Posts by Cassius

This deserves a post of its own, and ought to be in full caps:

It has been thought by some that Hegesias was influenced by Buddhist teachings.[2]

That such a statement is even reasonable to entertain is an indictment of Buddhism.

I don't have time for a full post but I want to get this out there before I forget about it. Credit to Emily Austin for bring this to our attention, which we touched on briefly in a short zoom discussion on 5/17/23.:

"Some contemporaries and predecessors of Epicurus did run around telling people that life is bleak, and that death is a welcome reprieve from human suffering, but Epicurus thinks that’s nonsense. The Cyrenaics were a competing hedonistic philosophical school and numbered among them was a man dubbed “Hegesias the Death Persuader” for the power of his argument that life is more painful than pleasant. Hegesias was reportedly run out of town for his effects on the young. That life is unpleasant is an odd view for a hedonist, and Epicurus felt at pains to deny it."

Seems to me that there is a lot to be learned from looking into this to see if we can figure out what weaknesses in Cyreniac philosophy held the door open for this kind of craziness and how Epicurean philosophy deals with it and prevents it. It's not clear to me how the dates relate and whether Epicurus was aware of Hegesias, and whether the reference in the letter to Menoeceus about those who wish never to have been born applies to him, but I think we could gain some good points of comparison by following the trail. -- especially as to the danger of inarticulately holding "freedom from pain" to be the goal of life without a lot of background explanation of how that perspective can make sense if you understand that freedom from pain is just a measurement of living completely engaged in pleasures without any component of pain of body or mind.

Seems to me also that there is a discussion here about the danger of letting "the perfect be the enemy of the good" if these clips are correct. What kind of logic is it that would say that because "perfect" happiness cannot be achieved we should consider the pleasure we can experience in life to be of indifference to us?

I wonder also if the title of this thread might better be: "Hedonism Gone Wrong....." which gets me back to why I personally do not in general conversation describe Epicureanism as "hedonism" or "pleasurism" (which would be the English term for hedonism if we were willing to be straightforward in English). Warning against the disasters that come from pursuing a feeling - even pleasure - without prudence is maybe the main subject of Epicurean ethics.

Here are references:

Hegesias of Cyrene - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Hegesias followed Aristippus in considering pleasure as the goal of life; but, the view which he took of human life was more pessimistic. Because eudaimonia was unattainable, the sage's goal should be to become free from pain and sorrow. Since, too, every person is self-sufficient, all external goods were rejected as not being true sources of pleasure:

Quote

Complete happiness cannot possibly exist; for that the body is full of many sensations, and that the mind sympathizes with the body, and is troubled when that is troubled, and also that fortune prevents many things which we cherished in anticipation; so that for all these reasons, perfect happiness eludes our grasp. Moreover, that both life and death are desirable. They also say that there is nothing naturally pleasant or unpleasant, but that owing to want, or rarity, or satiety, some people are pleased and some vexed; and that wealth and poverty have no influence at all on pleasure, for that rich people are not affected by pleasure in a different manner from poor people. In the same way they say that slavery and freedom are things indifferent, if measured by the standard of pleasure, and nobility and baseness of birth, and glory and infamy. They add that, for the foolish person it is expedient to live, but to the wise person it is a matter of indifference; and that the wise person will do everything for his own sake; for that he will not consider any one else of equal importance with himself; and he will see that if he were to obtain ever such great advantages from any one else, they would not be equal to what he could himself bestow.^[3]

Hence the sage ought to regard nothing but himself; action is quite indifferent; and if action, so also is life, which, therefore, is in no way more desirable than death:

Quote

The wise person would not be so much absorbed in the pursuit of what is good, as in the attempt to avoid what is bad, considering the chief good to be living free from all trouble and pain: and that this end was attained best by those who looked upon the efficient causes of pleasure as indifferent.^[3]

