Posts by Joshua

I'm coming late to this thread, so there will probably be some overlap. But I think I have a novel approach.

Don asked the question (if I'm summarizing fairly) whether the primary 'end' of life can ever be described as other than the highest good.

First, a quote from Tony Kushner's excellent script in the film Lincoln:

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Thaddeus Stevens:

You know that the inner compass that should direct the soul toward justice has ossified in white men and women, North and South, unto utter uselessness through tolerating the evil of slavery.

Lincoln:

A compass, I learnt when I was surveying, it'll point you True North from where you are standing, but it's got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms you'll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp, what's the use of knowing True North?

Now, that quote has problems (ahem...True North?), but the analogy of the compass doesn't seem half bad here.

An Epicurean might well say that the inner compass furnished by nature will–not should, but will–direct the soul toward pleasure. The compass is not normative, it is descriptive–even the inner compass of infants can be inferred to point toward pleasure.

If an individual finds themselves repeatedly veering toward pain and anxiety, it is not because their compass doesn't work–it is because they are ignoring it, or have conditioned themselves to use it improperly, or they've been given misleading directions or a faulty map (for example, they've been raised to understand that "real pleasure" is in following Christ, or whatever). What they need is not a moral chastising, but simply better training. They need to consult their compass, not someone else's poor directions.

The direction of pain isn't evil, or the "greatest bad", any more than South is bad. But it's not the direction we're driven toward by instinct, and upon reflection we'll probably find it's not the direction we really want to be going anyway. Nature has not furnished us a compass that points toward pain.

Even in consulting our compass, furnished by nature to point toward pleasure, we won't always be able to travel there in a straight line. Sometimes we have to traverse in the direction of pain to find a route that goes ultimately toward pleasure; a route that answers the cry of the inner compass.

So perhaps instead of saying "life is the highest good", or "pleasure is the highest good in life", we should be saying "pleasure is the magnetic North of life's compass".

Reading more on isonomia, I can see this as the under-pinning logic that gets us from one observed world, to many conjectured worlds, as one example. In that case, it is a species of inductive argument: "the inference of a general law from particular instances".

There's a quote in one of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories where Sherlock Holmes says that if a logician were presented for the first time with a drop of water, he could infer the existence of a Pacific Ocean and a Niagara Falls without ever having seen either.

Isonomia would be an even more direct line of argument; someone presented for the first time with a Niagara Falls could very reasonably infer the existence of a Victoria Falls.

If you hold as a premise that "nature never furnishes only one thing of a kind", then the argument becomes deductive and the conclusion stands or falls exclusively on the merit of that premise.

So the obvious question that imposes is this; do we accept or reject the premise? Does nature ever furnish only one thing of a kind? Bearing in mind, of course, that each kind of atom always occurs in refulgent quantity.

(Some atoms are unstable and do not, evidently, occur in nature. It requires a particle accelerator to produce them and they only "survive" for a fraction of a nanosecond. But the potential to produce them is always there.)

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Are there any other contenders for the role of primary divinity in Epicurean religion?

If the interpretation of George Santayana and other scholars is to be trusted, Lucretius' Venus is only one half of a dyad representing the Empedoclean principles of Love and Strife, re-creation and destruction, accretion and dissolution—things coming together and things falling apart. Co-equal and co-eternal, and each a necessary condition for the existence of the other.

Venus, then; first among equals? I don't have an opinion on whether or not DRN is a finished poem, but I find I love the idea that a 7th book would have ended with a Requiem to Mars—as in a sense the 6th book does, with the account of the plague in Athens.

Interestingly (or perhaps not), Venus is the second brightest object in the night sky and Mars occasionally outshines even Jupiter himself for third place.

Your post brings back a memory of Civics class in high school. One of our homework assignments was to draft a Declaration of Independence from whatever we chose. I wish I could remember what I declared my independence from.

I think Don is on the right track. Principal Doctrine 31 makes the point explicit:

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Natural justice is a symbol or expression of usefullness, to prevent one person from harming or being harmed by another.

