I certainly like the meticulous way you lay out an argument.
Epicurus says a lot of sensible things. Rephrased; "Something" does not arise from Nothing. - - -
(Totally non-Christian by the way. Christians utterly insist that God created the universe, all of nature, and mankind only out of NOTHING. Not even an emanation from Himself.)
And another one; "Something" does not pass away into Nothing.
Number one: But the principle thesis misses the obvious, IMO. Even if, the world is totally mechanistic, still there are unknowns. How is it possible to have unknowns in a machine? Furthermore, (because the quantity of unknowns are unknown), it means that it will always be IMPOSSIBLE to know how many unknowns are remaining. Maybe it is a million to one in favor of the unknown side?
Number two: The human mechanism feels fear in the front of unknowns. (Will this be a danger? "Everything in the infinite universe – is an object of anxiety".) That is built in to the human experience, and rightly so. Therefore the human is continually in search of THE explanation. The whole story of gods and spirits IS THE EXPLANATION, in front of unknowns, and it is what relieves fear. So without superstitious Paganism, there would have been unabated more fear. It is also said below that the purpose of knowledge is to free us from fear. "Knowledge" also includes divination and appeasing the gods with bribery (sacrificial offerings).
Number three: Priests backed up by the kings, distorted the god-realm to their favor, to brow-beat, (really torture and devastate) the common man. So that is where all the malevolent realms came from. (And there are also unknowns as stated above, and unexplained things were recorded.)
So Epicurus suggests discarding all these wrathful gods, and then you will live without fear. Then he is saying the world is mechanistic, so there's nothing to fear. And there is a certain amount of "Swerving" going on, but no need to trouble yourselves. So the unknowns that always will generate fear are minimized. And then if you retire from society for the most part, you don't bump into too many of them.
Why don't we have existential fear now? Well, we've been totally convinced that science answers, or will answer every conundrum. A good example: every time we build a new telescope, a trillion new galaxies are discovered. Well, every one of these trillions of galaxies resided together on a pin point, in space/no-space/no-time. Then 13 billion earth years ago at 12:45 pm on a Saturday, WASHOOM!!! it all blew up, (it was crowded), and that sent everyone sailing.
I don't know how you can stop laughing, or you can even choke and die of laughter. Really the biggest unknown of all is WHO PAID THEIR SALARIES? It is a whole industry devoted to quell our fear from unknowns. Whoopie.
_________________
I would say that billions and billions of people have no clue what is ataraxia, absence of mental disturbance, internal abundance, serenity, tranquility, equanimity, or imperturbability. 99% believe it is dullness, austerity, complacency, inattention, thoughtless, irresponsible, self-suppression.
I claim you'll never get to know it with Epicurus's method, because it doesn't address the true cause of agitation, although as I have just said, billions don't want anything to do with it. They just look at Epicurus to justify hedonism. Whether a misapprehension or not.
Then we get to a real conundrum: Sensation is produced by the interaction of soul and body. Now we have a new word in the mix, and apparently it was created by violating the first principle, that something is created out of nothing. (Or otherwise maybe the Soul is a "nothing" created out of a nothing?) Then "Perception" is unquestionably true. But whatever you say about it, is unquestionably false. A real ZINGER there.
Of course ALL PERCEPTION for those of us reading this, is an unknown combination of both sense and interpretation. And sense also follows yesterday's interpretations. I must say that navigation by the criteria of truth, has never fully worked. Yeah, I can navigate my way down to the supermarket.
Now here's another beauty: Feelings and experience are undeniable, but not necessarily having direct "material" causes. I am quite sure that other philosophies of the time stated an exact opposite hypothesis, and anyone who investigates now, can easily know the causes of feelings, and can actually generate and author them. Or set them down and "un-choose" them.
Pleasure is a moral good, and pain is a moral bad. WOWEE?
WHEREAS HERE'S ONE THAT'S TRUE: The just man is the least disturbed by passion, the unjust man the most highly disturbed.
_____________
In one place you say; binding an ethic for a larger group is necessary to cooperate with an ambition that I believe is necessary for society to work and grow. "Epicureanism, as originally understood, is a personal retreat from the obligations of society". Every society has accepted stereo-types of behavior. You could call it ethics or morality but only as an after-thought. It is just as likely to be "the only good Indian is a dead Indian", the moral of the time. There are some activists these days, and the web makes a lot of noise, but for the most part it looks to me like everyone is in the basement with Epicurus, no different from 2,000 years ago.
