Posts by Cassius

Quote from Joshua

Whither? To pleasure

Right and I agree. But if your paradigm is that life (without pain) IS pleasure, then aligning ones perspective in that direction might result in major terminology shifts, such as when the Epicureans continued to use the word "God" to refer to beings that the people of the day construed as most ungodlike.

No doubt, like Cicero said, people don't normally talk that way. But I have to think that in insisting that as to a normal and ordinary "hand," and as to the equation of the pourer to the drinker, that they are all in the state of greatest pleasure, and as to holding dogmatically that all we need to know about someone to say that they are in the greatest pleasure is that they say they are without pain - in those examples something is being telegraphed to us that we may find unintelligible due to our perspectives today, but which indicates a resolution to much that seems puzzling about Epicurus.

Quote from Don

I don't think you can answer "Why did you do that?" with "Because I'm alive" and have it have any real meaning.

I agree that we can't do that today with our current connotations. I think DeWitt is asking, however, whether that was not the direction that Epicurus was going, and once one "thinks like an Epicurean" in equating life in the absence of pain to be pleasure, then equating "being alive" with "pleasurable experience" is a natural association, and a good way to think.

This is one of the paragraphs we recently covered in "the new hedonism" chapter:

Quote

The extension of the name of pleasure to this normal state of being was the major innovation of the new hedonism. It was in the negative form, freedom from pain of body and distress of mind, that it drew the most persistent and vigorous condemnation from adversaries. The contention was that the application of the name of pleasure to this state was unjustified on the ground that two different things were thereby being denominated by one name. Cicero made a great to-do over this argument, but it is really superficial and captious. The fact that the name of pleasure was not customarily applied to the normal or static state did not alter the fact that the name ought to be applied to it; nor that reason justified the application; nor that human beings would be the happier for so reasoning and believing.

Just thinking out loud at the moment but I think this drift of thought is probably the explanation for DeWitt's viewpoint on the summum bonum, and I am not sure he's not right.

And yes that is a good formulation starting at the 14:00 minute mark, to which the ultimate motivation or cause is pretty clear, and which they refuse to accept:

"And for this cause we call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life. For we recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us, and from pleasure we begin every act of choice and avoidance, and to pleasure we return again, using the feeling as the standard by which we judge every good."

"Every creature, as soon as it is born, seeks after pleasure and delights therein as in its supreme good, while it recoils from pain as its supreme evil, and banishes that, so far as it can, from its own presence, and this it does while still uncorrupted, and while nature herself prompts unbiased and unaffected decisions. So he says we need no reasoning or debate to shew why pleasure is matter for desire, pain for aversion."

"Moreover, seeing that if you deprive a man of his senses there is nothing left to him, it is inevitable that nature herself should be the arbiter of what is in accord with or opposed to nature. Now what facts does she grasp or with what facts is her decision to seek or avoid any particular thing concerned, unless the facts of pleasure and pain?"

Thanks for the link!

Quote from Don

Which is why I balk at Dewitt's "life is the greatest good" because it seems a tautology to answer why I do something as "because I'm alive."

That framing of the question may be the most profound passage on the forum today. I think I will ask Elli to weigh in on how considering "because I am alive" or "life" may be very relevant to the idea of a "greatest good."

And I bet she might have better quotes / ideas than I have below to explore the issue.

In Epicurean terms, is not "life without pain" so close to "feeling without pain" that "life" = pleasure just like "feeling without pain" = pleasure?

If we are focusing as Epicurus did on the fact that we have an eternity of nothingness before birth and after life, is not our brief opportunity to live and to find pleasure pretty much synonymous?

Does not "I want to live" mean essentially "I want to experience pleasure" in Epicurean terms?

And if in Epicurean terms "life" is pleasurable, might not DeWitt be onto something by his phrasing? (Once we translate life into pleasure through Epicurus analysis.)

Is the reasoning that Chrysippus was attacking with the hand analogy or Cicero was attacking with the "host pouring wine" analogy really very far from considering "life - in the absence of pain" to be best formulation? Is that very far from Torquatus saying "I affirm that all who are without pain are in pleasure, and in that the fullest possible!"

