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If I were to mention "philosophy" to you, what would be your first reaction? Oops, hard and boring, don't want to touch? Or do you immediately think of a philosopher you prefer, a philosophical work you have read?
"Voltaire was a philosopher unlike any other because he was rich." "Some of Schopenhauer's readers believe that the pessimism that runs through his work is so deep that if he had been sincere, he would have committed suicide a long time ago." ...... Idly flipping through Warburton's "A Brief History of Philosophy" and reading these "poisonous tongues", I can't help but laugh. Philosophy can also be fun and playful. The ideal king chose Four relatively well-known philosophers, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Rawls, each of whom was selected due to space limitations.
I very much hope that you who come in to read this article will leave a message about one or two philosophers and philosophical works that you like, and we will choose three of them and send them to the "Brief History of Philosophy". At the same time, your sharing may also be selected and recommended. Please feel free to leave a message!
He was a philosopher with a difference
Because he's rich
Excerpt from Nigel Warburton's A Brief History of Philosophy
Artur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer(1788-1860)
Hegel had many admirers, but Artur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was not among them. Schopenhauer believed that Hegel was not a true philosopher at all, because he was not serious and honest enough in his discussion of philosophical questions. In Schopenhauer's view, Hegel's philosophical theories were fundamentally nonsense, while Hegel described Schopenhauer as "nasty and ignorant."
Life is painful, and it is better not to be born. Few people are so pessimistic about their thoughts about life, but Schopenhauer is such a pessimistic person. According to him, we are all trapped in a hopeless cycle: wanting to get, getting, wanting more, never ending, until we return to the West. Every time we seem to get what we want, we start wanting something else. You may think you'll feel satisfied if you become a millionaire, but that satisfaction won't last long and you'll want something else you don't have. Man is like this, never satisfied, never stopping craving. It's all very frustrating.
In fact, Schopenhauer's philosophy is not as gray as it sounds. He argues that if we could recognize the true nature of reality, behavior would be very different and might avoid some of the pessimistic characteristics of human behavior. The ideas he expressed were very close to those of the Buddha. The Buddha taught that all life contains suffering, but at a deep level, there is no such thing as a "self," and if you realize this, you can see through and become enlightened. This similarity is not a coincidence, and unlike most Western philosophers, Schopenhauer read extensively Eastern philosophical works. There is even a Buddha statue on his desk, next to which is another figure who had an important influence on him: Kant.
Kant & Hegel
Unlike Buddha and Kant, Schopenhauer was a gloomy, difficult, vain man. He applied to teach at a university in Berlin, and because he was so convinced of his talents that he insisted that he and Hegel's classes be scheduled at the same time. It turned out to be self-defeating, with Hegel's classroom full and Schopenhauer's classroom empty. Schopenhauer later left college and lived the rest of his life on an inheritance he inherited.
There are experiences that can make life less unbearable, and most of these experiences come from art. Art provides a still point where we can briefly escape the endless cycle of struggle and desire. In Schopenhauer's view, music is the best art form because music is a reproduction of the will itself. He thinks this explains why music can move us so deeply, and if you listen to Beethoven's symphony with the right mindset, you get not only emotional stimulation, but also a glimpse of real reality.
No other philosopher has placed art at such a core, so it is not surprising that Schopenhauer was popular with people of all kinds in the art world. Composers and musicians liked him because he believed that music was the most important of all arts. His ideas were also favored by novelists, including Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, and Thomas Hardy. Dylan Thomas wrote a poem called "The Force of Flowers Through the Green Fuse," inspired by Schopenhauer's description of the world as the will.
In Schopenhauer's view, hurting others is a form of self-harm, which is the basis of all morality. If I kill you, I will destroy the forces that bind us together. When one person hurts another, it is like a snake biting its own tail without knowing that its poisonous fangs are biting its own flesh. So the basic morality that Schopenhauer taught was compassion, which is to say that others are not outside of me, and I care about you, because in a way, you and I are both part of the world of will.
Portrait of Arthur Schopenhauer
Ludwig Sigismund Ruhr, circa 1815
This is the moral position espoused by Schopenhauer. However, whether he himself has achieved this kind of concern for others is highly questionable. Once, an old woman was chatting with someone outside his door, and he was so angry that he pushed her down the stairs. The old man was injured, and the court ordered Schopenhauer to pay her lifelong compensation. A few years later, the old man died, and Schopenhauer did not show sympathy, scribbling a joke in Latin on her death certificate, "obit anus, abit onus," meaning "When the old woman dies, the burden is gone."
