Posts by Elayne

For me, I recognize injustice as a sense of asymmetry, and there's evidence this is an innate faculty. If someone intentionally harms me and I did not harm them first-- and there is reason to suppose we have agreed to this non-harming somehow--even tacitly-- I will get that sense of "dirty pool." My range of asymmetry tends to be fairly broad, and after a friendship is established, I wouldn't get a sense of injustice except for prolonged, recurrent asymmetries that I felt my friend could have avoided.

The degree of pain an asymmetry causes is proportional to the degree of feeling I had for the other person (if we were close, a better word might be betrayal)-- and the direct effect of their action on my life, which is in addition to the asymmetry. For instance, if someone I knew robbed me of my money, there are two issues-- the asymmetry of their action towards me -- the injustice--AND the loss of funds. I tend to mainly feel pain from the action itself if I don't know the perpetrator, even if I also am aware of the injustice of someone harming me when I had not harmed them.

Every action in an agreement has an effect of pain or pleasure, since there is no 3rd feeling of neutral. It just isn't always enough asymmetry that we will be moved to bother with it, compared to other things we could be doing. If we get obsessed with trivial asymmetries, we will test the patience of our friends, lol!

Hiram, I agree with Cassius. These minimalists are limiting their tools for pleasure to the hammer of minimalism, and then worshipping the hammer. It doesn't help spread our philosophy if it's done badly.

I have experienced some long periods of very limited funds in my life-- lots of ramen noodles, $10 a week for groceries, etc. I have gone through humid summers in the 95-105 degree range, without AC because I couldn't afford to buy one. I still found ways to enjoy life, and I won't even say I was frugal. I would eat ramen noodles and even fast for some of the month -- and blow all the rest on ingredients for one good dinner for my friends.

It's rich people who can usually afford to be frugal, lol! Minimalist living these days takes some $-- those tiny houses don't come that cheap. Which is fine, if they enjoy it. The real lesson is that whatever your resources are, use them for pleasure. If rationing your resources gives the most pleasure, do that. If sharing them with friends does, do that. Epicurus had feasts-- if you want to hold a feast for your friends, and it's worth saving for, then go for it.

To take a few quotes out of context of the rest of the philosophy is unwise. The version promoted by minimalists is easy for our opponents to tear down, whereas the philosophy you see by looking at the whole is very sturdy.

Quote from Hiram

Questions about ideal Governments usually rely on assumptions about human nature.

The very idea that there could be such a thing as an "ideal" government, IF we knew all possible information about human nature, is problematic. That is a social utilitarian perspective, and idealist-- not Epicurean. It's not even something an Epicurean would bother with.

And Joshua, while on an individual basis I have done similar things, I am hesitant to say a method works without data. If replicated research showed that traditional Lakota ceremonies, on an intention to treat basis, had a measurable effect and better or at least comparable to the current evidence-based therapies, then I would definitely recommend them as an option. Anecdotal cases are not enough to convince me.

There are multiple different issues here-- different groups of non-Epicureans and also Epicureans who have pleasures that may conflict with ours (which Cassius brings up). Others who can't or won't try to have pleasure. Individually, we can treat these people using our own hedonic calculus.

However, it will be a failed project to promote the philosophy if we are not clear about who our audience is and what we are advising. That is why Epicurus was a dogmatist. His intended audience was the group he thought could make use of his words. He didn't spend time trying to find alternative philosophies for people who couldn't or wouldn't apply his, and he didn't hedge on his positions.

Because this is such a rigorously thought out philosophy, trying to apply it in an eclectic way or use it only part-time is like trying to stand in several boats at once. It confuses people who are trying to learn and who could potentially benefit from the actual philosophy. To be a public guide in EP means to aim the teaching clearly and consistently at people who can use it.

Just saw your other comment-- Epicurus didn't advise us to trust everyone. Psychopaths will act for their own pleasure anyway, but in some cases they can be persuaded that they are happier out of jail.

Ok, so let me make sure I understand: are you hesitant to promote Epicurean Philosophy and its moral relativism-- in which virtues are only good if they lead to pleasure-- because you are worried that your brother and others like him will not be able to use this type of advice for their own pleasure? And because you love him, of course this affects your pleasure too.

I understand that Epicurus did not think everyone could make wise choices, and I have seen difficult situations in my family as well, where people suffered because they did not (and maybe could not) choose well. I don't take that to mean the philosophy is deficient, but I agree with you that not every person can apply it successfully.

The 12 step programs, with their absolute morality, have no better effect than no treatment if "intention to treat" analysis is applied. There is a form of therapy-- an example would be Stanton Peele's life process therapy-- which is more effective. The focus is on helping patients find activities they enjoy so much that they lose interest in their addiction. It seems reasonably Epicurean to me, but the main thing is that it works. I am a pragmatic person about medical care.

