The Philosophical Experience of the Present

This philosophical will was already sketched in the archaic period. When Pittakos, one of the Seven Sages, declares that the best thing is to “do the present well,”52 that is, to concentrate on the present—which implies that one should not let oneself be distracted by the past and the future—it is indeed a piece of advice and a rule of behavior that is being proposed.

In the Sophistic movement of the fifth century BCE, which offered young Athenians training for political life, we can see that Antiphon the Sophist, for example, criticized his contemporaries for, so to speak, giving up what they have for something far less certain, by failing to live in the present, which is the only reality:

There are some people who do not live the present life but make preparations with great effort, as though they were going to live some different life, and not the present one. And while they are doing this, the time that they are neglecting is gone . . . it is not possible to retract one’s life like a move in checkers.53It was said that Aristippus, one of Socrates’s followers, “knew how best to manage the present situation,”54 that is, to enjoy present good things without trying to attain absent or inaccessible things, and that he considered that there was happiness only in the present instant.55

This attitude inspired admiration, which shows that it did not correspond to a generalized, spontaneous behavior but on the contrary was the result of a conscious, deliberate philosophical will to adapt oneself to reality as it presents itself.

Despite the profound difference between Stoic and Epicurean doctrines, one can discern, underlying the two doctrines, an important analogy in the experience of the present. It can be defined as follows: Epicureanism and Stoicism privilege the present over the past, and especially over the future. They made it a principle that happiness must be found in the present alone, that an instant of happiness is equivalent to an eternity of happiness, and that happiness can and must be found immediately, right now, at once. Epicureanism and Stoicism invite us to resituate the present moment within the perspective of the cosmos and to attribute an infinite value to the slightest moment of existence.

Epicureanism was above all a therapeutics of anxiety. People are terrified because they believe that the gods concern themselves with human beings and hold punishments in store for them after death. They are troubled by the fear of death, devoured by the cares and sufferings engendered by unsatisfied desires. For some, there is the moral worry brought about by the concern to act with perfect purity of intention. The practice of Epicureanism was intended to deliver humankind from these multiple torments. The gods themselves live in perfect tranquility, without being troubled by the care of producing the universe or governing it, for this universe is the mechanical result of an encounter between atoms that exist eternally; the gods therefore pose no threat to human beings. The soul does not survive the body, and death is not an event of life; it therefore means nothing to humankind. Desires trouble us only if they are artificial and useless: one must reject those that are neither natural nor necessary, prudently satisfy those that are natural but not necessary, and satisfy, above all, the desires that are indispensable for the survival of existence. As far as moral worries are concerned, they will be completely appeased if one does not hesitate to acknowledge that humans, like all living beings, are always guided by pleasure. If one seeks wisdom, it is simply because it brings peace of mind, that is, ultimately, a state of pleasure. Epicureanism proposes a wisdom that teaches one to relax, to suppress worry, a wisdom that, moreover, is only apparently easy, for one must renounce many things in order to desire only what one is certain to obtain and to submit one’s desires to the judgment of reason. The goal, in fact, is a complete transformation of life, and one of the main aspects of this transformation is a change in attitude with regard to time.

For the Epicureans, senseless people—that is, most of the human race—are devoured by insatiable desires aimed at wealth, glory, power, and the disorderly pleasures of the flesh.56 What characterizes all these desires is that they cannot be satisfied in the present. This is why, as the Epicureans said, senseless people “do not recollect their past nor enjoy their present blessings; they merely look forward to those of the future, and since these are necessarily uncertain, they are consumed with anxiety and terror. The worst of their torment is when they perceive too late that they have devoted their zeal in vain to money, power, wealth, or glory. For they never attain any of the pleasures for which they had been inflamed by hope, and for the conquest of which they had worked so hard.”57 “The fool’s life is unpleasant and anxious,” according to an Epicurean saying; “it rushes entirely toward the future.”58Thus, Epicurean wisdom did indeed propose a radical transformation of the human attitude to time, a transformation that had to be effective at each of life’s instants. One must know how to enjoy present pleasures without letting oneself be distracted from them, avoiding thinking about the past, if it is unpleasant, or about the future, insofar as it provokes disorderly fears or hopes in us. Only the thought of what is pleasant, of pleasure, whether past or future, is allowed into the present moment, especially when the goal is to compensate for present pain. This transformation presupposes a specific conception of pleasure, according to which the quality of pleasure depends neither on the quantity of desires it satisfies, nor on the duration in which it is realized.

