Posts by Cassius

Rolf -

In summary form, it's "good without God" but in the sense of an absolute good that is not related to pleasure. Nietzsche wrote against it for similar reasons. It's an ambiguous term that is more akin to politics than philosophy. There is no recognized definition of what humanism really means - yes there are various groups with their own definitions but there is no systematized statement or formal school where anyone has the right to say is what it really means. And in the sense of implying that there is an absolute good, rather than defining good in relation to pleasure, it's really closer to platonism or stoicism, but without specifying a source for its claims.

EDIT:

In other words, "Good without god" is incomplete, and fails to define what good really means, and equates to "Good without giving a reason"

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Epicurean Philosophy Vs. Humanism

I have never considered Epicurean philosophy to be a form of "Humanist" philosophy any more than it is a form of Stoicism or Platonism. I haven't written extensively on this, in part because many Humanists are allies on certain important points, such as rejection of Supernatural Religion.

But I was reminded of this point today and I think it is time to start a thread on it. My position is that "Humanism" is just another "-ism" that has a goal at its center which is very different from…

Cassius

May 27, 2019 at 3:48 PM

I agree with Don and Kalosyni. This is an example of the opening of Book 2 of Lucretius. Thinking about the pains that you are free from is actually pleasurable too. But to be clear there are many kinds of pleasure, and that's not to say that thinking about not stubbing your toe is "the greatest pleasure" - it's just one of many that is open to you while you are alive. There are a lot more pleasures that i would advise pursuing before "meditating on your unstubbed-toe!"

Quote from Rolf

Is this worth revising?

I am very glad that Don has done the work he has done and I hope he'll continue as long as he can. But the question of "is it worth it" is going to be different for different people.

Don's been studying Epicurus a long time and he's free of the orthodox peer-pressure. But to even recognize that pressure takes a lot of reading, and a lot of the process involves UN-Learning what is written on Wikipedia.

So for a lot of people I wouldn't recommend spending a lot of time there.

And that doesn't touch on the dynamics of wading into a battle of dealing with people who are committed to opposing viewpoints, and the very nature of Wikipedia and the way it is set up.

So as I see it for those who have time to work on an accurate presentation of Epicurus, I'd say that time is far better spent setting up your own blog or article or book or website or video and starting from scratch to explain Epicurus more correctly.

Even worse than wikipedia are many of the popular videos on Epicurus. If someone has talent in that department, probably new video introductions to Epicurus would be even more useful in the near term than trying to tackle the wikipedia editors.

Here's something else about the benefit of looking for and participating in a "community" of like minded people who are interested in Epicurus.

It's very important to be willing and dedicated to thinking for yourself, and not allowing anyone to tell you to take what they say on faith and authority. I fully agree with that.

BUT -

The truth of the world is that there are highly organized forces that have spent thousands of years perfecting methods of philosophical and religious intimidation and oppression. A single individual stands no chance against those forces on his or her own. Most people are not going to be able to make a dent against those forces collectively, or even to the extent of freeing their own minds personally from that influence, without a lot of reading and information and communication from outside themselves.

Again speaking from my recent "Nature's God..." reading, I'll give everyone from 500 AD on up to now the benefit of the doubt and accept that it was absolutely impossible - under penalty of death - for them to escape from the influence of Judeo-Christianity. So I can understand why they would tread lightly around Epicurus and try to cover him over with theism. So my point is not to criticize them, even though of course I do question whether it was absolutely impossible to reproduce an intellectual environment that was widespread in the Roman world only a few hundred years before.

But no one should underestimate the power that has accumulated in established institutions of the world. The various isms that run it, including "humanism," might look like they are all over the board, and they do often agree on very little, except they do agree that Epicurean philosophy is unacceptable.

Our little discussion forum here is not going to make a dent in that power either, but over time, if there is ever to be any re-emergence for truly Epicurean ideas, (in other words to ever get back to the intellectual freedom of 50 BC) people who agree with Epicurean views will have to find ways to work together to get a foothold. That's the only way to hope to stand up against the combined efforts of the rest of the world that keep Epicurean views chained up only to the world of food and other immediate bodily indulgence.

Quote from Rolf

Why is this? What relation to the gods have to anticipations?

You'll need to read at least the DeWitt material before you get a more informed view on this. As I recall there's not much on it in Emily Austin.

As to how it relates to anticipations, that's part of Epicurus' theory of knowledge that responds to Plato's ridiculous theory of forms and pre-existence of the soul and the impossibility of knowledge without both of those working together. Plato held only the eternal is real and only the ideas/forms are eternal. Thus nothing revealed by the senses and rational processing of the sensory data is truly real.

