An
interview with Heroes of History editor
and Estate historian John Little
When did
you first discover the writings of Will Durant?
There was a copy of
Durant’s The Story of Philosophy in our
household when I was growing up; my father had read
Durant and liked his presentation of the ideas and
lives of the greater thinkers from the Western
tradition and, when I came to the "age of
inquiry," which is to say teen years, I thought
philosophy would be a good tool to have in my arsenal
as I prepared to face and question the world outside
of my home. That book offered to give me its
"secrets" without obscurity or without my
having to be trained in another language such as that
spoken by most collegiate metaphysicians and
epistemologs. The ideas and their vitality to my life
were immediately apparent. That particular book, by
the way, has had a very enduring influence and is
responsible for introducing more people to the
subject and study of philosophy than, perhaps, any
other book. It was first published in 1926 and is
still – some 75 years later – the leading
seller for introductory texts to philosophy. I
recently checked Amazon.com and was delighted to see
that it was still in the top 1,800 of its book sales
– out of Amazon’s catalogue of millions of
titles!
Why do you
think Durant’s philosophy writings have proven
so popular?
Well, Durant made
philosophy – and, later, history -- intelligible
to vast numbers of people; he created a better
frequency by which to transmit its message which
resulted in people clearly understanding its message
and its significance to human existence. Durant was
what Walter Kaufmann once said of Nietzsche: "a
philosopher that a great many intelligent people read
for the sheer pleasure of it."
I well remember the photo of
Mohandas Gandhi sitting in his humble way, totally
absorbed in reading Durant’s The Case for
India – which is interesting in itself to
consider; here was a man with a sub-continent on his
head, and laboring for the liberation of 320,000,000
people; a man who had "zero" leisure time
and yet he made time for -- and presumably
found a certain degree of emotional refueling in
– reading the words of Will Durant. Apart from
the Pulitzer committee, who awarded Durant its
coveted award in 1968, Durant’s insights and
prose inspired and impressed everyone from Presidents
such as Jimmy Carter, Harry Truman and Ronald Regan
to literary figures such as George Bernard Shaw and
H.L. Mencken, to philosophers such as Bertrand
Russell and John Dewey, to public defenders such as
Clarence Darrow who once remarked, "There are
few people whom I have ever known for whom I have a
higher regard and a greater appreciation. I’d
rather have written his book on The Story of
Philosophy than to have done anything or
everything that I ever did."
This said, it was
always for the common man and woman that Durant
wrote, believing that philosophy was not to be the
playground of professional academics, but a pastime
that was available to all who wished to better
understand the meaning of life. The Story of
Philosophy sold a million copies – a million
copies, for a philosophy book! – in its first
year of publication, alone.
What drew
you to Will Durant’s work?
I was drawn to the
humaneness of it; Durant always wrote with an
understanding and forgiving eye and spoke with
unparalleled erudition and eloquence on the greatness
of our human heritage. Listen to this phrase from the
opening chapter of Heroes of History as but one
example:
I will not
subscribe to the depressing conclusion of
Voltaire and Gibbon that history is "the
record of the crimes and follies of
mankind." Of course it is partly that, and
contains a hundred million tragedies -- but it is
also the saving sanity of the average family, the
labor and love of men and women bearing the
stream of life over a thousand obstacles. It is
the wisdom and courage of statesmen like Winston
Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, dying exhausted
but fulfilled; it is the undiscourageable effort
of scientists and philosophers to understand the
universe that enveloped them; it is the patience
and skill of artists and poets giving lasting
form to transient beauty, or an illuminating
clarity to subtle significance; it is the vision
of prophets and saints challenging us to
nobility.
On the turbulent
and sullied river, hidden amid absurdity and
suffering, there is a veritable City of God, in
which the creative spirits of the past, by the
miracles of memory and tradition, still live and
work, carve and build and sing. Plato is there,
playing philosophy with Socrates; Shakespeare is
there, bringing new treasures every day; Keats is
still listening to his nightingale, and Shelley
is borne on the west wind; Nietzsche is there,
raving and revealing; Christ is there, calling to
us to come and share his bread. These and a
thousand more, and the gifts they gave, are the
Incredible Legacy of the race, the golden strain
in the web of history.
