Posts by Godfrey

As to what spurred my interest in Epicurus: that question is adding some clarity to my thinking.

Background: for several years I sat with a neighborhood Zen group. Although I enjoyed it, I didn't see myself as a Buddhist and eventually began looking for a suitable western practice. Stoicism came to my attention and I studied that for awhile, but I couldn't agree with the contemporary focus on ethics at the expense of physics and logic. I discovered Epicurus while reading Cicero's On The Nature Of The Gods: Epicurus' ideas struck a chord, particularly his physics. The fact that it is a unified philosophy which is still pertinent in the 21st century is very appealing.

I realize now that what I've been trying to do with a "practice" category is a series of brief action statements. For instance, in retrospect I could reduce my personal Zen practice to "daily meditation and mindfulness". These were actions which kept my daily activities in a Zen framework, to which could be added study of the eightfold path, precepts, etc as desired or necessary for greater insight. These are also key to any Zen practice so they aren't just a to-do list of personal Zen-ness.

To apply that to my personal EP outline: delete the Practice category. To the end of Ethics add these action statements (kind of a personal pharmakon?):

- Spend frequent time with like-minded friends

- Maximize pleasure

- Review desires

I am interested in those, as a matter of fact I'm planning to re-read Epicurus' letters for my next foray and eventually read Lucretius. It's quite interesting how EP relates to modern physics, although I'm not a scientist and beyond a certain point modern physics just blows my mind.

I live in a big city, near the beach. On a good night we can see 10-20 stars. We have a dog.

As you can tell, I'm making up the "practice" list as I go so I appreciate the input. What I'm trying to do is to focus the EP ethics into a more specific, personal list of practices - a personal approach to living the philosophy; cultivating an attitude. Maybe this turns into a place to put my goals into an EP context. But you're right that it can't one list for everybody.

Looking at it the list is rather mental but I think it needs to be to some degree as a bridge between the ethics and just living pleasurably and avoiding pain.

I'm having some trouble making the leap from the ideas to living the ideas, so a list feels right for me personally and that's why I've included it here. I'm curious if other people have this issue as well and have come up with any good strategies?

"Throughout each day, periodically pause and notice a pleasant sensation: sight, sound, smell, touch, taste" seems like it hits a sweet spot in some way. I'm finding as I work with it that it helps me to check in often and it also makes me think about how I might plan certain activities in the future that focus on specific sensory pleasures. This might be illustrative of a bridge between ethics and very general pleasure/pain....

Here's the current work-in-progress version of my personal outline. In an effort to bring EP more directly into my daily life, I've added (hopefully not heretically) a "practice" category. I've made revisions in the other categories for clarity and to reduce some redundancies that I had.

CANON

- The five senses are our primary source of information.

- Anticipations/innate ideas are an instinctual, intuitive source of information which exists in advance of experience.

- Pleasure and pain, both mental and physical, are how we evaluate information and are our guides to action.

- Reason and intuition are secondary to and necessary for evaluating and understanding information from the senses, the anticipations and the feelings.

PHYSICS

- We live in an infinite universe consisting exclusively of matter and void: everything is subject to natural law. Therefore there is by definition no supernatural realm. Nothing exists outside of the universe which could have created the universe.

- Nothing is created from nothing and nothing is reduced to nothing. Therefore the universe has always been and will always be.

- All compounds are impermanent, but the elementary particles composing them are indestructible and over time recombine to form other compounds.

- The soul is corporeal and begins and ends with the body.

- Science is necessary to dispel superstition and fear and to understand the limits of pains and desires.

- The gods are a topic that I need to give more thought to….

ETHICS

- Because there is no supernatural realm and no afterlife, the greatest good is life itself.

- Pleasure is the goal and guide of life. It is set by nature: pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain leads to maintaining life. Pleasure is the end goal of all other goals.

- Pleasure is a state of gratification. Since mind and soul are corporeal, pleasure includes health of mind and body and freedom from mental and physical disturbance.

- Prudence, honor and justice are prerequisites for pleasure.

- Each individual must contemplate and analyze their desires as to whether they lead to pleasure over pain. For each particular desire ask "what will be the result for me if the object of this desire is fulfilled and what if it is not fulfilled?"

- Natural and necessary desires are those that lead to pain when not fulfilled (food, clothing, shelter, safety). Training oneself to fulfill only these desires leads to the simplest life of pleasure.

- Some desires are natural but not necessary. These further desires will not increase pleasure but embellish it.

- The fulfillment of some desires leads to more desire. These desires are unnatural and should be avoided.

