In the Ruins of the West. Michel Onfray speaks

“Walking Among the Ruins”, published in France six months ago by Albin Michel and this week by Ponte alle Grazie, has earned Michel Onfray a nomination for the prestigious Renaudot Prize. The renowned philosopher and intellectual has embarked on a new philosophical history of the West. He recounts the development of Greco-Roman civilisation through the prism of the war of ideas. As an extraordinary storyteller, Onfray brings the ruins back to life and resurrects a vanished world. Three further books will follow, in which Onfray will tackle the rest, from the Christian era to nihilism. Why continue to delve into the classics?

“It is not so much a stand-alone book as the start of a tetralogy that aims to be a philosophical history of the West,” Onfray tells Il Foglio. “This volume will be followed by three more. The genealogy of our civilisation is, of course, Judeo-Christian. The first phase of the West is Greco-Roman. In this volume, conceived as a stroll amongst the ruins, I examine these dualities to highlight a tension resolved within, by and for civilisation: reality (atom or idea), the couple (marriage or libertinism), truth (vocation or profiteering), happiness (pleasure or virtue), pleasure (asceticism or enjoyment), suicide (duty or will), the citizen (cosmopolitanism or slavery), suffering (here below or in the afterlife), amongst others. Each of us has chosen one or the other of these two responses. Civilisation, for its part, has chosen what was most beneficial to it in order to persist in its very existence. This provides an opportunity to set Platonism and Aristotelianism, Epicureanism and Cyrenaicism, Pyrrhonism and Stoicism, Neoplatonism and Atomism in tension with one another. This philosophical material constitutes the West’s toolbox. Judeo-Christianity draws on Platonism, Stoicism and Neoplatonism to construct its doctrine centred on Jesus, the Son of God, born of a Virgin, who fulfils the Jewish messianic prophecy. The second volume, ‘Building a Cathedral’, which I have just finished writing, recounts the medieval and Renaissance crystallisation of an ideology centred on this fiction. It covers the first 1,500 years of Judeo-Christianity, following on from the 1,000 years of the Greco-Roman era. The third volume is entitled ‘Building a Temple’, with the subtitle ‘The Religion of the Enlightenment’; the fourth and final volume, ‘Desecration of a Cenotaph’, is subtitled ‘The Religion of Nihilism’. It is a detailed, 2,500-page response to the ‘woke’ activists, deconstructionists and other deniers who maintain that Europe has no Judeo-Christian roots and who date the beginning of French history to the first use of the first Jacobin guillotine on 25 April 1792.”

These authors, these philosophers and these moments in history have much to say about us. “Firstly: that almost everything has already been said in antiquity and that, since then, there have been only variations on these themes. For example, today’s vegetarians or vegans are doing nothing more than recycling the analyses developed by the Neoplatonist Porphyry in De abstinentia. Meat-eaters are unwitting disciples of Diogenes of Sinope, an advocate of a return to nature. Secondly: that philosophical ideas produce real effects, something we tend to forget. Believing that the world consists solely of matter and the aggregation of atoms makes possible a world diametrically opposed to the idealist view, according to which immaterial ideas exist that give meaning to what is. Christianity is a form of idealism, as are all religions. The atheist struggle, throughout the centuries, has been underpinned by atomist philosophy. On the subject of decay: the Greek and Roman texts themselves are for the most part in ruins. All that remains are blocks of stone which sometimes fail to convey the majesty of the buildings to which they belonged. Epicurus wrote three hundred books; all that remains of him are three letters to his disciples and a handful of fragments known as the ‘Vatican Sentences’. Christianity deliberately destroyed everything. The ravages of time did the rest. A stroll through the Roman Forum teaches us that civilisations are mortal, that they arise from the ruins of the civilisations that preceded them – Assyria, Sumer, Babylon, the Persians for the Greco-Romans, then the Greco-Romans for Judeo-Christianity. It also teaches us that we are living in a time of the West’s collapse in favour of a ‘post’ civilisation: post-human, post-truth, post-terrestrial. In a thousand or two thousand years’ time, our century will probably be viewed as a century of civilisational collapse.”

Judeo-Christian civilisation is part of the continuity of ancient civilisation. “Of course. There is an overlap between civilisations; they do not arise spontaneously, as it was once thought that a heap of rubbish gave rise to rats, which had simply approached the heap to find food… They are generated, come into being, live, grow, reach a peak, decline, fade away and disappear after leaving material for a subsequent civilisation. Our understanding of Egyptian thought, thanks to an ever-increasing number of translations of the corpus, allows us to see that without the thinkers of the age of the pyramids there would have been neither Pythagoras nor Plato, and therefore probably not even Judeo-Christianity. Dualism, the immaterial nature of the soul, life after death, and monotheism – as exemplified by Akhenaten – are tenets that underpin Judaism, Christianity and Islam. With these foundational elements, the Torah, the Gospels and the Qur’an have given rise to three civilisations. The next civilisation, which will probably be the last, is taking shape. It is already drawing on those ancient concepts I mentioned earlier: the opposition between the virtual and the real, where the former gives meaning to the latter; digital survival through the condensation, preservation, displacement and transfer of data, to which subjectivities would be reduced; the possibility of artificial intelligence as a means of achieving the total encoding of the world and its control, which would guarantee immortality. This is what is taking shape in terms of the genealogy of civilisation.”

