Posts by Joshua

Some part of my brain is snagging on that orientation line.

I believe the author means it to correlate with the line above. As in, "The Stoics believe that the source of moral authority is Natural Law, and the orientation of moral authority is that it applies universally to everyone." And, "The Epicureans believe that the source of moral authority is human agreement, and the orientation of moral authority is that its application is relative to varying human agreements."

It is not Universalist in the sense that some Christian sects are Universalist (that is, in their eschatology--"all souls end up in heaven").

As for moral relativism, which will no doubt be a charge leveled against Epicurus, the false assumption here is that the victims of a given covenant of justice have necessarily given it their assent. An Epicurean may well argue that slavery was immoral even in ancient Greece, in spite of their social conventions, specifically because the slave was never a party to the 'social contract' in the first place. The first lesson for the Epicurean to draw from this is the necessity of securing protection from other men, by means of self-sufficiency and friendship. The second lesson is this; that when the argument qualifying the idea of justice-by-convention is taken to it's natural conclusion, it is in the end an argument for democracy; for general franchise; for limited government; and for free expression.

The "Natural Law", by contrast will always be a cudgel in the hands of dictators and theocrats, for whom moral certitude forms the thin veneer of respectability concealing their depredations.

Or so I think. ? -josh

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I read an anti-polis / anti-state, somewhat anarchic message into this, that must have repercussions in a philosophy education.

Hiram offers an interesting and subtle bit of textual criticism here, and I think it's worth exploring.

It's a famously difficult maxim for several reasons. It is removed from its context; it doesn't adequately define or explore either of the two options presented; and, most curiously, it doesn't even make it obvious which of the two is preferable! This last challenge invites the reader to infer from it almost anything they like. I could, for example, infer and defend any of the following if I considered only this text in isolation:

1.) The student will know the difference between studying philosophy for herself and studying philosophy for all of Greece, and will choose to study for herself.

Or, 2.) The student will know the difference between studying philosophy for herself and studying philosophy for all of Greece, and will choose to study for all of Greece.

Or, 3.) The student will know the difference between studying philosophy for herself and studying philosophy for all of Greece, but won't decide between them. Perhaps employing a bit of game theory, she'll choose to study philosophy for herself for all of Greece!

When I first encountered it, it didn't even occur to me that there were multiple possible interpretations. "Well," I thought, "of course the Epicurean will study philosophy for herself. The point of philosophy is to cure the dis-ease of the soul." And despite the obvious example of Epicurus himself (who in a sense did study philosophy for Greece--see Lucretius' paean in Book 1), I still favor this reading; itself an indirect indictment of the nauseating proto-totalitarianism of the Platonic philosopher-king.

And another point I've thought of; acquiring many and nice clothes is an entirely different prospect for us today than it was even a century or two ago. The average teenager in our time wears more different shirts in a week than were worn in a year by the lower classes before the machination of laundry, weaving, knitting, and stitching. You can present yourself well without anything like what it would have cost before. And especially if you live in a modern city, you may dress stylishly and still not be ostentatious by comparison.

This will, of course, depend on culture. But there's an interesting corollary question regarding the ostentation of simplicity. This is wonderfully expressed by a story I once read, doubtless apocryphal, about Diogenes the Cynic. In any case I can't find it just now, but I recall it going like this; He went about Athens in the humblest of garb, browbeating citizens for their finery. Why should a man care what he wears? When he was at the public baths one day, his ratty cloak was stolen and replaced by fine robes. He refused these, and demanded from the young men standing by that they return his cloak.

"Ah," one of them responded, "but you have said that a wise man should take no care of what he wears. But we see now that you do care; here is YOUR pride and ostentation!"

And what do I think of this story? The cynic, fearing that he should be misunderstood by men, cannot take fine clothes. It would be the end of him as a cynic, for to be a cynic is nothing more than to be a reactionary to culture. The Epicurean, who follows a path of principles and not merely one of apposition, will not refuse the clothes because he will not fear to be misunderstood. Being misunderstood is, for him, de rigeur. And so he dons the finery, thanks his new friends for their gift, and perhaps invites them to dine that evening.

I'll poke into that when I've got time. My senior thesis was on the subject of the transcendentalists. Some remarkable characters, but none that I would point to immediately as being Epicurean in any deep sense.

Excellent reading, folks! It's no wonder Walt Whitman was a shock to such people: he was the supreme poet of the celebration of the body in that dull age when men most wanted to deny it.

I found an interesting article on Whitman's relationship to the subject;

https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2012/12/23/wal…ems-of-science/

Although perhaps that needs it's own thread.

-josh

Edit; I've just learned that Whitman's father was a devoted student of Frances Wright, attending her lectures and subscribing to her publication. There may be a more-than-cursory connection here after all.

We are animals thrown up by the seeds of things, before we are philosophers. Children wailing helpless on the shores of life, before we are men and women. Music doesn't affect us like philosophy does, but it certainly affects us. It affects us like sunlight and verdure, like clear air and space to move in. Penicillin will cure the fool as easily as the wise man, but none will argue for that that it is not medicine. It will purge the disease, but it will not make you strong. You've got to make yourself strong, with discipline and purpose.