- In some instances it is valuable to endure pain in order to achieve a resultant greater pleasure.

- Autonomy is achieved by living frugally, only desiring what is natural and what can be maintained by a source of income which provides an excess of pleasure over pain.

- Friendship adds to the variety of pleasure through sharing. Among these many pleasures are security and love of philosophy.

- Justice is an agreement among beings and is not absolute.

PRACTICE

- Throughout each day, periodically pause and notice a pleasant sensation: sight, sound, smell, touch, taste.

- Exercise daily for the pleasure of movement and for the benefit of good health.

- Rest daily (in addition to sleep) for the pleasure of relaxation and for the benefit of good health.

- Compose a daily haiku or haibun for the pleasure of reflecting on philosophy and on events of the day.

- Review decisions with respect to the categories of desire and the results if fulfilled or not fulfilled.

-

-

It would only be an incidental byproduct of other activities and not something to be sought after or desired (since one should be getting rid of desire). For example meditation, enlightenment, or helping an old lady across the street may bring pleasure. But they are to be done because they are what needs to be done. If they bring pleasure, there's no reason not to enjoy that pleasure but it shouldn't be dwelled upon and the activities aren't done for the reward of the pleasure.

That sounds pretty dry. There's plenty of pleasure in B, but theoretically it's achieved under these conditions.

Buddhism isn't against feeling by any means and the goal isn't to suppress or terminate feeling. The goal is enlightenment/nirvana, which involves a sense of connectedness/oneness with all beings and a sense of joy.

Desire, however, is to be understood and ended. A nuance of eliminating desire is that if you understand yourself as being one with all things, then there is nothing to desire. So the Buddhist approach to desire is quite different from that of EP, where it is (to my current understanding) worked with as a means to focus the pursuit of pleasure on the life-enhancing varieties.

My understanding is that they are considered to have been part of one of Buddha's first teachings and transmitted orally after that, until they were eventually written down. However this wikipedia article provides much more detail than I was aware of, both as to their origin and to their centrality in various branches of Buddhism:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths

The best place to start this discussion objectively is with the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism. These are among the most fundamental doctrines of Buddhism.

THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS

The truth of suffering

The truth of the cause of suffering

The truth of the end of suffering

The truth of the path to the end of suffering (the eightfold path)

THE NOBLE EIGHTFOLD PATH

Right understanding (of the four noble truths, for one)

Right intention

Right speech

Right action

Right livelihood

Right effort

Right mindfulness

Right concentration

My understanding is that desire/clinging/attachment is one of the causes of suffering in Buddhism. Possibly you could compare this to unnatural and unnecessary desires, but I don’t think that would be completely accurate. Desire/clinging/attachment is more about clinging to things which are impermanent. It is also about clinging to the self, which is considered an illusion. This aligns to some degree with “don’t fear death” in EP. So there are overlapping or related concepts common to both philosophies, but how the concepts fit into the big pictures seems to be quite different.

This evening I've been reading DeWitt's chapter on Sensations, Anticipations and Feelings and it brings way more clarity than anything else that I've read. So much so that I'm not feeling as obsessed by the Anticipations anymore.

Excellent point! I'll try to clarify this in my next pass at the outline. I am absolutely pro-science and didn't consider the anti-science viewpoint which is so prevalent today when I wrote this. What I was trying to do was to streamline my outline. I take science as a given and therefore was focusing on trying to understand other points of the philosophy as I composed the outline. The part of the Physics that is most challenging to me is the gods, so I'm now reading up on that and on the Anticipations in the Canon. These two seem to me to be interrelated in some fashion that I don't yet understand.

One of the benefits of writing and posting an outline is that I'm beginning to appreciate more of the nuance and controversy involved in what seems at first to be a very straightforward philosophy. Many thanks for your feedback Hiram!

Thanks for the thoughtful and detailed response.

First off, I'm not a philosophy student (or a philosopher) so there's nothing to be worried about there!

There's a lot to think about here so I'll just touch on a few points now. I'm intrigued by the idea of the anticipations being a continuously operating faculty and a predisposition. If I'm understanding it correctly, that seems to relate well to the rest of the Canon. I agree with you that concepts don't make much sense, especially with regard to Epicurus's statement about false conclusions from anticipations about the gods.

Thanks for the David Sedley reference; I found that paper and downloaded it for after I finish the DeWitt chapters. It sounds like just what I'm looking for so hopefully that will be productive!

