Posts by Cassius

Quote from Elayne

When I read DeWitt, I realized how important the contexts were. For myself personally, when I study for my own pleasure, that automatically includes wanting the pleasure of those I'm close to. Not a whole country

That is the impression I got from DeWitt too and I think it is persuasive. I have read many times in other places that Greek education was heavily oriented toward "producing good citizens." if so, that would make total sense with DeWitt's interpretation -- that we are educating ourselves (in philosophy and in most all else too) not "for Greece" but for ourselves. Which does not mean that Greece is not an important part of our world, but that ultimately Greece itself is not the highest value - especially if "Greece" is not the equivalent of "our friends." Under the right circumstances I could imagine that the two could be roughly equivalent, but the larger and more problematic the political situation the less equivalent that would be.

I think what is coming into focus is that in terms of real-life meetings, we're almost going to have to find a way to do some shotgun style advertising to draw as many people as we can into what may almost be a lecture-like environment, and hope that maybe 5% or some very small number will have enough interest to come out.

I am thinking that Meetup is so heavily oriented to a "lonely-hearts club" type person (and I am not criticizing that) that the people we will find there will be even less motivated - maybe substantially less motivated - than facebook.

It might take targeting a very large community (like Atlanta in my general area) and then using meetup maybe for logistics but plan to find a way to solicit interest from local philosophy departments / schools / colleges and even looking for local facebook groups (if they exist). In other words looking for a wider variety of places to advertise so that we aren't just relying only on Meetup.

When I was younger meeting notices for such things used to be placed in Libraries and other gathering spots but I am not sure that works anymore.

Quote from Elayne

What caught my eye was that pleasures are only "generally good", when it is actually that the pleasures themselves are always good but that sometimes pains come along with certain pleasure-bringing actions and thus those actions are not advisable. It's not the pleasure that's the problem at all-- it's the entire consequences of the action. That might sound like a quibbling distinction but I don't think it is minor. Because sometimes one can modify the results of an action so that the pleasures remain and the pains are lessened or removed.

Oh I missed that and I completely agree with this.

joshua I appreciate your helping me think these things through. Like i said I am trying to put my myself in the place of someone who tries to stay as rigorously consistent with the principles as possible without injecting my / our modern viewpoint. But it's of course hard to do that so it helps to test the arguments against ever more extreme test cases to see if they can stand the strain. So far I think they can if we rigorously reject the idea that any law or morality can be the same for all people at all times and all places under all circumstances.

"where the strong make decisions and the weak suffer what they must is a contradiction in terms, "

I know that what you say applies to me, but it concerns me that this comes close to drawing a bright line that may not be in fact so bright. Is it not possible to imagine situations where the strong do make decisions for the weak that do in fact lead to greater pleasure for both? Is a parent child relationship such an example? Generalities are useful but the closer we get to stating that anything is a "rule" the closer we probably get to extending our personal opinion further than it has the "power" to go over the feelings of the people involved.

If I understand your points I think I agree with all you wrote. I realize as I think about things things that I am trying to take these issues to their logical conclusion.

IF there is nothing eternal except matter in motion through the void, and if the universe has no "center" and no "outside" from which a creating power looks on and says "THIS is good and THAT is bad" then we are truly left with the feelings of pleasure and pain as the motivation for all action.

We can set our sights on things that we think will please us (democracy, equality, capitalism, socialism, communism) but never can there be any "outside" justification for it other than ourselves and what we set as our goals. Presumably we set goals for some reason, and that reason ultimately is a function of our calculation of how our feelings of pain and pleasure will be impacted.

All of this might seem like the path to nihilism, but I think Epicurus probably saw it as the opposite: He presumably saw it as daring to cut away all illusions and getting right to the heart of the matter. Looking for justification "out there somewhere" is a dream - all justification must come to us in life, and ultimately through our feelings of pleasure and pain. Deprive us of all feeling, and we are dead, as per PD2. But rather than look at feeling as "all we have" and feel like we are deprived of something that we "ought" to have, such as gods might have, I think the point would be that since our feeling is ultimately our most important connection to reality, we have to guard it as rigorously and intensely as we can, because in very short order life is over and it is gone.

And in one of the phrases from DeWitt's commentary that I remember best, I think it's true that all these issues of morality and ethics and pain and pleasure have meaning ONLY to "the living."

