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Review of The Happiness Diet

The Happiness Diet: A Nutritional Prescription for a Sharp Brain, Balanced Mood, and Lean, Energized Body, by Tyler Graham and Drew Ramsey, is full of useful bits of information that are essential for making good, informed dietary decisions. It also covers the history of  how processed foods are made, and uses plain scientific facts to explain why whole foods are usually superior sources of the nutrients we need.

The most important part of the book, in my opinion–and the reason why I chose to review it–is the “elements of happiness” portion. In addition to the essential nutrients that our body cannot produce and must acquire from our diet, the book adds a list of nutrients (like folate, vitamins D and B12, and others) that the body needs in order to synthesize happiness. This, of course, reminded me of a passage in the Letter to Menoeceus where Epicurus is expounding the hierarchy of desires:

among the necessary desires some are necessary for happiness, some for physical health, and some for life itself.

While the food industry does not consider nutrients necessary for happiness to be essential in the same way that nutrients necessary for health are essential, an Epicurean who is interested in applying the knowledge in this book will likely consider the “elements of happiness” to be as important as the nutrients needed for health, since both are considered natural and necessary in Epicurean doctrine.

In Tending the Epicurean Garden, I suggested that we know more about the science and diet of happiness now than the ancient Epicureans did, and that it might be possible to start considering what an Epicurean diet might look like for us–one that considers happiness, moods and pleasure, as well as health, in its calculus. For those who are serious about reassessing their dietary choices along Epicurean lines, the book The Happiness Diet fills the knowledge gap that must be filled to pursue this project, and invites a deeper study into the foods and ingredients that contain the essential elements of happiness. If you’d like to conduct your own research online on the essential elements of happiness, and what the best food sources are for each, they are:

  1. Vitamin B12
  2. Iodine
  3. Magnesium
  4. Cholesterol
  5. Vitamin D
  6. Calcium
  7. Fiber
  8. Folate
  9. Vitamin A
  10. Omega 3 oils
  11. Vitamin E
  12. Iron

These are the vitamins, molecules, and natural elements that the body requires from a dietary source in order to be able to synthesize happiness and good moods. Because these ingredients are required for happiness (one of the three “necessary” goods in the Letter to Menoeceus, and a separate priority from “health”), they fall within the “natural and necessary” category in our hierarchy of desires, even if only a small measure of them is needed for happiness.

It’s my view that the dietary science of happiness invites a reform, or at least the addition of specificity, to Epicurean ethics. Epicurus argued that we only need a little food, not much more, to sustain our bodies. But the three categories of what is considered natural and necessary add nuance to this natural measure of food: we now know that our intake of food must contain enough of certain essential nutrients (for health) and enough of the elements of happiness in order to enable our bodies to experience health and happiness.

Therefore, we know that we don’t just need enough food: we need enough of these particular nutrients.

The Happiness Diet reminds us that happiness and moods are physical, natural things. Somewhere encoded in the molecules of our bodies there are hormonal changes and chemical reactions that account for our moods and states. As an Epicurean, the physicality of happiness makes sense to me. It rescues happiness from speculative discourse, and helps to ground our dietary and lifestyle choices and rejections in concrete, scientific, empirically-informed data.

The book does more than provide guidance concerning how diet relates to happiness, knowledge which is useful in our dietary choices and rejections. It also warns us–with many examples–of the dangers of processed foods to our health and moods.

The Happiness Diet is not preachy, or vegan, or very restrictive. It supports, for example, the consumption of some measure of pork, lard, and dairy products. The book presents hard scientific facts. The science lends the book authority, and the reader is left to decide what to do with all the information provided. Many recipes and ideas for using the ingredients it recommends are provided towards the end of the book.

Overall, I strongly recommend this book. It presented my mind with new and useful perspectives concerning my choices and rejections at the table, it influenced my culinary adventures in a positive way, and gave me the power of knowledge.

Further Reading:
The Four Foods Epicurus Enjoyed

Summary and Review of “The Compass of Pleasure”, a book that explores the neuroscience of pleasure

“Philosophers like the Epicureans, St. Augustine, and Nietzsche have tried to analyze and comprehend this elemental fact of our experience, but it is only recently that we have been able to study it empirically, thanks to remarkable advancements in neuroscience. In The Compass of Pleasure, David J. Linden, explains the recent research that has enabled us to understand how the brain’s pleasure circuits are engaged by our vices and, surprisingly, our virtues.”

