Posts by Joshua

Cassius, I think you are right—this was a strong episode. Thanks to all who participated!

I particularly enjoyed the discussion of Epicurus as leader, teacher and so forth. I'm sure that I'm as guilty as anyone of investing too much attachment into the figure himself; you can see it in some of my poems. Elayne's cautions are well taken, and she is a valuable voice.

I might add a few points to flesh out my own thinking; and to redeem, in a way, Lucretius and Lucian and others who have covered him with honor.

The first thing I would say is that we are shielded by the philosophy itself against the worst forms of hagiography. It will never be asserted—it couldn't be taken seriously if it were—that Epicurus was set apart in significance from other mortals. We will not, cannot, fall into the demeaning trap of thinking him heralded, prophecied, chosen, or marked by signs and portents. He performed no miracles; he was born to no god; he ascended into no paradise.

He was a mammal—like other mammals, born of a natural sexual union (how absurd that we have to say that out loud!), and kin to the beasts of the field, and did not disgrace himself by claiming otherwise. What little there was of nobility in his painful, animalistic and ignoble death, was nobility of mind and philosophy. He claimed no other.

Nor did he claim to heal; but taught us only, perhaps, how we might find health ourselves. He could not make the deaf to hear or the blind see. He gave no voice to the mute—the voice he gave was to pleasure itself, in a world that did not want to hear it.

Of his temperament even some of his enemies could speak well. In his school, Diogenes Laertius tells us that he declined the perils of communal property—for he foresaw that greed and mistrust were bitter poison to wholesome fellowship. His easy grace, his mild manner and simple bearing showed how ill-fitted was the bacchanalian mask that his slanderers put upon him.

Elayne is right; what could be more obvious than that pleasure is the proper end of life? It was a pearl richer than all the rest of ancient philosophy—so much muck. And yet it took an Epicurus to pry out that pearl, and bring it up into sunlight.

If I believed that a job done once was done forever, and that so worthy a truth as this would stand itself apparent for all coming time, then we could leave off honoring him.

But the agora of ideas isn't getting less absurd and obscure; it's growing muckier by the day! And for as long as we are confronted with an endless parade of charlatans, we shall have need of Epicurus.

Welcome, Susan! It seems like ages since the Bhagavat Gita and the Upanishads were part of my regular reading 🤔.

I do come from a background of intense interest in Buddhism. That was—to borrow a term—in another life, so I don't know how helpful I'll be. I expect you will have things to teach us!

As a student of Vedanta, you are already trained to understand a few of the most important Epicurean conclusions about consciousness. The first is that human consciousness cannot reasonably be unique. The Śramaṇas of India understood this well; any theory of consciousness that attempts to explain the human mind must also account for the mind of the rat in the sewers. It won't do to say that we are special; Epicurus believed that we are all sprung from celestial seed. Our minds emerge spontaneously from indestructible matter. Since matter is thought to be infinite, the number of conscious beings is thought to be infinite as well.

The second conclusion we share with Vedanta is that other minds are worth studying as a healthful practice for our own minds. There are minds as far exceeding ours in capability as ours exceed other mammals. The gods, if such exist, must be fully natural—not so far unlike ourselves. And if they pass their days in deepest happiness, as Epicurus reasoned they must, then they are a fit subject for human contemplation. Life is a long struggle in the dark, said Lucretius; and yet with philosophy, we may learn to rival Zeus in happiness. We also benefit from the honor we bestow on the wise.

There are many other comparisons to be made, and the disagreements between Epicurus and the schools of the East are broad as well as deep. But it is a promising position to start from!

Joshua

A good find Cassius, but rather sad—it seems to confirm DeWitt; "It was the fate of Epicurus to be named if condemned, unnamed if approved."

Henry David Thoreau rode the 19th century lecture circuit as well. I am absolutely convinced from a comprehensive reading of his published works and private letters that he did not believe in a personal god, or in any hell or paradise, and yet he sometimes evokes this theme in his lectures—as when arguing against slavery, or pleading for the life of John Brown. A case of tailoring his message to his audience, I suppose. The Reform movement had strong ties to the Romantic movement in Europe and the Transcendentalists in America, as well as the Quaker and Unitarian churches.

