a) Heidegger gives us Nietzsche as the philosopher of the will to power and the last metaphysician of the West.

b) Deleuze gives us Nietzsche as the critical and clinical genealogist and in the guise of a superior empiricist.

c) Vattimo gives us a Nietzsche who does not complete and exhaust the tradition but seeks a twisting free of metaphysics and heralds the inauguration of weak thinking.

“I have presented such terrible images to knowledge that any ‘Epicurean delight’ is out of the question. Only Dionysian joy is sufficient: I have been the first to discover the tragic” (KSA 11, 25 [95]: WP 1029).

A critique of commercial society and an emerging consumer culture.

A commitment to stable pleasures and mental equilibrium over the need for constant change.

An attempt to live free of the delusions of human exceptionalism, and free from the gods, especially the fear of the gods.

An emphasis on a therapy of slowness and the vita contemplativa, including a tempering of the human mind in order to liberate it from moral and religious fanaticism.

The search for a simpler, cleaner, and leaner existence purified of the metaphysical need with an attention to the importance of the closest and smallest things.

A care of self that is intended to be coextensive with the whole of life, suggesting an ecological rather than an atomistic approach to the art of living.

In a note from 1881 Nietzsche writes intriguingly that he considers the various moral schools of antiquity to be “experimental laboratories” containing a number of recipes for the art of living (Kunstgriffen der Lebensklughheit: literally ‘artifices for worldly wisdom’) and holds that these experiments now belong to us as our legitimate property: “we shall not hesitate to adopt a Stoic recipe just because we have profited in the past from Epicurean recipes” (KSA 9, 15 [59]).

For the Cynics: social constraints and conventions.

For the Epicureans: the quest for false pleasures.

For the Stoics: by the pursuit of egoistic self-interest.

For the Skeptics: by false opinions.

In order to change our value judgements, however, we must make a radical choice to change our entire way of thinking and way of being. This choice is the choice of philosophy, and it is thanks to it that we may obtain inner tranquillity and peace of mind (Hadot, WAP? p. 102).

Members of the school were actively engaged in self-improvement and the improvement of others by mutual admonition and correction. The aim was to inculcate goodwill, gratitude, respect for wisdom, self-control, frankness, openness and moderation in all things. Arrogance, greed, jealousy, boastfulness, and anger were faults to be removed be gentle correction rather than by coercion or punishment (Gordon Campbell, ‘Epicurus, The Garden, and the Golden Age’, p. 222).

We withdraw into concealment: but not out of any kind of personal ill-humour, as though the political and social situation of the present day were not good enough for us, but because through our withdrawal we want to economize and assemble forces of which culture will later have great need, and more so if this present remains this present and as such fulfils its task. We are accumulating capital and seeking to make it secure: but, as in times of great peril, to do that we have to bury it (WS 229).

Live in seclusion so that you can live for yourself. Live in ignorance about what seems most important to your age…the clamor of today, the noise of wars and revolutions should be a mere murmur for you. You will also wish to help – but only those whose distress you understand entirely because they share with you one suffering and one hope – your friends – and only in the manner in which you help yourself. I want to make them bolder, more persevering, simpler, gayer (GS 338).

Vatican Sayings 33: “The voice of the flesh cries, ‘Keep me from hunger, thirst, and cold!’. The man who has these sureties and who expects he always will would rival even Zeus for happiness”.

For all people’s misfortune and suffering comes from the fact that they are unaware of genuine pleasure. When they seek pleasure, they are unable to find it, because they cannot be satisfied with what they have; or because they seek what is beyond their reach; or because they spoil their pleasure by constantly fearing they will lose it. In a sense, one could say that people’s suffering comes primarily from their empty opinions, and hence from their souls. The mission of philosophy and of Epicurus was therefore above all therapeutic: the philosopher must tend to the sickness of the soul, and teach mankind how to experience pleasure (Hadot p. 115).

• Desires that are natural and necessary• Desires that are natural but not necessary• Desires that are empty, that is, neither natural

nor necessary. Natural and necessary desires are those whose

satisfaction deliver people from pain and correspond to elementary needs or vital necessities.

Natural but not necessary desires include desires for sumptuous foods and sexual gratification.

Those that are neither natural nor necessary, produced by empty opinions, include the limitless desire for wealth, glory, and immortality.