– Dust jacket front blurb from The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good

I am coming up on approximately my first year since deciding to go deep into the study of Epicurean philosophy. In that time, I have learned a lot about the history of the development of pleasure ethics, from Plato’s Philebus, to Aristippus and the Cyrenaics, through to Epicurus’ more nuanced theory. However, I think that since we are living in the age of modern science, it could be useful for us to draw on the recent knowledge coming from the field of experimental neuroscience to inform and shape our understanding of pleasure ethics. It could be that modern science confirms, rejects, or at least further contextualizes the principles that were reasoned by the ancients but which could not be explored empirically until only recently. That thinking is what led to my review of this book.

The prologue to the book opens with an amusing story recounting a time when the author went travelling in Thailand. When he boarded one of the three-wheeled motorcycle taxis, the driver asked him essentially ‘what’s your pleasure?’, and proceeded to offer him a litany of contraband and illicit sexual opportunities. This triggered in his mind the question of why it is that we are such ‘dopamine fiends’, or why we go looking for pleasures of all varieties.

“We humans have a complicated and ambivalent relationship to pleasure, which we spend an enormous amount of time and resources pursuing. A key motivator of our lives, pleasure is central to learning, for we must find things like food, water, and sex rewarding in order to survive and pass our genetic material to the next generation. Certain forms of pleasure are accorded special status. Many of our most important rituals involving prayer, music, dance, and meditation produce a kind of transcendent pleasure that has become deeply ingrained in human cultural practice.”

Chapter 1: “Mashing the Pleasure Button”

This first chapter is an extended history lesson about past efforts to experiment (occasionally highly unethically by modern standards) with pleasure stimulation in animals and humans. He recounts the experiments by Hebb, Olds, and Milner starting in 1953, which involved implanting electrodes in the brains of rats and then sending electrical stimulation to specific brain regions when the rat pressed the lever. What they found was that the rats would over time become trained to seek the lever and be stimulated, and, dramatically, that the rats would furiously press the lever as many as thousands of times per hour to satisfy their fixation. They would choose the electrostimulation over food, over water, over sex, over parenting their offspring, to the point of death.

Eventually by 1972, these sorts of experiments were tried on humans, with the highly unethical goal of “bring[ing] about heterosexual behavior in a fixed, overt homosexual male.” The patient B-19 was hooked up with electrodes implanted directly at nine sites in his brain. When he was given the freedom to regulate his own stimulation, he would mash the button “like an eight-year-old playing Donkey Kong”. The author writes:

“This study is morally repugnant on many different levels — the profound arrogance of attempting to “correct” someone’s sexual orientation, the medical risk of unjustified brain surgery, the gross violations of privacy and human dignity. Fortunately, homosexual conversion therapy with brain surgery and pleasure center stimulation was soon abandoned.

Stepping back a bit, what we are left with, from this and a handful of other studies, is an appreciation of the immense power of direct electrical stimulation of the brain’s pleasure circuitry to influence human behavior, at least in the near term.”

He then gives an account of the underlying neuroscience of pleasure, which originates with signaling from neurons stemming from the ‘ventral tegmental area’ (VTA) in the brain. These electrical impulses move along the fibrous axons until they arrive at terminals. When they reach the terminals, the neurotransmitter dopamine is released from its stores in the terminal into the surrounding space, called the synaptic cleft. The dopamine then binds onto the target neuron’s dopamine receptors, and those which do not bind are then returned to the transmitting terminal in a process called ‘reuptake’ and are recycled for later use.

The molecules associated with certain drugs are able to prevent this reuptake process, which allows the stream of dopamine to cross the cleft more efficiently, and explains why these drugs are experienced as intensely euphoric and pleasurable. The author writes that the central insight of these diagrams is that:

“Experiences that cause the dopamine-containing neurons of the VTA to be active and thereby release dopamine in their targets (the nucleus accumbens, the prefrontal cortex, the dorsal striatum, and the amygdala) will be felt as pleasurable, and the sensory cues and actions that preceded and overlapped with those pleasurable experiences will be remembered and associated with positive feelings.”

These experiences remind me of what Epicurus refers to as kinetic pleasures, or the pleasures of variation and ‘motion’. Such pleasures include any of those that arise after some stimulus has impinged upon our senses, such as hearing a string quartet, licking an ice cream cone, petting a fluffy animal, gazing up at beautiful architecture, or smelling a lovely perfume. However, they are not limited to just those bodily pleasures that affect our senses, but also the mental pleasures such as remembering or anticipating pleasant experiences. These also have the power to trigger our dopamine response.

