Posts by Joshua

Listening to this now, and very much enjoying the conversation!

Here are a few points that come to mind;

Regarding the image of seminal fluid "spreading through the limbs", I think Lucretius may be making an inference by analogy. He seems to think of this fluid as being associated with adolescent growth and sexual maturity, which of course it is–the "springtime" of life, when the streams run high with the freshets of meltwater, and the sap in the trees runs up into the limbs and oozes out the trunk. This is actually offered as one of the definitions for the word 'sap'; vigor or energy: e.g "the hot, heady days of youth when the sap was rising".

Regarding the image of "falling toward the wound", he seems to be drawing on the ancient association between Mars and Venus, war and love–the arrows of Cupid. The way that intense love, particularly when unrequited, can feel like a kind of trauma. When Romeo overhears his friends mocking him because of his obsession with Rosaline, he says (to himself and the audience) "They jest at scars who never felt a wound." But he felt the wound, deeply–and yet rather than recoil from this trauma, he found himself drawn ever closer. The connection between the young man's "spurt of fluid" and the dying soldier's gush of blood is then too easy to pass up–and certainly any ancient reader of Homer would have been accustomed to imagining such violent scenes.

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Now the son of Tydeus was in pursuit of the Cyprian goddess [Aphrodite], spear in hand, for he knew her to be feeble and not one of those goddesses that can lord it among men in battle like Athena or Enyo the waster of cities, and when at last after a long chase he caught her up, he flew at her and thrust his spear into the flesh of her delicate hand. The point tore through the ambrosial robe which the Graces had woven for her, and pierced the skin between her wrist and the palm of her hand, so that the immortal blood, or ichor, that flows in the veins of the blessed gods, came pouring from the wound...Diomedes shouted out as he left her, "Daughter of Zeus, leave war and battle alone, can you not be contented with beguiling silly women? If you meddle with fighting you will get what will make you shudder at the very name of war."

Iliad, translated by Samuel Butler

The poet W. B. Yeats was a great lover of Lucretius, and his commentary on this passage about love is often found separated from its Lucretian context; "The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul." Our bodies touch, but we can never be close enough to satisfy the desire that love instills.

I haven't finished listening, but I am certainly enjoying it

I dislike the term "virtue-signalling", which I think is dismissive and overused, but it may have some relevance here.

What Person A says: "I think virtue is the highest good."

What Person B hears: "I am virtuous, and can be trusted to act 'morally'."

Said A. "I think pleasure is the highest good."

Heard B. "I am selfish, and plan on doing whatever I damn well please."

Now, what would I like Person B to hear?

"I'll be seeking pleasure today, if it doesn't cause too much collateral pain, or else interfere with my usual obligations; if you're not too busy, perhaps we can seek it together? How about a pleasant lunch?"

My conclusion after reading this is that my command of the source texts has seriously declined! I'm quite impressed with some of you!

If we could say for certain, for everybody and for all times and places, that:

A.) a given desire is unnatural and unnecessary, *and*

B.) That we ought not pursue unnatural and unnecessary desires,

Then we will have ipso facto established a (false) universal ethical law. Epicurus makes it plain elsewhere that there are no absolute universal ethical laws. So he cannot be saying what people think he is saying. These categories are observations to aid with the business of living, not premises to aid with the business of Logic. Maybe they're helpful, maybe they're not; from my point of view it certainly seems that they cause more confusion than anything. But one thing that is clear, or should be, is that these observations are not meant to establish by inference a series of Commandments.

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Well, I am confronted with secondary literature that all presents clear-cut answers and I am questioning some of those....

Sounds like Manuel was getting the right idea!

I came across an article the other day that heavily cited Sedley. It was highly relevant to my ongoing interest in the Epicurean geometers. I'll see if I can track it down.

https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol14-trans/285

Actually we seem to have it in English at the same website.

That work?

Hmmm...it shows up for me, but when I switch to Incognito mode I just get a bad link. I'll try to edit the post and see what happens.

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For anyone who is not completely submerged in the spirit of our age, who feels instead like a spectator as the world goes past him, especially, from time to time, vis-à-vis the intellectual attitudes of his contemporaries — on him will Lucretius’s poem work its magic

I don't know anything more about this quote than can be found here, but it might be worth looking in to!

Ha! I suspected someone here must have seen it already. I don't spend much time on the fine-art side of things.

And if you're not familiar with the painter, this should give some hint as to his legacy!

I had not heard of this work before. It was done as an illustration for Thomas Moore's "The Epicurean". Coming from a pre-eminent English painter remembered for his haunting portrayals of the force, power, and grandeur of Nature, this piece strikes me as an uncharacteristic nod to the balance of classical harmonies. I have not read this book, but I do mention it Here.

When we studied Turner in college as part of British Romanticism, it was his nautical paintings we looked at. You can find a gallery representative of his work on the Wikipedia page.

Although it occurs to me now that I haven't even taken Lucretius into account. 🤔

Since we're on the subject, I did recently have a conversation with a young man from Texas who tells me that cow udders are a delicacy in those parts. With a decent bottle of red, one, though of modest means, might nevertheless dine like an aristocrat.

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If you miss udders and draughts of Chian wine, you will see at least sincere friends and you will hear things far sweeter than the land of the Phaeacians. But if you ever cast your eyes on me, Piso, we shall celebrate the twentieth richly instead of simply.

-Philodemus

Going from memory, I believe that bread and water (Diogenes Laertius) and a 'pot of cheese' (Usener) will round out the attested fare.

I sometimes use Google's "Ngrams" feature to dredge up old writings on Epicureanism. Today I decided to do a few comparative searches.

