Posts by Cassius

Quote from Todd

Edit: I neglected to mention that I discovered DeWitt via NewEpicurean.com, so I have you to thank for that!

Excellent!

Thanks for taking the time to write the description. That tells me that I need to focus on aspect of the "survey" on how much of the "original sources" people have read.

For example, have you read Diogenes Laertius from start to finish? Have you read any of "On Ends"? I have only recently discovered myself that while the Epicurean sections are of tremendous interest, the entire rest of the book too gives great insight. It is as if - and I did not realize this - Cicero was really setting out to cover all the bases from all the schools and give a good grounding in each. So there is a LOT to be learned even from the other chapters.

I am totally with you on the difficulty of Lucretius. I started and stopped reading it so many times over 50 years that I can hardly remember. But I finally got past my problems, and now I see it as a true gold mine. That is why i'm getting interested in a book review series on that -- I think if we can make that more accessible we can really add something to the discussion.

I am thinking that I need to set up some kind of spreadsheet with these core books.

How about Frances Wright? Did you read "A Few Days In Athens?"

I think it is extremely interesting and helpful to discussion to get at least a general idea of someone's reading background, not because we want to play one-upmanship games, but because it helps give clues to someone's interpretations. For example how much have they read into Epicurus himself, or Lucretius, or the Ciceronian passages on Epicurus, or the Lucian material, or Plutarch.

I need to come up with some kind of way to survey that and maybe encourage people to add that to their profile. Thoughts on good ways to get the most out of that idea?

Edit 1 : Where is the best place for this? Encourage people to put it in their main "profile" (either "wall" or "about me") that is clickable from their avatar icon? Encourage them to make it part of their "footer" that displays with every post and/or under the user history that appears with every post (in the box in the left column)?

Edit 2: Would it be helpful to have a list of core texts that people could include with a checkmark or something to indicate if they have read it?

Todd can you remind me of your background? You've read DeWitt recently? Have you also read any of the Cambridge or other books recently, such as for example Catherine Wilson? What do you consider to be your main source of Epicurean reading? Lucretius? What translation?

Don't worry if it takes too much time to respond; no problem, but i do think it is interesting and helps analysis to get a fix on the main sources in a person's reading. Of course some here for all I know could be professors and read in the original Greek or Latin! And you may have read far more than I have!

And how much Plato or Aristotle or Stoicism have you read?

I may have to set up some kind of general profile question because I really think this is interesting data.

I will turn to you whenever I need optimism Todd -- in the meantime I have to go battle some Stoics!

Aside: I think we are seeing close-up the hazards that arise from not taking the DeWitt approach and pointing out early and often how Epicurus was in revolt against his predecessors, and how the war with Stoicism was very real.

A lot of people seem to think that Epicurus was right in line with the rest of the Greeks and just decided to embrace atomism and applied a word twist on pleasure/absence of pain - but that otherwise he was substantially similar. And that's where a lot of this Stoicism-love comes from that we see so often among people who come to the forums for the first time.

What I am calling the DeWitt approach was to point out how profoundly Epicurus was rejecting Platonism, and that includes Aristotle before Epicurus and the Stoics afterwards.

It's hard for us today to appreciate the depth of that difference because most of us are not well versed in Plato (especially Philebus) or the details of Aristotle on the meaning of "happiness."

But it's worse than that we are not well versed. The truth is the modern world, religious AND secular, has fully embraced the heart of the non-Epicurean viewpoint, and they recognize that it is an enemy that they think needs to be stamped out, so they demonize discussion of "pleasure" and the Epicurean view of non-absolute virtues. I think most of us sense that that is how they play their mind-control games, because they know that the Epicurean view strikes at the heart of their intellectual and civil power structure. That means we face more than just educating ourselves about the ancient context and determining what Epicurus meant.

It means that at the end of the day, when we find out what Epicurus really did mean, we are going to find that we are a very small minority in a very hostile world, and that we had better stick together on core issues if we ever hope to be more than isolated gnats waiting to be swatted by the organized opposition,

Quote from Hiram

So eudaimonia / happiness is a legitimate Epicurean philosophical inquiry.

Quote from Hiram

Can you explain in what way one deprecates pleasure by rescuing the meaning of eudaimonia?

Exactly in the way that the Lampe quote that you included implies - in the great majority of modern conversations, "happiness" is an abstraction, a platonized alternative to the real experience of pleasure."