Chapter 2: “Stoned Again”

This chapter is about the different kinds of drugs and why we become addicted to them:

“All cultures use drugs that influence the brain. They range from mild stimulants like caffeine to drugs with potent euphoric effects, like morphine. Some carry a high risk of addition, some do not. Some alter perception, others mood, and some affect both. A few can kill when used to excess. The specific attitudes and laws relating to psychoactive drug use vary widely among cultures. . . “

He gives a number of historical and cross-cultural examples of drug use to illustrate his point. The first story used to illustrate the timelessness of human drug addiction is the (hitherto unknown to me but humorously surprising) case of the Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius’ addiction to opium:

“Perhaps it was easier to be a Stoic while stoned: The emperor was a notorious opium user, starting each day, even while on military campaigns, by downing a nubbin of the stuff dissolved in his morning cup of wine. Writings by Galen suggest that Marcus Aurelius was indeed an addict, and his accounts of the emperor’s brief periods without opium, as occurred during a campaign on the Danube, provide an accurate description of the symptoms of opiate withdrawal.”

Another interesting example of a drug used that is non-addictive and non-pleasure activating is DMT (or ayahuasca), administered in shamanic rituals by the tribes of the Amazon rainforest, which has the power to induce horrifying images in the mind (but with the therapeutic aim of overcoming these fears).

He distinguishes between those drugs that do light up our pleasure center in the brain and those that do not. As it turns out:

“Those psychoactive drugs that strongly activate the dopamine-using medial forebrain pleasure circuit (like heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines) are the very ones that carry a substantial risk of addiction, while the drugs that weakly activate the pleasure circuit (like alcohol and cannabis) carry a smaller risk of addiction. Drugs that don’t activate the pleasure circuit at all (like LSD, mescaline, benzodiazepines, and SSRI antidepressants) carry little or no risk of addition. This pleasure gradient also correlates strongly with the willingness of animals to work for these drugs.”

He also explains why only mildly-euphoric drugs like nicotine, taken in small but frequent doses, tend to be more addictive than infrequently used highly-euphoric drugs like injected heroin. It boils down to the user’s desire to achieve a comparable level of pleasure: since cigarettes are only mildly pleasant, it takes more of them to achieve a comparable dopamine hit, and the repetition of continuously exposing one’s brain to the stimulus creates dependency. He defines drug addiction as “persistent, compulsive drug use in the face of increasingly negative life consequences” and argues that addiction should be treated as a medical issue:

“When we say that addiction is a disease, aren’t we just letting addicts off the hook for their antisocial choices and behaviors? Not at all. A disease model of addiction holds that the development of addiction is not the addict’s responsibility. However, crucially, recovery from addiction is.”

From the Epicurean point of view, careful attention needs to be paid to the enjoyment of certain psychoactive drugs, and the information in this chapter is relevant to making prudent and informed decisions using the method of hedonic calculus. Additionally, we should look sympathetically towards those who are hooked on substances, because the path to recovery is arduous.

Chapter 3: “Feed Me”

This subject of this chapter is: ‘Why do we enjoy eating, how is eating regulated in the brain, and why do some people struggle with eating habits?’

The first task is to dispense with the myth of blood glucose as the primary trigger for the onset of feeding. The author says that “eating is biochemically induced only in cases of severe starvation,” and that under normal circumstances, there are other drivers of food regulation. This reminds me of a quote from Porphyry:

“Do not think it unnatural that when the flesh cries out for anything, the soul should cry out too. The cry of the flesh is, “Let me not hunger, or thirst, or shiver,” and it’s hard for the soul to restrain these desires. And while it is difficult for the soul to prevent these things, it is dangerous to neglect nature which daily proclaims self-sufficiency to the soul via the flesh which is intimately bonded to it.”

– Porphyry, Letter to Marcella

Addressing the last question first, the author explains how one contributor towards obesity is a deficiency in the hormone leptin. Leptin is secreted by fat cells that helps to regulate appetite and energy expenditure in the brain. When less fat cells are present, less leptin circulates in the body, which causes the desire for more food and less energy expenditure, resulting in weight gain. On the other hand, if there are an excess of fat cells present, more leptin in the blood is registered and so feeding is suppressed and metabolism and activity are increased to burn more energy.

“While the leptin homeostatic system explains how the brain can receive information about long-term changes in weight as indicated by body fat, it doesn’t account for the short-term regulation of appetite.”

