On Love E-Book

Luc Ferry

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 369

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

All the great ideals that gave life meaning in earlier societies - God, the nation, revolution, freedom, democracy - are in disarray today, questioned by many and rejected by those who have lost faith in them. But there is another value, rooted in the birth of the modern family and in the passage from traditional to modern marriage, that has transformed our lives in profound and often unrecognized ways: love. It affects not only our personal lives but many aspects of our social and collective life too, from art and education to politics.

In this book Luc Ferry shows how the quiet rise of love as the central value in modern societies has created a new principle of meaning and a new definition of the good life that requires a completely different kind of philosophical thinking. It forms the basis for a new philosophy for the twenty-first century and a new kind of humanism for the modern world - not a humanism of reason and rights, but a humanism of solidarity and sympathy. The ideal that this new humanism realizes is no longer that of nationalisms and revolutions, of the perpetrating of organized violence in the name of deadly principles that are pursued over and above humanity. Rather, it is about preparing and ensuring a future for those we love most: our future generations.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Preface

Introduction: A Brief History of the Meaning of Life

First guideline: a definition of philosophy as the non-religious quest for the good life

Second guideline: how love finally became the main source of the meaning of our lives

The revolution of love has a profound impact on our ideas about the meaning of our lives: it requires a new philosophy

Far from affecting the private sphere alone, the revolution of love profoundly modifies public issues

Why the philosophies of the past can no longer satisfy us

Four great principles of meaning have, in succession, preceded the revolution of love

Why does the ‘meaning of life’ change from period to period? Is there anything like a ‘logic’ to this history? How does each new ‘principle of meaning’ incorporate each time more – and more human – dimensions of existence?

Modern art, the liberator of the forgotten aspects of existence

How the great successive principles put forward to give meaning to life have revealed themselves, contrary to a received idea, to be increasingly ‘efficient’

The greatness of European civilization resides in its culture of autonomy

One can ‘live in’ old philosophies, but the world can’t be understood in any inventive way by sticking to the old principles

1 The Revolution of Love

How love becomes a new principle of meaning and what kind of love we are talking of. Three reflexive approaches to love: analytical, historical and philosophical

From love as a form of making sacred to love as a bearer of meaning

How the revolution of love is destined radically to transform collective issues and political life

2 Politics at the Dawn of a New Era

The irresistible decline of the two great centres of meaning on which politic has been focused for two centuries: the nation and the revolution

Contrary to the received idea, the twilight of traditional ideals does not announce the ‘disenchantment of the world’, the ‘age of emptiness’ or ‘democratic melancholia’, but quite the opposite: the ‘re-enchantment of the world’

Ecology is the first new political movement that can compete with the age-old domination of liberalism and socialism

The ‘second humanism’ will reorganize all the big political questions under the purview of this new focus of meaning, namely, the question of future generations

The three failings of the first humanism

The heart of the ‘French-style’ republican idea: the human being has rights, quite irrespective of all the ways he is rooted in a community

The double historicity of mankind

Why the first humanism broke some of its promises

The three constitutive weaknesses of the republican idea: nationalism, the revolutionary idea and the colonial gaze

How we moved from the first to the second humanism which led to our breaking with colonial racism

The ‘deconstruction’ of traditional values permitted the advent of charitable and humanitarian action and of a politics turned towards future generations

The Lévi-Strauss moment: the critique of ethnocentrism and the birth of a radical relativism

The making sacred of difference and otherness: the ‘Foucault–Derrida’ moment

The decay of ‘philosophies of difference’: from struggles for liberation to the communitarian retreat

The hollow debate between ‘old’ republicans and ‘modernists’

The humanism of love reintroduces the sacred and the long-term perspective into politics

Two ‘received ideas’ prevent people from becoming aware of the revolution of love

The democratic passions

From the revolution of love to the question of the future of Europe

3 On the Spiritual in Art and Education

Upbringing and education in the age of the second humanism

Love raises as many questions as it solves

From upbringing to education

The three dimensions, Christian, Jewish and Greek, of European upbringing: love, the Law and works

Love tends these days to imperil respect for the Law and the knowledge of works

Love is the problem but it is also the solution

The revolution of love has considerably enriched and diversified our relationships with our children, and this has opened the way we bring them up to new dimensions of human being

Education nowadays has to face three new difficulties

What lies behind these recent failures, if not on the part of the schools, at least on the part of schoolchildren?