‘kinetic’ pleasure is basic instinctive pleasure and produced by action to satisfy a need, such as the ingestion of food (or the ejaculation of sperm); this is an unstable kind of pleasure since it is temporary and involves pain – the pleasure of eating will soon be followed by the pain of hunger, etc.

  ‘katastematic’ pleasure is ‘stable’ in that it endures and involves no

pain: it is the pleasure of contentment and serenity, involving the absence of need and desire, and the equilibrium of tranquillity. It is superior to the animal pursuits of food and sex and for the Epicureans is to be elevated into the highest goal of life, attaining a state of ‘ataraxia’.

If we were not disturbed by our worries about celestial phenomena and death, fearing…that the latter is something dire for us, we would have no need of the study of nature. We cannot free ourselves of fear about the most essential things if we do not know exactly what the nature of the universe is…without the study of nature it is impossible to obtain pleasure in its state of purity (cited in Hadot p. 118).

The ‘All’ is eternal and is not created by a divine Power. This eternal universe is constituted by bodies and space, or the void, in which they move.

The bodies that we perceive, such as those of living beings, the earth, and the stars, are made up of indivisible, immutable bodies, infinite in number.

These are atoms that fall at equal speed in a straight line, as a result of their weight, in the infinite void. They collide and give rise to composite bodies as they deviate, however, infinitesimally, from their trajectory. Bodies and worlds are born, and disintegrate, as a result of the continuous movement of atoms. Thus, in the infinity of time and of the void, there is an infinity of worlds that appear and disappear and our world is just one of them.

There is a deviation of atoms: this is needed to explain the formation of bodies… (p. 119); and there is human freedom through the introduction of chance into necessity.

• People need not fear the gods since they have no effect on the world or the people in it. Although the gods exist they exercise no action upon the world, and this is a condition in fact of their perfection:

“That which is blessed and immortal has no troubles itself, nor does it cause any to others; so that it is not subject either to anger or benevolence. For everything of this kind is found only in that which is weak” (cited in Hadot, p. 121).

• People need not fear death since the soul is made up of atoms and, like the body, it disintegrates at death and loses all sensory capacity. When death appears we cease to exist, so why should we fear that which has nothing to do with us?

To none is life given in freehold; to all on lease. Look back at the eternity that passed before we were born, and mark how utterly it counts to us as nothing. This is a mirror that Nature holds up to is, in which we may see the time that shall be after we are dead. Is there anything terrifying in the sight – anything depressing – anything that is not more restful than the soundest sleep (Book Three: 971).

Death, therefore, must be regarded, so far as we are concerned, as having less existence than sleep, if anything can have less existence than what we perceive to be nothing. For death is followed by a far greater dispersal of the seething mass of matter: once that icy break in life has intervened, there is no more waking (Book Three: 926).

All these teachings – meditate upon them night and day, alone and also with a companion…Thus you will feel no worries either asleep or awake, but will live like a god among men. Accustom yourself to living with the thought that death is nothing for us (Letter to Menoeceus, cite din Hadot p. 122).

The gods are not to be feared. Death is not to be dreaded. What is good is easy to obtain. What is bad is easy to bear.

It is certain that Nietzsche sought to found a philosophical school modelled on Epicurus’s garden. In a letter of 26 March 1879 he asks Peter Gast: “Where are we going to renew the garden of Epicurus?”

Nietzsche writes that Epicurus “is the best negative argument in favour of my challenge to all rare spirits to isolate themselves from the mass of their fellows” (KGB III, 1, 418).

Like Epicurus, Nietzsche’s philosophical therapy is in search of pupils and disciples: “What I envy in Epicurus are the disciples in his garden; in such circumstances one could certainly forget noble Greece and more certainly still ignoble Germany!”

Epicurus has been alive at all times and is living now, unknown to those who have called and call themselves Epicureans, and enjoying no reputation among philosophers. He has, moreover, himself forgotten his own name: it was the heaviest pack he ever threw off (WS 227).

Epicurus relates to the Stoics as beauty does to sublimity; but one would have to be a Stoic at the very least to catch sight of this beauty at all! To be able to be jealous of it! (Nietzsche, 1883, KSA 10, 7 [151])

I see his eyes gaze upon a wide, white sea, across rocks at the shore that are bathed in sunlight, while large and small animals are playing in this light, as secure and calm as the light and his eyes. Such happiness could be invented only by a man who was suffering continually. It is the happiness of eyes that have seen the sea of existence become calm, and now they can never weary of the surface and of the many hues of this tender, shuddering skin of the sea. Never before has voluptuousness (Wollust) been so modest (GS 45).

