Who can be an Epicurean today and why not
To my mind being “Epicurean” today may mean many thins to many people. We cannot simply pretend to ignore that the word “epicurean” is being used to describe at least three semantically different categories:
1. fond of or adapted to luxury or indulgence in sensual pleasures; having luxurious tastes or habits, especially in eating and drinking.
2. fit for an epicure: epicurean delicacies.
3. ( initial capital letter ) of, pertaining to, or characteristic of Epicurus or Epicureanism.
We might, of course agree to exclude the foodies but the rest of the world might ignore our decision. But even after the arbitrary exclusion of the first two established meanings of the word we would have at one end of the remaining wide spectrum the people who have heard that it is not the same as being a foodie , plus, on reading Lactantius’s “if god is willing to prevent evil, but not able?…then he is not omnipotent..” they feel they like it and repost it on Facebook’s Epicurus wall (every month or so). At the other end might stand those people who would live in an Epicurean community an Epicurean way of life, communally practicing the teachings. We could agree, of course, that by barely subscribing to a set of principles, like for instance the Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings, and the Letter to Menoeceus, or maybe even just the Tetrapharmakos, one should be entitled to describe oneself as a n“ Epicurean”. Or maybe as a “non-practicing Epicurean” or “principled Epicurean” or “philosophical Epicurean” etc.. The above mentioned general principles are general enough to be acceptable for the vast majority of those people who value a minimum level of rationality and honesty, even though they might have been baptized/incorporated/engulfed into some vast and vague and abstract worldview ‘community’ like Christianity, or Buddhism, or the Islam – or any of their local branches.
Without practicing the teachings the subscribers to a set of Epicurean principles might be no more ‘Epicureans’ as the majority of Christians and other members of the established mass-religions are. (I never stop being astonished by seeing the word “Christian” describe an honest Amish craftsman and Ken Lay, the Christian Extraordinaire. )What is the meaning of the word Christian then? And what should be the meaning of the word “Epicurean”? Or what word or combination of words should more or less appropriately describe the non-foodie branch of practicing Epicureans?
Maybe we should start by agreeing on whether being a member of an Epicurean community is a necessary element of designating someone or oneself as Epicurean. The freemasons decided that there is no such thing as a freemason outside of a lodge. Can or should this principle be applied to self-proclaimed Epicureans? Or shall we try to develop a more precise terminology?
As you see, we have two problems to deal with
1. define what we mean by the word “Epicurean”
2. then find a better word for it
We can, of course eschew the challenge and go on messing up the terms further describing our own personal mixture of philosophical and/or psychological and/or sociological ingredients as “Epicureanism” or even “Neo-Epicureanism”.
CHREMOLATRY: a new word for an old disease
Every December I spent in Western Europe or North America I was trying to find a diagnostic word that would describe the epidemic disease that befalls the inhabitants of these regions. They start buying things in unimaginably enormous quantities, wrap them up and give them each other, or keep them for themselves. Things they do not need. The average West European owns 10 000 things, the average North American even 20 000 things. They don’t know how many of these things they really need. But they keep on multiplying them.
What are we experiencing each December? A wild rush fore more things. Back in 1998 I was almost crushed by the shopping multitudes in the center of the Westphalian city of Münster. The next advent Sunday the crowd managed to really stomp a person to death there. Here in the US I saw the same stampede for more things on TV as ‘Black Friday’.
I remember Georges Perec’s first novel, ‘Les Choses’ that describes how a young couple explores “happiness” in a consumer society by surrounding and burying themselves under an increasing number of objects. The English title ‘Things: A Story of the Sixties’ pretends the phenomenon was limited to the Sixties of the previous century.
“Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necesitate” is a statement known as Occam’s razor, or Ockham’s razor, and word for word it means that “entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.” It is sometimes expressed in Latin as ‘lex parsimoniae’ (the law of parsimony, economy or succinctness. It is a principle that generally recommends from among competing hypotheses selecting the one that makes the fewest new assumptions.
If we were to translate this recommendation from the realm of epistemology into the realm of everyday life we might say: do not multiply things beyond necessity. I could also say: ‘stop reifying!’ (from Latin ‘res’ thing + ‘facere’to make, reification can be loosely translated as thing-making; ) or ‘stop making more things than needed!’
Today the legendary light bulb went up in my head and I found the diagnostic name of the disease that takes epidemic proportions every year in December:
CHREMOLATRY. I made it up from the Greek words
chrema = a thing,(also: business, spec. money, riches)
+ -latry = worship
I waive the copyright on it and send it out to my friends and acquaintances as a diagnostic name they can also use as a diagnostic tool by asking themselves the question:
“How deep am I affected by CHREMOLATRY? How deep am I worshipping things and how much do I contribute to their multiplication beyond necessity?”