He sees parallels between the current state of chaos and the fall of the Roman Empire. “I see nothing else. For some time, I kept a logbook of this decline. Four volumes have been published under the title ‘La nave dei folli’. I stopped halfway through the fourth: it was nothing but repetitions of the nonsense of our age. In it, I listed all the follies, which I commented on ironically: it is a catalogue of nihilism in which the ridiculous vies with the pitiful, the laughable with the deplorable, and the comic with the lamentable. Latest news from the nihilist front: some ‘therians’ dress up as animals and live like them, barking and urinating on lampposts – at least those who have chosen to be dogs. For his part, the philosopher Peter Singer, who teaches ethics at Princeton University in the US – you have to pinch yourself not to laugh – endorses sexual relations between animals and humans. The philosopher Paul B. Preciado urges people to stop having sex with white men and, as well as bestiality, proposes – in the form of a coprophagic alternative – eating their lovers’ excrement. This appeared in *Libération* in 2014. Petronius can go and cool off: the decadent Romans never went that far.”

Onfray’s Epicureanism, born of Norman folk culture and rooted in a home, a land and a family, seems so far removed from today’s way of life. “Not at all; it presupposes an attentive and heightened awareness of reality and, much like in Chinese, Japanese or Korean poetry, it presupposes that one can seek and find in nature the means to rejoice in one’s own pure presence in the world. He has published around ten collections of poetry, including haiku, to set down in writing this art of attuning oneself to the unfolding of the world to the point of experiencing the pleasure of one’s own living presence in the reality of the world. Even in the city, there is always the sky and its ever-changing states to allow for contemplation. And then there are the pleasures of reading, writing, music, cooking — which I practise —, friendship and conversation. I own a house in my home village, by the river. The moments I spend at night in my garden, gazing at the starry sky, offer me an opportunity for genuine Epicureanism. Otherwise, more generally, they offer me the chance to experience the sublime vastness of the cosmos, our smallness within it, my own smallness within it, and the thrill of ecstasy that runs through anyone who has this sort of experience just a few steps from the country cemetery where I shall be buried’. He believes, however, that our civilisation is doomed.

“Because the first lesson to be learnt from a stroll amongst the ruins – and I have visited many, not only in Italy or Greece, but also in Libya, Tunisia, Lebanon, Algeria, Egypt, Turkey, Palestine – is that all civilisations that were majestic and magnificent in their time die one day, then are lost in the sand, which is itself the decay of stones that were once indestructible. I have had the immense good fortune to visit the real Lascaux Cave and the real Chauvet Cave. These traces of what was once a vast and long-lasting civilisation bear witness to the fact that they, too, have perished. In the Chauvet Cave, gazing upon the rock upon which a man had placed a bear’s skull was one of the most moving moments of my life. The same applies to the dolmens and menhirs found in my department of Orne, in Normandy: they bear witness to a Celtic and Gallic civilisation that has also perished. Everything that exists, including civilisations, is born, lives, grows, declines, experiences a period of senescence and dies. The same applies to our solar system, which is heading towards its own demise whatever humans do, eco-anxious types included… A doctor who led an elderly person to believe he had the means to spare his patient from death would be a fraud. The same applies to politicians who claim to be saving a civilisation that, in any case, is doomed to perish.”

Our elites have nothing but the word ‘culture’ on their lips, but if you ask them to defend it against the woke and Islamist onslaught, they’ll impale you alive. ‘Because these so-called elites are themselves decadent! Take Peter Singer and Paul B. Preciado, for instance, who are revered as stars in their respective circles. If you don’t have sex with an elephant, Singer considers you a speciesist of the most dangerous kind. If one does not engage in similar practices, such as baking and consuming a cake made of excrement with a sexual partner, one is labelled a dangerous heterocentric white male of the worst kind. Admitting a preference for sex with human beings or for apple pastries is enough to be metaphorically impaled. It should be noted, in their defence, that these two figures are not exceptions. Between the veneration of Lenin, Stalin and Mao – not to mention Hitler – in the first half of the 20th century, the celebration of paedophilia in the post-’68 years, the assertion that madness is the true reason, that there is no difference between the normal and the pathological, that the schizophrenic is an ideal of philosophical life, that the Iranian Revolution is an opportunity for spirituality in politics, that strange invisible structures are truer than reality, that every man wants to kill his father and lie with his mother, the festival of nonsense is of the highest order in the philosophical world.”

Meanwhile, the West is imploding demographically and culturally, whilst revisionist regimes (China, Russia, Islamism, India, etc.) seem poised to carve up what remains of us. Who stands to gain from these ‘ruins’? “Those to whom the world will return are obviously not Westerners, who have played out their part and will make way for those who are more alive than they are,” says Onfray. “The contenders for leadership of the total state – which will, of course, be totalitarian – are very few in number, with one pair leading the field: in the struggle between China and the United States, the advantage lies with China, which has a totalitarian dictator capable of bringing his country under control, planning for the long term, and marshalling a population numbering in the billions, mobilised and militarised, and which already holds a monopoly on rare earth metals—and thus leadership in every field, including, of course, armaments and nuclear weapons, not to mention its advantage in robotics and artificial intelligence. One imagines that, in the Middle Kingdom, warehouses must be crammed full of robots destined one day to become an army of soldiers unleashed against the West. When these machines arrive on a terrace in Saint-Germain-des-Prés where the French are celebrating — it’s like Petronius’s banquet every day in France — we’ll bet they won’t be coming to sit down for a spritz.”

But if the end is inevitable, why does he keep fighting and writing books? “To die standing.”