Luc Ferry Quotes

اللزوم البرهاني ((وضع النفس فى موضع الآخرين من أجل فهم أفضل لوجهة نظرهم))

عندما انتزع نفسي من نفسي من اجل فهم الغير ، وعندما أوسع حقل تجاربي ، فإني اتفرد بما أنني أتجاوز ماهو خاص في وضعي الأصلي من أجل التوصل إما للعالمية أو على الأقل ، لمراعاة إمكانيات الإنسانية جمعاء

أن تكون حكيماً لا يعني أن تحب أو تسعى لتكون محبوباً بل ببساطة أن تعيش بحكمة، سعيداً حراً على قدر الإمكان بعد تغلّبك أخيراً على المخاوف التي أيقظتها نهائية الإنسان فينا.

لو كنا خيّرين تقائياً وموجّهين طبيعياً نحو الخير لما كانت هناك حاجة لوصايا زجرية. لا بل نحن بعيدون كل البعد عن ذلك كما تلاحظ دون شك... إنما وفي أغلب الأوقات, نحن لا نجد صعوبة في معرفة مايجب القيام به من أجل العمل الصالح, لكننا لا نتوقف عن السماح لأنفسنا ببعض الاستثناءات, وذلك لأننا وبكل بساطة نفضل أنفسنا على الآخرين! لهذا السبب يدعونا الواجب الملزم للمزيد من "الضغط على الذات" ولبذل الجهود من أجل الاستمرار في التقدم والتحسن

إننا بحاجة للآخرين لكي نفهم أنفسنا, وبحاجة إلى حريتهم وإلى سعادتهم إذا أمكن ذلك, لإتمام حياتنا الخاصة

يلزمنا فعلاً أن نبتعد عن الواقع للحكم بصحته أو بسوئه , كما يجب اتخاذ مسافة بالنسبة لانتماءاتنا الطبيعية أو التاريخية لكي نكتسب مايسمى عادة "الفكر الناقد" الذي بدونه لا يمكن إطلاق أي حكم قيمي

The present moment is the only dimension of existence worth inhabiting, because it is the only one available to us. (...) Yet we live virtually all of our lives somewhere between memories, and aspirations, nostalgia and expectations.

Greek philosophers looked upon the past and the future as the primary evils weighing upon human life, and as the source of all the anxieties which blight the present. The present moment is the only dimension of existence worth inhabiting, because it is the only one available to us. The past is no longer and the future has yet to come, they liked to remind us; yet we live virtually all of our lives somewhere between memories and aspirations, nostalgia and expectation. We imagine we would be much happier with new shoes, a faster computer, a bigger house, more exotic holidays, different friends … But by regretting the past or guessing the future, we end up missing the only life worth living: the one which proceeds from the here and now and deserves to be savoured.

Do not let your picture of the whole of your life confuse you, do not dwell upon all the manifold troubles which have come to pass and will come to pass; but ask yourself in regard to every passing moment: what is there here that cannot be borne and cannot be endured? Then remind yourself that it is not the future or the past that weighs heavy upon you, but always the present, and that this gradually grows less. (Meditations, VIII, 36)

Unable to bring himself to believe in a God who offers salvation, the philosopher is above all one who believes that by understanding the world, by understanding ourselves and others as far our intelligence permits, we shall succeed in overcoming fear, through clear-sightedness rather than blind faith.

The Gods are not to be feared; death cannot be felt; the good can be won; what we dread can be conquered.

True knowledge is not to be had solely through a combat against error, bad faith and untruth, but more generally, through a combat against the illusions inherent in the sensible world.

..the irreversibility of things is a kind of death at the heart of life and threatens constantly to steer us into time past- the home of nostalgia, guilt, regret and remorse, the great spoilers of happiness.

Every philosophy is a façade-philosophy’ – such is the hermit’s judgement … Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding-place; every word is also a mask. (Beyond Good and Evil, 289)

Or as Seneca expresses it, in the Letters to Lucilius: ‘You must dispense with these two things: fear of the future, and the recollection of ancient ills. The latter no longer concerns me, the former has yet to concern me.

