Is anyone here an Epicurean? Back when I was in high school I used to read a lot about Epicureanism. Don’t confuse it with Epicurism, which is what the philosophy has mostly been understood as (when it wasn’t totally ignored). An Epicure is sort of another name for a ‘foodie’ or a wine connoisseur or someone who only cares about pleasure. An Epicurean focuses more on peace of mind with a pleasures of the flesh in a moderate amount.
Mises in Human Action wrote:
The historical role of the theory of the division of labor as elaborated by British political economy from Hume to Ricardo consisted in the complete demolition of all metaphysical doctrines concerning the origin and the operation of social cooperation. It consummated the spiritual, moral and intellectual emancipation of mankind inaugurated by the philosophy of Epicureanism.
To start off with, Epicureanism can be summed up by the tetrapharmakos:
This is beyond naive and Epicureanism cannot solve the problems of the human predicament as post-Classical philosophers have noted.
For one thing, death is a black door beyond which man cannot see, so by that fact alone it presents worries. How can one be so sure that death is the annihilation of the self as to simply pretend that death provides no worries? The same thing goes with the idea of God presenting no fears.
Furthermore, is good so easilly attainable and evil so readily endurable. Can one really read the histories of human horrors like Elie Wiesel’s Night and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archepelago and still believe that proposition. I would have to answer no, sometimes it is possible to be in such an abyss of despair that good is quite hard to attain, and the evil is nigh impossible to endure.
Like the other Classical philosophies, Skepticism and Stoicism, Epircureanism only holds water when the times are good and the true evils of the human condition are far off, but when everything goes sour, Epicureanism collapses like a house of cards.
The same thing goes with the idea of God presenting no fears.
I thought his point of this was that the gods were distant in the kosmos and uninterested in human affairs.
Anyhow, my fav tidbit about Epicurus is that his atomism was based on that of Democritus and Leucippus (sp?), except that he denied that Leucippus ever existed.
And my point was that, like the Epicurean concept of death, that does nothing to show that God provides no fears. How sure can one really be that the gods care nothing for human affairs?
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?”
And my point was that, like the Epicurean concept of death, that does nothing to show that God provides no fears. How sure can one really be that the gods care nothing for human affairs?
Well, I think we both know where the burden of proof lies.
There are some serious flaws with Epicurus’ thought, of course, but I do like that they shunned political involvement.
I like some aspects of Epicureanism.I agree it’s annoying that it’s thought of as hedonism.I love a lot of greek philosophy.The stoics were fascinating in their ideas and like Epicureanism,I believe their philosophy is somewhat misunderstood.They did not oppose emotional per se just ‘passion’ or emotions that are without rational reason equivalent to phobias for example.At least that’s my understanding of them.
on a side note ,apparently Thomas Jefferson classified himself as an Epicurean.
What the Stoics opposed was a passive reaction to events. Every sage (the perfect practitioner of Stoicism, that is) must have a detachment from the world, and must instead find a peace of mind through the positive use of his free will.
In Stoicism one finds a philosophy concerned with the relationship between the deterministic cosmos and man’s free will. To the Stoics, the mind was something spiritual and therefore outside of the determinism of the world, but this is one of its greatest flaws for then one is placed in the sticky situation of explaining why this is so.
“According to nature” you want to live? O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain all at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power–how could you live according to this indifference? Living—is not that precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is not living–estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And supposing your imperative “live according to nature” meant at bottom as much as “live according to life”–how can you not do that? Why make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be? In truth the matter is altogether different: while you pretend rapturously to read the canon of your law in nature, you want something opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to impose your morality, your ideal, on nature–even on nature–and incorporate them in her; you demand that she should be nature “according to the Stoa,” and you would like all existence to exist only after your own image-—as an immense eternal glorification and generalization of Stoicism.
For all your love of truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, so rigidly-hypnotically to see nature the wrong way, namely Stoically, that you are no longer able to see her differently. And some abysmal arrogance finally still inspires you with the insane hope that because you know how to tyrannize yourselves—Stoicism is self-tyranny—nature, too, lets herself be tyrannized: is not the Stoic–a piece of nature? But this is an ancient eternal story: what formerly happened with the Stoics still happens today, too, as soon as any philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates a world in its own image; it cannot do anything otherwise. Philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to a “creation of the world,” to the causa prima[first cause].
-Nietzsche on the Stoics (from Beyond Good and Evil)