Posts by Joshua

I think you're on the right track there, Cassius. It speaks well of the Epicurean tradition that it produced a biting satirist like Lucian, and attracted a self-styled pamphleteer like Hitchens and a revolutionary like Jefferson. Hitchens identified irony as the redeeming quality of literature as opposed to scripture ("the gin in the campari," he called it, "and the cream in the coffee"), and irony was with Epicureanism from the beginning, as in Vatican Maxim #40.

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He who asserts that everything happens by necessity can hardly find fault with one who denies that everything happens by necessity; by his own theory this very argument is voiced by necessity.

Hard to read that without imagining the wry, sardonic smile that must have accompanied its writing.

I've been listening to Isaac Asimov's Second Foundation, and am nearly at the end of the trilogy. I came across an interesting idea;

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So he created his Foundations according to the laws of psychohistory, but who knew better than he that even those laws were relative? He never created a finished product. Finished products are for decadent minds. His was an evolving mechanism, and the Second Foundation was the instrument of that evolution.

This got me thinking about something that has bothered me since high school; if ideology is nearly always a problem in societies (and the ideology could be nearly anything; religion, nationalism, fascism, communism, scientism, etc.), then is it any good to select ideology as the antidote?

I suspect that it was this paradox that drove me initially to Thoreau (who positively delights in paradox), and through him to the East, where men like Lao Tzu have been speaking in ironic contradictions for millennia. Christopher Hitchens encountered the same problem; he was a Trotskyist agitator at Oxford, and much later an ally of the Bush Administration. He eventually concluded that

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The synthesis for which one aimed was the Orwellian one of evolving a consistent and integral anti-totalitarianism.

Did Epicurus create a "finished product," and we are merely "decadent minds" rifling the dry scrolls of the past? Did he create an "evolving mechanism," and we are the means of its modern evolution?

NB; both Asimov and Hitchens were anti-religious; thought well of pleasure; and wrote reverently of Lucretius. It's an intriguing cluster of men and ideas.

Thanks Cassius! I thought DeWitt had made the same point but wouldn't have known where to grab the citation.

I think to understand the rejection of geometry as a prerequisite of philosophy we really need to understand the sort of claims that were made for it. These claims have in fact never stopped being made, and find a fascinating expression in, of all people, Abraham Lincoln;

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"He studied and nearly mastered the Six-books of Euclid (geometry) since he was a member of Congress. He began a course of rigid mental discipline with the intent to improve his faculties, especially his powers of logic and language. Hence his fondness for Euclid, which he carried with him on the circuit till he could demonstrate with ease all the propositions in the six books; often studying far into the night, with a candle near his pillow, while his fellow-lawyers, half a dozen in a room, filled the air with interminable snoring." Abraham Lincoln from Short Autobiography of 1860.

The assumption here is that if one understands how to prove a geometric theorem, one will equally know how to prove a philosophical one, as here;

But this involves a logical sleight-of-hand; it employs an argument by analogy, but argument by analogy only works if things really ARE analogous. Epicurus would challenge Lincoln on this point. If he wants to argue an end to slavery, he needs to argue from a foundation of sensation, anticipations, or feelings--because people aren't triangles, they're people.

Simply put, geometry as a foundation of philosophy is an invitation to casuistry. Nevertheless, I will always enjoy a wonderful performance by Mr. Daniel Day-Lewis!

I seem to be struggling with images today.

Edit; Alright, I think it worked!

With time to spare on a load to South Portland, I caught a ride to the seaside. What a delight it was to see the Atlantic again! I haven't stepped in it's waters since I was a boy. I started the day at Two Lights, and strode into the surf still wearing socks and shoes. This I later regretted, but was completely enchanted with.

People were scattered on the rocks, watching the spray and the sailboats on a cloudless day; one man was fishing, and pulled in a striped sea bass while I watched.

The driver had directed me to the lobster shack for lunch, and there I soon bent my sloshing steps. I am lately a lover of Lobster Rolls, having tried them for the first time in Salt Lake City. Homemade blueberry pie to accompany, and all of it seasoned with a view of the sea. After this I walked the 6 miles up to Fort William's Park, the home of Portland Head Light.

This view inspired the following ditty (an emblem of our school?), and I was fascinated to learn of all the hands that go toward maintaining a lighthouse through the ages. New hands, new lenses to focus, new paint on the exterior; but an unchanging tradition of guidance, refuge and safe harbor.

