Posts by Joshua

Martin makes an excellent (and very Epicurean) point! Usefully analyzing pleasureable experiences with a view toward improving them in the future is very practical, and hence very much worth doing.

There are probably a lot of semantic kinks in that poem that we could work out if we bothered to do so, but the conclusion for me is basically what I've said in this episode and what I've jotted off there; that there's a charm or agreebleness inherent to pleasure that is lost to me the instant I attempt to analyze or categorize it.

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We insist on precision around here , though it bends the poesy a little out of shape.

-Edward Abbey

With apologies to Ogden Nash;

Two Kinds of Pleasure

There are, according to Epicurus-

's letter,

Two kinds (if I understand the schematic)

Of pleasure;

The first kind is kinetic, and happens-

(It'd better!)

When it happens to you. That's one, and

The other

Happens, or rather doesn't (it's katastematic);

Like atar-

Axia, it's something of a state or condition.

Think eta 'r

Epsilon: for the difference, by his verdict

Is pleasure

Active or pleasure passive. If this all seems drastic,

Or you forget 'er,

Then maybe you can just try to be phlegmatic.

But what I have found

Is that the pleasure you seize and treasure

Is better

Than the pleasure you seek to measure.

Yes; and I almost think those posts should be moved out of this thread into their own, but I'll leave that up to you.

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As for this particular writer/prisoner, what else do we know about him? Was he sympathetic to slaveholding? Did I read something about him being a northerner, or was he just in a northern prison?

Born and educated in Ohio. Moved to Mississippi as an educator, joined the Confederate army, imprisoned (ironically) in Ohio, offered his freedom in exchange for a renunciation of the Confederate cause; refused, and after the war returned to Mississippi where he died.

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So probably the same observation about the Roman Civil War applies to the American version. You had people on both sides who were moral absolutists appealing to divine right (the South's Deo Vindice and the North's "Battle Hymn")

I see upon rereading my post that I never got around to stating this point, but ^this is where I was going with that.

I don't think Caldwell is going to revolutionize our understanding of anything, but here's another point I neglected to make; if not for the war, his interest in Lucretius would likely not even be remembered. He's a fragment from the wreckage, swept up with the tide of a particular moment in history. It will take more work to dig up the references that are even more obscure.

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I got the impression while I was scanning that this would be more of a curiosity than anything. He certainly didn't seem to have any great insights, just wanted to read the poem.

^This is reasonable appraisal, and I'm not certain I wholly disagree with it.

However, if I can be permitted to step out onto a limb or two, I do see a few features of interest.

First, this quote;

Is it not somewhat remarkable how closely this opinion maps onto Thomas Jefferson's? To wit:

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I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing every thing rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.

Perhaps more than coincidence? I wonder when Jefferson's letters became public.

I also personally find it fascinating that he was a staggeringly voracious reader, with a clear and powerful intellect, who gave in his diary the impression of total devotion to the Confederate cause. Cassius has made the point elsewhere that there were Epicureans on both sides of the Roman civil war; it's unclear to me from these fragments how deep Caldwell's interest was in Epicurean philosophy, but he does represent an interesting, if uncertain, data point here.

Thoreau was one of the great abolitionists of the antebellum period; like Caldwell, he also kept a journal. Like Caldwell, he approached Lucretius in the Latin text.

But unlike Caldwell, he stopped reading after the first hundred lines—he had absorbed the image of Epicurus 'traversing the flaming ramparts of the world' and returning with a boon for mankind, but he curiously identifies him not as Epicurus, but as Prometheus!

This strikes me as hugely important—is there something about the Epicurean conception of justice (as not morally absolute) that appeals to the slaveholder, but repulses the abolitionist?

As I suggested, I'm out on limb.

And while Don was very helpful with his scans, I think he missed this one;

High praise here—but "Poet of the Garden"?

Caldwell must have read Cicero, and possibly even the Torquatus; he read Bulwer, who evidently wrote on the subject (put a pin in that thought...).

I begin to suspect that Mr. Caldwell knew rather more than his diary lets on.

The Belfast Address should be required reading around here!

And I'd like to read that diary in general.

The Belfast Address should be required reading around here!

And I'd like to read that diary in general.

