going to run against the so-called conventional wisdom, the ideas that flatter the prejudices of a ruling elite or the masses. Philosophy begins with the desire to see beyond what is immediately in front of one’s self, either in nature or society, and such inquiries are often going to put philosophers in trouble with the powerful. Durant presents philosophy as a fearless inquiry into The Nature of Human Beings and the World.

“Therefore the essence of 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 coordinate our sense experience in terms of law and purpose; only for lack of this does the mind of an imbecile differ from the mind of Caesar.”

The particular kind of wisdom that philosophy seeks are the general truths uniting the world as a whole, facts which are not contingent upon a particular place and time but are rather eternal and ubiquitous. This requires the ability to see patterns, whether in the natural world, social life, or the tendencies within the human mind. This is not hidden knowledge that can only be discovered through contact with an intimate circle of elite minds—anyone can be a great philosopher to the extent that they can detect patterns at the broadest frame of existence.

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

For Plato, an individual object was only a pale imitation of its ideal form, which existed entirely in the imagination. This meant that the truth of things was beyond human experience, something they could try to approximate but never fully grasp, except perhaps for an elite few. Aristotle is much more willing to see the truth of things in material existence, which would make him extremely popular with medieval Christians, whose core contention was that God could (and did) become fully human, and thus there was no necessary rupture between absolute truth and the material world.

“[Al]though external goods and relationships are necessary to happiness, its essence remains within us, in rounded knowledge and clarity of soul. Surely sense pleasure is not the way: that road is a circle: as Socrates phased the courser Epicurean idea, we scratch that we may itch, and itch that we may scratch. Nor can a political career be the way; for therein we walk subject to the whims of the people; and nothing is so fickle as the crowd. No, happiness must be a pleasure of the mind; and we may trust it only when it comes from the pursuit or the capture of truth.”

Aristotle’s ideal of the great-souled person is in some respects a major break from Plato’s ideal of the philosopher king, and in other respects strikingly similar. Whereas Plato insists that the greatest minds must rule the city to cultivate those capable of becoming like themselves, Aristotle finds greatness to be a lonely, or at least individualistic affair, since any kind of public role would require association with, and approval by, people less virtuous than himself. They do, however, both agree that the highest form of life is the life of the mind.

“Nothing could be so injurious to health as the Stoic repression of desire; what is the use of prolonging a life when apathy has turned into premature death? And besides, it is an impossible philosophy; for instinct will out. ‘Nature is often hidden; sometimes overcome; seldom extinguished. Force maketh nature more violent in the retur; doctrine and discourse maketh nature less importune; but custom only doth alter or subdue nature.”

Durant does not think highly of the post-Aristotelian philosophers like Zeno or Epicurus and their argument over whether to deny all pleasure or pursue nothing but pleasure. In the hands of Bacon, however, Epicureanism is refined into a doctrine of technological and social progress, particularly care for the health and wealth of the average citizen, without those concerns eliminating the responsibilities of good citizenship and submission to rightful authority.

“Ultimately, our troubles are due to dogma and deduction; we find no new truth because we take some venerable but questionable proposition as an indubitable starting-point, and never think of putting this assumption itself to the test of observation of experiment. Now ‘if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties.’”

Bacon rejected the authority of dogma in favor of free intellectual enquiry, giving rise to empiricism. Bacon’s innovation was to introduce the scientific method of observation, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion as a means of exploring all facets of knowledge, and not just those that could be confined within a laboratory.

“The dream of every thinker is to replace the position of the scientist; why does it remain only a dream after so many incarnations? Is it because the thinker is too dreamily intellectual to go out into the arena of affairs and build his concept in reality? Is it because the hard ambition of the narrowly acquisitive soul is forever destined to overcome the gentle and scrupulous aspirations of philosophers and saints?”

Durant here offers a wry assessment of the pitfalls of the “thinker” in comparison to “the scientist,” suggesting in a series of rhetorical questions that, since the thinker usually deals in a world of abstractions, they are less capable of trying to turn concepts into reality. Nevertheless, in debating the issues of Science, Morality, and Free Will, the inquiries of the philosophical thinker and the scientist sometimes overlap.

“Spinoza is not to be read, he is to be studied; you must approach him as you would approach Euclid, recognizing that in these brief two hundred pages a man has written down his lifetime’s thought with stoic sculptury of everything superfluous […] You will not understand any important section thoroughly till you have read and pondered the whole […] Read the book not all at once, but in small portions at many sittings. And having finished it, consider that you have but begun to understand it.”

Durant wants to make philosophy fun and accessible to a large audience, but in some cases, there is just no getting around the difficulty of the texts involved. He regards his own chapters as useful but insufficient introductions for the authors, whom one must consult directly to receive anything near the full benefit of their teaching. This is not an easy task with Spinoza, but Durant both urges the reader to read his work anyway and to not be discouraged when understanding does not come all at once. Such an encouraging approach reflects Durant’s commitment to popularizing philosophy among a general reading audience.