Is considering "being alive" to be the answer to why we do things very far from Nietzsche's formulations about saying "Yes" to life, in which he thinks he needs to go beyond Epicurus because Epicurus isn't "strong" or "forceful" enough about how to live (with which I think we would all here disagree)?

From Wikipedia:

Nietzschean affirmation (German: Bejahung) is a concept that has been scholarly identified in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. An example used to describe the concept is a fragment in Nietzsche's The Will to Power:

Quote

Suppose that we said yes to a single moment, then we have not only said yes to ourselves, but to the whole of existence. For nothing stands alone, either in ourselves or in things; and if our soul did but once vibrate and resound with a chord of happiness, then all of eternity was necessary to bring forth this one occurrence—and in this single moment when we said yes, all of eternity was embraced, redeemed, justified and affirmed.
— Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Will to Power: Selections from the Notebooks of the 1880s (translated by R. Kevin Hill and Michael A. Scarpitti). Penguin Books, 2017, p. 566^[1]

Opposition to Schopenhauer

Walter Kaufmann wrote that Nietzsche "celebrates the Greeks who, facing up to the terrors of nature and history, did not seek refuge in "a Buddhistic negation of the will," as Schopenhauer did, but instead created tragedies in which life is affirmed as beautiful in spite of everything."^[2][3] Schopenhauer’s negation of the will was a saying "no" to life and to the world, which he judged to be a scene of pain and evil. "[D]irectly against Schopenhauer’s place as the ultimate nay-sayer to life, Nietzsche positioned himself as the ultimate yes-sayer…."^[4] Nietzsche's affirmation of life's pain and evil, in opposition to Schopenhauer, resulted from an overflow of life.^[5] Schopenhauer's advocacy of self-denial and negation of life was, according to Nietzsche, very harmful.^[6] For his entire mature life, Nietzsche was concerned with the damage that he thought resulted from Schopenhauerian disgust with life and turning against the world.

I came across this article in a roundabout way so I am not 100% sure of it, but I'll post based on the reputation of "Scientific American" -

Genetic Memory: How We Know Things We Never Learned

I met my first savant 52 years ago and have been intrigued with that remarkable condition ever since. One of the most striking and consistent things in the…

blogs.scientificamerican.com

Episode 179 of the Lucretius Today Podcast is now available!

Quote from Don

Maybe there's a podcast episode or two in the future?

Oh definitely yes, we have not given that work nearly the attention it deserves. I will admit, however, that it's probably the most challenging of any that we might attack, and we'll definitely want to spend some time reading Sedley's analysis, and the extensive appendices by DeLacey in his book, before we tackle it.

Right now my inclination is for us to go on the counterattack on ethics first, and deal with Cicero's "Book Two" of On Ends, so that we can begin to give Torquatus and Epicurean Philosophy the "last word" that they were denied in Cicero's rendition.

In the section of this podcast where Joshua cited John Tyndal's Belfast address, I drew attention to a question of whether John Tyndal was going further than Frances Wright in being willing to draw deductions about things beyond the senses from observations that the senses do allow us to make.

In editing that section it occurred to me to do a word search of "A Few Days In Athens" for "atoms," and the result surprised me. There is very little mention of atoms in AFDIA except brief mentions in Chapters 15 and 16. That to me would reinforce the question I was drawing out in the podcast - that the willingness to infer details beyond the physical evidence is an important topic in which the issues discussed by Epicurus and Philodemus in "On Signs / On Methods of Inference" present some pretty important questions for further thought. Something to come back to later.

#AFewDaysInAthens #Canonics

Quote from Don

It's a similar situation to the Bible in that there were no "verses" in the original texts. Scholars started dividing the New Testament into verses in the 1400-1500s. Maybe the artificial divisions are an outgrowth of that tendency.

