Clinamen Vitae — The swerve toward lived experience, where life is worthy of being lived
Between night and day lie twilight and dawn - moments that belong neither to light nor to darkness, yet honor both as complementary shades of our natural, tangible, and shared reality. These moments transcend - or rather, refute- the Aristotelian logic of the excluded middle, which leads to dilemmas and false necessities. Nature does not operate this way; it does not exclude, does not oppose. It discerns, measures, and allows - and it is best described through Epicurean philosophy when that philosophy becomes lived experience.
The history of economic theory is saturated with dialectical constructions. From Aristotle to Marx, and from Smith to Mises, economic thinkers have sought value, exchange, labor, profit, and wealth through conflicting or abstract logics. Dialectics - whether as an idealist method or a materialist driving force - dominates as an analytical tool. Yet this dominance has always come at a cost: it fails to offer any clear conclusion about how human beings might live a truly pleasant and eudaimonic life.
Dialectics tends to lead to some relentless necessity. Opposition must be overcome, history must advance, labor must be alienated and then liberated. But nature does not obey necessity. It operates through probabilities, not purposes. Nature has no intention, no salvific aim, no discriminating will, no providence; It simply allows - through the swerve (clinamen) - that deviation which makes freedom possible.
Thus, the Epicurean person, by studying Nature through the lens of prudence, introduces purpose into ethics: pleasure as the measure of every good, the avoidance of unnecessary pain, and the pursuit of eudaimonia - a life of fullness, grounded in the aim of pleasure and the absence of fear.
The Epicurean Canon - this treasure of epistemology - is not the product of dialectical transcendence. It is the achievement of phronesis (prudence), shaped by all that the human being has learned, and continues to learn, through lived experience. It is the manifold method by which one observes, measures, and investigates the causes of phenomena as they unfold.
And here emerges the true wealth of autarkeia (self sufficiency) - not merely a choice, but a swerve. It is the full, conscious, and experiential knowledge of what is natural and necessary in human life. It is ontological freedom from necessity - not a rejection of matter, but an understanding of its measure.
And this measure is not quantity, but the quality of one’s relationship to things - a relationship shaped by the human being. As Protagoras so precisely said: “Man is the measure of all things.”
It is prudence that evaluates both pleasure and disturbance- not through the avoidance of intensity, but through the selection of what is natural and beneficial. For even measure, without prudence, becomes vagueness - and vagueness leads to the mediocrity of confusion.
Epicurean prudence is not mediocre. It is precise, generous, and free. It is great, as Epicurus himself exhorts in his 45th saying and in his greeting: “Εὖ πράττειν καὶ Σπουδαίως ζῆν” i.e. “Act well and live greatly.”
The art of living is to discern clearly what is beneficial from what is harmful - for to live well and to die well are one and the same.
Epicurus, in Saying XLIV (44), speaks of self-sufficiency with clarity and precision:
“When the wise person confines himself to what is necessary, he knows better how to give than to receive, such a great treasure of self-sufficiency he has discovered.”
Self-sufficiency is the capacity to offer without depending on ulterior motives. It is an act of friendship and freedom - not a mere strategy for survival.
This stance of self-sufficiency is not solely Epicurean. It resonates deeply in Pericles’ Funeral Oration, as preserved by our great historian Thucydides. There, the virtue of friendship is not reciprocity - it is offering without calculating advantage. Friendship is not a debt; it is the remembrance of beneficence. Freedom is not interest; it is enduring trust - a timeless quality that prevails, and thus, friendship becomes an immortal good.
“The bravest of all are those who clearly understand both the pains and the pleasures of life, and yet this knowledge does not make them avoid danger. We acquire friends more by doing good than by receiving it. We help others without anxiety, inspired by the trust that freedom instills.” (Pericles’ Funeral Oration)
The prudence of the wise and the political virtue of Pericles converge on the essential: through friendship, one cares without ulterior motive, but not without discernment. Friendship contains prudence, and prudence measures. At first, one takes a risk, offers, tests, trusts. But once friendship is established, it is measured in presence.
As Epicurus says, friendship is chosen for its own sake- even if it begins in mutual benefit.
The Spartans, with their strict discipline and closed society, fell into the Thucydidean trap - where the power of the other compels one to live in anxiety and turmoil. They could not endure the presence of a society they could not control a city that prospered without fear, that offered without subjugating, and that found freedom through friendship and frankness. And so, the pretexts emerged for a devastating war to begin.
Yet, at a certain point, it was not strategy that determined the course of the war, it was the plague. The invisible typhus virus became the great general of History, and Panoply-clad Ares, god of war, merely followed. Salvation did not come from the strength of arms; it came from the study of Nature, prudence, friendship, human concern, and care.
