I discovered Michel Onfray, as I suspect many have, by accident. In the summer of 2010, as an impecunious graduate student attending courses at the Sorbonne in Paris, one of the few activities I could afford was to browse bookstores. Tilting my head and crouching in the aisles, I would whittle away afternoons admiring, from A to Z, the names and titles of the remarkable French literary canon. During the course of these adventures, I lingered when I reached the Os, struck by the column of titles by this earnest-looking man named Onfray. Beyond the sheer volume of his writing—often taking up several shelves in a typical Parisian bookstore—the titles themselves were compelling: The Art of Pleasure: Toward a Hedonist Materialism; Sculpting the Self: Aesthetic Morality; The Philosophers’ Stomach: A Critique of Diatetical Reason; Rebel Politics: A Treatise on Resistance and Insubmission, among dozens of others. Intrigued but suspicious, I bought the cheapest one and took it home to read. Not only was the French extremely accessible, the book contained some of the clearest expositions of materialist and hedonist philosophies that I have ever read. In particular, his writings on ethics were timely, passionate, and practical, addressing difficult contemporary concerns with ease. The next day, I was back at the store, stocking up on several more titles, which had the same effect. I knew without a doubt that I had encountered a writer who would always be in my head, and I was astonished to find out that only one of his dozens of books had been translated. On his profile page at the Université Populaire de Caen, I found his email and on a whim decided to ask him which of his books he would next like to see in English. The same day, he responded cordially, naming A Hedonist Manifesto: The Power to Exist as the most appropriate choice. All of a sudden I had a new project to occupy my time in Paris (and for the next several years, thanks to innumerable delays and distractions).
As I worked through the preface of A Hedonist Manifesto, I could recall few philosophy books that begin so confessionally, or that employed such a warm and familiar style of writing. Encouraged by his tone and general persona, I wrote to Monsieur Onfray again and asked if he would be willing to meet for lunch if I happened to pass through his town in Normandy. To my surprise, he graciously accepted, and my partner and I met him and his longtime companion, Marie-Claude Ruel, for a wonderful meal and informal conversation in the village of Argentan. On our drive to Normandy from Paris, we were amused when Radio France came on the air, featuring none other than Michel Onfray lecturing on Freud and debating a panel of psychoanalysts over his controversial new book The Twilight of an Idol: The Freudian Fantasy.
Our meeting with him confirmed for me the sincerity of his Epicurean spirit. Perhaps the legendary philosopher of the ancient Greek Garden was not so different from this down-to-earth Norman who was willing to take time out of his grueling schedule to spend the afternoon with an undistinguished American graduate student. For the remainder of my stay in Paris, I noticed Onfray’s presence everywhere: more radio programs; countless YouTube videos, including two feature-length documentaries; and magazine articles, including his interview with President Sarkozy in the popular newsstand publication Philomag (only in France!). These early impressions, combined with several subsequent years engaged with Onfray’s work, have led me to believe that there is no one like Michel Onfray working in contemporary Anglophone literature. While other writers have overlapping concerns, none has his ability to produce broad cultural popularity and significance out of philosophical analysis, nor do they approach the synoptic scope of his project.
Inevitably, he will be compared to the popular New Atheists, who have had great recent success, and this is not inappropriate. However, he is valuable to us in English translation not as a French echo of our contemporary humanists, but for the depth and structure he gives to contemporary humanist goals. Not only does he diagnose major political and social problems, he brings thousands of years of philosophical history to bear on them, exposing how different metaphysics and theories of perception affect the way we treat ourselves, the policies we write, and the relationships we build. Yet he is not a mere intellectual historian. At the heart of his writing is a critical energy and clarity of purpose: to show the deleterious effects of idealism and the benefits of hedonism—terms that are not always well understood, and that he takes pains to clarify for contemporary audiences. In other words, his philosophy talks us down from the ledge of believing that fulfillment, truth, and health must be found outside of this world, and that there are eternal laws written somewhere beyond the sky that we are obliged to follow. Once we are shaken out of those delusions, we can construct new, fresh, tailor-made orientations that make life more bearable and perhaps even enjoyable.
In the United States, when we produce philosophers, they are not rewarded with the fame that Michel Onfray enjoys in France. Thus, he cuts an anomalous figure: a philosopher who, at age fifty-five, has written more than sixty trenchant manifestos, critiques, and treatises; a philosopher—charismatic and telegenic—who has mastered the modes of contemporary media and achieved an improbable ubiquity in his native country; a philosopher from humble beginnings who went on to write multiple best sellers; a philosopher with the resources and social conscience to build a free university for his working-class neighbors in the provinces. If the Anglophone world combined the literary fecundity of Stephan King, the pedagogical passion of Allan Bloom, Martha Nussbaum’s range of philosophical interest, Christopher Hitchens’s panache, Noam Chomsky’s radical leftism, and Cornell West’s class consciousness, we would be in the ballpark. But even this chimera misses the mark. There remains something uniquely French about Michel Onfray. He carries a national mantle that goes back for generations in France, with no clear counterpart in the Anglophone world: not just a vague person of letters or popular science, but a public, politically engaged philosopher with true national influence.
In the past century, perhaps no other country has boasted so many of this ilk: Léon Blum, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, and Sartre, to name a few. All of these thinkers, working during and after the Second World War, applied their philosophical training to the pressing political questions of their time, which most often had to do with the uncomfortable tension between American liberalism and the vestiges of Marx represented by the Soviet Union. This tension exploded and became much more complicated following the calamitous Paris uprisings of May 1968. This event was the paroxysmic culmination of an anti-idealism that had been gaining strength throughout the 1960s, and it would profoundly affect the lives of everyone in its wake, including Michel Onfray.
