A Perspective of Wisdom
The idealist tradition manifests in an ad hoc way. Plato practiced a schizophrenic pedagogy: he had an oral esoteric discourse intended for elites, while offering an exoteric teaching to a greater number of people. This is an aristocratic practice of philosophy. The Academy professes that Plato is for everyone, that nothing prohibits us from taking a course on Plato. What we call his complete corpus comes from that one accessible, exoteric transmission.
There was also that secret course lavished upon chosen students, those picked from the elites of the esoteric stratum. It was presumably taught after years of training in high-level mathematics, first principles, final consequences, and genealogical elements. As a result, there is a clear fracture in the history of ideas between inferior philosophy for more people and superior philosophy for the elite.
Once again, in response to the Platonic practice of philosophy, Epicurus and his cohorts started out differently. The Garden was open to all, without distinguishing between age, sex, social status, education, or heredity. There was no desire to produce an elite to occupy the best positions in society and reproduce the social order. Hence, one can say that the Platonic aim is theoretical and elitist and that the Epicurean aim is practical and existential. The history of philosophy hinges on these two tropes: the theoretical practice of a cabinet and the existential engagement with everyday life.
There is a relationship to place. Plato taught in a secluded place, discrete, closed off, and shut in, among similar people who are distinguished from the masses and destined to govern over others more than over themselves. How could this not lead to a principle of elitist schools that function to provide society with the best means for perpetuating the system that recruits and appoints them? There’s a clear connection between this and the secret Academy of the French Republic. It must be added that the University’s ideological tolerance is proportional to the weakness of its power. We have seen what happens when its power is limitless.
Pierre Hadot teaches that all ancient philosophy aims for the philosophical life. I’m afraid I must qualify this hypothesis, which is seductive but fragile with regard to various Pre-Socratics: for example, what about Heraclitus and Empedocles, as well as Plato and his cohorts, such as in the Timaeus? Or Aristotle in his Physics or Metaphysics? Clearly, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, and Cyrenaicism entail existential practice, and their philosophers are leaders of it. However, not all ancient philosophers agree that the theoretical leads, with any force, to eudemonia.
The ancient divide between the open agora and the secret school deepens with the rise of Christianity, which completely discredited existential philosophy. The Fathers of the Church lay claim to true philosophy. We find this expression in almost every one of their discourses. They speak of intellectuals as courtesans and of the power of philosophers. Eusebius of Caesarea, a friend and panegyrist of Emperor Constantine, employs the feminine article la for philosophy: the philosopher uses his intellectual ability, his reasoning power, and his talent for reflection in order to justify and legitimize history, the archive, the Truth.
From that point on, a host of thinkers, with varying degrees of zeal, lined up behind such power and crushed any attempt to think or write freely. The philosophical life? Finished: to be a philosopher, it sufficed to follow the teachings of St. Paul. Ancient wisdom, because it was pagan, was false; alternative Christianities, especially Gnosticism, were heretical; and all independent and autonomous ways of thinking were forbidden. The Agora? The Forum? The Garden? No more…The Church takes the first position and submits to the Episcopal, imperial authority.
But existential practice persisted. Astonishingly, the Epicurean community could, with a little theoretical refinement (Epicurean Christians included Valla, Erasmus, Gassendi, and others), reveal the permanent value of existential philosophical practice: theory needs practice, ideas incarnate themselves. To be Christian is not to content yourself with an ostentatious display, but to live as one, to emulate the life and everyday acts of Jesus. In this regard, the cenobitic community of a Benedict, for example, would not have shocked the Athenian student of the Epicurean Garden.
Thus, Christianity destroys the existential path in order to take the philosopher away from criticism, debate, and controversy surrounding the minute details of doctrine. That is how theology kills philosophy, or at least demands its surrender. From St. Irenaeus with his Against Heresies, to Aquinas and his Summa Theologica, philosophy acts as a maid doing trivial chores. God, henceforth, is the sole object of all thought. At least that’s how it was for six dark centuries of Western history.1
A large part of traditional, classical, idealist philosophy keeps reproducing these scholastic schemes. There are interminable discussions about the gender of angels, heaps of sophistries, ad nauseum rhetorical spins, willful verbal obfuscation, religious neologisms, onanistic and autistic approaches to practice, and other peculiar symptoms. A kind of schizophrenia always threatens philosophers who segregate theory and practice. But in secluded cabinets—like the philosopher under Rembrandt’s stairs2—they can live and make a living from his teaching…This is the character of the Philosophy Professor—well described as a Socratic functionary. Is he a corporate sellout? I would say that Hegel is the epitome of all the vices of the profession.
Despite all of this, the existential tradition survived in philosophy. The Greek and Roman spirit continues with Montaigne, for example, and also with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard: Essays, The World as Will and Representation, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Repetition can affect our real existence, the concrete one, in the same way as the Letter to Menoeceus.3 But The Phenomenology of Spirit tends not to.4 The ancient spirit still offers a chance to get through the impasse where theoretical philosophy too often stagnates. Yet it is theoretical philosophy that dominates the University and official venues of philosophy. I believe that the spirit of ancient existential philosophy should be reactivated.