هل يتبادر إلى ذهنك بأن مبدأ كل مشاكل الإنسان, ومبدأ الانحطاط والجبن, هو الخوف من الموت؟ درّب نفسك لمقاومته ولتنزع كل كلماتك وكل دراساتك وكل قراءاتك إلى ذلك وستدرك أن هذا هو السبيل الوحيد لأبناء البشر لكي يصبحوا أحراراً" -أبيكتات

To know one’s history, is, as in psychoanalysis, to work towards one’s own emancipation, and a democratic ideal of liberty of thought cannot dispense with the study of history, if it is to approach the present without prejudices.

Strength, beauty, intelligence – all natural gifts received at birth – are self-evidently qualities, but not on a moral plane. You can use your strength, your beauty or your intelligence to commit the most wicked crime, and you demonstrate by this alone that there is nothing inherently virtuous about natural gifts. Therefore, you can choose what use to make of them, whether good or bad, but it is the use that is moral or immoral, not the gifts themselves. ‘Free will’ becomes the determining factor of the morality of an action. With this idea, Christianity revolutionised the history of thought. For the first time in human history, liberty rather than nature had become the foundation of morality.

The problem, however, is that I have yet to meet anyone, materialist or otherwise, who was able to dispense with value judgements. On the contrary, the literature of materialism is peculiarly marked by its wholesale profusion of denunciations of all sorts. Starting with Marx and Nietzsche, materialists have never been able to refrain from passing continuous moral judgement on all and sundry, which their whole philosophy might be expected to discourage them from doing.

Our history, especially that of the great religions, Christianity in particular, has given us a "hidden prejudice" in favor of the "beyond" at the expense of the "here and now" and this must be changed. (quoted from The Age of Atheists" by Peter Watson, p 25)

For Rousseau, animals clearly possessed intelligence, sensibility, even the faculty of communication. Therefore it is not reason, or affectivity, or even language that differentiates the human being. On the contrary, everyone who has a dog knows perfectly well that the dog is more sociable and even more intelligent than, in some cases, certain human beings.

لو كنا خيّرين تقائياً وموجّهين طبيعياً نحو الخير م كانت هناك حاجة لوصايا زجرية. لا بل نحن بعيدون ك البعد عن ذلك كم تلاحظ دون شك... إنما وفي أغلب الأوقات, نحن لا نجد صعوبة في معرفة مايجب القيام به من أجل العمل الصالح, لكننا لا نتوقف عن السماح لأنفسنا ببعض الاستثناءات, وذلك لأننا وبكل بساطة نفضّل أنفسنا على الآخرين! لهذا السبب يدعونا الواجب الملزم للمزيد من "الضغط على الذات" ولبذل الجهود من أجل الاستمرار في التقدم والتحسن

Aprender a viver, aprender a não mais temer em vão as diferentes faces da morte, ou, simplesmente, a superar a banalidade da vida cotidiana, o tédio, o tempo que passa, já era o principal objetivo das escolas da Antiguidade grega. A mensagem delas merece ser ouvida, pois, diferentemente do que acontece na história das ciências, as filosofias do passado ainda nos falam. Eis um ponto importante que por si só merece reflexão. Quando

My doctrine says, the task is to live your life in such a way that you must wish to live it again – for you will anyway! If striving gives you the highest feeling, then strive! If rest gives you the highest feeling, then rest! If fitting in, following and obeying give you the highest feeling, then obey! Only make sure you come to know what gives you the highest feeling, and then spare no means. Eternity is at stake! This doctrine is mild in its treatment of those who do not believe in it. It has neither hell nor threats. But anyone who does not believe merely lives a fugitive life in the consciousness of it. (Extract from Nietzsche’s 1881 notebook)