The quality of pleasure does not depend on the quantity of desires it satisfies. The best and the most intense pleasure is that which is the least mixed with worry, and which most certainly ensures peace of mind. It will therefore be obtained by the satisfaction of natural and necessary desires, the essential desires necessary for the preservation of existence. But these desires can be easily satisfied without any need to expect them from the future, with no need to yield to the uncertainty and worry of a long pursuit. “Thanks be to blessed Nature,” says an Epicurean sentence, “that she made necessary things easy to obtain, and things hard to obtain not necessary.”59 All kinds of illness of the soul—human passion, desires for wealth, power, or depravity–force us to think of the past or the future. Yet the purest and most intense pleasure can be easily obtained in the present.

Not only does pleasure not depend on the quantity of satisfied desires, but above all, it does not depend on duration. It does not need to be long in order to be absolutely perfect. “An infinite time cannot provide us with a pleasure greater than that with which the time which we know is finite provides us.”60This may seem to be a paradox, which is based first of all on a theoretical idea. The Epicureans thought of pleasure as a reality in itself that is not situated in the category of time. Aristotle had already said that pleasure is complete and total at each moment of its duration, and that its prolongation does not change its essence.61 For the Epicureans, a practical attitude is added to this theoretical representation. By limiting itself to what ensures complete peace of mind, pleasure reaches a summit that cannot be transcended, and it is impossible to increase this pleasure by duration. Pleasure is entirely within the present instant, and one does not have to wait for anything at all from the future in order to increase it.

One could summarize everything we have just said by these verses from Horace: “Let the soul find its pleasure in the present and come to hate worries about what is beyond.”62 A happy mind does not look toward the future. We can be happy right now, if we limit our desires reasonably.

Not only can we do this, but we must. Yes, happiness can be found immediately, right now, in the present. Instead of reflecting on the whole of one’s life, calculating hopes and uncertainties, one must seize happiness in the present instant. The matter is urgent: “We were born only once,” says an Epicurean sentence, “twice is not allowed. We must therefore be no more for eternity. But you, who are not the master of tomorrow, you put off joy until tomorrow. And yet, life is consumed in vain in procrastination, and each one of us dies without having known peace.”63 “While we are speaking,” says Horace, “jealous time has fled. Seize the day [carpe diem], then, and trust tomorrow as little as possible.”64

Horace’s carpe diem is by no means, as is often imagined, the advice of a sensualist. On the contrary, it is an invitation to conversion, that is, to becoming aware of the vanity of superfluous, limitless desires. It also means becoming aware of the imminence of death, of the uniqueness of life and of the instant. In this perspective, each instant appears as a wonderful gift that fills whoever receives it with gratitude: “Believe,” says Horace once again, “that each new day that dawns will be the last for you. Then you will receive each unexpected hour with gratitude.”65Gratitude, amazement: we have already encountered these feelings among the Epicureans, in the context of the miraculous coincidence between the needs of a living being and the facilities Nature provides for it. The secret of Epicurean joy and serenity is to live each day as if it were the last, but also as if it were the first. One feels the same grateful amazement by greeting the instant as if it were unexpected as by greeting it as completely new. In the words of Lucretius:

If all things were now revealed for the first time to mortals, if they were thrown before them suddenly and unexpectedly, what more wonderful than these things could be said, or which people would have less dared to believe beforehand?66Ultimately, the secret of Epicurean joy and serenity is the experience of infinite pleasure provided by the awareness of existing, even if only for an instant. To show that a single instant of existence is enough to provide this infinite pleasure, the Epicureans practiced saying every day: “I have had all the pleasure I could have expected.” As Horace says: “That man will be master of himself and live a happy life who as each day ends can say ‘I have lived.’”67 Here again, we see the role of the thought of death in Epicureanism. To say, every evening, “I have lived”—that is, “my life is over”—is to practice the same exercise that consisted in saying: “today will be the last day of my life.” Yet it is precisely this exercise of becoming aware of life’s finitude that reveals the infinite value of the pleasure of existing in the instant. In the perspective of death, the fact of existing, even if only for a moment, suddenly assumes an infinite value and provides a pleasure of infinite intensity. One can say “my life is over” and remain unperturbed only if one has become aware of the fact that one has already had everything in that moment of existence.