Should we motivate pupils with games or does hard work bring knowledge along in its wake?

Certain countries have found a solution to the ‘breakdown of the school system’: how?

What initiatives should be most emphasized to overcome the current problems in schools?

Art in the age of the second humanism

Modern art as an art of the deconstruction of traditions

One ‘deconstruction’ can conceal another: behind the ideology of the avant-garde lies liberal globalization

Beauty and innovation

What should we do with the new dimensions of existence that modern art has liberated?

Modern popular art has, like no other in history, been responsible for the spread of a new sensibility that is part of the revolution of love

Conclusion: Death, the Only Objection? Love, a Utopia?

The contradiction between love and death

Ethics and politics of love: towards a new categorical imperative

Index

First published in French as De l’amour © Editions Odile Jacob, 2012

This English edition © Polity Press, 2013

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7017-1

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7137-6 (Multi-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7138-3 (Single-user ebook)

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Preface

The global crisis in which we find ourselves enmeshed has intensified the feeling that the world is out of control, that political remedies, on the Right and on the Left, no longer have any purchase on reality, that the values in whose name we act apply less and less to our way of life. We cannot continue to give in to this schizophrenia, this bad faith that makes us think of the present in terms of yesterday’s ideas – ideas that are now clearly obsolete. The aim of this book is, firstly, to show how and why this long period of bewilderment is producing, without our yet being fully aware of it, a new principle of meaning that will enable us to regain control over our destinies, give coherence to our way of seeing the world and set up ideals we can believe in; and secondly, it seeks to analyse the profound concrete changes that result from it in the great domains of individual and collective existence, namely, the family, politics, education and art.

The public discourse of republican values (values that are no longer an issue in the debate, since we all support them, from the extreme Right to the extreme Left) is now light years away from the real questions of our lives as we see them (our children’s futures, the most important man or woman in our lives, the coming of a society that will enable everyone to flourish freely). Hence the sterile stand-off between, on the one side, governments churning out endless measures that are doubtless technically or tactically justified, but whose overall aim is clear to nobody; and, on the other side, the anger, fear and indignation that have gripped ordinary people in so many countries.

It would be ungracious to lay the blame at the feet of politicians alone since each of us is prey to the same symptoms. Like them, we defend principles that no longer correspond to the way we act. The same people who protest every day against the snare and delusion of consumption will change their iPhones every six months; those who think we ought to go back to the old grey smocks that all French children used to wear still let their children post images of themselves in skimpy clothes on Facebook; and everyone swears by what is ‘eco-friendly’, but still owns a four-wheel drive – and there’s nothing very fair about that. This is called ‘accepting one’s contradictions’, a haughty way of saying that we are accepting nothing except our inability to choose ideals that we really agree with. In short, our representations no longer match up to the truth of our intimate experience; and this consigns us all to the position of ‘do as I say, not as I do’.

How can this divorce be explained? For over a century and a half, the arts, philosophy and our lifestyles have continued to liberate and then give value to hitherto forgotten, marginalized or repressed dimensions of human existence: to sexuality, the unconscious, the feminine element in men and the masculine element in women; to childhood, and our animal and natural aspects. Baudelaire was not the first to have been ‘as bored as a dead rat’, but he was the first to turn this into art, to reveal all the wealth, the authenticity, the freedom of imagination that can unfold in these moments of ‘spleen’. In this way, he opened up a domain to which we are all heirs. From Philippe Delerm’s The Small Pleasures of Life to Bénabar’s songs, from a weekend at Center Parcs to the ‘right not to be a perfect mother’, we never cease recycling his work, for good and ill. As a result of this movement, paradoxically taken up and amplified by global capitalism even though it originally claimed to be radically anti-bourgeois, private values have become the main source of public values. All the great ideals that gave life meaning (God, one’s country, the Revolution) are now in a fragile state in Europe; love is henceforth the only value in which we all unreservedly believe. This is why education, health, assistance for dependants, the preservation of the planet for future generations and, more generally, all the initiatives designed to foster the full realization of each person have become central themes in the political debate.