Ha - I just came across this which I have never seen before but is relevant to our discussion of "morality"

"Catherine Wilson asserts the MORAL right to be identified as the author of this book!"

Is this some kind of new phrasing in international copyright law?

Good grief. I would have thought that "Copyright Catherine Wilson 2019" was sufficient for that, must we appeal to absolute morality in a book on Epicurus???

I agree with you as to "orientation" Joshua. And I bet if I had taken the trouble to read the text first, there might be explanations there that would make it clear.

As to "moral relativism" the more I think about anything involving "morality" the more I question whether the Epicureans even spoke in that term as we use it today. Certainly they spoke about "virtue" and "good" and "evil" but do we have good cites from Epicurus or Lucretius talking about "morality" as anything other than tied to pain and pleasure?

For example in your sentence: ". An Epicurean may well argue that slavery was immoral even in ancient Greece, in spite of their social conventions, specifically because the slave was never a party to the 'social contract' in the first place." The Epicurean would surely note that the relationship is pleasurable to the owner, and painful to the slave, and that if the relationship did not come about by agreement (I suppose that is possible) then it would be unjust. And even if it came about by agreement at first, and the parties changed their mind, then we would at most have a breach of contract, not anything that violates any kind of abstract natural or divine or ideal law.

But would an Epicurean talk in terms of their being some kind of outside standard of "morality" which slavery in ancient Greece (or any other place) violated?

Certainly we have the example of Cassius Longinus who decided that Caesar (arguably a dictator against the law) offended his sense of *something* enough to assassinate him and to go to war against his successors. In those letters between him and Cicero he talks about the interrelation between virtue and pleasure as they applied to that situation, but I don't recall that he spoke in terms of the problems being one of "morality" or Caesar being "immoral."

Sometimes it is hard to separate the philosophical issue from the emotion of the particular example (slavery, here) but I think that is exactly what Epicurus was advising in those PD's on Justice from 30-40.

We personally find some things so painful and offensive to us that we go to war and fight to the death over them, but if there is no god, no ideal forms, no abstract eternal truths, then when we fight to the death we should realize that we are fighting for our own preferences, not because we are vindicated by gods or outside standards.

At least that is the way I am reading it. I am very interested in any opinions otherwise, or with a different twist on it, but I think the Epicurean fundamental principles of the way the universe work compel that conclusion.

I now have my copy of the book but have only begun to go through it. My eye was caught, however, but this Stoic v Epicurean comparison chart near the end of the book. In particular, the description of the Epicurean "purpose of ethics" as "freedom from harm" and "happiness" as "freedom from anxiety and fear" strike me as grave distortions of Epicurus (but in accord with the modern majority view).

Much of the rest of the chart looks generally Ok to me, but the entire chart seems a little "loose" in meaning. For example, is the main concept "Orientation" clear enough to mean something?

I am about to conclude that using Meetup as a method of setting up a local group is a dead end. I think Hiram reported something similar, and I know that my own efforts have yielded nothing. I also gather that Elayne's success has been limited.

Possibly the issue is that the type of person who frequents Meetup is just a casual user looking for something superficial (like Stoicism at the deepest). Even if such people attend an initial meeting or two, they are likely to drop away when they find that Epicurean philosophy challenges them in an uncomfortable way.

In my case I made very clear on my opening Meetup page that the group was not general philosophy, and not Stoicism, and gave details about what it is about. If that scared away people and caused the lack of response, then so be it. Even with that, I got notifications that eight people indicated interest, but I could never get anyone to commit to an organizational first meetup. Probably what's necessary is to go ahead with at least two people (preferably three) at a public restaurant, and then see who is too shy to reply, but actually shows up.

I suppose Meetup can be one arrow in a quiver to use, but relying on it as a primary tool is probably not a good idea.

Which means alternate methods need to be developed.

@Brad - Whether Elayne interviews you or not, it would be interesting to have you post some of your own thoughts on how to do it, either in this thread or in another one.

If you have a series of comments, or simply so lengthy that it would take this thread off topic, start a thread in THIS forum Childhood Education

If it doesn't let you start a thread there please let me know - I think you can.

Wasn't there an anecdote in "A Few Days In Athens" as well about the appearance of Gryphon? (or something like that)

I suspect Elli will post this somewhere we can find it but it probably belongs in this thread too:

Ecce Teacher, an excerpt from the book "TA HELLINIKA", by Dimitris Liantinis.

