Ha! I was waiting for when you'd eventually take this one on. The funny part is, I agree with you on nearly everything.
I also have to laugh that this whole argument is happening almost 2,300 years after Epicurus died. I wonder if he'd be glad to see people still having this discussion.
I also wonder if suspension of judgment can become its own source of confusion rather than a cure for it. If ataraxia is the goal, does constantly withholding judgment eventually turn into its own unsettled state, maybe a quieter one, but still unsettled.
My honest hang up with modern Epicureanism, and maybe you can talk me out of this, is how often it gets used as a coat of paint for people's existing politics. A lot of contemporary Epicurean writing leans hard into a specific ideological direction and calls it Epicurean, and it makes me wonder how much of that is actually Epicurus versus people finding a philosophical justification for views they already held. I really don't know how to get past that.
But again, I agree with the kenai doxai list - fearing death is bad, thinking wealth, power, or fame will make you happy is bad. I also agree that the traditional virtues aren't inherently good, only instrumentally so.
And I wholeheartedly agree with the avoid politics line. I can see the connection to dogmatism, people screaming and shouting about things they're not actually sure of because they've decided to follow the mob. I've heard that line attributed to a lot of people, but it traces back to Epicurus through Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch's essay on the subject, lathe biosas, so I'm still not sure who said it first in any real sense.
All that said, I wonder if these two schools are even closer than I originally thought.
Like I've always said - show me where I'm wrong and I'll change my position.
It sounds to me like your main issue with modern Epicureanism has a simple solution: don't read whomever you find annoying! I can theoretically understand your objection to modern ideologies impinging on the ancient philosophy, but I honestly don't know what contemporary Epicurean writing you're referring to, because I don't really read any. Just stick to books by dead people and Untroubled, and you should be fine!
You know, there is some plausibility in saying that Epicureanism is not fully incompatible with Pyrrhonism. And that is exactly why it became possible for me to find in Pyrrhonism a good substitute for Epicureanism: I simply didn’t like how the latter is full of concepts I don’t personally find attractive or applicable. For example, your stressing on the importance of friendship (that’s just not how I feel); or your physics (almost entirely outdated except for the atoms thing). Pyrrhonism is uncommitted to any statements and that leaves a full space for my own thoughts, discoveries and experiments. I just don’t want to subscribe to someone’s “truths”. So for me, conversely, Pyrrhonism is Epicureanism minus bullshit)
Hmm. As I interpret it, Epicurean friendship also includes romantic partners and family members. Do you not value those either?
On the physics, their main insistences were that we live in a material world with no incorporeal afterlife and no interference from anthropomorphic gods. Do you think those ideas are outdated?
While I mentioned friendship and science, the main difference I stressed in the article was practical prudence. I included topics like maintaining one's health, living within one's financial means, and being realistic when deciding whether chasing things like fame or great wealth were high likelihood routes to happiness.
Do all of these things seem like bullshit to you? If you think they are all irrelevant for the quality of one's life, then Pyrrhonism may indeed be the best fit.
The issue is not whether I value my wife or my parents. The issue is that I don’t see them - philosophically - as necessary and inescapable preconditions to my well being. That is to say, it could happen that my parents died or I failed to find a partner. In that case Epicurean will consider me a poor being, while it is still possible that I would be quite content with what I got. Or not! I just do not agree that there’s only one way to go.
On physics - it seems to me you mention the parts of it that mostly affect your ethical standard. But there is a whole bunch of stuff explaining atoms, planets movements and so on in the remaining writings. And obviously it is very unscientific from the today’s point of view. Actually the same with the Stoic physics.
Again, none of the mentioned values are bullshit for me, I just don’t think that they count as philosophical truth.
The argument of the essay was that Epicurus is very conservative when it comes to "philosophical truth," in a way that those with Pyrrhonist inclinations might find appealing. If he declares anything of ethical import to be objectively true, it is that pleasure is good, but even that can easily be read as an evident biological observation, rather than a statement of moralism akin to those of the Stoics.
Everything else is probabilistic extrapolation of a sort that doesn't seem to me to violate any Pyrrhonist tenets regarding the criterion of action, or your own behavior. Epicurus doesn't assert that a wife is "necessary" (he wasn't married himself), or that any of the components of prudence (health maintenance, financial decision-making, career choices, etc.) represent "philosophical truth." But they do empirically seem to be relevant factors for the pain and pleasure of your life.
If you feel that these kinds of choices are worth taking into consideration for practical reasons, but are not subject to any kind of moral obligation, then Epicurus agrees with you! Pyrrhonism just seems to neglect such issues entirely.
I would agree that modern people don't need to spend time mastering the cutting edge astronomical theories of 300 BC. But in terms of the history of science, one could make a case that the Epicureans represent a radically more "scientific" outlook than that of their contemporaries and predecessors, both in their principle of multiple explanations and in their refusal to admit ungrounded speculation about non-material existences or interfering gods. Those big underlying ideas have aged very well.