In the short term, feeding is regulated by the feeding control circuit, taking place in the hypothalamus. There are two competing hormones, CRH which signals for hunger and orexin which signals for satiety. These hormones are in competition with one another. He likens the competition between these two signals to “an old-fashioned bathtub with separate hot and cold water taps: the temperature of the bath is then determined by the relative flow of hot and cold water.”

Okay, but this all sounds very deterministic, as if we were just biological machines responding to chemical circumstances and states in our brain. Don’t we have free will in all matters? This is what Linden has to say on that:

“The idea that eating is primarily a conscious and voluntary behavior is deeply rooted in our culture. We humans are invested in the notion that we have free will in all things. We want to believe that weight can be controlled by volition alone. Why can’t that fat guy just eat less and exercise more? He just lacks willpower, right? Not at all. Our homeostatic feeding control circuits make it very hard to lose a lot of weight and keep it off.”

We should not be too hard on ourselves or others who are struggling with diet and weight management. We can try to train ourselves to rely on less food, but not all people will be capable of doing so without medical intervention.

However, the first question has still not been addressed. Does the pleasure circuit activate during the naturally pleasant act of eating? “The answer is clearly yes,” says Linden. Eating releases a surge of dopamine:

“These studies revealed not only that eating was associated with dopamine release, but also that the degree of dopamine release could be used to predict how pleasurable the subject rated the experience of eating. Different foods produced different levels of dopamine release, a finding that correlated with the reported pleasures of eating. . . . Also, as hungry subjects continued to eat and became sated, the amount of dopamine released in the dorsal striatum was reduced. Not surprising: The first bites of a meal give the most pleasure when you’re hungry.”

This means that certain foods are more pleasant to eat than others, and the amount of pleasure experienced diminishes as eating proceeds, with that first bite being the most delicious. However, after the eating has occurred, it would seem that the feeling of satiety is the same regardless of what food was consumed. This reminds me of some lines from the Letter to Menoeceus:

“Just as he does not choose the greatest amount of food but the most pleasing food, so he savors not the longest time but the span of time that brings the greatest joy.”

“So simple flavors bring just as much pleasure as a fancy diet if all pain from true need has been removed, and bread and water give the highest pleasure when someone in need partakes of them.”

Later in the chapter he talks about how stress can lead to overeating. It does so by causing a complicated cascade of hormonal signaling that results in corticosterone passing into the brain, triggering the feeling of stress that leads to overeating. One possible remedy to this is to try out “behavioral strategies for stress reduction, like meditation or exercise, [that] can reduce the amplitude of stress hormone surges and are thereby effective in reducing stress-triggered overeating.”

So there is a utility to practices like meditation, which can help regulate our stress levels. An Epicurean meditation can consist of contemplation of the Epicurean gods or on the meaning of the Kyriai Doxai.

Chapter 4: “Your Sexy Brain”

“When I’ve spoken about our human behavior in regard to drugs or food, I’ve indicated that we’re basically the same as other mammals. While we have a bigger neocortex than a mouse or a monkey, and therefore a greater ability to counteract our subconscious drives with cognitive control, at the root our responses to food and psychoactive drugs are the same as those of our distant mammalian relatives. The same is not true of our mating system.”

This chapter looks at the experience of sex, sexual patterns, and sexual addiction (by now you might be finding a pattern in this book – he is very interested in how harmful behavioral patterns form). In humans, unlike some of the other mammals, sex is frequently recreational. Additionally, most of the other mammals are promiscuous, whereas humans tend to be monogamous. Homosexuality is another trait present in humans that can be found in animals. Looking towards our primate cousins, the author observes the following about bonobos:

“In bonobos, it seems as if homosexual behavior, in addition to providing sexual pleasure, also fulfills a social role by diffusing tension and promoting social bonding at the expense of aggression.”

So it seems that a variety of different orientations (heterosexual vs homosexual, etc.) and mating style tendencies (monogamous vs non-monogamous) can be found in the animal kingdom, as well as in humans.

Linden continues by examining the properties of sexual addiction. He regrets to observe that in our society, the sexually addicted have a low probability of seeking help due to social stigma. Sexual addiction is a very real phenomenon that has terrible consequences for not only those people who become addicted but also those people who are treated as means to the end of satisfying the addiction.

Regarding these topics, Metrodorus has this to say:

“[addressing a young man] I understand from you that your natural disposition is too much inclined toward sexual passion. Follow your inclination as you will, provided only that you neither violate the laws, disturb well-established customs, harm any one of your neighbors, injure your own body, nor waste your possessions. That you be not checked by one or more of these provisos is impossible; for a man never gets any good from sexual passion, and he is fortunate if he does not receive harm.”