Yes makes sense. So to avoid drawing any improper conclusions from the "absence" of divisions, it would be necessary to know of some ancient texts where divisions *were* used. If everything in ancient Latin and Greek was in fact run together without much break then not much can be inferred.

Quote from Don

I'm also, in part, placing this here to serve as notes for myself and anyone else who wants to dive in to this

Good idea. We really need to pin this down. It's logical to have a way to keep track of the sentences, but the artificial division introduces an overlay of meaning that needs to be kept in the background - by "force" if necessary.

Plus I don't think we should lose sight of the "celestial book" references, and we should consider how this "list":which may not really be a list might be related to that. If such a book were of manageable length would Diogenes Laertius really have left it out of his collection?

Numbering is not exactly a mystical art. If Epicurus or the later school leaders had thought separation and numbering were important or helpful, then presumably they could easily have numbered them themselves - and if they did not, that is significant.

OK so we established there that the 40 enumeration probably does not date before the 1800's or so I gather,.

So that would indicate the numbered divisions are no older than the 1600's.... Would be very interesting to know who first used them!

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All of us who are here have arrived at our respect for Epicurus after long journeys through other philosophies, and we do not demand of others what we were not able to do ourselves. Epicurean philosophy is very different from other viewpoints, and it takes time to understand how deep those differences really are. That's why we have membership levels here at the forum which allow for new participants to discuss and develop their own learning, but it's also why we have standards that will lead in some cases to arguments being limited, and even participants being removed, when the purposes of the community require it. Epicurean philosophy is not inherently democratic, or committed to unlimited free speech, or devoted to any other form of organization other than the pursuit by our community of happy living through the principles of Epicurean philosophy.

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In that regard we have found over the years that there are a number of key texts and references which most all serious students of Epicurus will want to read and evaluate for themselves. Those include the following.

1. "Epicurus and His Philosophy" by Norman DeWitt
2. The Biography of Epicurus by Diogenes Laertius. This includes the surviving letters of Epicurus, including those to Herodotus, Pythocles, and Menoeceus.
3. "On The Nature of Things" - by Lucretius (a poetic abridgement of Epicurus' "On Nature"
4. "Epicurus on Pleasure" - By Boris Nikolsky
5. The chapters on Epicurus in Gosling and Taylor's "The Greeks On Pleasure."
6. Cicero's "On Ends" - Torquatus Section
7. Cicero's "On The Nature of the Gods" - Velleius Section
8. The Inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda - Martin Ferguson Smith translation
9. A Few Days In Athens" - Frances Wright
10. Lucian Core Texts on Epicurus: (1) Alexander the Oracle-Monger, (2) Hermotimus
11. Philodemus "On Methods of Inference" (De Lacy version, including his appendix on relationship of Epicurean canon to Aristotle and other Greeks)
12. "The Greeks on Pleasure" -Gosling & Taylor Sections on Epicurus, especially the section on katastematic and kinetic pleasure which explains why ultimately this distinction was not of great significance to Epicurus.

It is by no means essential or required that you have read these texts before participating in the forum, but your understanding of Epicurus will be much enhanced the more of these you have read. Feel free to join in on one or more of our conversation threads under various topics found throughout the forum, where you can to ask questions or to add in any of your insights as you study the Epicurean philosophy.

And time has also indicated to us that if you can find the time to read one book which will best explain classical Epicurean philosophy, as opposed to most modern "eclectic" interpretations of Epicurus, that book is Norman DeWitt's Epicurus And His Philosophy.

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We've added a new section to the front page - a "Table of Key Tags" which appears right after the "Table of Key Discussions." (Scroll down the page and you will see it.)

Personally I have not used the "Tag" feature of the forum very much, but it is a very useful addition to the organization of the site into Forum Sections and Threads.

Generally when starting or looking for an existing thread, it's a good idea to look at the "Table of Key Discussions" to help find the place to post. However any discussion might contain a post that contains information of importance to a key concept (tag) that's outside the scope of the discussion, so when making a post or adding a picture or an article you can use either the dedicated "Tag" box for the post or simply add the familiar #Hashtag format to create a tag.