Ha! I was waiting for when you'd eventually take this one on. The funny part is, I agree with you on nearly everything.
I also have to laugh that this whole argument is happening almost 2,300 years after Epicurus died. I wonder if he'd be glad to see people still having this discussion.
I also wonder if suspension of judgment can become its own source of confusion rather than a cure for it. If ataraxia is the goal, does constantly withholding judgment eventually turn into its own unsettled state, maybe a quieter one, but still unsettled.
My honest hang up with modern Epicureanism, and maybe you can talk me out of this, is how often it gets used as a coat of paint for people's existing politics. A lot of contemporary Epicurean writing leans hard into a specific ideological direction and calls it Epicurean, and it makes me wonder how much of that is actually Epicurus versus people finding a philosophical justification for views they already held. I really don't know how to get past that.
But again, I agree with the kenai doxai list - fearing death is bad, thinking wealth, power, or fame will make you happy is bad. I also agree that the traditional virtues aren't inherently good, only instrumentally so.
And I wholeheartedly agree with the avoid politics line. I can see the connection to dogmatism, people screaming and shouting about things they're not actually sure of because they've decided to follow the mob. I've heard that line attributed to a lot of people, but it traces back to Epicurus through Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch's essay on the subject, lathe biosas, so I'm still not sure who said it first in any real sense.
All that said, I wonder if these two schools are even closer than I originally thought.
Like I've always said - show me where I'm wrong and I'll change my position.
It sounds to me like your main issue with modern Epicureanism has a simple solution: don't read whomever you find annoying! I can theoretically understand your objection to modern ideologies impinging on the ancient philosophy, but I honestly don't know what contemporary Epicurean writing you're referring to, because I don't really read any. Just stick to books by dead people and Untroubled, and you should be fine!
"don't read whomever you find annoying!"
Also good life advice in general, not just for reading lol.
:) Good advice.
You know, there is some plausibility in saying that Epicureanism is not fully incompatible with Pyrrhonism. And that is exactly why it became possible for me to find in Pyrrhonism a good substitute for Epicureanism: I simply didn’t like how the latter is full of concepts I don’t personally find attractive or applicable. For example, your stressing on the importance of friendship (that’s just not how I feel); or your physics (almost entirely outdated except for the atoms thing). Pyrrhonism is uncommitted to any statements and that leaves a full space for my own thoughts, discoveries and experiments. I just don’t want to subscribe to someone’s “truths”. So for me, conversely, Pyrrhonism is Epicureanism minus bullshit)
Hmm. As I interpret it, Epicurean friendship also includes romantic partners and family members. Do you not value those either?
On the physics, their main insistences were that we live in a material world with no incorporeal afterlife and no interference from anthropomorphic gods. Do you think those ideas are outdated?
While I mentioned friendship and science, the main difference I stressed in the article was practical prudence. I included topics like maintaining one's health, living within one's financial means, and being realistic when deciding whether chasing things like fame or great wealth were high likelihood routes to happiness.
Do all of these things seem like bullshit to you? If you think they are all irrelevant for the quality of one's life, then Pyrrhonism may indeed be the best fit.
The issue is not whether I value my wife or my parents. The issue is that I don’t see them - philosophically - as necessary and inescapable preconditions to my well being. That is to say, it could happen that my parents died or I failed to find a partner. In that case Epicurean will consider me a poor being, while it is still possible that I would be quite content with what I got. Or not! I just do not agree that there’s only one way to go.
On physics - it seems to me you mention the parts of it that mostly affect your ethical standard. But there is a whole bunch of stuff explaining atoms, planets movements and so on in the remaining writings. And obviously it is very unscientific from the today’s point of view. Actually the same with the Stoic physics.
Again, none of the mentioned values are bullshit for me, I just don’t think that they count as philosophical truth.
The argument of the essay was that Epicurus is very conservative when it comes to "philosophical truth," in a way that those with Pyrrhonist inclinations might find appealing. If he declares anything of ethical import to be objectively true, it is that pleasure is good, but even that can easily be read as an evident biological observation, rather than a statement of moralism akin to those of the Stoics.
Everything else is probabilistic extrapolation of a sort that doesn't seem to me to violate any Pyrrhonist tenets regarding the criterion of action, or your own behavior. Epicurus doesn't assert that a wife is "necessary" (he wasn't married himself), or that any of the components of prudence (health maintenance, financial decision-making, career choices, etc.) represent "philosophical truth." But they do empirically seem to be relevant factors for the pain and pleasure of your life.
If you feel that these kinds of choices are worth taking into consideration for practical reasons, but are not subject to any kind of moral obligation, then Epicurus agrees with you! Pyrrhonism just seems to neglect such issues entirely.
I would agree that modern people don't need to spend time mastering the cutting edge astronomical theories of 300 BC. But in terms of the history of science, one could make a case that the Epicureans represent a radically more "scientific" outlook than that of their contemporaries and predecessors, both in their principle of multiple explanations and in their refusal to admit ungrounded speculation about non-material existences or interfering gods. Those big underlying ideas have aged very well.