[...The first commandment is to build the soul of the child on the stone of life. The second is to clean from the inside the rust of superstition.

Without knowing and without to understand it, from the birth of the child, we put snakes around the child with superstitions and magical cataplasms. And with these poisons, we choke his soul. As the weeds choke the wheat.

Superstitions are like Lernea Hydra. And Leviathan who swallows seas. We load on the back of the new man our sick imagination, the falsehoods, the ignorance, our moral fossilization, the fearful and performances around the sunken atavism of the ancestors. And we force the child to lift on the shoulder this flea market of uselessness and oxidation as that ancient Titan lifted the sky in his shoulders.

We strive to subtract the Nature inside the child, and we exchange it with our sick mind.

And look the priests with censers in the corners of cemeteries. As they're grabbing the money from the suffering persons. Like the snake, they are, looking for how to magnetize the victim. And when it happens to watch them how they brawl in vulgarity in front of the customer. Smashing. Of course, one may comprehend and for their rabid reaction while we ask the establishment in Greece of the crematorium and the optional cremation. As it happens in seasoned countries.

And look the astrologers with horoscopes and zodiacs in newspapers, the magazines, and television. You see some thick ladies who when they start talking to you about the Ear of Virgo and the influences of Capricorn with the horns in your love, they clam up Penzias and Wilson ...

And look the hymn for the good soul and good end of one's life. To become righteous and be good for the others. The sunset you go to the little window, and read the Holy Bible and fairy tales of Halima, as the saying to that daughter of the "Woman of Zante": You n 'sanctify, and let do not care that others are wolves ready to eat you. And above all, this: You keep your eyes four, for the Heaven and its Kingdom.

Red as poppies and yellow as bile is the drug's landscape of falsity and superstition. The strategy to destroy the natural landscape of the child with the superstition is intentional, is directed, and is felony trillion and quadrillion to death and inhuman....]

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I don't know how to evaluate what makes sense on co-authorship but I will do what I can and I bet others will too. I think that's one of the best uses of a forum like this, as an aid in proofing and other research.

Here are some general thoughts that occur to me during the course of an ongoing debate about a different non-Epicurean philosophy:

it is not my goal in this or any other Epicurean forum to just meet new people, smile to them about how we all want to be happy and have less pain, and walk away. I don't think that was what Epicurus was all about either. What I find in my life is that my greatest pleasures and support comes from dealing with FRIENDS who largely see the world the way I do -- and that does not mean "we just all want to be happy" and leaving it at that.

The reality is that people tend to gravitate into circles with which they identify, and there are certain core attributes of the Epicurean circle that go far beyond "atheism" and "let's all be happy." The world "happy" is notoriously ambiguous, and the Happy Christian and the Happy Muslim and the Happy Jew and the Happy Communist and the Happy Capitalist (and on and on in listing the mainstream political parties, philosophies, and religions) have very little in common with the core values of what I understand Epicurus to have taught. And the harsh reality is that people in crowds lose what little sanity they have as individuals, and the larger and more homogeneous the crowd of the groups that I just mentioned, the more intensely ANTI-Epicurean they tend to be.

I am all in favor of using words that do not offend unnecessarily, and of being as compassionate and kind to individuals as we possibly can. But it does us no good in our goal of identifying - or "making" - new people like us if all we do is smile and nod and talk about how much in common on the surface that we have with each other.

Because at a very basic level we don't have much in common with people who look to God to tell them what to do, or look to virtue idealism to tell them what to do, and who decide what to do based on the reward or punishment they face after death, or who think that "logic" is the answer to every problem and who in fact look down on and attempt to suppress emotion. Those are huge differences in perspective, and we could go on and on listing more.

One thing that Epicureans seem to largely agree on, but most others muddy over with "spiritualism" and "new age" nonsense, is that this is the only life we have, and this is the only opportunity to experience whatever pleasure we are going to experience. That means that we don't have a lot of time to dawdle around smiling and talking sweet nothings to organizations that are inherently at core anti-Epicurean.