A further triumph is our spiritualisation of enmity. This consists in our profound understanding of the value of having enemies: in short, our doing and deciding the opposite of what people previously thought and decided … Throughout the ages the church has wanted to destroy its enemies: we, the immoralists and anti-Christians, see it as to our advantage that the church exists … Even in the field of politics, enmity has become spiritualised. Almost every party sees that self-preservation is best served if the opposite number does not lose its powers. The same is true of Realpolitik. A new creation, such as the new Reich, needs enemies more than it does friends: only by being opposed does it feel necessary; only by being opposed does it become necessary. Our behaviour towards our ‘inner enemy’ is no different: here, too, we have spiritualised enmity; here, too, we have grasped its value. (Twilight of the Idols, V, 3)

Nietzsche's case is an especially interesting one for whoever wishes to undertake a critical examination of the “neotraditionalist” path. Two main reasons justify this evaluation: ― Nietzsche's work, on the one hand, explicitly and in an exemplary manner articulates the critique of democratic modernity and the denunciation of the argumentative foundation of norms: in this way it permits us ―better than does the work of other philosophers― to grasp all that is involved, within the choice between tradition and argumentation, in the rejection of the latter. ― On the other and perhaps more important hand, the way Nietzsche went about this rejection illustrates in a particularly significant fashion one of the main difficulties this type of philosophical projects comes up against: the neotraditionalist avoidance of democratic modernity makes it necessary to look for and ―we insist on this― whatever could be today's analogue of a traditional universe: the analogue, for (as Nietzsche knew better than anyone) it is out of question that in a time when “God is dead”, tradition should function as it does in theological cultures, in which whatever renders the value of tradition “sacred” and gives it its power is never unrelated to its rootedness in the divine will or in the world order supposed to express this will. Situating as he does his reflections at the same time after the “death of God” and after the (inseparably associated) discovery that the world once “dedivinized”, appears to be devoid of any order and must be thought of as “chaos”, Nietzsche take into account the end of cosmological and theological universe, an end that in general defines the intellectual and cultural location of the Moderns: we are thus dealing here, by definition and, we could say, at the stage of working sketch (since Nietzsche is, in philosophy, the very man who declared the foundations of the traditional universe to be antiquated), with a very peculiar mixture of antimodernism and modernity, of tradition and novelty ―which is why the expression “neotraditionalism” seems perfectly appropriate here, right down to the tension expressed within it. The question is of course one of knowing what such a “mixture” could consists of, both in its content and in its effects. Since, more than most of the representative of ordinary conservatism, Nietzsche cannot contemplate a naïve resumption of tradition, his “neo-conservative” approach permits us to submit the traditionalist option to an interrogation that can best examine its limitations and unintended consequences ―namely: what would a modern analogue of tradition consist of?

In the technological world...it is no longer a question of dominating nature or society in order to be more free or more happy, but of mastery for mastery's sake, of domination for the sake of domination. Why? For no end, precisely, or rather: because it is quite simply impossible to do otherwise, given the nature of societies entirely governed by competition, by the absolute imperative to 'advance or perish'.

I have always found it faintly ridiculous, but it has acquired such predominance over two centuries that we cannot ignore it – are what we might call the ‘religions of earthly salvation’, notably scientism, patriotism and communism. Unable to continue believing in God, the Moderns invented substitute-religions, godless spiritualities or, to be blunt, ideologies which, while usually professing a radical atheism, cling to notions of giving meaning to human existence, or at least justifying why we should die for them.

I will say that the cross of materialism is that it never quite succeeds in believing what it preaches, in thinking its own thought. This may sound complicated, but is in fact simple: the materialist says, for example, that we are not free, though he is convinced, of course, that he asserts this freely, that no one is forcing him to state this view of the matter — neither parents, not social milieu, nor biological inheritance. He says that we are wholly determined by our history, but he never stops urging us to free ourselves, to change our destiny, to revolt where possible! He says that we must love the world as it is, turning our backs on past and future so as to live in the present, but he never stops trying, like you or me, when the present weighs upon us, to change it in hope of a better world. In brief, the materialist sets forth philosophical these that are profound, but always for you and me, never for himself. Always, he reintroduces transcendence — liberty, a vision for society, the ideal — because in truth he cannot not believe himself to be free, and therefore answerable to values higher than nature and history.

