Michel Onfray

Michel Onfray (born 1 January 1959) is a French writer and philosopher with a hedonistic, epicurean and atheist worldview.

A highly-prolific author on philosophy, he has written over 100 books.

His philosophy is mainly influenced by such thinkers as Nietzsche, Epicurus, the Cynic and Cyrenaic schools, as well as French materialism.

He taught this subject to senior students at a high school that concentrates on technical degrees in Caen between 1983 and 2002.

He has gained notoriety for writing such works as Traité d'athéologie: Physique de la métaphysique (translated into English as Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam), Politique du rebelle: traité de résistance et d'insoumission, Physiologie de Georges Palante, portrait d'un nietzchéen de gauche, La puissance d'exister and La sculpture de soi for which he won the annual Prix Médicis in 1993.

Onfray is often regarded as being left-wing; however, some observers have stated that he harbours right-wing tendencies.

He has become appreciated by some far-right circles, notably with his sovereignist magazine Front populaire.

Born in Argentan to a family of Norman farmers, Onfray was sent to a weekly Catholic boarding school in Giel from ages 10 to 14.

This was a solution many parents in France adopted at the time when they lived far from the village school or had working hours that made it too hard or too expensive to transport their children to and from school daily.

The young Onfray, however, did not appreciate his new environment, which he describes as a place of suffering.

Onfray went on to graduate with a teaching degree in philosophy.

In the 2002 election, Onfray endorsed the French Revolutionary Communist League and its candidate for the French presidency, Olivier Besancenot.

At that time, he and his supporters established the Université populaire de Caen, proclaiming its foundation on a free-of-charge basis and on the manifesto written by Onfray in 2004 (La communauté philosophique).

Onfray is an atheist and author of Traité d'Athéologie (Atheist Manifesto), which "became the number one best-selling nonfiction book in France for months when it was published in the Spring of 2005 (the word 'athéologie' Onfray borrowed from Georges Bataille and dedicated to Raoul Vaneigem who had defended freedom of speech, including Holocaust denial, in Nothing is sacred, everything can be said. The book repeated its popular French success in Italy, where it was published in September 2005 and quickly soared to number one on Italy's bestseller lists."

The series of books are composed by the titles I. Les Sagesses Antiques (2006) (on western antiquity), II.

Le Christianisme hédoniste (2006) (on Christian hedonism from the Renaissance period), III.

In 2007, he endorsed José Bové but eventually voted for Besancenot and conducted an interview with the future French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who, Onfray declared in Philosophie Magazine, was an "ideological enemy".

Les libertins baroques (2007) (on libertine thought from the Baroque era), IV.

Les Ultras des Lumières (2007) (on radical enlightenment thought), V. L'Eudémonisme social (2008) (on radical utilitarian and eudaimonistic thought), VI.

Les Radicalités existentielles (2009) (on 19th and 20th century radical existentialist thinkers) and VII.

La construction du surhomme: Jean-Marie Guyau, Friedrich Nietzsche (on Guyau's and Nietzsche's philosophy in relation to the concept of the Übermensch).

VIII.

His book Le crépuscule d'une idole : L'affabulation freudienne (The Twilight of an Idol: The Freudian Confabulation), published in 2010, has been the subject of considerable controversy in France because of its criticism of Sigmund Freud.

He recognises Freud as a philosopher but brings attention to the considerable cost of Freud's treatments and casts doubts on the effectiveness of his methods.

Les Freudiens hérétiques (2013).

IX.

Les Consciences réfractaires (2013).

In an interview, Onfray established his view on the history of philosophy:

There is in fact a multitude of ways to practice philosophy, but out of this multitude, the dominant historiography picks one tradition among others and makes it the truth of philosophy: that is to say the idealist, spiritualist lineage compatible with the Judeo-Christian world view.

From that point on, anything that crosses this partial – in both senses of the word – view of things finds itself dismissed.

This applies to nearly all non-Western philosophies, Oriental wisdom in particular, but also sensualist, empirical, materialist, nominalist, hedonistic currents and everything that can be put under the heading of "anti-Platonic philosophy".

Philosophy that comes down from the heavens is the kind that – from Plato to Levinas by way of Kant and Christianity – needs a world behind the scenes to understand, explain and justify this world.

The other line of force rises from the earth because it is satisfied with the given world, which is already so much.

"His mission is to rehabilitate materialist and sensualist thinking and use it to re-examine our relationship to the world. Approaching philosophy as a reflection of each individual's personal experience, Onfray inquires into the capabilities of the body and its senses and calls on us to celebrate them through music, painting, and fine cuisine."

In 2015, Onfray published Cosmos, the first book of a trilogy.

Onfray considers ironically that it constitutes his "very first book".

Onfray writes that there is no philosophy without self-psychoanalysis.

He describes himself as an atheist and considers theistic religion to be indefensible.

Onfray has published nine books under a project of history of philosophy called Counter-history of Philosophy.

In each of these books Onfray deals with a particular historical period in western philosophy.