The French Context: Idealism Before 1968
Of all the French wartime writers, Onfray is closest to Camus. Departing from his contemporaries on the Left, Camus refused to endorse Stalinism as a viable and necessary alternative to Gaullist traditionalism or American liberalism. For other leftists of the time, Stalinist violence was troubling on the surface, but since it claimed a lineage derived from the sage Marx, it was seen as collateral damage in the execution of a noble plan. Such a view is quintessentially idealist, for it believes, coarsely or subtly, that there is some metaphysical thread running through history, some secret purpose or destiny unfolding inexorably, enlisting individuals as pawns. When Camus rejected this view, he rejected a very entrenched idealist understanding of history handed down through the canons of Western thought for centuries.
The idealist understanding of history goes back at least to the Old Testament, and has been defended by Christian philosophers as diverse as Augustine, Luther, and Hegel. For all of them, there is a primordial intent, a logos, underlying events, and it is something we can decipher. Napoleon’s wars, Robespierre’s Terror, and the revolutions in America and France were all the expression of a code, just as the images on a computer are the unfolding of an anterior language. Nationalists of all stripes, supplicants of the market’s invisible hand, and those who blithely accept political and economic collateral damage all adhere to this idealist version of history: whatever happens in the realm of politics and the economy happens by necessity. The wise man understands why it could not have been otherwise.
So desperate were wartime French leftists for the success of the Communist dream in the Soviet Union that they were willing to pour their energies into interpreting a silver lining to the Gulag abattoir. Seeing a need to counterbalance de Gaulle’s traditionalist regime, French leftists were also willing to sanction the widespread use of terrorism in the Algerian resistance to French colonialism. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who was, along with Sartre, one of the most influential Stalin apologists of the time, wrote, “But Marxist Machiavellianism differs from pure Machiavellianism inasmuch as it transforms compromise through awareness of compromise, alters the ambiguity of history through awareness of ambiguity, and it makes detours consciously—calling them detours.”1 What Merleau-Ponty euphemistically calls “detours” includes, of course, mass executions, starvation, and forced labor. For the apologists, however, it is unsophisticated to think of them merely as atrocities; there are lessons to be learned from them. He explains, “History, despite its detours, its cruelties, and its ironies, already contains a working logic in the condition of the proletariat which solicits the contingency of events and the freedom of individuals and so draws them toward reason.”2 Thus, current events emanate from some metaphysical entity—History—and it is up to the intellectual to interpret events to understand why history is doing what it’s doing. It is this permissive, passive, interpretive political orientation that pervades the political thought of French leftist intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century. But they did not construct any radical new politics; all they did was invert the same idealist paradigm as before. Both sides still believed that certain States are destined for glory and righteousness, authorized to sacrifice individuals in the name of that destiny. And if one disagrees with the State in power, individuals are authorized and even exhorted to resort to murder in order to hasten the demise of such false States.
Camus, however, was profoundly uncomfortable with this understanding of history. At great personal cost—the alienation of many friends and the dismantling of his reputation—he insisted that history’s bloodlettings could not be interpreted away or justified as inexorable “detours.” While conceding that suffering could not be eliminated from the human condition, Camus held that avoiding it and mitigating it should never cease to guide our political decisions. Permitting either the State or the individual to use murder as part of a political or ethical process forecloses any hope of partaking in a legitimate future. It is like the vengeful Marquis de Sade who, locked in his prison cell, dreamed of a twisted oligarchy that sustains itself through the murderous consumption of everything other than itself. However, the killers are unable to escape the very logic of their system, and they inevitably fall victim to the violent energies they have been fueling. Likewise, National Socialism, in the final analysis, never truly envisioned its own success. Its essence was negation and destruction, and Camus notes, if it “had gone still farther, we should only have witnessed the more and more extensive deployment of an irresistible dynamism and the increasingly violent enforcement of cynical principles which alone would be capable of serving this dynamism.”3 For Camus, contemporary violent regimes and movements do not get a free pass. Every postwar philosopher recognized the tragedy of Heidegger’s endorsement of the psychopathic-utopian Nazi regime, yet the lesson seemed not to have been well learned. History had already condemned National Socialism and humiliated Heidegger for his myopia and inhumanity, yet Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and the majority of French leftists threw their political lot in with Stalinist communism, despite its well-documented practice of terror. Camus held that individual dignity could not be exchanged for the success of a herd, no matter how reasoned its goals. Knowledge of history should not incline one to passively observe contemporary acts of violence while waiting for them to be vindicated. Knowing history should incline one to think critically of what is going on in light of the lessons of the past. Thus, the responsible intellectual should be willing to judge and condemn anything that falls short of a high ethical standard. Yet it is precisely the construction and defense of ethical standards that eluded French leftists in first half of the twentieth century. They had grown accustomed to challenging the morality propped up by the conservative regimes of Vichy, Pétain, and de Gaulle, as well as the moral principles promoted by American capitalism and the ugly irruptions of Fascism and National Socialism.
