Woof! Not a pocket-sized spring-break beach read, this leviathan! 🐳
Before proceeding, consider that it is not enough that philosophy is true; it must also reckon whether or not it in itself is healing. One must love philosophy itself and what it offers and why it exists to not fall into its many scholastic and academic traps and poisons that turn vitality into abstraction.
Why do we ask questions? Why not just follow the rules and walk within the confines of already existing beliefs? Why question and explore the horizon yonder rather than stay a safe distance before its edge sucks up your dinghy? If you haven’t asked yourselves these kinds of questions, stay far—far!—away from philosophy lest you turn into stone. A knowledgable stone, and all the heavier for it.
The history of philosophy is the history of two kinds of kinds of inquiries:
What is there?
What is the nature of reality?
What exists?
What is existence?
What kinds of things exist?
What is knowledge?
What are the best means to get it?
What is the relationship between ourselves and the world?
Big concepts = reason; experience; truth and meaning; logic; perception; thought; theorizing; making sense of language; mind; consciousness.
What matters?
What are values?
What are ethics?
How do politics work as an extension of ethics?
What is a good life? What is a good society?
What are our obligations, and responsibilities?
How do we make judgments about wrong and harm and how to remedy them?
What sort of people should we be, both individually and socially?
What is beauty, and how does it relate to the quality of our lives?
What is a meaningful life?
We still do not know what ultimately exists. We still wrestle with problems about what is good and right, about how society should be organized, about meaning and value, and especially about the quest for the good and worthwhile life. Many people do not think about these things, preferring instead to take a prepacked set of views from some tradition, typically a religion, from which most of them cherry-pick what is convenient, and ignore what is inconvenient. But philosophy is the refusal to be lazy about the great questions. It patrols the circumference of the little patch of light that is knowledge, looking out into the dark of ignorance to seek the shapes there. Even though most people shy away from accepting the challenge to think — Russell said, ‘Most people would rather die than think, and most people do,’ — they still find themselves often enough confronted by a philosophical question: about right and wrong, about what choice to make in some fundamental respect, about what it all really means. Thus everyone is a philosopher at times; everyone takes part. And that makes us all players in the history of philosophy.
The strengths of this book gave me a sense of philosophy’s epic scale and sequence and progressions and the evolution of civilization, a kind of grand narrative of human thought. Bonus: includes Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, and Arabic philosophy, though Western philosophy is the dominant focus.
The obvious weaknesses involved necessary omissions and simplifications. Philosophers about whom I did not know much, I learned the fundamentals; philosophers I did know a lot about felt oversimplified. It’s already a behemoth of a tome, so structurally speaking, the author’s hands were tied — everything we know can’t be bound in one volume (or library). Yet I begrudgingly knock off two stars for the impossibility of the task.
When a man has filled his mouth so full of food that for this reason he cannot eat and it must end with his dying of hunger, does giving food to him consist in stuffing his mouth even more or, instead, in taking a little away so that he can eat? Similarly, when a man is very knowledgeable but his knowledge is meaningless or virtually meaningless to him, does sensible communication consist in giving him more to know, even if he loudly proclaims that this is what he needs, or does it consist, instead, in taking something away from him? ~Kierkegaard
As compendiums of knowledge, books like this make my head feel over-stuffed — like a squirrel gathering too many nuts and not enough time eating them. 🐿️ 🌰
But reading philosophy and its history as a way of remembering how to perceive, how to question, how to not close down in the midst of all that is leads me most emphatically to the one question that matters most: how to live now with this one life that’s soon gone. And for that, spending time with other beings who dedicated their lives to asking and living their questions, I am grateful; and supremely relieved and happy that I now know less than I did before.
Beautiful!