With music, you may interrupt the mind's endless restless anxiety. You may take a pause to purge for a time your own fretful neuroses, and begin, in the intervals, to clarify your thoughts. Coming to your senses in a literal way, you will have calmed the turbulence of the mind, and primed the pump of thought for wise recollection. That will be the time for discipline, and right reason. That will be the time to bathe your mind once again in the precepts of true philosophy.

It is true that we frequently squander those moments of elevation, and true that they are not a sufficient condition of happiness. But as men are not gods, we are not always in a mood receptive to wisdom. When I'm frustrated and angry, I am closed off to wisdom. But a little later, when the heart rate has settled and the amygdala calms done, I look back and see how silly I was a moment ago. We need that withdrawal, from stress and anxiety and struggle. Music, and conversation, and wine, and a walk in the garden may move us into a such a state. Music cultivates the soil of the mind--it will not grow into good on it's own, but if one takes the opportunity to nurture the seed of philosophy in that rich loam, can it fail to bear fruit?

Hiram's edition, actually. My Amazon review is dated January 2018. (I've just found it again myself. My review reads as a bit sappy to me now, but the emotion was utterly genuine.)

More disconnected brain ramblings; there's a story related by the great French essayist Montaigne about the justice system of the time. An innocent man was condemned to die; when the actual criminals were found out and confessed, the judges met to discuss this first man's fate. They decided that he must still be executed, because "it was better to execute an innocent man than endanger respect for law." (Paraphrase by William Hazlitt).

There's an exchange in a A Few Days in Athens where the subject of criminal rehabilitation comes up. Metrodorus (having to mind the memory of the scandalous behavior of his brother Timocrates) takes the position that some crimes are so beyond the pale that the guilty are irredeemable. Epicurus seems to take the position that redemption is always possible, and mercy is to be favored if there's a chance of atonement. Not canon, of course, but not bad.

For myself, I rather like that scene from Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons that Christopher Hitchens was fond of citing in defense of free expression.

It's worth noting that for Epicurus justice existed not naturally but by convention. If men convened in order to criminalize impiety (as of course they generally do, when given half a chance), the teachings of Epicurus would themselves be the act of a reprobate. I'm aware that I haven't really answered your question...

That's a lovely passage, Elli, and conveys the feeling exactly. Thank you!

it's stunning, Hiram. My favorite state to drive in. Someday I'll convince my friends to get out here with me, and we'll see it properly!

Thank you, Cassius! I'm afraid you guys will have to stomach a bit of my journaling from time to time.

There's a good deal of Edward Abbey in this post. I've done it off-the-cuff, hopefully I haven't drawn too heavily. My excuse shall be that I think of him everytime I come this way.

6:30 AM.

I've been up for five hours, wending my way west from Wamsutter to Salt Lake City. Sitting at the dock now, relieved of duty for a time, and watching the morning sun light up the snow-gilt eyries between Flat Top and Farnsworth Peak, I recline a bit deeper into the chair and rest my head. Good old Utah. The bustle of industry is a faint buzz in my ears, but between my thoughts and that mountain there's nothing but morning air and sunshine. I'm aware of it now; that much-vaunted inner world. The palace of monks and poets, ascetics and philosophers.

Ne plus ultra. No more beyond; beyond that snowy eminence, nothing but blue sky. And inside, interiorly, nothing beyond the vague and scarcely intelligible patter of a mind finally at something near to rest. Is that right? I know, of course, that it isn't; that beyond that blue sky is an infinity of space and time, of worlds wheeling off into eternity. And within, the deep imperceptible currents of subconscious; the stirring impressions of a lifetime of experience, the fight-or-flight instinct of the lizard-brain, the molecular lust and terror for life and immortality. For permanence.

But for myself, I am content with surfaces. The mountain, for instance, and the idling engine of a freightliner next to me. Red Earth and Blue Sky. Not for me the cant and polemic of theology and philosophy; well, not this morning at any rate. Perspective! That's what I mean; a life lived partially in the academic world of thought and disputation, and partially here--OUT here, out beneath the sun and wind and sailing cloud. A time to partake of the refulgent pleasure of just BEing. The dream of the aesthetic, that's what I yearn for; all the light and power of true philosophy, shot through with the golden sweetness of beauty, form, loveliness and pleasure. Will I ever tire of such vistas?

Could I ever want more than this?

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Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

-Henry David Thoreau

Thanks awfully, gentleman! I'm beginning to feel that as I spend more time here, I shall certainly write more. Your idea about the recorder, Godfrey, is an idea I've had but have not implemented. Initiative and discipline; the very things I need. And not presumptuous in the least! I'll post more lines as they come to me.

-josh

Oh, no! Sorry, I meant The Swerve. His previous book was Will in the World, which was my first of his. A biography of Shakespeare, and nothing to do with Epicurus. The Swerve, for all its many faults, genuinely captivated me. Greenblatt reveals the architecture of a solid materialist foundation beneath Lucretius' frequently erroneous didactics.