If the conflict between so many competing moralities makes one thing clear, it is that none of them is absolute and we must work to create new values—perhaps not just communal values, but values tailor-made for each individual. This is the starting point of Sartre’s existential ethics and Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity—where the individual, thrown into this world, must define herself and maximize her freedom within her own circumscription. In defense of this open-ended ethics, Sartre idealized antinomian figures such as the playwright, inveterate thief, and unabashed sexual deviant Jean Genet.4 And while Sartre’s project produced compelling work, we see that it nevertheless failed to criticize Stalin; for with all its conviction, it lacked the self-doubt needed to take a step back and ask if things should not, in fact, be different. Along with Merleau-Ponty, Sartre settled on a philosophy of abstract metaphysics, penetrating psychoanalysis, and passive politics that “transforms compromise through an awareness of compromise.” But where Sartre and Merleau-Ponty wait for history to redeem Communism at the end of all its “detours,” Camus could not escape his own involvement in the history unfolding around him. He could not sit and watch death and murder without crying out against it, even if this made him appear unsophisticated to his contemporaries. Of the lessons to be learned from the suffering of history, he writes,
I have need of others and others have need of me and of each other. Every collective action, every form of society, supposes a discipline, and the individual, without this discipline, is only a stranger, bowed under the weight of an inimical collectivity. But society and discipline lose their direction if they deny the “We are.” I alone, in one sense, support the common dignity that I cannot allow either myself or others to debase. This individualism is in no sense pleasure; it is perpetual struggle, and, sometimes, unparalleled joy when it reaches the heights of proud compassion.5
This is the perennial challenge of ethical and political philosophy: how to maintain the integrity of the individual without usurping the freedom of others. Why should one ethical perspective be preferred to another? Camus, never convinced of his ability to resolve these questions, at least exhorted his contemporaries to be more critical of the moral relativism they clung to so stubbornly. Cold logic defends moral relativism well, but all for nothing; moral critique and judgment must be possible. Moreover—and here we begin to lean toward Epicurus—they should be founded on the principles of empathy and compassion and aimed at the mitigation of suffering for oneself and others. Values do not derive from a communal destiny, but from the pains and desires of individuals, each longing for freedom.
Camus proffered no system by which we should make ethical judgments. His thoughtful essays and works of fiction make few prescriptions, but encourage us to embrace our self-doubt and think more subtly about our actions and political commitments. He was not a systematic or totalizing philosopher—as his erstwhile friend Sartre unsuccessfully aspired to be—but a gentle critic of the entrenched and stubborn ideologies of his time, someone who began to weave together the philosophical strands of moral rigor, Nietzschean anti-idealism, and leftist libertarianism, all crucial elements of the philosophy of Michel Onfray.
In The Libertarian Order: The Philosophical Life of Albert Camus, published in 2013, Onfray argues that Camus’s whole philosophical intent is summarized in a single line from his essay “Summer,” published in 1950: “In the dark of our nihilism, I only look for reasons to overcome this nihilism. Not through virtue, nor through some rare elevation of the soul, but through an instinctive loyalty to the sunlight where I was born, where, after thousands of years, men have learned to embrace life even in suffering.”6 Onfray adopts the same guiding spirit, glossing Camus’s passage in the following way: “Camus’s philosophy is encapsulated in a single sentence: the diagnosis of European nihilism, the will to overcome it through a positive philosophy, thinking beyond good and evil, the smell of the earth, the visceral memory of a childhood sunlight, one’s inscription in an ancestral lineage, and the acquiescence to life even in its negativity.”
The present book, A Hedonist Manifesto, proceeds from this Camusian starting point. In the preface, Onfray lays bare his own unshakable past and the indelible imprints it left on his life, culminating in the positive outcome of achieving The Power to Exist, even when memories still hurt. He picks up the gauntlet dropped by the humble and self-doubting Camus prescribing a reliable and responsible system by which to make ethical decisions. But he does not offer some entirely novel ethical theory born from his own genius. Rather, he simply proposes the rehabilitation and adaptation of a venerable but traduced ethical philosophy: the Epicurean Hedonism of ancient Greece. Camus was surely sympathetic to Epicurean Hedonism (which he interpreted as an impossible attempt to banish pain and expectation from the human experience) but his principal sandbox remained a combination of the belles lettres and phenomenology that prevailed in his era. The philosophy of the time was still riding the waves made by Husserl and Heidegger, all set against a Hegelian background propagated by Alexandre Kojève and his dozens of students, and to a lesser extent, Jean Hyppolite.7 To endorse the blithe, materialist, pleasure-seeking Epicurus at such a time would have been dismissed as obtuse. Even worse would have been to endorse the most recent advocates of Epicurean Hedonism: the English philosophers John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, who were at once critics of the French Revolution and inspirators of American liberalism. Onfray, on the other hand, under no such constraints, takes it upon himself to reconcile Camusian individualism with the updated and rehabilitated Epicureanism kept alive by English Utilitarianism. He argues, “I would like philosophy to be understood as the construction and decoding of an egodicy,8 a philosophical life resulting from an epiphany of reason, for an existential perspective with a utilitarian and pragmatic aim. All of these converge in one term, Hedonism, which can be further distilled into Nicolas Chamfort’s maxim “enjoy and have others enjoy, without doing harm to yourself or anyone else; that is all there is to morality.”9
Onfray’s philosophical project diverges from a long lineage dominated by Hegelian idealism and the ensuing tradition of phenomenology that has remained an integral part of the French philosophical style. Fueling Onfray’s project is the iconoclastic spirit of May 1968—a cry out against the consequences of France’s idealist heritage, but one that was ultimately reabsorbed by it and needs to be revived.
Idealism After 1968
The events of May 1968 started as a minor dustup between administration and students at Nanterre University. A small group of protestors challenged antiquated rules and regulations, specifically over the school’s ban on coed dormitories. The university closed, expelling many students and angering even more young people in the capital. As protests mounted, President de Gaulle mobilized the police against them in force. This authoritarian display lit a fire under the capital’s left-leaning labor unions and disgruntled workers in general, who embarked on wildcat strikes on an unprecedented scale. Eventually ten million workers walked off their jobs throughout France—roughly two-thirds of the national workforce. Under the threat of civil war or violent revolution, with the army stationed just outside of Paris, de Gaulle was forced to call a new general election, and the crisis was diffused almost as quickly as it had started.
