Posts by Little Rocker

Quote from Don

Do I remember correctly that Lucretius specifically writes about having difficulty translating Greek words/ideas into Latin... Or am I thinking of Cicero?

Cicero also definitely complains about it, mostly when discussing all the technical terms of the Stoics. From De Finibus 3.5: 'The most learned people [the Greeks], working in a language which is generally considered to be richer than our own [Latin], are still allowed to use unfamiliar terms when dealing with recondite material. All the greater is the allowance that should be made for us [folks writing in Latin] who are so bold as to tackle these topics for the first time.' (trans. Woolf). Of course, he then claims Latin is technically superior--he just has to invent a lot of new words himself.

This thread reminded me of a blog post from a while back about the correspondence between the Spinoza scholar Yitzhak Melamed and an Amsterdam rabbi. The rabbi's rejection of Melamed's request was later overruled, but the record of Spinoza as an 'Epicourous' (note the caps like a proper noun) unworthy of a lifetime of study remains.

I've been wanting to read that Epicurean Ethics in Horace book, but it's checked out of the library and Oxford has listed the book at the price of your first born child.

Was thinking about this thread today after I listened to John Prine's 'Spanish Pipedream.'

I had the same thought, Joshua. I think you're right that the capital 'T' makes 'truth' sufficiently Platonic to make Epicurus fine with rejecting it, but I wonder what you think about the next sentence--all is permitted.

Yeah, I think this approach is fascinating and likely correct, though it is still sort of niche by contrast to the old-guard 'computational' model of the mind. You find more extended mind folks among evolutionary biologists. I hadn't really thought about it with respect to Epicurus, but it would be cool to look at the text. It's possible that his views about living together outside of town are in some sense indicative of how he thinks the environs affect thought, for example.

I also have a sad history of killing succulents, but I grew tomatoes for a few summers before I started traveling regularly, and it was amazingly rewarding. I say give it a go! As for Epicurus, there seems to have been a record of him writing to thank a friend for selling grain at a fair price during scarcity, and another record of the Epicureans rationing beans. So as Don says, it seems they did grow many things, but like everyone else, they were not entirely self-sustaining. As I understand it, Greece always had trouble growing enough food to feed its population, which is one of the reasons they had so many colonies. And then there were skirmishes among the city-states for the agricultural land. There's a good book about this, aptly titled War, Food, and Politics in Early Hellenistic Athens, GJ Oliver.

This is a minefield, so I’ll just register an occurrent thought. Epicurus clearly thinks that all pleasures are perceived (or available to perception), so I find G&T compelling on that front. The thing is, if all pleasures are a kind of perception, and all perceptions are a kinesis, then all pleasures are kinetic. Some are (perhaps) just more kinetic than others. Now, you could invent a different kind of perception, one in which the subject and the object of perception are somehow the same (that’s, as I understand it, Aristotle’s attempted, semi-incoherent solution), but G&T don’t see any indication of that solution in Epicurus. And I'm not sure I do either.

So for what it's worth, I'm inclined to think the difference is that katestematic pleasure is always there, always available to perception. I can call it to mind and experience it wherever I am. 'Kinetic' pleasure comes and goes. But that's just me shooting from the hip.

Quote from Joshua

Learned young to lie early and often. When I got my first job at 16 I would skip Sunday mass for "work"; "work" in my private vernacular being to leave the house in my work uniform and go browse the books at Barnes and Noble.

I also had a strange Sunday book ritual! I could never skip service, but I had a fellow student from my big public high school whose parents owned the only remaining independent bookstore in town. So they told me I could have the employee discount, and I went there every Sunday afternoon to pick out what I would read that week, usually two novels, with the occasional poetry or philosophy thrown in for good measure. I eventually worked there for a few summers in college. Also, I did lie, but only about whether I had been to Sunday afternoon choir practice...until the choir director ratted me out for missing!

I was raised Southern Baptist, deep in the belly of the whale, so I know (almost) exactly what you're talking about, Eoghan. It's like being raised bilingual--the second language is always in your head, even if you never speak it. The only truly regrettable result of breaking away from religion for me has been that it alienates me somewhat from my family and almost everyone I grew up with.

Quote from Pacatus

I was raised in a milieu of Christian/Stoical/Kantian “virtue moralism” that I liken to a Pavlovian programming that leaves an array of reactive triggers in your subconscious – that can grab you decades later (at least for me).

Yeah, in my experience it never goes away....it just gets muffled.

Quote from Pacatus

I was raised in a milieu of Christian/Stoical/Kantian “virtue moralism” that I liken to a Pavlovian programming that leaves an array of reactive triggers in your subconscious – that can grab you decades later (at least for me).

Yeah, in my experience it never goes away....it just gets muffled.

Yeah, I definitely think it's an open question whether Epicurus thinks we are free to act on something other than what we consider most pleasant, so I agree with Godfrey that we might find ourselves pulled in both directions. The passage Cassius mentions from Torquatus definitely attributes psychological hedonism to Epicurus (we simply act on what we find most pleasant--we can just tell ourselves other stories). But there are some people who think Cicero is wrong about Epicurean psychological hedonism, and they usually point to KD 25, which seems to suggest that a person can act with reference to a goal other than pleasure. The people who think Epicurus believes we can act contrary to pleasure (but we shouldn't) are usually called 'ethical hedonists.'

