For Living the Good Life Stress-Free: Orientation
We all need orientation to guide us from pain to pleasure, from stress to happiness, from confusion to clarity. Who gives us what kind of orientation today in which form with what intent?
We learn very early which way to turn our face to get milk from mother’s breast or avoid a slap from mother’s hand, where to go for food, comfort, company and when to stop touching a hot stove. Our senses and our physical environment teach us what is good and healthy for us by producing a feeling of pleasure. What is bad for our health produces disgust. Pleasure and pain are the basic stop-and-go signals for our individual survival.
This would be enough if we weren’t so very social. But humans cannot survive on their own and therefore the social group will also teach us what is good and bad for the survival of the group. The group’s teachings might differ from what we learned through our direct sense feedback. Your senses tell you to devour all the food but if you don’t share it with (some of) your group members they might punish you and not share with you their food the next time.
So you learn to work out your survival strategies balancing your individual needs as felt by your drives and tastes with the group values as experienced through daily practice, learning conflict and expectation management. This is hard enough and it takes years to find your place in the group in such a way that you can still live also according to your personal drives and tastes.
Your job to find orientation will get even more difficult or even impossible if your social environment keeps on sending you ambiguous messages by, e.g., commanding you not to lie but at the same time everybody lying to you about a life after death.
As a consequence you will be disoriented and will try to work out strategies to get along within this system. You can choose to conform to the system and pretend to follow its rules, being incongruent with your own inner beliefs. Or you can choose “to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing” become incongruent with the value system and acceptable behavior patterns of your social environment. In both cases you will ruin your mental and possibly also your physical health. You will perceive the most widespread incongruities mostly as conscience conflicts and stress.
What can you do if you don’t wish stress to ruin your health and happiness ? What other options can you have?
You could find a value system linked to behavior patterns and corresponding lifestyles in a congruent manner. In other words you might seek and find people who walk their talk and their thoughts, words and acts are congruent not only among themselves but they resonate with your own deepest needs as well.
I have good news for you: There is such a proven and viable model of pragmatic and easy to follow values system. It is the 2300-years-old practical Epicurean philosophy. It makes it easy to be honest and happy at the same time. It has been hushed up and defamed by the competing philosophies and worldviews of the Platonist, Stoic, Skeptic as well as Christian theoreticians and theologians but it never stopped giving simple practical orientation to reasonable, rational and honest people. For an enormously long period of 800 years, from 300 BCE till 500 CE (almost four times longer than the existence of the US!), it was even the most widespread worldview and lifestyle of the non-fanatical, pragmatic middle class of the Greek and Roman world.
Professional philosophers mostly know how relevant Epicurean attitudes, worldview and life conduct are today and how many of our stress-related and ecological problems would be solved if we only adopted and applied them. Unfortunately they don’t know how to say all this in simple language that is understandable also for everybody. The overwhelming majority of psychologists and sociologists, educators and life coaches has either never heard about Epicureanism or if they did, they erroneously believe that it is about eating and drinking. Anyway they are churning out ever “new” happiness recipes, as if re-inventing the wheel every week.
I will endeavour to make the practical Epicurean happiness guidance available for everyone who needs orientation but cannot accept childish myths or spiritual hocus-pocus supplied by organizations, groups or individuals with the aim of turning you into a docile instrument for their profit/power increasing machinery. Re-discovering the Epicurean system of values, attitudes and behaviour patterns might make you feel reborn in a friendly and sustainable world, enabling you to live in harmony with yourself and with your social and natural environment.
Epicurean solutions for our burning problems – Prof. Hossenfelder’s views (5): Epicurus’s philosophy guides and cures
Prof. Malte Hossenfelder says that Epicurus reminds us what philosophy can and should do: the science to help us plan and conduct our lives.
Nowadays philosophy is hardly more than scientific speculation about linguistic phenomena. Even ethics consists mainly in the discussion of its own methods. In most forewords to philosophical books on ethics you can read that the author’s aim is to find ways how ethical norms could be established but no author even suggests that he could set up such norms of behavior.
On the contrary: Epicurus has given us practicable ethical norms – practiced by his followers unchanged for 800 years. He showed a practicable way how to live if you want to be happy and he did this in a simple language understandable for people with basic education.
At the same time Epicurus didn’t only teach and preach but he lived in accordance with his own teachings and so he became an inspiring role model for all those who decided to lead a happy life.
Epicurean philosophy applied in everyday life has been guiding and curing stressed, disoriented, suffering people for 2300 years now. It is easy to understand and simple to follow. It is compatible with science and its practice has such side effects as producing a major contribution to sustainabilty.
All you need is to take the decision: I want to be happy in tghis life because there is no other life ahead.
Epicurean solutions for our burning problems – Prof. Hossenfelder’s views (3): how science can produce more happiness
Malte Hossenfelder sees Epicurus’s topicality also in the Epicurean approach to science. For Epicurus science was a tool to achieve happiness directly through stress-FREEDOM: the role of science was to liberate the stressFREEDOM seekers from irrational fears and at the same time to furnish knowledge directly relevant to live a happy life.
We use science to subdue and overexploit nature, to produce unnecessary products and awake a sense of greed for these products in the belief that all this process will lead us finally indirectly to happiness.
Taking the direct way would be more efficient for us and more sustainable for nature’s resources. The Epicurean approach results in a faith in nature’s laws that work independently of our wishes and desires and therefore we needn’t care or worry about them, even if some of our theories prove to be false. “How could be a man disturbed by a failure, if he’s free from ambition and fears neither death nor pains?” states Hossenfelder.
Hossenfelder doesn’t say this but any Epicurean (and many others) would agree to it: science should primarily do the following:
- develop ways for producing more food with less effort
- develop more efficient medicines with less side effects
- develop better housing solutions for more people
and communicate its accomplishments in such a way that food-, health- and housing-specialists can apply the findings.
Epicurean solutions for our burning problems – Prof. Hossenfelder’s views (2): needs-based economy for more happiness
Malte Hossenfelder sees Epicurus’s topicality in the first place in the fact that the economy propagated by Epicurus and practiced by his followers for 800 years was a needs-based economy. Practicing it today would eliminate two of the major problems we are facing:
a.The overexploitation of natural resources:
b. The social tensions between rich and poor
to be continued
Epicurean solutions for our burning problems – Prof. Hossenfelder’s views (1)
Malte Hossenfelder is one of the few professional philosophers who had the courage to tackle and understand and explain convincingly Epicurus’s SUBdivision of necessary and natural desires (the “non-professional” - in the sense of amateur in the sense of making a living from something else – philosophers having tackled this successfully are Victor Kioulaphides and Tome Merle in the Epicurean Group on Yahoo).
Beyond a good understanding of Epicurus’s philosphy Hossenfelder expresses his conviction that the Epicureay Way of living has a high topicality for all of us today. He sees Epicurus’s topicality in the 21st century in five fields.
As his book on Epicurus (Epikur, Verlag C.H. Beck, 1998, München) is available only in German as far as I know, I will summarize here his recommendations.
- The role of needs-based economy in producing happiness
- The role of science in producing happiness
- The role of autarky in producing happiness
- The immediate and direct availability of happiness
- The role of philosophy in forming ethical norms and defining a lifestyle
I will shortly present each of these domains in the next days.
You may get more information in German on Professor Hossenfelder here:
http://www.uni-graz.at/malte.hossenfelder/site.php?show=1
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