Will Durant

1) His Biography:

William James Durant was an American author, historian, and philosopher who lived from November 5, 1885, to November 7, 1981. The Story of Civilization, an 11-volume work he cowrote with his wife Ariel Durant and released between 1935 and 1975, is his most famous work. Earlier, The Story of Philosophy (1924), hailed as a landmark work that helped to popularise philosophy, was acclaimed for him.

Inspired by Spinoza’s sub specie aeternitatis, he thought of philosophy as having a comprehensive viewpoint, or “seeing things sub specie totius.” He wanted to revitalise the vast collection of historical knowledge for use in the modern era by bringing it together, giving it a human face, and making it more accessible. In 1968, Will and Ariel Durant won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and in 1977, they received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

2) Main Works:

The Lessons of History:

The Durants take us on a voyage through history, examining the potential and limits of humanity throughout history, with their approachable collection of philosophy and social advancement. The Durants illuminate the overarching themes of history and give context to our day by juxtaposing the great lives, thoughts, and achievements with cycles of war and conquest.

The Story of Philosophy:

Will Durant examines the lives, thoughts, and perspectives of numerous influential philosophers throughout history in this illuminating and immensely enjoyable book. The author develops a history of philosophy by demonstrating how each thinker’s ideas influenced and counselled the succeeding generation, beginning with Socrates and Plato and ending with Friedrich Nietzsche, with twelve other notable philosophers in between.

Our Oriental Heritage: The Story of Civilization, Volume I:

Learn about the nature and origins of civilisation as well as the history of civilization from the inception in India, China, and Japan, as well as Egypt and the Near East up until the death of Alexander.

The Life of Greece: The Story of Civilization, Volume II:

This takes us through a history of Near Eastern and Greek civilization from the earliest times through Alexander’s death and the Roman conquest.

Caesar and Christ: The Story of Civilization, Volume III:

This takes us through history of Roman civilization and of Christianity from their beginnings to A.D. 325.

The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time:

The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time stays faithful to Durant’s idealism as a thinker who consistently opted to highlight the best aspects of the human nature. The very best of our culture is preserved in this book for the benefit of next generations. This is a compact liberal arts and humanist curriculum in one volume, brimming with Durant’s famed wit, expertise, and uncanny capacity to explain events and ideas in simple and fascinating terms.

Philosophy and the Social Problem:

He produced his first book, Philosophy and the Social Problem, in 1917 while pursuing a PhD in philosophy at Columbia University. He talked about the view that philosophy had stagnated because it had refused to address the real social issues.

3) Main Themes:

History:

The Durants worked hard to write what they dubbed “integral history” when they wrote The Story of Civilization. They were opposed to history’s “specialisation,” which some have referred to as the “cult of the expert.” Their aim was to create a “biography” of the history of the West as a civilization. It would also cover the history of Western culture, art, philosophy, religion, and the development of mass media, in addition to the conventional histories of wars, politics, and the lives of heroes and villains.

The Story spends a significant amount of time considering how ordinary people have fared throughout the course of the 2500-year span that constitutes their “story” of the West. With persistent emphasis on the “dominance of the strong over the weak, the dominance of the clever over the simple,” these volumes also offer an unapologetically moral context to their descriptions. The most popular historical series in history is called The Story of Civilization.

Our Oriental Heritage, the first book in the Story of Civilization series, contains three novels plus an introduction. The reader is taken through the various facets of civilization in the introduction (economical, political, moral and mental). The Near Eastern civilizations are the focus of Book One (Sumeria, Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Judea and Persia). The title of book two is “India and Her Neighbors.” Book three travels further east, where the Chinese Civilization thrives and Japan begins to establish itself on the political map of the world.

On the Decline and Rebuilding of Civilizations:

He shared Oswald Spengler’s belief that conflict between religion and secular intellectualism culminated in a civilization’s collapse by bringing the tenuous institutions of convention and morality to an end. He claims that because of this, the highest stages of every civilization are marked by a particular friction between religion and society. Religion starts by providing men who are worried and confused with magical help; it culminates by giving a people the moral and religious unity that seems to be so beneficial to statesmanship and the arts; and it concludes by waging a suicidal battle for the cause of the past. For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness.

Intellectual history then takes on the character of a “conflict between science and religion,” and priestly dominance of the arts and letters is perceived as a grating shackle or terrible barrier. Law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce are only a few examples of institutions that were formerly under the sway of the church but have since escaped and become secular, if not downright profane. Literature and philosophy turn anti-clerical as the intellectual classes reject ancient theology and, after some reluctance, the moral code associated with it.

The liberation movement fluctuates between a jubilant worship of reason and a crippling disenchantment with all dogmas and ideologies. Without religion, behaviour degenerates into a chaotic epicurean state, and without comforting religion, life itself becomes a burden for both conscious poverty and worn-out affluence. A culture and its religion typically die peacefully together in the end, like body and soul. In the meantime, a new myth emerges among the oppressed, giving human hope and effort new courage and form after centuries of anarchy.

On science and the Bible:

Durant expressed his opinions on how to make the Biblical account of creation and the theory of evolution compatible in a 1927 article. He remarked, that “I do not believe it can be done, and I do do not see why it should be.” There is no justification for torturing the Genesis narrative to make it adhere to contemporary philosophy because it is exquisite and deeply significant as symbolic.

You won’t need me to tell you right now that I am a theological sceptic who does not believe in either the Christian God who punishes and rewards sinners or the warlike God of the Hebrews, Durant wrote in 1967. I observe numerous signs of order in the cosmos, as well as many situations that appear to be chaotic, such as meteors’ irrational whims or planetary orbits’ arrogant deviances from the courses that our geometry would have demanded. (Durant, 1967)

On history and the Bible:

According to Durant’s description of the discoveries in Our Oriental Heritage, the chapters of Genesis that contain the earliest Jewish stories have been given a great deal of credit once again. The Old Testament’s account of the history of the Jews has withstood criticism and archaeological investigation in its broad strokes, with the exception of supernatural occurrences; new evidence from records, monuments, and excavations is added every year. Until it is proven false, we must believe the biblical story in its entirety.

4) His Legacy:

Durant pushed for women’s suffrage, equal pay, and better working conditions for the nation’s workforce. Durant not only wrote extensively, but he also put his views into practise. He worked to make people more accepting of one another’s points of view and persuaded people to overlook people’s faults and misdeeds. He noted in Our Oriental Heritage that Europe was simply “a jagged promontory of Asia,” mocking the cosy insularity of what is now known as Eurocentrism.

He bemoaned “the provincialism of our traditional histories, which began with Greece and concluded Asia in a line,” and claimed that they demonstrated “a potentially fatal error of perspective and intelligence.”