Frankly, I don't think that there is anything here for the modern world. I have also studied ancient history on several continents, and what might have been "right for them", can in no way be an addition to our current society. With philosophy, there are some old truths, but those truths are not to emulate. We cannot unearth some non-existent paradise and reanimate it in the present. Those truths that were really farsighted, set you onto your own discoveries. They didn't try to corral you into their mode of thinking.
I feel that I know the workings of life, because mine works, and not through doing what is "pleasurable". And; a life that works, is pleasurable.
I can't take all the credit here - Mr. Strodach, the translator and author of the Introduction gave me excellent material to work with. Perhaps a bit too much, but that's preference - he's likely a professional philosopher and writer, while the only thing I profess is amateurishness.
Yeah, fundamentally, I don't think Epicurus scales past the small group. If you don't have to worry about money (being old, well-off, or having completed your plans for FIRE), it's a perfectly workable program. Especially for anyone with enough rental property, dividends, or interest to cover their expenses - huge plus there.
Epicurus' basement ethic (if I can call it that, and I will, because its funny) would imply that everyone should aspire to be basement-dwellers. While historically not a large proportion were in a position to do so, that proportion is increasing (c/o: The Internet, remote work, the relatively passive income streams of interest, rent/lease, financial products, etc., ad nauseam). Perhaps it can shed some light on some modern malaises.
I wonder if the juxtaposition between the quotes regarding "intercourse" and "marriage" reflect something lost in translation regarding homo- versus heterosexual relations.
Interesting article, thanks for the summary. Impressive how close to our modern understanding of the nature of the material world he got. Not bad for what, 3,000 years ago? (Edit: 2300 years. OK, still...)
Most likely. Since I don't know Greek, I can't correct it, so I poke fun at it until someone tells me I'm wrong (I must be, I'm posting on the Internet).
The resemblance struck me the first time but it's not quite as strong as it appears. Based on the Epicurean theory, for example, objects give off microscopic atomic films of themselves that we can sense (eidola), which begs the question of why objects don't just all shrink until they disappear, because the atoms must come from somewhere. We recognize this now as light and sound being reflected, or giving off a smell and so on. Close in the broad strokes, not so much in the details. Didn't go much into this in the article because it was the metaphysics I was more interested in.
Wow - this really hammered home how comprehensive Epicurean philosophy is compared to the modern assumptions. Never realised he went into theory of matter etc!! Super insightful, Argo, thanks for writing this :)
Also crazy how much crossover there is with concepts in eastern philosophy (nothing returns to nothing etc)
What reaches us in school isn't the nice parts, you have to go digging to get to the cool stuff.
I do find it interesting that Epicureanism looks a lot like the kind of optimistic "tech-will-make-things-better" bros of the 00s and 10s that I grew up with. Gave me flashbacks to effective altruism, Richard Dawkins readers, and so on.
That much of it boils down to "if we could just be more rational, everything would be fine" is a very familiar attitude.
The first-principles approach to understanding (speculating) about reality falls under metaphysics, not ethics. I'm not read up on Epicurus, but the Academics and Stoics saw their ethics as being logically downstream of metaphysics. The good life consisted in living in accordance with the nature of the things.
Yeah, I'm no expert, so I've mixed up the two. It's pretty interesting to me now that they thought of it as one big whole, rather than the more divide-and-conquer strategy that we use today.
Nowadays ethics is more concerned with questions of morality, right and wrong. When the classical philosophers talk about ethics, it's about how to live well, how to live the best life.
Interesting that we've circumscribed ethics, implying that variation in personal preference trumps any kind of shared ideal framework. Does that mean we have discarded the idea of universal goods and evils, or that we think it's impossible to have one best way adopted by everyone?
Epicurus' own idea kind of falls into this. If everyone lives in the basement, who's out there running the chicken tendie store?