But the problem is that the main frameworks at our disposal for understanding collective life do not take into account this now decisive aspect of our existences. Liberalism is no better than socialism or nationalism at integrating private life into the dynamics of public life. Indeed, they do the complete opposite: they reject it from the political sphere on principle. Of course, this was originally done out of a still legitimate concern to guarantee the full autonomy of the private sphere by taking it out of the illegitimate control of public powers. Today, however, it is the opposite movement that needs to be given its due place since it is clear that a growing number of collective issues arise from new common expectations deeply rooted in the convergence of individual aspirations. This means we need to acknowledge that we were mistaken to limit politics just to the managing of interests: in fact, passions have always played a decisive role in it. A reading of Shakespeare should have been enough to make us realize this.

In other words, we are in one of those rare but decisive transitional periods when our frameworks of understanding, our now outdated cultural markers, no longer enable us to find our way through events as they happen, and even less guide these events effectively. This calls for an in-depth metamorphosis in the way we envisage our lives.

When I met Luc Ferry, over twenty years ago, we immediately … had a huge row! About pretty much everything: modern art, education, politics. … I was dead set on giving their full meaning to the new forms of existence that now lie at the heart of our lives, while his main concern was first of all to integrate these new aspects into a ‘non-metaphysical’ reformulation of humanism that would preserve their definitive contributions. In any event, we agreed that we couldn’t leave things there and that the available philosophies were no longer adequate, either because they were immediately vulnerable to the objections of Nietzsche and his successors, or because they led to a permanent double discourse that consisted, for example, in radically criticizing the idea that there are universal moral values while calling one’s neighbour a bastard in the name of these same values.

Since that time we have become the best of friends. Over thousands of hours of discussion, I have gradually seen a philosophy take shape – one that, if I may speak as I find, makes it possible not just for our differences to be overcome, but above all for an answer to be given to our need for a way of thinking that will really shed light on the present world and the very kernel of the lives we live in it. Since neither of us was in bad faith, the human experiences on which we based our arguments all had some truth in them. From then on, the aim of the conversation was not to win out over the other by having the ‘final word’ in the argument but to understand the reason for our differences of opinion.

I now feel that, in his latest books, Luc Ferry has succeeded in developing an altogether original philosophy based on a new principle that gives us a much more direct and profound access to the experience of the world that is now ours. For the first time in decades, or even a whole century, he has laid a foundation and a way of building on it which will enable us to construct a real philosophical system, in other words a way of giving a proper coherence to the diversity of our experiences, and thus of endowing our lives with overall meaning.

Of course, you can always retort that you’re a pragmatist and that you won’t have anything to do with ‘ideas’: after all, why not? And yet, there is nothing more illusory than this affectation of pure realism: experience proves that those who claim that they are happy to stop there are nonetheless forever telling us ‘what we need to think’ about things. The only difference is that they serve up stale ‘received ideas’ which, as we have seen, have nothing very fruitful to say to us anymore. Unlike what many people imagine, philosophy is not of use to philosophers alone, or even mainly. When Descartes constructed a philosophy based on ‘common sense’ alone, ‘the most widely shared thing in the world’, and on the well-known words ‘I think, therefore I am’, he provided us with a framework which, right up to the French Revolution, liberated whole generations whose ancestors had long been at a loss about whether to follow the commands of the Church, those of the prince, the thoughts of Aristotle, the demands of tradition, the wishes of their fathers, or their own free will: you need only read the plays of Molière to see how the characters’ love affairs can be hampered by conflicts of legitimacy. In this sense, everyone has benefited from Descartes, even those who haven’t read him! In the nineteenth century, the limits of the purely rational and moral vision of the world that had led the French Revolution to a complete dead end forced philosophers to reintegrate forgotten dimensions of human life within its purview: history in Hegel, class struggle linked to relations of production in Marx, the will to power and the unconscious in Nietzsche.