Would our merry race go on multiplying the things on the face of the earth, polluting also the air, the water, even our brains if we asked us this question? Would the cult of multiplying things beyond necessity reach its paroxysm at the end of each year?
I doubt it. No appeal to reason has led to more reasonable conduct of life on a mass level in the long run.
On an individual level, however, the question might lead to the question “what are the things that I really need?” and might even mark the starting point of a wonderful journey of self-knowledge, purification, simplification, stress elimination. Or even peace of mind that is happiness.
misquoting Aristotle
No Epicurean is, should, or can be a great fan of Aristotle but we all are in the habit of quoting him. For instance on what he said about habit: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.”
I am sorry to admit that I am no exception in my Epicurean happiness guide “From Pain to Pleasure: The Proven Pathway to Happiness” , in the just published paperback edition, too…
Because it is a misquote. I have just found it out from Jules Evans in an article entitled Fake quotes he published on Sunday, 18 December 2011 in his blog.
I also found out from Jules’ blog entry that I am not alone with this misquote. Others widely misquote, too, and not only Aristotle but also John Stuart Mill, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi.
Commenting on Jules’ article Greg Linser refers us to ‘Falser Words Were Never Spoken’ by Brian Morton, published in the New York Times who mentions Henry James, George Eliot, Picasso “all of them are being kept alive in popular culture through pithy, cheery sayings they never actually said.”
From now on I guess I’d better stick to quoting people I know firsthand, like myself:
“Check the source before you quote, or you risk to misquote and be exposed.”
Jules Evans, Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Greg Linser, Brian Morton, New York Times, , From Pain to Pleasure: The Proven Pathway to Happiness, Henry James, George Eliot, Picasso
how to explain to your kids that they are aliens
My legal status is currently almost congruent with my cultural identity. In Romania, where I was born and raised as a Hungarian, I was not an alien. I was part of a minority. In Germany I became a German citizen after relinquishing my Romanian citizenship, so I was not an alien, but a Spätaussiedler, an immigrant of German ancestry.
Finally I almost managed to bring my legal status in line with my cultural identity: a Central European in the Midwest, a legal alien.
My wife says I shouldn’t call myself an alien or even a legal alien, though. She says they don’t use that technical term any more in the US but another technical term: ‘permanent resident’ or the non-technical term: ‘recent immigrant’. This is technically correct, since the Wikipedia defines an alien as someone “who has temporary or permanent residence in a country (which is foreign to him/her)” It further proposes that he or she “ may be called a resident alien of that country. This is a subset of the aforementioned legal alien category.”
My personal view on the matter is that there are advantages in being a bit of an outsider: you can distance yourself more easily from the local forms of culturally accepted idiosyncrasies (like no speed limit in Germany or shooting your family, neighbors and presidents in the US, or beating your wife in Hungary) and have more fun discovering new manifestations thereof.
I only run into difficulties when I am pressed by my children who are dual citizens of Hungary and Germany to give coherent explanations. I keep on avoiding to discuss this issue until they grow a bit more so they can read How To Be An Alien by George Mikes (whose contributions to Radio Free Europe were definitely funnier than mine and so are his explanations regarding the legal and cultural status of being an alien).
But I might still have to teach them somehow the lesson Sting learned as an Englishman in New York:
“It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say.”
Sedaris lowered himself again
David Sedaris lowered himself again: he told dirty jokes during a performance in Madison, Wisconsin: Celebrated humorist Sedaris not above ribald comedy at Overture
That would have been perfectly acceptable in any country in East or South Europe, where political correctness is not part of the national hypocrisy toolbox.
Back in the late 1990s I did business development in East Europe for a German company and all export business development managers assembled every year three times to exchange their ideas and experiences at the German headquarter. On one of these occasions we had to be trained to use a new software but the software manager had left for vacation without leaving the password for his substitute. It took the substitute about two hours to reach him and during this time we all told dirty jokes, except our German colleagues who were embarrassed since the ribald words marking the punch line of a joke translated into German were only ribald and vulgar but not funny.
Our German colleagues shook their heads incredulously also when I told them that little booklets entitled ‘The best Gypsy Jokes’ and ‘The Best Jew Jokes’ are sold at every railway station and at hundreds of other places in Budapest by Gypsies. And I’m sure they are collected and published by Jews.
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