Posts by Joshua

Side note: he precedes his poem with a Latin inscription from Ovid:

"Unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe—quem dixere Chaos;"

"There was one countenance upon all of the world—which they call Chaos;"

http://xtf.lib.virginia.edu/xtf/view?docId…=&brand=default

Yet another random find.

When I saw that this was published posthumously I started to get my hopes up. Too salacious to let out in his lifetime? Sadly not. This poem should be called Against Lucretius. It's basically a systematic refutation of Lucretius' Epicureanism as expressed in the first part of DNR Book I. First there's the invocation of the biblical creator. Then a paean to the triumph of Britain; next, a nod toward atomism but bracketed by the claims that God is the designer of the atoms, and that materialism itself could never proceed past the point of random chaos.

All boiler-plate up to here, but then an interesting turn: an inversion of the crime of Agamemnon. After laying out his belief that all races are brothers (as all men are sons of Adam), it is fratricide that marks out the real crime. Slavery, suggests Higgons, is proof that man is hopelessly sinful without the guidance of God. He might as well have translated it literally—"to such heights of evil are men driven without religion."

And just a few other features of interest. His science is mostly adequate for its time, but with an oddity or two. If I'm reading it correctly, he says in one line that gravity causes heavier objects to fall faster than lighter objects–something even Lucretius knew was wrong. He also acknowledges the probable existence of life on other worlds, which is somewhat odd for someone who believes in the myths of Genesis.

Its a fairly quick read, but doesn't amount to much for us. A few pages of serviceable but uninspired heroic couplets.

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Most ordinary people have training in astrophysics

🤣 Either you've slipped up, Cassius, or you meet with a different vintage of 'ordinary' than I do!

This bit about the 'bliss pill' is a very modern-sounding thought-experiment, but its roots are ancient. Homer proposes a similar problem in his Odyssey with the land of the Lotus-Eaters, memorably captured by Tennyson in a poem of that name.

If you could spend your life on an exceedingly pleasant island in the Mediterranean eating narcotic flowers, drowsy and content and forgetful of family and duty and honor, would you choose that? The 'right' answer for Homer and all good pious Greeks was no. It might be worth exploring what the Epicurean answer would be.

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33. The cry of the flesh is not to be hungry, thirsty, or cold; for he who is free of these and is confident of remain so might vie even with Zeus for happiness.

I cite this passage because the words "confident to remain so" seems to me to be the crucial distinguishing factor between pleasure and happiness. I liked the way Cassius formulated it; pleasure is a direct feeling, happiness is a higher level construction that involves pleasure, but the hope of continued pleasure and the absence of fear.

Epicurus' core teaching about death is that it is "nothing" to us. This is essential. If what awaited us beyond the grave was eternal torment, no amount or length of pleasure would be adequate to keep us happy. We have to know where we're 'going' with it, in our life and after it.

I don't think I can agree with Elli that Gaia is a better Greek analogue than Aphrodite. Partially because Aphrodite is the consort of Ares (Mars), partially because Aphrodite has the clearer association with pleasure, and partially because Lucretius was drawing on Empedocles and his duality between Love and Strife.

Certainly in Venus' capacity as 'nurturing' and 'mother', she has a resemblance to Gaia. It would be better to say, as the Loeb edition does say, that she "is a figure of extraordinary complexity".

I am inclined to agree with Elayne when it comes to 'stretching the text'---If indeed that is what we are doing, in a fair analysis. A few months ago I read The Rise and Fall of Alexandria. I've mentioned it before, but I keep coming back to it because for me the key point I take from it is this; we have an obligation to estimate the value of these early thinkers by considering the context in which they wrote. Take a practical example:

Hippocrates' understanding of internal medicine, and its supposed foundation in the fluctuations of the four 'humors', is so wrong that it can be difficult for us to appreciate how much progress he had made toward being right. The men of his age believed, by and large, that disease and health were the sport of the gods. A prayer here, a burnt offering there--throw in a consultation with a witch or an exorcist, when other means fail--that was the best they could hope for. Hippocrates took a more analytical view of things. He thought that disease of the body had its origin in nature, and not the divine. He thought that the course of disease could be traced, from cause to effect, and that with sufficient study these natural processes could be laid bare to the understanding of the human intellect. This early and infantile version of science has in the intervening centuries been clarified, expanded, systematized, subjected to rigor and experimentation--has indeed been reworked almost beyond recognition. Almost. But the kernel of the original idea (which was nothing short of a revolution in human understanding, for its time) remains unaltered. The origin of disease is not in caprice and malevolence, not vengeance and anger; it is instead rational and explicable.

There's no shame in Lucretius being 'wrong' from time to time. He got nearly everything of real importance right.

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"But still, what a difference when one lays aside the strenuous believers and takes up the no less arduous work of a Darwin, say, or a Hawking or a Crick. These men are more enlightening when they are wrong, or when they display their inevitable biases, than any falsely modest person of faith who is vainly trying to square the circle and to explain how he, a mere creature of the Creator, can possibly know what that Creator intends." -Christopher Hitchens

And let us not for a moment suffer the confusion that this 'naturalness' is in any way related to Natural Law, a position that I regard as more unnatural than almost anything in philosophy. Nature furnishes the norm, but it does not furnish moral "Laws" for our mindless obedience!

