Ars Vitae

The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780268108915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Despite the flood of self-help guides and our current therapeutic culture, feelings of alienation and spiritual longing continue to grip modern society. In this book, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn offers a fresh solution: a return to classic philosophy and the cultivation of an inner life.

The ancient Roman philosopher Cicero wrote that philosophy is ars vitae, the art of living. Today, signs of stress and duress point to a full-fledged crisis for individuals and communities while current modes of making sense of our lives prove inadequate. Yet, in this time of alienation and spiritual longing, we can glimpse signs of a renewed interest in ancient approaches to the art of living.

In this ambitious and timely book, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn engages both general readers and scholars on the topic of well-being. She examines the reappearance of ancient philosophical thought in contemporary American culture, probing whether new stirrings of Gnosticism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, and Platonism present a true alternative to our current therapeutic culture of self-help and consumerism, which elevates the self's needs and desires yet fails to deliver on its promises of happiness and healing. Do the ancient philosophies represent a counter-tradition to today's culture, auguring a new cultural vibrancy, or do they merely solidify a modern way of life that has little use for inwardness—the cultivation of an inner life—stemming from those older traditions? Tracing the contours of this cultural resurgence and exploring a range of sources, from scholarship to self-help manuals, films, and other artifacts of popular culture, this book sees the different schools as organically interrelated and asks whether, taken together, they can point us in important new directions.

Ars Vitae sounds a clarion call to take back philosophy as part of our everyday lives. It proposes a way to do so, sifting through the ruins of long-forgotten and recent history alike for any shards helpful in piecing together the coherence of a moral framework that allows us ways to move forward toward the life we want and need.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum (On Ends) 3.2.4, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914, 1931), 220.

2. Anthony Birley, Marcus Aurelius: A Biography (1966; repr., New York: Barnes and Noble, 1987), 195, 286n30. He established chairs in Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism.

3. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1.1–8, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926, 1934), 3–69.

4. Epictetus, Encheiridion 3, in Discourses, Books 3–4. Fragments. The Encheiridion, trans. W. A. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928).

5. As of this writing, the mug is for sale at Zazzle: https://www.zazzle.com/epictetus_png_coffee_mug-168278386246607669.

6. John Kaag, “Need a New Self-Help Guru? Try Aristotle,” New York Times, January 23, 2019; Edith Hall, Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2018).

7. Carlos Fraenkel, “Can Stoicism Make Us Happy?,” review of How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life, by Massimo Pigliucci (New York: Basic Books, 2017), Nation, February 5, 2019, https://www.thenation.com/article/massimo-pigliucci-modern-stoicism-book-review.

8. Simon Critchley, Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us (New York: Pantheon, 2019); Catherine Wilson, How to Be an Epicurean: The Ancient Art of Living Well (New York: Basic Books, 2019); Seneca, On Anger, trans. James Romm, How to Keep Your Cool: An Ancient Guide to Anger Management (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

9. Gerald Howard, “Reasons to Believe,” Bookforum, February/March 2007. In this fine profile of Philip Rieff, book editor Howard writes that Rieff’s theory of the triumph of the therapeutic and psychological man “is one of the most durable concepts we have for grasping the inner dynamics of our culture.”

10. For an investigation into the origins of the “Serenity Prayer,” see Fred R. Shapiro, “Who Wrote the Serenity Prayer?” Chronicle of Higher Education,April 28, 2014, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Who-Wrote-the-Serenity-Prayer-/146159.

11. Lawrence C. Becker, A New Stoicism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

12. Daniel Wickberg, “What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New,” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (June 2007): 661–84.

13. The epigraph to this section is from Marcelo Gleiser, “Meaning in a Silent Universe,” New Atlantis, no. 47 (Fall 2015): 76–86.

14. Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud, 40th Anniversary ed. (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007), x.

15. P. Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic, 3.

16. P. Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic.

17. Kathryn Schulz, “The Self in Self-Help,” New York, January 6, 2013.

18. Schulz, “The Self in Self-Help.”

19. Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1949), 29.

20. P. Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic; Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, 3rd ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 1979). Others have contributed greatly to our understanding of the therapeutic sensibility, including Peter Berger, Tom Wolfe, Christopher Lasch, Christina Hoff Sommers, Sally Satel, and Wendy Kaminer, among others.

21. P. Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic, 1-54.

22. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 23–24. “For what emotivism asserts is in central part that there are and can be no valid rational justification for any claims that objective and impersonal moral standards exist and hence that there are no such standards” (22). For MacIntyre’s inspired discussion of the Aristotelian notion of telos and its connection with eudaemonia, see especially 146–50.

23. For example, Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978); T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981); and Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).

24. Catherine Tumber, American Feminism and New Age Spirituality: Searching for the Higher Self, 1875–1915 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 173.

25. P. Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic, 8–10.

26. Jonathan Imber, ed., Therapeutic Culture: Triumph and Defeat (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2004). Imber went on to edit The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff (London: Anthem Press, 2017), a collection of essays on Rieff’s contribution.

27. Ellen Herman, Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); James Davison Hunter, Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age without Good or Evil (New York: Basic Books, 2001); James L. Nolan Jr., The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at Century’s End (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 2. Nolan’s first chapter, “The Therapeutic Culture” (1-21), is an excellent introduction to the concept and critique.

28. Frank Furedi, “The Silent Ascendency of the Therapeutic Culture in Britain,” in Imber, Therapeutic Culture, 24; Frank Furedi, Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age (London: Routledge, 2004).

29. James L. Nolan Jr. and Sandra Davis Westervelt, “Justifying Justice: Therapeutic Law and the Victimization Defense Strategy,” Sociological Forum 15, no. 4 (December 2000): 617-46.

30. Niquie Dworkin, “Rieff’s Critique of the Therapeutic and Contemporary Developments in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy,” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 35, no. 4 (November 2015): 230-43.

31. Emotion-based claims and reason-based claims can both be valid, but their arbiter cannot be themselves or one another. An emotion-based claim cannot be bested by a reason-based claim by definition. Nor can a reason-based claim be bested by an emotion-based claim. Emotion and reason can be employed separately as means but can never by themselves get at ends. Both emotion and reason operating in tandem are needed to get at ends.

32. Boris Kachka, “The Power of Positive Publishing: How Self-Help Ate America,” New York Magazine, January 6, 2013, 1.

33. Kachka, “Power of Positive Publishing,” 5.

34. Kachka, “Power of Positive Publishing,” 5.

35. Mark Greif, Against Everything: Essays (New York: Pantheon, 2016), 95.

36. Greif, Against Everything, 12.

37. Greif, Against Everything, 13-14.

38. Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Christine B. Whelan, “Self-Help Gurus Like Tony Robbins Have Often Stood in the Way of Social Change,” op-ed, Washington Post, April 13, 2018.

39. Ewen, Captains of Consciousness; David Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976).

40. Ilham Dilman, Love and Human Separateness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), introduction and chap. 1.

41. Dilman, Love and Human Separateness.

42. Martha Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3. Subsequent page citations ar...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyrights
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Therapeia
• One The New Gnosticism
• Two The New Stoicism
• Three The New Epicureanism
• Four The New Cynicism
• Five The New Platonism
• Conclusion: Philosophia
• Epilogue: Once
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index