These events forever reshaped the role of the State and the individual in France, and the effects would spill over into many other Western nations. Moreover, 1968 called traditional moral questions, and it had a fissiparous effect on leftist ideology, nudging it out of its Marxist furrow and into a new era, much more difficult to define, that would come to be known as postmodernism.
Undoubtedly, one of the most important influences on the minds of leftists leading up to the events of 1968 was Nietzsche. His antiauthoritarianism, anti-Statism, opposition to the degradation of common wage labor, and general philosophical anti-idealism provided sustenance for a disillusioned generation. Before the 1930s, his work inspired such thinkers as the anarchist Georges Palante, who admired his passionate individualism and skepticism of Marx’s teleological view of history. However, upon Nietzsche’s death—when his right-wing, anti-Semitic sister became the executor of his literary estate and bastardized many of his writings in support of National Socialism—he would be forsaken by the Left for decades. Although Henri Lefebvre attempted to rehabilitate him in 1939, and Georges Bataille in 1945, he was not appropriated by the Left until the 1960s, when philosophers like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze began to introduce him to a young and hungry audience. His antiestablishment spirit (far from the German nationalism with which he had been erroneously associated) even began to trickle into the United States, inspiring counterculture and even reformist theologians such as Thomas Altizer, who on Good Friday in 1966 was featured in Time magazine’s cover story “Is God Dead?”
Nietzsche’s pugnacious and hyperbolic language was imitated by the early instigator of May 1968 Daniel Cohn-Bendit, whose determination to be admitted into the women’s dormitory at Nanterre University was expressed in quotes such as “It is forbidden to forbid!” and “Live life without limits and enjoy without restraint!” While the initial ambitions of the protest may have been modest, it soon dawned on millions that these sentiments could be applied much more broadly; there were far too many restrictions in contemporary French society—in schools, in the workplace, in relationships—and it was time to shake them up.
Yet, as in the era of Camus, this wave of critical negativity failed to usher in a phase of positive value construction. Rebellion relied on an inversion of existing paradigms: idealist Christian morality was flouted by the scatological sexualities of Bataille, Sade, and Genet; the idealist teleological history of Hegel, and even Marx, was thrown out in favor of thoroughgoing nihilism; idealist belief in perfect Beauty gave way to glorification of neurotic semiart. These developments were certainly interesting, but they did not build revolutionary new models.
Camus died in 1960, but had he been alive in 1968 and the years following, he would have been disheartened to see his fellow leftists missing the opportunity to start fresh and establish new and more humane values. This is a challenge Onfray gladly takes up, proposing a way out of the impasse: “There are ideas out there to help us resolve contemporary problems that face the Left in the areas of ethics, politics, and economics,” including ancient Greek hedonism and the much misunderstood Nietzsche. Onfray argues that these philosophical resources should be reclaimed and rehabilitated by the Left to satisfy the ongoing hunger for alternatives to frustratingly entrenched attitudes.
Onfray’s willingness to construct clear ethical standards also goes a long way toward quieting conservative critiques of the Left’s moral relativism. In the United States, the most trenchant critique of this kind comes from Allen Bloom in his best-selling book published in 1987, The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom paradoxically laments America’s embrace of pluralism and tolerance in vogue in the 1960s. He argues that the toleration of all cultures, traditions, and practices, far from opening our minds and helping us see more clearly, simply clouds our moral vision. It makes us afraid and unwilling to judge and weigh one course of moral action against another. It divests the contemporary world of meaning and renders it a directionless arena of nihilism. Referencing one of his heroes, Plato, he writes, “Methodological excision from the soul of the imagination that projects Gods and heroes onto the wall of the cave does not promote knowledge of the soul; it only lobotomizes it, cripples its powers.”10 Bloom’s answer to the challenge is to revive the very idealism that had been criticized by the Left since the 1960s. Rather than encourage students to abstain from absolute moral positions, Bloom believes it is his duty as an educator to guide students to put in the hard intellectual work it takes to finally settle on a righteous moral position. We should all strive to know what Plato meant by ideal Beauty, Truth, Justice, Good, and Right rather than smugly dismissing these values as illusory:
History and social science are used in a variety of ways to overcome prejudice. We should not be ethnocentric, a term drawn from anthropology, which tells us more about the meaning of openness. We should not think our way is better than others. The intention is not so much to teach the students about other times and places as to make them aware of the fact that their preferences are only that—accidents of their time and place. Their beliefs do not entitle them as individuals, or collectively as a nation, to think they are superior to anyone else…. This folly means that men are not permitted to seek for the natural human good and admire it when found, for such discovery is coeval with the discovery of the bad and contempt for it. Instinct and intellect must be suppressed by education. The natural soul is to be replaced with an artificial one.11
Onfray agrees with Bloom’s diagnosis, but he does not give in to the temptation to posit a “natural human good” or “natural soul” unless both claims are thoroughly grounded in materialism: we are circumscribed by the genetic material that makes us up and the environmental material that shapes it. Likewise, there is nothing inherently negative about an “artificial” soul, if understood clearly: the soul according to Epicurus is an epiphenomenon resulting from the collision of atoms within space; it has very many special qualities, but it is not some eternal, sui generis thing.