It is a comparable revolution which Luc Ferry is proposing to us. But in my view this new philosophy has not previously appeared in its fullest guise, partly because the author, for pedagogic reasons, has given a great deal of room to several other philosophers, partly because he needed to give his ideas a firm foundation by drawing on various analyses (historical, anthropological, conceptual). Probably, too, the very idea that one has put one’s finger on the long-awaited solution inclines one to caution and to a certain discretion in the presentation of one’s discovery.

The project of this book, indeed, is to try and set out, as clearly as possible (this time without any side tracks or false modesty) this new philosophy that we so much need, and to show how it will help us better to find our way in this world of ours, in the most concrete areas of activity. Like all true philosophies, it is not in the least some fanciful idea pulled out of thin air to be imposed on the more credulous among us. Rather, it is an effort to focus on what drives us all at the deepest level – something for which we hitherto did not have the words, or any adequate vision.

Claude Capelier

Introduction: A Brief History of the Meaning of Life

Luc Ferry: First, a few words on the title I’ve chosen for this book. Why this homage to Stendhal? Of course, I was initially wary of reusing his title On Love (De l’amour). I was worried that such a borrowing might seem too pretentious, since he placed the bar so high. Of course, the title should be taken as the expression of a debt of admiration, as a homage to Stendhal’s confession, which I find so deeply moving and with which I can identify so closely: ‘Love has always been, for me, the greatest thing of all … or rather, the only thing!’ What Stendhal means is that love isn’t just one feeling among others, a common passion like other passions such as fear, anger, jealousy or indignation. It’s a new principle of meaning, a principle that shapes a completely new conception of the good life: it inaugurates a new era in the history of thought and of life, as I shall be attempting to show over the following pages.

Although love is, no doubt, as old as humanity, and although it is always ambiguous, being accompanied by its opposite (hatred), its emergence within the modern family – in other words the shift from arranged marriage (or marriage of convenience) to marriage chosen freely through and for the flourishing of love (especially the love of children) – has changed the tenor of our lives, and not just in the private sphere. Art and politics have also been profoundly altered by this change, and it is the impact of these revolutions in private life on the public sphere that I would like to explore in this essay. This is why, in spite of my initial hesitations, I finally decided that On Love was the only possible title for this book.

I must warn our readers that we will not really be analysing this new principle of meaning, and – as they say – ‘talking about love’ straight away, but only in the first chapter that follows this introduction. Then, in the second chapter, I’d like us to discuss how this new principle is going to bring about a radical change at the most collective and most public level of all, namely politics, so as to drive home the lesson that we’re not just talking about the history of private life. Finally, within the same framework, we’ll be talking about art and education.

But in this introduction, the first task is to give a quick overview of the historical dynamic and the human problems that make this change of paradigm necessary. We can’t avoid this preliminary stage if we are to gain a proper understanding of what is entailed by the idea of a ‘new principle of meaning’, ‘a new definition of the good life’ that requires a completely new kind of philosophical thinking. This is why, by way of preamble, I would like to do something I’ve not really done before and highlight the connection between the two main themes that I have discussed in my previous books. On the one hand, there’s the definition of philosophy as the quest for the good life, for wisdom or for a secular spirituality – in other words, the idea that (like religion) philosophy strives to define a blessed life for us mortals, but without going via God or faith. And on the other hand, there is what I’ve called the ‘revolution of love’ that accompanies the shift, in modern Europe, from arranged marriage and the traditional family to marrying for love as it underlies today’s family life.

In my view, these two themes are inseparable in so far as the second theme, which implies a formidable rise in the influence of love as the organizing principle of our lives, necessitates – on the philosophical and not just existential level – a new definition of the good life, of the meaning of life, and of the wisdom required if one is to attain it. Obviously, the history of private life was bound to have an impact on collective, public, and even political life, and it is mainly this which I would like to analyse here. As we shall see, this way of thinking marks such a break from traditional political systems that it is still difficult to discern. The liberal tradition, like the socialist tradition – the two lines of thought and action that have dominated the history of modern Europe ever since the French Revolution – have shared two major features. First, they both relegated everything that belonged to the private sphere and ‘civil society’ to a realm that lay outside the field of noble politics. Second, they considered politics merely as a way of managing private interests in the name of the general interest, whereas – as I will be showing – passions often play a much more predominant role in history than do interests as such.