If you are interested in talking to Stanton, I can personally connect you. He helped me with a family member. I wrote an endorsement of a recent book he put out. His therapy is not inexpensive, but it's worth it.

I am glad we are talking about this. One thing that would help new people keep things straight is if you can clearly identify when you are approaching things from an Epicurean perspective and when you are not-- otherwise, others tend to assume it's all Epicurean, and they get muddled.

I'm also really sorry things aren't going well for your brother, and that it causes you pain.

Quote from Hiram

Seems that Catherine Wilson has taken on Nussbaum:

https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/review-morgan-wilson

Part of the criticism stems from the insinuation that people can not be trusted with moral relativism. I’m not sure where I stand with that.

Hiram, I appreciate your honesty regarding your uncertainty about moral relativism. I have suspected that is an issue for you, from reading your book and from many of your posts and comments. The alternative to relativism is absolutism, or a mixture of some relative and some absolute areas (which seems to be the most common approach to me)-- and that is not a position consistent with Epicurean Philosophy. As an online friend, I can say that you seem like a very nice person-- and not yet an Epicurean. I do not think you have fully placed pleasure as your goal in life. That is understandable-- in our culture, it is hard to adopt a fully Epicurean position. However, I have serious concerns that you have become a public figure who is thought to be an Epicurean, when you have not really embraced the whole philosophy. I believe you would have the best chance at a pleasurable, happy life if you could become comfortable with the relativism in Epicurean Philosophy-- and that those who are following you as their Epicurean expert would also be better off. I am following Epicurus' example by being frank with you here, because friends are honest with each other, and I hope other Epicureans will be frank with me should I go off course in some way myself.

A member of our group alerted us to this video, which makes a number of serious errors. I am posting it for the purposes of illustrating the differences between Epicurean Philosophy and some inaccurate modern popularizations.

First, as we've discussed several times in this group, ataraxia and aponia (absence of anxiety and absence of pain) are certainly integral to the feeling of pleasure-- however, these are not words to _substitute_ for pleasure, and they don't indicate some unusual or special kind of pleasure.

Think of it this way-- to put a chair in my living room, I must have an absence of empty floor space where the chair is. But I don't say "I put an absence of empty floor space in my living room"! That tells you nothing at all about what is there instead of empty space. I say "I have a chair", and then you will know what I mean.

In the same way, reduction of pain and anxiety is important to make room for pleasure, but a removal process doesn't describe pleasure.

That is why Epicurus used the word for pleasure-- because everyone knew what he meant. It wasn't an esoteric term, and it didn't mean some kind of rarified monk-like state.

Second, it is kind of hilarious how the video makers have misunderstood the movie Office Space. The scenes they show as representing Epicurean action are intended by the screenwriters as part of the long series of errors made by the lead character, Peter, and his friends. Action scenes, such as kicking a faulty piece of equipment, are presented by the video makers as representing static mental pleasure-- a bizarre decision.

Getting stuck in a miserable Dilbert cubicle is clearly not pleasurable, but the initial efforts to get out include theft (which Epicurus advised against due to the consequences of pain) and other heedless moves. It isn't until Peter realizes he has caused danger to his friends, the pain of which is not worth the potential gain, that the plot turns.

Instead of glorifying slacker culture, the movie takes it apart. We learn that Peter has already been doing nothing for most of his day, staring into space pretending to be busy. When he finally decides to get a job he enjoys, he is much more active than before, and he is engaged and smiling. He's enjoying working beside his neighbor. Overlooking the cliches about blue vs white collar work (one can be intellectually active too), it is clear Peter has decided to use his freedom to arrange his life for pleasure-- while his software engineer friends, in contrast, remain stuck.

Who represents the outcome of doing nothing? The arsonist, who gets the money and uses it to sit under an umbrella on the beach, still complaining constantly.

I would not call Peter an Epicurean model, although his final move was in that direction.

Beware of this type of misleading presentation of our philosophy. You will miss out on your possibility for a life of pleasure if you follow this neo-Epicurean path of aiming towards minimalism, doing nothing, and blandness. Instead, understand that your choices have consequences of pain or pleasure, and make those choices wisely. Aim for pleasure! What will you do _today_ to move towards your own pleasure?

Arrgh. Yep, this article is a hot mess. Once you get into imaginary ideas like fancy pleasure or absence of pain which is _not_ pleasurable, in an reality-based sense of the word, everything that follows is nonsense. Biology is a sufficient argument against the false premise. There's no true zero state in a living, conscious human. Let him bring me a case. 😂

Great to have you, Todd!

Love that! I first read LOTR when I was 10, and through my teens I read it several more times.

