Episode 291 - TD21 - Epicurus Pushes Back Against "Expect The Worst And You'll Never Be Disappointed"

Welcome to Episode 291 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote "On The Nature of Things," the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world.

Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.

This week we continue our series covering Cicero's "Tusculan Disputations" from an Epicurean viewpoint.

Today we continue in Part 3, which addresses anger, pity, envy, and other strong emotions. Today we'll continue into Section XIV, where we compare Epicurus' views on dealing with grief to those of other schools.

In the episode we are recording today we are going to find Cicero attacking - and in the course of that attack giving us a great deal of good information about - Epicurus' advice on how to approach the bad things that can and sometimes do happen to us.

Quote

VS55. We must heal our misfortunes by the grateful recollection of what has been, and by the recognition that it is impossible to undo that which has been done.

Cicero's focus on this indicates to me that #VS55 is extremely underappreciated in most discussions about Epicurus.

Episode 291 of the Lucretius Today Podcast is now available. Today our episode is entitled: "Epicurus Pushes Back Against 'Expect The Worst And You'll Never Be Disappointed.'"

Thanks Patrikios. I am going to post about this further elsewhere but i spent some time today reviewing the remaining part of Section III of Tusculan Disputations (from where we are now to the end of the section).

For the next several weeks we're going to be reading some of the most intensely anti-Epicurean discussion anywhere in Cicero, but it's packed with important information that explains what the issues were all about and why Epicurus addressed them the way he did.

I'm going to post further and recommend that anyone who has time to read these sections would be doing themselves and us a favor, as there is a lot here the the podcasters are going to have to address and it would be good to see it discussed in detail here on the forum as we go through it.

We'll be starting in Section XVI next week:

Cicero - Tusculan Disputations - EpicureanFriends Handbook

.... and at least the next five or ten sections are packed with information on Epicurus.

I also had a chance to begin reviewing Part IV. That's going to take some strategic picking and choosing, as a lot of it is devoted to discussion Pythagorus and then the Stoics, but I've already picked up something significant that I did not realize.

Cicero takes the Peripatetics to task, and the Peripatetics and Stoics were at war with each other, apparently because the Peripatetics tried to say that these strong emotions are not bad in themselves, and they can even be useful (such as anger in wartime) so long as they are kept within bounds - which I gather fit into their endorsement of all things in moderation. At least in the part I have reviewed so far, Cicero sides with the Stoics and takes the Aristotelians to task for admitting that any amount of disturbance can be a good thing. It's easy to look upon those disputes between other schools as irrelevant, but when you see how the main debates were being framed by the older/larger schools it becomes easier to see how short or fragmentary comments by Epicurus were framed to engage in the same disputes. That short comment in Diogenes Laertius that the wise man will feel his emotions more strongly than others, but this will not be hindrance to his wisdom, becomes not just an isolated fragment but hugely important to seeing where Epicurus fit in these larger disputes.