The Ancient Art of Living I

AN EPICUREAN GARDEN

(4) I had the great pleasure last summer of reading Robert Poague Harrison’s wonderful Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, which begins by discussing Heidegger’s interpretation of “care” (Sorge) as the chief dynamic of human existence, from which Harrison elides into care-taking as emblematic of whatever there may be to a human art of living. It is a theme also explored in Michael Polin’s fine Second Nature. When you combine this with the idea that all the ancient schools are inclined to understand the philosophical askesis or “discipline” of life as a “therapeia” or cultivation of emotion, desire, conduct and thought, the idea of the Epicurean retreat, the “epistrophe eis heauton,” the “conversion to oneself” comes into view as the true garden we are to dwell in.

Of course this is not easy. There is the press of the world, of the body, pleasure, sex, ambition, property, death, even the philosophical desire to know. Our dwelling may partake of more ‘trouble’ and ‘worry’ than we should wish, or the ancients thought we could avoid. How then to ‘cultivate’ that garden that is the self, if it is to take a well-ordered and pleasant form?

In this regard I have found it immensely interesting that the very thing Heidegger brings forward as a first condition of authentic or ‘resolute’ living—the consciousness of death and finitude, of ‘being’ = becoming in personal time—is thematized by Socrates in his defense of his life to the Athenians and then again in Epicurus’ Letter to Menoeceus. The re-cognizing of personal death as that beyond our thought and feeling, its incorporation in our self-knowledge as knowledge of ignorance and therefore not a genuine part of our life, therefore decisively as “nothing to fear”—this is a critical condition for Socratic wisdom on the good, and “Step #1” on the Epicurean Way.

And I do not doubt that some have gone there: not only Epicurus but no less a modern than David Hume is said to have died serenely, enjoying conversation with friends. But can any of us walk with such constancy today? Death is surely the trap door through which not we but each of us I’s fall out of the world. (“So it goes” as Kurt Vonnegut would say.) Just as certainly it seems a resolutely rational mind will not affirm it is to a different and better place, however much aging may induce acquiescence, but to no-where, no-thing so far as we can picture. Our being is life, and in this consideration my ‘self’ must shudder, even if I may be converted by it to a different, somehow both burden-lightened and doubly conscious, enlightened self.

With this in mind, we are spurred to reconfigure life as art—becoming not being, creation not nature. To make time, which before was chronos, “universal process,” awaken as kairos, “singular opportunity." To realize, as Hadot would put it: “the present alone is our happiness.” Thus may our being be eroticized, and we opened to freedom and uniqueness, including that of and with others. (Which is not to say the Epicurean admonitions of simplicity, law-abidingness, gentility, intellectual life and friendship do not still mark a well-traveled path.)

I'm increasingly convinced this ‘existentialist’ approach is critical for understanding the ancient arts of living, which otherwise seem to me to smack too much of theistic metaphysics, presumption, dogmatic rationalism, Christianity. (Even Plato's Symposium, in some ways a much better picture of the philosopher than the Apology, peaks in such a vision.) The prospect of ‘participation in universal Reason’ and of in taking one's place in the ‘harmony of the well-ordered Whole’ is enormously appealing, but as I’ve said before, that is not the world I know.

So I find Foucault’s contrast between morality as socially ('divinely') imposed norms of being and ethics as the art of freedom and self-government useful for understanding the ancients, especially the Epicureans, even if it distorts somewhat the Stoic self-conception. The art of living is a human art, not the work of a mortal god.

As a footnote I should add: we need also to take account of the 'narcissizing' social net enclosing us, the world of images, commodities, politics, ambitions and lifestyles we all dwell in. (A child of five today, with a vocabulary of perhaps 1000 words, knows over a hundred brand names.) We cannot enter an Epicurean garden today without taking our appetites and 'values' along, and that of course means we enter in badly. We are too enthralled, and not so easily separated from, the world of the "Mad Men." Our greatest artists are still Jagger and Warhol. We run the risk of two-dimensional lives. The "turn to the self" may need to take at some point a less private path than we first thought, if we are to find a 'self' worth cultivating, and in which we can be happy. (Or so it has been for me. More on this later.)