There is lots of moral philosophy dedicated to systematically defending a moral view. Ethics can be arranged into three fuzzy tiers: metaethics is concerned with abstract concepts, normative ethics "involves substantive proposals concerning how to act, live, or what kind of person to be" (Shelly Kagan), and applied ethics involves reasoning about specific moral/ethical cases. Kagan's textbook Normative Ethics covers a wide breadth, recommended.
Normative ethical theories can be grouped into three broad categories: deontology (Kant, most religions), utilitarianism, and the grab bag of virtue ethics. Epicurus was utilitarian avant la lettre. His contemporary opposition (Academics, Skeptics, and Stoics) were virtue ethicists.
The way I see it is that Epicurus was stuck between his desire to exhort people to do the right thing and his materialist/deterministic metaphysics that basically says "trust your sensations, do not fear death or gods, only pain, and you were going to do the right thing anyway because the right thing is pleasurable to you". So he comes up with this philosophical framework that tries to be deterministic and downplay the capricious Greek gods while pointing at doing the right thing rightly construed.
In such a framework, however, one cannot be "great", only "good", so the logical end of that is to put the minimum effort into being good in order to not cause harm.
Hence, living in a basement off water and bread, occasionally getting some chicken tendies (cheese in the original) so you can sometimes have an expensive meal. It focuses on what is necessary (for survival) rather than what is sufficient (for prosperity). NEETlosopher/FIREfanatic confirmed.
They used the positive "do all the things" pleasure, not the negative "no pain" pleasure, likely because the former meaning came more natural back then. The negative conception, from what I've read, tends to be most associated with Buddhism.
I certainly like the meticulous way you lay out an argument.
Epicurus says a lot of sensible things. Rephrased; "Something" does not arise from Nothing. - - -
(Totally non-Christian by the way. Christians utterly insist that God created the universe, all of nature, and mankind only out of NOTHING. Not even an emanation from Himself.)
And another one; "Something" does not pass away into Nothing.
Number one: But the principle thesis misses the obvious, IMO. Even if, the world is totally mechanistic, still there are unknowns. How is it possible to have unknowns in a machine? Furthermore, (because the quantity of unknowns are unknown), it means that it will always be IMPOSSIBLE to know how many unknowns are remaining. Maybe it is a million to one in favor of the unknown side?
Number two: The human mechanism feels fear in the front of unknowns. (Will this be a danger? "Everything in the infinite universe – is an object of anxiety".) That is built in to the human experience, and rightly so. Therefore the human is continually in search of THE explanation. The whole story of gods and spirits IS THE EXPLANATION, in front of unknowns, and it is what relieves fear. So without superstitious Paganism, there would have been unabated more fear. It is also said below that the purpose of knowledge is to free us from fear. "Knowledge" also includes divination and appeasing the gods with bribery (sacrificial offerings).
Number three: Priests backed up by the kings, distorted the god-realm to their favor, to brow-beat, (really torture and devastate) the common man. So that is where all the malevolent realms came from. (And there are also unknowns as stated above, and unexplained things were recorded.)
So Epicurus suggests discarding all these wrathful gods, and then you will live without fear. Then he is saying the world is mechanistic, so there's nothing to fear. And there is a certain amount of "Swerving" going on, but no need to trouble yourselves. So the unknowns that always will generate fear are minimized. And then if you retire from society for the most part, you don't bump into too many of them.
Why don't we have existential fear now? Well, we've been totally convinced that science answers, or will answer every conundrum. A good example: every time we build a new telescope, a trillion new galaxies are discovered. Well, every one of these trillions of galaxies resided together on a pin point, in space/no-space/no-time. Then 13 billion earth years ago at 12:45 pm on a Saturday, WASHOOM!!! it all blew up, (it was crowded), and that sent everyone sailing.
I don't know how you can stop laughing, or you can even choke and die of laughter. Really the biggest unknown of all is WHO PAID THEIR SALARIES? It is a whole industry devoted to quell our fear from unknowns. Whoopie.
_________________
I would say that billions and billions of people have no clue what is ataraxia, absence of mental disturbance, internal abundance, serenity, tranquility, equanimity, or imperturbability. 99% believe it is dullness, austerity, complacency, inattention, thoughtless, irresponsible, self-suppression.
I claim you'll never get to know it with Epicurus's method, because it doesn't address the true cause of agitation, although as I have just said, billions don't want anything to do with it. They just look at Epicurus to justify hedonism. Whether a misapprehension or not.