All this must, moreover, be resituated within the context of a general vision of the universe. Thanks to the doctrine of Epicurus, which explains the origin of the universe by the fall of atoms in the void, in the eyes of a philosopher, as Lucretius says, the walls of the world open up, and all things appear in the immense void, in the immensity of the All.68 Like Metrodorus, the Epicurean can exclaim: “Remember that, being mortal by nature, with a limited life, you have risen by the reasonings about nature to the infinity and eternity of things, and you have seen all that has been and all that will be.”69Here we find the contrast between finite time and infinite time. In finite time, the sage grasps all that occurs in infinite time. More precisely, as Léon Robin said, commenting on Lucretius: “The sage places himself in the immutability, independent of time, of eternal Nature.”70 Thus, the Epicurean sage perceives, in this awareness of existence, the totality of the cosmos. Nature, as it were, gives him everything in the instant.

In Stoicism, the moment of concentration on the present is even more accentuated, as is clearly apparent in this meditation of Marcus Aurelius:

The following are enough for you:

The judgment you are emitting in this moment on reality, as long as it is objective,

The action you are carrying out at this moment, as long as it is accomplished for the service of the human community,

The inner disposition in which you are in this very moment, as long as it is a disposition of joy in the face of every conjuncture of events brought about by external causality.71

Marcus Aurelius thus practices concentrating his attention on the present moment, that is, on what he is thinking, doing, and feeling in this very moment. “This is enough for you,” he says to himself, and the expression has a double meaning: this is enough to keep you busy, you don’t need to think about anything else; and this is enough to make you happy, there’s no need to seek anything else. This is the exercise he himself calls “delimiting the present.”72 To delimit the present is to divert one’s attention from the past and the future, in order to concentrate it on what one is in the process of doing.

The present Marcus Aurelius is talking about is a present defined by the lived contents of human consciousness: it thus represents a certain thickness of time, a thickness that corresponds to the attention of lived consciousness.73 It is this lived present, relative to consciousness, that is in play when Marcus Aurelius advises us to “delimit the present.” This is an important point: the present is defined with regard to the thought and action of the person who commits her entire personality to it.

The present suffices for our happiness because it is the only thing that belongs to us and depends on us. In the view of the Stoics, it is essential to know how to distinguish between what depends on us and what does not depend on us. The past no longer depends on us, because it is fixed definitively, while the future does not depend on us because it does not yet exist. Only the present depends on us. It is therefore the only thing that can be good or bad, because it is the only thing that depends on our will. Because they do not depend on us, and do not pertain to the order of moral good or evil, the past and the future must be indifferent to us. There is no use worrying about what no longer exists or what may never be.

Marcus Aurelius also describes this exercise of delimiting the present as follows:

If you separate from yourself, that is, from your thought . . . all that you have done or said in the past, and all the things that worry you because they have yet to occur . . . ; if you separate from time what is beyond the present and what is past . . . and if you practice living only the life that you live—that is, the present—you will be able to spend all the time left to you until your death, with calm, benevolence, and serenity.74

Similarly, Seneca describes this exercise as follows:

One must circumscribe two things: the fear of the future and the memory of past difficulties: the latter no longer concerns me, while the former does not concern me yet . . . The sage enjoys the present without depending on the future. Freed from the heavy cares that torture the soul, he hopes for nothing, desires nothing, and does not launch himself into what is doubtful, for he is content with what he has [that is, with the present, the only thing that belongs to us]. Do not believe that he is content with little, for what he has [the present] is everything.75Here, we witness the same transfiguration of the present that we encountered in Epicureanism. For the Stoics, we have everything in the present. The present alone is our happiness, for two reasons: First, because, like Epicurean pleasure, Stoic happiness is complete at each instant and does not increase with duration. Next, because in the present instant we possess the whole of reality, and an infinite duration could not give us more than what we possess in the present moment.

In the first place, then, happiness—that is, for the Stoics, moral action or virtue—is always finished, total and complete, at each moment of its duration. Like the Epicurean sage’s pleasure, the happiness of the Stoic sage is complete, lacking nothing, as a circle is still a circle, whether it is large or small.76 Like a propitious or opportune moment, a favorable occasion is an instant whose perfection depends not on duration but precisely on quality, on the harmony that exists between the external situation and the possibilities one has: happiness just is the instant in which a human being is completely in accord with nature.