We shall not close
our eyes to the evils that challenge us -- we
shall work undiscourageably to lessen them -- but
we shall take strength from the achievements of
the past; the splendor of our inheritance. Let
us, varying Shakespeare’s unhappy king, sit
down and tell brave stories of noble women and
great men.
Such eloquence
actually causes me to pause in wonder and
appreciation. Will Durant is the only philosopher I
have ever read, besides Plato and Nietzsche, who can
lift philosophic prose into the realm of poetry. He
is without question the greatest prose stylist
philosophy has ever had to represent it – and
that’s saying something. Bertrand Russell, for
example, wrote in illuminating and concise prose;
writing, like Durant, for clarity rather than
reputation. But he was still of a very scientific
mindset which made some of his texts such as Human
Knowledge, It’s Scope and Limits and Principles
of Mathematics read like textbooks in science and
mathematics, respectively, which, apart form the odd
spark given off by Russell's renowned wit, were
rather austere reads. Durant's writings, by contrast,
are like a crackling fire;
which not only comforts the soul, but fills the
entire room with its illumination. He glorified the
achievements of men and women in the fields of art,
literature, science, philosophy and the humanities in
a spirit that sought to understand and forgive –
rather than to critique and vilify, which I found
both refreshing and inspirational.
What sets
Will Durant apart from other philosophers?
Durant advanced a philosophy
that was very "this world" oriented; many
philosophers claim their metaphysics for example to
be based on "what is" or reality – but
closer inspection reveals their beliefs to be
tethered to the clouds of abstraction; which is to
say, mental gymnastics rather than the realities of
life and man. Durant turned his back on that sort of
philosophy as he found it insensitive to the element
of vitality that he found in himself and in
everything else. Science can tell you how to measure
things in space but it did not answer the fundamental
question of "what is man?" As a result
Durant looked to history for it was in man’s
past that one could really see the "what
is" – how man actually behaved. History
was, when viewed from Durant’s perspective, not
simply dates and records of events, but
"philosophy teaching by example." From his
broad survey of history he cultivated a philosophy of
perspective, not sectarianism; understanding, not
ridicule; which has resulted in millions the world
over coming to envision a better way for human beings
to live in harmony with one another and to live more
meaningful and enlightened lives. He was discouraged
to find that most of the philosophers over the past
two hundred years or so were content merely to study
and write about the various parts of philosophy, but
never to see that these parts existed in relation to
a greater whole; the well-being of mankind. In
reflecting back on the philosophic journey of his
life in the late 1960s, Durant recalled his
displeasure with the philosophic establishment,
stating that:
Philosophers were
losing themselves in epistemology –
endlessly discussing the processes of knowledge
– instead of going on to apply philosophic
perspective to the actual problems of life. I
pleaded with the professors to advance from
epistemology, logic, and metaphysics to such
questions as our changing morals, our dissolving
marriages, the goals of education, the
improvement of conduct and character, the ideals
of art, the meaning of history, the reality of
progress, the relation of ethics to politics, the
responsibilities and possibilities of
statesmanship, the conflicts of nature and
civilization, of East and West, of communism and
liberty, of faith and doubt, and the silent but
pervasive flight of the intellectual classes from
religion to secularism in modern states.
Whether in prose or in
debate, Durant saw human beings not as many of his
philosophical contemporaries did, i.e., as tragic or
comedic automatons in an indifferent universe, but as
beings that could, when sufficiently inspired, rise
to levels of genius and heroism. I came away from
reading Will Durant revitalized and feeling
surprisingly good about the human race. To put a
sharper point on the question of what sets Durant
apart from other philosophers, I think that
philosophers today are still missing the bigger
picture; the perspective that a "love of
wisdom" should instill. They are like the man
who wishes to build a home by calling to his site
bricklayers, carpenters and electricians – but
neglecting to fashion a blue print. The materials are
useless if they are not purposefully employed and
likewise the various branches of philosophy. I
suppose it’s impressive to train your thoughts
to do full, twisting back layouts over the vault of
the mind – but to what end? Does this
accomplishment make for a happier life? Does it make
you more understanding and forgiving? Does it teach
you about man’s nature? Does it reduce racial or
religious intolerance? Does it make for a better
life? For a better world? Durant, by contrast, was a
thinker who saw philosophy as vital to such everyday
issues as life, death, love, parenting, marriage,
political policy, adversity, racism and living a more
rewarding life.
