Posts by Joshua

The Buddhist reflects on death in order to escape the mortal world.

An Epicurean reflects on death in order to, in the words of W. H. Auden, "Find the mortal world enough."

Hello, all

It's been a time, but I still have an eye here—and a voice that I don't use enough!

Some may recall that I came to the Epicurean way through Buddhism. Indeed, I have used the Meditation on Death myself. Here's what I have to say;

To hear modern Buddhists speak of the Meditation on Death is generally to hear them mischaracterize it. I confess to not having listened to the linked podcast, Eugenios, but I want to clarify the point. What a Buddhist meditates on is precisely the death of the body. It's good so far as that goes—but before you get very far into it, you arrive at the problem.

The problem is that the deep, underlying structure of Buddhism precludes the possibility of genuine death. In fact, that's rather the whole point. They meditate on death in order to dismiss the claims of the body (which really does die) and focus all their earthly energy on the mind or spirit. How do I know this? Because; if Buddhists genuinely believed that death meant extinction, then death would encompass their definition of nibbana. And are we to believe that the shortest road thither is to kill one's self? Obviously not. And so we may discern that when the early buddhists spoke of rebirth, they meant it literally. The idea that rebirth is metaphorical, or poetic, or only by analogy, is a modern fiction.

What Thomas Jefferson said of the trinity is equally true of rebirth; An idea must be distinct before reason can act upon it, and no one ever had a distinct idea of rebirth, or of nirvana.

As an Epicurean, what do I think of all this?

First: that the claims of the body are not to be dismissed or denied, but are wholly justified, in and of themselves. I believe this because pleasure is the self-evident good.

Second: there is a sense of urgency in the shortness of human life, but it's source is altogether different from an Epicurean viewpoint. The Pali Canon teaches that nirvana is only possible in a human rebirth, and that a human rebirth is as rare as a sea turtle surfacing inside a golden ring in the middle of the ocean. A buddhist better get it right in this life or they'll surf through the six realms of existence waiting for another chance. The urgency for an Epicurean, by contrast, is that one will squander his only life in pain and suffering because he hasn't learned how to optimize for pleasure effectively.

Third: that there is certainly value in reflecting on death. Specifically; we should do as Epicurus instructed, and reflect on how Death is Nothing to us!

Well, I have to go back to work...it's an excellent topic though!

Josh

There's an interesting story about his library. After the British burned the Capitol in the War of 1812, Jefferson offered to sell his collection to the government as replacement, under one condition; they had to buy the WHOLE collection, and they had to keep them together.

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Jefferson's offer was met by warm support from many in the House and Senate; still, the bill introduced to authorize the purchase of Jefferson's library faced congressional opposition, particularly from the Federalists, such as Cyrus King, who argued that Jefferson's books would help disseminate his "infidel philosophy" and were "good, bad, and indifferent ... in languages which many can not read, and most ought not."

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Does anyone really think that Cicero and Seneca were the kinds of books Cyrus King was worried about?

Happy (now belated) birthday, Elayne!

Jefferson's reading is an interesting place to start, but the library of a voracious reader may be misleading. Nevertheless, the fact that he owned five different editions of Lucretius in Latin as well as translations in English and French is illustrative.

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Yes - and that reminds me too that we should compare this with the story of Torquatus' ancestor, who had his son executed for disobeying orders in a war, and how that compares / differs from the Iphanessa story

On a probably unrelated note, I turned up something the other day in my reading. It was Frontinus' Aqueducts of Rome (Frontinus being a military and civil engineer who was put in charge of the system), and he made mention of the Torquatian Gardens, or maybe Gardens of Torquatus. No other extant Latin text mentions them. It was a large family in Rome though, there's probably no connection. But it did strike me as a feature of interest.

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The Iphigenia story is very significant for how repulsive it shows religion to be. For us the Abraham / Isaac story us more well known. Are there others?

Well, there's a rather important one for Christians!

Of course, an alternative consideration is that the translations are correct and that Diogenes Laertius got something wrong.

I read Frontinus yesterday on The Aqueducts of Rome. The early portions of the text are badly preserved; I continue to marvel that we were so lucky with what survived, and above all with Lucretius.

There are other threads in which we've discussed this that Mike might find interesting. I don't have time this morning to go find them, but I can briefly outline my own argument:

1. The confusion between translations arises because of a wholly reasonable confusion among the translators over the Greek system of conjunctions. It's interesting that a language capable of such nuances as Ancient Greek also has such a poverty of conjunctions. We have a thread somewhere where I explain this problem in depth.

