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Yes the image Don is pointing to in post 8 just doesn't seem to me to look like the image in post 5. The image in post 5 at first glance looks to me more like a variation of Epicurus himself.
I don't doubt that you guys are right but that image in post 5 (which I do think I have seen before) confuses me.
Good idea for a list of the open source software we use. The major ones that come to mind that I am currently using:
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This thread might be of limited interest but I discovered tonight that TauPhi and Cleveland Okie share an interest with me in Linux and Free Open Source software. We've previously discussed this topic at least in passing in a couple of places, and I may be posting this in the wrong forum (if so we'll move it).
But in the meantime while the iron is hot I wanted to invite Clevelan and Tau and anyone else with an interest in this to add to this thread. For the moment I will just say that all my computers have been Linux for at least ten years, and I find the whole "Free and Open Source" software movement to be something that fits neatly into my ideas that Epicurean philosophy should be spread as freely and openly as possible. The methods used t coordinate volunteer projects in building software (using GIT and similar methods) seems to me to fit hand in glove with methods we can use to coordinate volunteers in propagating Epicurean philosophy. The Epicurean viewpoint is inherently personal and doesn't lend itself to tight central control, and it seems to me that the same methods people have found successful for working together freely on software are a good model to follow in our philosophic work.
Maybe one more example -- I find that two current FOSS software projects -- Obsidian.md and Logseq - lend themselves directly to outlining and organizing the Epicurean material, and I use them most every day.
Ok that's a general intro to the topic but people can get as specific as they want. Apologies to those who are not interested, but this is a good example of a topic that is at least tangentially related to philosophic work, and we invite others with similar specialized interests to do the same in this "Lifestyle and Self-Improvement" section.
Thanks for that question and that helps let us know where you are in your reading.
We have some initial introductory material on pages like this -- https://www.epicureanfriends.com/wcf/new-user-page/
- but we really need better summaries of the core material.
All of the books and material we have listed in your "Welcome" message are good, and where you start depends mainly on your particular interests. The videos and other intro material on Youtube and elsewhere generally focus on the "ethics" questions and they can leave people bewildered if they don't understand some of the basic worldview issues first.
It would be of great help to us if you would give us feedback on what you find to be clear and what you find to be confusing as you read further into Epicurus. We use information like that to make the website better and to decide what kind of new materials to produce.
I do know that Epicureans believed in gods who had put things in motion but then removed themselves from our affairs and sat completely detached from humans
I am sure others will chime in but if by "things" you mean the entire universe, then this is not correct -- that is the "deist" view but not the Epicurean view. In the Epicurean view the universe is eternal and was never created by any gods or other supernatural forces. In whole and in total (not particular planets or solar systems or galaxies, but truly 'in whole') the universe has always existed and always will exist. That is why the phrases "nothing from nothing" and "nothing to nothing" are so foundational.
As far as the rest of your paragraph yes that would be correct. There is absolutely no "supernatural" dimension -- no heaven, no hell, no afterlife of any kind.
I want to add a comment/question that occurs to me because of the podcast that we recorded today:
I think most of us would agree that it is healthy functioning for the human body to feel pain when it is exposed to something painful.
So the question is: Should we view the Epicurean gods (real OR ideal, either way), as being painless because they are *incapable* of feeling pain, or because they have so arranged their affairs and circumstances that they are never exposed to anything that is painful?
I ask because this might have a relationship to the original question of the gods feeling gratitude. Are they capable of feeling gratitude but do not because they have nothing outside themselves to be grateful for? Are they not grateful for their companionship with their companion gods?
I am thinking the answer would be that the gods are capable of feeling pain, but do not because they have so arranged their affairs so as never to be exposed to it, and in that way of looking at things they would serve as a model for we as humans to also in our own ways arrange our affairs.
But again the usefulness of this at the extreme may be more of a logic game than anything else. It seems obvious that we all, at whatever stage of development, wish to arrange our affairs so as to have no need to experience unnecessary or "un-worthwhile" pain.
