Posts by Joshua

Welcome! Former Land Surveyor here (crew chief, not licensed). I'm now using CAD and scanning software in a dental lab for 3D printing, which keeps me out of the elements.

Let me know if you have any interesting book recommendations from your field!

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That sounds to me like an echo of the Stoic "if you're not 100% virtuous all the time, you're crap." I seem to remember they say you can still drown an inch below the surface of the water. Maybe people are mapping a Stoic perspective on an Epicurean idea?

This claim about Stoicism comes from Cicero; I didn't look very hard, but I didn't find the same claim in other Stoic texts from the ancient world.

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“For just as a drowning man is no more able to breathe if he be not far from the surface of the water, so that he might at any moment emerge, than if he were actually at the bottom already … similarly a man that has made some progress towards the state of virtue is none the less in misery than he that has made no progress at all.” (De Finibus, IV.48)

I've finally managed to reach a truce with the Evangelical in my life. We just don't discuss it. I'd say there are now fewer than 14 days in a year where I have to hear about this stuff.

Moving back north helped a lot.

Yeah, I do hear that greeting in the Midwest. I probably say it myself from time to time, though I'm not sure. We'll have to ask kochiekoch!

As I listen to the episode, I begin to realize that we were very nearly describing the hedons and dolors of Utilitarianism--units of unmixed pleasure and pain. While in any given moment one can experience both pleasure and pain, a particular feeling is either pleasureable or painful.

I'm not sure this is a useful path to go down, but it's probably worth addressing because I can see this being a source of confusion given the differences between Epicurean philosophy and Utilitarianism.

In coming to terms with Cicero's loathing for pleasure, I thought of another reason beyond the ones that we have already discussed. We could probably make a list;

• Pleasure directly challenges the Virtues for pride of place among human pursuits. The Virtues are orderly feminine personifications, reinforcing social structure, political security, justice in human affairs, and the goodness in the Roman state religion--Pleasure is the "harlot" as Cicero says, the thief in the night, the enemy at the gates, and the frenzied chaotic Bacchanalia set against the quite life of sedate Otium, the useful, healthful, restorative leisure of the learned Roman aristocrat.
• The pursuit of pleasure signifies weakness, swinishness, and moral decay. Those who pursue it are intellectual eunuchs.

Another reason that occurred to me;

• The pleasure-pain diad, which, its adherents claim, is sufficient to contain all human pathos, is offensively reductionist. For Cicero, who sees himself as a dedicated statesman, a skilled rhetorician, a model prose stylist, an adept philosopher, a careful biographer, and a virtuous friend, the reduction of human experience to mere pleasure and pain represents a direct challenge to his own view of himself--he is a polymath; a many-sided man, the prototypical Renaissance man, whose motives are complex. And will you claim that I, Cicero, am driven by desires and impulses no better than those of an animal!?

How do we square these considerations with VS47?

"47. I have anticipated you, Fortune, and entrenched myself against all your secret attacks. And we will not give ourselves up as captives to you or to any other circumstance; but when it is time for us to go, spitting contempt on life and on those who here vainly cling to it, we will leave life crying aloud in a glorious triumph-song that we have lived well."

Good evening!

As many have noticed, the forum was spammed by what was probably a bot at around 11:30 PM Eastern. I have attempted to delete all of the offending material. If anything is still showing up on your end please let me know. Site Administrator Cassius and Coordinator Kalosyni will proceed with a ban when they log on.

Thank you for your patience!

Joshua

I suspect that Paul wrote letters because he was responding to the same social and political pressures that the Epicureans were responding to, whether or not there was any connection between the two traditions--both groups were barred from teaching in the Gymnasia, the Agora, and the Roman Forum. So they found recourse in one of the only options left to them. This was a stroke of great luck for us, as Zeno's whole output from the Stoa is lost except in fragments while Epicurus' letters survive.

