5. Interpreting the text. What is significant about this text is not just that as long as we humans live, we are delivered over to cura, but also that we are formed by cura, this in contrast to the usual idea that we are composed of body (earth) and soul. Jove says that “Cura prima finxit.” Cura is the very origin of ex-sistence and holds us in her grip as long as we live (Cura. . . teneat, quamdiu vixerit). We never leave that origin behind; rather, it owns and controls our ex-sistence throughout our mortal lives. Ex-sistence as involved in meaning is fundamentally determined by cura.
Note, too, that the creature gets its name “homo” from the fact that humus constitutes its ontic status. On the other hand, its ontological status is indicated by the fact that the god who gets to name the creature is Saturn, whose counterpart in Greek mythology is Chronos, i.e., time.2 This suggests that our very essence consists in living temporally in the world.
6. Epistle 124 to Lucilius. What does the ontic element of cura tell us about ex-sistence? Burdach3 makes the important point that the Latin word cura has two distinct meanings. On the one hand it can mean “care” or “anxious concern.” But on the other hand, it can be translated into German as Hingabe: being given over to, occupied with, and intensely engaged in something. That second meaning is what Seneca has in mind in his last letter to Lucilius (Epistle 124, 14):
Of the four kinds of natural entities—trees, animals, human beings, and God—the last two are rational, but with the distinction that God is immortal whereas human beings are mortal. In the case of God, his good, i.e., his perfection, is achieved by his own nature, whereas with human beings, their good or perfection is achieved by cura (unius bonum natura perficit, dei scilicet, alterius cura, hominis).
7. Interpreting Seneca. For Seneca, our perfectio is achieved in and through cura and consists in becoming what we are able to be: free for the possibilities which are most our own and into which we project ourselves. But ex-sistence is likewise thrown,
2. Compare Herder’s poem, “Das Kind der Sorge,” (Suphan XXXIX, 75).
3. See his “Faust und die Sorge,” p. 49. By the time of the Stoics, merimna [care, thought, solicitude] was already an established term. The Latin Vulgate of the New Testament translates merimna as sollicitudo.It was while studying Augustine’s Greek-Christian anthropology in the light of Aristotle’s ontology that I began to interpret human being in terms of cura qua Hingabe, our being a priori given over to making sense of the world.