What can a philosopher show for himself? His life. If someone writes a book, but it is not accompanied by a philosophical life, it is not worth our time. Wisdom is measured in details: It is found in what one says and doesn’t say, what one does and doesn’t do, what one thinks and doesn’t think. We can put it in terms of Proust’s theory of multiple selves:5 we can, for example, radically separate the philosopher writing Being and Time from the man who adhered to the Party of Hitler during the entire period of Nazism. If we accept this split, a great philosopher can be both a Nazi and a great philosopher with no problem. There’s no connection between the person who composes a voluminous treatise on ontology and the one who vouches for a politics of extermination! Certainly, acknowledging Heidegger’s political commitment is not sufficient reason to ignore him. We should still criticize him, comment on him, and appreciate his writings. But it’s important to avoid the double bind—acting as if the real does not exist and seeing only him…For Sainte-Beuve deserves careful consideration.6
A philosopher has to be a philosopher twenty-fours hours a day, including while making his laundry lists. Plato was philosophical when he wrote against hedonism in the Philebus; but it was even clearer when this preacher of the ascetic ideal died at a banquet. He was a great philosopher when he promulgated the Parmenides, just as he was when he expressed his desire to burn the works of Democritus. He was a philosopher when he founded the Academy as he was in his youth as a dramatic writer and fighter. He was a philosopher when he published the Republic and Laws, just as he was as a courtier to Denis of Syracuse. And so on. They are indistinguishable.
Hence the need for a close relationship between theory and practice, mental reflection and life, thinking and action. A philosopher’s biography is not just a commentary on his published works; it shows the nature of the relationship between his writings and his conduct. Only both of them together constitute a work. More than most people, the philosopher must keep these two forces, which so often oppose each other, connected. Life feeds the work, which in turn feeds life: Montaigne first discovered and demonstrated this. He knew that one produces a book, yet what makes it all the more remarkable is that the book shapes the author in return.
A Pragmatic Utilitarianism
What is the principle philosophical arena? It’s not the school, the university, or any other enclosed space. It’s the open theater of the world and daily life. There, the Lineage, Concept, Idea, and Theory do not have the same status that they have in the idealist realm. Existential logic does away with the religion of the Incarnate Word. Words serve to exchange, communicate, and formulate, not to separate. Theory proposes a practice; it intends a practice. It does not have a purpose beyond that. In nominalist logic, words work in a utilitarian way; they are nothing more than practical instruments—there is no religion of the Incarnate Word…
I believe we should promote a utilitarian and pragmatic philosophy, not its evil sister—idealist and conceptual philosophy. Only the former allows for the existential project. But before pursuing it, we have to decontaminate these two terms because in the classical tradition, utilitarianism and pragmatism suffer from a double meaning, as is often the case with nonclassical ideas. Thus, materialist, sensualist, cynic, epicurean, sophist, skeptic, and many other terms have one philosophical meaning, but also a trivial sense. Oddly, the first meaning is usually contradicted by the second; one seems to negate the other…
Thus, materialist: In the philosophical sense, refers to a thinker who argues that the world is reducible to a pure and simple arrangement of matter. But for most laymen, it refers to one who is obsessed with accumulating goods and riches. The same goes for cynic: Philosophically, it means a disciple of Diogenes of Sinope, someone who practices total asceticism and moral rectitude. However, for most, it means a crude individual without faith or principle. Epicurean designates a disciple of Epicurus, a proponent of a frugal life and asceticism. But it also means a vulgar and gluttonous boor. Sophist refers to a methodological perspectivism, but it simultaneously denotes an amateur reasoner who cheats in order to win a debate. And so on…
Philosophers know that utilitarianism has a lineage going back to Jeremy Bentham, an important thinker, and John Stuart Mill, who promoted the principle of utility—meaning the greatest happiness for the greatest number—as the cardinal point of ethical philosophy. Bentham’s Deontology (1834) and Mill’s Utilitarianism (1838) formed the basis of this powerful way of thinking, marginalized by the idealists. Those Anglo-Saxons did not think nebulously. They built a clear, precise, readable philosophy devoid of all a priori metaphysics, and above all—and hardest for the idealists to handle—it leads to wisdom that is useful in everyday life, in the most mundane reality.
For the man in the street, utilitarianism is stigmatized as the conduct of someone who in relationships with others is incapable of generosity or magnanimity. Utilitarian politics, philosophy, and economics is viewed as egoistic, little concerned with people, and preoccupied with immediate concrete results. A little cynicism and Machiavellianism are added: it is supposed that the utilitarian wants hard cash, material, tangible, immediate, and trivial benefits. This combination is really the antithesis of Bentham and Mill’s thinking. What happens to the cardinal principle of the “greatest happiness for the greatest number” if all you end up with is the minor immediate satisfaction of a single person?