This point is absolutely essential to Greek myth: it is always through justice that one gains one’s ends, ultimately, because justice is fundamentally nothing more than a form of adherence to—adjustment to—the cosmic order. Each time someone forgets this and goes against the rule of order, the latter is in the end restored, destroying the interloper. This lesson of human experience emerges already in veiled form in mythology: only a just order is permanent, and the days of injustice are always numbered.

To maintain power requires justice and intelligence as well as force.

Freedom, the virtue of disinterested action (‘good will’), and concern for the general welfare: these are the three key concepts which define the modern morality of duty, and which Kant was to express in the form of absolute commandments, known as categorical imperatives.

The world is a chaos, an irreducible plurality of forces, instincts and drives which ceaselessly clash.

aegis

Gaia—which in Greek means “the earth.

It is from these three primordial entities—Chaos, Gaia, and Eros—that everything will come to life, and the world will progressively organize itself.

how do we pass from chaos to “cosmos”: from disorder to the perfect and just regimen of a magnificently ordained natural dispensation upon which the sun gently shines?

another divinity is present at this moment of origins, namely Tartarus.

to name them in order of appearance) Chaos, Gaia, Tartarus, and Eros. Nothing else, as yet, has come into existence.

theogony” and “cosmogony.” What do they mean? In truth, these archaic Greek terms are quite simple, as well as interchangeable. The birth (-gony) of the world (cosmos) and the birth (-gony) of the gods (theo) are one and the same: the cosmogony, the birth of the cosmos, is also and reciprocally a theogony, a story about the origins of divinity.

rough-hewn,

interstices,

trenchant

appellation

pleiad

Nietzsche's central obsession is hierarchy. He says so and repeats it: “Given that it is the problem of hierarchy of which we must speak, that it is the problem for us, free spirits.” Hierarchy: meaning both the problem of the hierarchy of values and praise of the values of the hierarchy. To think is, of course, to judge, but this in the sense of the value judgement. To situate oneself "beyond good and evil" does not in any way mean giving up judging, classifying, eliminating. On the contrary. It is to want to position oneself beyond traditional evaluations, simultaneously Christian and egalitarian. If the Enlightenment and the French Revolution were in conflict with the Church, it was in the name of egalitarian values whose origin was Christian.

as Freud said; that the nostalgia for lost paradises, for the joys and sorrows of childhood, lays upon our lives a weight as heavy as it is unknown to us.

Beaucoup le disent aujourd’hui, parmi les écologistes, chez ceux, aussi, qui se disent « altermondialistes ». Mais l’originalité de Heidegger et de sa critique du monde de la technique, c’est qu’elle n’en reste pas aux critiques rituelles du capitalisme et du libéralisme. D’ordinaire, en effet, on leur reproche, pêle-mêle, d’accroître les inégalités, de dévaster les cultures et les identités régionales, de réduire de manière irréversible la diversité biologique, celle des espèces, d’enrichir les riches et d’appauvrir les pauvres…

Non pas, tu t’en doutes, celle d’un retour en arrière aux Lumières, à la raison, à la république et à l’humanisme, ce qui n’aurait, je t’ai dit pourquoi, aucun sens, mais une tentative de les penser à nouveaux frais, non pas « comme avant », mais au contraire après et à la lumière de la déconstruction qui a eu lieu.

Uma das principais extravagâncias do período contemporâneo é reduzir a filosofia a uma simples "reflexão crítica" ou ainda a uma "teoria da argumentação".

Now, in the tradition of Stoicism, the innermost essence of the world is harmony, order – both true and beautiful – which the Greeks referred to by the term kosmos.

hybris

chimeras”;

heifer,

Philosophy

par excellence

Zeus, ruler of the gods.

seminal

primordial

The proposition that Calypso dangles before Odysseus is irresistible, as is she herself, as is her island—an unprecedented offer for any mortal. To all of which, almost incomprehensibly, Odysseus remains unmoved. As unhappy as ever, he declines the goddess’s uniquely tempting proposition. Let us be quite clear from the start: the refusal is of epochal significance. It contains in nucleo what is undoubtedly the most powerful and profound lesson of Greek mythology, which will subsequently be adopted by Greek philosophy* for its own purposes, and which can be summarized as follows: the ultimate end of human existence is not, as the Christians (further down the line) would come to believe, to secure eternal salvation by all available means, including the most morally submissive and tedious, to attain immortality. On the contrary, a mortal life well lived is worth far more than a wasted immortality! In other words, the conviction of Odysseus is that the “diasporic” or displaced life—the life lived far from home, and therefore without structure, outside of ones’s natural orbit, in the wrong part of the cosmos—is quite simply worse than death itself.

