Posts by Godfrey

Funny, I'll be getting off a plane Tuesday night....

Mindfulness meditation is, to me, pertinent to an Epicurean. In a nutshell, you begin by choosing a specific "object" to focus on such as your breathing or perhaps the sounds in your environment. Just notice it/them and notice what thoughts pop up. Don't get hung up on the thoughts, just let them go. You can do it sitting quietly or anywhere except driving a vehicle.

The relevance of this to EP is that it's a way to become more aware of your sensations, feelings and underlying thoughts. To me this is a great way to practice and develop a habit of working with the Canon.

Something I've been doing lately which I'm enjoying, which isn't pure meditation, is to listen to a 5-10 minute guided meditation on the Fitbit app before getting out of bed in the morning. I tend to get amped up to get myself out of bed, which ends up setting an anxious tone for my whole day. Starting off by relaxing with a short guided meditation is pretty effortless and sets a much more pleasant tone for the day.

I've commented elsewhere that I don't follow a "hedonic regimen" for the reason that I think it ends up becoming a chore rather than maximizing pleasure. If anything, I prefer a "hedonic menu". The same applies for meditation. There is a great variety of meditation techniques: you might call these tools to work on your pleasure engine (credit to Joshua ). Use one as long as it feels valuable to you but feel free to switch to another. Or to none at all. We're trying to maximize pleasure but not to become Zen masters

I'm interested but won't be able to make this one.

Cassius in my notes on Gosling and Taylor I skipped over the Plato and Aristotle sections . It will be a few days before I'll be able to look it over but I'll see if I can find something. I did read Philebus quite a while ago but can't remember the details, however Don it's only about fifty pages or so, so it's relatively painless to give it a quick read. As for in depth study: now THAT could be torture!

Yes I was saying that the source is the pathe.

If I eat a delicious apple, I experience that through my sensations. Then the feeling of pleasure arises from these sensations. So in the specific context of post #122 I'm suggesting that the feeling of pleasure, not the apple, is the source. There's the stimulus (the apple), the pathe, and the experience of the pathe: duration, location, intensity.

Quote from Don

When discussions like this come up, I always have the feeling that the ancient Epicureans read this and went "Yep, I totally agree with that and it makes perfect sense

Absolutely!

Looking at it like this I'd say that all three apply: location, duration, intensity.

No, the opposite. The source, the pathe, is the same but our experience of it is different in different parts of the mind/body, over different durations and, depending on how one interprets the Greek, due to varying intensities.

"Fill in the intervals" sounds to me like "accumulate". I interpret "accumulate" as something that happens in the body, but "condense" as something that happens to the pleasure.

Right now I'm thinking that the blunt force meaning is of the PD something like "if you make all of the external, objective aspects of various pleasures equal, then the pleasures will be equal". So this seems to say that pleasure itself, the pathe, is a specific thing (maybe an on/off switch), and the only differences between pleasures are where in the body or mind they occur and for how long. "Condense" would imply an additional difference in intensity, "accumulate" would not.

My mother in her later years used to stretch her birthday celebration over a couple of weeks: with family on the day, but lunches and such with friends as could be arranged. It's the celebrating that counts

Haven't we discussed previously that Epicurus argued against ranking pleasures? Or was he just arguing against pleasure being unlimited? Either way, he must have been familiar with the Platonic/Aristotlean exercise of ranking pleasures.

PDs 9, 10 and 11 look to me to be similar to PDs 19, 20 and 21 in that they could have been originally written as a single paragraph. As one works through the paragraph, one gets a view of EP which begins with pleasure and leads back to astronomical phenomena and death. This "clump" of PDs then is a very concise overview!

Also, it's possible that the convoluted if-then wording is a jab at Platonic dialogue: rather than leading the reader down a primrose path as Plato does, he makes us work to think through what he's saying. Plato poses questions and answers them for us, assuming that we will accept his answers. If we don't accept his answers (as most of us on this forum don't) then his arguments fall apart. The structure of 9-10-11 might be designed to prompt us to reason things out for ourselves.

Finally, if the PDs were intended to be memorized, it would probably take more mental engagement to memorize a statement in this form as opposed to something more rote like "pleasures are different but can't be ranked". Although this in particular doesn't seem very convincing.

Quote from Cassius

Yes those other translations are a reminder that there is *something* in addition to time that Epicurus is considering, bit it does not jump out at me with clarity what that something is. It's almost like he is talking about how much of the body and mind is engaged in that pleasure as it is occurring.

That sounds right. Makridis calls it "space and duration". The word "accumulation" makes more sense to me than "condensed" but I can't comment on the correct Greek. So he seems to be saying that IF for example the pleasure in your belly could accumulate to fill your entire body and mind, or the pleasure of learning could accumulate to fill your entire body and mind, and IF each of these would last for the same amount of time, then there would be no difference between the two. But as Hicks points out, this is not the case.

Is this a convoluted way of saying that pleasures differ from one another, but that you can't rank them? PD 9, 10 and 11 are all structured similarly in setting up "if-then" scenarios, and each one implies that the "if" scenario is not the way things are.