The Lighthouse

Perched on shores of treacherous shoals

Where water heaves and, crashing, rolls

Beneath the beam that scans for souls,

The weathered prow and turning lens

That mortal after mortal tends

Stands firm unto the end of ends.

I finished the day with a stroll along the wharfside in downtown Portland; a well-made margherita pizza at the Porland Pie Co.; a cigar for desert by sundown over the city; and a third conversation with yet another driver as I returned to the truck.

(P.S. I also experienced sore feet and a small blister; the loss of my phone, and it's safe return; and the sight of a doomsday preacher in the park. Those and other pleasures I reserve for my later amusement.)

-Josh

I don't really follow it all that closely, Cassius. Obviously the subject figures prominently in Science Fiction, which I'm trying to read more of. Some of my friends are more into all that than I am, but I talk with them about it, and the subject invariably comes up in conversations about meaning, the afterlife, the shape of the world, etc. For me it's the vastness of it all that is most enchanting. Richard Feynam believed that that alone was evidence against religion; "the stage is too big for the drama."

And now for Sean Bean, and some misplaced Yorkshire goodness;

Here's a scattershot summary of the state of play. I'm mostly just going off what I've learned in reading.

1. H²O is more common than people think. Hydrogen is most common element; helium second, oxygen third. Most common molecule is H². Helium is inert, doesn't bond. O² is quite common as well; H²O very likely to be widespread.

2. Exoplanets being discovered all the time, including at the nearest star system to Sol (Proxima Centauri). This process is mostly done by computers now.

3. Earth-life more resilient than once thought. Thriving microorganisms happily bubbling away at deep-water vents, where the water is hot enough to boil, but can't because the pressure is too high. These extremophiles suggest the goldilocks zone wider than we thought.

4. Space is BIG. Proxima Centauri is the closest system, and it's still 4 light-years away. It would take our fastest probes 50,000 years to get there. Humans discovered agriculture at the end of the last ice-age, about 12,000 years ago. Written history is at most 5,000 years old. We're simply not equipped to conceive of these distances/timescales.

5. Space is OLD. Hold your arm out to the side, parallel to the ground. If you measure the history of Earth from the center of your sternum to the edge of your fingertip, all of human history would vanish in one pass of a nail file at the end of your fingernail. What if there WAS a space-faring civilization "nearby", but we missed it by half a billion years?

6. The Dark Forest Theory; this is an attempt to answer the Fermi paradox (where's all the life?) based on game theory. Basically, any civilization would have to assume that a contact event would have a high probability of being catastrophic for that civilization. So if there are other civilizations out there, we should assume they are trying not to be found. (In Earth's history, our most influential contact-event was the European discovery of the Americas. It was disastrous for the Native Americans.)

This question was one of the three major 'problems' in Epicureanism that led St. Augustine of Hippo to reject the school as impossible to reconcile with the faith he was trying to codify. However attractive he found our ethics, he couldn't tolerate a philosophy that taught: first, that the Universe was the sport of chance; second, that the soul perished with the body; and third, that there were other worlds, and an infinity of time in both directions.

He responded thus; "There is no place beside the world, no time before the world." Some readers try to reinterpret that phrase to mean "no place beside the universe, etc..."

But it's very clear what he meant, and who he was responding to.

Thanks Cassius! The backdrop of this dialogue is Abonoteichus on the Black Sea, during the 'reign' of Alexander-the-Oracle-Monger, prophet of the snake-god Glycon. Lucian mentions that Alexander once made himself "supremely ridiculous" by burning a copy of Epicurus' Principle Doctrines and throwing the ashes into the sea. I wanted to explore the reaction of the Epicurean community to such aggressions.

I have Giordano Bruno in mind in the third line from the end, although I'm not sure that kind of sacrifice is really sound doctrine. And I'm also aware that "Scholarch" may not be the right word here, in a school so far from Athens.

This poem is written in the form of a sestina, with repeating end-words. The first stanza sets the pattern; each subsequent stanza recycles the words according to the one before, in this formula: 5, 2, 4, 3, 6, 1. Because the second-line word goes second in the next stanza as well, its position never changes. That word is "garden"--stable, reliable, unaltered.

The scene of the poem is the city written about by Lucian.

Abonoteichus - a dialogue

Scholarch:

By winds and waves that storm our coast for ages!