What Odysseus’s refusal contains in a nutshell is a definition of the life well lived—from which we begin to glimpse the philosophical dimension of the myth. Following Odysseus, we must learn to prefer a condition of mortality in accord with cosmic dispensation, as against an immortal life doomed to what the Greeks termed hybris (pronounced “hubris”): the immoderation that estranges us from reconciliation to, and acceptance of, the world as it is. We must live in a state of lucidity, accepting death, accepting what we are and what is beyond us, in step with our people and with the universe. This is worth far more than immortality in a vacuum, denuded of meaning, however paradisal—with a woman we do not love, however perfect she may be, far from our own kind and from our hearth, in an isolation symbolized not only by Calypso’s island itself, but also by the temptations of deification and eternity that estrange us in equal measure from what we are and from what surrounds us. . . . It is an inestimable lesson in wisdom for a secular age such as ours today—a lesson that breaks step with the logic of monotheisms past and future, and that philosophy will translate into the language of reason, with its doctrines of salvation without a God, and of the good life for ordinary mortals such as we are.

aegis,

sibylline”;

sybarite

citadel,

The whole sense of the voyage of Odysseus, which we shall trace or retrace in chapter three, starts here: the good life is the life reconciled to what is the case, the life lived in its natural place, within the cosmic order, and it behooves each of us to find this place and accomplish this voyage if we want one day to arrive in the harbor of wisdom, of serenity.

ensemble

the Greek philosophical tradition thought of the world as, first and foremost, an overarching order: at once harmonious, just, beautiful, and good. The word “cosmos” connotes all of this. For the Stoics, for example, to whom the Latin poet Ovid defers in his Metamorphoses—when reinterpreting after his fashion the great myths dealing with the origins of the world—the universe resembles a magnificent living organism. If we want to get an idea of this, we might think of what doctors or physiologists or biologists discover when they dissect a rabbit or a mouse. What do they find? Firstly, that each organ is marvelously adapted to its function: What is better constructed than an eye for seeing, than lungs for oxygenating the muscles, than a heart for pumping blood via an irrigation system? These organs are a thousand times more ingenious, more harmonious and complex, than almost all of the machines devised by man. Moreover, our biologist discovers something else: that the ensemble of these organs, which considered individually are sufficiently astonishing, together form a quite perfect and “logical” whole—what the Stoics indeed named the logos, to refer to the coherent ordering of the world as well as to verbal discourse—and a whole that is infinitely superior again to any human invention. From this point of view, we must humbly acknowledge that the creation of even the humblest being—a tiny ant, a mouse, or a frog—is still far beyond the reach of our most sophisticated scientific laboratories.

The fundamental idea, then, is that within the cosmic order that philosophical inquiry would subsequently explore—the order established by Zeus (according to the inaugural mythological narratives) after a series of wars against the forces of chaos—each of us has his appointed or “natural” place. In this perspective, wisdom and justice consist fundamentally in the effort by humans to find this place. A lute maker adjusts one by one the multiple pieces of wood that constitute his instrument before they can enter into harmony with each other (and if the sound post of the instrument, sometimes referred to as the âme, or “soul”—the small dowel of white wood that spans the top and back plates of the lute—is badly positioned, then the latter will cease to sound properly, will fail to be harmonious). So, too, we humans must, in the image of Odysseus of Ithaca, find our place in life and occupy it under pain of not otherwise being able to accomplish our mission in the scheme of things, in which event we shall encounter nothing but unhappiness. This is indeed the message that Greek philosophy, for the most part, was to draw from the mythological past.

recondite

once inserted into the cosmos, once his individual life is set going in harmony with the cosmic order, the wise man understands that we simple mortals are merely a fragment of this whole, an atom of eternity, so to speak, one element of a totality that cannot disappear. So that, ultimately, for the sage, death ceases to be truly real. In a nutshell, death is but a passage from one state to another—and, considered as such, it should no longer hold any terrors for us.