In case some are not familiar with it, I would submit for your consideration (a Rod Serling phrase there) one of the most well-thought-of episodes of the 60's Twilight Zone episodes --- "A Stop At Willoughby."
Here is its Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Stop_at_Willoughby
And here's a link where it currently can be viewed: https://odysee.com/@Ntv:3/Twiligh…At-Willoughby:0
The reason it comes to mind is that the thrust of the episode is that the lead character envisions his own version of a "paradise" situation in which: "He learns that this would be a place that is "peaceful, restful, where a man can slow down to a walk and live his life full measure."
This definitely involves slowing down and getting off the rat race of a modern competitive and commercial life, but for purposes of the current analysis I would focus on the fact that his "paradise" vision does not involve being a corpse or asleep, but living a "normal" life full of "normal" activities (band concerts, fishing, etc). This is in contrast to his boss who tells him to "push, push, push" and his wife who drinks herself to death while worrying about her peers and the country club.
As usual with Twilight Zone the issue is more submitted for consideration rather than suggesting a practical response (not to spoil the plot, but the lead character ends up dead). However the imagery of how the best life involves action, rather than being simply a floating disembodied mind, is useful for our purposes, I think.
A full measure life would include all the things that Epicurus said he experienced and without which he would not have known the good:
“I know not how to conceive the good, apart from the pleasures of taste, of sex, of sound, and the pleasures of beautiful form.”
– Diogenes Laertius, Book X
If you haven't seen this one it is 30 minutes well spent.
Push! Push! Push! The lead character's boss reminds me of Zeno pointing an accusing finger at Epicurus on the side of the Bosoreale cup:
As to the issue of Plato arguing that pleasure has more limit, here is the argument in Philebus which seems to me even more clear than what Dewitt cited --- followed by the same argument in Seneca:
Philebus 27e, link to full copy of Philebus (Wikisource) (Gutenberg
SOCRATES: I omit ten thousand other things, such as beauty and health and strength, and the many beauties and high perfections of the soul: O my beautiful Philebus, the goddess, methinks, seeing the universal wantonness and wickedness of all things, and that there was in them no limit to pleasures and self-indulgence, devised the limit of law and order, whereby, as you say, Philebus, she torments, or as I maintain, delivers the soul. — What think you, Protarchus? …
SOCRATES: Have pleasure and pain a limit, or do they belong to the class which admits of more and less?
PHILEBUS: They belong to the class which admits of more, Socrates; for pleasure would not be perfectly good if she were not infinite in quantity and degree.
SOCRATES: Nor would pain, Philebus, be perfectly evil. And therefore the infinite cannot be that element which imparts to pleasure some degree of good. But now — admitting, if you like, that pleasure is of the nature of the infinite — in which of the aforesaid classes, O Protarchus and Philebus, can we without irreverence place wisdom and knowledge and mind? And let us be careful, for I think that the danger will be very serious if we err on this point.
PHILEBUS: You magnify, Socrates, the importance of your favourite god.
SOCRATES: And you, my friend, are also magnifying your favourite goddess; but still I must beg you to answer the question. …
SOCRATES: And whence comes that soul, my dear Protarchus, unless the body of the universe, which contains elements like those in our bodies but in every way fairer, had also a soul? Can there be another source?
PROTARCHUS: Clearly, Socrates, that is the only source.
SOCRATES: Why, yes, Protarchus; for surely we cannot imagine that of the four classes, the finite, the infinite, the composition of the two, and the cause, the fourth, which enters into all things, giving to our bodies souls, and the art of self-management, and of healing disease, and operating in other ways to heal and organize, having too all the attributes of wisdom; — we cannot, I say, imagine that whereas the self-same elements exist, both in the entire heaven and in great provinces of the heaven, only fairer and purer, this last should not also in that higher sphere have designed the noblest and fairest things?
PROTARCHUS: Such a supposition is quite unreasonable.
SOCRATES: Then if this be denied, should we not be wise in adopting the other view and maintaining that there is in the universe a mighty infinite and an adequate limit, of which we have often spoken, as well as a presiding cause of no mean power, which orders and arranges years and seasons and months, and may be justly called wisdom and mind?
