Michel Onfray and philosophy's quarrelsome turn: from the lectern to the public square

No single label will do for Michel Onfray — and that is the result of a choice made forty years ago.

“Atheist philosopher”, “hedonist thinker”, “Nietzschean”, “critic of the left”. Each is accurate; none is sufficient.

What sets him apart is less what he thinks than where he does his thinking. Onfray has spent his career trying to remove philosophy from the keeping of university chairs, refereed journals and conversation among specialists. To understand him, then, one has to look not only at his books but at the institutions he has founded and the media ventures he has launched.

By his publishers' reckoning he is the author of more than a hundred books, and his work has been translated into a great many languages.

Caen: a university without diplomas#

In 2002 he founded the People's University of Caen.

The idea was simple, and it carried a direct rebuke: a free programme in philosophy and the humanities, with no academic qualification required and no entrance examination. Who comes in and who stays out is decided by interest, not by the university.

This is a different answer to the same question raised by Alain de Botton's The School of Life, which we discussed yesterday: to whom does philosophy belong?

De Botton's answer is therapeutic; Onfray's is militant.

Hedonism: more than the pursuit of pleasure#

The hedonism of Onfray's early work makes a larger claim than the ordinary sense of the word suggests.

What is at stake is not simply the taking of pleasure. It is whether a person can build an ethics of living that refuses to deny the body, the desires, the relationships and the fact of death.

La Sculpture de soi of 1993 — “Sculpting the Self” — is the central text of that project. Rather than submit to ready-made moral and social patterns, Onfray argues there, a person may shape himself as one shapes a work of art.

Behind this lies the strong pull of Nietzsche. But Onfray reads Nietzsche not in order to produce academic commentary; he reads him in order to turn philosophy directly into a practice of living.

His question is plain and heavy: can a person be the author of his own life?

Atheology#

The book that carried furthest beyond France was Traité d'athéologie, published in 2005.

Atheism, in Onfray's treatment, is not the negative position of failing to believe in God. It is a comprehensive project of inquiry into what religions have done to human beings, to morality, to the body and to politics.

At its base lies a single thought: a human life can be given meaning without being surrendered to a transcendent authority.

The contested part of the method is here as well. The polemical manner of his critique of religion has more of intellectual combat about it than of scholarly detachment. Onfray helped to popularise secular and atheist thought; at the same time, academics attacked his historical and philosophical readings without mercy.

It is an instance of something visible across the whole career: Onfray does not want to interpret philosophy, he wants to fight with it.

The counter-history#

Among his largest undertakings is the series Contre-histoire de la philosophie — a counter-history of philosophy.

The work puts the canon of the standard history in question. Where the traditional narrative places Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant and Hegel at the centre, Onfray sets out to make visible the materialists, the atheists, the hedonists and the libertarians: Epicurus, Lucretius, Gassendi, La Mettrie, the Cyrenaics.

The underlying claim: the history of philosophy is not the history of the winners and of the doctrines that acquired institutions.

The claim itself is arguable, but the question behind it is legitimate. How does a canon form, and who is left outside it?

The quarrel over Freud#

One of the great polemics of his career came with Le Crépuscule d'une idole — “The Twilight of an Idol”.

Onfray subjected Freud's biography, his psychoanalytic theory and his scientific claims to a harsh critique. In France it caused an enormous row.

Freud's defenders accused him of ignoring historical context and of judging psychoanalysis reductively. Onfray replied that psychoanalysis had turned into an intellectual dogma.

The argument was not only about Freud. What was really at issue was how critical philosophy is permitted to be in the face of a thinker's cultural authority.

Settling accounts with the left#

For a long time Onfray placed himself within the tradition of the left. Over the years his criticisms hardened — of the post-1968 left, of Marxism, of the European project and of various features of French politics.

That shift has made him hard to situate. He refuses to be described as of the right or the far right; yet his positions on immigration, Islam, the European Union and national sovereignty have earned him the charge, in France, of having moved rightward.

Neither “an old leftist drifting right” nor a straightforward place within the left tradition quite accounts for him. His defining habit is to keep the settled political categories permanently open to dispute.

The journal Front populaire, which he founded in 2020 and edits, is the institutional expression of that position.

Building a public sphere of one's own#

The most significant recent development is Onfray's construction of a media ecosystem of his own.

Through his website and web television channel he publishes lectures, commentary on current affairs and archive material; the platform is updated regularly. On Europe 1 he appears before listeners with the programme Face à Michel Onfray.

For the transformation of the modern intellectual, this is worth noting.

The twentieth-century philosopher depended on institutional intermediaries: the university, the publishing house, the newspaper, the television channel. Onfray is one of the examples showing that the twenty-first-century philosopher can build his own instrument.

The gain is obvious: no middleman. So is the price: no external check.

The new project: the West in four volumes#

The most ambitious work Onfray now has in hand is an attempt to rewrite the philosophical history of the West.

Déambulation dans les ruines — “A Walk Among the Ruins” — is the first volume of the series Histoire philosophique de l'Occident, published by Albin Michel. The series will run to four independent volumes.

The frame of the project reads like a summary of Onfray's method: to read the history of Western civilisation as a war of ideas.

From antiquity onwards, he argues, world views have been organised by radical oppositions: the materialism of Democritus against Platonic idealism, Cynic freedom against Pythagorean marriage, the paid rhetoric of the sophists against the philosophical life of Socrates, the hedonism of Aristippus against Stoic virtue.

The first volume carries the subtitle “the wisdom of the ancients” and offers a walk among the thinkers who first tried to say what a philosophical life might be.

The object is no longer the individual philosopher: it is to retell how the West has thought about itself.

Philosopher or polemicist?#

The easiest verdict on Onfray is that he is “highly controversial”. But the verdict misses what is at stake.

Onfray's philosophy is built to generate argument in the first place. He brings together the genealogical eye he takes from Nietzsche, the defence of atheism, the hedonism, the critique of institutions and the political polemic, and with them tries to stop philosophy being a quiet specialism.

To his admirers he is a libertarian thinker giving philosophy back to the public. To his critics he is an intellectual who over-generalises and who simplifies historical and scientific matters for the sake of a fight.

There is probably some truth in both.

But the history of philosophy teaches something more important: a thinker's influence is measured not only by how right he is found to be, but by the questions he forces onto the agenda.

Onfray's lasting legacy may lie there. He has reopened one of the oldest questions in French philosophy.

Is philosophy a discipline taught at university, or is it the art of building one's own life?

The whole forty-year adventure can be read as an attempt to defend the second answer.

In Turkish#

Four books have appeared in Turkish: Bir Hedonist Manifesto (a hedonist manifesto), Ateoloji Üzerine Bir İnceleme (a treatise on atheology), Yaratmaya Var mısınız? (are you up for creating?) and Filozofun Damak Tadı (the philosopher's palate).