Epicurus rejects that totally and says there are three faculties of contact with the real world - the 5 senses, pain and pleasure, and anticipations. Anything they present to you is "real" and but it's up to you to understand in what way they impact you and react accordingly. Epicurus concluded that in putting all the evidence together it's obvious that nature never makes a single thing of a kind, that space is infinite and eternal, and that it is simply logical to believe that earth and humanity are not the only location of life in the universe, or the highest life. Some forms of life are more successful than we are at living happily, even to the point of conquering death -- but nothing and no one is SUPERNATURAL.

If you start saying "there's no direct evidence of life anywhere else that I've ever seen" then you're eliminating many logical conclusions that flow from the evidence we do have. It's not necessary for us to have seen or touched everything to believe that it exists -- we believe atoms exist without ever seeing or touching them.

So there are many deep implications of the physics and epistemology that you never get to until you get past the superficial idea that Epicurus only cared about "pleasure" and nothing else.

Quote from Rolf

So perhaps it’s best for me to drop my modern understanding of the term “gods” when I read what Epicurus and his fellow philosophers have to say on this point.

That's absolutely essential and you'll see that as you read more. To repeat, that's the danger of focusing only on the ethics -- you miss the major part of the philosophy, including the parts that establish the ethics in the first place.

The letter to Menoeceus is only a part of the philosophy. It's presented much more fully in Lucretius, but most people aren't going to be able to pick up Lucretius and get the full point because it's so unfamiliar to modern ways of thinking. That is why I suggest reading the DeWitt book very early in the process of studying Epicurus so you can begin to see the outlines of the full picture as quickly as possible. It's far from perfect but it doesn't focus exclusively on the ethics and dismiss the rest of the philosophy like many other approaches do.

Quote from Godfrey

Cassius did you mean to say "we as humans are not the best and the brightest"? That would be my understanding..

GEEZ what a mistake. THank you! Of course I meant "not" and i will edit the original now! thank you!

Oh one more thing deriving from my Stewart reasoning. The idea of the possible existence of supernatural gods seems to be tied in most people's minds to the possibility of the soul surviving death. Even as the Deists were proclaiming freedom from religion they were undercutting their own positions by continuing to talk about the possibility that there might be a life after death.

As I see it, the possibility of an afterlife is about as opposite to the views of Epicurus as anything can be. The Deists seemed to want to entertain the possibility that their "natural god" might somehow have a mechanism to also allow life after death. Maybe they felt like they had to do so for political or survival reasons, and maybe what they did was reasonable under their circumstances, but I think it led to very bad results, and essentially helped with those who wanted to keep the discussion of Epicurus under a tight lid.

Any kind of position that allows for the possibility of life after death, or supernatural forces of any kind, is going to lead to the kind of murkiness and ambiguity that ultimately led to the shortcomings of Deism. To the extent that that kind of thinking hangs around even today, in my view it cannot be reconciled with Epicurean philosophy and needs to be clearly stated to be incompatible with it.

Quote from Rolf

My gut tells me it’s not so important, since gods play no role in epicurean cosmology and ethics. That said, Epicurus didn’t deny the existence of such gods (as far as I’m aware). Do we disregard this as a mere product of its time or does it play some vital role within epicurean philosophy?

I think as you read more you'll come to revise the premises of your opinion in this paragraph, and you'll see that the Epicurean theory of gods plays a much greater role than first meets the eye, and certainly not just as a product of his time.

However having said that I agree with Godfrey's and Joshua's comments and in the end I think it's fair to say that trying to develop a precise POSITIVE position on the Epicurean gods is not a priority. There's a lot to be learned from the process in which Epicurus evaluates the issue, but since we don't have the details of his final conclusions those aren't nearly as important.

For example, it's very unclear exactly what participation in "religious" ceremonies Epicurus engaged in himself or approved of for his people, and in the absence of good information on that I think it's very sketchy to try to take a firm position on how his statements apply to religious participation today.

I want to add a comment based on my latest thoughts after reading Matthew Stewart's "Natures' God...."

I think the "Deists" and their associates made a major mistake in abandoning Epicurus' views of the nature of gods into a sort of "nature is god" pantheism. If Stewart is correct and I am reading Stewart correctly most of them decided essentially either that there was too much pressure from religion, or the masses of people are too stupid, to take any other position, so they played a game of obfuscation and decided to retreat from the confrontation with supernaturalism by going all in on "the god of nature."