If I were a fiction writer, I'd write a "quest" book like that with the heroes as a band of Epicurean friends, fighting off Stoic trolls, etc.

My intuition is that many of those folks, at least the smarter ones, don't actually take those things literally. But they are afraid to break ranks. It's a naked emperor situation. More about groupishness/ loyalty than it is about belief. You show your loyalty to the tribe by saying you believe absurd notions. This seems to be a common behavior in our species. I'm an outlier, which gets called low "agreeableness" in the Big Five personality tests. Agreeableness meaning whether you will go along with your crowd, not whether you are friendly.

As a lifelong atheist in the South, I've been at plenty of events where there is some kind of group prayer, and by keeping my head up and my eyes open, I find out who else isn't praying. It's not always who you'd guess. ?

But this groupish dynamic shows up in all sorts of ways, not just among politicians or around religion. I have been on organizational boards where the decisions made absolutely no sense, until I realized who the "teams" were. This is why I would not make it as a politician-- because that's just not how my mind works. I figure if we're on the same team, we want to tell each other the truth, but that's not how it's done.

Couldn't have said it better, Joshua! We use wisdom only to decide our actions-- the feelings are a direct interaction with reality, like the senses. A key difference of understanding between Epicurus and the Objectivists.

This reminds me of a ridiculous sentence in a study I read several years ago, which measured the fat content in human milk over the first year of an infant's life. It rises during that time, which surprised the researchers, and becomes higher than whole cow's milk. Their conclusion was along the lines of: more study will be needed to determine if this is safe for infants over one year of age. I laughed so hard that I dropped the journal.

I'm glad you are safe! My dad, stepmother, and brother/sil/niece moved to Oveido, just east of Orlando, so I've been checking in with them... their first hurricane drill! They said the same as Nate, no big deal. The houses are made with concrete blocks these days-- everything is tied down/braced/ storm shutters and so on. But they've decided to get a generator to be ready for next time.

23 and 24 ... if someone is "close" to me, meaning I love them, of course my pleasure will naturally be tied up in theirs. But a "suffering world" concept may not wind up being helpful to your happiness. You may find that Epicurus' way of treating humans as specific individuals is a better route to pleasure. The other might lead you into idealist social utilitarianism, which doesn't follow from the philosophy.

#24 My advice-- if clarity doesn't cause pleasure, who needs it? But if clarity on a certain issue increases pleasure, then it's a useful tool. What is "betterment"? Something different from pleasure?

Your philosophy has several elements in common with Epicurus, and a few that might pull you away from a life of pleasure.

The tabula rasa is not generally thought to be accurate these days-- there are a few holdouts, but they are regarded as similar to flat-earthers. Like other species, humans appear to have some innate pattern recognition. Some of these innate "programs" are online at birth and others appear in developmental sequence as the brain matures-- but just because the pattern recognition shows up later doesn't mean it is empirical, vs innate. Linguistics has provided some of the supporting research... also, babies in all cultures, independent of variations in experience, show specific behaviors and understandings at specific ages. Smiling, object permanence, sharing behaviors, and specific fears of snakes despite no past exposure, the dark, being left alone (reliably by 6 months old) appear on a schedule. Babies even have rudimentary physics expectations, at the same ages, not thought to be only from observation. This makes sense because evolutionary pressure would select for these patterns supporting survival to reproduce. If we had to learn everything from scratch that would be inefficient and risky.

It appears that we have an innate sense of justice that may be based on symmetry, as we would expect from the tit for tat models. And think about partnership preferences which may be influenced by the expected health of the partner/ child bearing/raising potential-- these are likely not learned only by observing other partnerships and outcomes, because there wouldn't have been sufficient data by the time of sexual maturity. Instead, evolution has done that slowly.

Epicurus' prolepses fit these findings perfectly IMO!

I am confused by #12 under Physics, that the swerve is a consequence of biological complexity rather than that the universe has always been probabilistic. I don't think there's evidence for that, but if you have evidence can you cite it? Also, the use of the word "perfect", with swerves as a deviation from perfect, implies an ideal-- I understand the Epicurean position as saying ideals are nonexistent rather than that the material universe fails to achieve them.

I have had a private and enjoyable conversation with a member about Epicurean friendship, and I think it has been a while since we specifically discussed friendship here. The member had a question about how "agape", an ancient Greek term for love which has been used for a sort of general charity and well-wishing by Christians, might be able to blend with our philosophy.

Here is a good example of how, by sticking to the original 3 part philosophic structure of Canon, Physics, and Ethics, and by using original texts, we can take an Epicurean view of friendship. After doing so, it will (I hope) be clear to our members that trying to incorporate incompatible elements of friendship from Christianity would not have the same results.

