Posts by Cassius

Getting back to the earlier issue of incorporating new evidence / facts:

Absolutely and Epicurean is always going to look for, observe, and incorporate new facts into his application of the philosophy and how to live.

BUT what is the number one fact that must be considered?

The first and most important fact is that you are a finite being, and you are never going to have access to all of the evidence / facts that you would like to have.

So if that is the case, what do you do?

You start off with a framework of analysis that acknowledges that you are finite, while the universe is infinite, and you perfect your "operating system" - your "philosophy" - that allows you to function confidently within the sphere of facts that are open to you.

That's what Epicurus did, nothing in the intervening centuries has been discovered to change that framework, and that's why his work is valuable today in its original form, rather than being "improved" by all sorts of changes which ultimately fade into significance in the face of the practical need to live and take action in an unlimited universe in which the evidence open to us is limited. Epicurus shows us how to defeat the numbing and paralysing and slavery-inducing effects of standard religious teaching and Academic philosophy.

And that's what I also think is so dangerous about accepting the implication that such and such a scientific theory has it all figured out, or that the "universe" is all expanding from a center, or that Yahweh is the one true god, or whatever. If you keep focus on the logical big picture that the universe is infinite in time and eternal in space, then it's easy to see that all these shortsighted theories are ultimately traps, and it's easy to dismiss them as impossible. That is a huge confidence-builder in the face of nihilism, and it's totally justified by the evidence that is available to us -- nothing in our experience (or in reliable human history) has ever come from, or gone, to nothing. All the rest is deduced from that factually-irrefutable starting point.

EDIT: I want to expand on this point in the future so I am setting up this thread in Physics: Proposition: It is not the "science" of Epicurus that should impress us, but rather the "perspective" on science, or, if you will, the "limit" on science.

Excellent point about "cult classics" --- that is a sense of the word that I do think applies. I also think of an analogy to "sports teams" in the modern world. People get very attached to their sports teams/clubs but most of the time they don't lose touch with reality in doing so.

Quote from Oscar

I think that's the least Epicurus requested from us in his dying words, no?

Yes probably so....... I just try to avoid the word "cult" because it has so many connotations of giving up one's independence of thought, which i think is inherently the opposite of what the philosophy teaches. I know that DeWitt used the word -- I suppose the connotations were bad in his day too, but I bet they are worse today. My take is that you can be like Lucretius and revere someone as a father figure or even godlike without giving up your own freedom or crossing the line into thinking that Epicurus could never have been wrong on anything.

Looks like something happened to my graphic clips above. I will try to find them and fix them.

Yes I am going to watch this later but I agree with Elayne, and the part you quoted Oscar seems very unfair to me. I suspect that this is overblown, even to some extent this from DeWitt:

Quote from Oscar

“His handbooks of doctrine were carried about like breviaries; his sayings were esteemed as if oracles and committed to memory as if Articles of Faith. His published letters were cherished as if epistles of an apostle. Pledges were taken to live obedient to his precepts. On the twentieth day of every month his followers assembled to perform solemn rites in honour of his memory, a sort of sacrament” - Dr. N.W. DeWitt concerning the most revered and the most reviled of all founders of thought in the Graeco-Roman world

To be charitable I would think that this might apply to SOME people, or might apply to YOUNG people who were being trained at younger ages, but I do not think that it is likely accurate to broad-brush the entire school as overly cultish.

I think it is very possible to respect and admire someone and give them the benefit of the doubt when you aren't sure of something yourself, without giving up your own mind and feelings and your own senses and your own evidence, especially when the core of what that person is teaching you is that you MUST use your own mind and feelings and senses to weigh the evidence, since that is how he came up with the philosophy in the first place.

Just to be clear I am not saying that you Oscar have a false view, I am saying that I see in a lot of commentators, especially the more Stoic-minded ones, the tendency to see Epicureans in an unflattering way, which in my mind is likely caused by the fact that they disagree so strongly with Epicurean viewpoints on religion, ethics, etc.

Definitely will keep you posted Charles. As soon as I break through my mental block on getting a first episode of Lucretius done, I will move to this, and we can probably set up and entirely different schedule so that we can do both simultaneously.