And 24:

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Those animals which are incapable of making covenants with one another, to the end that they may neither inflict nor suffer harm, are without either justice or injustice. And those tribes which either could not or would not form mutual covenants to the same end are in like case.

In light of this, "natural justice" is not to be confused with "Natural Law"; it is merely the sense of justice inherent to human nature. And yet even here there is hairsplitting, for though all humans likely possess this innate sense as an heirloom of our evolutionary past, it is quite possible to be conditioned by culture or circumstance out of a sense of justice.

Even in lower order animals we can see certain seemingly altruistic behaviors, like food-sharing, that hint at the development of this trait in humans.

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Divine Nature as an abstraction is also thought to be innate. Epicurus' evidence for this is the near-universality of belief among humans; even today, the rate of proper atheism among U.S. adults is something like 5 percent. There is a tendency among the non-religious to believe that religious belief at some distant epoch will at long last perish from the Earth, ushering in a golden age of...well, I don't know what exactly.

But if Epicurus is right, this is not to be hoped for. Like Sigmund Freud in his Future of an Illusion, Epicurus seems to have recognized that the religious sense is innate; like the sense of justice, it can be conditioned against by culture or circumstance, but on the whole our species is not likely to abandon it altogether.

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But here is where things get interesting; in the case of justice, Epicurus' account is descriptive, not normative. It tells us how things are, in other words; not necessarily how they should be. Primitive tribes whose culture or circumstance prevent them from exercising a sense of justice are not thereby unjust. In living without justice, they also ipso facto live without injustice. The words cease to carry any meaning or applicability for those peoples.

And this should be true of the divine nature as well. There will be those for whom the hypothetical objection imagined by Pascal is a truth to their own nature; "I am so made that I cannot believe."

Lacking a sense of the godly ought not make one ungodly, if the same is true of justice. It ought to be possible to, I might say, sublimate beyond the reach of the question altogether; to change one's state so completely that it no longer applies. But that's my argument, and not Epicurus'.

My late grandmother wrote a letter–something like 14 pages of fine cursive—toward the end of her life to one of my many cousins for a school project.

It is the only extant "memoir" in my family that I am aware of for that period, and is full of historical interest in a parochial kind of way. A copy of the letter did not fall into my hands until it began to recirculate after her death.

It was in reading that letter that I first became aware of a particular feature of interest of that time period, dotting the landscape of the upper midwest; the ballroom venue.

It was during a tour of these venues (the "Winter Dance Party Tour") that Buddy Holly's plane crashed after his last performance at a ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa. The family farm, which another cousin now runs, is less than hour from that very venue.

So thanks for posting these! My family on both sides were living in the northern counties of Central Iowa at the time; out of 30-odd aunts and uncles, someone must have seen The Epicureans play.

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If the Romans thought it was perfectly adequate in the order they used then we can make sense of it too.

😂

For an extra treat, look up the etymology of the English word 'adequate'.

After reading the thread I spotted it at once.

Also, if someone can post the Stallings translation I'd like to see how she handles it in long lines.

...The trouble is that I can't find a way to keep the tense and the meaning, and also make it sound good in English.

"[And] his victory lifts us to heaven"

The 1st person plural packs a much better punch. In glancing over the translations, Humphries is the "worst" of the lot in keeping to the original grammar, and yet his has the better economy of language–and to my ear is more elegantly phrased.

This is a link to Latin Per Diem, in the episode in which he parses this particular passage. He gives the following translation:

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"(His) victory raises us to equality with heaven"

There's your 3rd person present active indicative, Don! "[His] victory raises us | victoria exaequat nos".

Don I wonder whether you've ever seen The Browning Version? I love the 1994 production with Albert Finney. The film is set in an English boarding school (I think?) and the background of the main plot deals heavily with translation, as the title implies.

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And so Religion, which we feared before, by him subdued, we tread upon in turn. His conquest makes us equal to the Gods.

