LUC FERRY'S QUEST FOR SALVATION

by Dave Maier

It's very difficult to write a good introduction to philosophy. Put in too much technical detail and it reads like a textbook, irrelevant to all but sophomores; but leave too much out and it's just a self-help book. Luc Ferry is a French philosopher whose recent essay in this genre, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living, is our subject today.

Ferry's book is generally successful in walking that fine line. He keeps the details to a minimum, leaving room for plenty of argument, much of it eloquent and forceful.  He leaves no doubt about where he thinks his explorations lead, and what their consequences are for contemporary life. As he himself argues, philosophy must address its readers in this direct and personal way if it is not to devolve into pointless academic speculation, a fate shared, he thinks, by too much contemporary philosophy. Even if that subtitle promises more than it can deliver (more accurate, if more unwieldy, might be A Philosophical Guide to Philosophical Guides to Living), Ferry's book provides an excellent background for further investigation and debate.

Ferry's explanatory scheme is necessarily compact, but for his purposes it works very well. The philosophy of each major era in the history of Western thought addresses three related questions: in Kant's famous formulation, they are 1) What can I know? 2) What must I do? 3) What may I hope? Kant's own system is built around his answer to the first question, which inaugurates the "critical philosophy" that brought us irrevocably into the modern period. In contrast, Ferry centers on the third question as the one driving the whole endeavor.

A human being […] is the only creature who is aware of his limits. He knows that he will die, and that his near ones, those he loves, will also die. Consequently he cannot prevent himself from thinking about this state of affairs, which is disturbing and absurd, almost unimaginable. And, naturally enough, he is inclined to turn first of all to those religions which promise 'salvation'.

That promise, though, is worthless if we don't believe it. Where religion demands faith, philosophers – arrogantly so, from the religious perspective – accept only what can be shown by reason. Philosophical "salvation" is thus intimately connected to what Ferry calls theoria, an investigation into not only how things are in the world, but also the means by which we know this (or what Ferry is careful not to call "metaphysics" and "epistemology" respectively). More practically, we also want to know how to deal with other people, and what our mutual obligations are (which includes the question of what "obligations" are in the first place). The key to understanding each era, in Ferry's view, is to see how it deals with these three questions.

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