The "Table of Key Tags" also serves the purpose of reminding people of what the most important tags are and helps standardize them, so that for example we generally use #Twentieth rather than some other form such as 20er.

Tags which appear in white mean that there are no matches yet, but let's start to use those so they fill in.

Tags can be created at will simply by using the # sign in front of the word, just like other sites such as Twitter. However in order to keep the table manageable, only key tag concepts will be listed in the box.

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In a recent Zoom session TauPhi mentioned that he had seen and appreciated this lecture series on Lucretius. I haven't had a chance to review it myself but wanted to post the link so in the future we can refer to it and discuss it.

Great notes Joshua - thank you!!!

In this episode (unless I decide to cut it out) I analogized at least some of the Epicurean speculations about the nature of the gods to the type of thing we do today, in speculating what life might be like in the future with great advances in medical technology and science.

And of course that brings to mind a cultural example of this, which some of us are old enough to remember. The specifics of this video are not at all Epicurean as to god "starting over" and so forth, but it does have a catchy tune:

Welcome to Episode 180 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 13, entitled "The True Piety."

Chapter XIII - The True Piety

• Gradation In Godhead
• Incorruptibility And Virtue
• Isonomy And the Gods
• The Life of the Gods
• Communion And Fellowship
• Prophecy And Prayer

- Gradation In Godhead

+ starting at 263 we may talk about the issue of images making up the gods like the issue of drops of water making up a river.

- Incorruptibility And Virtue

+ the maintenance of their own incorruptibility is ascribed to the gods as a virtue.

+ Epicurus himself did not call the gods immortal.

+ Thus it must be discerned that just

as the happiness of man is self-achieved, so the happiness of the gods is

self-preserved.

- p268 Plutarch, for example, who, though hostile. wrote with texts of Epi.

curus before him, has this to say: "Freedom from pain along with

incorruptibility should have been inherent in the nature of the blissful

being, standing in no need of active concern:'

- the gods are consequently

not deathless, only incorruptible; this incorruptibility, not being in-

herent. demands some sort of conservation. which can only be ascribed

to the foresight and effort of the gods themselves. This. then, is their

virtue. to preserve their own happiness and incorruptibility.

Here is part of Dewitt's reference:

Quote

"Since the prophet Daniel, for instance, was believed to have been inspired by God, it was to be expected that his prophecies would be fulfilled by God. Prophecy was subsidiary to divine providence. In conformity with this view Josephus gives a somewhat extended account of the prophecies of Daniel and their precise fulfillments, thus demonstrating for his readers the falsity of the Epicurean doctrines, which he rehearses at suitable length."

And here from Josephus is the concluding aspect of that section, referencing the Epicureans:

Quote

"And indeed it so came to pass, that our nation suffered these things under Antiochus Epiphanes, according to Daniel’s vision; and what he wrote many years before they came to pass. In the very same manner Daniel also wrote concerning the Roman government; and that our countrey should be made desolate by them. All these things did this man leave in writing, as God had shewed them to him. Insomuch that such as read his prophecies, and see how they have been fulfilled, would wonder at the honour wherewith God honoured Daniel; and may thence discover how the Epicureans are in an error, who cast providence out of human life; and do not believe that God takes care of the affairs of the world; nor that the universe is governed and continued in being by that blessed and immortal nature: but say, that the world is carried along of its own without a ruler and a curator: which were it destitute of a guide, to conduct it, as they imagine, it would be like ships without pilots; which we see drowned by the winds: or like chariots without drivers, which are overturned: so would the world be dashed to pieces by its being carried without a providence, and so perish and come to nought. So that by the forementioned predictions of Daniel those men seem to me very much to err from the truth, who determine that God exercises no providence over human affairs. For if that were the case, that the world went on by mechanical necessity, we should not see that all things would come to pass according to his prophecy. Now as to my self I have so described these matters as I have found them and read them. But if any one is inclined to another opinion about them, let him enjoy his different sentiments without any blame from me."

Glad to have you Evan!