When Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy was published in the late spring of 1926, it was greeted with expressions of great good will for its author and with praise for its lucid style, but not, on the whole, in any fashion that betokened enormous popularity for it. The Atlantic Monthly spoke of it as an interesting and enlivening introduction to the study of philosophy, and the Bookman reported that Dr. Durant’s account of the lives of the world's great thinkers contained "a host of good tales and merry quips." But the prevailing note was on the worthy nature of the effort: people ought to benefit from the study of philosophy, Dr. Durant had made the works of philosophers intelligible to the general reader and, as the Outlook noted, the world was particularly in need of philosophy that year.
The winds of criticism blew lightly over the volume, without force enough to generate much excitement, or to propel it very far in any direction. But The Story of Philosophy began to sell at first remarkably well, and then sensationally. In a matter of months there were 17 printings, close to 30 in three years. Dr. Durant had warned his publishers that a work of this sort could not be expected to sell more than 1,100 copies; he wanted to cushion their disappointment because they were counting on a sale of 1,500. However, within four years it had sold more than 500,000 copies and ranked among the greatest bestsellers of the '205. The total sale reached nearly four million, probably a record among works of philosophy.
The story of The Story of Philosophy is a part of the distinctive character of the book, and a key to its enduring vitality. Its essential pattern was hammered out in lectures to students of philosophy who were mature, intelligent, articulate, but who were also uninformed, and in particular were unfamiliar with the great inheritance of western philosophical literature. They were workmen, and the circumstances that led Durant to be teaching them and to shape this book in the process were a long way removed from the usual academic career. He was himself born in 1885 into a working-class family of French-Canadian immigrants in North Adams, Massachusetts. As the scholar among eight children, he was trained for the priesthood almost as soon as he began to go to school. Education by the Jesuits, a subtle mind and a retiring disposition, together with a profound appreciation of the literature of philosophy, made him an almost ideal interpreter of philosophy in the traditional sense of the term.
But something happened that changed him. He describes the process in his autobiographical novel, Transition, written immediately after the success of The Story of Philosophy. The central figure of that novel is a promising, passive, learning-intoxicated scholar, as Durant was. He sacrifices his chance to study in Europe when he finds his religious faith evaporating. The deeper struggle is emotional: his break with the Catholic Church means a break with his devout, affectionate family, in a series of harrowing scenes and sad reconciliations; it means almost the end of human associations for him until new patterns of life can be woven. The world, Durant wrote, was going through changes that were not so impersonal as history presented them, for they unsettled the minds and morals of men by uprooting customs and beliefs. And the accompanying mental transition and readjustment meant spiritual suffering as well as broken families and friendships.
"Philosophy might be defined as unified knowledge unifying life,” he once told a gathering of philosophers at Harvard; "it is not philosophy if it is knowledge alone, scholastically insulated from affairs," A good part of his own break with his past was his need not to be insulated from affairs, to find himself among all sorts of conditions and men, to test his learning against the teeming, careless, everyday and unphilosophical world.
So from the quiet of the seminary he plunged into the disorder of working-class life in New York, a penniless scholar who eventually found work teaching in an experimental school run by anarchists. At 28 he married one of his students. Bride and groom enrolled in Columbia University together, living on $300 the first year. In 1917 he obtained "We began to have food with our meals." He taught in the department of philosophy at Columbia until 1921, when he organized a school for workmen. In the years that followed, the essential pattern of The Story of Philosophy was formed in lectures and discussions with students who were gifted with that deep sense of economic reality that distinguishes philosophers who are day laborers in their spare time.
The Labor Temple, in which he held his classes, was a five-story building on the corner of i4th Street and Second Avenue in New York, in a region of coffee shops, union headquarters, political organizations, and the offices of radical and revolutionary periodicals. It was a Presbyterian Church founded by a minister in 1910 in an effort to reach the industrial workers whose intellectual elements haunted that area. Theodore Roosevelt, Samuel Gompers and Leon Trotsky were among the many eloquent speakers who appeared there, along with economists, temperance reformers, socialists, single taxers, and other masters of discourse and exposition. At the Labor Temple, Durant’s Sunday evening lectures on philosophy, delivered to audiences of 500 or more each week, and his night classes for smaller groups, became a New York institution.
In 1922, during the second year of the school, publisher E. Haldeman-Julius happened to pass as Dr. Durant was beginning an evening lecture on Plato. Haldeman-Julius was the publisher of small paperbound five-cent books, called Little Blue Books, dealing with such subjects as modern thought, physiology, hygiene, atheism, glands, alcohol, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and such thinkers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Strindberg. From his publishing office in Girard, Kansas, Haldeman-Julius sent Durant a letter asking him to write out his lecture on Plato. Durant refused, but Haldeman-Julius then sent him a check for $150 which he could not afford to turn down, the salary of teachers in the Labor Temple School being $15 weekly. In 1922 there appeared A Guide to Plato. It sold about 100,000 copies, and was soon followed by a Durant guide to Francis Bacon, by essays on Kant, Nietzsche and Voltaire, and by similar booklets on contemporary American and European philosophers 11 works in all.