Tell an audience of nineteenth century men and women that you are going to educate children on the model of the best philosophers in Europe, and they might applaud you. Tell them that the foundation stones of that philosophy were laid by Epicurus as a bulwark against Plato and religion, and the same audience might balk to hear it.

Pestalozzi, by contrast, was a Christian humanist trained for the clergy.

This would be a subject worthy of a monograph; in lieu of such at present, I will take the thesis in defense of her authorship here.

I haven't read any of her other works at full length, but the evidence I've seen so far fairly convinced me.

Like Diogenes of Oenoanda, Wright was cosmopolitan. Born in Scotland and orphaned, she lived throughout her life in England and America, and for brief interludes in France. She traveled even more widely; through Europe, through the United States and the frontier, south as far as Haiti, north into Canada. It might properly be said that she lived on the road.

In this capacity she was both writer and orator, and was the first woman in the country to lecture mixed company in public on subjects of morality and politics. She was in this respect a new Leontion, and suffered similar calumnies. She was also the first woman in America to edit a published journal.

She befriended Lafayette and Jefferson, Bentham and Mill. She attempted a utopian community for the betterment of African slaves, which failed. Even so, she supported other communities throughout her life. On her career she had this to say, in a letter to Lafayette:

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Trust me, my beloved friend, the mind has no sex but what habit and education give it, and I who was thrown in infancy upon the world like a wreck upon the waters have learned, as well to struggle with the elements as any male child of Adam.

The biblical reference is superficial; more subtle is the allusion to Lucretius, whom she surely read. From Cyril Bailey's translation;

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Then again, the child, like a sailor tossed ashore by the cruel waves, lies naked on the ground, dumb, lacking all help for life, when first nature has cast him forth by travail from his mother’s womb into the coasts of light, and he fills the place with woful wailing, as is but right for one for whom it remains in life to pass through so much trouble.

Her allusion to this passage precedes Alfred Tennyson's (In Memoriam) by over twenty years.

Like Epicurus she was critical of superstition, critical of priests and clergy, and critical of the institution of marriage—and yet like Metrodorus she did marry, and bore a child.

It might rightly be said that she wrote out her Epicurean philosophy once (and rather completely), and gave the rest of her life to living it.

I agree with Cassius' concluding thoughts—more reading of her other works is in order!

I see Cassius has a write-up here, I haven't read through it yet.

The recent thread on Julius Caesar has me thinking about Trajan, Hadrian and Plotina. There are, I think, two letters of Plotina (one to Hadrian and one to the Epicurean community in Athens [?]), and then Hadrian's reply/decree. Do we have these somewhere? I don't see much on Plotina here.

Thank you, Don! Your voice was sorely missed in some of these older threads on translation. My study of Ancient Greek is haphazard at the very best of times.

That's quite a breadth of possibilities.

That's another great one, Cassius! What's so striking about that list is that most of the stories are about wild or captive animals that don't have a long history of domestication.

I love stories like this. There are other stories of animals 'adopting' stray and vulnerable members of other species. Pure heartwarming goodness. And philosophically important as well, as Don points out.

"But if we teach kids they're descended from monkeys, they'll act like monkeys!"

This is great, Don!

https://www.cracked.com/article_20054_…tain-death.html

Your English is great, Camotero; have no fear on that point

The classic example is the square tower that appears to the senses to be round from far away.

Reality: the tower is square

Misleading sensation: the tower is round

Option 1: discard the evidence of the senses because they are misleading. Knowledge cannot be derived from the senses.

Option 2: analyze all relevant sensations to arrive at a more complete understanding. Knowledge can be derived from the senses.

Pyrrho, the Skeptic, chose option 1.

Epicurus is emphatic; Choose option 2!

Regarding gratitude, I don't agree that this emotion in the subject implies or requires an object.

I find myself alive in the universe. I know that there is sorrow, and fear, and that life sometimes hurts—but I also know that it is wonderful, really wonderful, sometimes sublime, just to be alive here. There is beauty and delight here that will move me even at my last breath. There is knowledge and philosophy to dull my pains, and to enhance my pleasures. There is friendship, romance, love, art, and literature—all the choicest fruits of a peaceable and prosperous age, in a free and civil society. To say that I am grateful is simply to say that I appreciate it. To appreciate something, and to appreciate the gift of something, are two different things. One who appreciates wine recognizes its worth and its specialness in a deep and penetrating way.