Before we view this as a directive against any sort of sexuality whatsoever, we must appreciate the context in which this was written: a world without contraception, STD protection, and traditional social mores and regulations. If Metrodorus could see the context of today’s world, it is likely he would not be so hard on modern Epicureans who wish to satisfy their natural desires harmlessly. Care must be taken so as not to become sexually addicted.

Chapter 5: “Gambling and Other Modern Compulsions”

This chapter is about other miscellaneous compulsions, including a diverse range of addictions, such as addiction to the Internet, gambling, pornography, chocolate, consumerism, etc. One of the central questions he is attempting to address is why is it that abstract concepts (that are not immediately sensible) are perceived as pleasant. He presents a number of experiments to explore these matters in detail, such as experiments in reward association in monkeys. He concludes by saying that:

“This chapter has seen our ideas of the dopamine pleasure circuit extended in some provocative directions. Initially it seemed that the pleasure circuit was either naturally activated by intrinsically adaptive stimuli like food, water, or sex, or artificially engaged by drugs or stimulating electrodes placed deep within the brain. We also discussed how the development of addiction could slowly modify the structure and function of the pleasure circuit and thereby drain the pleasure out of any of these activities, replacing liking with wanting. These observations are all true, but they don’t tell the whole story.

We now know from Schultz’s monkey experiments that rapid associative learning can transform a pleasure signal into a reward prediction error signal that can guide learning to maximize future pleasure. It is likely that this same process is what enables humans to feel pleasure from arbitrary rewards like monetary gain (or even near misses in monetary gain) or winning at a video game.”

So it seems that we do have the capacity to experience mental pleasures that stem from the expectation of future reward. The Epicureans held that the pleasures of the mind can even exceed the pleasure of the flesh. The anticipation of a future pleasure can be a powerful motivator of behavior.

Chapter 6: “Virtuous Pleasures (and a Little Pain)”

This chapter is about the ‘virtuous’ pleasures – those pleasures that come with some voluntary effort but are overall good for us and our wellbeing, such as exercise, meditation, fasting, and philanthropic giving.

“Sustained physical exercise, whether it be running or swimming or cycling or some other aerobic activity, has well-known health benefits, including improvements in the function of the cardiovascular, pulmonary, and endocrine systems. Voluntary exercise is also associated with long-term improvements in mental function and is the single best thing one can do to slow the cognitive decline that accompanies normal aging. Exercise has a dramatic antidepressive effect. It blunts the brain’s response to physical and emotional stress.

Given these massive long-term benefits, it is clear that voluntary exercise is a useful component of one’s hedonic regimen. Although these activities may be strenuous in their performance, the subsequent advantages accrued are worth taking into consideration. Additionally, one may enjoy short-term benefits, such as “increased pain threshold, reduction of acute anxiety, and ‘runner’s high’, which is a short-lasting, deeply euphoric state that’s well beyond the simple relaxation or peacefulness felt by many following intense exercise.”

“Another virtuous pleasure that is culturally widespread and often linked to spiritual practice is meditation. . . .While meditation is certainly relaxing and is sometimes described as blissful, does it in fact activate the medial forebrain pleasure circuit? [One study] found a significant increase in dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens of their meditators. This result is suggestive, but it awaits both confirmation and extension to other forms of meditation.

What is clear about meditation is that it has the ability to reduce our stress, activate a large number of brain regions, and decrease the activation of other brain regions. What is still unclear is whether it triggers the release of dopamine. It is worth experimenting for yourself to see whether mediation can form a useful component of your hedonic regimen.

Can fasting also serve a role in our hedonic regimen? The staving off of eating for an increased period of time induces the body to enter a state of autophagy, whereby the body draws upon its stored resources to provide energy, hence burning fat. So fasting can help regulate body weight. Additionally, after one has fasted for a period of time, the amount of pleasure one experiences at the break of the fast may be impressive. Regarding fasting, Seneca had this to report about Epicurus:

“The great hedonist teacher Epicurus used to observe certain periods during which he would be frugal in satisfying his hunger, with the object of seeing to what extent, if at all, one thereby fell short of attaining full and complete pleasure, and whether it was worth going to much trouble to make the deficit good.  At least so he says in the letter he wrote to Polyaenus in the archonship of Charinus {308 – 307 B.C.}.  He boasts in it indeed that he is managing to feed himself for less than a half-penny, whereas Metrodorus, not yet having made such good progress, needs a whole half-penny!”