2. The weight of the biographical evidence suggests to me that the Bailey translation is less accurate. It's true that Metrodorus married and had kids. But did Epicurus? Hermarchus? Polyaenus?

3. Whichever translation one prefers, the qualifying clause in the following sentence renders the two translations nearly equivalent logically. Sometimes it is wise to marry; and sometimes it is not.

Yes, Cassius, I hadn't seen that thread. That probably makes this one redundant!

Interesting! I had not read this thread before I posted the other one.

Cassius already covered it, but I consider the proem to Book IV (repeated from book I) to be essential. It contains the essence of his missionary zeal, the pride and pleasure of his work, an encapsulation of the pioneering spirit of the philosophy, his sense of the therapeutic quality of his verse, and the finest indication of what he might have achieved in lyrical (rather than Epic) poetry had he applied himself to it.

Some of the most influential lines are rather pithy, and may not work well in this format;

"Life is one long struggle in the dark."

"So potent was religion [or superstition] in persuading to evil deeds."

An infant thrown up onto the shores of light, etc.

More on the statue:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/ancient-…-lamp-stand/amp

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection….-A.D.+1&pos=21

Regarding the statue;

There is a whole 'grammar' in these old statues that can carry meaning that most of us will miss. The crop of hair and beard, the gesture of the arms, the drape of the cloth, the orientation of the hands and fingers, etc. A general will have a different hand position than a philosopher, as an example.

So I don't know anything about this statue, but an expert might be able to infer quite a lot.

A little thought experiment for the day:

Suppose you were tasked with abridging De Rerum Natura; what criteria would you use to decide what gets left on the cutting floor?

Would you abridge based on the force and power of his poetry, and leave off some of the duller sections on heat and wind and magnets?

Would you select for the finest summary of Epicurean thought?

Would you opt for pith? Or for the choicest Latin? For the Synoptic view, and skip the details?

In another life I once loved the Tao Te Ching. I've heard it described as a book that can be read in an afternoon, or a lifetime. Could you cut Lucretius in such way that you have such a book, but without losing anything essential?

On a personal note, I generally dislike abridgments. I recall how crestfallen I was one high school summer when I had fought my way through The Count of Monte Cristo, only to discover after I read it that, in those lazy afternoons, I had been reading an abridged text.

But the question might give insight into how we all read the text in different ways. To paraphrase Stephen Greenblatt, books always run into the particular fissures of one's psychic life.

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Great to hear from you - post whenever you can. So you've move from truck-driving to surveying? Quite a move there must be a story behind how you picked surveying!

Actually, Cassius, I sort of just fell into it through a family connection. But land surveying was Henry David Thoreau's profession for most of his life—and in fact a handful of his surveys, including the survey of Walden Pond, are still on file at the records office in Concord, Massachusetts. And that pleases me immensely. I love being outside, and the work isn't bad.

As I was setting up the instrument the other day in preparation for a topographic land survey, I found myself thinking back to Plato's dictum;

"Let no one who is ignorant of geometry enter here."

Now, It happens that I am not altogether ignorant of geometry; but working as a land survey rodman is giving me a more thorough education in its practical application than I had ever hoped for. My library (after much shrinking) is beginning to expand in odd directions; I've ordered four books on land surveying and one, an irresistible Loeb edition by the Roman engineer Frontinus, on the engineering of aqueducts. Lucretius in several places makes reference to "boundary marks" and "the shining borders of the light", and I've lately found myself reading those lines with a fresh eye. Perhaps I will bring myself closer to those Epicureans of whom Torquatus said,

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We value the art of medicine not for its interest as a science, but because it produces health. We commend the art of navigation for its practical, and not its scientific value, because it conveys the rules for sailing a ship with success.

I haven't been as active here as I'd like to be, but I do remain dedicated to the study of Epicurus and the pursuit of pleasure.

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Great thoughts hallow any labor. To-day I earned seventy-five cents heaving manure out of a pen, and made a good bargain of it. If the ditcher muses the while how he may live uprightly, the ditching spade and turf knife may be engraved on the coat-of-arms of his posterity. —The Journal of Henry David Thoreau

You know, after I posted that this morning Cassius I got to think about the similarity between voluptas and voluntas ("wish" or "desire").

That's an excellent note on "voluptuousness". The Latin for pleasure used by Lucretius is "voluptas".

Update:

The use of Iphianassa for Iphigenia was not related to meter, as the two names rendered in Latin are metrically equivalent. The mystery remains!

This is a treasure trove unlooked-for, Charles. Much pleasure to you in the mining—and should you double it by bringing forth gems, we'll treble it with fellowship!