In the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, a similar phenomenon developed called the Republic of Letters, a complex web of private correspondence for the transmission of ideas. Ironically, the term was first used by Francesco Barbaro in a letter to Poggio Bracciolini, and in the very same year--1417--that saw the rediscovery of Lucretius by the latter. In one surviving letter, a friend of Poggio pleads with him to be more guarded in his writing--a letter stops being private if it falls into the wrong hands, after all.

Poggio's letter written in admiration of Jerome of Prague, a heretic murdered by the Church at the Council of Constance, is here.

Having listened to that portion now, I can say that I don't know how you managed to edit it in such a way that I nearly made sense in what I was saying!

^ This is right. Bear in mind it won't show up correctly in preview, and after you post it you'll have to refresh your browser before it shows correctly.

I should caution the listener that my thoughts on 'meaning' are tentative at best, so take everything I say there, and regarding Thomas Carlyle, with a grain of salt. It does strike me as a conversation worth having, though!

I should note that the words 'kinetic' and 'katastematic' made a rare appearance on this week's podcast episode, along side a few quotes from John Stuart Mill. Most notably his claim that it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.

Thank you Godfrey, that one is worth saving. There are points in it that I might have emphasized differently, but it's not bad so far as it goes. It would take a reading knowledge of five languages to go through the author's sources, with a heavy reliance on Italian and German. Scholarship that lies, unfortunately, beyond the reach of most of us!

Unfortunately the subject of the gods is the one about which we have the greatest lack of source material. DeWitt (the Great Hypothesizer?) suggested that Lucretius' "lost" seventh book dealt with the gods at length. Epicurus wrote a scroll on the same, which really is lost, and we have two books from Philodemus on the Epicurean gods.

Diogenes Laertius does not record that Metrodorus wrote on the question specifically, but he did write a response to Plato's Euthyphro, a dialogue in which Socrates attempts to understand the meaning of Piety.

Lucretius, meanwhile, does give us in Book V a definition of Pietas which he contrasts with the Religio of Agamemnon in Book I;

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O unhappy race of men,

when they ascribed such actions to the gods

and added to them bitter rage! What sorrows

they then made for themselves, what wounds for us,

what weeping for our children yet to come!

There is no piety in being seen

time and again turning towards a stone

with one’s head covered and approaching close

to every altar, and hurling oneself

prostrate on the ground, stretching out one’s palms

before gods’ shrines, or spreading lots of blood

from four-footed beasts on altars, or piling

sacred pledges onto sacred pledges,

but rather in being able to perceive

all things with one’s mind at peace.

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Theism is broadly defined as the belief in the existence of at least one deity.[1][2] In common parlance, or when contrasted with deism, the term often describes the classical conception of God that is found in monotheism (also referred to as classical theism) — or gods found in polytheistic religions — a belief in God or in gods without the rejection of revelation as is characteristic of deism.

Deity:

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A deity or god is a supernatural being who is considered divine or sacred.

I suppose you could argue about definitions, but not without wholly muddying the waters. Epicureanism in non-theistic.

In another thread I made a post in which I compared a timeline of the Late Republic with Horace's literary output, and traced the inferred influence of politics on his Epicureanism;

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RE: Let's Make a List of 1) Major Causes of the Decline of Epicurean Philosophy after Lucretius and 2) The Obstacles to its Revival Through Today

[…]

Horace is devilishly difficult to pin down, unfortunately. But first, a chronology;

[Assassination of Caesar, 44 BC]

[Battle of Philippi, 42 BC]

[Lepidus Exiled, 36 BC]

Satires 1 (c. 35–34 BC)

[Battle of Actium, 31 BC]

Satires 2 (c. 30 BC)

Epodes (30 BC)

[Reign of Augustus Begins, 27 BC, followed by military adventuring. Returns to Rome 24 BC]

Odes 1–3 (c. 23 BC)

Epistles 1 (c. 21 BC)

Carmen Saeculare (17 BC)

Epistles 2 (c. 11 BC)

Odes 4 (c. 11 BC)

Ars Poetica (c. 10–8 BC)

Now then. Between Philippi and…

Joshua

August 21, 2023 at 8:40 PM

Since the post is very relevant to this subforum, I am linking to it here.

