The Garden of Man | CULTIVATION is the Meaning of Life | A Symbolic Orientation for the Individual

In a world of extremes, the ancient symbol of the garden represents the ideal balance between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ where the individual flourishes and grows. The garden is nature that is not wholly wild, a walled-off, tamed wilderness where you can live with mitigated fear and danger, and without being burnt out, consumed by stress, anxiety, and depression like people who are always hustling and networking and climbing the social ladder.

These two facets of cultivation and guardianship are presented as the purpose of human beings by texts like the Hebrew Bible—the meta purpose which encompasses all other aims and goals. The purpose of human life is cultivate: to organize and nurture Being into a state of becoming, for the sake of its own flourishing.

John Milton’s famous extra-biblical poetization of the Genesis events in Paradise Lost, presents the work of Adam and Eve in this way:

“On to their morning’s rural work they haste
Among sweet dews and flow’rs; where any row
Of fruit-trees overwoody reached too far
Their pampered bows, and needed hands to check
Fruitless embraces: they led the vine
To wed her elm; she spoused about him twines
Her marriageable arms, and with her brings
Her dow’r the adopted clusters, to adorn
His barren leaves.” (Paradise Lost, V.215-219)

Marriage in Paradise Lost is a concept that goes far beyond the man and woman and sinks its metaphorical roots into the natural world, where man and woman are to act as kinds of priests or pastors of nature, cultivating nature by uniting its disparate elements—on the principle that fruitfulness, growth, and new birth only spring from a kind of union.

Our actions and lives feel meaningful primarily when they have this ineffable sense of fullness, or dare we say, pregnancy. We are only satisfied when we see our lives bearing some kind of fruit, whatever we take that to mean, whether it be a string of consequences that have positive ramifications, making art, having children, or making some mark on the world. We have a fundamental intuitive understanding of the concept of fruitfulness: of growing as opposed to withering, of phenomena that carry on life, reproducing rather than fading—of thoughts, words, and actions that nourish and strengthen as opposed to weakening.

Through cultivation, and guidance, and wisdom we seek to make ourselves and the things around us fruitful, nourishing, reproductive, eternal. Long before modern biology, Aristotle speculated that the reason we want to have children is because we have an instinct for immortality. “For any living thing that has reached its normal development and which is unmutilated… the most natural act is the production of another like itself… in order that, as far as nature allows, it may partake in the eternal and divine. That is the goal towards which all things strive, that for the sake of which they do whatever their nature renders possible.” On the Soul, 415a25-415b1.

The goal of life should be to establish a garden, firstly, in the metaphorical sense, viewing your life as something to cultivate, but also looking to unselfishly cultivate the world around you.

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