I should add that I think Epicurus thinks we can still act for pleasure while choosing pain, but only when we think the pain leads to more pleasure overall. So we're still doing what we consider most pleasant.

I tend to think Epicurus would respond something like:

Pleasure is the universal motivation, whether the existentialists like it or not. It's a matter of our animal nature. We always act in light of what we take to be most pleasant. (This view is often called 'psychological hedonism').

And yet, humans do not universally accept this truth about our motivations, convincing ourselves we are acting for other reasons because we are prone to false beliefs. So someone can tell themselves all day long they are acting for duty, not pleasure, but that is just a tidy narrative they tell themselves for their own reasons.

As for existentialism, my impression is that there's a sense in which psychological hedonism would not bother many of them, depending on how radically free they consider humans, because Epicurus does think we have freedom to choose what is most pleasant. We just don't have the freedom to choose to act on something other than what we consider most pleasant. So when the existentialists make their existential choices, what they are doing is deliberating about what they consider most pleasant. And that might be enough freedom for many existentialists. If that makes any sense...

I am not, I should say, claiming to be an authority on this matter (especially about existentialism) and it is a contentious question, best addressed, in my opinion, by Raphael Woolf in 'What Kind of Hedonist was Epicurus?'

Quote from EricR

So I thought I recalled a quote from Epicurus that addressed this. Something about one's experience of life is not being improved by a philosophy, rendering it useless.

Were you perhaps thinking of this: 'Vain is the word of a philosopher by which no human suffering is cured. For just as medicine is of no use if it fails to banish the diseases of the body, so philosophy is of no use if it fails to banish the sufferings of the mind' (Usener fr. 222)

I was admittedly somewhat surprised to discover that I was in fact changed by studying Epicurus as a way of living rather than an academic exercise. Sometimes it was just that I finally discovered a justification for views I already had pre-reflectively (e.g., that greed leads to unhappiness). Sometimes it was that I actually altered how I interacted with others (privileging activities that would provide me with memories over unmemorable activities, at least when I had a choice). And I made peace with the fact that I thought life should be pleasant, which was actually a difficult transition because of my upbringing. Those are only a few examples of changes in my outlook and behavior, but they are perhaps the most notable ones.

Here's my take on a few of them. These are all essentially eudaimonist theories, so the goal is always some form of happiness, excepting perhaps some of the Cyrenaics.

Plato (at least in key dialogues) maintains that (complete?) happiness requires knowledge of the Form of the Good, which a philosopher achieves chiefly by means of 'dialectic,' which itself requires a bedrock educational program starting from childhood that includes music, physical education, military training, administrative work, and various other forms of mathematics and theoretical study.

Aristotle: (complete?) happiness is manifested in a life of virtuous activity. Virtue consists in a 'mean' between extremes of vice (e.g., courage lies in the mean between cowardice and rashness), and the virtuous person consistently 'hits the mean' that is 'relative to them' (i.e. everyone's mean is not the same). The virtuous person has a stable character, so they do the right thing, for the right reasons, for its own sake, taking pleasure in the activity across a wide variety of circumstances.

Pyrrhonism-- tranquility (ataraxia) that follows the 'suspension of judgment' about all theoretical and practical questions. Methodologically, you take up a question (e.g., is there motion?) and marshal the best arguments for and against, decide neither position is better than the other (i.e. establish equipollence), then suspend judgment. Magically, tranquility follows the suspension.

Stoicism--this one is pretty difficult, but they definitely think happiness is virtue (in fact, virtue is the only good thing), when virtue is something like a coherent set of true beliefs about nature and value.

Quote from Don

That's the weird thing to me on the grammar. The pleasure phrase "in enjoyment, in pleasure" is between the definite article τας and κειμενας. So, paraphrasing your line, it seems to me like it's "those that lie in pleasure" and not "those X that lie in consumption". The preposition is attached to pleasure/enjoyment.

Granted, I'm just eyeballing it, so I should take some time to give it closer attention, but I'm reading the second τὰς as a reference back to τὰς ἡδονὰς, with the ἡδονὰς understood, so taken together 'the pleasures of profligates or the [pleasures] lying in consumption.'

Yeah, I admit I still think it's 'the pleasures that lie in consumption,' but now I'm intrigued to look at other uses.

Not to lead us astray here, but is it possible this could be a reference to sex? I mean, if we did follow the idea that we're talking about the kinds of things a person might enjoy while lying in bed.

Epicurus does seem to use the standard philosophical ἄπειρος whenever he wants to talk about the unlimited (see KD 20, for example), so while I think it's definitely true that Epicurus wants to correct the misunderstanding that Epicureans pursue unlimited pleasure, like Don, I'm inclined to render that specific passage without appeal to the unlimited. I find the idea that it concerns sloth appealing because that does seem like a proper contrast to profligacy, though I admit I had never read the passage that way myself.