By sighing Aphrodite in her garden,

Where hast thou been my son, for there is fire

Deep in thine eyes, and strife upon thy temple?

What trial shakes thy soul with trembling atoms,

Sieging thy mind like a beleaguered city?

Ephebos:

I strain my limbs for use of all their atoms

And refuge take in this the soothing garden,

For multitudes are gathered at the temple

Where piled scrolls are ravaged in the fire!

A sickness lies upon this seething city,

And men disgrace the memory of ages!

Scholarch:

Ah--is that all? Have ye not seen this city

Charméd by snakes, defiling grove and garden,

With grim religion spreading fast as fire?

Have ye not seen them lurking by that temple--

and of all sexes, qualities, and ages--

Who rain on Epicurus scorn like atoms?

Ephebos:

But can it have been so in all past ages?

Can truth have grown free only in a garden

Which ought by rights have garlanded a temple?

Will all mankind forsake that sacred fire,

Spurning pleasure--denying void and atoms?

Naught but Euxine waters would cleanse this city!

Scholarch:

Peace son! Their worth is measured not in atoms.

Some yet will seek true health, and this our garden

Will beckon them--a solitary fire

Against the darkness; a bright green-grass temple

Unroofed to starlight, shining like a city,

And crowned with all the wisdom of the ages!

Ephebos:

Wilt thou then that we leave for that city?

Scholarch:

And bear the fruit of peace from out this garden.

Ephebos:

Even into the shadow of that temple?

Scholarch:

For Epicurus, even unto fire.

Ephebos:

And make his wisdom echo through the ages--

Scholarch:

And calm that rage, that rends his scrolls to atoms.

-josh

His Getty lecture was great. I really wish he had read the audiobook himself, it always enhances the experience if they're good at.

The Italian gentleman who did read the audiobook did well though, and his native language helped a lot with all of the Italian words and names.

You've been keeping busy! Looks great, I hope everyone has a good time!

Excellent post, Cassius, and happy Twentieth!

An excerpt from Thoreau's journal (emphasis mine).

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Up and down the town, men and boys that are under subjection are polishing their shoes and brushing their go-to-meeting clothes. I, a descendant of Northmen who worshipped Thor, spend my time worshipping neither Thor nor Christ; a descendant of Northmen who sacrificed men and horses, sacrifice neither men nor horses. I care not for Thor nor for the Jews. I sympathize not to-day with those who go to church in newest clothes and sit quietly in straight-backed pews. I sympathize rather with the boy who has none to look after him, who borrows a boat and a paddle and in common clothes sets out to explore these temporary vernal lakes. I meet such a boy paddling along under a sunny bank, with bare feet and his pants rolled up to his knees, ready to leap into the water at a moment’s warning. Better for him to read “Robinson Crusoe” than Baxter’s “Saints’ Rest.”

A life dedicated to pleasure and the study of nature. Nature ephermal, changing in appearance but unchanging in its atomic laws; raw, real, beautiful.

Fill your cup with pleasures!

Edward Abbey was an iconoclast, a contrarian, a gadfly, and a radical. He was a desert ranger, a poet, a novelist, a student of philosophy, and a keen observer of nature and human life. He was an aesthetic, a sensualist, an atheist, a materialist, and in general terms an antagonist. A provocateur.

In a list of his favorite poets, he names first Anacreon and then Lucretius . He is, after Thoreau, my second favorite essayist.

Here are a few of my favorite quotes:

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My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time. from his journal; (cf. Diogenes of Oenoanda)

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Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless. Desert Solitaire (places joy prior to virtue)

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As for the "solitary confinement of the mind," my theory is that solipsism, like other absurdities of the professional philosopher, is a product of too much time wasted in library stacks between the covers of a book, in smoke-filled coffeehouses (bad for brains) and conversation-clogged seminars. To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head: if he ducks he's a liar. His logic may be airtight but his argument, far from revealing the delusions of living experience, only exposes the limitations of logic. -Desert Solitaire (relevant to a lot of arguments, like free will and determinism)

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From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.

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If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a Juniper tree or the wings of a vulture-that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.

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Paradise is not a garden of bliss and changeless perfection where the lions lie down like lambs (what would they eat?) and the angels and cherubim and seraphim rotate in endless idiotic circles, like clockwork, about an equally inane and ludicrous -- however roseate -- unmoved mover. That particular painted fantasy of a realm beyond time and space which Aristotle and the church fathers tried to palm off on us has met, in modern times, only neglect and indifference passing on into oblivion it so richly deserved, while the paradise of which I write and wish to praise is with us yet, the here and now, the actual, tangible, dogmatically real earth on which we stand. -Desert Solitaire

Well, that's enough to be going on.