As an example, unlike
the cloistered academics who turn up their noses at
Durant’s attempt to bring philosophy back into
the arena of human affairs, Durant was not content
merely to write articles for peer-reviewed journals;
he took his beliefs to the people, fighting for equal
wages, women’s suffrage and fairer working
conditions for the American labor force. Durant even
drafted a "Declaration of Interdependence"
in the early 1940s – presaging the "Civil
Rights Movement" by some two decades – and
calling for, among other things:
Human dignity and
decency, and to safeguard these without
distinction of race or color or creed; to strive
in concert with others to discourage animosities
arising from these differences, and to unite all
groups in the fair play of civilized
life…Rooted in freedom, children of the same
Divine Father, sharing everywhere a common human
blood, we declare again that all men are
brothers, and that mutual tolerance is the price
of liberty.
No other philosopher
of his caliber or generation spent the time or the
effort to combat racial and religious intolerance so
stridently in so early a stage in America’s
history. Durant pursued this issue so vigorously that
his ‘Declaration’ was introduced into the
Congressional Record on October 1, 1945. We would
have to wait until the arrival of Dr. Martin Luther
King on the Civil Rights scene -- some ten years
later -- to hear such eloquence on this issue again.
By what
name would you call Durant’s philosophy of life?
Had he ever chosen to
give his creed a name, it might well have been called
"Perspectivism" -- as that was his council;
to see the part in the light of the whole. To see
human nature against the backdrop of our actual
history and the practical effects and consequences of
certain ideas that went with and against the grain of
human nature. Whereas Spinoza, who was Durant’s
personal favorite among the philosophers, had sought
to see things sub specie eternitatis –
that is, "in view of eternity;" Durant
believed that such a view was not possible for human
beings to envision because human beings are not
eternal but temporal beings. Instead, Durant
suggested we seek to see things sub specie totius
– "in view of the whole;" that
is, from as broad a perspective as possible.
Has
professional philosophy (i.e., philosophy as taught
and practiced in Colleges and Universities) changed
since Will Durant came on the scene?
In certain respects;
since Durant came on the scene, there has been a
greater receptivity to ideas that have a broad
practical value; people are not as inclined to
discount a man’s viewpoint simply because he is
not lettered in philosophy as they might have been in
times past. Although Durant received his PhD. in
philosophy from Columbia, he never referred to
himself as "Dr. Durant" and never by-lined
himself with that title. It was always the value of
the idea, rather than the vehicle of its delivery
that was of interest to him. After all, neither
neither Plato nor Aristotle were PhDs, but few today
would doubt the significance of their thought. On the
other hand, the situation that Durant fought against
is still in existence; philosophers today, as in
Durant’s day, have in many respects abdicated
their moral responsibility to society; they’ve
retreated from the real world by burying their heads
in the sand castles of Epistemology; they are well
versed in means but ignorant of ends; they have lost
sight of the forest by focusing their gaze too
intensely on particular trees – or even, with
the majority of metaphysicians and epistemologs, upon
the bark of a particular tree. Durant implored them
to come out of the classroom and into the world.
How did
your involvement with the estate of Will Durant come
about?
