Thus, we fabricate the objects of our worry, quarrels, social rituals, and conventional values. That is what our world is like; we no longer see the world qua world. In the words of Rilke, we no longer see "the Open"; we see only the "future." Ideally, we would
see everything
and ourselves in everything
healed and whole
forever.26
The obstacle to perceiving the world is not to be found in modernity, but within man himself. We must separate ourselves from the world qua world in order to live our daily life, but we muHI 11cpnrate oursclve11 from the
"everyday" world in order tu 1·edi11covcr 1hc wcll'ld llllll world .
The Sage and the World
259
S The Instant
There is a well-known text, in which we can see both the echo of ancient traditions and the anticipation of certain modern attitudes: Rousseau's Reveries du promeneur solitaire.21 What is remarkable in this passage is that we cannot help but recognize the intimate connection which exists, for Rousseau, between cosmic ecstasy and the transformation of his inner attitude with regard to time. On the one hand, "every individual object escapes him; he sees and feels nothing which is not in the whole." 28 Yet, at the same time,
"Time no longer means anything [to him] . . . the present lasts forever, without letting its duration be sensed, and without any trace of succession.
There is no sensation - either of privation or of enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear - other than the one single sensation of our existence. " 29 Here Rousseau analyzes, in a most remarkable way, the elements which constitute and make possible a disinterested perception of the world. What is required is concentration on the present moment, a concentration in which the spirit is, in a sense, without past nor present, as it experiences the simple "sensation of existence." Such concentration is not, however, a mere turning in upon oneself. On the contrary: the sensation of existence is, inseparably, the sensation of being in the whole and the sensation of the existence of the whole.
In Rousseau, all this is a passive, almost mystical state. For the ancients, however, it is quite apparent that the transformation of one's view of the world was intimately linked to exercises which involved concentrating one's mind on the present instant.30 In Stoicism as well as in Epicureanism, such exercises consisted in "separating oneself from the future and past," in order to "delimit th e present instant." 31 Such a technique gives the mind, freed from the burden and prejudices of the past, as well as from worry about the future, tha t inner detachment, freedom, and peace which are indispensable prerequisites for perceiving the world qua world. We have here, moreover, a kind of reciprocal causality: the mind acquires peace and serenity by becoming aware of its relationship with the world, to the extent that it re-places our existence within the cosmic perspective.
This concentration on the present moment lets us discover the infinite value and unheard-of miracle of our presence in the world. Concentration on the present instant implies the suspension of our projects for the future. In other words, it implies that we must think of the present moment as the last moment, and that we live each day and each hour as if it were our last. For the Epicureans, th is exercise reveals the incredible stroke of luck thnnks to which each moment we live in the world is made po1111ihlc.
260
Themes
Believe that every day that dawns will be the final one for you. If you do, you will receive each unexpected hour with gratitude.32
Receive each moment of accumulating time as though it came about by an incredible stroke of luck. 33
Let the soul find its joy in the present, and learn to hate worries about the future. 34
Albeit for different reasons, the Stoics also shared this attitude of wonder at what appears and occurs in the present instant. For them, each instant and each present moment imply the entire universe, and the whole history of the world. Just as each instant presupposes the immensity of time, so does our body presuppose the whole universe. It is within ourselves that we can experience the coming-into-being of reality and the presence of being. By becoming conscious of one single instant of our lives, one single beat of our hearts, we can feel ourselves linked to the entire immensity of the cosmos, and to the wondrous fact of the world's existence. The whole universe is present in each part of reality. For the Stoics, this experience of the instant corresponds to their theory of the mutual interpenetration of the parts of the universe. Such an experience, however, is not necessarily linked to any theory. For example, we find it expressed in the following verses by Blake:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.35
To sec the world for the last time is the same thing as to see it for the first time, tamqutim spectator 11ovus. 36 This impression can be caused by the thought of death, which reveals to us the miraculous character of our relationship to the world: always in peril, always unforeseeable. Alternatively, it can be caused by the feeling of novelty brought about by concentrating one's attention on one instant, one moment of the world: the world then seems to come into being and be born before our eyes. We then perceive the world as a "nature" in the etymological sense of the world: physis, that movement of growth and birth by which things manifest thcmselves.37 We experience ourselves as a moment or instant of this movement; this immense event which reaches beyond us, is always already there before us, and is always beyond us.
We are born along with38 the world. The feeling of existence of which Rousseau spoke is precisely this feeling of identity between univl�rsul bcinic and our own existence.
The Sage and the World
261
6 The Sage and the World
Seneca was equally stupefied by the spectacle of the world (which he contemplated tamquam spectator novus), and by the spectacle of wisdom. By
"wisdom,'' he meant the figure of the sage, as he saw it personified in the personality of the philosopher Sextus.
This is a very instructive parallel. There is in fact a strict analogy between the movement by which we accede to the vision of the world, and that by which we postulate the figure of the sage. In the first place, ever since Plato's Symposium, ancient philosophers considered the figure of the sage as an inaccessible role model, whom the philo-sopher (he who loves wisdom) strives to imitate, by means of an ever-renewed effort, practiced at each instant. 39 To contemplate wisdom as personified within a specific personality was thus to carry out a movement of the spirit in which, via the life of this personality, one was led toward the representation of absolute perfection, above and beyond all of its possible realizations. Similarly, in considering a partial aspect of the world, contemplation discovers the totality of the world, going beyond the landscape�0 glimpsed at a given moment, and transcending it on the way to a representation of totality which surpasses every visible object.