Posts by Joshua

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

Loving these fragments, Hiram!

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.

Great post, Elayne! I've known my oldest and best friends since we were 3 or 4 years old in preschool together. If I lied about my emotional state to them, they would know I was lying straight off, and would call me out on it! I hope I would do as much for them.

Nearly 30 years later, I know that there will always be a place for me at their table; on their couch; around their campfire. A place I can always go back to, and it would feel just like going home.

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We must have infinite faith in each other. If we have not, we must never let it leak out that we have not.

Henry David Thoreau, Journals

Interesting article, thanks for that.

Theology has been disastrous for healthcare initiatives in Africa. The Catholic position on contraceptives has meant untold numbers dying horribly from HIV transmission, and Islamic resistance to "western" immunization is one of the obstacles that has forestalled the eradication of Polio in countries like Nigeria. So it's definitely worthwhile pointing out that there are cultural resources inherent to Africa that antedate the arrival of the missionaries, and can be called upon to unite her people.

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-hedonism

The pursuit of one's own pleasure as an end in itself; in ethics, the view that such a pursuit is the proper aim of all action. Since there are different conceptions of pleasure there are correspondingly different varieties of hedonism.

-Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy

I think that hedonism has a sufficiently clipped and precise definition, particularly under the heading of ethics.

However, I also understand that many are apt to confuse the word with sybaritism, and libertinism. But it will always be the case that the real confusion is over the word pleasure itself. No getting around that, I'm afraid.

Thank you all. Looking forward to it. Carpe Diem, and all that!

Martin has posited that democracy is a political system consistent with Epicurean philosophy. I agree, and have argued here before that convention implies legitimate power ONLY over those who agree to convention. I.E. excluding slavery, totalitarianism, theocracy, etc.

The reason I don't give that answer myself for number 4 is simply because the textual tradition isn't strong enough to justify it.

For my own part, I agree with you!

Those four answers show precisely what kind of muddled thinker Rand really was.

1. Identifying metaphysics as objective reality just punts the question. What "is" objective reality? What is it made of?

2. Reason can build on epistemology, but it does not stand in for it. Epistemology must answer to something more "prime"; as sensation (for an empiricist), revelation (as in theology), a priori knowledge, feelings, anticipations, etc. Reason operates on knowledge--it is not a foundation of knowledge on which to operate.

3. Self-interest is actually a valid, if often wrong-headed, ethical system.

4. Capitalism is a theory and expression of economics, not really of politics. She wants to offer it as a counterpoint to Marxism, which offers a theory of economics, a theory of history, AND a theory of government. But that was never what capitalism was; a society can have a capitalist economy, and still have all of its political decisions ahead of it.

But to answer your question;

1. Metaphysics: Atomic Materialism (one kind of philosophical naturalism)

2. Epistemology: the Canon: Sensations, Feelings, and Anticipations.

3. Ethics: Hedonism*

4 Politics: [theory or practice?]

4a: theory of politics: Arises by human convention.

4b: practice of politics: N/A (unrelated to the questions that concern the Epicurean.)

*of Hedonism, three kinds; egotistical, altruistic, rational. In my opinion, Epicurus advocated rational hedonism; no need to consider everyone else's pleasure (altruism), nor any wisdom in ignoring the same (egotism); instead, consider other's pleasure and pain rationally, as it bears on your own hedonic calculus. That is why friendship is initially founded in utility.

That is the number one problem I have with this idea, Godfrey. My all-time favorite podcast is Hello Internet, and honestly I don't even care what they're talking about that day. Just two interesting and VERY different guys having an interesting conversation. I am nowhere near quick enough on my feet to do that kind of show.

Thanks, Cassius. I think when it comes to hedone vs aponia, I'll damn the torpedoes and forge ahead ?

I go home for a week in August, so that's when I expect things will get rolling. In the meantime I'll be working on setting up a basic website to host it, getting together some equipment, making a logo, writing scripts, lining up some music if I go that route, etc.

In the meantime, I can still record passable mp3's with my phone mic. So I'll probably try and record some texts here soonish to get sharpen some vocal skills. I know there's an audio clip section somewhere, so I'll post those (or send them to you?) as they come.

So what I'm thinking for a format is something like that for an opener. A few relevant quotes to kick off each episode, the "mission statement" script. Then a short instrumental, and then a brief outline of the subject for that show. After that, a longer reading from an epicurean text, and a "sermon" (for lack of a better word) on how the modern epicurean can apply the teachings to their own situation.

I want the show to avoid some of the abstruse textual sticking points, and the esoteric arguments over free will, etc. That stuff is all important, but what I would want to listen to would be a show that was simple, straightforward, repetitive on the important points; it should be the kind of content that inspires and affirms, and convinces the listener to go out and really USE the philosophy. Like a Christian devotional, or a Buddhist dharma-talk.

I consume a lot of audio, and am really feeling deeply the absence of a good podcast dedicated to Epicurean philosophy. I understand that maybe Oscar is working on something?

In any case, I have a pretty good voice (or so I'm told...I spent enough years working in drive-through restaurants to be confident of this). I've been kicking around an idea for some time, and I finally made a (very short!) recording.

My primary obstacles right now are that I live in a truck, I have no equipment, I don't entirely know what to talk about, and dealing with computers makes my head hurt.

However! I registered a few domains today, and I will be playing around with this idea further. So (if this blasted link actually works) I present my initial pitch for a new podcast...A Mortal Brew.

Thanks, Hiram. That looks like a good read, I'll look at it more closely later today. I was myself a vegetarian for 14 months (basically up until I went over-the-road), and still have sympathies there. That's mostly an objection to how we raise them rather than how we kill them, pain being an evil and all. My parents have started raising animals again, on a small hobby farm; and I have always supported hunting and fishing. (I don't do either...purely out of laziness and to avoid the mess!)

That's an excellent idea, Martin! Having consumed a good bit of Eastern spiritual literature after college, I would note that Near-Death experiences, like "memories" of "past lives", are totally dependent on the cultural upbringing of the subject.

When Hindus have near-death experiences, they NEVER see Jesus of Nazareth. When Christian's have them, they NEVER see Krishna or Buddha or their next reincarnation.

What this tells me is that the neuro-chemistry of their brain is throwing up incomprehensible outputs that involve deep emotion, and the subject plugs that scattered noise into an existing cognitive framework (i.e. religion).

There was one case in America recently where the subject was a child and the father shamelessly profiteered off his imaginative deliriums. When he he came into adolescence, he renounced the fraud and apologized (although he did not renounce Christianity). The publishers were forced to pull the book from shelves. His name was Alex Malarkey for those curious.

I do mean "FALL to grief". Hermarchus, despite his protest in Line 1, has been grieving already internally. Maybe he feels the triple burden--the death of Epicurus, the responsibility for the school, the care of the children of Metrodorus--maybe he feels it's all too much. But when he sees that one of the young scholars has placed a wreath of laurel onto the cold marble bust, and that out of reverence and joy rather than grief, he is overcome by an emotion of relief and catharsis. Even should he fail in his task (as scholarch), he now understands that the master's teachings will endure.

Absolutely! I find Hermarchus a fascinating character, and I wish we knew more about him. Wrote this one last night and didn't think much of it, but when I read it this morning I made a few line changes and decided I liked it after all.