Yes Charles please keep going as you have time. I know Elayne has thoughts on this issue as well. As I see it , it seems to break down for me first into issues of awareness, and being aware of multiple things at the same time, which I think is possible, so that some things you are aware of are pleasurable and others are painful in different parts of your experience at the same time. I would think Epicurus would say that that is possible, but Elayne may have some thoughts on that.

But then there is the theoretical / logical side of this problem, which is where I think Epicurus thought it was important to keep the two in distinct categories without compromise or blending of multiple observations at the same time.

This takes us back to Philebus and the "purity" argument, because if you admit to blends of pleasure and pain then you are faced with the contradiction that you then must have some science that tells you what blend is "best." So long as you keep pain and pleasure separate, pleasure is always desirable and pain is always undesirable, but definition. But if you admit "mixed" states then you are forced to come up with some other standard of choice, other than PLEASURE, by which to choose what mixture is best. This leads you down the path of embracing "Wisdom" or "reason" as the factor by which to choose, and if you make wisdom or reason your ultimate factor of choice, then you end up displacing pleasure as the ultimate guide of life.

I know I am truncating the argument way too much, but I know that this last part I just stated is in Philebus, and I believe it is critical to link Epicurus' arguments to these logical disputes, for which I think they are his answers.

Even if there are reasons to question the "awareness" issues I mention above (and again I cannot recall Elayne's full positions on this) I still think that the logical issues are themselves sufficient to explain Epicurus' argument (though ultimately I think the logical issues and the awareness issues go hand in hand).

Oscar I personally am MUCH more comfortable with graphics, in which I have the ability to make effort, even if not much talent, vs the musical part, at which I have no talent or aptitute whatever. So anything you can piece together on the music side I am happy to work on graphics for.

In the above discussion I don't think that Hiram is including all of the detail that even in the partial form that we have it that Epicurus / Lucretius cited. I think if you check Dewitt you will see that there is both (1) the argument from anticipations, which is most fully preserved in the Velleius narrative in Cicero's "On The Nature of the Gods," and (2) the direct receipt of "images" though space by the mind.

Those who reject Epicurus' theory tend to focus on the images argument and blend that into the anticipations argument, but someone attempting to weigh all the evidence of what the texts contain would need to consider both the anticipations argument and the "images" argument.

There's a lot going on in the consideration of Epicurean gods, and my personal viewpoint is that Hiram is hanging too much weight on his own personal weighing of the current state of scientific evidence, which is by definition not complete and is ever changing. It's definitely a problem also to site the evidence that the universe is expanding (that refers to the OBSERVABLE universe) to contradict the Epicurean theoretical position that the universe is boundless in size. I have to admit that that one always bothers me. Just because the part of the universe that we have OBSERVED seems to be expanding from a central point does not countermand the logical deduction that the universe is boundless in size, and that presumably there are all sorts of other areas that are expanding or collapsing or whatever based on their own histories.

To talk about the "universe" as expanding from a center is going to be out of court from the beginning in Epicurean terms. Of course we can go back to the issue of definitions and say that "universe" doesn't mean EVERYTHING, and if so that's fine, but that's not the traditional use of the term "universe."

I looked at some more of the youtube versions of this song. Even if each line needs to truncated severely, it should be easy to fill in the gaps with a slide show / graphic illustrating each principle in much more full form. Then the song line can become the memory device for the full doctrine illustrated in in the picture, kind of like with the Tetrapharmakon

You are very correct Oscar - I just reviewed the original and each line is going to need to be much more compact than I have written it.

Oscar I am am very interested in anything you would suggest!

Before I made the first set of suggestions I should have gone back and studied the format of the music, because now I am remembering that it seems many of the gifts were very short "five golden rings" (?) and I wasn't remembering accurately how the lines fit together to go with the flow.

If you are so inclined any ideas that you have would be welcome. I do think that using this a a memory device would be very useful.

This is a subject that has come up before and I will probably move this to the ethics subforum later. I see an issue here on the question of how we describe the sum of our experience at any one moment, in which I think there is an issues that (1) our experience at any one moment probably contains all sorts of feelings, mental and physical, but which obviously can't be focused on at one time, and how this relates to (2) pleasure and pain being distinct feelings that never blend together to form a third type of feeling.