None of this, however, is as strong as the testimony of Cicero,^[4] who claims that Hegesias wrote a book called Death by Starvation (Greek: ἀποκαρτερῶν), in which a man who has resolved to starve himself is introduced as representing to his friends that death is actually more to be desired than life, and that the gloomy descriptions of human misery which this work contained were so overpowering that they inspired many people to kill themselves, in consequence of which the author received the surname of Death-persuader (Peisithanatos). The book was said to have been published at Alexandria, where he was, in consequence, forbidden to teach by king Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 BC).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3751954

But if you're going to take the time to OCR it, and that gives us a fully digital version without formatting issues, then that too would be worthwhile. For lots of reasons reduction to basic text and/or markdown format is very desirable for use in many ways

But don't let these others stop you from digitizing this is you can! It would be great to have one that we know is reviewed by Bailey, possibly with his comments as to issues in the text and selecting from various versions.

Just read it. Your criticism is spot on. Deliberate and stubborn refusal to identify "meaning" as "pleasurable" for reasons that probably need a psychologist to drill down to find.

Very similar to the refusal to accept Epicurus' position that healthy functioning life in its normal state - without pain - is itself pleasurable.

This isn't just a dispute over dictionary definitions, there is an agenda behind it to fight against pleasure itself as being given by Nature as the guide of life.

And I would bet that same agenda is behind Buddhism and Stoicism too.

That would be great to have. There is a version of the Latin on the internet from that site that contains many Latin texts - the Latin Library - but I have never been sure how high quality it is.

Lucretius

Thanks for posting this separately Don as I agree it deserves a thread of its own. Going to probably be until the weekend before I can listen but I am really looking forward to this one.

Yes I can definitely be harsh on the Stoics on occasion, but in reading a little more into Emily Austin's book tonight I came across a couple of relevant paragraphs from Chapter 15 that remind me to keep the pressure on due to the different approaches to dealing with what is and what is not in our control:

• "Epicurus, unlike the Stoics, suggests strategies for coping with and counteracting grief rather than encouraging its elimination. The Stoics seek to eliminate grief because they think it arises from a false judgment that something bad has happened. Epicureans, by contrast, manage grief, and they recommend distracting ourselves by replaying pleasant memories, expressing gratitude for past and present pleasures, and engaging with close and caring friends. Taken together, we have three Epicurean points about misfortune: some losses are genuine misfortunes that merit grief, we should cope with our grief rather than seek to eliminate it, and the most effective strategies involve cultivating gratitude and caring friendships.
• The Stoics generally advocated a providential account of the universe, according to which the gods structure the cosmos for the best and to the benefit of human beings. As such, most of the Stoics thought that everything under the control of the gods happens for a good reason, even things which might at first appear to be serious misfortunes. In contemporary religious discourse, endorsement of complete providence secured by an all-powerful and beneficent God might'' express itself in phrases like “the Lord works in mysterious ways.
• Seneca captures this Stoic attitude toward loss with the story of Stilbo, cast as a model of Stoic virtue. Stilbo survived the destruction of his country and the death of his wife and children. When the man responsible for Stilbo’s misfortunes asked how he was holding up, Stilbo responded, “I have lost nothing!”3 While Stilbo’s response does seem admittedly badass, it depends on the underlying assumption that none of the things he lost contributed to his happiness, so their loss cannot diminish his happiness. His children were “nothing.” Whether by a providential or non-providential account, Stoic doctrine leads to the conclusion that grief is irrational because nothing bad or harmful has happened."

I agree with all your comments.

I looked quickly enough at jupyter to see that it does use markdown, so I am not really sure what advantages it offers over a wiki-like or other solution that maybe tracks revisions, but really the git does that i think. so I really am not sure what even are the selling points of Jupyter.

And like you I have enough general knowledge of git to be dangerous, but I've never really understood how it works or all the master and branching and cloning and updating options. I've tried looking into some GUIs to help with that, but they haven't proved educational enough to get me using it -- yet. The idea and method seems to be very popular though so it will probably be worth keeping at it to figure it out one day.