You make good points about what I wrote about science and the impossibility of verifying the existence of the gods through the senses, I hadn't thought of those and do need to dig in to the original texts before I refine my outline. I'm trying to absorb the philosophy for my own use, but wandering too far from the original does defeat the purpose of studying it to some extent. I'm looking forward to reading your page on pleasure as well.

As I dig in to these ideas more will it be best to start new threads elsewhere or to continue here?

First, kudos to Cassius for creating this forum and thanks to all who have been posting. It's really great to have a place to learn, discuss and/or get feedback!

I'm seriously lost in the rabbit hole of the anticipations and the gods. My current thoughts on these are in the outline and I'm posting the entire outline to get some feedback on my general grasp of the philosophy.

Unless there are suggestions otherwise (help!), from here I'm planning to read the DeWitt chapters VII, VIII and XIII for his take on the anticipations and the gods, then Barwiss for more on the anticipations. These topics are pretty mind bending and maybe a bit incomplete in the sources, but I think that coming to an understanding of them will be valuable to an overall understanding. Plus they seem to be inter-related in that understanding one may help to understand the other and vice versa. Anyway, here goes:

KNOWLEDGE/CANON

- The five senses are our primary source of information.

- Anticipations/preconceptions are an instinctual, intuitive source of information which exists in advance of experience.

- Pleasure and pain, both mental and physical, are our guides to action.

- Reason and intuition are secondary to and necessary for evaluating and understanding information from the senses, the anticipations and the feelings.

NATURE/PHYSICS

- We live in an infinite universe consisting exclusively of matter and void.

- Nothing is created from nothing and nothing is reduced to nothing. Therefore the universe has always been and will always be.

- Science needs to be studied only to the degree that it brings relief from fear.

- It is impossible to verify the existence of the gods through the senses, therefore knowledge of their existence or non-existence is based solely on the information of the preconceptions and the feelings and, after that, reason.

ETHICS/ACTION

- The ultimate good is life itself.

- Pleasure is the goal of life. This is because it is the end goal of all other goals.

- Pleasure is defined as: freedom from mental and physical disturbance.

- Prudence, honor and justice are prerequisites for pleasure.

- Contemplation and analysis of desires is an integral part of Epicurean practice.

- Natural and necessary desires are those that lead to pain when not fulfilled (food, clothing, shelter, safety). Training oneself to fulfill only these desires leads to the simplest life of pleasure.

- Each individual must analyze their additional desires as to whether they lead to pleasure over pain. These further desires will not increase pleasure but vary it.

- In some instances it is valuable to endure pain in order to achieve a resultant pleasure.

- The fulfillment of some desires leads to more desire. These desires are unnatural and should be avoided.

- "Direct every preference and aversion toward securing health of body and tranquility of mind, as this is the sum and end of a blessed life."

- The Three Goods are friendship, autonomy, and the analyzed life.

- Autonomy is achieved by living frugally, only desiring what is natural and what can be maintained by a source of income which provides an excess of pleasure over pain.

- The analyzed life is a life of pleasure, evaluated and lived by constant attention to the three degrees of desire and according to the Canon.

- The Four Remedies are: don't fear the gods; don't fear death; pleasure is easy to procure; pain is easy to endure.

- Justice is an agreement among beings and is not absolute.

Thanks!

Thanks Martin!

As I recall I found the Society of Friends of Epicurus on Google+, and found this forum from the links on that site. It would be ideal if both this site and Hiram's site came up at or near the top of a Google search. Both sites deserve to be there due to the wealth of information that you both provide. I don't know what it takes to get there however, maybe it takes more resources than are reasonable and/or available.

Sounds good. There's lots to dig in to so it should be an interesting journey!

Hello! I come to Epicurus by way of Zen and the Stoics.... I've got no formal education in philosophy. As a way to learn to meditate, I attended a Zen sitting group for several years. Eventually I began hunting for a Western philosophy and came across the Stoics. The more I looked in to Stoicism, the more dissatisfied I was with it: it has a complete system, but most practitioners seem to pitch Physics and Logic and reduce the system to nothing but Ethics and some practices. I discovered Epicurus while reading Cicero's On The Nature of the Gods. Finally, here is something that makes sense to a Westerner and is a complete philosophy (well, what remains of the writings at least). It really resonates with me; I've been dabbling, reading, trying it out in my life for a year or so.

This forum is the best thing that I've found in terms of an Epicurean community (I don't do Facebook...). Lots of great info, and it seems to be fairly active and growing. After checking in periodically for a few months, I decided to take the dive and join in! I've been working on a tentative outline and hopefully I'll get it posted before too long.

Cassius and Hiram, thanks for all you've been doing to spread the word!