For years I had wanted
to do something that would point out the significance
of Will Durant’s ideas and work and the best way
to accomplish this was, obviously, to work with his
estate. It occurred to me that the odds were that
someone who lectured and wrote so extensively about
philosophy and history over a period of some 60 years
would probably have left behind a much greater wealth
of concentrated lore, unpublished treatises and
life-changing ideas. I was right. I wanted, for
purely selfish reasons, to have Will Durant as
"my teacher" for philosophy and history; to
be his student as he played Virgil to my Dante;
guiding me through the "Country of the
Mind." You come out of such an enterprise a much
different person than you were when you went in and I
would rather be taught by Will Durant than any other
professor that I could think of. I also thought that
I could organize and edit his materials competently
so that they would be meaningful to a contemporary
audience. With this as my main spur, I contacted the
estate, a meeting was arranged, and I laid out before
them my desire to reintroduce Durant and his
teachings. They evidently liked my proposition and,
so they said, my credentials; that is, my background
in philosophy and knowledge of Durant and his ideas,
and they agreed to grant me access to materials that
were heretofore unseen by anybody save the immediate
Durant family – that was quite an exciting
position to find myself in. I was delighted to
discover that the Durant estate had preserved audio
recordings, videos, movie film, essays, notebooks,
journals, letters and, even more significantly, what
proved to be the manuscript of Durant’s last
book – written at 92 years of age – Heroes
of History.
Tell us
about this new book, Heroes of History. What’s
the story behind its release?
Well, four years before his death, Will
Durant began work on an abbreviated version of his
highly acclaimed eleven-volume series, The Story
of Civilization in which he compressed over 110
centuries of human civilization into eleven volumes.
To take that same 110 centuries and try to telescope
it into one 360 page book is no less monumental an
undertaking, but that’s what he did. The project
was originally conceived as a series of audio
lectures, but Durant soon realized that the dialogues
could be developed into a book that would serve as a
wonderfully readable introduction to the subject of
history – and history as a relevant form of
philosophy. He completed twenty-one of a proposed
twenty-three chapters before his death in 1981, at
the age of ninety-six and those chapters span
thousands of years of human history -- from Confucius
to Shakespeare, from the Roman Empire to the
Reformation, finally ending in the eighteenth
century. The "story" behind the discovery
of the manuscript was that, while doing my research
in the Durant archive, I happened upon a series of
typed "mini-talks" along with letters to
his daughter, Ethel, indicating that he intended to
publish these scripts as a book entitled Heroes of
History. Unfortunately he passed away before he
could realize this vision. Upon his passing, the
manuscript for the book, along with his many papers
were boxed up with his other affects and put into
storage. Ethel passed away in the latter part of the
1980s and her daughter, Will and Ariel’s
granddaughter, Monica Mihell, inherited the boxes.
The papers were almost destroyed when water leaked
into the storage area after a severe bout of
rainstorms that hit Los Angeles in 1996. In fact,
some papers were water damaged beyond salvation. I
recall picking up old essays that Durant had written
and they would disintegrate in my hands as I held
them, which was terrible and rather depressing.
However, on the brighter side, the vast majority of
materials including the manuscript for Heroes of
History emerged from the deluge relatively
unscathed and I think it is in many respects
appropriate that twenty years after his passing
– and twenty years after Durant finished it
– it will be released to the public as he
intended. Its discovery is a major event, not only
for lovers of his prose, but for students of history
and philosophy the world over.
Can you
give us an overview of the book?
Heroes of History
is a book that contains stories of life-enhancing
wisdom and optimism, complete with Durant’s wit,
knowledge, and unique ability to explain events and
ideas in simple, exciting terms. It is the lessons of
our heritage passed on for the edification and
benefit of future generations. Some of its chapters
are entitled:
- What is
Civilization?
- Confucius and the
Banished Angel
- India -- From
Buddha to Indira Gandhi
- From the Pyramids
to Ikhnaton
- Philosophy and
Poetry in the Old Testament
- The Road to
Pericles
- The Golden Age of
Athens
- From Plato to
Alexander
What else
can we look for in the immediate future concerning
Will Durant? Do you see a renaissance of sorts for
his legacy?
Apart from the Heroes of
History book, which will be released by Simon and
Schuster this November, I am presently working on
editing the audio tapes of Will and Ariel reading the
book – which is really exciting as it will allow
the listener to attend private lectures on history,
art, philosophy and civilization from Will and Ariel
themselves! I’m also just completing the final
edits on no less than four new Will Durant titles and
Simon and Schuster have indicated interest in them as
a "Will Durant Library" imprint of books.