Except for his doctoral thesis, these were Dr. Durant's only published books before The Story of Philosophy began to sell by the tens of thousands of copies. This work marked a sort of continental divide in American cultural history. If a book that was devoted in a large part to such matters as Kant's conceptual knowledge or Spinoza's substances could thus reach millions of readers, then obviously there was no subject that could not be brought into the common stream of public discussion. The Story of Philosophy was not the first of the mature digests of knowledge that were then appearing: H. G. Well's Outline of History was published in 1920, and Hendrik Willem van Loon’s Story of Mankind in 1921. But it differed from these in the greater complexity of its material and in its wide range of purely literary example in its remoteness, that is, from the battles and pageants and migrations that make the story of human doings more readily understandable than an account of mankind's struggle for wisdom.
It has often been said that Durant succeeded with The Story of Philosophy because of his sense of the philosophers as human beings. John Dewey commented that he did not popularize philosophy but humanized it. The biographical details that pop up unexpectedly in this book are unforgettable, as in the description of Herbert Spencer as a bridge builder, engineer, and inventor of patent saltcellars and chairs for invalids. But the humanizing of knowledge goes deeper than its biographical freshness. The reader who discovers the book in this special edition becomes aware of qualities that were not so apparent when it first appeared. It has a personal and distinctive flavor that nevertheless combines with the rigorous discipline imposed by a textbook or a manual. It has a curious tension that underlies the exposition of the most abstruse doctrine. There is a certain arbitrariness as for example in the choice of philosophers to be emphasized which nevertheless involves no special pleading and does not sacrifice the authority of the work or separate it from the known and general pattern of history.
When he wrote The Story of Philosophy, Durant was, in short, writing a familiar sequence, but he was writing it in his own version. He was daily and hourly testing the story of philosophy against the concerns of the everyday life of that strange being whose works may be more heroic than we believe, the average man. Durant had the drive of his own lifelong love of the literature of philosophy, with its wealth of sonorous phrase and the dazzling brilliance of its generalizations, but he had something else those most academic authors in his field lack the corrective of the challenging skepticism that underlies working-class talk in the realm of ideas. Much of the lasting interest of The Story of Philosophy comes from an interplay between relaxed and leisured discourse on the one hand, and an awareness on the part of the author that he was addressing listeners to whom he must make clear its significance.
Along with these two elements is a sense of the great distance that separated the concerns of the academies from those of his audience. Running through the work like a powerful current is the determination to narrow that distance. The general is brought down to a specific example, readily understandable and yet not an oversimplification.
In The Story of Philosophy's essay on Bacon, Durant wrote: "Of theory and practice; one without the other is useless and perilous; knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind. We strive to learn the forms of things not for the sake of the forms but because by knowing the forms, the laws, we may remake things in the image of our desire. So we study mathematics in order to reckon quantities and build bridges; we study psychology in order to find our way in the jungle of society.”
In his essay on Spinoza, Durant could write that Spinoza "read in Maimonides a half-favorable discussion of the doctrine of Averroe's, that immortality is impersonal; but he found in the Guide to the Perplexed more perplexities than guidance. For the great Rabbi propounded more questions than he answered; and Spinoza found the contradictions and improbabilities of the Old Testament lingering in his thought long after the solutions of Maimonides had dissolved into forgetfulness." Durant's readers did not need to know all about the teachings of Averroe's and Maimonides to understand that passage, nor did it take Spinoza's thought out of the lofty plane which Durant felt was in itself one of Spinoza's great contributions.
The Story of Philosophy was a practical work, the outgrowth of a concrete need. Durant's reaction to its tremendous popular success was thoroughly practical also. He managed to avoid the fatal venture of popular philosophers from the time of Aristotle onward namely, the desire to guide the state by influencing the ruler and, instead of becoming consultant to a political leader, bought a house on Long Island and wrote such works as Adventures in Genius and On the Meaning of Life. In 1931, after visiting Russia, he tried to counter the great Marxist propaganda campaign -to win over American intellectuals that were then beginning, writing Tragic Russia, one of his least popular works. Subsequently he settled in Los Angeles where, through more than two decades, he has been writing his monumental History of Civilization, the eighth volume of which, dealing with the Age of Reason, appeared in 1961.
The Story of Philosophy is exceptional among his own books, as it is unique among introductions to philosophy. It is easier, less formal, revealing everywhere an enjoyment and an appreciation of the subject that overrides any dutiful concern to explore all phases of it. The popular response that it evoked has one plain significance: the lessons of philosophy, tested and interpreted as Dr. Durant has done in this work, still have meaning outside the academies as well as within them, equally valid for the educated and the uneducated, the rich and the poor, the mute and the articulate, their wealth withheld from no part of mankind.
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