In Human, all too Human Nietzsche writes of a “refined heroism” “which disdains to offer itself to the veneration of the great masses…and goes silently through the world and out of the world” (HH 291). This is deeply Epicurean in inspiration: Epicurus taught that one should die as if one had never lived.

Only the ennobled human being may be given freedom of spirit; to him alone does alleviation of life draw near and salve his wounds; only he may say that he lives for the sake of joy (Freudigkeit) and for the sake of no further goal…(WS 350)

Nietzsche admires Epicurus for cultivating a modest existence and in two respects: first, in having “spiritual joyfulness (Freudigkeit) in place of frequent indulgence in single pleasures” (KSA 8, 41 [48]), and, second, in withdrawing from social ambition and living in a garden as opposed to living publicly in the market-place. As Nietzsche stresses, “A little garden, figs, little cheeses and in addition three or four good friends – these were the sensual pleasures of Epicurus” (WS 192).

• To those who are tormented by the fear of the gods, one points out that if the gods exist they do not concern themselves with us and that it is unnecessary to engage in “fruitless disputation” over the ultimate question as to whether they exist or not.

• Furthermore, in response to the consideration of a hypothesis, half belonging to physics and half to ethics, and that may cast gloom over our spirits, it is wise to refrain from refuting the hypothesis and instead offer a rival hypothesis, even a multiplicity of hypotheses. To someone who wishes to offer consolation – for example, to the unfortunate, to ill-doers, to hypochondriacs, and so on – one can call to mind two pacifying formulae of Epicurus that are capable of being applied to many questions: “firstly, if that is how things are they do not concern us; secondly, things may be thus but they may also be otherwise” (WS 7).

The task, Nietzsche says, is to live in terms of “a constant spiritual joyfulness (Freudigkeit)” (HH 292) and to prize “the three good things”: greatness, repose, and sunlight, in which these things answer to thoughts that elevate, thoughts that quieten, thoughts that enlighten, and, finally, “to thoughts which participate in all three qualities, in which everything earthly comes to transfiguration: it is the kingdom where there reigns the great trinity of joy (Freude)” (WS 332).

Part II: Hadot and Spiritual Exercises

Spiritual exercises can best be observed in the context of Hellenistic and Roman schools of philosophy. The Stoics, for instance, declared explicitly that philosophy, for them, was an ‘exercise’…philosophy did not consist in teaching an abstract theory…but rather in the art of living. It is a concrete attitude and determinate lifestyle, which engages the whole of existence. The philosophical act is not situated merely on the cognitive level, but on that of the self and of being. It is a progress, which causes us to be more fully, and makes us better. It is a conversion which turns out entire life upside down, changing the life of the person who goes through it. It raises the individual from an authentic condition of life, darkened by unconsciousness and harassed by worry, to an authentic state of life…an exact vision of the world, inner peace, and freedom (Hadot 1995: pp. 82-3).

…we switch, says Hadot, from our typical and limited ‘human’ point of view, in which our values depend solely on our passions, to a ‘natural’ vision of things in which the events that happen and befall us are viewed in the perspective of universal nature.

By encouraging concentration on the minuscule present moment…attention (prosoche) increases our vigilance…attention to the present moment allows us to accede to cosmic consciousness, by making us attentive to the infinite value of each instant, and causing us to accept each moment of existence from the viewpoint of the universal law of the cosmos (Hadot 1995: 85).

As James Porter puts it, “what an Epicurean enjoys is not some pleasure that is distinct from life, but life qua pleasure” (ibid. 213). And as Hadot has pointed out, Epicurus’s teaching seeks to transform our relationship to time, in which we become focused on the present moment, and this transformation presupposes a quite specific conception of pleasure, “according to which the quality of pleasure depends neither on the quantity of desires it satisfies, nor on the length of time it lasts” (Hadot 1995: 223).

Not pleasure in the form of mere sensual gratification, but the intellectual pleasure derived from contemplating nature, the thought of pleasure past and present, and lastly the pleasure of friendship (ibid.).