Quote from Titus

seems to be rather aiming to attract people who might think this world is out of control and Stoicism shows the methods how to get back in control.

Yes - but what they will find in Stoicism is not a prescription to reach out and embrace the world and change those things that can be changed so as to create more pleasure, but an invitation to reject all pleasure and emotion in favor of retreating into mind games about "virtue" as ultimately that is all they care about as under their control.

And that's a vastly different approach to which many who come looking for help in "gaining control" to be worse than their current situation.

Thank Titus I had not heard of that. Interesting how it starts with a quote from Seneca Hope it gets better but I can't view a table of contents on Amazon:

As for the one you did, posting a translation might be very helpful for those working to make something similar.

"Do you know how the Epicuean attitude is for a general Philantropy/compassion /sympathy or let´s say "social feelings""

Yes the word that creates the real issue there is "general." Presumably everyone agrees that philanthropy / compassion / sympathy /social feelings are appropriate in certain situation, and the real issue is whether there is a categorical imperative that such feelings must be pursued in "all" situations --- i e a general and generic attempt to embrace every living human being.

And even then, why stop there? Why not extend equal concern to the dead, or to the unborn, or to very living animal or insect, etc. etc.

The harder question is where to draw the lines, and from that perspective that's where Epicurus' test of practical results becomes more clear.

I split off my comments (which were predominantly about the technology used for the comparison, and placed it HERE, along with the recent Linux discussion:

Thread

Jupyter Notebook (Used in Lucretius Comparison_

It looks like the full PDF of the paper is here:

https://github.com/haraldsDev/luc…-Comparison.pdf

Boy this guy is good -- writing it and uploading it to github for revisions. This is a great way to take advantage of technology to do things! TauPhi and Cleveland Okie It looks like he isn't really taking advantage of github for revisions, but this is the start of the way to publish a paper and then work on it collaboratively with extremely fine grained control over what revisions are…

Cassius

May 17, 2023 at 9:04 AM

As a subitem in THIS forum: Other Outreach / Technology / Educational Projects

After looking through the PDF this looks more like a "science project" to parse through particular words by computerized means and then compare them. I note that the six translations are listed only at the end of the document and even then by year and not by author.

No doubt there is some great stuff in here but it's not a general summary of the different translations for high-level comparison.

However the very fact of how he is approaching the project and the technology he is using may lead to some useful observations. We definitely need a better way to work collaboratively, and to process revisions in master documents, then purely using Google docs. Some combination of Jupiter / github might work for that.

I don't want to turn this into a technology thread, but if anyone has any knowledge of this maybe we need a separate thread on whether Jupyter is a desirable platform.

Interestingly, when I go to the Jupyter documentation, it appears they are using Mkdocs for their documentation just like I am using for the "Course Materials." Why aren't they using Jupyter itself?

It looks like the full PDF of the paper is here:

lucretius-translations-comparison/HMatulis-DH-Project-Course-Lucretius-Translations-Comparison.pdf at main · haraldsDev/lucretius-translations-comparison

DH Project course – Comparison of 6 English translations of Lucretius “De rerum natura” -…

github.com

Boy this guy is good -- writing it and uploading it to github for revisions. This is a great way to take advantage of technology to do things! TauPhi and Cleveland Okie It looks like he isn't really taking advantage of github for revisions, but this is the start of the way to publish a paper and then work on it collaboratively with extremely fine grained control over what revisions are accepted in to the main trunk of the paper.

I am not familiar with this project but it looks like he prepared it in this format --

Project Jupyter

The Jupyter Notebook is a web-based interactive computing platform. The notebook combines live code, equations, narrative text, visualizations, interactive…

jupyter.org

Those are good.

I have to admit also that I've been impressed with it since I first heard it - Rolfe Humphries' title "The Way Things Are"

Ha - I see that has a subtitle - "How To Thrive In A World Out Of Your Control." I know we all feel that way at times but I'd like to think that an Epicurean alternative book would have a very different "feel" to it. And it's also interesting that they chose not to include their "trademark word" - virtue.