Like Bloom, Onfray proposes a return to values, by no means advocating universal tolerance. (His critics often excoriate him for his eagerness to condemn entire traditions and oeuvres, such as monotheism, Freud, and Plato himself.) The answer is not to prop up the moribund absolutes of Platonism and monotheism; contemporary nihilists are at least correct in rejecting those phantoms. Just because a value is not eternal and unchanging does not make it meaningless. He writes, “We have to commit to a nominalist ethics in order to avoid relations calibrated toward platonic friendship, literary love, ancillary affairs, bourgeois adultery, tariffed trades, inevitable clandestine trios, and other banalities.” A nominalist ethics is effective, for it accords far better with reality than an ethics that believes, by sheer force of will, that eternal laws exist and only need to be deciphered. Onfray explains that “nominalists use concepts that are useful for discussion, but not for anything else.” We must continually construct and amend our ethics with a constant vigilance, never assuming that it has reached perfection. Here we see the influence of Jeremy Bentham, who in Anarchical Fallacies, published in 1791, warned the authors and enthusiasts of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man that the patent idealism pervading the document was both meaningless and dangerous. Regarding the presumption of eternal, preexisting rights, Bentham argues, “There are no such things as natural rights—no such things as rights anterior to the establishment of government—no such things as natural rights opposed to, in contradistinction to, legal: that the expression is merely figurative; that when used in the moment you attempt to give it a literal meaning it leads to error, and to that sort of error that leads to mischief—to the extremity of mischief.”12 This turned out to be a remarkably prescient warning against the mischief that would follow in the form of Robespierre’s Terror of 1793–1794 when an inviolable Republic was protected with a fanatical, pure, and swift Justice, establishing a “despotism of Liberty.” Bentham could not have dreamed of a worse “extremity of mischief,” and it was all the result of an irrational use of language and a fervid clinging to illusory absolutes.
Like Bentham, Onfray has no truck with such Platonic relics, yet he is confident that we have the capability and the resources we need to construct new positive values that are self-conscious of their own nominalistic precariousness. Like Bloom, he enlists reason to judge between different courses of action, but reason does not lift a veil to reveal an eternal Platonic foundation. It acts as reason does in the scientific method—it seeks restlessly to refine and clarify courses of action that are more satisfying and more humane.
The Anglophone Context
Anglophone philosophy diverges significantly from the continental tradition with the success of Locke’s, Hobbes’s, and Hume’s empiricism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which was incorporated by Bentham and Mill a century later. For them, reality could not be a kind of magic show emanating from Platonic forms in an invisible realm. In terms of metaphysics and epistemology, reality is what is verifiable to direct perception. Ethics ceased to be a game of interpreting eternal principles and became an ongoing construction of conventions aimed at minimizing suffering. However, more recently, Anglophone philosophy has been less concerned about ethics and more concerned with reducing philosophy to a combination of formal logic and cognitive science, all under the umbrella term analytic philosophy, as opposed to the old theology-tainted, overethical tradition of the “continentals.”
A very visible recent example of the state of analytic philosophy, which likes to call itself “academic philosophy,” can be seen in Colin McGinn’s New York Times editorial “Philosophy by Another Name,” published in 2012. McGinn argues,
Most of the marks of science as commonly understood are shared by academic philosophy: the subject is systematic, rigorous, replete with technical vocabulary, often in conflict with common sense, capable of refutation, produces hypotheses, uses symbolic notation, is about the natural world, is institutionalized, peer-reviewed, tenure-granting, etc. We may as well recognize that we are a science, even if not one that makes empirical observations or uses much mathematics. Once we do this officially, we can expect to be treated like scientists.13
The linchpin of this move toward institutional validation is the renaming of philosophy to “ontics,” the study of the fundamental nature of reality. Such a shift would remove the ethical burden that comes along with the label “philosopher,” lover of wisdom, contemplator not only of the nature of reality, but of one’s proper role within it. In ontics, Nietzsche, anxious and euphoric over the prospect of escaping nihilism, is a quixotic dreamer. Even Aristotle is naïve when he writes in the Nicomachean Ethics, “We are conducting an examination, not so that we may know what virtue is, but so that we may become good, since otherwise there would be no benefit from it.”14 Academic philosophy should focus its energies on, and be content with, just discovering what virtue is objectively. Only upon this objective, scientific knowledge of the true nature of virtues can we take tentative, modest steps in the direction of ethical speculation.
Onfray takes a completely different approach. He also considers the role of modern science in philosophy, but not in order to arrive at absolute conclusions about ontics. Rather, his goal, as we see in part 5, “A Promethean Bioethics,” is to use new scientific knowledge to refine the ways we act in the world—to better understand our limits and possibilities. Philosophy is an art of living, not a descriptive science. It does not derive its value from the unassailability of its arguments or the objective truth of its conclusions. Tight argumentation is rhetorically important, for sure, but a philosophy is valuable only if it matters to a real, present, active, embodied ethical life. A philosopher does not construct a theoretical edifice based on the dissection of things outside his self; he struggles and overcomes some pain or anxiety and is driven to share that overcoming with others so that they may not suffer the same way.
Therefore, instead of restricting our philosophical scope in the name of objectivity, the most effective methodology for moral philosophy is that of the autobiographer. With this attitude, Onfray is among the few contemporary philosophers to take seriously the task of strengthening the bond between metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, instead of carving them up into autonomous fields. It matters from where one thinks ethics derive their value, because one will choose one’s actions based on those assumptions. As human beings, perhaps the most objective knowledge we have is of the primacy of pleasure—the absence of pain—as the motivating force behind our own and others’ actions.
On this point Onfray stands firmly on the shoulders of Bentham, as well as Mill, who explains, “The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest-Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.”15 This thinking flies in the face of idealism, Platonic, Christian, or otherwise. Those traditions seek not to adapt ethical principles to maximize happiness, but to temper our demands for happiness in order to better accord with eternal ethical laws. The slave economies, theocracies, and phallocracies that populate our histories and propagate wretchedness are challenged only when people demand happiness and abandon a priori assumptions about eternal laws. Examples of this in the modern world include the battle for gay rights—the first widely read essay in support of which was Bentham’s “Offences Against One’s Self,” published in 1785. Moreover, anti-idealism is at the heart of feminist criticism: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, and Mill’s The Subjection of Women, published in 1869, dispensed with the presupposition of a metaphysical hierarchy between men and women, as well as any ethical imperatives based on such hierarchies. The real social and political effects of such work are immense, but we are still plagued by many of the same problems they inveighed against two centuries ago. Why has moral progress been so slow? For Onfray, one reason is that we have not heard Nietzsche’s cry clearly enough: we still cling to the residue of moribund Christian ideals instead of constructing something new and fresh for ourselves in the present day.