Here's how this works; you enter a search term, and google scans through an enormous quantity of digitized books and newspapers published over the last two hundred years. The data is then plotted on a line graph. I don't know how much we can really glean from this data, since it's plagued by inevitable errors (text-scanning a photocopy is hideously inaccurate), and also inevitable omissions and biases (presumably works still under copyright are excluded, for example). Nevertheless, here are a few eye-catching comparisons:

I somehow missed this thread in May, but I'm glad to have caught it now.

It's true that we don't have much context here from an Epicurean point of view, but in other respects the context is quite rich—it involves the whole history of Greek culture.

The belief among these ancients seems to have been that the underworld was not a place of torture, except in a few notable and extreme cases, but a place of forgottenness. Achilles, Pericles, Homer—a handful of the select and renowned have gone to the Happy Isles, and their names will echo until the world ends. But the common lot of humanity is to wander forever listlessly as shades ("pale in wondrous wise" to quote a translation of Lucretius in reference to Ennius); no name, no face, no memory. Utterly forgotten. The Damnatio Memoriae was not only a punishment for tyrants brought low. It was, to the Greeks, the sad fate of almost all of us.

How happy, then, to be an Epicurean! Death holds no terror; no, not even the subtle anguish of living on without really living; of being, yet without Being. Yes, most of us will be forgotten, and not so long after our deaths.

But we will not care, because we will not exist.

Isn't it interesting? Epicureans can claim:

-The only preserved library of papyrus rolls from antiquity

-The largest collection of Greek and Roman statuary ever to be found in one place (Villa of the Papyri)

-The longest inscription surviving from the ancient world

-The best and most thorough biography in all of Diogenes Laertius' books

-An oversized share of surviving Greek and Roman cameo rings

-And to cap it all, Lucretius' De Rerum Natura–the only surviving long-form materialist work from antiquity

Not bad for a school that St. Augustine wrote off 16 centuries ago; "Its ashes are so cold that not a single spark can be struck from them."

I continue to hold the view that Epicurus' approach to logic is inseparable from the intellectual climate in which he lived and worked. I've cited Stephen Spielberg's film "Lincoln" to this effect here before, and it's a perfect example of what I mean;

What Lincoln is proposing here (as memorably acted by Daniel Day-Lewis, and brilliantly scripted by Tony Kushner) is that moral laws of justice and equality can be derived from the logic of geometry. What's so striking about this scene is that it so perfectly mimics Platonism and Pythagoreanism and their geometric foundations. Lincoln is making a worthwhile and commendable moral stand, but his reasoning is faulty. There's nothing in geometry that can actually answer, with any kind of logical finality, these moral questions. In spite of the worthiness of the cause, it amounts to an abuse of reason.

This is not, in my view, to be understood as a carte-blanche dismissal of logic and reason.

Elayne I want to thank you in particular for correcting me on one point–'non-rational' is far preferable to 'irrational'!

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"When making decisions, don't use logic and reason, use the Epicurean canon.

Hmmm...🤔

I'm experiencing some heavy resistance to this phrasing. Let me see if I can articulate a response.

I first take issue with what might be differing interpretations with the word decision. If the word decision means "a conclusion or resolution reached after consideration", and these decisions can either be—according to the prevailing view of psychology—rational or irrational (in the neutral connotation of that last word), then we're faced with a startling apposition! Am I suggesting to my friends that they only make irrational decisions? I hope not. I think we too easily forget how quickly reason encroaches even on the simplest and most absent-minded of choices.

Here's a decision I often make based on personal pleasure; "I think I'll get a coke."

And here's only some of the underlying architecture of that decision;

-Observation 1: "This place sells soft drinks in a range of choices."

-Observation 2: "My previous experience with soft drinks—and it is extensive—suggests to me that a soft drink will give me pleasure."

‐Observation 3 (self evident): "pleasure is the end or goal of my life."

-Premise 1 (inductive reasoning): "If I get a coke it will probably give me pleasure this time, too."

-Decision/Conclusion: "I think I'll get a coke."

So that even if I were to restrict the question only to 'decisions about pleasure', or 'decisions about the proper end of life', I would still have problems with it. But how much more troubling when we move beyond these humble beginnings!

I have family members who hold to a position they call "Zetetic Astronomy". One of the conclusions of their astronomy is that the Earth is flat. We have very little to learn from what these people think, but there is a lot to be learned from how they think. The basis of Zeteticism is that the traditional Scientific Method is fundamentally flawed. Scientists begin by making hypotheses about their observations, which they then attempt to falsify. From the point of view of the Zeteticist, these scientists are merely introducing a prejudice or bias into their work when they hypothesize. "What they ought to be doing instead (this is me paraphrasing) is performing the observation with an unbiased mind, and trusting the results."

For example; "I don't observe a gravitational pull when I put two apples side by side. No evidence for gravity."

"When I pour water on a baseball, it runs off onto the ground. No evidence for spinning ball with water on it."

"When I ride a merry-go-round, I can feel movement and rotation. I don't normally feel that. No evidence for motion or rotation of Earth."

You get the gist. I've had wearying hours of such "arguments", and have no stomach for them any longer. This particular individual used to drive me to distraction by failing to meet one simple demand; articulate your argument in the form of a syllogism. He never agreed to do it. C'est la vie!

TL;DR—The point I'm laboring to make is that reason and logic impend rather quickly in any decision-making process. Epicurus was right to exclude them from the canon, but they become inescapable fast. No, that's not advice I would give to my friends.

I like this idea. It took me a few moments to figure out who "D.L." is, it might not hurt to give the full name on the first citation.