Then we get to a real conundrum: Sensation is produced by the interaction of soul and body. Now we have a new word in the mix, and apparently it was created by violating the first principle, that something is created out of nothing. (Or otherwise maybe the Soul is a "nothing" created out of a nothing?) Then "Perception" is unquestionably true. But whatever you say about it, is unquestionably false. A real ZINGER there.
Of course ALL PERCEPTION for those of us reading this, is an unknown combination of both sense and interpretation. And sense also follows yesterday's interpretations. I must say that navigation by the criteria of truth, has never fully worked. Yeah, I can navigate my way down to the supermarket.
Now here's another beauty: Feelings and experience are undeniable, but not necessarily having direct "material" causes. I am quite sure that other philosophies of the time stated an exact opposite hypothesis, and anyone who investigates now, can easily know the causes of feelings, and can actually generate and author them. Or set them down and "un-choose" them.
Pleasure is a moral good, and pain is a moral bad. WOWEE?
WHEREAS HERE'S ONE THAT'S TRUE: The just man is the least disturbed by passion, the unjust man the most highly disturbed.
_____________
In one place you say; binding an ethic for a larger group is necessary to cooperate with an ambition that I believe is necessary for society to work and grow. "Epicureanism, as originally understood, is a personal retreat from the obligations of society". Every society has accepted stereo-types of behavior. You could call it ethics or morality but only as an after-thought. It is just as likely to be "the only good Indian is a dead Indian", the moral of the time. There are some activists these days, and the web makes a lot of noise, but for the most part it looks to me like everyone is in the basement with Epicurus, no different from 2,000 years ago.
Frankly, I don't think that there is anything here for the modern world. I have also studied ancient history on several continents, and what might have been "right for them", can in no way be an addition to our current society. With philosophy, there are some old truths, but those truths are not to emulate. We cannot unearth some non-existent paradise and reanimate it in the present. Those truths that were really farsighted, set you onto your own discoveries. They didn't try to corral you into their mode of thinking.
I feel that I know the workings of life, because mine works, and not through doing what is "pleasurable". And; a life that works, is pleasurable.
.
I can't take all the credit here - Mr. Strodach, the translator and author of the Introduction gave me excellent material to work with. Perhaps a bit too much, but that's preference - he's likely a professional philosopher and writer, while the only thing I profess is amateurishness.
Yeah, fundamentally, I don't think Epicurus scales past the small group. If you don't have to worry about money (being old, well-off, or having completed your plans for FIRE), it's a perfectly workable program. Especially for anyone with enough rental property, dividends, or interest to cover their expenses - huge plus there.
Epicurus' basement ethic (if I can call it that, and I will, because its funny) would imply that everyone should aspire to be basement-dwellers. While historically not a large proportion were in a position to do so, that proportion is increasing (c/o: The Internet, remote work, the relatively passive income streams of interest, rent/lease, financial products, etc., ad nauseam). Perhaps it can shed some light on some modern malaises.
I wonder if the juxtaposition between the quotes regarding "intercourse" and "marriage" reflect something lost in translation regarding homo- versus heterosexual relations.
Interesting article, thanks for the summary. Impressive how close to our modern understanding of the nature of the material world he got. Not bad for what, 3,000 years ago? (Edit: 2300 years. OK, still...)
Most likely. Since I don't know Greek, I can't correct it, so I poke fun at it until someone tells me I'm wrong (I must be, I'm posting on the Internet).
The resemblance struck me the first time but it's not quite as strong as it appears. Based on the Epicurean theory, for example, objects give off microscopic atomic films of themselves that we can sense (eidola), which begs the question of why objects don't just all shrink until they disappear, because the atoms must come from somewhere. We recognize this now as light and sound being reflected, or giving off a smell and so on. Close in the broad strokes, not so much in the details. Didn't go much into this in the article because it was the metaphysics I was more interested in.
Still very impressive.
I will certainly grant that I also found the apparent immediate contradiction amusing.