– Seneca, Letter to Lucilius

Partly through the chapter, the author dissects the claim by Jeremy Bentham that we are subjects of our masters, pleasure and pain:

“In the late eighteenth century the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously proclaimed,

“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. . . . They  govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it.”

The accumulating neurobiological evidence indicates that Bentham was only half correct. Pleasure is indeed one compass of our mental function, guiding us toward both virtues and vices, and pain is another. However, we now have reason to believe that they are not two ends of a continuum. The opposite of pleasure isn’t pain; rather, just as the opposite of love is not hate but indifference, the opposite of pleasure is not pain but ennui — a lack of interest in sensation and experience.

You don’t have to be a sadomasochistic sex enthusiast to know that pleasure and pain can be felt simultaneously: Recall Boecker’s aching but blissful long-distance runners, or women in childbirth. In the lexicon of cognitive neuroscience, both pleasure and pain indicate salience, that is, experience that is potentially important and thereby deserving of attention. Emotion is the currency of salience, and both positive emotions — like euphoria and love — and negative emotions — like fear, anger, and disgust — signal events that we must not ignore.”

So he contends that the opposite of pleasure is not pain but rather ennui, in this sense interpretable as a lack of excitement, and that pleasure and pain are both salient experiences, or having the quality of being important or prominent to respond to. For example, the sensation of pain in animals is often triggered by nociception, which is the response to exposure to noxious stimuli. In order to preserve the integrity of the endangered body part, the animal recoils and avoids the stimuli and experiences a feeling of pain.

Chapter 7: “The Future of Pleasure”

This chapter is about the future of pleasure as neuroscience and nanoscience research progress. The author is skeptical about the near term feasibility of nanobots invading our brains and simulating perfect-fidelity sensory experiences and virtual realities. He departs from the optimism of futurists like Ray Kurzweil, who think that the biotechnological revolution is coming in the next decade or two. The central disagreement is about the pace of the neuroscience research, which he argues will drag on in a linear fashion in spite of the fact that technological capability will continue to advance at an exponential pace.

He concludes the book with the following passage:

“In the end, however, thinking about the future of pleasure comes down to the individual. If pleasure is ubiquitous, what will happen to our human “superpower” of being able to associate pleasure with abstract ideas? Will it be washed away in a sea of background noise? If pleasure is everywhere, will uniquely human goals still exist? When pleasure is ubiquitous, what will we desire?

Conclusion

This has been a very brief and surface level summary of this book. I give it a strong recommendation (I think a copy can be picked up cheaply on ebay or abebooks, if not for free at the library), or from amazon. I think that it contains many positive and practical takeaways for the practitioner of Epicurean philosophy, or of pleasure/hedonic/utilitarian ethics in general.


David J. Linden, PhD, is a highly influential American professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University and editor in chief of The Journal of Neurophysiology. He has written some popular books for the scientifically-interested lay audience, including in addition to this one, The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God and Touch: The Science of the Hand, Heart, and Mind.

This review summary was written by Friend Harmonious with editorial feedback from Guide Hiram.

Further Reading:

The Compass of Pleasure

Review of “De l’inhumanité de la religion”

I know not what a man is, I only how his price. – Bertolt Brecht

After reading and commenting on Michel Onfray’s literature for an English speaking audience in an attempt to fill the gap created by the lack of English translations of his work, I decided to also write a review of the book De l’inhumanité de la religion” by the French-speaking Belgian author Raoul Vaneigem, which is also unavailable in English. Both books were adamantly recommended–and for a good reason!–by the Las Indias bloggers on their youtube channel on the occasion of the Día del Libro (the Day of the Book). Fortunately for me, Spanish is my first language and French is my third language–which I do not get to practice often–so I take a very particular pleasure in delving into provocative philosophical literature in Romance languages. It’s the kind of intellectual challenge that I live for!

There’s a reason why I took a particular interest in this book. In the past, in the piece Poverty: Secularism’s True Enemy, I’ve argued that we cannot create a REAL secular movement to defend the West from obscurantism and from the many evils of religion, unless and until we also fight the battle against poverty. This piece cites and relies heavily on research on how religiosity is statistically linked to poverty, high crime rates, low levels of educational achievement, and other societal dysfunctions. The most complete meta-study on this is by Paul Gregory. Please feel free to read that article and scan through its sources as a preamble to the intellectual feast that Vaneigem serves, and to help contextualize this discussion.

The Agricultural Enclosure as Religion’s Cradle

De l’inhumanité de la religion argues that there are material reasons for the rise of religion. Vaneigem describes how life changed for our precursors who lived at the dawn of the agricultural era in l’enclos agraire (the agricultural enclosure) and argues that the beginnings of organized religion can be traced there.