NOTE FROM CASSIUS --- This post is where Joshua introduced us to John Tyndall's "Belfast Address" which is a remarkable document with much discussion of Epicurus and materialism. This thread is now devoted to that topic. A version here at the forum is located here: Tyndall - Address at Belfast If you would like a pure text version to run through a text-to-speech engine, a version is located here: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/wcf/filebase/i…lfast/#versions

See this post below for an audio MP3 version: RE: John Tyndall - Address Delivered Before the British Association Assembled At Belfast - 1874

George Santayana; Three Philosophical Poets;1910. Contrasts Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe.

John Tyndall; The Belfast Address; 1874. A history of atomism, and an argument against the 'God of the Gaps'.

James Parks Caldwell; Diary; 1863-1864. Prison diary of a Confederate soldier, praises Lucretius.

George Santayana; Three Philosophical Poets;1910. Contrasts Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe.

John Tyndall; The Belfast Address; 1874. A history of atomism, and an argument against the 'God of the Gaps'.

James Parks Caldwell; Diary; 1863-1864. Prison diary of a Confederate soldier, praises Lucretius.

My phone is dying, but I will have more to say! You are certainly right that she separated mindfulness from the apparatus of Eastern spirituality, and that is worth talking about.

Early on she mentions Thich Nhat Hanh; if I had a "guru" when I was deep in Buddhism, it was certainly him. I loved his books, sought his dharma talks, and followed the goings-on at his Plum Village retreat in France. There actually was a Buddhist temple in home town, which I enjoyed going by but would never have considered going in—theirs was a cultural emphasis, and my interest was solely on the 'dhamma'.

My memory of Thich Naht Hanh's mindfulness is best represented by the dish-washing she mentions on the podcast. When you're washing the dishes, you're not thinking about Cicero's De Finibus; you're not thinking about work, or an interesting podcast. You're not listening to an audiobook—you're really not even thinking about the dishes! Your whole attention is trained on to the motions, sensations, the experience of dishwasher.

A thought will arise; you will acknowledge it, and then let it go. There will follow a moment of mental 'blankness', but inevitably, another thought will arise.

You will acknowledge it, and let it go. Your project is to clear your mind of the whole process of cognition. Your mind does not want to be clear—it has aeons of natural selection and a whole lifetime of habit driving it toward this singular purpose—it wants to think! But you are going for mindfulness, so you clear it again. You are trying to be in the present, fully awake to experience and sensation, but not to thought. Thought is a distraction from the present moment, and you are trying to be present.

Here's the thing; after a few thousand hours, or tens of thousands of hours, this training will result in a few empirically verifiable changes in the brain. The brains of long-practicing monks look different under brain imaging scans, and function differently; they've aged better, have more activation in the "good" areas (happiness, altruism) and less activation in the "bad" areas (fear, selfishness, anxiety).

Mindfulness in the early attempts can be really frustrating, and most people give up. In some individuals, where the mind is especially troubled, mindfulness can exacerbate existing mental health problems. But the biggest problem for me is the discipline required, and the colossal time-sink involved.

Personally, I got to a point where I chose to rely on the hope that there exist other pathways to happiness, and I abandoned that one. I'll never have the brain of a master meditator; but I like to think I've still got a fair crack at long-term happiness.

But you know what? For the sake of experiment, I may give it another try!

One thing I find interesting is the connection that she's drawing between mindfulness and curiosity. I think I probably spend quite a lot of my time 'zoned out'. I also think that its in those moments that my mind forges the most interesting connections;

"...hmmm...I wonder if that word has a Latin root..."

"Hmmm...If you put a tiny stirling engine in a mechanical watch, you might be able to make it self-winding just off of body heat..."

"Hmmm...that would make an interesting framing device for a poem..."

"Hmmm...that jobsite I'm going back to tomorrow presented a few challenges, but I might have fewer problems if I try it this way..."

"Hmmm...I could probably make my own canoe outriggers if I can think of a way to attach [x] to [y]..."

You get the idea. Discursive thought seems far more pleasurable to me than 'trying hard not to think'.

However, I'm well aware of the fact that human minds differ substantially in their interests and obsessions. I certainly know people who compulsively ruminate on things that I can see are making them miserable. The best example is the obsession with politics, whereof the symptoms are 1.) Endless frustration, and 2.) The tiresome tendency to relate every conversation back to politics.

Maybe mindfulness is, for many, a useful therapeutic retreat away from self-imposed mental aggravation? Whereas for some people an energetic and wandering mind bears fruits that are pleasing, rather than irritating?