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Wasn't Epicurus's mother a purveyor of charms and oracles?

That's the story--that his father was an itinerant teacher and his mother sold charms, both occupations suggesting low birth. Given that;

1. They were unwanted colonizers in disputed territory and
2. Metrodorus wrote a tract "On Noble Birth" defending Epicurus against the derision of his detractors,

The story is probably true enough so far as it goes. As for the VS, I suspect that there is a touch of irony in it. When Alexander the Great went to an oracle at the Oasis of Siwa, the prophets told him that he was not the son of Philip, but the son of a God. How convenient for both parties--it cost the Oracles nothing to say this, and earned them the patronage of the most powerful man on earth. If only the High Priestess at Delphi had thought of it first!

Oracles in the ancient world were flatterers; politically useful, the lent an air of pious gravitas to any worldly endeavor. DeWitt cited Demosthenes to this end;

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It is just and right and important, men of Athens, that we too should exercise care, as you are accustomed, that our relations with the gods shall be piously maintained. Therefore our commission has been duly discharged for you, for we have sacrificed to Zeus the Saviour and to Athena and to Victory, and these sacrifices have been auspicious and salutary for you. We have also sacrificed to Persuasion and to the Mother of the Gods and to Apollo, and here also we had favorable omens. And the sacrifices made to the other gods portended for you security and stability and prosperity and safety. Do you, therefore, accept the blessings which the gods bestow.

In one of my favorite anecdotes, Heraclitus hid a scroll in a temple where it would be discovered and passed off as divine utterance.

For every ten thousand seers, there is but one Lucy Harris to steal the pages from the "prophet", in her case Joseph Smith, and challenge him to reproduce the results.

But now to the point. Whatever else he might be, Epicurus is not a prophet, an Oracle, or even (though he was given the title Soter) a Messiah or heavenly savior. But he was a voice, and he cried out in the metaphorical wilderness of ancient superstition. And those who were 'well disposed', as the inscription in Oenanda puts it, to hear his words may have thought that not everything they were hearing was good news.

He offered pleasure, but it was pleasure only in this world; death, he said, was nothing to be feared, but neither was there hope for a life to come. The universe was infinite and eternal, and if that failed to cheer you up, there was more; neither our world nor our species was morally, physically, or theologically at the center of it. As for the gods, they do exist; and while they do not punish us, neither will they answer our prayers. Supplication is futile; there is no hope for intercession in times of need, and no justice for the victim of the evildoer in the judgment of the afterlife. Logic and dialectic, which had seemed the surest route to knowledge, truth, and virtue, in fact brought us no closer to the end that we sought for. And if divine friendship is the richest and deepest fountain of pleasure, what hope can we have that the fountain will not run dry tomorrow? Seeing that the utter finality of death will not only take our friends from us, but also poison our happiness with an impossible longing to be reunited.

Only a beast unfit to be called a philosopher could teach a way of thinking so unworthy of the human soul. But for the Epicureans themselves, it must have been Lucian of Samosata who best captured their feeling;

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The fellow had no conception of the blessings conferred by that book upon its readers, of the peace, tranquillity, and independence of mind it produces, of the protection it gives against terrors, phantoms, and marvels, vain hopes and inordinate desires, of the judgement and candour that it fosters, or of its true purging of the spirit, not with torches and squills and such rubbish, but with right reason, truth, and frankness.

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But secondly I was still more concerned (a preference which you will be very far from resenting) to strike a blow for Epicurus, that great man whose holiness and divinity of nature were not shams, who alone had and imparted true insight into the good, and who brought deliverance to all that consorted with him.

The bible also talks in several places about cracked pots and burst wineskins. Apparently it's a popular metaphor.

Rousseau is sometimes called an Epicurean, and seldom more-so than by his contemporary critics.

Here is a quote from one of the "Fragments to Emile";

This passage was edited according to the footnote, where an earlier edition had the sentence "Every consistent Epicurean is necessarily a Stoic."

I actually don't know anything about this book or these "Fragments", so take it with a grain of salt.