And yeah, it's not objects giving off thin films of atoms, it's sequences of atoms bouncing off objects that we detect. 🤣
Wow - this really hammered home how comprehensive Epicurean philosophy is compared to the modern assumptions. Never realised he went into theory of matter etc!! Super insightful, Argo, thanks for writing this :)
Also crazy how much crossover there is with concepts in eastern philosophy (nothing returns to nothing etc)
What reaches us in school isn't the nice parts, you have to go digging to get to the cool stuff.
I do find it interesting that Epicureanism looks a lot like the kind of optimistic "tech-will-make-things-better" bros of the 00s and 10s that I grew up with. Gave me flashbacks to effective altruism, Richard Dawkins readers, and so on.
That much of it boils down to "if we could just be more rational, everything would be fine" is a very familiar attitude.
Atomists gonna atomise, as you eloquently show. What a pleasure to read this, and how apposite. Thank you Argo.
We need more atomizers now. I want my nuclear power. I want my electricity too cheap to meter.
Sweden going nuclear now https://x.com/PeterSweden7/status/1792225332394697024
Brilliant move. Overbuild and sell to Norway and use their hydro to provide grid stability.
I think the White Haired Wonder of the Land of the Wooden Shoe has promised more nuclear power stations.
Hallelujah! Prince Nuclear returns, shunned until his people's hour of need, but returning to save them regardless.
https://argomend.substack.com/i/142601945/nuclear
I used to consider myself Epicurean, but I turned out to be a hedonist.
I view him as a fore runner of pragmatism.
His thought putting a lot of emphasis on feelings, experience, and sensation as ways of knowing truth dovetails nicely with that.
Because of the mistake in definition, or a change in your preferences?
The first-principles approach to understanding (speculating) about reality falls under metaphysics, not ethics. I'm not read up on Epicurus, but the Academics and Stoics saw their ethics as being logically downstream of metaphysics. The good life consisted in living in accordance with the nature of the things.
Yeah, I'm no expert, so I've mixed up the two. It's pretty interesting to me now that they thought of it as one big whole, rather than the more divide-and-conquer strategy that we use today.
Nowadays ethics is more concerned with questions of morality, right and wrong. When the classical philosophers talk about ethics, it's about how to live well, how to live the best life.
Interesting that we've circumscribed ethics, implying that variation in personal preference trumps any kind of shared ideal framework. Does that mean we have discarded the idea of universal goods and evils, or that we think it's impossible to have one best way adopted by everyone?
Epicurus' own idea kind of falls into this. If everyone lives in the basement, who's out there running the chicken tendie store?
There is lots of moral philosophy dedicated to systematically defending a moral view. Ethics can be arranged into three fuzzy tiers: metaethics is concerned with abstract concepts, normative ethics "involves substantive proposals concerning how to act, live, or what kind of person to be" (Shelly Kagan), and applied ethics involves reasoning about specific moral/ethical cases. Kagan's textbook Normative Ethics covers a wide breadth, recommended.
Normative ethical theories can be grouped into three broad categories: deontology (Kant, most religions), utilitarianism, and the grab bag of virtue ethics. Epicurus was utilitarian avant la lettre. His contemporary opposition (Academics, Skeptics, and Stoics) were virtue ethicists.
I'm onboard with the conception of Epicurus as an ethical NEET.
Basement-dweller philosophy!
The way I see it is that Epicurus was stuck between his desire to exhort people to do the right thing and his materialist/deterministic metaphysics that basically says "trust your sensations, do not fear death or gods, only pain, and you were going to do the right thing anyway because the right thing is pleasurable to you". So he comes up with this philosophical framework that tries to be deterministic and downplay the capricious Greek gods while pointing at doing the right thing rightly construed.
In such a framework, however, one cannot be "great", only "good", so the logical end of that is to put the minimum effort into being good in order to not cause harm.
Hence, living in a basement off water and bread, occasionally getting some chicken tendies (cheese in the original) so you can sometimes have an expensive meal. It focuses on what is necessary (for survival) rather than what is sufficient (for prosperity). NEETlosopher/FIREfanatic confirmed.
It's ironic that Epicurus became associated with hedonism when he advocated getting off the hedonic treadmill.
They used the positive "do all the things" pleasure, not the negative "no pain" pleasure, likely because the former meaning came more natural back then. The negative conception, from what I've read, tends to be most associated with Buddhism.