That's what it is to appreciate life and its blessings; to pause for a time and take stock. To see it deeply, and recognize its worth.

Because it could so easily have gone the other way.

Thank you Cassius, I'll certainly look into it! I still have that next episode on my hard drive waiting to be edited, if I can only find the time.

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Unfortunately as I understand it, academic historians do not like to engage in broad sweeping historiographic narratives which may be overly simplistic (the biggest example of this usually given is Edward Gibbon's 1776 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire).

This is certainly the case, even when it has nothing to do with theology; Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel both elicit a similar response, and the debate proceeds forever and forever ad nauseum.

My own observation is that those who detract the historical thesis that they dismiss as merely a "Whig Fable" do so by trying to prove too much. I once read an argument put forward suggesting that the totemic power ascribed to books by medievals was a sign of their love of literacy. This could not, of course, be further from the truth; what could be a more obvious sign of illiteracy, than to think of books as sacred or totemic!? A literate person reads books, hungry only for what the contain. They reproduce books so that they can save them from oblivion, or else pass them on to other readers. It is only the illiterate who content themselves with the dry crust of the thing itself.

And does it matter whether Giordano Bruno was murdered for free inquiry or for occult heresy? In either case the salient point remains; he was murdered by a tyrannical and imperious church for holding the wrong opinion. With nearly all of these quibbles, the fault-finding historians succeed only in failing to grasp the obvious. St. Paul delivered his most powerful sermon on the Areopagus in Athens, and he left that city a free man. He preached in a synagogue in Jerusalem, and he left Jerusalem in chains.

You are correct about his penury, Cassius—I recently read a book called Measuring America in which Jefferson figured prominently—but it was his personal library that he sold to Congress. The British had just burned the capital in the War of 1812, including the Library of Congress, and Jefferson's private collection was the largest in North America. It seemed like a perfect match—except that many in Congress grumbled at the deal, complaining that many of Jefferson's books were far too irreligious, far too politically radical (he was highly sympathetic to the bloodsoaked revolution in France), and far too unreadable; a high percentage of them were not in English. In fact, at least five of these books were copies of Lucretius, in Latin.

I don't think his letters would have been included in this sale, however.

Something I'm curious about; do we know when Thomas Jefferson's letter to William Short first became widely available? The National Archives didn't attempt a definitive collection of his papers until 1943.

It may have been common sense (although I confess to disliking that term!), but consider that Frances Wright was the only writer whose work survives between antiquity and DeWitt—that is to say, for nearly 2,000 years—to have attempted publicly to redeem Epicurus' whole system and reputation, on his own genuine terms.

One other thing I should mention; Santayana's essay was one out of three in a book called Three Philosophical Poets. I haven't read the other two, but here is the description from the Doubleday edition published 1953;

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One of the world's most renowned and provocative thinkers discusses Lucretius, the materialist; Dante, the supernaturalist; and Goethe, the romanticist; and thereby introduces the three dominant systems of Western philosophy--the sources of our major speculative traditions. This work serves the newcomer to the history of philosophy as an admirable introduction to the field, and for the more advanced reader it is a most concise and meaningful interpretation of these three great philosophical poets.

Santayana was himself a materialist, in spite of his Platonism, and is generally considered to have given Lucretius the most favorable review of the three. Lucretius was a supreme poet, and a materialist—but also an Epicurean. Santayana was an admirer of good poetry, as well as a materialist; but his other views were incompatible with Epicureanism. Cassius mentions 'something more extensive' going on, and I think it's partially this—the narcissism of small differences. Santayana exposes himself to this diagnosis explicitly, by suggesting that a materialist who was not an Epicurean would have opened up richer fields for poetic exploration than Lucretius was willing or able to pursue.

And the capstone of all this seeming paradox? A quote from one of Santayana's novels, from a character that critic's call his "alter-ego";

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I have the Epicurean contentment, which is not far removed from asceticism.

