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.
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”.
how the pleasure principle shapes our world
THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE in the New Yorker: Stephen Greenblatt explains how Lucretius and his poem “On the Nature of Things” shaped the modern world.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/2011/08/08/110808on_audio_greenblatt
Parallels between Epicureanism and Confucianism
The parallels between Epicureanism and Buddhism have been seen and shown, discussed and understood during the last years but its parallels with Confucianism, at least to my knowledge, not yet. I was not aware of any parallelism myself before reading Bertrand Russell’s ‘Eastern and Western Ideals of Happiness’.
I was sometimes musing about the pros and cons of how the Western world might have evolved if Epicureanism and not Christianism had been installed as state religion by the Romans. Would the creed and conduct of life of the middle classes have been able to influence the cruel fanaticism if the lower classes or the cruel cynicism of the ruling classes?
Such speculations are of course mote but after reading Russell’s essay I tend to see more positive than negative possibilities of a practicable system of ethics imposed by the ( a quasi ‘state-religion’)based on an understanding of human nature, and the cultivation of humanity such as Confucianism had been in China for2400 years.
The following quotations might enlighten the parallelisms that I discovered for myself (emphasis mine):
The civilisation of China, as every one knows, is based upon the teaching of Confucius, who flourished five hundred years before Christ. […] His personality has been stamped on Chinese civilisation from his day to our own. […]
During his lifetime the Chinese occupied only a small part of present-day China, and were divided into a number of warring states. During the next three hundred years they established themselves throughout what is now China proper, and founded an empire exceeding in territory and population any other that existed until the last fifty years. In spite of barbarian invasions, Mongol and Manchu dynasties, and occasional longer or shorter periods of chaos and civil war, the Confucian system survived,
bringing with it art and literature and a civilised way of life. It is only in our own day, through contact with the West and with the Westernised Japanese, that this system has begun to break down.
A system which has had this extraordinary power of survival must have great merits, and certainly deserves our respect and consideration. It is not a religion, as we understand the word,
because it is not associated with the supernatural or with mystical beliefs. It is a purely ethical system, but its ethics, unlike those of Christianity, are not too exalted for ordinary men to practise.
He […] never exacts anything contrary to nature and the natural affections.
Confucius was in all things moderate, even in virtue. He did not believe that we ought to return good for evil. […]
The principle of returning good for evil was being taught in his day in China by the Taoists, whose teaching is much more akin to that of Christianity than is the teaching of Confucius. […]
It is characteristic of China that it was not Lao-Tze but Confucius who became the recognised national sage. Taoism has survived, but chiefly as magic and among the uneducated. Its doctrines have appeared visionary to the practical men who administered the Empire, while the doctrines of Confucius were eminently calculated to avoid friction. […]
Chinese governors naturally preferred the Confucian maxims of self-control, benevolence and courtesy, combined, as they were, with a great emphasis upon the good that could be done by wise government.
It never occurred to the Chinese, as it has to all modern white nations, to have one system of ethics in theory and another in practice. I do not mean that they always live up to their own theories, but that they attempt to do so and are expected to do so, whereas there are large parts of the Christian ethic which are universally admitted to be too good for this wicked world.
We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach but do not practise, and another which we practise but seldom preach. […] In practice, our effective morality is that of material success achieved by means of a struggle; and this applies to nations as well as to individuals. Anything else seems to us soft and foolish.
The Chinese do not adopt either our theoretical or our practical ethic. They admit in theory that there are occasions when it is proper to fight, and in practice that these occasions are rare; whereas we hold in theory that there are no occasions when it is proper to fight and in practice that such occasions are very frequent. […]
Young China—that is to say, the students who have been educated on European lines—recognise modern needs, and have perhaps hardly enough respect for the old tradition. Nevertheless, even the most modern, with few exceptions, retain the traditional virtues of moderation, politeness and a pacific temper. […]
If I were to try to sum up in a phrase the main difference between the Chinese and ourselves, I should say that they, in the main, aim at enjoyment, while we, in the main, aim at power. We like power over our fellow-men, and we like power over Nature. For the sake of the former we have built up strong states, and for the sake of the latter we have built up Science.
The Chinese […] will not work, as Americans and Western Europeans do simply because they would be bored if they did not work, nor do they love hustle for its own sake. When they have enough to live on, they live on it, instead of trying to augment it by hard work. They have an infinite capacity for leisurely amusements—going to the theatre, talking while they drink tea, admiring the Chinese art of earlier times, or walking in beautiful scenery. To our way of thinking, there is something unduly mild about such a way of spending one’s life; we respect more a man who goes to his office every day, even if all that he does in his office is harmful.
Living in the East has, perhaps a corrupting influence upon a white man, but I must confess that, since I came to know China, I have regarded laziness as one of the best qualities of which men in the mass are capable. We achieve certain things by being energetic, but it may be questioned whether, on the balance, the things that we achieve are of any value. We develop wonderful skill in manufacture, part of which we devote to making ships, automobiles, telephones and other means of living luxuriously
at high pressure, while another part is devoted to making guns, poison gases and aeroplanes for the purpose of killing each other wholesale. We have a first-class system of administration and taxation, part of which is devoted to education, sanitation and such useful objects, while the rest is devoted to war. In England at the present day most of the national revenue is spent on past and future wars and only the residue on useful objects. On the Continent, in most countries, the proportion is even worse. We have a police system of unexampled efficiency, part of which is devoted to the detection and prevention of crime and part to imprisoning anybody who has any new constructive political ideas. In China, until recently, they had none of these things. […] The result was that in China, as compared to any white man’s country, there was freedom for all, and a degree of diffused happiness which was amazing in view of the poverty of all but a tiny minority.