We’ll be coming back to this. But let’s start by summarizing, albeit briefly, the main guideline of my philosophical thinking.

First guideline: a definition of philosophy as the non-religious quest for the good life

I’ve already set out this theme quite clearly in my book Learning to Live. Philosophy is actually quite different from the way it is usually presented in the final year of French secondary schools. The pedagogic literature on philosophy teaching tends to see it as no more than a general art of argument, a sort of ‘method of thinking’, a training in ‘critical thought’ which would ideally aim at getting pupils to ‘think for themselves’, to become more independent, by doing exercises such as writing essays or commentaries on texts. Of course, I’m not in the least averse to this kind of focus. Indeed, it’s an excellent plan. It’s just that it falls more within the scope of an intelligent civic education than within philosophy as such – to which it is only very distantly connected. If anyone had told Plato, Epicurus, Spinoza or Nietzsche that they were philosophizing in order to write ‘essays’ or to ‘learn how to think properly’, I reckon they’d have simply roared with laughter! Philo-sophia: etymologically, ‘quest for’ or ‘love of’ ‘wisdom’ – the word had a meaning for them, as we can see even in Nietzsche, in aphorisms such as the one entitled ‘Why I am so wise’ …

What I wanted to show, in Learning to Live, was this: throughout the philosophical tradition from the ancient world up to Heidegger, by way of Spinoza, Lucretius, Kant and Nietzsche, philosophy was always conceived – at least by the greatest thinkers, without any exception – as the attempt to define the good life, the highest good, the blessed life and the wisdom that leads to it: in short, as an attempt to answer the great question of what the meaning of life can be for mortals. This is what I have called a secular spirituality and a doctrine of salvation without God. Why? Because, unlike the great religions, and even though they have the same aim in view (identifying the conditions of a good life for those who are doomed to die), philosophy really does try to provide its own definition of the ultimate meaning of our lives, without going through God, without going through faith.

I’m sometimes told that there is no such meaning, that the concept of ‘the meaning of life’ is meaningless, except from a religious point of view, since it would require us to stand outside life, so to speak, if we are to give it a purpose – and this is possible only for believers. Maybe. This objection, however, is based on a piece of sophistry that it would be pointless to dwell on too long. Let’s just say, so as to remove any doubts that might trouble my readers, that in all the major philosophies it’s a question of asking what is meaningful within our lives, what may comprise their final purpose when seen from within. Spinoza, for example – and we can’t suspect him of yielding to any illusions about a meaning that transcends life – never stops insisting on this: there is a final aim that human beings can set up for themselves thanks to philosophy, and this aim is salvation and joy, obtained through wisdom and understanding. He says the same thing in the very last lines of the Ethics, where we find him convinced that he has shown the true paths that lead to a blessed life for all humans willing to follow them. Unlike the ignorant person, who has not read the Ethics or gone through the stages that lead to a true understanding of things, the truly wise person

is hardly troubled in spirit, but being, by a certain eternal necessity, conscious of himself, and of God, and of things, he never ceases to be, but always possesses true peace of mind. If the way I have shown to lead to these things now seems very hard, it can still be found. And of course, what is found so rarely must be hard. For if salvation were at hand, and could be found without great effort, how could nearly everyone neglect it? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. (Part V, prop. 42, scholium, tr. Edwin Curley)

Here we see that, for Spinoza – but he is expressing a conviction shared by all great philosophers – philosophy can be reduced neither to ‘thinking well’, nor even to the idea of autonomy. These two qualities are of course required for it, but they are merely necessary, and not sufficient, conditions for philosophizing properly. For in the final analysis, philosophy is indeed, not an art of eloquence, but a doctrine of secular salvation, a wisdom without God, or at least without God as understood in the great monotheistic religions, and without the succour of faith, since it is through the lucidity of reason, with the means we have to hand, that we are to attain real wisdom. So here we have a meaning, a purpose assigned by philosophy to human life.

