Читать книгу A Brief History of Thought - Luc Ferry - Страница 22

What might this mean? Epictetus is speaking about his child, and what is at stake is once again death and the victories that philosophy can enable us to gain over (fear of) death. It is in this sense that the most practical of exercises connect to the most exalted spirituality. To live in the present and detach oneself from the regrets and anguish that define the past and the future is indeed to savour each moment of existence as it merits; in the full awareness that, for us mortals, it may be our last.

Your time is circumscribed, and unless you use it to attain calm of mind, time will be gone and you will be gone and the opportunity to use it will not be yours again … Perform each action in life as though it were your last. (Epictetus, Meditations, II, 4, 5)

What is at issue spiritually in this exercise, where the subject shakes off all attachments to past and future, is therefore clear. It is a question of conquering the fears associated with our mortality, thanks to the use of an intuition that is not intellectual but intimate and almost physical.

There are moments of grace in our lives, instants when we have the rare experience of being completely reconciled to the world. Just now I gave the example of swimming underwater. Perhaps this doesn’t mean anything to you or seems an odd choice, but I am sure you can imagine for yourself many other examples: a walk in a forest, a sunset, being in love, the calm and yet heightened state of something accomplished well – any of these experiences. In each case, we experience a feeling of serenity, of being at one with the world in which we find ourselves, where harmony occurs of its own accord, without being forced, so that time seems to stop, making room for the enduring present, a present which cannot be undermined by anything in the past or future.

To see to it that life as a whole resembles such moments: that is the fundamental project of Stoic wisdom. It is at this point that we touch on something resembling salvation, in the sense that nothing further can trouble a serenity which comes from the extinguishing of fears concerning other dimensions of time. When he achieves this degree of enlightenment, the sage does indeed live ‘like a god’, in the eternity of an instant that nothing can diminish.

From which you can understand how, for Stoicism as for Buddhism, the tense in which the struggle against anxiety is to be waged is indeed the ‘future perfect’. In effect: ‘When destiny strikes, I shall have been prepared for it.’ When catastrophe – be it illness, poverty or death, all the ills linked to the irreversible nature of time – will have taken place, I shall be able to confront it thanks to the ability I have acquired to live in the present. In other words one can love the world as it is, no matter what transpires:

If some so-called ‘undesirable’ event should befall you, it will in the first place be an immediate relief to you that it was not unexpected … You will say to yourself, ‘I knew all along that I am mortal. I knew that in this life I might have to go away, that I might be cast into exile. I knew that I might be thrown into prison.’ Then if you reflect within yourself and ask from what quarter the accident has come, you will at once remember that it comes from the region of things outside our will, which are not ours. (Epictetus, Discourses, III, 105–6)

This wisdom still speaks to us today, through the centuries and overarching many cultures. However, we no longer inhabit the world of Greek antiquity, and the great cosmologies have for the most part vanished, together with the ‘wisdom of the ages’. This raises an important question: why and how do we pass from one vision of the world to another? Or, in other words, why are there different philosophies which seem to follow on from one another in the history of ideas, rather than a single system of thought which survives the passage of time and suffices us once and for all?

Let’s examine this question in detail through looking at the most recent example: that of the doctrines of salvation associated with the great cosmologies. Why was Stoic wisdom not enough to stifle the emergence of competing systems of thought, and, specifically, to prevent the spread of Christianity? After all, Christianity was to deal Stoicism a lethal blow, relegating it to a marginal position for centuries.

By taking a specific example of how one vision of the world yields to another, we may learn lessons of a more general kind about the development of philosophy. As far as Stoicism goes, we recognise that, however grandiose the positions it advocated, a major weakness affected its response to the question of salvation – one which was to leave room for a competing version to establish itself, and which consequently allowed the machine of history to set off again.

As you have probably noticed, the Stoic doctrine of salvation is resolutely anonymous and impersonal. It promises us eternity, certainly, but of a non-personal kind, as an oblivious fragment of the cosmos: death, for the Stoic, is a mere rite of passage, which involves a transition from a state of individual consciousness – you and I, as living and thinking beings – to a state of oneness with the cosmos, in the course of which we lose everything that constitutes our self-awareness and individuality. It is by no means certain, therefore, that this doctrine can fully answer the questions raised by our anxiety about human finiteness. Stoicism tries valiantly to relieve us of the fears linked to death, but at the cost of obliterating our individual identity. What we would like above all is to be reunited with our loved ones, and, if possible, with their voices, their faces – not in the form of undifferentiated cosmic fragments, such as pebbles or vegetables. In this arena, Christianity might be said to have used its big guns. It promises us no less than everything that we would wish for: personal immortality and the salvation of our loved ones. Exploiting what it saw as a weakness in Greek wisdom, Christianity created a new doctrine of salvation so ‘effective’ it opened a chasm in the philosophies of Antiquity and dominated the Occidental world for nearly fifteen hundred years.