This comes up today because I see a facebook comment from Mike Anyayahan and I composed this comment about it. I'll post it here as a general comment to see what people think about this:

Mike: I saw you posted this on your timeline: "Mental pleasure exists only when you have peace of mind. Peace of mind exists only when you have no more fears and worries. Fears and worries exist only if you are still wanting. You are still wanting only when you have no limit in what you want."

I think I see a thread of thought there which might be worth discussing -- the "only" part. I think it is correct Epicurean thought to point out that pleasure and pain are separate feelings and do not blend together. However it is probably also true that we experience many different types of feelings at different times, and even at the same time in different parts of our experience, so I would think it is possible to experience some feelings of mental pleasure while also having a concern that there are worries that need to be addressed (which I think is probably what peace of mind involves). So I would question the "only." Also, the last two sentences might be read to mean that wants should be extinguished, which I don't think would be a correct Epicurean statement.

And factually, it is probably not true that "you are still wanting only when you have no limit to what you want" is it? I am thinking there that the "limit to what you want" is a conceptual point of view that is highly useful for us to think about in debating the nature of pleasure. However as far as day to day life goes I think you can probably be a good Epicurean, acknowledging that pleasure has a limit (as discussed by PD3, Elayne, and elsewhere in this thread), and still feeling hungry when you have not eaten all day.

These comments are largely nitpicks but I think what you are writing is intended to be seen as a general statement of a "rule." So I am thinking that some of the points could probably be tightened up to be more accurate to the Epicurean viewpoint (which I am presuming is your goal there).

This reminds me that I am aware that Diskin Clay, to mention one commentator, came up with a different version of the twelve than did DeWiit. I will paste here the clips that i have on that and also upload the full article. Clay's version does not make the point stated by DeWitt in his number 4.

I have personally been disposed to reject Mr. Clay's version because he counts ten principles of physics, and then to round out the twelve ( a number I understand was referenced as a book title in Diogenes Laertius) he considers the first two of the PD's (about gods and death) to be the last two of the twelve. That does not sound convincing to me. I could see a stretched argument that PD1 might have some physics implication, but not PD2. This material will help in analysing the DeWitt material however.

Also, I remember some commentator somewhere saying that Clay's version was "more careful" than that of DeWitt. However as I read back over these I think Dewitt was probably correct in thinking that the twelve principles were very specifically related to the nature of the atoms, from which the more sweeping principles arise, but are not specifically stated as among the fundamentals themselves. It seems to me that Clay is mixing axioms (nothing comes into being or goes out of being) with conclusions (the universe is as it always was and will be). I think DeWitt is probably correct that all 12 would have been more like axioms than conclusions.

(On a personal note I should say I have a high regard for Diskin Clay because shortly after I starting studying Epicurus I wrote him a letter - maybe about 2011; obviously before he died - and he was gracious enough to write me a nice note in response, so I will always be appreciative of that.)

Here is the full article from which these two pages come:

File

Diskin Clay: Epicurus' Last Will and Testament

The title of this article is very figuratively written, and the subject is not at all focused narrowly on Epicurus' last will, but much more broadly on Epicurus' general legacy, with a lot of attention to physics.

Cassius

January 4, 2020 at 10:41 PM

Ok I did not remember this exactly as I find it now:

Footnote 8 is to Diogenes Laertius 10.40-41 which may not be of much help.

Thanks Oscar!

on this one -

Quote from Oscar

"Atoms in a body can be more than one type" to "atom's types are plenty"

I was afraid I was already getting to far away from what appears to be the point:

PN 04 "Solid bodies are either compounds or simple."

I need to look back at the intent of that one, which seems to be separate and distinct from

PN 12 - "The number of the different shapes is not infinite, merely innumerable."

In other words, it may be that 4 is making such a different point than 12 that it might not be appropriate simply to say "there are lots of different types of atoms. Without going back to DeWitt as I type this, I seem to remember that he was thinking that it was important to Lucretius / Epicurus to note the existence of heaps of atoms of the same type, such as "pure gold" or anything else composed of a single element. Now offhand I can't think of what the significance of that would be, but I'll go back to dewitt and see what I can find, and also compare the letter to Herodotus and try to find the section in Lucretius that would involve this issue.