Eternity is a long time, and I hate the thought of wasting one second (though I admittedly do it all the time). That's why I see much of the job of rediscovering Epicurean philosophy as a kind of "campaign," and not as just a pleasant thing to do in the afternoon. If we can identify quickly that a certain group is going in a different direction than we are, then we should point it out in sharp contrasts so that the people we are looking for can find us, and the rest can look elsewhere. I have no ill will toward any individual of any race, creed, religion, or political persuasion. But to the extent that any grouping or category of people have a culture or direction that is at root actively anti-Epicurean, then my judgement is that PD39 and PD40, about separating ourselves from our enemies, and guarding the power to defend ourselves from them, is the best prescription:

39. The man who best knows how to meet external threats makes into one family all the creatures he can; and those he can not, he at any rate does not treat as aliens; and where he finds even this impossible, he avoids all dealings, and, so far as is advantageous, excludes them from his life.

40. Those who possess the power to defend themselves against threats by their neighbors, being thus in possession of the surest guarantee of security, live the most pleasant life with one another; and their enjoyment of the fullest intimacy is such that if one of them dies prematurely, the others do not lament his death as though it called for pity.

Yes that is what I am thinking Joshua. And in what I read of Frances Wright's personal history, she was definitely a "Doer" and a "reformer" as much as a "thinker" and those characteristics strike me as more transcendentalist than Epicurean. So I am thinking that she may have happily attached her name to a book that someone else was too afraid to publish (especially in England) under their own name.

In fact there is an aside within AFDIA where the author takes to task a particular English professor for essentially embracing Epicurean ideas but denouncing Epicurus himself, and pointing out how hypocritical that was. I sometimes wonder if that isn't itself a link to someone else who was involved in the book.

I've read through the rest of the books of Diogenes Laertius and I can see that most of the details that are in AFDIA could be gained from reading that single book. But the final effect is just so well done, it strikes me as the result of some much older and more mature woman or man.

According to wikipedia AFDIA was released in London in 1822 and if that is correct presumably it was ready for publication maybe a year before that(?) Frances write was born 9/6/1795, so in 1822 she was 27 years old. In fact, wikipedia says she wrote this by age 18!

Is it possible that she was so dynamic that she was able to get all that done? Certainly. But I also see on wikipedia -- "In 1813, when Wright was sixteen, she returned to Scotland to live with her great-uncle, James Mylne, a philosophy professor at Glasgow College." and in fact her father was a correspondent of Adam Smith and a political radical in his own right. She at that time in her life she was moving in a circle of people of whom any or many could have been interested in the same material.

At any rate, just useless speculation, other than to the extent that it leads us to the discovery of other old books on Epicurus which have dropped out of sight but which may still exist somewhere.

Joshua if you run into anything of interest on Frances Wright please be sure to comment about it. I find her to be a fascinating but enigmatic figure - I can find nothing else she ever wrote about Epicurus, or even anything particularly philosophical at all, other than "A Few Days In Athens." That has always caused me to doubt whether she wrote it herself, because (1) she had an older relative who was a well known philosophy professor, as I understand it, and (2) I cannot imagine someone who had gained such a depth of knowledge of the details of philosophy in general and Epicurus in particular not writing more on the subject. if I

This is not to put her down, only to try to answer what I think as a mystery. Not to compare myself or the people I know to her, but to me "A Few Days In Athens" almost requires a lifetime of study to have been so deft with the subject as to write it. And if it is possible that she just lent her name to what everyone no doubt understood would be an explosive anti-religous book, then maybe we might be able to locate other similar material that is equally useful.

I am not familiar with the school in which whitman was traveling (transcendentalist?) and I don't know at all that it is parallel to Epicurus except in certain particulars, but I would like to look up any and all writers of that period who dealt specifically with Epicurus so we can get access to them. I feel sure there are many more beyond the other obscure ones we've found, in addition to Wright, such as Lorenzo Valla and Cosma Raimondi (much earlier figures).

I look forward to at some point getting some of this material in hand. In the meantime, here is something I found recently published about On Anger -

https://www.academia.edu/1327827/On_a_c…odemus_On_Anger

Here's a caution from that article --

I don't see that we have any threads or notes under the VS62 section of the forum - maybe as we locate commentary on that, or come up with it ourselves, we can put some of that there for future reference: VS 62 -Now it parents are justly angry with their children...

Wow Godfrey, I just read this for the first time and probably need to reread to see if there is anything I disagree with, but wow this seems to me to be directly on point. Thank you!

Might be good to collect some relevant links:

https://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Your-W…=gateway&sr=8-1

http://sarahwilliamsgoldhagen.com/