There is another, more extreme way to face the endless cycle of desire. In order to avoid falling into the depths of desire, you can completely get away from this world, become an ascetic, and live a life of poverty and desirelessness. This is the ideal way to cope with life proposed by Schopenhauer, and it is also the way of life advocated by many Eastern religions. Schopenhauer himself, however, never became an ascetic, and although he withdrew from his social life as he grew older, he enjoyed the company, affair, and fine eating for most of his life. Maybe it can be said that he is a man of different hearts. Some of his readers argue that the pessimism that runs through his work is so deep that if he had been sincere, he would have committed suicide a long time ago.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche(1844-1900)
"God is dead" is the most famous phrase of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). But how could God die? God should be eternal, that is, alive forever, not dead. In a way, the core of this sentence is also here, it sounds very strange, it is deliberately done by the author. Nietzsche deliberately made a fuss about the fact that God does not die, not that God once existed and no longer exists, but that faith in God is no longer reasonable.
Nietzsche was quite different. He was hired as a professor at the University of Basel at the age of 24 and looked like he was going to have a smooth future in academic research. But he has an eccentric personality and a unique mind, unable to integrate into society or obey conventions, and seems to be happy to make his life difficult. He left the university in 1879, partly because of ill health, and traveled to Italy, France, and Switzerland, writing books that few people read at the time, but are now famous philosophical and literary works. His mental health deteriorated, and he spent most of his later years in a psychiatric hospital.
In stark contrast to Kant's methodical exposition of ideas, Nietzsche's views seem to come to you from all angles. Much of his work is short, fragmented paragraphs, even short one-sentence commentaries, some ironic, some quite sincere, and many arrogant and provocative. Reading Nietzsche's work, sometimes it feels as if he is shouting at you, and sometimes it is like whispering mysteries in your ear. He often wants the reader to be on his side, as if to say to the reader, you and I know what is going on, but the idiots can't see clearly.
One topic he constantly discusses is the future of morality. Nietzsche believed that once you accept that God does not exist, you cannot continue to uphold the Christian view of right and wrong, or you will deceive yourself. Values inherited from the past, such as compassion, kindness, and consideration of the interests of others, can be refuted by denial, and his way of challenging these values is to speculate on where their origins are.
Traveler on the Sea of Fog
Painted by Caspar David Friedrich, 1818
According to Nietzsche, the Christian virtue of caring for the weak and the helpless is surprising in fact. You might think that compassion and kindness are obviously good and not controversial. You may be taught from an early age to praise acts of kindness and despise selfishness. Nietzsche believed that the way we think and feel has a history of development. Once you understand the history or "genealogy" of these concepts, it is difficult to insist that these concepts are eternal and unchanging, nor to accept that they are objective criteria that guide our behavior.
Nietzsche showed a strong preference for aristocratic values in his work, a reverence for strong and belligerent heroes, rather than advocating Christian morality for sympathy for the weak. Christianity and its derived morality held that everyone had the same value, while Nietzsche saw it as a grave mistake. His outstanding artists, such as Beethoven and Shakespeare, are far better than the average person. What he seems to be trying to express is that Christian values themselves stem from jealousy and hinder the development of human nature. If heroic values are replaced, the price may be that the weak are trampled on, but it opens the door for the strong to achieve glory and achievement.
In Zarathustra, Nietzsche proposed the concept of the superman, an imaginary future man who is not bound by traditional moral norms, but transcends them and creates new moral values. Perhaps influenced by Darwin's theory of evolution, he saw Superman as the next step in human development. This statement is worrying because it seems to support those who consider themselves heroes and act recklessly at the expense of others. Worse still, the Nazis borrowed this idea from Nietzsche's writings to support a distorted view of racial superiority and inferiority, although most scholars believe they distorted Nietzsche's true intentions.
Jean Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre（1905-1980）
If you could go back in time to 1945 and go to a café in Paris called "The Two Wise Men," you'd see a small man with bulging eyes, smoking a pipe and writing in a notebook. This man was Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), the most famous existentialist philosopher. He was also a novelist, playwright and biographer. He spent most of his life in hotels, and his writing was almost always done in cafes. At that time, he did not look like a cult figure, but after a few years, he became the center of popularity.
Sartre believed that there is no essence of human beings, and that we did not come to earth for some purpose. As human beings, we don't need to live our lives in a particular way. Individuals can choose what to do and what kind of person they become. We are all free, and only you can decide your life. If you let someone else decide how you live, it's also an option. You can choose to be the kind of person others expect you to be.
Obviously, if you choose to do something, you may not be able to succeed. The reasons for not succeeding may be completely out of your control, but you have to take responsibility for wanting to do it, trying to do it, and reacting to failure.
