When the issue of happiness undermines that of knowledge, philosophy abandons its own domain in order to dedicate itself to a strange activity: it starts dealing with the human being… Nowadays it is interested in answering as thoroughly and as seriously as possible questions that it wouldn't have bothered to care for before. "How to avoid sufferance?" is the most demanding one. Tired and estranged from impersonal anxiety, from the greed to know, philosophy turns away from speculation and prefers comforting truths to daunting ones. This former type of truth is the one that Epicure was expected to give to a Greece that was weak and enslaved and in need of a magic formula for rest and of a remedy against angst. In those times he was the equivalent of today's shrink: didn't he denounce, in his own way, "the restlessness of the civilization"? (Throughout every confused and refined age, some Freud of some kind tries to unburden souls). More than with Socrates, with Epicure, philosophy approached therapeutics. Healing and especially self-healing – that was his ambition: although he wanted to free people from fear of death and of gods, he was experiencing both. The ataraxia he boasted about was not a habit for him: his "sensitivity" was notorious. As for his disdain for sciences, which he was reproached with later, we know that it represents the particularity of some "broken hearts." This theoretician of happiness was ill: it seems that he vomited twice a day. He must have undergone terrible sufferings in order to hate that much the "restlessness of the soul"! He probably spared the little serenity that he succeeded in gaining for his students; grateful and naïve as they were, the latter built him a fame of wisdom. As our illusions are much frailer than those of his contemporaries, we can easily catch a glimpse of the unseen face of his Garden.
from The Temptation to Exist, 1956
by Emil Cioran (1911-1995)