Lucretius, at the end of the sixth book of De Rerum Natura, expresses this with Epicurean tragic clarity: Nature has no intention, makes no distinctions, does not save - it simply allows the swerve.
Faced with this indifference of Nature, the only salvation is friendship and prudence. As Philodemus writes: “Save one another.” Not through stratagems or devices that impose dominion, but through the awareness of human concern. Prudence, when it weighs probabilities and measures outcomes, is an act of care - not through metaphysical transcendence or presence conjured by empty words, but through human acts!
Such a human act was the huge inscription erected in the heart of the Agora by the Epicurean Diogenes of Oenoanda. A care engraved - not only for the unborn - but for the present, the wandering, the fearful, for those who seek eudaimonia through knowledge that heals fear and dissolves the superstitions that provoke the greatest conflicts and disturbances among people.
Diogenes’ inscription echoed the steady cadence of the historian Thucydides’ clarity, who reminds us in words simple, clear, and comprehensible:
“The exclusion of myth from my History may render it less pleasing to the ear. Yet it will suffice me if it is judged useful by those who seek a precise understanding of events - those that have already occurred, and those which, by human nature, are likely to occur again in similar fashion. For I wrote my History as a treasure for all time, not as a contest piece to be heard and forgotten.”
In the Western world, the politics of economy has been transformed into a system of management, a technocratic imposition, a mechanism detached from the human being. And as philosophical discourse falls silent, and human values begin to collapse alongside it, the world itself starts to lose its meaning. Yet phronesis - that root of all virtues which does not negotiate life, but cares for it - can still guide toward the safe harbor of eudaimonia.
The politics of economy, when guided by phronesis that is the root of all virtues, which, according to Epicurus, surpasses philosophy because it transforms it into meaningful action, with pleasure as the criterion for every good - and, above all, with respect for human values, resembles a wise Captain steering a ship toward the safe harbor of human eudaimonia.
Eudaimonia is, and will always be, that Ithaca of the poet Cavafy - which may have seemed poor to you, but did not deceive you, for it gave you the beautiful and wealthy journey.
Such a politics of economy cannot become a system, cannot be reduced to theory, and never collapses into a technocratic or bureaucratic proposal to do so-called “good business.”
It is a way of genuinely pleasant life , and life is not something to be negotiated.
And if there is a final word, let us write it here in indelible letters and on every wall of the city:
The final word is not transcendence - that Platonic ascent toward the intelligible, which seeks fulfillment beyond the world.
It is presence - with body and soul, in the here and shared real. For through presence, knowledge is transmitted - not as information, but as lived experience. Not as the domination of authority demanding submission, but as relationships that inspire trust. Not as salvation from an earthly or supernatural savior, but as salvation within this world and through one another - those allēlōn whom the statesman Pericles honored as citizens, and the tragedian Sophocles praised as hypsipoleis -citizens who elevate the city through presence, care, clarity, justice, and honesty.
In contrast to the hypsipoleis stand the apoleis - those who belong nowhere, who neither care for the city nor dwell in presence. Unlike the Stoic cosmopolitans who claim to love all humanity yet often love no one in particular, the hypsipoleis begin with the small and the familiar. For if one cannot love the nearness of one’s own city, how can one truly love the vastness of the world?
And beyond the civic stage, from the ashes of Vesuvius, the Epicurean Philodemus addressed the human being not as subject of the polis, but as friend among friends - with a discourse of philia (friendship), parrēsia (frankness of speech), and synaisthisi (empathy). A discourse that leads the human being toward the fullness of eudaimonia.
«For when we possess eudaimonia, we have everything; and when it is absent, we do everything to attain it». Thus begins and ends the letter of Epicurus to Menoeceus.
And if our dear Nietzsche spoke of Greek civilization as the Achilles leap - that charioteer’s vault that transcends the abyss - we recognize it as the Epicurean clinamen: the small, indeterminate swerve that breaks necessity and makes freedom possible.
Not amor fati, the acceptance of fate as ultimate truth; but clinamen vitae: the inclination toward lived experience, toward presence, toward care and empathy within the world and through others.
Clinamen Vitae is the Epicurean swerve of clever Odysseus: the subtle deviation that keeps him human, present, caring, mortal yet free. A phrase that encapsulates his resistance to Circe’s indulgent enchantments and his refusal of Calypso’s immortality - as Epicurus puts it:
“Thus the awareness that death is nothing to us makes our mortal life enjoyable - not by adding infinite time to it, but by removing the longing for immortality.”
Because life is not to be loved simply because it cannot be changed; it is to be swerved within -because it is worth living, for it is one and only, and there shall never be another in all eternity.
Thank you for your precious time. 😊
----------------------------------------------------
Clinamen as artistic presence: sound without performer, freedom without command.
The link : https://www.pinaultcollection.com/en/boursedecom…ursier-mougenot