It's interesting that the Brown edition alone uses 'Gods' for 'caelo', instead of heaven, stars, sky, etc.

That's a highly daring translation of the most dangerous line in a hugely subversive poem. It's no great wonder the translator remained anonymous!

This would be sort of like the word "level" in English:

Noun; "a smooth, even surface"

Verb; "level the playing field"

Adjective; "a level, easy stroll"

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That looks to be a separate but related word: aequor

Aequor would be a noun adapted by metonymy from the adjective aequus, no? And aequo the same word as a verb.

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1. compare

2. equal

3. level, make even/straight

4. reach as high or deep as

Don Latin-Dictionary.net has these four variants under aequo. The poet in me rather likes number 4, for the 'reach' double-entendre I mentioned above.

Edit;

I had a long-suffering English professor in college who I think grew somewhat tired of my etymological leaps (reaches? ); but even he was impressed when he put me on the spot in a close reading of Milton's Paradise Lost, and I was able to furnish a connection extemporaneously between "malice" and "apple" in the scene in the Garden of Eden.

Malus is the Latin word, and still the scientific name for the "malicious" fruit.

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As I write this I can't remember if I had a source for that particular version or just mashed them together in a way that seemed logical at the time

I suspect it was this! When I searched for the exact wording of the quote the only two results are this thread and NewEpicurean.

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Aequo = level, equal

And also "plane" or "plain". In the Hymn to Venus "Aequora Ponti" is usually translated "waves [i.e. surface] of the sea". In English another word for this would be "reach", as a noun. "Sailing over a broad reach", and so forth.

Perhaps "reach the stars" is not so far out of place?

Cassius , are you certain you have the translation right?

I just received a copy of the Humphries translation in the mail this week, and my version has it;

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Religion, so, is trampled underfoot,

And by his victory we reach the stars.

I remember the audible version vividly enough to know it is the same there. And I would have remembered it anyway, as his is my favored translation of this passage!

I keep writing strictest sense, but I haven't actually defined my terms. I understand humanism (lowercase) in the strictest sense to be not a philosophy, but an orientation of interest or inquiry. Art can be humanist; it needn't have anything to do with philosophy at all. I vaguely remember studying the great cathedrals of Europe in college and learning that even the hidden tops of the roofs were ornamented. "God sees the top" being the motivation. The humanist motivation in modern construction might call instead for an HVAC system up there.

I haven't read all the material here, but I will say that I think Epicurean Philosophy is definitionally humanist in the very strictest sense. Similarly, I'm nominally registered in the selective service program under the United States Government.

But I haven't reflected much on that since I turned 18, and it has no influence whatever on the way I live my life. If I was introducing a bit about myself to someone, it would be fruitless and quite odd–not to say counterproductive–to open with that fact. It just has nothing to do with who I am.

Humanism in Epicurean Philosophy (again, in the strictest sense) might well be a trivial fact, but it's not a particularly helpful or informative one. It would be strange to dwell on it. It definitely wouldn't make it into the Epicurean précis or "elevator pitch".

It does have a certain poignancy.

I actually found this because of a poem I was workshopping; I was going to use the Sarno River that flows into the Bay of Naples as a metaphor for Epicurean philosophy. Starting out muddled under the ash of Vesuvius and then slowly, and by degrees, tending toward clarity and wholesomeness.

That was until I discovered that the Sarno is the most polluted waterway in Europe...

XLIV. ON MOUNT VESUVIUS.

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This is Vesuvius, lately green with umbrageous vines; here the noble grape had pressed the dripping coolers. These are the heights which Bacchus loved more than the hills of Nysa; on this mountain the satyrs recently danced. This was the abode of Venus, more grateful to her than Lacedaemon; this was the place renowned by the divinity of Hercules. All now lies buried in flames and sad ashes. Even the gods would have wished not to have had the power to cause such a catastrophe.

He was perilously close to stumbling upon a real point in that last sentence.