“[I]t comes about that the law of individual power which obtains in a state of nature, yields in organized society to the legal and moral power of the whole. Might still remains right; but the might of the whole limits the might of the individual—limits it theoretically to his rights, to such exercise of his powers as agrees with the equal freedom of others. Part of the individual’s natural might, or sovereignty, is handed over to the organized community, in return for the enlargement of the sphere of his remaining powers.”

Spinoza here wrestles with The Nature of Human Beings and the World in discussing the relationship between individuals and wider human society in a state of civilization. Spinoza’s thought presents an early conception of the social contract, whereby an individual must peaceably submit to “the organized community” to guarantee a portion of rights and sovereignty for each individual. “The state of nature,” by contrast, is a more lawless affair where the individual can dominate unchecked.

“Voltaire absorbed almost all that England had to teach him—its literature, its science, and its philosophy; he took all these varied elements, passed them through the fire of French culture and the French spirit, and transmuted them into the gold of Gallic wit and eloquence. He recorded his impressions in Letters on the English […] without quite knowing or intending it, these letters were the first cock’s crow of the Revolution.”

During the Enlightenment, several French philosophers, most notably Voltaire, looked to England as the model of individual liberty and responsible government. In claiming that “the first cock’s crow of Revolution” sounded through Voltaire’s writings during this early exile, Durant draws attention to The Sociohistorical Context of Philosophy, linking the development of Voltaire’s philosophical ideals to the later French revolutionary movement.

“In these two men we see again the old clash between intellect and instinct. Voltaire believed in reason always: ‘we can, by speech and pen, make men more enlightened and better.’ Rousseau had little faith in reason; he desired action; the risks of revolution did not frighten him; he relied on the sentiment of brotherhood to reunite the social elements scattered by turmoil and the uprooting of ancient habits. Let laws be removed, and men would pass into a reign of equality and justice.”

Here Durant emphasizes one of the important points of difference between Voltaire and Rousseau in their approach to The Nature of Human Beings and the World. While Voltaire was an outspoken advocate for reform, he believed that the civilizing effects of reason were the key to enlightening people and improving the human condition. By contrast, Rousseau favored a more instinctual and romantic approach, arguing that civilization did not bring enlightenment but instead merely destroyed the inherent primordial goodness of man.

“[T]he mind of man (and here at last is the great thesis of Kant) is not passive wax upon which experience and sensation write their absolute and yet whimsical will; nor is it a mere abstract name for the series or group of mental states; it is an active organ which molds and coordinates sensation into ideas, an organ which transforms the chaotic multiplicity of experience into the ordered unity of thought.”

The giant of German philosophy, Kant, regards truth to lie beyond the most obvious facets of human experience, but argues that it is nevertheless accessible to the highest levels of human reason. Kant’s thought thus attempts to reconcile reason with aspects of traditional idealism.

“‘Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself; and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being, to use him as a mere means for some external purpose.’”

Kant’s categorical imperative (See: Index of Terms), whereby every person possesses equal moral worth, is a radically democratic doctrine with little precedent in the history of philosophy, at least as Durant describes it. Kant’s great innovation is to deny the connection between reason and morality, arguing that the latter must stand on its own merits.

“What strikes the reader at once upon opening The World as Will and Idea is its style […] What blunt honesty, what refreshing vigor, what uncompromising directness! Where his predecessors are abstract to the point of invisibility, with theories that give out few windows of illustration upon the actual world, Schopenhauer, like the son of a businessman, is rich in the concrete, in examples, in applications, even in humor. After Kant, humor in philosophy was a startling innovation.”

Schopenhauer’s philosophy is generally pessimistic, but Durant nonetheless admires him for the clarity and consistency of his convictions and the accessibility of his prose. The conclusions might be unpleasant, but the process of arriving at them is far less troublesome than many other members of Durant’s canon.

“Only in space and time do we seem to be separate beings; they constitute the ‘principle of individuation’ which divides life into distinct organisms as appearing in different places or periods […] In reality there is only the species, only life, only will. ‘To understand clearly that the individual is only the phenomenon, not the thing-in-itself,’ to see in ‘the constant change of matter the fixed permanence of form,’—this is the essence of philosophy.”

Anticipating Darwin’s theory of evolution, Schopenhauer helps to advance the idea of the species as a collective unit with its own urge to survive and perpetuate itself, a process to which the individual is an important and yet ultimately insignificant contributor, raising the issue of Science, Morality, and Free Will. Schopenhauer’s conclusion comfortably belongs within a philosophic tradition that strictly divides the manifestation of a thing from the “thing-in-itself”—Schopenhauer was, however, radical in applying such a standard to humanity itself.

“The proper field and function of philosophy lies in the summation and unification of the results of science. ‘Knowledge of the lowest kind is un-unified knowledge; science is partially-unified knowledge; philosophy is completely-unified knowledge.’ Such complete unification requires a broad and universal principle that will include all experience, and will describe the essential features of all knowledge.”