I do love Robert Burns, but it's a sad day for an Epicurean when he can't bring himself to buy a pint for an old friend–as in lines 9 and 10!

Another excellent poem, and especially relevant for this "towmond" (12-month);

Contented wi' little, and cantie wi' mair,

Whene'er I foregather wi' Sorrow and Care,

I gie them a skelp as they're creepin' alang,

Wi' a cog o' guid swats, and an auld Scottish sang.

I whyles claw the elbow o' troublesome Thought;

But man is a sodger, and life is a faught:

My mirth and gude humour are coin in my pouch,

And my Freedom's my lairdship nae monarch daur touch.

A towmond o' trouble, should that be my fa',

A night o' gude fellowship sowthers it a':

When at the blythe end o' our journey at last,

Wha the deil ever thinks o' the road he has past!

Blind Chance, let her snapper and stoyte on her way;

Be't to me, be't frae me, e'en let the jade gae:

Come Ease, or come Travail, come Pleasure or Pain,

My warst word is:- "Welcome, and welcome again!"

Happy New Year!

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2016/04/skeleton-mosaic-turkey/

Scrolling down that same page, I saw a link to this other interesting article!

I saw one of these on a trip there in college, but not nearly as intact as this one. Very interesting! I confess to be hopelessly in love with the apparent Roman obsession for frescoes on every available surface.

I've found a side view of the cup, showing both a clear view of the walking stick as well as the object behind. This appears to me to be a column with a statue of a woman on top. Hard to say what's at the base of the column, or who the woman (goddess?) is.

A more interesting question for me was the walking stick itself, as well as the bags carried by the philosophers. It seems that this represents the "wallet and staff" that marked out Cynicism, but was also a generic symbol for Greek philosophers.

There are logical reasons why "one god" doesn't work in Epicurean philosophy, regardless of its other attributes. Nature never furnishes only one thing of a kind. In an infinite cosmos these forms are being endlessly thrown up somewhere.

This assumes, of course, that one takes the realist view of Epicurean divinity.

It is true, Susan, as you say; Epicurus did not formulate a philosophy of mind that would impress a Gautama, or a Shankara. But neither did these two develop philosophies of nature that would have engaged the attention of an Epicurus. And if there be any room for mysticism in this tradition, it must necessarily be a mysticism of nature, and not of mind.

When I contemplate the cosmic scale—when I consider, from my humble vantage point, the deepness of time, the incomprehensibility of the twin eternities that stand in apposition on either side of my short life—then do I feel something of the mystic's ultimacy. We are, as Lucretius put it, "all sprung from celestial seed". There is an ineffable kinship in this; that we share a like beginning not only with the animal, but with the vegetable and mineral.

That while poring over these ancient texts I also breathe, and so literally 'con-spire', in one atmosphere that spans distant oceans, with the humble grassy reeds of the Nile Delta, whose forgotten ancestors were made into the papyrus scrolls upon which these books were first written down and copied—and that we alike were mothered by the same earth, and we alike shall die here, our atoms in some later age to mingle in forms equally kindred, and yet half alien—that in this there is something encouraging and almost transcendent.

This is all poetry and metaphor, of course. And there will be those who say that the Epicurean cosmos is terribly cold, heartless and bleak. I have no answer for this, except to say that I do not share that view. Upon the Universities of the West are draped the name of Alma Mater. The credit for this coinage belongs to Lucretius—and yet for him this Mother was the whole generative power of nature. If you can look at another human and see at once the man, the material, and the animal, and see also the boundless world of Nature that it took to make thus much, you may find a glimmer of something mystical in these kinships.

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We are star stuff harvesting starlight. -Carl Sagan

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There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. -Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

This bit on the comic playwrights is interesting. One thing that Epicurus certainly had going for him in this respect was that he had Menander in his corner, as a boyhood friend who was sympathetic to the philosophy.

Another thing to consider is this; the comic playwrights were having a go at the "sacred cows" of Athenian high culture. Epicurus doesn't really fit into that category.

I might be misremembering slightly! That does look like the right passage.

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And that's correct (in a vacuum), right? How or why would he intuit that? I think I need to revisit that Letter.

I don't have a citation to hand, but see Lucretius on this point. I think he says that in the absence of air-resistance a ball of wool and a ball of lead will fall at the same speed.

On a side note Don, you may want to give Hello Internet a listen if you haven't already. CGPGrey and Brady Haran. Its my favorite podcast!

Haven't had a chance to watch this yet, but I've always had a slight confusion on the "down" issue. Epicurus seemed to think that the "original" motion of any given atom was "down" until it either swerved or hit another atom and ricocheted. Except that the cosmos was beginningless, so I'm not sure when this "original" downward motion happened. Lucretius is clear that an atom in motion is governed by inertial force at a uniform rate of speed in any given direction until they swerve or are acted upon by an outside force. These atoms, once moving in another direction, are not affected by any downward pull. Do I have that right?

I've only just read through it once Charles, but thank you for your hard work! I'll return to it in a day or two for rereading and comments.