Posts by Don

Quote from Elayne

Awareness of sequential pleasure would be nothing if not for the fact that such awareness itself is pleasure, and I am quite certain I myself experience it as a feeling 😃 and not a cognition.

Okay, I'll give you that. But you're still just precognitively reacting to stimuli with the sensation of pleasure. I keep coming back to the fact that humans react to stimuli with either pleasure or pain (I'm trying to stay within the Epicurean canon). We describe how that sensation makes us "feel" with language, but we experience the sensation itself precognitively.

Quote from Elayne

If a person felt guilty about pleasure, awareness of sequential pleasure wouldn't feel happy but painful.

Interesting premise although I don't think that's the case. One can't experience pleasure "as" pain. They would be experiencing pain. What you seem to be describing is how someone would be thinking about their feelings which sounds contrary to your next statement.

Quote from Elayne

I do think Platonism has penetrated culture sufficiently that there are some people who define the word conceptually. But I stand by my assertion that most ordinary people, non academics, "feel happy" rather than "think happy."

I don't think Platonism is at play here. We're not defining an ideal happiness.

Are you then simply using the same word "happy" to stand in for "pleasure"? What about all the synonyms for happy?

I'm not saying you "think happy". What I'm saying is that:

1) A person experiences the sensation of what is called "pleasure" as opposed to a sensation of "pain" or they are experiencing more pleasure right now than pain.

2) That person interprets that sensation as "making" them happy. At the speed of thought, so it might appear simultaneous. But the sensation comes first. The description comes second.

People can try to convince themselves to say they're happy. You can't fool yourself as to sensing pleasure or pain.

Quote from Bryan

Here are some personal notes I have on the Principle Doctrines along with some new translations.

Just started to look through, but this looks great. Thanks for sharing!

In the interest of reciprocity: https://sites.google.com/view/epicureansage here's a translation I did of the characteristics of the Epicurean sage.

Quote from Elayne

I did a poll once of my FB friends on whether happiness is a feeling or a concept. They said feeling except for one person. The songs "Don't worry, be happy", "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands"-- these are feeling songs. To use it abstractly is a philosophy attempt to denigrate feeling by saying your happy feeling isn't real happiness-- you should seek an abstract ideal instead. It's the ivory tower against the people, trying to make life esoteric 😂. That's Platonic, to make it abstract.

I use it the way ordinary people do, as an expression of a pleasurable feeling.

I don't agree. The feeling/reaction to a situation or stimulus is *pleasure.* "Being happy" is the cognitive response to that feeling of pleasure. "Happiness" is the state of being that you are aware of yourself being in when you experience sequential pleasurable sensations over a certain duration.

If I say "I'm happy," one can ask "Why are you happy?" This thing and this thing and this event "make" me happy. Happiness can often be broken down into constituent parts.

"If I say "Aaaaaaah" as i close my eyes and look up on a warm sunlit day, I'm experiencing pleasure. I may also think "I'm happy" at that moment but that comes after the actual sensation of pleasure.

Quote from Cassius

"That's what I find so intriguing about the range of words translated as happy from the texts: makarios, eudaimonia, then types of happiness like euphrosyne and khara."

Don is it safe to presume that these words had different shades of meaning, so that using happiness in each case is almost certainly overbroad?

Yep

I'm thinking happiness is more of a process or state or condition: the state of a continued subjective sense of well-being or contentment.

"I am happy" has a spectrum of meaning.

That's what I find so intriguing about the range of words translated as happy from the texts:

makarios, eudaimonia, then types of happiness like euphrosyne and khara.

"I am happy" has so many shades as to be almost open to meaning anything unless we say "I know it when I see it."

My quick reaction to that thread heading is pleasure (vs pain) is a reaction to something. I would agree happiness is an abstract concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjectiv…ing?wprov=sfla1

Quote

This is why we say that pleasure is the beginning and the end of a completely happy life. καὶ διὰ τοῦτο τὴν ἡδονὴν ἀρχὴν καὶ τέλος λέγομεν εἶναι τοῦ μακαρίως ζῆν.

Happiness is such a vague concept even among positive psychology researchers. Like the proverbial obscenity: "I know it when I see it." It's used to translate any number of words in the original texts, sometimes it seems arbitrarily. Here it's the same word from PD1 translated "blessed" there.

