Ars Vitae

Description

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.

Author Bio

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn is professor of history at Syracuse University. She is the author of a number of essays and books, including Black Neighbors (winner of the Berkshire prize) and Race Experts.

Reviews

”In her profoundly insightful and thought-provoking work, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn . . . notes, ‘the problems with contemporary culture stem in part from its inability, even in the event that basic needs are met, to provide adequate resources for the living of everyday life.’ . . . Lasch-Quinn’s work not only informs but urges the reader to seek a deeper understanding of the current problems we face.” —Journal of Sociology and Christianity

“In Ars Vitae, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn provides a new way for us to think about the ways in which modern Americans strive to find meaning in, and strive to realize the potential of, their lives. The book sets into relief the peculiar ways in which Americans grasp at the question of how to live and ultimately calls for a new inwardness in American life. This is a masterwork of a book.” —Susan McWilliams Barndt, author of The American Road Trip and American Political Thought

"Lasch-Quinn turns to the ancients to persuade her readers that living, contra postmodernism, can bring us to 'the heights of awe, love and wholeness,' even in the face of great pain and evil. . . . Many of us go through days, weeks, and even years of being beaten down, but suffering, Lasch-Quinn’s book tells us, can be transfigured into beauty, even holiness. " —City Journal

"[Lasch-Quinn] is a gifted scholar whose examination of ancient works, their modern scholarly reception, and the appearance of big ideas in popular culture is consistently brilliant. . . . She manages to cover over two thousand years of philosophical development in under four hundred pages, and while those pages are dense in content, they are charmingly readable. The introduction, ‘Therapeia,’ is worth the price of the book.” —Front Porch Republic

"This is what makes Ars Vitae such vital reading. It provides both a thorough-going critique of the therapeutic, self-obsessed ethos so dominant today, and a way beyond it, through the potential development of those inner, moral resources on which true selfhood and a moral community rest. " —spiked

Ars Vitae is a remarkable book . . . the prose feels intensely personal, and even intimate, engaging the reader in the author’s search for meaning with an approach that feels consequential without being personally needy. " —Law and Liberty

"With impressive learning and admirable literary grace, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn calls on us to take seriously again what Cicero called 'the art of living.' Drawing on a range of classical thinkers and schools, she demonstrates how true inwardness and self-knowledge are the antidotes to shallow consumerism and a narcissistic preoccupation with the self. This is a gem of a book, scholarship at the service of self-understanding and the search for truth." —Daniel J. Mahoney, author of The Conservative Foundations of Liberal Order

"Lasch-Quinn has set out in Ars Vitae to embody the best of what true philosophical writing has to offer. She writes in a way that makes her readers better thinkers, more reflective and self-aware, and she does so by showing the development of her own thinking—who her influences are, the sources from which she draws her wisdom, and how philosophy informs her understanding of herself, the culture, and the world in which she lives." —Los Angeles Review of Books

"Specifically human life is about trying to discover and live the good life. When our politics and culture deny that, such searches reappear in both good and distorted ways, as Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn details in her fine and probing new book Ars Vitae. One can only agree with her in recommending Plato and Plotinus as transcending the element of immanent rationalist functionalism that threatens to compromise Aristotle's approach to the virtues." —John Milbank, author of Theology and Social Theory

“Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn displays here an amazing familiarity with a vast and technical scholarly literature on ancient philosophy—not only on its relevance to everyday life in present-day America. Her understanding of such sources is juxtaposed with her insight into present-day popular culture—it’s all quite astonishing. If ever a book deserved publishing, it is this one.” —Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of What Hath God Wrought

"An astute archeologist of ideas, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn spies the finest remnants of our classical past lurking within the motley mess of contemporary life. In Ars Vitae, she reminds us, as Faulkner once did, that the past is not dead and that the old Greco-Roman approaches to the art of living still constellate our thoughts and customize our actions, consciously or not." —David Bosworth, author of Conscientious Thinking