Eudaimonia is a Greek word that means nothing to most people not schooled in ancient Greek, and it has all the hazards of confusion in using an untranslated words. But even "Happiness" has the same ambiguities: it is often used to mean totally different things to different people, even though the only real commonality that is going on in that discussion is the issue of finding it pleasurable.

But if someone means "pleasure" then why don't they SAY pleasure? Is it not because the word has been so slandered and despised by the mainline religions and philosophies (both before and after the time of Epicurus) that it is a word that is shied away from in "polite company"? This is exactly what Cicero said when he wrote that you could not appeal to pleasure in the Senate or in the legionary camps, and it is exactly the issue.

Anti-Epicurean philosophies prevail over Epicurus largely because they have convinced people that "pleasure" is disreputable. Using a non-translated word just papers over the problem, and this is similar with "ataraxia," which is also a term that has no well-defined meaning, but people throw around with a wink and a nod as if it is the answer to every question.

So the answer to your question is that using a term like "happiness" and "edaimonia" is perfectly acceptable, just like using the term "gods" is acceptable, if you are explicit in your definition. And just as with "gods" we have a context today in which no one understands "gods" in the Epicrurean way, and no one understands "happiness" or "eudaimonia" in the Epicurean way either.

Use of happiness/eudaimonia without full contextual definition introduces the same ambiguities and issues that use of "absence of pain" ataraxia / aponia does, and I would reply to that in the same way. Used without definition in standard discussions among people who cannot be expected to know the full context is a prescription for disaster, just like Ataraxia / absence of pain has led commentary on Epicurus down the road of asceticism and minimalism, which is why Epicurus has been kicked to the curb throughout the world. And Epicurean philosophy won't come off the curb so long as we follow along in the standard discussion which conveys to the minds of most normal people that Epicurus isn't worth the time of day to discuss.

Hiram I agree that this "eudaimonia" issue is a great issue to discuss. As for issues relating to Alex and the Facebook group, there is a long history there which (at least for the moment) I don't think for many reasons would be appropriate for us to go into in public posts here. We can certainly cover all the philosophic issues of general concern, however.

Great post Joshua! You are a poet even when writing in prose!

At risk of deviating off track I want to call in this suggestion / illustration. I think the opening items of the Principal Doctrines are best viewed in the same way we are discussing here: they tied to particular contexts, in which they are "antidotes" to popular misconceptions which Epicurus expected his readers to confront.

He expected them to confront all sorts of misconceptions about the gods, so instead of dealing with all of them separately he gave them the key to unwinding all of them - by referring to the nature of what a "true god" would certainly be like, and not be like.

He expected them to confront all sorts of threats and promises about life after death, so instead of dealing with all of them separately, he gave them the key to unwinding all of them -- that death is the end of all sensation, and therefore NOTHING can happen after death.

And then -- and here is the current issue --

He expected them to confront all of the Platonic and other arguments about why pleasure cannot be the goal of life, most all of which are based on some version of the "pleasure is insatiable" and "it can't be the best because it has no limit, and so he gave them the key to unwinding all those "logic traps" - he pointed out that human life gives us a limit of how much we can experience, and that the very most pleasure we can experience in life is the amount that we experience when all pain has been eliminated. THAT's the context and the reason for the entire "absence of pain" discussion, and it makes perfect sense when viewed in that context, but seems absolutely inscrutable to us - because we haven't read Philebus, we don't know anything about Plato, and we've totally lost the common context that any educated person in ancient Athens would have learned from childhood!

Quote from JJElbert

To put the matter succinctly; not "eudaimonia", or "happiness", or "minimalism", or "freedom from pain", or "letting go", BUT

"Bold-stroke-capital-P-comically-oversized-cartoon-mallet-PLEASURE"

And not just because I am a radical, or I think Epicurus was devoted to radicalism for the sake of radicalism, but for the reason I just summarized to Todd: admit that ANYTHING is a required component of the ultimate good, and you are left drowning without a life-preserver until you admit that REASON/LOGIC/WISDOM is required to identify that good, and probably (if you are Aristotle) money and other accoutrements of being a noble Athenian. You will quickly be led to find that this "art of slicing and dicing" the components of the good is really the essential thing, and you will ultimately (if you are persuaded by "reason") be forced to admit that Venus is held in too high an esteem by Epicurus, as Plato urged on Philebus.

I wish I were more of an expert on Philebus myself, but I have read it several times and these arguments are indeed there.