-josh

He is the PERFECT choice for Paul Atreides. Stellar casting.

I watched the movie before listening to the audiobook. Both were great. Armee Hammer (Oliver in the film) reads the audiobook. It was really well done.

Call Me By Your Name

André Aciman, 2007

I wasn't sure whether to do this here, but the novel is too beautiful and heart-breaking to put out of my mind, and too pleasant and relevant not to share.

Call Me By Your Name is a more-than-bi-curious coming-of-age tale set in a lovely Italian villa on the coast of the Mediterranean. A precocious and literary 17-year-old boy named Elio spends his summer days in the back garden, transcribing Bach as he strums the guitar or fingers the piano; or else dips in the pool in the noonday sun, or in the sea just beyond. Or on the tennis court, with friends and cousins. By evenings he dines alfresco with his cultivated and scholarly family--the conversation sliding between English, French, and Italian as it suits--while the sun sets, the wine flows and the apricots ripen in the garden orchard.

His father, a professor, hosts one American graduate student each year in a summer residency at the villa. The student this summer, a 24-year old named Oliver, is working on a manuscript for a book he's writing on Heraclitus and the Pre-Socratics. Over his six-week residency, the two young men forge a difficult, sensual and poignant friendship that will change both their lives forever.

Aciman's novel is a protracted study of human pleasures, and the barbs they leave in us after we've known them. The scene is rich with subtle ironies and affinities: a secular Jewish-American family living "discretely" in Catholic Italy; a life of the mind, living in a body that declines--refuses--to be ignored; a world of sepia-toned books and culture and music, and the raw red emotions that bleed inexorably through all the artifice. A world of Lucretius, and Heraclitus, and Giordano Bruno in the Campo Di Fiori; but also of Dante, of Mussolini, of the crowded churches of Rome. Parallel lives.

The novel is intelligent, powerful, raw, brooding, contemplative, and sensual. Highly recommended!

-josh

Thank you;

I did up the last stanza first, and wrote the rest as prelude. What I am beginning to understand is that so much of my thinking about Hellenism, philosophy, Epicurus, art, poetry, love, literature etc. is shadowed--I do not say overshadowed--by the hue of mortality. Some will, no doubt, find something morbid in this. A sickness of the soul--the sigh of Ecclesiastes, who has made the diagnosis (that life flows quickly, and leaves very little behind), but did not, could not, know the cure. (A god-shaped hole?)

But there is no sickness. No diagnosis to be made. I am not diseased. Not a god-shaped hole, but a whole, atomic in its unity, that needs no gods. I am merely, complete-ly, human. Nothing human is alien to me, said Terence. No man is an island, said Donne. Perhaps the old priest knew as much as the pagan poet after all.

I was 29 years old when I learned that the flower of the yucca was edible. Every lakota boy would have learned that by the age of 4. How many yuccas went untasted by me? The pleasures that salve us are all around; will we see them? We will learn of them in time; those natural palliatives? Not a cure, for we need and want no cure, but a sweetness, the scent of which lifts our heads to ever-higher glories. A light that shines on us in the dark; not like the copper's torch, to catch us slinking in fear; but like the stars, shining into a dim close wood, and finding us rising, rising to their shining!

-josh

Iowa Fields

to Epicurus

I saw Ilium gleam

As her walls, in a dream,

Watched her sons return home on their shields--

Saw the marching Greek host

In the corn, and the coast

Of Asia in

Iowa fields.

The philosophers spoke

In the shade of the oak

As the willows and cottonwoods reeled

In an October gale

Blowing hearty and hale,

Pages flipping in

Iowa fields

And I wrote out your name

On the face of the stream,

Writ in water but never repealed--

Made your garden to bloom

Like the yucca, festooned;

Flowering lonely in

Iowa fields.

And your precepts I pressed

Like a stamp to my chest--

And a ring on my finger revealed

Where your likeness was cast

And a voice from the past

Rose up godlike in

Iowa fields.

I hoped to see thee again

By the feld or the fen

When the bells of the Twentieth pealed.

But--alas! lies my ring

At the end of all things

In a grave beneath

Iowa fields.