I find it very interesting that as part of that period, however, many of the people who were working on finding a way to fight back against religion also found Epicurus' theory of life throughout the universe as very significant to their thinking.

To the question "Must an Epicurean believe in gods?" nobody really has the right to say "yes" other than as part of stating their own opinion. There's certainly no rule to that effect in order to post to Epicureanfriends.com. If someone in the future sets up other organizations for other purposes, that's something that they would have to decide.

Howecer on the core point that "there are no supernatural gods" or supernatural forces of any kind, I think most of us agree that that is such a core part of Epicurean philosophy that it would be absurd to divorce that from the rest of the philosophy.

Even specifying the term "non-interventional" doesn't go nearly far enough to avoid what I am characterizing as the mistake of the Deists. There are too many other attributes that people associate with gods that also have to be eliminated.

At present and with the limited texts that we have it's just not possible to be certain exactly what Epicurus taught positively about gods except that they are not supernatural in any way. While it's a certainty in Epicurean philosophy that there is life elsewhere in the infinite and eternal universe, and it seems likewise a certainty that we as humans are NOT the best and the brightest, what's really necessary is to stamp out every implication of supernaturalism in discussing what those beings might be like.

So the "stamping out every implication of supernaturalism" is what I see as the essential part of Epicurean theory of gods, and any wavering on that issue is where I would draw the line of considering someone thoroughly Epicurean. Most all the rest is just a matter of applying reasonable projection to the possibilities that do exist in an infinite and eternal natural universe, and how far one wants to go in that directlon is largely a matter of personal disposition.

Also, CIcero is stating explicitly that "meditating on death" is meant in the sense of spending your time now while you are alive, thinking about how wonderful it will be when you are dead:

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For what else is it that we do, when we call off our minds from pleasure, that is to say, from our attention to the body, from the managing our domestic estate, which is a sort of handmaid and servant of the body, or from duties of a public nature, or from all other serious business whatever? What else is it, I say, that we do, but invite the soul to reflect on itself? oblige it to converse with itself, and, as far as possible, break off its acquaintance with the body? Now to separate the soul from the body, is to learn to die, and nothing else whatever. Wherefore take my advice; and let us meditate on this, and separate ourselves as far as possible from the body, that is to say, let us accustom ourselves to die.

In the next several sections Cicero continues his general argument that the soul is divine, but by now the argument is familiar and he does not introduce a lot that is new.

One thing that CIcero does introduce however, and that we'll want to discuss, is that Cicero says god forbids us from taking our life into our own hands and ending it early:

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But these reflections are of long standing, and borrowed from the Greeks. But Cato left this world in such a manner, as if he were delighted that he had found an opportunity of dying; for that God who presides in us, forbids our departure hence without his leave. But when God himself has given us a just cause, as formerly he did to Socrates, and lately to Cato, and often to many others,—in such a case, certainly every man of sense would gladly exchange this darkness, for that light: not that he would forcibly break from the chains that held him, for that would be against the law; but like a man released from prison by a magistrate, or some lawful authority, so he too would walk away, being released and discharged by God. For the whole life of a philosopher is, as the same philosopher says, a meditation on death.

But Cicero also notes that Socrates left voluntarily:

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and it was because he was influenced by these and similar reasons that Socrates neither looked out for anybody to plead for him when he was accused, nor begged any favour from his judges, but maintained a manly freedom, which was the effect not of pride, but of the true greatness of his soul: and on the last day of his life, he held a long discourse on this subject; and a few days before, when he might have been easily freed from his confinement, he refused to be so, and when he had almost actually hold of that deadly cup, he spoke with the air of a man not forced to die, but ascending into heaven.

Welcome to Episode 277 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. This series addresses five of the greatest questions in philosophy, with Cicero speaking for the majority and Epicurus the main opponent:

1. Is Death An Evil? (Cicero says no and Epicurus says no, but for very different reasons)
2. Is Pain An Evil? (Cicero says no, Epicurus says yes)
3. Does the Wise Man Experience Grief and Fear? (Cicero says no, Epicurus says yes)
4. Does the Wise Man Experience Joy and Desire? (Cicero says no, Epicurus says yes)
5. Is Virtue Sufficient For A Happy Life? (Cicero says yes, Epicurus says no)

As we found in Cicero's "On Ends" and "On The Nature of the Gods," Cicero treated Epicurean Philosophy as a major contender in the battle between the philosophies, and in discussing this conflict and explaining Epicurus' answers to these questions, we will deepen our understanding of Epicurus and how he compares to the other major schools.

