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A Brief History of Thought. Luc Ferry
Читать онлайн.Название A Brief History of Thought
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isbn 9781786898074
Автор произведения Luc Ferry
Жанр Философия
Издательство Ingram
However, let us leave this aspect of things to one side for the time being. We shall return to it later when we need to define more closely the difference between philosophy and the exact sciences. I hope that you will sense already that this theoria – so different to our modern sciences and their supposedly ‘neutral’ principles, in that they describe what is and not what ought to be – must have practical implications in terms of morality, legality and politics. How could this description of the cosmos not have had implications for men who were asking themselves questions as to the best way of leading their lives?
Ethics: a System of Justice Based on Cosmic Order
What kind of ethics corresponds to the theoria that we have sketched so far? The answer is clear: one which encourages us to adjust and orientate ourselves to the cosmos, which for the Stoics was the watchword of all just actions, the very basis of all morals and all politics. For justice was, above all, adjustment – as a cabinetmaker shapes a piece of wood within a larger structure, such as a table – so our best efforts should be spent in striving to adjust ourselves to the harmonious and just natural order of things revealed to us by theoria. Knowledge is not entirely disinterested, as you see, because it opens directly onto ethics. Which is why the philosophical schools of antiquity, contrary to what happens today in schools and universities, placed less emphasis on speech than on actions, less on concepts than on the exercise of wisdom.
I will relate a brief anecdote so that you might fully understand the implications. Before Zeno founded the Stoic school, there was another school in Athens, from which the Stoics drew a great deal of their inspiration: that of the Cynics. Today the word ‘cynic’ implies something negative. To say that someone is ‘cynical’ is to say that he believes in nothing, acts without principles, doesn’t care about values, has no respect for others, and so on. In antiquity, in the third century before Christ, it was a very different business, and the Cynics were, in fact, the most exacting of moralists.
The word has an interesting origin, deriving directly from the Greek word for ‘dog’. What connection can there be between dogs and a school of philosophical wisdom? Here is the connection: the Cynics had a fundamental code of behaviour and strived to live according to nature, rather than according to artificial social conventions which they never stopped mocking. One of their favourite activities was needling the good citizens of Athens, in the streets and market squares, deriding their attitudes and beliefs – playing shock-the-bourgeois, as we might say today. Because of this behaviour they were frequently compared to those nasty little dogs who nip your ankles or start barking around your feet as if to deliberately annoy you.
It is also said that the Cynics – one of the most eminent of whom, Crates of Thebes, was Zeno’s teacher – forced their students to perform practical exercises, encouraging them to discount the opinions of others in order to focus on the essential business of living in harmony with the cosmic order. They were told, for example, to drag a dead fish attached to a piece of string across the town square. You can imagine how the unhappy man forced to carry out this prank immediately found himself the target of mockery and abuse. But it taught him a lesson or two! First, not to care for the opinions of others, or be deflected from pursuing what Cynic believers described as ‘conversion’: not conversion to a god, but to the cosmic reality from which human folly should never deflect us.
And, another more outrageous example: Crates occasionally made love in public with his wife Hipparchia. At the time, such behaviour was profoundly shocking, as it would be today. But he was acting in accordance with what might be termed ‘cosmic ethics’: the idea that morality and the art of living should borrow their principles from the harmonic law which regulates the entire cosmos. This rather extreme example suggests how theoria was for the Stoics a discipline to acquire, given that its practical consequences could be quite risky!
Cicero explains this cast of mind lucidly when summarising Stoic thought in another of his works, On Moral Ends:
The starting-point for anyone who is to live in accordance with nature is the universe as a whole and its governance. Moreover, one cannot make correct judgements about good and evil unless one understands the whole system of nature, and even of the life of the gods, not know whether or not human nature is in harmony with that of the universe. Similarly, those ancient precepts of the wise that bid us to ‘respect the right moment’, to ‘follow God’, to ‘know thyself ’, and ‘do nothing to excess’ cannot be grasped in their full force (which is immense) without a knowledge of physics. This science alone can reveal to us the power of nature to foster justice, and preserve friendship and other bonds of affection. (III, 73)
In which respect, according to Cicero, nature is ‘the best of all governments’. You may consider how very different this antique vision of morality and politics is to what we believe today in our democracies, in which it is the will of men and not the natural order that must prevail. Thus we have adopted the principle of the majority to elect our representatives or make our laws. Conversely, we often doubt whether nature is even intrinsically ‘good’: when she is not confirming our worst suspicions with a hurricane or a tsunami, nature has become for us a neutral substance, morally indifferent, neither good nor bad.
For the Ancients, not only was nature before all else good, but in no sense was a majority of humans called upon to decide between good and evil, between just and unjust, because the criteria which enabled those distinctions all stemmed from the natural order, which was both external to and superior to men. Broadly speaking, the good was what was in accord with the cosmic order, whether one willed it or not, and what was bad was what ran contrary to this order, whether one liked it or not. The essential thing was to act, situation-by-situation, moment-by-moment, in accordance with the harmonious order of things, so as to find our proper place, which each of us was assigned within the Universal.
If you want to compare this conception of morality to something familiar and current in our society, think of ecology. For ecologists – and in this sense their ideas are akin to aspects of ancient Greek thought, without their necessarily realising it – nature forms a harmonious totality which it is in our interest to respect and even to imitate. In this sense the ecologists’ conception of the ‘biosphere’, or of ‘ecosystems’, is close in spirit to that of the cosmos. In the words of the German philosopher Hans Jonas, a great theorist of contemporary ecology, ‘the ends of man are at home in nature’. In other words, the objectives to which we ought to subscribe on the ethical plane are already inscribed, as the Stoics believed, in the natural order itself, so that our duty – the moral imperative – is not cut off from being, from nature as such.
As Chrysippus said, more than two thousand years before Hans Jonas, ‘there is no other or more appropriate means of arriving at a definition of good or evil things, virtue or happiness, than to take our bearings from common nature and the governance of the universe’, a proposition which Cicero in turn related in these terms: ‘As for man, he was born to contemplate [theorein] and imitate the divine world … The world has virtue, and is also wise, and is consequently a Deity.’ (On the Nature of the Gods II, 14).
Is this, then, the last word of philosophy? Does it reach its limits, in the realm of theory, by offering ‘a vision of the world’, from which moral principles are then deduced and in agreement with which humans should act? Not in the slightest! For we are still only on the threshold of the quest for salvation, of that attempt to raise ourselves to the level of true wisdom by abolishing all fears originating in human mortality, in time’s passage, in death itself. It is only now, therefore, on the basis of a theory and a praxis (the translation of an idea into action; the practical side of an art or science, as distinct from its theoretical side) that we have just outlined, that Stoic philosophy approaches its true destination.