The same can be said about Pragmatism. Philosophically, this tradition puts knowledge and the goals of reason into perspective. In other words, this updated positivism proposes a theory of truth that denies the idealist Absolute in favor of epistemological relativism. When Peirce produced the term in “How to Makes Our Ideas Clear,” published in 1878, he laid the foundation for an authentic philosophy of immanence. It did not simply arise from a failure to see things from a single point of view or to arrive at expected results.
The Pragmatic Utilitarianism that I propose is a return to philosophical consequentialism: there are no absolute truths, there is nothing Good, Bad, True, Beautiful, or Just in itself, but only relatively, evaluated according to a clear and distinct plan. Indeed, from a personal perspective, hedonism in this case allows us to accomplish this project and achieve joyous results. The idea is already there in Bentham: think in terms of action and aim it relatively to its effects. Think in terms of action, and base your actions on the effects they will have.
A Hedonist System
In summary, I propose a counterhistory of alternative philosophies that will problematize the dominant idealist historiography. I call for embodied reason and the autobiographical writing that accompanies it in a purely immanent logic—in this case a materialist one. I would like philosophy to be understood as the construction and decoding of an egodicy, a philosophical life resulting from an epiphany of reason, an existential perspective with a Utilitarian and Pragmatic aim. All of these converge in one term: Hedonism. I often put forward the following maxim of Chamfort, because it serves as a hedonist categorical imperative: “enjoy and have others enjoy, without doing harm to yourself or anyone else; that is all there is to morality.” That statement says it all. Of course, we want personal enjoyment, but above all, we want others to enjoy themselves. No ethics is possible without that. Morality is all about others. There is no other way. For example, the Marquis de Sade did not offer any kind of morality. Chamfort’s consequentialist maxim allows for infinite variations.
First of all, I want to give the term Hedonism a dignity that it is not usually accorded. For the past fifteen years, my work has aroused many of the same problems that the ancient hedonists faced. Many of my critics have refused to soberly consider the details of what I say. They get hysterical about the single word pleasure. Everyone acts according to what they consider pleasurable, and they often simply transfer this onto others with the wish that it also pleases them.
Thus, I have often had to confront criticism that conflates hedonism with fascism, hedonism with Nazism, and hedonism with amoralism. Because of my avowed Nietzscheanism, they suspect that I must have a secret fascination with totalitarian and dictatorial regimes—that whole trope! To enjoy when others are not enjoying is actually the basest negation of all philosophy. But to enjoy and have others enjoy…What have they done with this and? They have ignored it.
There has also been the most facile interpretation of hedonism that conflates it with crude enjoyment, the trivial enjoyments of liberal consumerism. Others link it to opulent gastronomy—they assumed that this was what my first book, The Philosophers’ Stomach, was about. In that book I took an ironic approach to philosophical gastronomy (damn the ironist!), to the philosophizing body, to embodied reason (which I called the “Lush’s Reason”), to philosophical sensualism, to existential psychology, to the philosophical life, and to alternative historiography. All of those themes are already there in the ancient works of people like Diogenes.
In Theory of the Amorous Body, I tried to round out the image of the porcine Epicurean. I laid out the principles for what I called a solar eroticism and offered a manual for postmodern practice, a panegyric to women, and a libertine breviary in the spirit of Don Juan! They call me a stereotypical libertine—in its well-understood, trivial sense—when I oppose the Platonic theory of desire-as-lack to a Democritean logic of dynamic excess, in the latter’s favor; when I propose a libertarian feminism that celebrates women in contrast to the Judeo-Christian cult of the Virgin, Wife, and Mother; when, in lieu of marriage, I defend renewable synallagmatic agreements; and when I praise the merits of a metaphysics of sterility against the obligation to reproduce.
Pleasure scares people. They are scared of the word and the actions, reality, and discourses around it. It either scares people or makes them hysterical. There are too many private and personal issues, too many alienating, intimate, painful, wretched, and miserable details. There are secret and hidden deficiencies. There are too many things in the way of just being, living, and enjoying. Hence, people reject the word. They produce spiteful critique that is aggressive and in bad faith or that is simply evasive. Disrespect, discredit, contempt, and disdain are all means for avoiding the subject of pleasure.
But I persist in my theoretical and existential furrow: Hedonism, despite the way it is misunderstood, is the vision of the world I have been promoting over the course of thirty books. I have, of course, offered an analysis of reality (see the volumes of the Journal hedonist), but also a proposal to embrace it. In addition to hedonism, I defend totalizing and systemic philosophy, which has also become unfashionable. I defend trying to think powerfully, solidly, in a structured, coherent way. I try to examine all fields of knowledge. Hedonism is the overarching theme; my different works are variations on it. Thus, I have formulated an ethics (Sculpting the Self), an eroticism (Theory of the Amorous Body), a politics (Rebel Politics), an aesthetics (Archaeology of the Present), an epistemology (Anatomical Wonderlands), and a metaphysics (Atheist Manifesto). I’ve proposed an aesthetic morality, solar erotics, libertarian politics, cynical aesthetics, technophilic bioethics, and postmodern atheism. This atheism is the condition that makes the rest possible.