PROTARCHUS: Most justly.
---
We can find the same point made by Seneca in the following:
Seneca’s Letters – Book I – Letter XVI: This also is a saying of Epicurus: “If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if you live according to opinion, you will never be rich.” Nature’s wants are slight; the demands of opinion are boundless. Suppose that the property of many millionaires is heaped up in your possession. Assume that fortune carries you far beyond the limits of a private income, decks you with gold, clothes you in purple, and brings you to such a degree of luxury and wealth that you can bury the earth under your marble floors; that you may not only possess, but tread upon, riches. Add statues, paintings, and whatever any art has devised for the luxury; you will only learn from such things to crave still greater. Natural desires are limited; but those which spring from false opinion can have no stopping point. The false has no limits.
Seneca’s Letters – To Lucilius – 66.45: “What can be added to that which is perfect? Nothing otherwise that was not perfect to which something has been added. Nor can anything be added to virtue, either, for if anything can be added thereto, it must have contained a defect. Honour, also, permits of no addition; for it is honourable because of the very qualities which I have mentioned.[5] What then? Do you think that propriety, justice, lawfulness, do not also belong to the same type, and that they are kept within fixed limits? The ability to increase is proof that a thing is still imperfect."
On page 227 DeWitt writes:
---
To the youthful Menoeceus Epicurus writes: "Plain-tasting foods bring a pleasure equal to that of luxurious diet when once the pain arising from need has been removed. and bread and water afford the very keenest pleasure when one in need of them brings them to his lips:' 22
This is the fixed ceiling for pleasure. which he endeavors to establish in opposition to Plato. who compared the appetitive part of the soul to "a many-headed beast" and held to the opinion that desires increase endlessly and that pleasure defied the fixing of a limit. 23
---
The footnotes under 23 are from Plato's Republic:
Plato, Republic, Book 9, section 585e
[585d] that the kinds concerned with the service of the body partake less of truth and reality than those that serve the soul?” “Much less.” “And do you not think that the same holds of the body itself in comparison with the soul?” “I do.” “Then is not that which is fulfilled of what more truly is, and which itself more truly is, more truly filled and satisfied than that which being itself less real is filled with more unreal things?” “Of course.” “If, then, to be filled with what befits nature is pleasure, then that which is more really filled with real things [585e] would more really and truly cause us to enjoy a true pleasure, while that which partakes of the less truly existent would be less truly and surely filled and would partake of a less trustworthy and less true pleasure.” “Most inevitably,” he said. “Then those who have no experience [586a] of wisdom and virtue but are ever devoted to1 feastings and that sort of thing are swept downward, it seems, and back again to the center, and so sway and roam2 to and fro throughout their lives, but they have never transcended all this and turned their eyes to the true upper region nor been wafted there, nor ever been really filled with real things, nor ever tasted stable and pure pleasure, but with eyes ever bent upon the earth4 and heads bowed down over their tables they feast like cattle, [586b] grazing and copulating, ever greedy for more of these delights; and in their greed1 kicking and butting one another with horns and hooves of iron they slay one another in sateless avidity, because they are vainly striving to satisfy with things that are not real the unreal and incontinent part of their souls.” “You describe in quite oracular style,3 Socrates,” said Glaucon, “the life of the multitude.” “And are not the pleasures with which they dwell inevitably commingled with pains, phantoms of true pleasure, illusions of scene-painting, so colored by contrary juxtaposition [586c] as to seem intense in either kind, and to beget mad loves of themselves in senseless souls, and to be fought for,1 as Stesichorus says the wraith of Helen was fought for at Troy through ignorance of the truth?” “It is quite inevitable,” he said, “that it should be so.”