It is easy to hire someone else to do work for us—someone to clean, someone to tend the garden—but no one can take our place along that road that leads to the conquest of our fears, so that we can adapt to the world and find our right place in it.

Nietzsche was to reiterate this, long after the Greeks—which proves in passing that their message preserves an actuality such as can still be found in modern philosophy: the ultimate end of human life is what Nietzsche calls amor fati, or “love of one’s fate.” To embrace everything that is the case, our destiny—which, in essence, means the present moment, considered as the highest form of wisdom, and the only form that can rid us of what Spinoza (whom Nietzsche regarded as “a brother”) named, equally memorably, the “sad passions”: fear, hatred, guilt, remorse, those corrupters of the soul that bog us down in mirages of the past or of the future. Only our reconciliation to the present, to the present moment—in Greek, the kairos—can, for Nietzsche, as for Greek culture as a whole, lead to proper serenity, to the “innocence of becoming,” in other words to salvation, understood not in its religious meaning but in the sense of discovering ourselves as saved, finally, from those fears that diminish existence, stunting and shriveling it.

if wisdom consists in finding our natural place in a divine and everlasting order, so as to live our lives reconciled to the present moment, the madness of hubris consists in a contrary attitude, a proud and “chaotic” revolt against our human condition as simple mortals. A large number of mythological stories revolve around this crucial theme, and it is important to resist reading them—as is so often and so mistakenly attempted—according to a modern ethical framework inherited from Christianity.

accretions

If progeny and heroism—descendants and earthly renown—do not enable us to confront death with a greater degree of serenity, if these attributes afford no true access to the good life, toward what source of wisdom then can we turn?

write clearly, to refrain from obscure allusions or from supposing that my audience possesses any prior knowledge

parti-colored

the fundamental task that was originally that of Zeus: to struggle against the ceaselessly regrouping forces of chaos so that order may prevail over disorder, cosmos and concord over discord.

Dionysus,

archaic,

les trois Critiques qui correspondent, en première approximation à la théorie de la connaissance, à la morale et à l’esthétique.

Les questions auxquelles elles apportent des réponses ont disparu du champ de nos préoccupations ordinaires de sorte qu’elles n’ont pratiquement plus droit de cité, en tout cas plus sous leur forme originelle, dans l’espace public.

a pigeon would die of hunger next to a dish filled with choice meats and a cat next to a heap of fruit or grain, though either of them could get nourishment from the foods it disdains if only it had thought of trying them. This is why dissolute men give themselves over to the excesses that bring on fevers and death, because the mind perverts the senses and the will continues to speak when nature falls silent …

Philosophy wants us to get ourselves out of trouble by utilising our own resources,

Not that we must resort to indifference, of course, which neither Stoic sage nor Buddhist monk would for a moment countenance: compassion and benevolence to others, indeed to all other forms of life, must remain the highest ethical imperative of our behaviour. But passion is not acceptable in the home of the wise man, and familial ties, when they become too binding, must be loosened. Which is why, like the Greek sage, the Buddhist monk lives, as much as possible, in a condition of solitude. (The word ‘monk’ derives from the Greek monos, meaning ‘alone’.) It is truly in solitude that wisdom can bloom, uncompromised by the difficulties associated with all forms of attachment. It is impossible, in effect, to have a wife or husband, children or friends without becoming in some degree attached to them. We must free ourselves of these ties if we wish to overcome the fear of death.

a filosofia é uma doutrina da salvação sem Deus, uma tentativa para a pessoa se salvar dos medos sem recorrer nem à fé, nem a um ser supremo" "philosophy is a doctrine of salvation without God, an attempt for a person to save themselves from fears without resorting to either faith or a supreme being" -Luc Ferry, A Sabedoria dos Mitos