History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell

As many students in France, I took a compulsory philosophy course in my last year of high school, back in 1996-1997. My philosophy teacher, being a bit unorthodox (one of my friends said he found him one day half-drunk, sleeping on a bench in the street), decided to disregeard completely the official Education Nationale curriculum and introduce us to three thinkers and three thinkers only, which he thought were the main ones worth studying, namely Descartes, Nietzsche, and Freud. I had taken an earlier interest in Freud (notably Psychopathologie de la vie quotidienne), enjoyed the logic and clear writing style of Descartes (I had found at the time that his definition of truth in Le Discours de la Méthode was a bit unclear, but after rereading it, I find it in fact quite practical), but the most exciting read was definitely Nietzsche, with his refreshing writing style and crisp aphorisms (e.g., « Zola : ou la joie de puer » in Le Crépuscule des Idoles).

For the following two years, I studied for my business school exams in classe préparatoire and discovered, thanks to enthusiastic culture générale and history teachers, a whole new set of human science thinkers (such as Roger Caillois, Mircea Eliade, Claude Levi-Strauss, René Girard), historians (Fernand Braudel, Paul Bairoch), and novelists (such as Milan Kundera).

Having been accustomed to the clear writing style, lucidity, and exciting personal lives of novelists such as Milan Kundera, Albert Cohen (Belle du Seigneur), Albert Camus, or Romain Gary (a brilliant French teacher had us read Chien Blanc in high school, which made me discover this fascinating writer twenty years before he became popular again), it was tough for me to be forced to sit through hundreds of pages of compulsory « classics » with lengthy, boring descriptions.

As far as philosophy was concerned, my interactions with more classical authors such as Kant (whose writing style I found incomprehensible, his topics of interest quite boring, and his personal life lacking in excitement) and Plato (whose “allegory of the cave” felt extremely far fetched) were not very compelling either.

So I spent the next years re-reading my favorite authors (Gary, Nietzsche), discovering a few others (Houellebecq, Murakami, Garcia Marquez), and for the rest, reading the occasional comic (Hugo Pratt, Tardi, Taniguchi, and lesser known crime novel writers), but mostly perusing any nonfiction book I could get my hands on (e.g., business and investing books, bios of great founders and CEOs, history, economics and psychology books, self-help books) as I believed (1) nothing practical could be gained from mainstream fiction books (especially those written by moralizing authors, lacking in lucidity, and who had not lived fullsome and exciting lives) and (2) now that science and psychology had made significant inroads, most philosophers were preoccupied with dry and obscure abstract matters, far removed from real life.

I realized after a few years that fiction books did have a practical application, namely by offering examples, through the lives of characters, of how to live and how not to live one’s life. The same can be said of good films, the study of myths and religions.

Inspired by the approach of legendary investor and polymath Charlie Munger (who advises to learn the key principles of major human sciences and develop a latticework of “mental models”) and intrigued by the arts background of another legendary investor (Peter Lynch, who said that “studying history and philosophy was much better preparation for the stock market” than studying statistics), I decided to catch-up on my education and recently bought The History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), a British philosopher, logician and mathematician.

The book is quite lengthy and will probably take time for me to finish, but the introduction provides interesting insights on what philosophy is about:

Philosophy is something intermediate between theology and science:

• Philosophical conceptions are a product of two factors: (1) inherited religious and ethical conceptions, and (2) scientific investigation. Individual philosophers have differing proportions of these two factors in their systems.
• Philosophy consists, like theology, of speculations on matters where definite knowledge has been unascertainable, but appeals, like science, to human reasons rather than authority.
• Philosophy is a no man’s land between science (definite knowledge) and theology (dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge).

Many questions of interest cannot be answered in a definite manner by science nor in a convincing manner by theologians:

• Is the world divided into mind and matter?
• Does the universe have any purpose?
• Are there really laws of nature?
• Is man an insignificant creature on an unimportant planet?
• Is there a way of living that is noble or is everything futile?
• Is there such a thing as wisdom?

Why waste time on such insoluble problems?

As a historian:

• Men’s actions depend upon their theories as to the world, human life, good and evil.
• To understand an age or a nation, we must understand its philosophy.

As an individual facing cosmic loneliness:

• Science tells us what we can know, which is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know, we become insensitive to many things of great importance.
• Theology induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance.
• Uncertainty is painful but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.
• It is not good to forget the questions that philosophy asks nor to persuade ourselves that we have found indubitable answers go them.
• Philosophy can teach us how to live without certainty and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation.

Note: I hope these first few paragraphs have sparked your interest. I will regularly add other sections to this post to cover the key findings of the main philosophers.