Prior to the agricultural revolution, human society was not nearly as stratified as it became later with agriculture, which created the need for the exploitation of human labor on a grand scale by more organized, and more dehumanized, societies. It is this problem of labor as dehumanization that Vaneigem focuses on, and on how religious conceptions–particularly those of sacrifice, including blood sacrifice and the Biblical “curse” of daily toil–became a prominent part of man’s worldview, reducing him to the state of a beast of burden.

Vaneigem argues that in the Neolithic Era, the man of desire and creation became separated from the man of production and market. Man turned libido into quantities of work and felt an “existential trouble”. While some thinkers have sought to solve this problem by advising revolutionary methods, the author notes that even Marx’s revolt alienates the individual and kills his joy because it keeps man in toil for the sake of the collective: man in socialism or communism still lives for the sake of others.

“The Spirit” as Enforcer of Labor

The celestial lie merely countersigns the truth of terrestrial exploitation and endorses the purchase of those who resign themselves.

Epicurus established the doctrine of the swerve to wage war against the tyranny of heaven and “heavenly destiny”. To accept one’s fate–one’s curse–when one is poor, or even middle-class, almost invariably means to toil and labor in submission. Let’s revisit one of the initial curses that the Bible casts upon man.

To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your lifeBy the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” – Genesis 3:17-19

Before man was “cast out” of the primal hunter gatherer paradise, not only was there abundance in a manner that had been sustaining humans for millennia, but also people had worked only two hours on average per day to get food.

The Supreme Being as enforcer of labor is not only found in the Bible. In the East, the four caste system is also believed to have been established for all eternity by the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Lord Krishna himself, as related in the Gita.

According to the three modes of material nature and the work associated with them, the four divisions of human society are created by Me. – Shri Krishna, in Bhagavad Gita 4.13

Vaneigem does a good job of addressing the proverbial Platonic split between spirit and flesh in terms of how it affects man’s existential relationship to enforced labor. He talks about how “spirit dominates, matter is dominated“, how spirit “mutilates the body“, and how belief in spirit is alienation and objectifies real persons and bodies.

The author notes how desires, joy, and sex can usually only be entertained by night, and sometimes in shame, because they are “useless” (that is, they constitute leisure activities and do not lead to profit for the exploiters of man), and because by day we have to work. Therefore, the Platonic split has been experienced by man in terms of how we divide our night and day activities, with toil being experienced as violence perpetrated on the body and on nature by day, while at night dreams reveal “the secret scripture of the body“.

Among the other existential repercussions of enforced labor, the most prevalent one and the one easiest to quantify and observe in our society is in public health. It is sometimes claimed that around 75% of hospital visits have their origins in stress-related psychosomatic symptoms:

The pleasure of being was replaced with the anxious greed of having.

Raoul Vaneigem is quite direct and lucid in his French, and the best way to introduce key ideas in the book is by letting him speak in direct translation.

The divine power is born from the powerlessness to which the economy condemns man from the moment that it snatches him from life to reduce him to labor. The idea of God as creator …. master of man or arbiter of his fate is the sham of a system where the true specifically human power, creation, is dissolved by the need to work.

… Contrary to what has been … proclaimed throughout the centuries, the weakness of man is not inherent to his nature. It comes from his denaturalization, his renouncement of the only privilege that distinguishes him from the other kingdoms: the faculty to recreate the world with the goal of enjoying the creation of his own destiny.

The pillage of man’s creation for the benefit of the few, or the many, or for the benefit of some abstraction, was carried out according to the logic of sacrificial religiosity, but Vaneigem argues that it emerges from the predatory instinct on the part of those in power, and with the assistance of clergies.

It is here that the author elaborates an interesting claim that I also put forward years ago in a piece for Partially Examined Life titled Religion as Play. He argues that, prior to the agricultural revolution when most humans were hunter-gatherers, natural religion in its original form was a form of play. He thinks that initially, pre-ritual behavior was play, and was innocent and retained child-like elements. But then, when agriculture created the need for labor, those who attained power acquired the assistance of the priests who introduced the perversion of “sacred terror”, and ritualized play, slowly absorbing the playfulness, spontaneity and innocence into formal ritual. The conception of the sacred destroyed ritual as play, and terror inspired instead obedience, conformity, submission. We are reminded of the Biblical conception of the sacred, “kedosh”, which implies both separateness as well as that which is taboo, forbidden, which must not be named lest we disrespect it.

