Learning to Live: A User's Manual: A Users Manual [Kindle Edition]

This is an excellent, readable, inspiring and timely book. Luc Ferry protests that academic philosophy has become too technical, specialised and arid. Instead he develops a fresh focus for philosophy on the great themes and questions of life. Greek philosophy derived from harmony in the cosmos, whilst Christian thinking emphasised the individual's discordant nature. Cartesian thought introduced equality, individualism, the value of work and most importantly subjectivity, the individual's tabula rasa, and a rejection of tradition and authority as the basis of truth. Modernity offered alternatives of scientism, patriotism and communism whilst Nietzsche's deconstruction championed the 'will to power', 'amor fati',and his 'Grand Style' of assimilating perceived reality. Heidegger warned of the domination of technology.

This is all educative, interesting and compelling. But Ferry's greatest contribution is his assertion of the inadequacy of materialism and mere physicalism, and his well argued insistence on transcendence in immanence as the greater human reality. Agreeing with Husserl, Ferry develops the implications and fulness for humanity of a transcendence which materialism has denied. In so doing he offers a philosophy which renders us more fully human without resorting to religious creed.

The back cover of the 2010 Canongate paperback edition of this book posed three questions: What is philosophy; what is it for?; and why does it make a difference to me? Luc Ferry the French philosopher author of this book set out to answer these questions and he did so admirably, clearly, and in the course of which he provided a broad and fascinating outline of the general eras of philosophy as he understood it. It was a brilliant and enticing account of the rise of philosophy in ancient Greece, leading to the rise -and decline of Christianity because of science and the renaissance. Then he described the decline of philosophy through the pessimistic influence of Nietzsche. Nietzsche has been a difficult and enigmatic philosopher yet ferry discussed the importance and influence of Nietzsche so clearly and simply one wonders why Nietzsche was ever thought of as a difficult philosopher to understand. Finally, ferry brings us out of the pessimistic and chaotic picture of the cosmos of Nietzschean philosophy and gives the reader a renewed hope in the form of Ferry's view of humanistic philosophy. Ferry is not a Christian but holds a charitable view of Christianity - a welcome perspective to those tired of Dawkins and Hitchens.

This book is not so much an introduction to philosophy, as the sub-title claims, as an introduction to Humanism from a continental perspective. In the English-speaking world we are used to approaching Humanism (ie a world-view which dispenses with the supernatural, including gods, goddesses, life after death and holy books) from the viewpoint of British empiricism, with a strong Positivist orientation towards science and a dislike of metaphysical systems. Continental philosophy by contrast has been heavily influenced by Catholic theology, especially the system-building of Aquinas and the scholastics. That kind of philosophy typically starts from a set of axioms (eg God made man in his own image) and builds a system of thought from there, rather than depending upon experience and scientific research, which accumulates knowledge piecemeal. So it was interesting to see how Ferry could find a way through the works of typical continental philosophers, adapting some ideas and discarding others, to arrive at a Humanism which has much in common with its Anglophone counterparts.

Ferry's explorations of the philosophy of Nietzsche provide a case in point. The anti-religion and anti-Christian pronouncements of Nietzsche are well known, as is the link between his anti-democratic, amoral will-to-power and Nazi rhetoric. But Ferry digs deeply into Nietzsche's philosophy in order to show us not only the fatal flaws in his reasoning, but also the nuggets of truth which are embedded there, for example, that tragedy and heroism find their true meaning in a culture which abjures life after death and accepts that life ends in death. If Hamlet does not die at the end of the play, but carries on speechifying somewhere else, then the tragedy of the ending is lost. Tragedy only makes sense in a Humanist culture.

The end of the book, however, struck me as something of a regress to rationalist system-building again. Ferry is concerned to refute a reductive scientism which is totally materialist and determinist. He argues for mind, intentionality, free will and moral responsibility, as would most Humanists. But he does so with the help of Heidegger, which means a deal of intellectual fog gathers. I think that John Searle would have been a better guide in that territory. Searle keeps his feet on the ground and argues for the human dimension (mind, free will, etc) without using the jargon of old-style metaphysics.

Well worth reading, with a challenging conclusion.