And what we are reading in the letter to Menoecus is essentially a summary letter written to a student who would in all likelihood have been familiar with those Platonic arguments as the "gold standard" on discussing pleasure as a potential competitor for "the good."

Quote from Todd

How do you reconcile this with Epicurus' advocacy of clarity of language, and using words in the sense that immediately comes to mind?

I think that that answer is found in looking at the full context of the texts and seeing the many many references to "pleasure." I don't think that those foreclose the use of terms like "happiness" as well as long as the fundamental statements that "pleasure" is the only thing desirable in itself are kept in mind. I can easily imagine Epicurus believing that he had been so clear in laying down fundamentals that he could not be misunderstood by his own student (who presumably Menoeceus was, not an outsider or someone unfamiliar with the thrust of the philosophy.)

Your comments are not sidetrack at all

And as you referenced I think this is similar to the "gods" issue. It is useful to have a term for beings which constitute what we would truthfully consider divine, and Epicurus would also have known that he could not enforce his own terminology on everyone.

But i don't think this comes down to questioning his use of "happiness" a few times in relation to the many times "pleasure" is clearly designated. It is a matter of starting at the basics, building consistently on them, and keeping the big picture consistent as he surely would have done himself.

And there's no better example that we need to take things into account than the sentence which reads "By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul." That sentence is as counterintuitive and potentially contradictory to so much else that was written that it demands to be taken contextually and explained by reference to the whole. In that case the issue must be traced to the underlying premises of only two feelings (so therefore absence of one is presence of another by definition) and even further, tracing down why Epicurus was concerned about "only two" in the first place (which I think ties to Plato's arguments against pleasure).

The "happiness" question is much easier than that one. There are only two feelings, only pleasure is desirable in and of itself, and no one thinking in Epicurean terms is ever going to suggest that "happiness" is ultimately tied to any necessary requirement other than "pleasure."

All the other tools and alleged requirements of happiness with Aristotle and others alleged to be necessary would, if true, blow the theory of "pleasure as the ultimate good" out of the water. Because if something besides pleasure is required, how do we know what that is? Admit that the goal requires something other than pleasure and Plato will lead you down the primrose path that he led Philebus, and you will end up admitting that knowlege/wisdom that enables you to identify and obtain this non-pleasure element is an essential part of the goal itself, and you will end up admitting Plato's ultimate aim - that "wisdom" is the most important thing in life.

Quote from JJElbert

Do I take your meaning, Cassius, to be that Eudaimonia becomes a problem only when removed from the Greek and set into English?

Joshua I think there are a couple of levels of problem here. Epicurus used the word eudaimonia himself, but had his own definition and context, just as he had for "gods." So there was potential dispute even when used in Greek among Greek-speakers, and we see that issue going on even today among the supporters of Epicurus in Greece. It is my understanding that even today there are factions within the Epicureans in Greece who engage on this very same issue, with some being much more comfortable with "eudaimonia" and "happiness" to the extent that they rarely if ever even mention pleasure, and spend little if any time examining what "happiness" really means, or how it is connected to pleasure, just as Hiram's article glides over that point.

I think that debating the meaning of the word even between and among the Greeks is implicit in Diogenes of Oinoanda's inscription, and also in the statement by Torquatus (which is of course Latin), in the examples given above.

I think the same issue arises when we discuss it in English in translating from the Greek. Pleasure is a feeling for which we need no explanation, as Epicurus held:

(Hence Epicurus refuses to admit any necessity for argument or discussion to prove that pleasure is desirable and pain to be avoided. These facts, be thinks, are perceived by the senses, as that fire is hot, snow white, honey sweet, none of which things need be proved by elaborate argument: it is enough merely to draw attention to them. (For there is a difference, he holds, between formal syllogistic proof of a thing and a mere notice or reminder: the former is the method for discovering abstruse and recondite truths, the latter for indicating facts that are obvious and evident.) Strip mankind of sensation, and nothing remains; it follows that Nature herself is the judge of that which is in accordance with or contrary to nature. What does Nature perceive or what does she judge of, beside pleasure and pain, to guide her actions of desire and of avoidance?)

... but "happiness" is a much broader concept which cries out for a precise definition. We generally use Aristotle's "flourishing" as an example of a compound concept that is not at all the same as the "life of pleasure" advocated by Epicurus. As the Wikipedia definition above indicates, it appears that Stoics and others pre and post Epicurus used the term eudaimonia to mean very different things, although I am not proficient in quoting Stoics so I am not able to provide any examples at the moment.