In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche exposes the idealism that pervades popular morality. We celebrate the ascetic ideal, glorifying the weakness and cowardice of the herd by dressing them up in terms like humility, meekness, and chastity. From St. Paul to the present day, we have not been able to shake these guiding principles.
Even after the success of British empiricism and the French Encyclopedists, idealism produced a new hero in Kant, who was able to harmonize the two traditions. Kant’s crowning achievement in ethics was the formulation of his categorical imperative, a universal, transhistorical principle to guide all moral decisions: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”16 Against empiricists, Kant argues that it is unsophisticated to base morality on a sensible principle such as happiness, for happiness is too fluctuating and too bound up with individual desires. Rather, an eternal principle must be found, for “if pure reason by itself can be practical and actually is, as is evinced by the consciousness and moral law, it is always one and the same reason which, whether for a theoretical or a practical aim, judges according to a priori principles.” Where idealist morality had been diligently maintained for millennia by the Christian tradition, Kant now secularizes it; he lets the deity out of the house and reason steps in as custodian. This secularized idealism leads to what Georges Palante calls the secular priestly spirit: an outgrowth of Plato-Christian idealism given new credibility through secular inversion. Palante writes: “The secular priest considers himself a laborer in a disinterested task. Nothing selfish must be mixed in with his mission. He works for the pure idea; at least he claims so, and sometimes even believes it. Nietzsche noted devotion to truth among our free-thinkers and atheists, the final incarnation of the ascetic ideal.”17 Perhaps nowhere is the secular priestly spirit more evident than among the New Atheist authors that have been so successful of late. These writers are motivated by a passionate devotion to the truth, which is at odds with theism or any other kind of supernatural discourse. (For example, in The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris offers compelling arguments for the objective neurological foundation of morality.) They dust off hoary refutations of the deity, shine a bright light on the horrors committed in the name of religions, and defend the reasonableness of a materialist metaphysics. They argue for what their own area of expertise can offer the world, but they generally fail to contextualize the history of Western thinking. They link the ills of today to the noxious remnants of Christianity, but with their secular priestly spirit, they fail to understand the fundamental idealism that preceded and pervades it.
Onfray and New Atheism
In the 2000s, humanistic criticism flourished in the work of Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, who came to be known as the New Atheists. While their literary success is considerable, all of them have been widely criticized for annihilating straw men and failing to offer clear and constructive alternative systems of ethics. This criticism is not so easily leveled against Michel Onfray.
Working in confessed isolation from the Anglophone world for more than twenty years, he has become one of the most vociferous critics of Europe’s Christian heritage and, in the vein of audacious philosophers like Hegel and Sartre, he has constructed a comprehensive, systematic philosophy, complete with a clear and practical ethics fine-tuned for the contemporary West. Onfray’s work, of which the present book is a synthesis, does more than chime in with the New Atheists. While he laments the same theism that they do, for him the real force of negativity is the general philosophical orientation of idealism, particularly the inheritance of Plato and his scion, the Christian tradition. By tracing the damaging effects of Plato-Christian idealism throughout history, Onfray shares a bold new vision of the world, anticipating the concrete repercussions entailed by a genuine materialist and atheist reorientation.
He does not try to hide his distaste for religion, clearly confessing where it comes from: his miserable childhood in a Salesian orphanage surrounded by oppressive, violent, and pedophilic priests and Catholic laymen. With philosophical rigor, he shows how theistic metaphysics and idealist morality provide us with a perfect roadmap to error and pain. Yet he is not content with dressing them down; they are valuable reference points against which to build less mistaken metaphysical and ethical orientations. He systematically offers a path to what all the New Atheists seem to be after but do not explicitly articulate, or perhaps resist desiring: Epicurean, hedonic pleasure.
Perhaps the most Epicurean of all the New Atheists in his personal life was the late Christopher Hitchens, who in his popular God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything elucidates “four irreducible objections to religious faith”: “That it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded in wish-thinking.”18 Onfray echoes all of these points, taking them as the springboards of his philosophy, which differs more in form than in content from Hitchens’s literary intent. Having diagnosed the errors of theism, Hitchens eloquently explains the atheist approach to things:
And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our positions dogmatically: the disagreement between Professor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins, concerning “punctuated evolution” and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication…. We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and—since there is no other metaphor—also the soul. We do not believe in heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever find that without these blandishments and threats we commit more crimes of greed or violence than the faithful…. We are reconciled to living only once, except through our children, for whom we are perfectly happy to notice that we must make way, and room. We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion.