Comparing the actual outlook of the average Chinese with that of the average Western, two differences strike one: first, that the Chinese do not admire activity unless it serves some useful purpose; secondly, that they do not regard morality as consisting in checking our own impulses and interfering with those of others.
Confucius taught that men are born good, and that if they become wicked, that is through the force of evil example or corrupting manners. This difference from traditional Western orthodoxy has a profound influence on the outlook of the Chinese. […]
Among ourselves, the people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forgo ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others. There is an element of the busybody in our conception of virtue: unless a man makes himself a nuisance to a great many people, we do not think he can be an exceptionally good man. This attitude comes from our notion of Sin. It leads not only to interference with freedom, but also to hypocrisy, since the conventional standard is too difficult for most people to live up to.
In China this is not the case. Moral precepts are positive rather than negative. A man is expected to be respectful to his parents, kind to his children, generous to his poor relations, and courteous
to all. These are not very difficult duties, but most men actually fulfil them, and the result is perhaps better than that of our higher standard, from which most people fall short. […]
Another result of the absence of the notion of Sin is that men are much more willing to submit their differences to argument and reason than they are in the West. Among ourselves, differences
of opinion quickly become questions of ‘principle’: each side thinks that the other side is wicked, and that any yielding to it involves sharing in its guilt. This makes our disputes bitter, and involves in practice a great readiness to appeal to force. In China, although there were military men who were ready to appeal to force, no one took them seriously, not even their own soldiers. […] The great bulk of the population, including the civil administration, went about its business as though these generals and their armies did not exist. In ordinary life, disputes are usually adjusted by the friendly mediation of some third party. Compromise is the accepted principle, because it is necessary to save the face of both parties. Saving face, though in some forms it makes foreigners smile, is a most valuable national institution, making social and political life far less ruthless than it is with us. […]
If the whole world were like China, the whole world could be happy; but so long as others are warlike
and energetic, the Chinese, now that they are no longer isolated, will be compelled to copy our vices to some degree if they are to preserve their national independence. But let us not flatter ourselves that this imitation will be an improvement.
The student of Epicureanism will have no difficulty in discovering the parallelisms between the teachings, and especially the results of practicing the teachings, of Epicurus and Confucius.
Epicurean Belief System and Conduct of Life
After my lecture on Epicureanism I was asked whether I think that Epicureanism is going to spread again. My answer was two pronged:
In the broad sense there are millions, and maybe billions, of part time unwitting Epicureans spread all over the world.
I call part time unwitting Epicureans all those who don’t know much or anything about Epicurus and his teachings but share, for the most part, the Epicurean belief system and behave most of the time as you’d expect an Epicurean to behave, i.e. they
- think, talk and work honestly
- manage their households rationally
- tend to communal self-sufficiency
- contribute to the sustenance of their smaller or larger communities
- try to make the best out of their lives without harming others
- refuse the use of force and coercion in spreading their ideas
- are tolerant with others’ world views and lifestyles
- do not believe in the force of destiny or supernatural powers
- accept the validity of scientific methods and results
- are reliable and committed friends, partners, parents, coworkers
- are friendly with their friends and polite with everyone else
- respect the written and unwritten laws of the country where they live
- base their interactions on the principles of mutuality and contractuality
In the narrow sense, however, there are no full time practicing Epicureans that I know of, as of 2011. There are no Epicurean schools, no Epicurean education system and no Epicurean communities to teach, practice and cultivate a communal Epicurean conduct of life.
As a member of a long time dormant Italian Epicurean mailing list I was pleasantly surprised these days to see that the members started naming the places where they live and whether they are able and/or willing to host Epicureans so that they can get to know each other personally.
This initiative could even develop one day into something like the Pasporta Servo (Passport Service, the hospitality service for Esperantists) as soon as the Epicureans develop something like a consciously practiced common culture (and choose a common language to interact with Epicureans coming from another linguistic background.)
‘lathe biosas’ through the summer?
The members of the EpicureanGroup on Yahoo http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EpicureanGroup/
seem to have taken Epicurus’s advice a bit too much o heart: ‘lathe biosas’, i.e. live hidden, inconspicuously.
I miss their calm, cheerful and reflected voices.
For me the Wisconsin summer sounds (with the cicadas loud concerts) and feels (with the warm and humid air) rather Mediterranean: it reminds me of my favorite places on the Dalmatian coast of the Adria: Kotorska Boka and the island of Rab.
I spent most of the summer also mostly in hiding, too: most of the summer days working for money/sustenance of our holy bodiesJ, walking and talking with my wife and our children, reading and listening to Portuguese guitar music.
I had the chance to make a few people aware of the essence and the influence of Epicureanism on our daily lives by giving a talk in the Summer School in Madison, Wis. One person from the audience came to me after the lecture and confessed that she realized she was an Epicurean, unwittingly, as so many millions.
The lecture was taped and as soon as I manage to do some basic editing with my son I will upload it to youtube and give you the link. I could use professional help on editing, though, if anybody of my friends would offer their knowhow and some of their time.
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