Psychology Today re-discovers Epicurus
In an anonymous article that is “adapted” from Neel Burton’s ‘The Art of Failure: The Anti Self-Help Guide’ Psychology Today re-discovers Epicurus.
It is an excellent summary of the main points of the Epicurean philosophy. The author debunks a lot of the myths people believe when the say they are “Epicureans” but two widespread errors are not corrected:
- Right at the beginning of his article the author asserts that “According to Epicurus, reason teaches that pleasure is good and that pain is bad, and that pleasure and pain are the ultimate measures of good and bad.” This is an error and it is corrected by Cassius Amicus in an analytic comment on Facebook: “Epicurus’ rejected Plato’s espousal of “reason” as a tool of knowledge over the senses/anticipations/plain-pleasure mechanism. The point is that in order to be valid, ALL conclusions from reason must arise from and be constantly checked against the reality we judge from the three legs of the canon of truth. The modern tendency of many of us (including me) is to presume that “reason” is the key to correct thinking and living, but that is not what Epicurus said. Yes, properly applied, reason will validate the conclusion, but the real tools of determining truth are the information derived from the three legs of the canon. There are many citations for this, but the one I use most often is in Cicero’s De Finibus where in the Epicurean argument Cicero records that Epicurus held logic to be virtually worthless, and stressed how it is meaningless unless it starts from correct premises — from the three legs of the canon, to which reason is subordinate.’
- The author of the article in Psychology Today commits the “summum bonum” fallacy when he asserts that “Epicurus agrees with Aristotle that happiness is an end-in-itself and the highest good of human living. However, he identifies happiness with the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain rather than with the pure exercise of reason.” Norman W. DeWitt has convincingly demonstrated in his ‘Epicurus ad His Philosophy’ that “to Epicurus pleasure was the telos ['finis' in the sense of 'the goal'] and life itself was the greatest good.”
Epicurus developed an impressive range of training and coaching tools to enable his followers to live a happy life in accordance with his philosophy. These techniques had been successfully used unchanged for an almost unimaginably long span of time: 800 years. Many of themhave been ‘borrowed’ by the Stoics, and from them, by many Christians, re-branded as “spiritual exercises” – for instance by Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus (better known as the “Jesuit order”.) as demonstrated by Paul Rabbow in his ‘Seelenfürung’ and by Pierre Hadot in his ‘Exercises Spirituels et Philosophie Antique’.The author of the article in Psychology Today does not mention this fact.
You can dissolve all your fears when you realize how little you really need to lead a blissful life
Epicurus’s core teaching in a nutshell: “You can dissolve all your fears when you realize how little you really need to lead a blissful life.”
To encapsulate a felling or a thought in as few words as possible: this endeavor engendered the literary genre of the Japanese haiku. It also produced the famous four-fold cure (tetrapharmakos) of Epicurean practical wisdom :
- There is nothing to fear from God
- There is nothing to feel from death
- Good things can be acquired
- Bad things can be endured
It sounds simple. It shows the state of mind you can reach after consciously practicing the Epicurean conduct of life by daily reflections and mental exercises under the guidance of an Epicurean coach as Epicurean self-educating communities were practicing it unchanged in 800 years (300 BCE – 500 CE). It has been boiled down to this concentrated formula by the Epicurean community in the famous Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, maybe by their in-house instructor, the philosopher and poet Philodemus of Gadara, or his disciples, but more probably obtained collectively, as happiness itself is obtained.
Today I tried to boil it down further, the way cooks keep on reducing their stock. What I found at the bottom of my mental saucepan was this:
You can dissolve all your fears when you realize how little you really need to lead a blissful life.
My goal was to show not only the end-result but also indicate that it takes your individual decision and efforts to reach that state. The three-letter word ‘can’ must hint not only at the individual’s responsibility in making choices that further his own happiness but also at the fact that it might take the assistance of like-minded friends and experienced guides and coaches to reach that goal. And maybe long years of dedicated practice.
ECOL – Epicurean Conduct of Life™ stressFREEDOM coaches and therapists?
Since they found out about my cancer some of my friends and ex-coachees suggested that I finish and publish my ECOLOG - Epicurean Conduct of Life Orientation Guidebook™ . Others think it would be more helpful if I fully developed and made accessible a course for ECOL – Epicurean Conduct of Life™ stressFREEDOM coaches and or therapists.
My answer is:
I am firmly convinced that it could help lots of stressFREEDOM seekers, stressed adults and teenagers find their peace, supervisors and employees resolve their conflicts if they used the 2300 year old techniques I re-discovered, re-engineered and modernized.
I might even find the time to edit and review my notes.
But: I am not sure I will have time and energy left enough to
- coach and train the ECOL – Epicurean Conduct of Life™ stressFREEDOM coaches™ and stressFREEDOM therapists™
- coordinate the process of their certification
- set up the organizational structures needed to ensure the quality of instruction and supervision of practice of ECOL – Epicurean Conduct of Life™ stressFREEDOM coaches™ and stressFREEDOM therapists™
They countered that this would be feasible with support from committed laymen and experts.
I believe they are right but I am not sure that they will find a committed team for this project.
At least most probably not in my (seemingly more and more limited:) lifetime…
Also: I am not convinced that people know that stressFREEDOM is a constitutive element of a happy life. The prevalent education systems and media make them believe that in order to be happy they should strive for “success’ by being better than others and accumulate more possessions or buyable experiences than their neighbors. Nobody teaches them that the moment they decided to compete they have already lost…
how to satisfy your needs in ways that are congruent with your values
It’s such a simple principle – in principle:
satisfy your needs in ways that are congruent with your values.
In practice, however, it is not so simple at all.
‘I can grasp why the fact that my values and the way I satisfy my needs reduce the causes of stress and add to my well being’, said one of my coachees. (To protect his identity I will call him Peter.) He went on: ’My problem is that I just don’t know how to harmonize one of my cherished values with my actions. ‘
It turned out that the value he cherished so much was one of humanity’s core values: honesty. And his dilemma was also one of the the most common ones: how to be honest without hurting the feelings of his friend.
How to strike a viable balance between tactfulness and honesty? We are confronted almost daily with this problem in out interactions with our friends, family, coworkers. The need to belong is one of our other basic needs while to be honest is another one.
Peter’s problem was how to tell his friend that he did not feel like playing chess with him every Thursday afternoon any more. His friend was disabled and could not leave his house and the weekly chess parties were a very important element of his social life.
We all tend to use a “white lie” in such cases and we often do, since we do not have the knowledge and/or the skills to do any better. Peter’s first thought was to say that he had to work on a new project and that he was too busy at other times with his family. But at the same time he felt that he respected his friend too much to tell him a lie.
I told Peter openly and honestly that there were no simple answers and no quick fixes but it would be a good start is to ask himself how he could express his respect for his friend and only then tackle the thorny issue.
After only two coaching sessions he had both the knowledge and the skills to navigate safely between the rock of honesty and the hard place of tactfulness and save both his self-respect and his friendship. We also worked out another way to satisfy his own and his friend’s needs for belonging and honesty.
He said that it was well worth to work on himself for something very valuable to him: friendship.
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