As a great historian of the ancient world, the late Pierre Hadot, has shown, in the philosophical schools of Ancient Greece, the aim was not learning to wax eloquent about general concepts or to put together school essays with beginnings, middles and ends: it was learning to live, to attain wisdom. Hence the exercises that were imposed on disciples, among the Stoics, for example. I’ve often mentioned the case of the dead fish which the disciples of Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school, were requested to drag around on a leash in the market square in Athens. What was the aim of this strange exercise in wisdom? It was to learn to disdain what other people might say, the ‘bourgeois’ conventions, and turn one’s gaze to the truth, which, after all, disdains artificial rules. To attain the good life, it’s no doubt better to think properly, but we also need to live our thoughts, not to stay at the level of theory alone.

This theme is also found in Schopenhauer, even though he can be considered the founder of contemporary thought: in spite of the ‘pessimism’ which is all that hasty and superficial readers see in him, the aim of his philosophy is mainly to get through the stage of learning how to think and to attain the good life by following the principles of an ‘art of happiness’, a ‘eudaimonic art’ – titles which Schopenhauer himself had chosen to organize his last thoughts.

Of course, in every great philosophy there is also a theoretical part (generally known as the ‘theory of knowledge’) and a ‘practical’ part (which concerns ethics and politics). Our traditional school textbooks used to be generally divided into two volumes: ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Action’. The doctrine of wisdom or of salvation without God properly speaking is, of course, merely the final stage of philosophy, its ultimate or higher end, so to speak and it, as it were, crowns two other areas whose importance I really don’t want to underestimate. First, there is a theoretical part, generally known as the ‘theory of knowledge’, in which are found the various attempts (empiricist, idealist, criticist or phenomenological, for example) to explain our human ability to forge objective representations of the world and our experience. This is obviously an essential part of philosophy, as I would be the first to admit. The fact remains that this theoretical aspect is always connected with the question of wisdom, of the good life: this is indeed what distinguishes philosophical theories from scientific theories. Of course, the point is to understand the world, to form an idea or representation of it, and the great philosophers make use of the scientific knowledge available in their time (in astronomy, biology, physics, etc.) in order to do so. Despite what is sometimes said, most of the great philosophers of the past tended to be good scientists, or at least they were well informed about the science of their time. And it is worth noting that their theories of knowledge considered the sciences from an original standpoint: it was less a matter of knowing this or that sector of the real, the living things studied by biology, forces and matter in physics, planets in astronomy, and so on, than of trying to create an overall image of the world as the playing field of human life, i.e., as the field in which our existence has to take place: is this world knowable or mysterious, favourable or hostile, beautiful or ugly, harmonious or chaotic – how can we know it, and so on? These were the questions raised by ancient philosophy: they are quite clearly different from individual scientific inquiries. Thus, as is very clear in the case of the Stoics and Epicureans, there is always a connection – even in the most theoretical part of philosophy – with the central question of what a good life for mortals might be. Pierre Hadot brought out extremely clearly how decisive this preoccupation was in the theories put forward by the philosophers of antiquity. Even in the theoretical part, the world is not analysed from an absolutely objective point of view in the way a scientist would see it. Even less is it a matter of analysing one part of the world, in the way a biologist focuses on life, a sociologist on society or a physicist on matter or energy. The philosopher is different: he or she tries to draw on all the knowledge available so as to form a general representation of the world. This again shows that what is crucial is the world seen from a ‘soteriological’ point of view (the quest for salvation) or from an ethical standpoint: the world as the playing field of human life.

After the theoretical part, there is, in every great philosophy, a practical part. The importance of this is also something I have no wish to minimize: it includes ethical and political philosophy. Basically, the preoccupation of ethics is not the playing field itself, but the rules of the game which are to govern the dynamics of life as played out between human beings. How can humans and their relationships be pacified when they are free and thus tempted by egotism, by conflict, by anger? There again, when we look at the great theories of ethics since the birth of western philosophy in Greece, we soon realize that they too are always connected to the third dimension of philosophy that I call ‘the question of the good life’, the question of wisdom and spirituality.

Now these two parts of philosophy, whose importance I wouldn’t dream of denying, gain meaning only when related to a third ‘level’, which I analysed in Learning to Live and which again corresponds to the question of the good life, wisdom, the meaning of life – expressions which should here be understood as equivalent. In every case, we need to define what gives meaning to our lives, in other words to grasp what in the final analysis motivates our actions and justifies, as it were, our lives, sometimes without our even being aware of it – the ‘background motivation’, we might say. This is the first main guideline and I’d now like to link it to the second.