As for the Epicureans, so for the Stoics, an instant of pleasure is thus equivalent to an eternity. In the words of Chrysippus: “if one is wise even for a moment, one will not be at all inferior in happiness to him who exercises virtue forever.”77

As for the Epicureans, for the Stoics as well, one will never be happy if one is not happy immediately. It is now or never. The matter is urgent: death is imminent, one must hurry, and one needs nothing in order to be happy other than to want to be so. The past and the future are of no use. What is needed is to immediately transform our way of thinking, acting, and greeting events, in order to think according to the truth, act according to justice, and greet events with love. As for the Epicurean, so for the Stoic, it is the imminence of death that gives the present instant its value. As Marcus Aurelius says, “One must accomplish every act of life as if it were the last.”78 Then each instant takes on all its seriousness, all its value, all its splendor, and we clearly see the vanity of that which we were pursuing with so much worry and which death will snatch away from us. We must live each day with an attention so intense that we can say to oneself every evening, “I have lived,” that is, “I have realized my life, I have had all that I could expect from life.” In the words of Seneca: “He who has lived his entire life every day possesses peace of mind.”79We have just seen the first reason why the present alone suffices for our happiness: it is because one instant of happiness is equivalent to an entire eternity of happiness. The second reason is that in one instant, we possess the totality of the universe. The present instant is fleeting and minuscule—Marcus Aurelius insists strongly on this point80—but in this flash, as Seneca says, we can proclaim, along with God: “Everything belongs to me.”81 The instant is our sole point of contact with reality, but it offers us all of reality. Precisely because it consists in passage and metamorphosis, it lets us participate in the general movement of the event of the world and the reality of the world’s becoming.

To understand this, one must recall what moral action, virtue, or wisdom represents for the Stoic. Moral good, which is the only good for the Stoic, has a cosmic dimension: it means harmonizing the reason within us with the Reason that governs the cosmos, and produces the concatenation of fate. At each moment, it is our judgment, our action, our desires that must be harmonized with universal Reason. In particular, we must joyfully greet the conjuncture of events that results from the course of Nature. At every instant, therefore, we must resituate ourselves within the perspective of universal Reason, so that at each instant, our consciousness can become a cosmic consciousness. Thus, at every instant, if human beings live in harmony with universal Reason, their consciousness is dilated into the infinity of the cosmos, and the entire cosmos is present to them. This is possible because, for the Stoics, there is a total mixture, or a reciprocal implication of all things within all things. Chrysippus spoke of a drop of wine that becomes mixed with the entire ocean and extends to the whole world.82“He who sees the present moment,” says Marcus Aurelius, “has seen all that has occurred from all eternity, and all that will happen in the infinity of time.”83 This is what explains the attention given to each present event, to what happens to us at every instant. The entire world is implied in every event:

What happens to you has been prepared in advance for you from eternity, and the interweaving of causes has, since forever, woven together your substance and the encounter with that event.84

Here we could speak of a mystical dimension of Stoicism. At each moment, at each instant, one must say yes to the universe, that is, to the will of universal Reason. One must want what universal Reason wants, that is, the present instant such as it is. Some Christian mystics have also described their state as that of a continuous consent to God’s will. Marcus Aurelius exclaims: “I say to the universe: I love along with you.”85 This is a deep feeling of participation, identification, and belonging to an All that transcends the individual’s limits, a feeling of intimacy with the universe. For Seneca, the sage plunges into the cosmos (toti se inserens mundo).86 The sage lives in the consciousness of the world, and the world is always present to him. Even more than in Epicureanism, the present moment thus takes on an infinite value: it contains within itself the entire cosmos, all the value and richness of being.

It is therefore quite remarkable that these two schools, Stoic and Epicurean, which were so opposed to one another, both place the concentration of consciousness on the present moment at the center of their way of life. The difference between the two schools resides only in the fact that the Epicurean enjoys the present moment, whereas the Stoic wills it intensely. For one it is a pleasure; for the other, a duty.

From: Don’t Forget to Live

Goethe and the Tradition of Spiritual Exercises

Pierre Hadot

Translated by Michael Chase