Quote

19.4.27 Ataraxia is achieved by the removal of superstitious fear and false beliefs, the constant memory of the truth, and attention to present experience and perception. Now the mind is free of disturbance and so memory and expectation operate without anxiety. Similarly when physical pain is removed the body operates without pain and that will mean that always some pleasurable and painless perception is occurring, a condition of good cheer.

It's been quite a while since I read TGOP; this is the closest thing I can find in my notes (TGOP is one of those rare books in which I actually took notes; I can't recall if this is a quote or a paraphrase). But, to me, this reinforces the idea that understanding the physics, the canonic, the worldview, becomes something of a pleasure engine.

Having ataraxia in the quote is interesting: is it too "out there" to describe ataraxia as a pleasure engine? That never even occurred to me until reviewing this.

Two thumbs up!

It pleased me greatly to hear the repeated statements that in order to fully understand the philosophy you need to understand the nature of the universe.

Joshua your pleasure engine idea sounds like a fruitful one to pursue! As I recall, Gosling and Taylor came to a similar idea in The Greeks on Pleasure, although it wasn't nearly as concise and illustrative as your framing of it.

Excellent work, as always!

Quote from smoothiekiwi

Asking this „why“ is scary, and I personally am only at the very start of it. But I also think that it‘s the only way to a happy lief.

It IS scary! Especially when you start with the Physics and understand Epicurus' atomism and cosmology and their implications. But then studying and understanding the Canon provides a solid grounding in the here and now. And, at least for me, it's only at this point that the Ethics really makes sense.

Quote from smoothiekiwi

It's such a strange philosophy, completely alien to us- yet it's the most logically coherent one (looking at you, Stoicism!), and probably the one which will bring the most happiness and pleasure in the long run. Well, at least I hope that

You're right, it is logically coherent. It's a complete worldview, and also one that is highly consistent with modern science. And I too think it will bring the most happiness and pleasure, the best life. The more you study, the more you'll find that it’s much less strange and alien than it now seems: in fact you may find that it’s perfectly obvious. The sad thing is that so many of the texts have been lost, and the philosophy has been maligned and misrepresented by so many rivals over the millennia, that we all have to go through this process of piecing it together for ourselves.

For a basic reference on Greek architectural orders:

Greek architectural orders – Smarthistory

Welcome smoothiekiwi!

I too became aware of Epicurus, and convinced of his importance, through reading Cicero. And Tending the Epicurean Garden was one of the first books I read after that. I, too, felt like I wasn't really getting the philosophy at that point so I'd like to share a couple of thoughts from my journey.

Hiram as I recall was trying to find commonalities between Epicurus and other traditions, and was trying to lay out ideas for a hedonic regimen. As I've studied further I've largely rejected both projects.

I've rejected the commonalities project because, for me, it added a layer of confusion to understanding Epicurus: he needs to be understood on his own terms and in his own context. As I've studied a lot more and become more comfortable in understanding the philosophy I've become peripherally interested in his predecessors and how Epicurus was influenced by and responding to their ideas. That, however, is about following development of thought where I think Hiram was trying to incorporate practices from other traditions. Giving up on the latter allowed me to focus on Epicurus, and that's when Epicurus started to make sense!

As to the hedonic regimen, I interpret that as too structured for leading a pleasurable life due to my feeling that I need variety to prevent pleasures from becoming stale. Maybe a hedonic menu is more appropriate. But more important, I think, is understanding the Canon and the original context if you're trying to get a grasp of the philosophy. To me, that's the focus: my understanding, accepting and practicing the philosophy has grown from there.

This is the link to the podcast I listened to if anyone wants the short version before deciding to read the book:

The Next Big Idea - DOPAMINE NATION: Why the Modern World Puts Us All at Risk for Addiction

In “Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence,” Dr. Anna Lembke says today’s superabundance of pleasurable stimuli makes us all vulnerable to…

podcasts.google.com

I've listened to a podcast with her as well and found it worth pursuing. Just haven't got to it yet! Thanks for the post Don.

Preparing an outline and incorporating the resulting feedback was extremely helpful for me, and provided some good guidance in how to proceed with grasping the philosophy. I confess it was intimidating at first, as I'm quite new to studying philosophy. But the exercise was well worth it.

(I should probably take another look at mine and see how my understanding has evolved since then....)

Don your new layout works quite well and the verse links in the text are great! I was able to find verse 131 and the maza recipe very quickly.

This quote from the maza article seems to have some relevance to Epicurus' dietary habits:

"The Ancient Greeks prided themselves on a simple, hearty diet, believing it the source of their strength and, to some degree, their superiority. The varied cuisines of other peoples like the Persians were looked down upon as decadent, diet seen as evidence of moral character (“you are what you eat”). Maza has few ingredients, does not require much preparation, and is quite filling: thus, it checks off all the criteria of an ideal Greek staple."

At least according to this, the references that Epicurus makes to diet seem to be much less to do with radical asceticism and more to do with mainstream Greek culture. Another strike against interpreting him as a minimalist