Second guideline: how love finally became the main source of the meaning of our lives

The second guideline is the one that lies at the heart of my book La Révolution de l’amour (The Revolution of Love). It is based on an analysis that may initially appear somewhat historical, but which in reality is essentially philosophical. However, nobody philosophizes on just anything, simply to wax eloquent about general concepts. We philosophize about the real, and in this respect it’s always seemed crucial to me to root philosophical thinking in the natural sciences as well as in the sciences of history. My approach to the ‘revolution of love’ happens to be based first and foremost on the indispensable and enthralling work of historians such as Philippe Ariès, to whom I pay homage, as well as Jean-Louis Flandrin, Edward Shorter, John Boswell and François Lebrun, all of whom gave us new ways of thinking about daily life in ancient times. They founded what is called the ‘history of mentalities’ or ‘the new history’. Instead of concentrating on great battles, diplomacy between states or social classes – all of them fundamentally ‘grandiose’ themes – they dwelt on the warp and weft of the day-to-day life of ordinary individuals in bygone periods: what they ate, how they died, how they educated their children, how they got married, what sort of families they had … In the light of the new horizons opened up by these historians, I have taken a great interest in what, in my view, appears as the main source for the great revolution which our lives are currently undergoing: the shift from the ‘marriage of convenience’, the arranged marriage (arranged not just by parents but by villages), to the marriage chosen by young people based on, and for the sake of, love. ‘For the sake of love’ means for the flourishing of love in the family, the love of children and, more widely, the bond between generations.

This shift from the ‘marriage of convenience’, the basis of the traditional family, to marrying for love and the modern family, was a long process that took several centuries. It began in the seventeenth century – we can see its traces in the plays of Molière where, already, the children are rebelling against parents who want to marry them off ‘by force’. But it was only after the Second World War that this new model became universal, first in Europe, then, to a greater or lesser extent, in the other parts of the world.

Meanwhile, and this is an essential point, the advent of love as the sole legitimate basis for couples and families soon went beyond the framework of marriage and became the rule in all loving unions, whether the people involved were married or not, whether or not they were of the same sex. The demand for gay marriage is, in this sense, the endpoint of this history in its attempt to separate the idea of a union of couples from its traditional principles: lineage, biology, economy. Even in my childhood, it was still extremely rare, in bourgeois milieus, for anyone to get married without their father’s consent: there were obvious economic, social and inheritance reasons for this. ‘Morganatic’ marriages, unions in which the economic and social differences would have been too marked, were avoided. As for homosexual unions, based solely on the ‘right to love’, outside any consideration of biology or lineage, there was no question of them – not even in people’s dreams! These traditional visions, of course, still linger on, but they are gradually fading away and, at least in principle, everyone tends to acknowledge that in this old Europe of ours, love – and I might even say romantic love (since, as we shall see, there are quite clearly several sorts of love) – has become the main principle behind our unions. It is a magnificent but often problematic principle: basing family life on romantic love also means, as we need to make clear from the start, basing it on terribly fragile and shifting ground. Romantic love, as everyone knows (or should know) lasts for only a few years. After, if the couple wishes to survive the disappearance of this love, they will need to transform it into something more stable, a love that is not submitted to but one that is chosen, constructed, developed. A loving friendship, for instance, that will be able to last. The conversion from one form of love to the other is no easy matter, as witness the obvious fact that our loving unions last only for a while: 60 per cent of love marriages these days end up in divorce.

In this respect, we should point out straight away that, while love gives meaning to our lives, it does not always make them any easier. The next step is to claim that marrying for love has failed: but this is a step that I don’t want to take. What woman – what man, even – would nowadays wish to go back to the marriage of convenience, arranged by parents and villages? I will let everyone give their own answer but, as far as I can see, it’s perfectly clear: in spite of all the difficulties it arouses, a loving union is now the only one that appears to us, quite simply, worth having – and this, as I must emphasize, was not at all the case in bygone centuries.

