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.
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