A Brief History of Thought summary

One of the most influential philosophical movements in ancient Greece was Stoicism, founded by Zeno of Citium in the third century BC. To outline it, we’ll follow the three stages of philosophy outlined in the previous blink: theory, ethics and salvation.

According to the Stoics, the universe was similar to an animal. Each part of it was like an organ: specifically created to play a small role in helping the whole body to function. The result, they thought, was a perfectly harmonious, pre-ordained natural order between each part of the universe. They thought this order formed the fundamental nature, or essence, of reality, which they called kosmos. For the Stoics, this order existed within the universe and not external to it, like the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Although Christianity isn’t a philosophy because it emphasizes faith over reason, it’s still a system of thought that displaced Greek philosophy and had an immeasurable impact on the course of history.

How did this come about? Let’s again follow it through the stages of theory, ethics and salvation.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, humankind blew apart its previous conceptions of reality. For example, in the models of the universe developed by astronomers and mathematicians like Nicolaus Copernicus, the cosmos was an infinite void, with Earth definitely not at its center. Meanwhile, in the wake of theories developed by physicists like Isaac Newton, people understood the universe to be governed by forces that could be precisely measured and calculated.

It’s hard to comprehend the chasm of fear this would’ve opened for people at this time. Now that the universe seemed to be infinite and coldly mechanical, humans needed a new ethical order and way in which to interpret their place within the world. Also, with the afterlife now revealed to be a fiction for some, they needed a new form of salvation.

Rousseau’s radical new way of thinking about human freedom provoked a question that paved the way for new ideas about ethics. The question was this: With so much freedom available to them, how could human beings structure their behavior according to clear ethical guidelines?

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant took up this question in the eighteenth century, developing a theory of ethics for a new world in which humans were considered free actors. He came to two conclusions that would dramatically impact modern thought and become the basis of modern humanism.

So far, we’ve seen several watershed moments in the development of Western thought. But we can’t speak of philosophical revolutions without mentioning the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

We can read Nietzsche’s philosophy as a crusade against what he called nihilism. For Nietzsche, all doctrines – from Christianity and humanism to socialism – suppose that there’s a better world to be had and that we should sideline the present moment in favor of striving for it. They all had utopias to work toward and things they valued more than everyday life, like God and humanity. Nietzsche saw these as destroying and denying the importance and value of life as it is. Nihilism was, for Nietzsche, a denial of life.

One criticism leveled against Nietzsche is the following: If we’re constantly trying to deconstruct all our values and thought systems and if we maintain that there’s nothing superior to the here and now, where are we headed? The postmodern thinking Nietzsche helped usher in risks putting the real and concrete world on a pedestal and worshipping it.

But there’s another path. We can take the insights gained from postmodernism and use them to rethink humanism. This is contemporary humanism.