Freedom is hard to control, and many people are avoiding it, and one of the ways to do this is to pretend that there is no real freedom at all. According to Sartre, we have no excuse to escape freedom, and we are fully responsible for what we do every day, and how we feel about it, and even our own emotions. If you're feeling sad right now, that's your choice. You don't have to grieve at all, but if you feel sad, you're responsible. The need to be responsible for everything is frightening, and some people prefer not to face it because choice is a painful thing. Sartre believed that we were "destined to be free," and that freedom would always be with us, whether we liked it or not.
Movie "Lovers of the Flower God Cafe"
Sartre used the example of a waiter in a café to illustrate this point. The waiters at this café act in a very stylized way, as if they were a puppet. All his actions show that he defines himself entirely as a waiter, as if he had no choice. The way he served the dishes and the way he walked between the tables seemed to be part of a program of movements designed specifically for waiters, rather than controlled by people. Sartre called such behavior "self-deception", an escape from freedom. In this behavior, you deceive yourself into telling yourself that you cannot truly choose life freely. However this is a lie, because according to Sartre, you are free whether you like it or not.
Shortly after the end of World War II, Sartre gave a speech titled "Existentialism is a Humanitarianism," in which he spoke of human life fraught with pain and anxiety. The root of pain and anxiety is that we understand that we can't find any excuse to escape and that we have to take responsibility for everything we do. But Sartre believes that painful anxiety is worse than taking responsibility, because whatever we do, we ask others to do the same. If I decide to get married, then I feel that everyone else should get married; if I am lazy, then everyone should be lazy in my eyes. That is, based on their own life choices, I think all human behavior should be the same. If anyone sincerely thinks so, of course, it will feel like a huge responsibility.
Sartre uses a true story to explain what he means by "anguish of choice." During World War II, a student asked him for advice, and the young man was facing a very difficult decision: to stay at home to care for his mother or to leave home to find a resistance group to fight to save his country from the Germans. It was the toughest decision of his life and he didn't know what to do. If he had left his mother and she had no one to take care of, and he might not have found a resistance organization, but would have been caught by the Germans, then his attempts to participate in a noble cause might have been a waste of energy and life at all. But if he stays at home to take care of his mother, he is essentially letting others fight for him. What should he do? What would you do? What advice would you give him?
Sartre's answer was irritating. He told the student that he was free and that he should choose for himself. If Sartre gives the student any substantive advice, the student still needs to decide whether to follow the advice. As human beings, we cannot escape the burden of responsibility.
"Existentialism", as others have called Sartre's philosophy, comes from the idea that we first exist in this world and then have to decide how we will live. Of course, your point of view may also be the opposite: we may be like a pencil knife, designed for a specific purpose. Sartre believed that our existence preceded our essence, and for objects that were designed, essence preceded existence.
Existentialism later became popular, attracting thousands of young people, spending the night discussing the absurdity of human existence and inspiring novels, plays, and films. It's a philosophy that people can follow in their lives and can be used to help themselves make choices. As he grew older, Sartre became more involved in politics and became more left-leaning, and he tried to combine his views on Marxism with his early ideas. This is a daunting task. In his existential philosophy of the 1940s, he focused on the choices that individuals make for themselves, but in later works he sought to explain how we became part of a large group and how social and economic factors played a role in our lives. Unfortunately, his work has become increasingly difficult to understand, perhaps in part because much of it was written after he took amphetamines.
Guevara (right) meets Sartre (center) with Simone De Beauvoir (left) in Cuba in 1960
Sartre may have been the most famous philosopher of the 20th century, but if you ask the philosopher who was the most important thinker of the 20th century, many will tell you that it was Ludwig Wittgenstein.
John Rawls
John Rawls（1921-2002）
Maybe you're rich, maybe you're super rich, but most of us aren't. Some people are very poor and spend short lives in poverty and illness. This is neither fair nor justified. If there had been true justice in the world, there would not have been a situation in which some children starved and others had too much money to know what to do. If there is true justice in the world and every sick person receives good treatment, the poor in Africa will not be poorer than the poor in the United States and Britain, and the rich in the West will not be tens of millions of times richer than those who are born disadvantaged. Justice is treating people fairly. Some people's lives are flowered from an early age, while others, not because of their own faults, have little opportunity to choose how they can live: they have no choice for work, or even where to live. Whenever these inequalities are spoken of, some people will shrug their shoulders and say, "Oh, life is inherently unfair," but these people are usually particularly lucky themselves. But there are also those who will work hard and think carefully about how to organize society better, and they may also try to change society to make it fairer.
John Rawls (1921–2002) was a quiet and humble Harvard scholar whose book A Theory of Justice (1971) changed the way people think about these issues. "The Theory of Justice" is the crystallization of Rawls's nearly 20 years of painstaking thinking, and it is a book written by a philosophy professor to other philosophy professors, and the style is quite boring. Most of these works are collected in the library, but the fate of "On Justice" is completely different, becoming a bestseller. In a way, it's surprising that so many people are willing to read this book, but the core idea of the book is extremely interesting, and it quickly became one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Among the readers were philosophers, lawyers, politicians, and many others, something Rawls himself could never have dreamed of.
