Epicurus

I was aware that Epicurus wasn’t overly precipitate in his pursuit of pleasure. I was surprised at how, even in the old days, he felt the need to dispense with the Gods, you know, in order not to be a dignitary. That’s not how I feel—I love the Gods—but I can sorta get it, you know. (“ ‘Your mother told me you were already a warrior,’ Morgaine said, forgetting to pitch her voice low, and he smiled again at her.
‘And now I know your voice, Morgaine of the Fairies….how dare you come upon me as a priestess, kinswoman? Well, I suppose it is the Lady’s will. But I like you better like this than solemn as a Goddess,’ he said, with the familiar mischief, as if they had parted but the day before.
Clasping at shreds of her dignity, Morgaine said, ‘Yes, the Lady awaits us, and we must not keep her waiting.’
‘Oh yes,’ he mocked, ‘always we must scurry to do her will…. I suppose you are one of those to fetch and carry, and hang trembling on her every word.’
For that Morgaine found no answer except to say, ‘Come this way.’”, “The Mists of Avalon”. And those were the Celts, and not, indeed, the Romans or the Greeks, with their great cities and their officialdom and bureaucracy….)

I’m not exactly sure how to put it: dignity can be a sort of good, and yet people pay far more for it than it is really worth; the Gods love us and can help us, but people can misuse any religion, of course….

(shrugs) Anyway, there’s hardly fifty pages of Epicurus left, if you take away the (useful) notes, not that anybody except Plato and maybe Aristotle has all of most of their stuff left. But the Stoics did far better by the monks’ favors; when people in the language say ‘philosophical’, they usually mean stoic (and I think they usually understand the gist of that word). The monotheist clerics were sent a-riding by the rumors of Epicurus; they felt threatened, you know…. Not much merit in that, crushing your enemies, right…. There were some technological limitations back then, of course, but in general, I think they sorta acted out a sort of plan…. Can’t let the children know about Epicureanism….

As for me, I don’t know, even aside from the uninteresting physics discussions and the untrue ones about the Gods, whether I really believe that pleasure is ~the~ Good, and not just good. (Again, he understood that being impulsive doesn’t usually lead to ~net~ pleasure.) Knowledge ~should~ be seen at least ~mostly~ as a means rather than as an end, like he said, but I wonder if love isn’t just the whole thing, pleasurable or un-pleasurable, and the highest good…. Not that we should act impulsively. Indeed, people can get mighty pleased with themselves when they talk about “love is a temple, love the higher law”, you know…. And it is true really that many people might benefit from pissing on honor from time to time. Honor isn’t even knowledge, just an opinion, held as ~if~ it were knowledge, and love, and the law! And everything else, too!

…. “His sole aim is to convince himself that these terrors are unreal and imaginary, and if, incidentally, he discovers a great deal about the constitution of the world and man’s place in nature, it is because he cannot otherwise banish these terrors from his mind.”

I also, although we are so unalike. I suppose that the limitation is a gift for a mortal, and being limited the key to expansion. Very strange, of course.

…. It seems like the guy who wrote the introduction was a sort of old Apollo from the top of a tower in Oxford, who lived with a maid and didn’t put much by friendship and ethics and the everyday stuff that Epicurus valued and apparently wrote mostly about. However, the sort of strange, hard, knowledge of things in general stuff that he goes in for sounds like things that Epicurus knew as much about as he needed to, right. We, naturally, use reason and mind-activity to go from isolated perceived knowledges of the world towards more useful systems; however, it is at least as important, perhaps more, to check our mind activity and our logic if you will, with our actual experience, our actual perceptions. No theory of mine, about any god or anything else, is true because I have stubbornly laid it down as true beforehand, when my experience and sense-perceptions tell me that it isn’t the case.

…. (Cf Epicurus and atoms) As intellectual as I am, I’ve never understood the world of the Enneagram Five, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever really fully want to, you know.

…. It’s surprisingly Buddhistic/Stoic: happiness is being an eternal man without anger or preferences…. And so on. There are certainly differences among the various schools, but in their classic forms they’re all the inventions of avoidant men, you know.

