Will Durant ~ 'The Story of Philosophy'

This book came highly recommended from Rog as an initiation into the world of philosophy.

All the time I was growing up, I had liked piping the line “I do not understand philosophy” and had rest content. But my “rest” has been progressively disturbed as some maturity dawned in the otherwise undisturbed mental horizon. So, it was with eager anticipation that I took up Durant. It would not be too much to say that he does not disappoint.

The book is titled “The Story of Philosophy” but it would be more appropriate to call it “The Story of Western Philosophy”. Durant himself makes this point in the preface. He could cover only so much within the expanse of this book. The back-cover text (the so-called blurb) of this edition is surprisingly succinct and accurate (which makes me want to quote it here):

The Story of Philosophy chronicles the ideas of the great thinkers, the economic and intellectual environment which influenced them, and the personal traits and adventures out of which each philosophy grew.

And so we have a line of philosophers from Plato to Spinoza to Kant and down to Santayana and Russell. Durant sticks to a neat pattern. He begins by sharing tales about these great men's lives and then slowly follows their paths of life to elaborate on their line of thinking and the philosophies they came up with. He finishes off each segment with a 'criticism'. This last bit involves some tightrope walking, but Durant walks well. Even when he finds someone quite absurd with a particular line of thought (which is evident from his tongue-in-cheek remarks), he does not fail to point out where that person shone out. And if someone's proposed theory seems ludicrous in retrospect, he takes pains to show how yet that person stands tall because of the contributions he had made and the value of them. I think only once he comes across with quite unrelieved criticism and that is for Benedetto Croce. Even then he does not belittle the popular reputation Croce enjoys.


It is Durant's approach and writing style that is behind the huge appeal of this book. He peels away the scholastic layers from Knowledge and presents it in the language of the non-specialist. Readers are able to see that philosophy is not some erudite fortress but is full of facts directly related to their lives. I too was roundly surprised to discover how profound my ignorance could be. In place of mere abstract thinking, there were science and scientific hypotheses and economic theories which came under the concerns of philosophy. Of course, there is enough of abstract thinking too and even far-fetched speculation but that is not all. Philosophy does and do encompass all branches of human endeavour: art and music, science and economics, religion and metaphysics. And all these Durant places before us with as much lucidity as his philosophers allow him. His distinct antipathy for obscurantism helps here.

Then there is the bonus Durant brings along which often goes on to outweigh the principal. His humour. As he puts it himself:

The Story tried to salt itself with a seasoning of humor, not only because wisdom is not wise if it scares away merriment, but because a sense of humor, being born of perspective, bears a near kinship to philosophy; each is the soul of the other.

And we see the best amalgamation of the author's talent and the philosopher's genius in the chapter on Voltaire. It is the crown of delight in the whole book. What was most wonderful was that while going through the chapter I never for a moment felt that I was reading philosophy. And this even after I had got used to Durant's easy narration. It was the magic of Voltaire which does not allow any academic dryness to touch his utterances.

Voltaire's communication with Rousseau is one such instance where this is well-illustrated:

When he [Rousseau] sent to Voltaire his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, with its arguments against civilization, letters, and science, and for a return to the natural condition as seen in savages and animals, Voltaire replied: “I have received, sir, your new book against the human species, and I thank you for it... No one has ever been so witty as you are in trying to turn us into brutes; to read your book makes one long to go on all fours. As, however, it is now some sixty years since I gave up the practice, I feel that it is unfortunately impossible for me to resume it.”

Voltaire was not an atheist and yet his theism was so reasonable, free of all the evils (namely dogmas and superstitions that truly make such 'faith' problem areas, to my mind):

Nobody thinks of giving an immortal soul to the flea; why then to an elephant, or a monkey, or my valet?... A child dies in its mother's womb, just at the moment when it has received a soul. Will it rise again as foetus, or boy, or man? To rise again – to be the same person that you were – you must have your memory perfectly fresh and present; for it is memory that makes your identity. If your memory be lost, how will you be the same man?... Why do mankind flatter themselves that they alone are gifted with a spiritual and immortal principle?... Perhaps from their inordinate vanity. I am persuaded that if a peacock could speak he would boast of his soul, and would affirm that it inhabited his magnificent tail.

Our author matches pace with the French master of wit and we are the beneficiaries.

At the stage where Voltaire has finished his three year exile in England and is about to return home, Durant is telling us about the “Letters on the English” and finishes by saying: Without quite knowing or intending it, these letters were the first cock's crow of the Revolution. The very next line of the new sub-chapter runs thus: Nevertheless the Regent, not knowing of this chanticleer, sent Voltaire permission, in 1729, to return to France.

Durant has some subtly-stinging words about his chapter on Kant in the preface:

No apology is offered for the neglect of epistemology. That dismal science received its due in the chapter on Kant, where for many pages the reader was invited to consider the puzzles of perception. This chapter should have pleased the young pundit, for it came very near to obscurity.

Strikingly in opposition to what Durant says, I found the chapter one of the easiest as regards comprehension. That perhaps because in his extra-wariness about Kant, Durant does too good a job at explication. Kant, he says, is the last person one should read to learn about Kant. We follow his advice and we read him. As a result, Kant himself seems to increase in appeal. No wonder a professor of philosophy in a Midwest university wrote to Durant that he had been teaching Kant for fifteen years but never understood his meaning until he read this 'elementary chapter'.

In tracing the routes of philosophic thought, Durant links Voltaire and Kant, Locke and Kant, Rousseau and Kant in the said chapter. In the process, he spends some paragraphs in outlining the mind-matter debate. This section was one of my favourites. Following Locke and Berkeley and Hume's arguments and counter-arguments was nothing short of invigorating. Durant's quick-fire wit and clarity of expression too was at its best here:

(...) If sensations are the stuff of thought, the hasty argued, matter must be the material of mind.

Not at all, said Bishop George Berkeley (1684-1753); this Lockian analysis of knowledge proves rather that matter does not exist except as a form of mind. It was a brilliant idea – to refute materialism by the simple expedient of showing that we know of no such thing as matter; in all Europe only a Gaelic imagination could have conceived this metaphysical magic. (...) But the Irish Bishop had reckoned without the Scotch sceptic. (...) We know the mind, said Hume, only as we know matter: by perception, though it be in this case internal. (...) The result appeared to be that Hume had as effectually destroyed mind as Berkeley had destroyed matter. Nothing was left; and philosophy found itself in the midst of ruins of its own making. No wonder that a wit advised the abandonment of the controversy, saying: “No matter, never mind.”

Re-reading the above quoted bit brought home a realization. Perhaps more than anything else, it is Durant's success at presenting his philosophers as flesh-and-blood people – whose philosophies influenced and were influenced by their own lives – which makes this book so special.

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