The ultimate issue in this discussion, as I see it, is the polemical issue of how to explain the ultimate goal of life as clearly as possible. Epicurus clearly held PLEASURE as the single term which fits that single word to describe the ultimate goal, but he also used eudaimonia within his own context, likely to indicate that a "happy" man will also experience some pains at time, and also that the happy man experiences many different types of pleasures -- in the Lampe's words above, "happiness is a collection of pleasures" which I think is correct - a combination of every kind of physical, mental, and emotional pleasure which we can possibly experience. If an experience is deemed by us to be desirable, it is solely because it is, or leads to, pleasure.

So the real issue is that those who disagree with Epicurus, and who want to appeal to real normal people (we can exclude the Stoics from this) realize that normal people feel instinctively the pull of Nature and therefore want to "be happy." The manipulation and deception game of other philosophers is to pull in an ambiguous concept like "happiness" and redefine it to suit their own tastes in virtue, in nobility, in worthiness, or in whatever other high-sounding word is calculated at the moment to persuade the unwary. That way they deprecate pleasure as the feeling which is the ultimate guide given us by Nature, which is exactly what Hiram's article leads toward in deprecating the role of "pleasure" even though he denies that that is his intent.

This is an issue that has been discussed at length in public and in private in the past, and that is what I read into the message of the article. Some people believe that "pleasure" is such a disreputable word that they cannot tolerate riding under its banner, and that is in my humble opinion a very huge mistake

I see that Hiram has written an article ("In Defense of Eudaimonia") with which I strongly disagree, but which will provide a great platform for discussing the details of Epicurean philosophy.

First, I would point to a couple of sources that picked up on this precise point in meeting the arguments of Stoics and others in the years after Epicurus:

What is Happiness? Let's let Diogenes of Oinoanda explain:

What is the true end? Let's let Torquatus make the point very clear in "On Ends":

Given those statements, we need to be very careful in loose use of words that have become associated with anti-Epicurean philosophies, especially when we are talking with people who do not understand the ramifications of the issue:

Ok - here is a link to Hiram's post:

I am attaching a full pdf of the article, but there is one clip I want to be sure to emphasize, because I think the writer cited is absolutely correct:

We can of course cite the many instances in Epicurus' own texts, and in Lucretrius, which precisely point to "pleasure" as the goal and guide of life, but I will add those here later.

You will also want to reread the arguments on this topic in Elayne's - On Pain, Pleasure, and Happiness Second Draft

This Epicureanfriends forum is no doubt the "some Epicurean circles" being referenced, so here is a thread to discuss it.

Quote from Elayne

taking the Heisenberg principle that the act of measuring phenomena at the subatomic scale influences the experimental results, so that we can measure position of the particle OR the velocity but not both at the same time, to thinking that means we can basically bend spoons with our minds

Or taking it to mean that everything is so chaotic that NOTHING can be predicted or counted on, so hey,what the heck, let's just give up trying and get drugged out!

This thread is devoted to the American Friends of Herculaneum:

http://cal.byu.edu/macfarlane/herculaneumfriends/index.htm

Quote from Elayne

It's not that older adults are leaving the churches so much as they are dying and being replaced, right?

Or in my observation in the traditional "mainline" churches, they are dying and NOT being replaced (maybe that was a typo, but maybe its a reference to how the churches are trying to reinvent themselves).

But in many cases it worries me that what is following behind to fill the vacuum in social structure is not much better, and in some cases worse, than before. If it is "social media" or Hollywood / New York glitter media culture (not sure what the best word is for it) that is taking the place of the old community churches, then something already rotten is being replaced by something in many cases more rotten still. Maybe one symptom is the rise of meth and other drugs, and the apparent rise (or so I read) in suicide.

Great find, Joshua, I have never heard of him but will be watching for him from now on.

Great Ideas!!!!

As I write this, this video presentation from the Getty Museum is less than 24 hours old. It's long, but holds out the promise of the very latest information:

Joshua I personally see those initiatives as kind of like the continuing anti-abortion emphasis in some legislatures -- they are on the losing side of history and there are enough of them around yet to cause trouble, but they are mostly older people (of course there are exceptions) and their numbers are declining. And even on the "right" where they identify themselves, they are losing their grip on their own constituents. I think that a significant result of Epicurean "activism" would add to their further and faster decline, but I do think there's a uniquely Epicurean perspective about WHY they are wrong that avoids muddying the Epicurean message.