Posts by Cassius

"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/

Martin's post reminds me of that fragment which has always been one of the murkiest to me - I think people say that the original text is mutilated -

VS 62. If the anger of parents against their children is justified, it is quite pointless for the children to resist it and to fail to ask forgiveness. If the anger is not justified but is unreasonable, it is folly for an irrational child to appeal to someone deaf to appeals and not to try to turn it aside in other directions by a display of good will.

A book on children will also probably want to address the dispute over whether Laertius should be translated "the wise man will marry...according to circumstances..." or "the wise man will NOT marry.." I strongly think that the first is the correct one, as illustrated in Epicurus' will making provision for the marriage of Metrodorus' daughter, but a reader of Epicurus is going to come up on this issues elsewhere so might be a good idea to address it.

Some of my notes on that are collected here - https://newepicurean.com/love-marriage-…e-modern-world/

Excellent - I will read and comment in detail asap but looks great!

Good graphic, but I would be concerned not to go too far -- depending on whether the translation is accurate, I've always been concerned that the "of my slaves" indicated that he had others who he did not free. Maybe we can get greater clarity on the last line of the will over time - this version from Epicurus.net (emphasis added):

In this manner I give and bequeath all my property to Amynomachus, son of Philocrates of Bate and Timocrates, son of Demetrius of Potamus, to each severally according to the items of the deed of gift registered in the Metroon, on condition that they shall place the garden and all that pertains to it at the disposal of Hermarchus, son of Agemortus, of Mitylene, and the members of his society, and those whom Hermarchus may leave as his successors, to live and study in. And I entrust to my School in perpetuity the task of aiding Amynomachus and Timocrates and their heirs to preserve to the best of their power the common life in the garden in whatever way is best, and that these may help to maintain the garden in the same way as those to whom our successors in the School may bequeath it. And let Amynomachus and Timocrates permit Hermarchus and his associates to live in the house in Melite for the lifetime of Hermarchus.

And from the revenues made over by me to Amynomachus and Timocrates let them to the best of their power in consultation with Hermarchus make separate provision for the funeral offerings to my father, mother, and brothers, and for the customary celebration of my birthday on the tenth day of Gamelion in each year, and for the meeting of all my School held every month on the twentieth day to commemorate Metrodorus and myself according to the rules now in force. Let them also join in celebrating the day in Poseideon which commemorates my brothers, and likewise the day in Metageitnion which commemorates Polyaenus, as I have done previously.

And let Amynomachus and Timocrates take care of Epicurus, the son of Metrodorus, and of the son of Polyaenus, so long as they study and live with Hermarchus. Let them likewise provide for he maintenance of Metrodorus's daughters so long as she is well-ordered and obedient to Hermarchus; and, when she comes of age, give her in marriage to a husband selected by Hermarchus from among the members of the School; and out of the revenues accruing to me let Amynomachus and Timocrates in consultation with Hermarchus give to them as much as they think proper for their maintenance year by year.

Let them make Hermarchus trustee of the funds along with themselves, in order that everything may be done in concert with him, who has grown old with me in philosophy and is left at the head of the School. And when the girl comes of age, let Amynomachus and Timocrates pay her dowry, taking from the property as much as circumstances allow, subject to the approval of Hermarchus. Let them provide for Nicanor as I have done previously, so that none of those members of the school who have rendered service to me in private life and have shown me kindness in every way and have chosen to grow old with me in the School should, so far as my means go, lack the necessaries of life.

All my books to be given to Hermarchus.

And if anything should happen to Hermarchus before the children of Metrodorus grow up, Amynomachus and Timocrates shall give from the funds bequeathed by me, so far as possible, enough for their several needs, as long as they are well ordered. And let them provide for the rest according to my arrangements; that everything may be carried out, so far as it lies in their power. Of my slaves I manumit Mys, Nicias, Lycon, and I also give Phaedrium her liberty.

Bailey's Extant Remains:

For some reason this comes to my mind too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Quality_of_Mercy

"The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.' Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, but applicable to any moment in time, to any group of soldiery, to any nation on the face of the Earth—or, as in this case, to the Twilight Zone."

Even today in a non-Epicurean society we praise law and justice, and yet we also have and praise (at times) the executive right to pardon. If we really think about how pardons can be "just" then I think the Epicurean perspective begins to come into focus. (And that's not to mention our legal concepts of the separation between "courts of law" and "courts of equity.")