The Emily Austin article you mentioned is a good reference for any Stoic and we need to highlight it more here.

That is a great suggestion and we talk about it frequently. Several of us are working on something similar but unfortunately nothing I am aware of is ready for production. But this is a goal that is very high on our list.

Aside from the forum posts you mentioned, I would also recommend the Lucretius podcast. We'll incorporate that in whatever written materials we come up with, but I think an important part of any curriculum is personal participation and discussion with other like-minded people, and the podcast can help simulate that until we have more programs available.

I expect us to want to track Lucretius very closely (at least in the big picture) as we do this. If you have not spent quality time with Lucretius I think finding a good annotated translation (the Martin F. Smith version for instance) would be a good idea. Lucretius was presenting to Memmius pretty much exactly what you are looking for - a step by step introduction to the philosophy.

And here is an important point: Lucretius' focus on the physics is a feature, not a bug. I think Lucretius starts and emphasizes exactly where the philosophy presentation needs to start, and he goes over these big picture in a logical order. Here's a summary I've been working on recently:

• Nature: Everything that exists has a physical basis, and there is nothing that is supernatural. Nothing can be created from nothing.
• Gods: No supernatural gods exist, but it is useful to remember that intelligent life with physical bodies exists elsewhere in the universe, and to think about and seek to emulate those which have achieved perfectly pleasurable lives without any pain.
• Death: The soul is physical like everything else and cannot exist without the body. There is no life after death, and therefore no punishment or reward after death.
• Anti-Determinism: Human life is neither fated nor determined by forces outside itself.
• Knowledge: The five senses, the feelings of pleasure and pain, and the pattern-recognition faculty of anticipations provide a reliable basis for knowledge.
• Pleasure: The feeling of pleasure is the guide to a life of pleasure which is the goal of human life. Pleasure is a wide term that includes everything mentally and physically desirable in life. In contrast, "virtue" is a label that describes not an end in itself but whatever is an effective tool for the obtaining of a life of pleasure.

Lucretius mentions pleasure throughout, and he incorporates it into the opening of the poem and the interesting starting points of each book, but he starts the deep discussions with the fundamentals of how nature works, how death is the end, how humans have free will, and how knowledge is based on the senses.

This sets the stage properly from the beginning, and when you establish these fundamentals - such as how short life is and yet how pleasure is the driving force of all life - it seems to me you are much less likely to fall into the trap of thinking that "running from pain" is the focus of what life should be all about.

Quote from Matteng

Do you know how the Epicuean attitude is for a general Philantropy/compassion /sympathy or let´s say "social feelings".

I am sure that many here will have good comments on this. The first thing that would come to my mind in laying the ground work for the discussion, however, would be to suggest that this question stated this way is essentially another form of the "virtue" question that is discussed at great length in the Epicurean texts. The qualities you are suggesting (and even friendship is included in this) are tested by the practical question of whether they in fact (and not in theory) lead to a more pleasant life for the individual who is asking the question. Maybe the best example of this is in the Torquatus narrative starting at least around line 32.

As in the Vatican Saying, our desire for the qualities you mention are subject to the same test: VS71. :Every desire must be confronted by this question: What will happen to me if the object of my desire is accomplished, and what if it is not?"

Now having said that, a very good case can be made in many instances for pleasure arising from pursuing the objectives you list, but if you cross the line into thinking that these objectives are worthy "in themselves" apart from the actual results they produce, then I would suggest Epicurus would say that analysis goes too far astray from the goal of real people pursuing pleasure in their own lives and - as with any other deviation from "pleasure" as the goal - would end up with results that undermine that goal.

Now with that as a fundamental you could go forward in many ways to show that in particular situations with particular people, the goals you mention can be in many ways pleasure-enhancing.