The Canon contains the tools by which we interact with reality-- our senses (which we take to include instruments used to extend these), the prolepses, and our feelings of pain or pleasure. Applying the Canon to friendship, it is clear that we must have our senses in order to observe the existence and behaviors of other people-- children may have imaginary friends, but real friendship involves specific, real people. I would say that the role of prolepsis here includes our evolved processes for social interactions, which emerge developmentally and are not learned from scratch by personal experience alone. And our subjective feelings of pain or pleasure upon being with specific others provide us critical information about their intentions towards us.

From Physics, studied by means of the Canon, we know that we are mortal, that we have only this one life, and that there is no absolute morality in the universe-- no tablet of commandments and no rule about how to treat others. From the observation of nature included in physics, we see that pleasure is the evolved way organisms with nervous systems have developed to recognize what is health-giving and life-sustaining and pain the signal for tissue damage. Our observations teach us that members of the same species will tend to usually have many pains and pleasures in common, but individual variation of genetics and environment means we will also differ. Because of our more advanced cognitive skills, humans are able to consider our net pleasure, not just the pleasure of the moment, and plan our actions even more wisely.

This information leads to our Ethics, our ways of deciding how to act in various situations, in order to have net pleasure for ourselves. Remember that ethics and virtues are not absolute but are tools to use for the resulting pleasure. Let's look at some of Epicurus' words about friendship, which were based on the Canon and Physics.

PD 27 "Of all the things which wisdom acquires to produce the blessedness of the complete life, far the greatest is the possession of friendship" (Cyril Bailey). These are strong words. Epicurus based this on observation of his life and that of others. I find that for me, he is correct. I advise you to use the Canon to determine if this is true for you.

Letter to Idomeneus: "On this blissful day, which is also the last of my life, I write this to you. My continual sufferings from strangury and dysentery are so great that nothing could increase them; but I set above them all the gladness of mind at the memory of our past conversations. But I would have you, as becomes your lifelong attitude to me and to philosophy, watch over the children of Metrodorus" (CB). Epicurus' pleasure in friendship was so strong that even the memory of it provided pleasure during his painful dying process. It was important to his pleasure that he knew he had taken care to provide for his friends even after his own death.

VS 23 "All friendship is desirable in itself, though it starts from the need of help" (CB). This means that even though friendship is instrumental for other pleasures, the friendship itself is a pleasure. I find this to be very true and would go further in saying the intrinsic pleasure of friendship is the strongest.

PD 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." (this translation is from Epicurus.net-- I do not see the translator).

VS 28 "We must not approve either those who are always ready for friendship, or those who hang back, but for friendship’s sake we must run risks" (CB). Advice based on observation of what happens in each of those situations.

Those two quotes, PD 39 and VS 28, remind us that because we are using reality-based processes, not idealistic concepts, we will not have anything to do with virtues that treat all humans the same. We will not use abstract consequentialism. We must use our observations and feelings to find out who is a friend to us and who is not.

VS 56" The wise man feels no more pain when being tortured himself than when his friend tortured."

VS 57 "On occasion a man will die for his friend, for if he betrays his friend, his whole life will be confounded by distrust and completely upset." (both of these translations I got from epicureanfriends.com

, and there is a note that these have been reconstructed).

These last two quotes are very important, IMO. We are _not_ being advised to feel pain or to die for friends as if to be virtuous-- these are descriptive quotes. They are observations of what true friendship feels like-- that we are so connected to our friends that their pleasures and pains cause us pleasures and pains. Although friendship must be mutual to be real, the feelings themselves are not contractual. There is not a cold calculation that we use, nor logic, minus feelings, when it comes to our friends, because we love them with all our hearts.

Elli tells me that the Greek word for friendship is "filia", which comes from the word "filo", to love (which she says now also means to kiss).

In summary, Epicurean friendship is not abstract. It is a real relationship, of deep mutual feeling, between individuals. It is not compatible with the religious or idealistic expressions currently described as "agape". In my life, like Epicurus, I have been more glad for the love between friends than for any other pleasure.

I would think the decision would be based on individual assessment of net pleasure.

I have a type of autoimmune arthritis, and before menopause, whenever I would eat meat or chicken, my feet swelled up-- so I didn't eat them. I could eat fish occasionally but not often. This was the case for about 15 years-- I used to check every so often to be sure it was still true, because I love a juicy burger, lol.

Fortunately, that seems to be less of an issue now... but now animal protein seems to worsen insulin resistance for me, if I eat a regular serving. So I eat a little here and there, not much at one time. It doesn't bother me on a empathy basis.

Some people may have unusual sensitivity to thinking about eating animals that causes them disproportionate mental pain, and it makes sense for them not to eat animals as long as no net pain results from that decision.