Today we turn our attention further to "Is Death An Evil," and we will read beginning in Section XXVI where the discussion continues with more about the Pythagorean / Platonic view of the human soul.

We may be able to conclude the discussion of life after death this week, as most of the major arguments have already been given, and the remainder from 24 - 30 seems more like miscellaneous wrap-up.

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Our general discussion guide for Tusculun Disputations is here: https://epicureanfriends.github.io/tusculundisput…lish/section:12

And a side-by-side version with comments is here:

EpicureanFriends SideBySide Commentary on TD

Episode 276 of the Lucretius Today Podcast is now available. Today's episode is entitled: "Is Memory Evidence Of The Divinity Of The Soul?"

Rolfe thanks for your input so far. Don't share any personally-identifying information but it would be interesting to hear more about your background and reading history and other interests. Also, how did you find this forum?

We have an upcoming "first monday" meeting at which you're invited, and as you are in Europe we occasionally set up meetings at times that aren't in the middle of the night for Europeans, and we can work toward another one.

Here's a cite to one reference I made in this episode as to the importance of our understanding the implications of death. It's from Lucretius Book 3 around line 1060 - I generally think of it in Humphries words:

Quote

So each man flees
Himself, or tries to, but of course that pest
Clings to him all the more ungraciously.
He hates himself because he does not know
The reason for his sickness; if he did,
He would leave all this foolishness behind,
Devote his study to the way things are,
The problem being his lot, not for an hour,
But for all time, the state in which all men
Must dwell forever and ever after death.

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The Brown/Dunster version has it this way:

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The restless fool does not know the cause of his disease; if he thoroughly did, every one would give up all other pursuits and apply chiefly to search into the nature of things; I do not mean to trouble himself about the events of the present hour, but inquire into the doubtful state of eternity after death, which is everyone’s concern, and which must be the lot of all mankind.

Chatgpt handles it well:

Translate this for me from Latin:

quam bene si videat, iam rebus quisque relictis naturam primum studeat cognoscere rerum, temporis aeterni quoniam, non unius horae, ambigitur status, in quo sit mortalibus omnis aetas, post mortem quae restat cumque manendo.

ChatGPT said:

Certainly. The Latin passage you provided may be translated as follows:

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"How much better it would be, if each person, seeing this clearly, would now abandon other pursuits and strive first to understand the nature of things, since it is the condition of eternal time — not just of a single hour — that is in question, the condition in which all mortal life must remain after death."

And comparing those, Munro as usualy seems to be more literal:

Quote

For if he could rightly see into this, relinquishing all else, each man would study to learn the nature of things, since the point at stake is the condition for eternity, not for one hour, in which mortals have to pass all the time which remains for them to expect after death.

Another thing I'd add is that the cup analogy is just that - an "analogy" - as would be the ideal of all experience being pleasure. I think there's a tendency for us all to be thinking in terms of "explain to me exactly what I must do to enter the kingdom of heaven." In other words, give me the exact prescription for paradise, and I'll follow exactly those steps so that I - and everyone else who drinks the medicine - will experience exactly the same thing. With the idea being that there is some precise experience - setting foot in heaven or experiencing exactly the same euphoria of a magic potion - that is being talked about.

But life is not like that. Everyone has their own circumstances, and everyone has their own preferences in pleasures, and so the goal of everyone is not the same in exact terms -- only in abstract terms. And in abstract terms, it's very simple (and helpful, as a clear statement of a goal) to identify that what you would really like to have is "complete" pleasure with no mixture of pain.

But in our rush to think that there is a magic pill that everyone can experience the same way, we forget those differences, and we try to force "absence of pain" into a particular experience that we can climb into like a 1957 Chevy.

And the trouble is compounded because what is really in issue is not some abstract definition of a goal like a "kingdom of heaven." What really is the truth is that we don't live forever, our souls are not magical or divine, there's no life after death, no "god" to tell us what to do, and we have to ourselves use our time as we deem best, just like any other dolphin or horse or cat or dog or any other living thing must do. Only humans have the disposition to be lulled into complacency by thinking that there is some afterlife that we can look forward to as our reward, and thereby trade in our time in the hear and now for a promise of something "better" later.

I don't believe Epicurus saw "absence of pain" as something equivalent to a kingdom of heaven for which we trade the pleasures that are available to us while we are alive. I think he saw that life is a real-life here-and-now experience in which the best we can do is to organize our activities so that the time that we are as happy as possible during the time that we have.