I definitely remember reading the part about why the atoms can't be infinite in shape - because we know that the shapes don't get large enough for us to observe a single atom -- eveything that rises to what we see (is this the meaning of the "shores of light phrase"?) can be split, so i think that's the observation that proves the rule that a single atom itself never rises to the size of being visible.

But following on our recent conversation about how Epicurus was intent on his anti-Platonism, there may be a reason why it would be important to note that a visible body may be composed of atoms of only a single type.

Anyone have any ideas?

Note: It's possible that DeWitt has this wrong, since his is a reconstruction, but again I need to check the text.....

OK Friends, this is both a promise and a threat. Unless I get some creative assistance with this, you are eventually going to hear me sing this, and I promise that would be painful. I am sure some of you can do much better, and have better suggestions for rewording / rephrasing, before we get to that point.

However, this is a starting point, based on Norman DeWitt's reconstruction of Epicurus Twelve Fundamentals of Nature. Of course the final product must be something that can be sung to "the twelve days of Christmas" keeping as close to the fundamental points made by Epicurus as possible. Obviously also in this project a singer would really have to be flexible in singing the words at a pace that would fit the music.

Here is my first effort. If I can get some help we will spread credit (or blame) around appropriately! ---->

The Twelve Days of Class With Epicurus

On the first day of class Epicurus taught to me:

Nothing can be made from no-thing.

On the second day of class Epicurus taught to me:

No thing can be split to nothing, and

Nothing can be made from no-thing.

On the third day of class Epicurus taught to me:

Every thing is made of atoms and void,

No thing can be split to nothing, and

Nothing can be made from no-thing.

On the fourth day of class Epicurus taught to me:

Atoms in a body can be more than one type,

Every thing is made of atoms and void,

No thing can be split to nothing, and

Nothing can be made from no-thing.

On the fifth day of class Epicurus taught to me:

There's no limit to the number of atoms,

Atoms in a body can be more than one type,

Every thing is made of atoms and void,

No thing can be split to nothing, and

Nothing can be made from no-thing.

On the sixth day of class Epicurus taught to me:

There's no limit to the size of the void,

There's no limit to the number of atoms,

Atoms in a body can be more than one type,

Every thing is made of atoms and void,

No thing can be split to nothing, and

Nothing can be made from no-thing.

On the seventh day of class Epicurus taught to me:

The atoms are always in motion,

There's no limit to the size of the void,

There's no limit to the number of atoms,

Atoms in a body can be more than one type,

Every thing is made of atoms and void,

No thing can be split to nothing, and

Nothing can be made from no-thing.

On the eighth day of class Epicurus taught to me:

The speed of all the atoms is the same,

The atoms are always in motion,

There's no limit to the size of the void,

There's no limit to the number of atoms,

Atoms in a body can be more than one type,

Every thing is made of atoms and void,

No thing can be split to nothing, and

Nothing can be made from no-thing.

On the ninth day of class Epicurus taught to me:

The atoms move in lines and also bounce,

The speed of all the atoms is the same,

The atoms are always in motion,

There's no limit to the size of the void,

There's no limit to the number of atoms,

Atoms in a body can be more than one type,

Every thing is made of atoms and void,

No thing can be split to nothing, and

Nothing can be made from no-thing.

On the tenth day of class Epicurus taught to me:

Atoms can swerve at any point or time,

The atoms move in lines and also bounce,

The speed of all the atoms is the same,

The atoms are always in motion,

There's no limit to the size of the void,

There's no limit to the number of atoms,

Atoms in a body can be more than one type,

Every thing is made of atoms and void,

No thing can be split to nothing, and

Nothing can be made from no-thing.

On the eleventh day of class Epicurus taught to me:

Atoms have a weight a shape and size,

Atoms can swerve at any point or time,

The atoms move in lines and also bounce,

The speed of all the atoms is the same,

The atoms are always in motion,

There's no limit to the size of the void,

There's no limit to the number of atoms,

Atoms in a body can be more than one type,

Every thing is made of atoms and void,

No thing can be split to nothing, and

Nothing can be made from no-thing.

