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Books

Philosophy For Non-Philosophers by Louis Althusser

Neil Richardson philosophises on what Louis Althusser has to say to non-philosophers.

“The scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.” – Confucius

I requested a paperback through my local library, my curiosity triggered by its title, Philosophy for Non-Philosophers (2017), which suggested that an innovative author had somehow compressed renowned works into a text for newcomers. I expected sections within the book to discuss logic, language, ethics, and mind, before weaving the strongest threads of such topics into a robust conclusion – philosophy for today’s remarkably diverse public. Louis Althusser’s book in fact holds twenty-two frequently dense chapters: perhaps too many for the paperback’s two hundred pages and a prospective audience which includes ‘farmers and managers’. By way of illustration of the nature of the contents, his opening chapters are titled, ‘What Non-Philosophers Say’, ‘Philosophy and Religion’, and ‘Abstraction’; the last three are ‘Philosophy and the Science of Class Struggle’, ‘A New Practice of Philosophy’, and ‘The Dialectic: Laws or Theses?’

For Louis Althusser (1918-1990) – who turns out to be a French Marxist philosopher – idealist philosophers live in closed world, endlessly rereading their great teachers Plato, Hegel, and Descartes, whose works are overloaded with meaning, and inexhaustible for those trying to interpret their pages.

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