[ADMIN NOTE: This is an very important discussion that needs to be findable in the future, so I clipped the next several posts from another thread and pasted them here, in an older thread directly on point]

I get where you're coming from. I do have a question:

Quote from Matt

My position is this...pleasure is the goal. Happiness is the goal.

Which is it? Technically, those are two goals. You can't run both ways down the field.

One caveat off the top of my head: We have to be careful about calling what Epicurus and the ancient Greeks did "science." They wrote and thought about things that we would group under the heading of "science" but they weren't "doing science." They called their pursuits "physiology" (to anglicize their term) - the study of nature writ large, φύσις (physis) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physis?wprov=sfla1. They observed and thought about how the natural world works - including the whole cosmos - but calling it "science" places undue burden on their obligation to be "right." It sets up an unfair comparison where people can be smug and denigrate and deride how much they "got wrong." We need to look at their accomplishments in context and appreciate why they thought what they did. "Proto-science" or the precursor of science, but not "science."

Thank you, Cassius , for putting that post together. There's a LOT to unpack there. Here are some initial thoughts.

Cosmos, world, universe. The English words here obscure and obfuscate what Epicurus actually said. There's an interesting excerpt from the Letter to Pythokles:

Quote

[DL X.88]... ...A world is a circumscribed portion of the universe, which contains stars and earth and all other visible things, cut off from the infinite, and terminating [and terminating in a boundary which may be either thick or thin, a boundary whose dissolution will bring about the wreck of all within it] in an exterior which may either revolve or be at rest, and be round or triangular or of any other shape whatever. All these alternatives are possible : they are contradicted by none of the facts in this world, in which an extremity can nowhere be discerned. [89] "That there is an infinite number of such worlds can be perceived, and that such a world may arise in a world or in one of the intermundia (by which term we mean the spaces between worlds) in a tolerably empty space and not, as some maintain, in a vast space perfectly clear and void.

The "world" here is [kosmos] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l…0:chapter=1&i=1

The "universe" is [ouranos] the "vault or firmament of heaven" http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l…r=1&i=1#lexicon

It almost seems to me that in this case, the [kosmos] is the "visible universe" and the [ouranos] is the entire universe. But it also seems like the cosmos (to use the usual English spelling of that word) is the only part of the universe that we have access to because the cosmos has " stars and earth and all other visible things, cut off from the infinite, and terminating [and terminating in a boundary...]"

Now, I'm betting that Epicurus's concept of the cosmos was the Earth surrounded by a firmament of fixed stars and moving planets in the sky/heavens/ouranos. That is *our* cosmos. But the ouranos was bigger than our cosmos and could include other cosmoi to which we may not have access. And the extent of these cosmoi -- ours plus all the rest -- were [apeiros] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l…r=1&i=5#lexicon literally "not-limited" or boundless or infinite. According to the Pythokles letter, our cosmos *has* some kind of boundary but exists in an infinite heaven (NOTE: This has NOTHING to do with a religious "heaven"! Poetic nomenclature only for the expanse of the universe.] Our cosmos is just a piece of the infinite. So, our cosmos could be both infinite and bounded. Wrap your brain around this one: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/8897…ite-and-bounded

I have more thoughts to come, but I wanted to end on this. I firmly believe that one must avoid equating Epicurus's atomos with our modern concept of an atom. Epicurus's point was that the atomos (and I'm purposefully using the Greek transliteration to make the point) was a finite particle of stuff that was "uncuttable". It didn't change and was also distinct from what it made up. Atomoi made up dogs, trees, and people but there were not dog-atomoi, tree-atomoi, and people-atimoi. His primary mission in this was to contend against rival theories of his day. He wasn't trying to establish the Standard Model of quarks, gluons, mesons we have today. He'd be intrigued by this maybe, but I don't think he'd change his system. His system was adequate for his purposes. So when people slight him or try to dismiss him or try to shoehorn atomoi into the modern Standard Model, they all miss some part of the point. If you need an analog for atomoi in the modern theories, my suggestion is to think of them more as elements that make up molecules. The elements don't change whether they're in a star, a tree, or your big toe. They come together to form compounds. The elements -as building blocks - are a basic constituent of compounds. That's what Epicurus wanted to get across. There are basic building blocks in the Cosmos that can be put together in infinite ways. He posited that these building blocks were uncuttable to avoid the problem of an infinite regression. He *decided* you have to stop somewhere. That somewhere for him was the level of the atomos. You don't need to go further to account for the things in the cosmos.