AND
Plato, Republic, Book 8, section 562a
[562a] “Shall we definitely assert, then, that such a man is to be ranged with democracy and would properly be designated as democratic?” “Let that be his place,” he said. “And now,” said I, “the fairest1 polity and the fairest man remain for us to describe, the tyranny and the tyrant.” “Certainly,” he said. “Come then, tell me, dear friend, how tyranny arises.2 That it is an outgrowth of democracy is fairly plain.” “Yes, plain.” “Is it, then, in a sense, in the same way in which democracy arises out of oligarchy that tyranny arises from democracy?” [562b] “How is that?” “The good that they proposed to themselves1 and that was the cause of the establishment of oligarchy—it was wealth,2 was it not?” “Yes.” “Well, then, the insatiate lust for wealth and the neglect of everything else for the sake of money-making was the cause of its undoing.” “True,” he said. “And is not the avidity of democracy for that which is its definition and criterion of good the thing which dissolves it3 too?” “What do you say its criterion to be?” “Liberty,4” I replied; “for you may hear it said that this is best managed in a democratic city, [562c] and for this reason that is the only city in which a man of free spirit will care to live.1” “Why, yes,” he replied, “you hear that saying everywhere.” “Then, as I was about to observe,2 is it not the excess and greed of this and the neglect of all other things that revolutionizes this constitution too and prepares the way for the necessity of a dictatorship?”
The section we discuss today has some material I have not reviewed closely, including this as a footnote reference to a writer named Koerte from a work I have not seen:
Koerte: A. Koerte. Metrodori Epicurei Fragmenta, Leipzig, 1890
That's a reference for this from Epicurus:
"Each individual is physically constituted from the very beginning of his being for a definite span of life, so that, while he cannot live a longer term, he may live a shorter."
I am adding to this thread becaues the "lathe biosas" issue is coming up tomorrow in our book review of the Emily Austin "Living for Pleasure."
I wanted to add this link where the primary source for this phrase as being Epicurean is recorded - in Plutarch:
The essay is "Is Live Unknown a Wise Precept?" and it begins on the page at this link:
Welcome to Episode 174 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote "On The Nature of Things," the only 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 you will find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics.
We are now in the process of a series of podcasts intended to provide a general overview of Epicurean philosophy based on the organizational structure employed by Norman DeWitt in his book "Epicurus and His Philosophy."
This week we continue our discussion of Chapter 12, entitled "The New Hedonism."
This episode mentions Eudoxus. A separate thread has been created to carry forward that conversation in more detail:
The gods are grateful to Nature, for, without the eternal atoms, they would not enjoy pleasant lives.
Great question. On the face of it I would think that that meaning of grateful *would* apply to the gods. If the gods take pleasure in their own existence and circumstances - and I think that would be true - isn't that Nature?
Maybe we are in another one of those many definition searches.
I’d really like to know how being Epicurean got to be twisted on its head i.e being a person who is into fine and luxurious foods.
Most of the comment so far focus on the intentional warping.
There is also the fact that there is a "grain of truth" in that if you are thinking that Epicurus was "only" into simple pleasures, then that too is not true.
Epicurus was into "pleasure" and that can come in many ways, simple and luxurious, and the trick is to maneuveur through your personal context to focus on pleasures that do not cause you more pain than you are willing to experience for the sake of those pleasures.
The standard translation of VS63 is: VS63. Frugality too has a limit, and the man who disregards it is like him who errs through excess.
Further in the letter to Menoeceus:
130] Yet by a scale of comparison and by the consideration of advantages and disadvantages we must form our judgment on all these matters. For the good on certain occasions we treat as bad, and conversely the bad as good. And again independence of desire we think a great good — not that we may at all times enjoy but a few things, but that, if we do not possess many, we may enjoy the few in the genuine persuasion that those have the sweetest pleasure in luxury who least need it, and that all that is natural is easy to be obtained, but that which is superfluous is hard. And so plain savours bring us a pleasure equal to a luxurious diet, when all the pain due to want is removed; and bread and water produce the highest pleasure, when one who needs them puts them to his lips.
So there is both the "intentional misrepresentation" and the "grain of truth" that can be seen when you dive into the specific meaning of the words involved.
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Episode 173 of the podcast is now available!
In fact it would be fun to compare and contrast: Who was closer to Epicurus, Aristippus or Eudoxus? What do we know about their respective physics and epistemology that we might use to say that Epicurus thought of himself as being closer to one than to the other?