Onfray should certainly be included in these cothinkers, yet he diverges from all of them in his thoroughly philosophical approach. This is not to say that philosophy is the only valid, or even the best, path to the ethical. However, philosophy can go a long way in fleshing out intuitive claims like “an ethical life can be lived without religion.” Epicurus himself dismissed the polytheistic superstition of his time, arguing that the gods may exist—since we do indeed seem to talk about them—but that their divinity renders them merely transcendent and nothing else. We are irrelevant to them, and they are irrelevant to human experiences. Speaking of them only clouds our understanding of the universe. Unlike Plato, whose rigorous curriculum at the Academy was designed to orient the soul upward and away from the coarse earth, Epicurus would have us breathe the air about us more deeply and touch the earth more fully. For Onfray, theism and faith are not intrinsically evil; nothing is. Rather, they must be judged by their consequences: “The invention of an afterlife would not matter so much were it not purchased at so high a price: disregard of the real, hence willful neglect of the only world there is. While religion is often at variance with immanence, with man’s nature, atheism is in harmony with the earth—life’s other name.”19
It is not religion per se that obstructs immanence, but the idealist metaphysical orientation promoted by nearly all religions. Hegel himself diagnosed this problem, observing that Jewish theology and Muslim theology seek the absolute elsewhere, as something wholly other. He saw this as a mistake. These theologies, in which the absolute is alien to our own world, produce an unhappy consciousness that is in a state of perpetual longing and dissatisfaction. Using his philosophical genius, Hegel rehabilitated the Christian doctrine of the Trinity to teach that there can be a bridge between the transcendent and the immanent; indeed, the transcendent and the immanent are codependent and indissociable. But Hegel’s subtle theology, even if correct, is understood and understandable by very few. It is not what is taught in most churches and Sunday schools. Quite the contrary. We generally believe there is some plan, some destiny that may not be understood, but that we can somehow intuit and make an anchor of our conviction. It is not just religions that do this. School history courses at every level lead us to believe in a teleological thread running through events. Pundits and professors of international relations teach “American Exceptionalism,” which any presidential hopeful must be able to convincingly defend. These are merely a couple of the infinite idealist phantoms that populate our world and influence the ways that we act—always according to some hierarchic, servile, or solipsistic principle.
In their frequent debates with believers, New Atheists make the same mistake again and again, missing the opportunity to undermine religious thinking by attacking the idealism it rests upon. Both sides rest comfortably on straw men: atheists provide a litany of atrocities committed in the name of religion, and theists offer the counterargument that atheism produces murderous nihilists like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao. Knowing relatively little about Asia, they pass on Pol Pot and Mao, but eagerly cite Hitler’s and Stalin’s exploitation of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, respectively. Without the aid of these self-serving institutions and the credulity of their followers, neither Hitler nor Stalin would have had the capital they needed to enact their sanguinary policies. This is quite true, but it only addresses a fragment of the issue. If they considered Pol Pot and Mao, they might see what all four of these dictators have in common: they are consummate idealists. They all believed in abstract, immutable, eternal entities that needed to be fed with blood. Most obviously, like Robespierre, they all believed in a State that exists over and above the individuals within it. They believed in the same “kingdom of heaven” or “City of God” ideologies of past Christian rulers; they merely wrapped them in secular dress. They were certainly not nominalists, understanding the State to be a mere convention describing a complex collection of people, laws, and relations; they were not Epicureans or Utilitarians after the greatest good for the greatest number; and they did not heed Nietzsche, who believed any sort of nationalist or tribal pride—the renunciation of individuality—to be the height of folly.
Idealism, and not mere religion, incites mass violence, just as it is to blame for so much individual suffering in the contemporary world. This is where Onfray comes in most usefully—not as a chronicler of past historical thinking, but as someone who sees, right here and now, the harm that idealist thinking does to us, and how to begin to move beyond it.
Leftist Libertarianism
Onfray’s impact in France is not in question. Not attracted to the ideal intellectual lifestyle, he renounced the elite Parisian academia and taught high school in his native Normandy for over two decades. Not accepting the ideal style of philosophical writing, he penned dozens of books meant for a wide audience, most unfamiliar with philosophy. Not limiting himself to the ideal philosophical outlets of article, monograph, and cloistered lecture, he frequents radio and television programs and founded his own free university, inspired by the ethos of Epicurus’s Garden, open to everyone. He rankles the psychoanalytic industry, not as the Scientologists do in the United States, but through an erudite and tightly argued six-hundred-page critique of Freud’s own method.20 And while remaining on the fringe, he writes prolifically about contemporary French politics, teaching his large readership about libertarian principles and why the current Left is an illusion. This final point is not unheard of in the United States, for it was the general sentiment of the loud, if inchoate, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement of 2011. This movement, unsatisfied with the spineless collaborationism that passes for leftism in American politics, could have used a philosopher like Onfray on their side, joining lonely voices like those of Noam Chomsky to unite individualism with responsibility, anarchism with compassion, and resistance with clarity of purpose.
This is not to say that any new anarchist movement must have a clear philosophical system undergirding it. Certainly May 1968 in France did not unfold according to some theoretical plan, and much of OWS’s power stemmed from its spontaneity and explicit refusal to label itself. However, it stands to reason that if anarchism is to become a lasting and effective alternative to our dominant liberalism, there should be a more thorough understanding of its history and variations; only then can American activists refine what might work best for their communities, communicate clear messages, and gain converts. Indeed, contemporary American political discourse, dominated by corporate cable news, reflects very little general understanding of any political theory. How many times have we heard conservative lawmakers or presidential candidates massacre the basic principles of socialism, completely conflating it with communism, or conflating both of them with modest government regulation of the private sector? If even our own legislators are ignorant about basic socialism, what need is there to speak of anarchism? The very word anarchism generates sneers and summary dismissal. To the vast majority of Americans, it is a laughable, ridiculous dream of dreadlocked marijuana enthusiasts and vandals. How could it possibly be taken seriously?
One of Onfray’s goals has always been to rehabilitate terms that have been vitiated by long traditions of biased idealist thinking. First on his agenda is to rehabilitate the term hedonism from thousands of years of abuse at the hands of Christianity, whose self-hating, sickly attitude is antithetical to that of Epicurus. In the fragments that survive of Epicurus’s words and in Lucretius’s Epicurean masterpiece De Rerum Natura, there is nothing of Dionysian excess or of nihilism giving way to despair. There is just a commitment to this life, this earth, this body, and these friends, which are the only things we can hold to. Accused of gluttony by festooned clerics, Epicurus merely asks them to “send me a pot of cheese, so that I may have a feast when I care to.” Steven Greenblatt, in his popular book The Swerve, contributes to Epicurean rehabilitation, arguing that Lucretius’s worldview is at the heart of what we think of as modernity. Plato-Christians have tried to hide this influence, much to our impoverishment.