Quote from Elayne

I would like to reassure readers that in no way would a temporally finite universe, a universe with a beginning, have any effect on the universe being material, without supernatural realms or entities, and that it is unnecessary to adopt an infinite model just to resolve anxiety about such things. None of the current physics models include supernatural gods.

And, just to emphasize, Epicurus did not posit *any* responsibility for the "gods" (however he conceived of them or we understand his conception of the "divine") in the creation or administration of the cosmos. Atoms composing things and void through which the atoms can move: That's it. However the cosmos exists, it exists as a physical, material thing governed by knowable physical processes.

I'm sure many if not all of you saw this blog exchange a while ago between Wilson and Pigliucci but, if not, this seemed a good spot to repost:

https://massimopigliucci.medium.com/guest-post-wro…sm-6f60ae1df232

I don't agree with all of Wilson's characterizations of Epicureanism, but the back and forth between the two was at least entertaining after a fashion.

This stanza of Ithaka rang very Epicurean to me:

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Always keep Ithaca in your mind.

To arrive there is your ultimate goal.

But do not hurry the voyage at all.

It is better to let it last for many years;

and to anchor at the island when you are old,

rich with all you have gained on the way,

not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

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It made me think of Epicurus's instruction to remember the pleasures of your past so you don't grow old. And also the connection between ataraxia and smooth sailing.

Paian Anax! Thanks so much for spurring me to look into his work!

Quote from Cassius

AUDIO Miris - C. P. Cavafy - Read By Elli Pensa

That was great! Thanks Cassius for sharing Elli 's wonderful, heartfelt recitation! I've heard of Cavafy by name but was unfamiliar with his work. Time to investigate!

I would agree with Joshua . Lucretius knew what he was doing. Venus aka Aphrodite is the goddess of eros, sexual desire/lust, from which all life is born. You can't have babies and successive generations without the - let's say - pleasurable procreative act. This is *the* act of the creation of life.

I also wanted to weigh in on Elli's note about VS 78 if anyone is confused by her "noble/brave" comment:

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78. The noble/brave soul is devoted most of all to wisdom and to friendship — one a mortal good, the other immortal. ὁ γενναῖος περὶ σοφίαν καὶ φιλίαν μάλιστα γίγνεται, ὧν τὸ μέν ἐστι θνητὸν ἀγαθόν, τὸ δὲ ἀθάνατον.

Epicurus's word in question is ὁ γενναῖος. Elli is absolutely correct that in modern Greek ὁ γενναῖος means "brave" https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?ti…&oldid=54707874

However, in Ancient Greek the meaning was connected with "being true to one's birth or descent" http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?do…entry=gennai=os It's easy to see how this came down to modern times with the meaning "brave" (i.e., noble, high-born people were supposed to be brave). Words change meaning over time, sometimes in much more surprising ways like English "sad" which used to mean "satisfied, sated, full" https://www.etymonline.com/word/sad#etymonline_v_22587

Here's another TED Talk about the capuchin monkey experiment with grapes and cucumbers:

I'd suggest when viewing, substitute "just" for "fair" and "justice" for "fairness." That certainly looks like some basic innate characteristics to me from way back in our evolutionary inheritance.

Quote from JJElbert

Hippocrates' understanding of internal medicine, and its supposed foundation in the fluctuations of the four 'humors', is so wrong that it can be difficult for us to appreciate how much progress he had made toward being right.

That is a very important statement right there. Well put, Joshua !

JCRAGO You may be interested in the thread where I'm sharing my notes on Obbink's work on Philodemus's On Piety: Philodemus On Piety

One of the key words in the Latin is on line 131:

sponte

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l…129&i=1#lexicon

So images/idols/eidōlon/simulacra can interact with each other: horse eidōlon + human eidōlon = centaur eidōlon.

I also had second... third... I lost count... thoughts on that self-generated images section from the beginning of Book IV. I saw another few translations at work today. Now I'm wondering if the images are there, in the air, but the reason we see them is because they interact with the clouds. It isn't that the clouds form images/idols/simulacra of their own accord. The cloud takes on an image when an existing image in the air interacts with the cloud then fades away as the image/eidola/simulacra moves on thru the air.