This is the opposite of monasticism or passivity or the kind of intellectualism that results in going round and round and debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It's a very practical call to action to use your life as productively as you can during the time that you have, with "productivity" defined not in terms of purely bodily pleasure or purely mental pleasure but in terms of whatever combination of both nature impresses on you as the "happiest" way to spend your time. To paraphrase Torquatus, the person who runs from all pain and mental and bodily activity and who cannot foresee the disaster to which that kind of life will lead is worthy of contempt, not a chair in philosophy. Likewise in Jefferson's advice to william short, we need to "brace ourselves up" and get on with life, because the kind of soft indulgence in indolence that comes from what some people want to see as "absence of pain" is the furthest thing possible from what Epicurus actually taught.

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Patrikios check here: RE: Prolepsis / Anticipations As Epicurus' Answer to the MENO Problem

I hope Bryan won't mind but I think we need to add here a comment he just made on his wall:

Quote from From Bryan's Wall

What are now considered to be areas of empty space are really full of tiny, undetectable particles. We cannot see or measure them because they pass through us -- and through our instruments -- with almost no interference. “Gravity,” in the sense of a force acting at a distance without contact, does not exist. What we call “gravity” is really the result of how larger objects interact with the wakes and currents they create in the medium of these smaller particles.

Objects move in the direction they are already moving, without any loss of speed, and deviating only slightly and rarely -- unless they make contact with something else. To believe (as those who follow Einstein do) in forces beyond the force of touch -- is to give in to magical thinking.

To which I posted this reply:

This is a topic I've been thinking a lot about as a result of going through Matthew Stewart's book. Apparently there were several major failures of follow-through in the years after the Epicurean period.

Simply talking about "pleasure" and rejecting some (but not all) aspects of supernatural religion doesn't go nearly far enough if you're going to turn around and talk like the Deists did, and you:

(1) claim agnosticism about whether there is life after death, or even hopefulness that there is, and

(2) accept the possibility that particle motion is imposed on them by some force outside the particles themselves.

(3) talk about Nature or "everything" as a "God" (pantheism) without being clear that when you use the word god you are excluding supernatural action and design.

All if these three are really pretty simple to understand, but the "motion caused by unknown outside forces" that you're talking about in this wall post is probably the easiest of all to see how important it is.

And that surely helps explain why we have a section on magnetism in Lucretius (book six around line 1000) explaining that issue too in terms of flows of particles, not in terms of any mysterious outside force.

As to examining the issue of "weight" more closely, Joshua has pointed out in Lucretius Today 275 that "gravitas" seems to be the word used by Lucretius for "weight," and Don pointed out this as to the Greek:

Quote from Don

Joshua asked about the Greek word for "weight" in the characteristics of the atom: βάρος (baros). From which we get words like barometric, barometer "instrument for measuring the weight or pressure of the atmosphere," barophobia "an abnormal fear of gravity."

Here is another section from Lucretius where "gravitas" is not the word used. Given that there is never in any of these statements that there is "something else" pulling the atoms "down," I presume a good case can be made that regardless of the terminology, Epicurus was clear that this force of "weight" was something within the atoms themselves, not a force that is separate and apart from the atoms themselves. That is, other atoms and groups of atoms arguably could exert a pulling motion, but there is no extra-atomic force that operates on the atoms. This is very important for closing the door to the argument that some people like to make that this "force outside the atoms" is "god."

5-181

Whence again was first implanted in the gods a pattern for begetting things in general as well as the preconception of what men are, so that they knew and saw in mind what they wanted to make? And in what way was the power of first-beginnings ever ascertained, and what they could effect by a change in their mutual arrangements, unless nature herself gave the model for making things? For in such wise the first-beginnings of things many in number in many ways impelled by blows for infinite ages back and kept in motion by their own weights have been wont to be carried along and to unite in all manner of ways and thoroughly test every kind of production possible by their mutual combinations; that it is not strange if they have also fallen into arrangements and have come into courses like to those out of which this sum of things is now carried on by constant renewing.

5-181

Exemplum porro gignundis rebus et ipsa
notities hominum divis unde insita primum est,
quid vellent facere ut scirent animoque viderent,
quove modost umquam vis cognita principiorum
quidque inter sese permutato ordine possent.
si non ipsa dedit speciem natura creandi?
namque ita multa modis multis primordia rerum
ex infinito iam tempore percita plagis
ponderibusque suis consuerunt concita ferri
omnimodisque coire atque omnia pertemptare,
quae cumque inter se possint congressa creare,
ut non sit mirum, si in talis disposituras
deciderunt quoque et in talis venere meatus,
qualibus haec rerum geritur nunc summa novando.