While philosophers have spent centuries trying to uncover the deepest secrets of the universe, Spencer abandons this quest as fruitless, turning instead to the next best things which actually are knowable. Science is a vital component insofar as it provides empirically proven data, but philosophy must search beyond what is provable to uncover the deeper causes that make things what they are and inform their processes of change.

“Conduct, like anything else, should be called good or bad as it is well adapted, or mal-adapted, to the ends of life […] Or, in terms of the evolution formula, conduct is moral according as it makes the individual or the group more integrated and coherent in the midst of a heterogeneity of ends. Morality, like art, is the achievement of unity in diversity; the highest type of man is he who effectively united in himself the widest variety, complexity, and completeness of life.”

Like Nietzsche, Spencer is a moral relativist. Unlike Nietzsche and his staunchly individualistic “Superman,” however, Spencer hangs onto a concept of goodness as something that should be “well adapted […] to the ends of life” and which benefits the group as a whole.

“Socrates—‘the type of the theoretical man’—was a sign of the loosened fibre of the Greek character […] Critical philosophy replaced the philosophical poetry of the pre-Socratics; science replaced art; intellect replaced instinct; dialectic replaced the games. Under the influence of Socrates, Plato the athlete became an aesthete, Plato the dramatist became a logician, an enemy of passion, a deporter of poets, a ‘pre-Christian Christian,’ an epistemologist […] in its youth, a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic.”

Nietzsche is the only philosopher, at least in Durant’s account, to challenge the very idea of philosophy as Socrates represents it. Every thinker Durant describes, along with many others he considers briefly or elides from the text, consider the life of the mind to be the highest form of existence. Nietzsche stands out in championing the life of action, even violence, as preferable to the one of contemplation, believing that philosophy as traditionally practiced has ultimately led to the enervation of humanity.

“The formula for decay is that the virtues proper to the herd infect the leaders, and break them into common clay […] Different functions require different qualities; and the ‘evil’ virtues of the strong are as necessary in a society as the ‘good’ virtues of the weak. Severity, violence, danger, war, are as valuable as kindliness and peace; great individuals appear only in times of danger and violence and merciless necessity.”

Many of the thinkers in this volume are skeptical of democracy, but none hate it quite as much as Nietzsche does, or validate aristocracy quite so explicitly. While Plato believed that an aristocracy of the wise should rule for the good of the whole, Nietzsche thinks that only the highest orders of people deserve any consideration at all: In a direct repudiation of Kant’s categorical imperative (See: Index of Terms), he affirms that the great should absolutely use others as means to their own ends.

“If determinists were right, and every act were the automatic and mechanical result of pre-existent forces, motive would flow into action with lubricated ease. But on the contrary, choice is burdensome and effortful, it requires resolution, a lifting up of the power of personality against the spiritual gravitation of impulse or habit or sloth. Choice is creation, and creation is labor.”

Determinists, those who deny human free will, often look to the workings of nature to argue that since its patterns are fixed, and human beings are a part of nature, their behavior must be similarly fixed. However, nature itself is full of dynamism and unpredictability, from the weather to genetic mutations. Human beings particularly struggle not only with their environment, but also with painful questions of right and wrong that never should have emerged if their existence was supposed to follow a preset plan. This passage reflects the philosophical debates surrounding Science, Morality, and Free Will.

“For we are not so educated as we think; we are but beginning the great experiment of universal schooling; and it has not had time to affect profoundly our ways of thinking and our public life. We are building the equipment, but we are still primitive in methods and technique; we think of education as the transmission of a certain body of settled knowledge, when it should be rather the development of a scientific habit of mind.”

The early 20th century saw a growing belief in progress toward a harmonious and prosperous future. Education is here presented as a key to this initiative, although the passage emphasizes that what matters most is developing in people an active “scientific habit of mind” instead of the mere absorption and perpetuation of accepted knowledge.

“‘He who lives in the ideal’ says Santayana, ‘and leaves it expressed in society or in art enjoys a double immortality. The eternal has absorbed him while he lived, and when he is dead his influence brings others to the same absorption, making them, through that ideal identity with the best in him, reincarnations and perennial seats of all in him which he could rationally hope to rescue from destruction.’”

Santayana does not believe in the immortality of the soul in a Christian sense, but he does see philosophizing (and moral living generally) as carrying within it a sense of immortality. A person’s name and legacy lives on and reverberates in countless ways, with the example of his art or his conduct potentially influencing others.

“Unlike most philosophers, Dewey accepts democracy, though he knows its faults. The aim of political order is to help the individual to develop himself completely; and this can come only when each shares, up to his capacity, in determining the policy and destiny of his group.”

Dewey is the first of Durant’s subjects to embrace democracy wholeheartedly, to take Plato’s ideal of the philosopher king and see it as at least potentially applicable to everyone. If so, then a voting citizenry could act with the same sagacity as an insular elite. Education remains the key, just as it was for Plato, except now with a much more capacious understanding of what it can achieve on a societal scale.