On the twelfth day of class Epicurus taught to me:

The atom shapes are not numbered nor in-fi-nite,

Atoms have a weight a shape and size,

Atoms can swerve at any point or time,

The atoms move in lines and also bounce,

The speed of all the atoms is the same,

The atoms are always in motion,

There's no limit to the size of the void,

There's no limit to the number of atoms,

Atoms in a body can be more than one type,

Every thing is made of atoms and void,

No thing can be split to nothing, and

Nothing can be made from no-thing.

Can anyone offer assistance or suggestions?

(No, "forget the project" isn't acceptable, and won't save you in the end, because I intend to incorporate some form of this into eventual podcasting to go through these hugely important aspects of Epicurean philosophy.)

You got me going Oscar I have another example:

I also think that something that keeps rearing its head is that we are going to have to follow DeWitt's lead and pursue our understanding of Epicurus as a supreme anti-Platonist.

What I am referring to here is that although it seems clear that Epicurus himself detested logic games and the dialectical method, it seems clear that he decided that he needed to confront the Platonic arguments by developing responses that beat Plato at his own game -- using logic to show the shortcomings of logic. So even though he detested it, Epicurus engaged in logical warfare himself, and for better or worse much of what we have in the surviving texts in Epicurus' own hand was that part of his writing - where he was laying down the logical premises which Epicureans could study and learn and apply to defeat the logicians at their own game.

I think that is primarily what is involved in probably the most contentious issue facing us all - coming to an understanding of the "absence of pain" discussion in the letter to Menoeceus.

As you know I have come to the conclusion that this discussion is primarily aimed at the logical arguments against pleasure that were advanced in places like Plato's Philebus. Unfortunately the letter to Menoeceus is so short and gives so little background that this connection is not at all clear from the surviving text, and since we today are not immersed in logical arguments about "limits" and "purity" and "highest good" -- the normal person is going to interpret these passages without that context -- and without that context, taking the passages on their own in their current English translation forms -- then they can be read to be totally contradictory to much of the rest of the philosophy, for reasons we have discussed at length elsewhere.

So my point here is that what likely happened in the centuries after Epicurus is that the Epicureans were constantly confronted with logic game attacks by stoics and platonists, and it appears that some of them lost their nerve and attempted to compromise. Even today we face a powerful tendency to consider "logic" and "reason" to be unimpeachable references, from being taught to revere Mr. Spock and in 1000 other examples.

And the flip side is that we are taught to deprecate "feeling" / "emotion" as something to be suppressed and/or ignored and/or always to be distrusted.

So my point in this post is that even though I think we are clear that Epicurus' ultimate point is that "feeling" is the guide of life, we're still going to have to recognize that much that we have in the surviving texts constitutes "logic games" that were made necessary by the hostile environment in which the Epicureans (and we) live.

And that's huge part of the reconstruction battle that DeWitt trailblazed for us, but in which there still tremendous work to be done.

Something else that is probably clear because it come up regularly that bears repeating here.

I personally think that everyone should work to apply Epicurean principles to every aspect of their life, and that includes career, places to live, even politics.

And I think there is a time and place for that, for example my frequent example of citing Robert Hanrott. He has his application and he is stating it clearly.

My strategic concern is that in this forum, and in the projects that I am trying to invest most of my time in, I don't want to scare away anyone of any political persuasion by having them read something and think that Epicurean philosophy is left, right, center, or non-aligned. There's a time and a place for all of those, and I how those will develop and flower separately.

But I am really impressed with what DeWitt accomplished in making headway in recreating and explaining the core philosophy without getting into day to day divisive issues, and I think there's a lot more work to be done with that kind of approach. That's where I want to see Epicureanfriends.com and my other work go. Others will go in other directions regionally and by interest group, and at some point I may join in with some of that. But hot-button social issues create too much opportunity for misunderstanding.

It's kind of like Lucretius warning his readers not to dismiss the theory too quickly before understanding it. There will be plenty of time to disagree on applications after we understand the core points, but if we don't understand the core points first we'll never have a basis for getting off the ground in the first place.

Oscar:

You are right to see a major distinction in our approaches, but I think there may be more to it rather than taking a position on how much Epicurean philosophy might have changed over the centuries in the ancient world.