As you may know, many of Durant’s books are now
out of print, which is a pity as they contain
timeless wisdom and magnificent teachings, and I wish
to excise those portions and add new,
never-before-published material that speak to these
same topics – from the meaning of life to the
pursuit of happiness to the relevance of philosophy.
There is also a wonderful book that I think is the
perfect companion piece to Heroes of History,
which is entitled Significance and contains
Will Durant’s carefully considered ranking of
the best of our human heritage in terms of the
thinkers, poets, books and events that profoundly
shaped human progress. I also am planning to make
available a series of e-books, which will make the
teachings available within minutes to people who want
to read them right away. In addition, I hope to begin
work soon on a documentary (Little’s documentary
on Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee: In His Own Words won
the Toronto and Montreal International Short Film
Festivals and was also shown to standing-room only
audiences at the Tokyo International Film Festival.
Warner Bros. released it as a premium on their 25th
anniversary re-release of Enter the Dragon – Ed.)
as well as a series of videos and audios featuring
Will and Ariel Durant. I truly think these will be
products for people who take civilization and
civilized living seriously. There is tremendous
benefit for people who appreciate Durant’s
unique ability to compress complicated ideas and
events into a few sentences without ever
"talking down" to people and, this is
enhanced by his memorable wit and a razor-sharp
judgment about men and their motives. The very
qualities that made all of his books huge best
sellers. That’s why I’m excited about Heroes
of History; not only is it nice to see his final
book released as he intended it to be, but its
publication signals a carrying on of his tradition of
making scholarship and philosophy understandable to
the general reader, and making them good reading, as
well. I do entertain a vision of a major
reintroduction and re-appreciation of Will Durant,
his teachings and his legacy. Apart from the release
of this book – the first new Durant book in two
decades – and the other educational products I
just mentioned, we have launched this web site with
the support of his family and will continue to update
it for the benefit of those who want to know more
about the lives of Will and Ariel and of their
teachings. All of these, in addition to several other
projects I neglected to mention, will, I believe,
positively contribute to the preservation and
perpetuation of his legacy.
What do you
most hope readers will take from the writings of Will
Durant?
That’s such a
broad question as each person will probably take
something different from the writings, according to
their need or interests. Those who are lovers of
history, philosophy and great prose will certainly
enjoy the writings for their own sake. On a deeper
level, those seeking more meaning from life will be
amply rewarded for their time reading Durant’s
writings. We all know that there are people who are
sorely troubled by the prospect of existence; one
report indicated that once every seventeen minutes in
the United States, a person takes his own life. Such
people – obviously – are having a lot of
trouble seeing the silver lining of an existence
lived within the confine of a very dark cloud. They
need to know that there is a big world out there and
a rich heritage to which they are heirs. They need
only open their hearts and their minds; Will Durant
and his "Country of the Mind" will furnish
the rest. Durant will speak to them as a friend or,
as I like to think of him, as the grandfather they
might have wished they had. He was worldly, wise,
compassionate and kind. The type of person you could
go to with your life issues and who would have the
insight and erudition to help you out, without ever
lecturing to you. He stressed understanding and
forgiveness and these are two qualities that are in
short supply in the world today. They should not
expect Pollyanna platitudes; for Durant’s
insights are not based on airy whim, but rather on
his own special quality as a thinker -- he is
tough-minded, optimistic, courageous, and convinced
that without a knowledge of the past there is no
wisdom to guide us to the future. At the very least,
it is my hope that they will own a copy of Heroes
of History, as this was his last word on the
subject, and so much of the book is aimed directly at
the doubts and fears of people today. Its publication
is truly a major, and unexpected, literary and
historical event. With the dawn of a new millennium
and the beginning of a new century, nothing could be
more appropriate than reacquainting ourselves with
the teachings of this brilliant and gentle man and to
receive his gift to us of the collective fruits of
our human heritage. I would hope that readers will
come to share his view on the meaning of human
civilization and history and learn to draw from the
experience of the past the lessons we need to know
with which to put the future into context, and to
learn thereby how to step beyond the confines of fear
and ignorance into a life of harmony and total
confidence.
.