The revolution of love has a profound impact on our ideas about the meaning of our lives: it requires a new philosophy

While philosophy culminates in a ‘doctrine of salvation’, highlighting the things that can give meaning to our lives in spite of death, the ‘enthronement of love’ that we continue to witness is modifying our perspectives and requires a new philosophy. This is what has led me, as I mentioned earlier, to establish for the first time an explicit link between these two themes: philosophy understood, on the one hand, not as an argument or a form of critical thinking, but as a quest for the good life; and, on the other hand, the revolution of love that will entail a new idea of the meaning of life in our societies, an unprecedented questioning that breaks away from the old definitions. What interests me, and what I would like to develop more concretely in this book, is the way in which this revolution will have a profound impact on our lives in the private sphere but also in everything that is linked to collective issues and the political arena. The aim of this book, in fact, is to try and provide a key to the impact this revolution will have and to discern its consequences for the main aspects of our individual and social lives.

Far from affecting the private sphere alone, the revolution of love profoundly modifies public issues

As I’ve just suggested, the mistake that continues to be made by the great political traditions in France, liberalism on the one side and socialism or communism on the other, consists in considering that revolutions in private life affect, or should affect, just the private sphere so that, basically speaking, politics can concern itself with the general interest alone, understood as the regulation of particular interests. In reality, this revolution of love, however intimate the feeling on which it is based may be, will transform every domain in human activity, including the most collective areas.

This is what I’d like us to discuss since in my view there is no substitute for discussion when one wishes to explore a new and as yet uncharted dimension of human experience. Not that love as such is new, of course, and I emphasize this so as to avoid a too frequent misunderstanding: love, no doubt, is as old as humanity – as is hatred. But love had never formed the basis, the unique and absolute organizing principle, behind the family cell as it began to do in modern Europe from the nineteenth century onwards. This was the new phenomenon, one which – if I may repeat myself – would only really take wing in the second half of the twentieth century, mainly in the western world (the marriage of convenience largely remained the rule in many civilizations outside Europe). How will this revolution of love simultaneously provide us with a new definition of the good life in its properly philosophical aspect and, on another level, entail fundamental transformations in the domains of education, art and politics? These are the questions that I would like us to tackle.

I am fully aware of the difficulty of the enterprise. It’s always problematic to try and get people to understand such a radical change, a basic transformation which alters our usual representations in so many different ways, especially in the domain of politics. But the stakes are, in my view, so high that no effort should be spared in the attempt. So the aim of this book can be summed up clearly by saying that we need to focus on these two points: in what way does love comprise a new principle of meaning, and in what way does it modify our usual conceptions of education, art and politics?

Why the philosophies of the past can no longer satisfy us

Claude Capelier: In order to provide a clear answer to these two questions, we first need to explain why the definitions of the good life given by the great philosophers of the past – even though they still speak to us in so many ways – no longer manage to gain our assent: we’ve stopped believing in them, they seem to us to be light years away from our aspirations and the world in which we live.Luc Ferry: In the history of western thought (though not only that), four great principles of meaning, before that of love, dominated bygone ages. It’s crucial to understand how and why these great and ancient principles, although they continue to illuminate whole swathes of our experience, no longer strike us as credible reference points for guiding our thoughts and deeds. There is a paradox here, one which lies at the heart of the history of philosophy: the old principles of meaning still speak to us but, at the same time, they no longer tell us anything really decisive. They touch us, we sometimes find them grandiose, and indeed some people decide to ‘live in’ them – and yet, we can’t help finding them to be in some way definitively relegated to the past, disconnected from our present-day lives. To give you one example from outside philosophy, a person can have a deep love for the music of Bach and, at the same time, realize that it belongs to a time that’s no longer ours. This isn’t an objection, of course, but this situation deserves to be pondered and it is found in analogous form in the history of philosophy.

Four great principles of meaning have, in succession, preceded the revolution of love

How can we give a brief sketch of these four great principles of meaning, in other words, these four great definitions of the good life, wisdom, or salvation without God (to say it yet again, these formulations are, in my view, synonymous), which preceded the revolution of love which we are now witnessing and participating in? What explains the relative obsolescence of a particular principle over the course of history and the emergence of a new paradigm?

The cosmological principle

The first of these principles