It's true, for example, that Lucretius has the size of the sun all wrong. But what's more important was the brilliant insight that the Earth was merely one world among many in an infinite and centerless universe. These errors (minor quibbles when compared to the groundless cosmology of the Academics) are nevertheless obstacles to the modern mind in approaching the Epicureans. The texts by Greenblatt and DeWitt are foremost among those attempting to clear those obstacles, and while DeWitt's work is more useful and more important, Greenblatt's work is far more accessible to the general reader.

That was a reference to Stephen Greenblatt, who was a Shakespeare scholar and Norton Anthology editor to me, before he was anything else. We were assigned his earlier book in a college course on Shakespeare.

Griffin's reading of the De Rerum Natura is the finest reading of any poem I've ever encountered. His rendition of Book I is haunting! Someday I'd like to bite the bullet and start working through a good audio Latin course.

Thank you, Cassius.

I am Joshua, a native of Sioux City, Iowa. I'm a long-haul trucker with a BA in the humanities (a double major in History and English Literature, more specifically).

My early education was concerned mostly with history and political theory, but I was an early reader of the stoics, picking up the Meditations in the same week as my high school graduation. In the years that followed I diverged from history in my pleasure reading. I got into Thoreau rather heavily, reading everything he ever published, and followed that thread through Walden to the East. Having long since abandoned the Catholicism of my boyhood, I began to devour the great scriptures of the world--the Bhagavat Gita, the Upanishads, the Dhammapada and the sutras of Buddhism. The Chinese classics; Analects, Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu. In the meantime I had the opportunity to travel; to Greece, to Italy, to the British Isles.

I began to feel in the end that my own Frank denial of metaphysical idealism and the supernatural were incompatible with this reading. I was an "internet atheist", and without a home East or West. I had, of course, known by then of a materialist school that had flourished in Greece for a time, but its hedonism was repugnant to my sensibilities. I had never read its works.

When a Harvard Professor I quite admired (from Will in the World) wrote a book on Epicureanism, I was intrigued. I read it. I read it again. I ordered a copy of Lucretius and read that; and when I soon after read the seminal work of Norman Wentworth DeWitt, I was converted. It was strange; I had been to Herculaneum. To Athens. How had I missed all this?

I consume a lot of audiobooks on the road, but there are four paperbacks by my bed. One is Walden. The other three are Lucretius, DeWitt, and Frances Wright. I, too, am an Epicurean!

Strange star! Light, lingering in the West, whoso

Wouldst gleam this eve o'er silken river and

The silt hills, and thread the hanging grotto

Of dew-laden boughs with thy shimmering strand--

You, who call forth the sun upon the morn,

Setting fire to heaven, spreading light

And vital heat to the meridian!

In wondrous light all things on Earth are born,

Reared, and given to passionate delight

In the sweetness of life!

Cytherean

Maid, keep you by night to some secret

Tryst? Awaiting a youth handsome and bold

To steal over the garden wall and get

Your hand in his, and kiss you as he holds?

O Venus, you! Whose ancient light deceives

Me not, skating along the face of things,

For I know its weft, and find it delved deep

In the roots and bones of Earth. Thy reprieve

Falls sweet--Tarry here, counsel me to sing

Of old seeds of truths grasped, and pleasures reaped!

The lamp of Vesper hangs still, a pale urn

Watering our sleep with light and dewy dreams;

But the motion of all things is return--

Sink, and rise again. I trace thy gleam

Wandering, alighting waves far past my sight,

And sail thy wake on craft of human thought.

Stars do not shine that men may calibrate

Their instruments--float on! But my delight

Shall be to wash on Grecian shores, where taught

A sage long past whose simple truths abate

All Earthly fears.

That man, a Greek, fallen

Into mortal memory--to stardust

And starlight, scattering in the swollen

Void those atoms that were the scene of lusts

And terrors long conquered--Searching out the

Grounds of wise choice and avoidance, he lived

In this world a match even for gods

In happiness. His voice echoes to me

Across the centuries; he has contrived

A path of wisdom, pleasant still to trod--

A path incorruptible, laid forever.

Good evening, all! My name is Joshua, and I'm rather new around here. I've been an Epicurean for some few years, and I have occasionally been possessed by the notion to write a longform materialist poem in English. In my vision (forever out of reach) this would correct the two major deficiencies in Lucretius; first, the many (albeit generally trifling) mistaken scientific hypotheses in his poem. And second, the temporal disadvantage that separated him from the death pangs of pagan philosophy and the subsequent brutal intolerance of revelation.

To make a long story short, I began such a poem by degrees but soon found the rhyme and meter burdensome. I may add to it further, or start again in blank verse as time allows, but in any case I'll post it here for your perusal. I am desirous of letting it out for several reasons. For one thing, because I shall be pleased to have feedback! But I offer it as encouragement also; in the hope that some here will be pleased to know that there is a quiet, brooding literature in the world, unknown to you but not altogether unconnected. (To be continued...)