The deep irony here is that the people I know for whom mindfulness might be well-advised, are exactly the kind of people who will dismiss the idea out of hand.

After all, they've got things on the internet to get angry about!

I haven't listened yet, but my gut response is something like John Mulaney here at the 1:40 mark:

But I suspect that my time as a near-Buddhist has colored my perception! I'll put that one in the hopper.

As I continue to think about the thorny problems we've just discussed, I began to realize that all I'm doing is coming up with a series of great cop-outs.

Time Enough?

One of my other enduring interests is horology, or the study of the human art and science of time-keeping. Perhaps the greatest living watchmaker in the English speaking world is Roger Smith, who lives and works on the Isle of Man. One of the unofficial mottos of that Isle is "Traa Dy Liooar", or Time Enough.

The problem for us is that we are "by nature mortal and ephemeral" (Claudius Ptolemy), and that the one thing we don't have is time: even if we are fortunate enough to study philosophy while young, as Epicurus advised, we cannot go on forever in suspense, and skeptical of the proper End of life.

We are needful of an answer, an operating axiom from which to work. Sooner or later we need to give this tangled semantic web the Gordian treatment—to cut through words and logic and disputation, through dialectic and debate and Ciceronian puppet-strings, and to come down to something visceral and experiential.

...but that's not really an answer, is it.

As a Land Surveyor, I'm plotting an essay on precisely this subject. I had an idea for a title;

'Angles and Demons'

"I know that I am by nature mortal, and ephemeral—but when I trace at my leisure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, my feet no longer touch the Earth, but I stand in the presence of Zeus Himself and take my fill of ambrosia."

-Claudius Ptolemy, Almagest

This is sort of what I mean by "finding god" in mathematics.

I'll take a shot at some of these;

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1. I'm most of the way through DeWitt's book, and in Chapter 14 he writes of Epicurus, "He favored a minimum of government and chose to look upon men as free individuals in a society transcending local political boundaries." Is this an eccentric opinion of DeWitt's, or would most experts on Epicurus describe him as a kind of libertarian or classical liberal?

While we do heavily push DeWitt as the best introduction to Epicurean Philosophy, many of us also recognize his tendency in several ways to extrapolate beyond the textual evidence. I cannot recall a citation in the relevant texts where this opinion is directly expressed.

Complicating the problem are several historical facts worth mentioning. First, and In support of DeWitt's assertion, we do know that Epicurus chose to settle in democratic Athens. He had other options, some of which had more centralized governments. (I'll also mention that we try to avoid the thorny issue of politics on this forum, for what I think are obvious reasons.)

The second factor is that capitalism as we understand it did not exist, and had not been proposed. Further, Epicurus himself held slaves; it's difficult in any age to hold liberty as a strong value when slavery is de rigeur. There are no classical texts from any author surviving which propose abolitionism as an object. The ancients simply saw these issues differently than we do.

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2. Now that I know more about Epicureanism, thanks to DeWitt's book, I have to say that the Epicurean position that puzzles me the most is the denunciation of mathematics. Is there a ancient Greek cultural context here that I'm not getting?

There certainly is! Epicurus lived in a demon-haunted age, and Mathematics were not exempt from this broader context. Pythagoras had proposed a connection between geometry and the "10 concentric celestial spheres". His claim was not only about geometry and astronomy, but about "Truth". Plato as well saw a connection between Euclidean geometric theorems, and the kind of pure absolute moral theory that he himself was dabbling in; hence the sign over his door—"Let no man enter here who has not studied geometry".

This will help to indicate the other problem with Mathematics—namely, that the Ancient Greeks had no real taste for their practical application. As an example of this; the Alexandrians had done the work of developing an understanding of pneumatics and hydraulics, and they even devised a basic steam engine. And what did they use things for? Tricks and sorcery to complement the charlatanism of the temples and oracles.

Yes, that's right; they were one step away from attaching a piston and a wheel to this contraption, by which effort they could have discovered locomotive power! But they didn't.

Epicurus did not have time for philosophy that did not invite a practical application. He was surrounded by geometers, and at the end of all their inquiries they were finding God.

He knew they were on the wrong track entirely, and so dismissed them.

...oops...

CiceroVersion-1,2.pdf

This is Version 1.2 with a spelling correction and what LaTeX calls a "medium skip" between paragraphs.