Oliver Wendell Holmes was a great admirer of Santayana, but sums him up thus;

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He has a patronizing tone—as of one who saw through himself but didn’t expect others to.

He stands with Nietsche in a place of eminence, in the Rogue's gallery of Epicurus' detractors—and for that reason alone is worth reading.

I'll try to reply thoroughly to all of these comments when I get the time, but I'll sketch an outline of my thoughts here as they come to me.

First, of course, I dismiss his portrayal of Epicurus. We have the benefit of DeWitt, and Santayana did not. That doesn't excuse what Don calls sloppy scholarship, but his position was de rigueur for the time. But I'm certainly not here to make excuses for him!

It's his insight into Lucretius that is for me worthwhile. Not Lucretius as an Epicurean, perhaps, but Lucretius as a materialist, and, above all, as a poet of nature.

His exploration of the Venus/Mars diad, as a representation of the ongoing atomic cycle of emergence and dissolution, is illustrative of what I mean. I think that we all appreciate the significance of Venus as an enduring metaphor for the fertility of atomic "re-creation", but how much of our time do we give to its corrolary? Santayana makes an interesting proposition; assuming that Lucretius' poem is truly unfinished, did he plan to cap it off with an elegy for creation and a final balancing hymn to Mars? I can't say—and it may be that in ending the poem with the plague in Athens, Lucretius really did end the poem with Mars triumphant, and Venus, for a time, brought low. I know that I, for one, will be enriched by Santayana's explication on these lines when I again read Lucretius.

I do think that Santayana gets something really wrong in all of this—

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Life, however, belongs to form, and not to matter; or in the language of Lucretius, life is an eventum, a redundant ideal product or incidental aspect, involved in the equilibration of matter; as the throw of sixes is an eventum, a redundant ideal product or incidental aspect, occasionally involved in shaking a dice-box. Yet, as this throw makes the acme and best possible issue of a game of dice, so life is the acme and best possible issue of the dance of atoms; and it is from the point of view of this eventum that the whole process is viewed by us, and is judged.

How Santayana can write these words, and also hold that Lucretius despised life, is beyond me. And this is another aspect of Lucretius; it is too easy to miss the forest for the trees. As with Lucretius' love of pleasure, so it is with his love of life: the poem itself—the colossal and imaginative sweep of his art—is the best evidence there is for his zest and zeal. His whole poem, in form and finish, is better evidence even than the arguments it contains. How could anyone who really despised life dedicate his small hours to the crafting of 7,000 lines of verse, of unsurpassed beauty and grandeur?

But here again Santayana had the poor fortune to write in that long darkness, before DeWitt arose to shed his light; pleasure, DeWitt says in correction, is the telos. The summum bonum is life itself.

And yet there is more still to admire in Santayana's essay. In general, the further he gets from the subject of Epicurus, the more useful his analysis. His examination of Lucretius as a poet of nature is of a high order. His contrast of Lucretius with Shakespeare, Shelley, and Wordsworth is full of insight.

His contrast of Lucretius with Horace on the subject of friendship is noteworthy as well.

Anyway, when I finally get around to editing and publishing the next episode some of this will get a little clearer.

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I've been reading this essay diligently of late, and have borrowed a passage for use in the most recent recording for EpicureaPoetica (which, by the way, I hope to publish this afternoon).

Santayana was a Spanish-American philosopher of a Platonist bent, and his depiction of Epicurus won't win him any friends here. He slightly echoes Nietsche in this regard. Nevertheless, I think him a deft and engaging critic of Lucretius, whom he does hold in high esteem. Those who have a good foundation in the core texts—of Epicurus, of Lucretius, of Frances Wright, and of DeWitt—will be well-served by reading it.

My intention in the coming days is to draft an outline of the essay, so if you'd prefer to save some time you can wait for that instead. A straight recording of the essay may follow. He doesn't mention Tennyson's poem, but he has shed new light on Tennyson's approach to Lucretius, by outlining his own.

Good afternoon, Titus!

I cannot comment on these books with any personal experience, but Catherine Wilson and Haris Dimitriadis have been widely discussed around here. You'll be able to find them with a search, I think.

Dimitriadis' text in particular has been well- received. I need to pick up a copy myself!