…. Obviously it’s impossible to know, but I can’t help wonder if Epicurus had Venus in Aquarius like me: always wandering off by yourself, muttering high things to yourself about love and friendship….

…. I obviously don’t know much about Epicurus, being born when I was, but I can’t help confess a little suspicion. The world contains not a few intelligent people who refuse to be healthy, and some of them, like the art critics, claim to be interested in “pleasure”, etc—perhaps it’s some sort of cognate word, like some of the French and German words, or rather a Latin or Greek one, or more to the point, perhaps even at its most applicable-to-life, it’s a sort of anti-practical, replacement-for-practicality, that results in a sort of Ersatz life, you know: a cut-rate substitute that doesn’t cost you much blood, sweat and tears, you know. (Yes, BTS: or, I suppose, that “figure half in shadow” himself, from the old days.)

…. Anyway, it’s not everyone, clearly, who reads (listens to) “The Republic” and smiles at it, you know—Pleasure is to be laughed at; therefore, pleasure is to be laughed at ~I agree, Socrates—and then reads what’s left of Epicurus and feels that he was a bit of a stiff, but it’s like what the Bard said: All the world’s a stage…. And one man in his time plays many parts; or as the Beatles put it, “Nothing is real”, which is I suppose much the same.

…. Well, I certainly didn’t understand Epicurus, beforehand. Of course, we can’t know if only his most crusty sayings were recorded—it’s impossible for me to imagine any monk, or even: I mean, I had to watch this game show from 1978 (70s themed elevator music, the whole bit) in a waiting room just now, and it was so sterile the woman literally was Literally Afraid to say “sterile”, as in impotent, so she almost couldn’t play the game—but I mean, he does seem crusty. He doesn’t come off as very bold or very happy, like his reputation, (one thinks of a rich old man who never married and keeps a fancy table and doesn’t care what people think of him—which is misleading, except in that he is a rather un-marriage-y man who doesn’t care what people think of him, a rather different picture), or even really as especially happy at all, just…. Peacefully awaiting the coming of the Machine-Man, you know…. He’s like the protagonist of an Michelangelo Antonioni film, perhaps La Notte—and although I don’t hesitate to say that I prefer that to Action-Packed Eight: The Money Went Into the Special Effects Budget—but can you imagine what life was like when everyone generally was like that? If “Barbie” was too much of something, I can’t imagine “Oppenheimer” not being too little, you know. “I’m a scientist; I don’t have time for the mindset of the little people. I’ve chosen a very narrow sphere for myself—that’s the correct thing!” I feel like if you took Epicurus to see “Lady Bird”, he’d start mumbling about atoms, the collision of atoms….

(shrugs) But what you think is up to you. Even what you do is up to you, although with many people that’s a mostly theoretical sphere…. Though the reason is not in the saying so.… (more)

It is easy to snigger at Epicurus: there were so many things that we now take for granted that were not understood 2,500 years ago. If one rather tries to think how we would have explained the world, with such limited passed on knowledge, then he becomes pretty impressive.

Admittedly, the idea that everything is made of atoms came from Democritus, but Epi kept it alive in a period when it had become unfashionable. An amazing idea... OK, he got gravity wrong, but so did everyone pre-Newton. Epicurus thought the direction of travel was uniform so, if one happened to be upon another world (a pretty radical concept with which to deal) an object might fall upwards, if your planet was on a different plain. His view of items releasing atoms which enter the body and give an impression of the object was a little wide of the mark in the field of sight too, but he nailed thunder as being the rubbing together of clouds!

Epicurus taught that learning needed to go only so far as to discover a theory that could not be contradicted. At first sight, this seems very wrong: the examples that I've quoted where his theories have been superseded would indicate that more work would be valuable. If one looks at this in another light, however, there is some merit: when science moves on to disprove a theory, it will be re-examined. We take more care of our theories nowadays but, once they are enunciated, we tend to cling to them, even when they become questionable.

Epicurus strikes me as an early Hippie; he has a very liaises faire attitude to life. I like this chap.… (more)