For example, when Charles says this:

Quote from Charles

However, given the history of the philosophy, it most definitely grew within the following centuries after his death, we see this with Lucretius and the elaboration of the idea of the Atomic Swerve (Clinamen),

(Caution: in this post I am talking exclusively about your question of Hiram's approach vs mine. I cite Charles only because he happened to make this comment here and it's a good example of the type question that sometimes arises. I have seen some people take the position that Lucretius was deviating from Epicurus in many major fundamental ways and that's not what Charles is asserting, but some scholars apparently do.)

I take the position that there is no good reason to think that Lucretius deviated from Epicurus at all, and that the swerve and all other detail in the poem are mostly and probably totally just detail from Epicurus' "On Nature" that we lost from not having Epicurus' own work. And given Lucretius's own statements about his "reverence" and fidelity to Epicurus, there's every reason to think that he did everything he could to remain closely on track.

Now I am not so sure that the same could be said about Philodemus, but again his texts are much more fragmentary and "reconstructed" than Lucretius, so I always give him the benefit of the doubt as well, and look first to translation / reconstruction issues before I conclude that Philodemus intentionally deviated.

In addition, I think that there is good evidence in Diogenes Laertius and Cicero that later Epicureans compromised with stoics and other attackers on at least (1) the nature of the origin of friendship and (2) whether the canon has three legs or four, which is related to the Epicurean position on logic and reason.

I believe Dewitt covers both of these, and I consider both deviations from Epicurus to have been major undermining of the philosophy and contributing to its downfall.

Now the point I want to be clear on is that no doubt there were SCIENTIFIC discoveries of "facts" that would lead to modification of the probabilities Epicurus selected, such as the size of the sun, but I see absolutely no reason to think that any new scientific discoveries to this very day undermine Epicurus' *approach* to science, and how to deal with questions that arise when we have less than desirable amounts of evidence.

The divergence that you see between Hiram and myself is I think largely the result of Hiram using sources which are fragmentary, not well vetted, and largely speculative, to modify positions that are well established in the core texts and by the physics. For example that CAN BE NO absolute justice, and anytime Hiram (or Catherine Wilson, or me, or anyone else) implies that all Epicurean would reach the same moral or ethical or justice positions, then we are deviating from the core of the philosophy. I am sure that I fail to be sufficiently on guard and that I occasionally slip. but I perceive that others (let's use Robert Hanrott's blog, for example) simply make no effort to keep to the core position that a certain set of political views are their own, and cannot be asserted as universal using Epicurean philosophy as justification.

So getting back to your original question as to seeing Epicurean philosophy as a "conversation among friends" --- as to the core philosophy I absolutely do not see it that way at all. Certainly there WILL be conversation among friends as to APPLICATION of the philosophy, but the core itself is relatively simple, relatively clear, and being a set of premises about the way nature works is no going to be expected to be the subject of revision. This aspect may well explain any issues that arise from Philodemus -- he may have been extemporizing on his own, or doing his best to extend Epicurean principles to new fields, but I would bet my life that in doing so he made the same point I am making here - that application varies by circumstance, and does not constitute a change in the core philosophy.

Give me evidence of a life after death or a supernatural god and I will be the first to convert to that religion -- but the foundation of the philosophy, which is not open to change, is that there is absolutely no reason to expect that to happen, and so there is no reason to "keep an open mind" toward assertions of that kind, and every reason to guard against compromise and thereby undermining the confidence that we want to have in order to live as happily as possible.

So in sum I see the difference between my approach and Hiram's as both substantive on the issue of staying true to the core (which is that there is no absolute ethics) and procedural (on the question of how to deal with unclear and fragmentary texts, which is the subject addressed in Elayne's recent post.

I am writing this fairly quickly so I may have to revise and extend if I have forgotten something obvious -- and it's really in THAT regard that I see the proper application of "conversation among friends." That's the way I see my discussions with Hiram, with whom I have worked cordially for a long time. We all make mistakes and have different viewpoints, can remain friends as long as we proceed in good faith, but that doesn't mean that after time and reflection and examination of the question that "any position we prefer" is an acceptable basis for goal of a particular group. That's where it makes sense to particularize the goal is writing so that everyone is clear and can decide whether they are in or out on any particular project.