Posts by Leonard Martin

And thanks, Cassius, for the welcome, and for your efforts to spread Epicureanism!

Hello Cassius and other members.

I'm an old retired man and a veteran of the Epicurean Philosophy Facebook group. My history is a typical boomer one, comprising multiple efforts to make a good living and usually ending up making a just-OK one, until I managed to retire at last and stop hustling, and start thinking.

When thinking about my and the human condition, my first and most enduring understanding, sparked by the Epicurean Philosophy Facebook group, was that what Epicureanism offered was, quite simple, an abandonment of grandiosity. For 2000 years Christianity had encouraged people to feel that they and their immortal souls were of the highest possible importance in the great scheme of things—being at once soldiers in the great cosmic battle between good and evil, and each one a little stage on which that battle was fought out, day by day.

But now we are a historical interregnum period, when Christianity is in retreat and its grandiose political successors, Communism and Fascism, are quiescent, so each of us has to work out for himself what the meaning of his life shall be. As creatures of nature, we can't do better at that than respond to the innate guides of nature, pleasure and pain.

Luckily, Epicurus came into the world 300+ years BC and in the aftermath of Plato, the first great expounder of a grandiose view of the human condition. And Epicurus led a quiet rebellion against the seductiveness of such airy notions. I think that rebellion is at a time in history when it can come into its own again.

So my life today consists of sitting back in genteel poverty and watching this interregnum period play out, with deep interest.