Anarchism needs a similar revival. Fear-mongering elites have fought to convince us all that anarchism means chaos and hopelessness, and that it does not merit serious consideration. However, if only we looked a little more deeply into the principles articulated by people like Palante, Bakunin, and Proudhon, we would see that from its infancy, anarchism as a political orientation never advocates a dystopian free-for-all. In fact, serious anarchism is far more in line with what we often intend when we use the term libertarianism.
In the contemporary United States, libertarianism has taken on a strange national flavor. Generally associated with the Republican Party, and more recently the Tea Party, it chooses its battles very carefully. Libertarians pine for a moratorium on taxation, as well as moratoriums on government regulation of commerce, labor, and the traffic of firearms. But American libertarians’ ambitions tend to stop there. They still call for government sponsorship of Christian doctrine and regulation of nontraditional social practices like same-sex marriage. Thus, it boils down to a harsh economic individualism and ethical egoism à la Ayn Rand.
This is a sad and incomplete politics that does not conduce to civilized and enlightened society. American libertarianism could give itself much more substance by incorporating properly understood principles of anarchism, such as the emphasis placed on the coalition of individuals found in anarcho-syndicalism. The bunker-mentality aspect of American libertarianism is largely responsible for its stunted growth and inability to become a viable political alternative—one that might produce new ideas, agendas, and parties, breaking us out of our stagnant two-party deadlock and providing meaningful options to our sometimes directionless “independent” voters.
The Left need not concede libertarianism to the Right. By incorporating theoretical anarchism and staunch individualists like Nietzsche, American progressives may gain new life. They may realize that Marxism and state socialism are not the only options, and they may better resist the siren call of hysterical leftist idealists like Slavoj Žižek, who teaches us to admire Robespierre’s Terror and, ensconced at our desks, to not fear the prospect of blood running in the streets.21 While Onfray is not yet a household name on this side of the Atlantic, we may hope that his work in translation will make him an effective ally to Americans disillusioned by the speciousness of the institutional Left and rudderlessness of a Left yet to be.
New Directions
What else does Onfray have to offer the Anglophone world? He is a repository of alternative attitudes about sexuality, bioethics, and art. Of course, these topics are well covered by our own authors, but no one else weaves these threads together as tightly, exposing the intransigent conservatism that results from idealist clinging in so many areas. He shows that other models and other angles are not only possible, but better.
For example, one of the most vital social revolutions of our time is the rapid validation of marriage for homosexuals, as well as the recognition of many other legal rights. While Onfray did not need to nudge this movement along, his work elegantly describes this transformation as the crumbling of moribund ideals, that is, the belief in an eternal, inviolable category of marriage that exists in a perfect form somewhere outside the realm we live in and see. Feminist critique and queer theory have stood on this same antiessentialist foundation and can only benefit from a more thorough understanding of their implicit but fundamental opposition to the legacy of Platonism. By wedding metaphysical antiessentialism with systematic ethical hedonism, Onfray paves the way for new combinations of thought. Libertarian and libertine feminism becomes easier to imagine and discuss, as do new approaches to bioethics. When Platonic ideas are invalidated, it becomes harder to argue that stem-cell research infringes on some eternal, mystical human sanctity.
In addition to these issues alive and well in the news, Onfray’s comprehensive hedonism gives us resources to think differently about more subtle parts of our lives. It is not often that we hear cogent critiques of procreation itself, which most of us still consider the ultimate purpose of human life. But such thinking is patently idealist; it shows how much we cling to metaphysical categories outside of ourselves and how much we believe our lives house some inherent teleological purpose rather than a purpose of our own devising. Marriage itself, or the compulsion to live in lifelong monogamy for the good of society, becomes questionable for those who renounce metaphysical idealism. The sex-positive movement knows this, and countless people have benefited from the light-hearted erotics validated by popular figures like Dan Savage. Recently, transgender activism has seen great advances, leading people away from the fear and anger that often arise when sacred sex and gender categories are called into question.
Onfray only adds substance and structure to what many intuit, giving them historical context and pointing out interrelated issues. As his work gradually reaches the English-speaking world, I hope that our discourses will absorb some of the style, clarity, and ethical conviction he has offered France for decades.
A Note on the Translation
Jargon, neologism, and polyvalence are not integral to Onfray’s work. Therefore, there are few technical challenges to translating him. Self-consciously departing from the obscurity of most continental philosophy, Onfray’s style is closer to William James than Derrida or Lévinas, and thus feels quite at home in the succinct conventions of English. Yet part of Onfray’s immense appeal and success as an author is the informal flair and energy of his style. Thus, the general methodology of the translation has been to attempt to capture that flair, sometimes at the cost of literal fidelity. The most common license I have taken is probably the shortening of sentences with the insertion of periods. The average French sentence runs longer than the average English one, and it employs the passive voice liberally, without any negative connotation of passiveness. Therefore, since Onfray’s points almost never hinge on tricks of language, the ease of his writing is best captured in the natural cadence and active voice of English.
Another characteristic of Onfray’s antischolastic style is his rejection of footnotes. The original text contains no annotations; therefore, it should be understood that all annotations have been added by the translator to clarify philosophical and cultural references that may be unfamiliar to the average Anglophone reader.
Finally, special thanks to Beverley Robinson for help with translating many passages, Scott McClellan for editing several versions of the manuscript, and Joseph Blankholm for feedback on the introduction.