Rawls fought in World War II. He was serving in the Pacific Theater on August 6, 1945, when the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, Japan. The experience of the war had a profound impact on him, and he believed that the use of nuclear weapons was wrong. Like many people who lived through that war, he wanted to create a better world, a better society. But the way he sought change was through thinking and writing, not by attending political events and rallies. He wrote Justice during the Vietnam War, when large-scale anti-war protests took place across the United States, and not all of them were peaceful. Rawls chose to study abstract issues of justice rather than get caught up in the hot spots of the day. At the heart of his theory is that we need to think clearly about how we should coexist and how the state affects our lives. In order to live, we need to cooperate. But what should be done?
Imagine if you were to design a new society, a better one, the first key question to answer might be, "Who deserves what?" "If you live in a nice big house, with a private indoor pool, servants around to take care of, and a private jet ready to take you on a tropical island vacation, the society you've designed might be: some people are very wealthy, perhaps because they work the hardest, while others have much less money. If you live in poverty, you might design a society that doesn't allow anyone to become super-rich, where everyone gets a fairer share of society's resources, private jets are not allowed, and at the same time those who are less fortunate will have more opportunities. This is human nature: consciously or not, when describing a better world, people often think of their place. Presupposed biases and cognitive biases distort political thinking.
Movie "Parasite"
Rawls's genius was to conceive of an experiment of thought, what he called the "primordial position," which downplayed some of the selfish prejudices that we all have. The core of this thought experiment is simple: design a better society without knowing what place you will occupy in that society. You don't know if you're rich or poor, whether you're disabled, whether you're beautiful or ugly, whether you're male or female, smart or not, talented or skilled, gay or gay, bisexual or heterosexual. Rawls argues that behind this fictional ignorance, you will tend to choose fairer principles because you don't know where you'll fall and what kind of person you'll become. Proceeding from this simple choice of not knowing his place, Rawls developed his theory of justice, based on two principles: freedom and equality, which he believed would be accepted by all rational people.
The first is the "principle of freedom": everyone should enjoy a set of inalienable basic freedoms, such as freedom of belief, the freedom to elect leaders, and broad freedom of expression. Rawls argues that these freedoms are so important that even if restricting some of them improves the lives of most people, it cannot go beyond the importance of protecting them. Like other liberals, Rawls took these fundamental freedoms very seriously, believing that everyone has the right to enjoy them and that no one should take them away.
Rawls's second principle, the "Principle of Difference," is about equality. Society should give the most vulnerable groups more equal wealth and opportunities, and if different people in society receive different amounts of money, the only situation that allows for such inequality is if it directly helps the poorest people. Bankers can earn ten thousand times more than those with the lowest income, but this situation can only be allowed if the lowest earner can directly benefit and can therefore increase the income. If Rawls were in power, no one would receive huge bonuses unless the poorest were able to increase their incomes as a result. Rawls believes that if people don't know whether they're going to get rich or poor, they choose such a society.
What if behind the curtain of ignorance, some people prefer to gamble? What if they imagined life as a lottery ticket and wanted to make sure there were some very attractive positions in society? Gamblers may risk becoming poor in order to have a chance to become extremely rich. Thus, in the societies they prefer, the differences in economic status are even greater than those described by Rawls. Rawls believes that rational people don't gamble their lives in this way. Maybe he was wrong at this point.
Many philosophers of the 20th century have no intellectual connection to the great thinkers of the past. Rawls's TheOry of Justice is one of the few works of political philosophy of the 20th century that deserves to be compared with Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, and Kant. Rawls himself may have been too modest to agree with this view. But as an example, he inspired a new generation of philosophers, including Michael Sandel, Thomas Bog, Martha Nusbaum, Will Kinrica, and others.
The focus of "A Short History of Philosophy" is not on "history", but on "small". Jumping between chapters does not hinder comprehension, and it can even be said that this book is the kind of book that is suitable for using fragmented time to open a chapter at will.
The main purpose of this book is to remove the veil of philosophical mystery and make topics involving philosophy light and interesting. The author has been able to explain the difficult philosophical concepts in the simplest words, adding some personal comments and satirical ridicule from time to time, and accompanying the reader through the journey of reading through concise, clear and easy-to-understand words.
When you read this book, you will find that many philosophical ideas have actually been deeply integrated into our lives, running through daily thinking, judgment and action. In fact, it also gives us an opportunity to reflect on our worldview, outlook on life and values.
——Introduction to A Brief History of Philosophy
👇 A Brief History of Philosophy: Forty Lectures on Western Philosophy