If Vaneigem is right, this greatly endorses Epicurus’ claim that the original goal of religion is to cultivate pure, unalloyed pleasure. We may be able to revisit the precursor of religion–play–and purge it from sacred terror in order to explore a natural spirituality inspired in Epicurean primitivism.

Nature Versus the Market

Where the market is everything, man is nothing.

In positing a “market denaturalization”, the author is also saying that there is a tension between nature and market.

One problem created by this tension has to do with how scarcity is profitable for some people, who have it among their interests to sometimes introduce scarcity in order to artificially increase profits. Not only is scarcity profitable, but frequently in consumerist society the values of exchange and of use do not match, yet the logic of the market, of profit, and of scarcity continues to operate even when it comes to items of first need. This breeds misery, but also violence.

In Naturalist Reasoning on Friendship, I argued that human behavior follows two patterns that have parallels in two ape societies: the abundance paradigm among the bonobo produces societies of cooperation and where “make love, not war” seems to be the law, whereas the chimpanzees are more hierarchical and much more violent. This has been explained by the fact that chimpanzees grew up isolated from bonobos, separated by a river, and the bonobos never had to fight over food and resources thanks to the abundance in their territory, while chimpanzees had faced scarcity throughout their evolutionary history, so they learned to compete and fight. Similar patterns of increased violence can be seen in human societies marked by scarcity versus those that enjoy abundance.

Corruption, with its antithetical spirit of purity and impurity, has no better guarantor than poverty. Its determination to destroy school, housing, transportation, natural agriculture, industry useful to society, returns with the old tradition of religious obscurantism which is so good for business.

The author argues that openness of the markets kills religion, and that historically there has been tension between the agricultural enclosure (l’enclos agraire)–which is isolated and favors religion–and the cosmopolitan openness of the market, which introduces foreign ideologies and encourages us to question our in-group doctrine. We can evaluate Trumpism, Brexit, Le Pen and similar movements–with their destruction of trade agreements and distrust of all things foreign–as religious/national provincialism of the sort that Vaneigem talks about, where people marginalized by neoliberal economic totalitarianism seek refuge in the familiar.

Another way in which nature and the market are in tension is by two problems caused by excessive consumption: 1. the environmental ills and 2. the impoverished and enslaved state brought about by massive debt. Consumerism and lucrative inutility–the frequent lack of relation between the use value and the monetary value of things–breed alienation, insatiable desires, as well as debt, which breeds wage slavery.

Vaneigem also mentions the separate issue of birth control as it relates to religion and poverty. Unable to produce more subjects by having children of their own, priests encourage people to over-breed irresponsibly, regardless of the prospects that these children will have of being able to live a pleasant life, get a good education, and escape the vicious cycle of poverty. In the case of some very dysfunctional Catholic societies, like what we see in Mexico, this also produces problems like the ones I described in Unwanted Children at the Border and the Evil Legacy of Catholicism.

Conclusion

For millennia, people have woven their identity around labor and have not know real freedom. For this reason Vaneigem says that, even after they have abandoned wishful thinking, “the widows of their oppression turn back to religion, not knowing who they are without it“. He inspiringly concludes his book by offering solutions to this problem and calling for a life-affirming philosophy. This includes a call to heal the Platonic split: we must restore the unity of body and conscience.

The aborted desires engender the Gods, the engendered desires will abort them … God and his avatars are nothing more than the phantoms of a mutilated body.

Only the aspiration to live will allow the passing of religion.

Some of the quotes from the book sound like paraphrases of things Epicurus would have said. For instance, the paradigm created when we stop trying to exploit nature and other humans reminds us of Epicurus’ teaching that we should “not force nature”.

Nature is called to escape oppressive work which denaturalizes it. The land is no longer a territory for conquest, but the site of the creation of infinite joys.

Towards the end of the book, Vaneigem offers the image of the type of creative well that we must become for ourselves in the process of self-creation, which reminds me of Lucian’s Well of Laughter. The book does a great job of revisiting Epicurean primitivism and calling for a return to an alignment with nature. It also reminds me of the third principle of autarchy drawn from Philodemus’ scroll On Property Management, which states: “the philosopher does not toil”. As we are increasingly replaced with robots, our need to reinvent labor, and the Epicurean gospel of living lives of pleasure and freedom, will become more of a moral imperative: the kind that will ultimately decide whether we build a dystopia or a utopia.

Further Reading:

Philodemus’ scroll on the Art of Property Management

 De l’inhumanité de la religion

 

Book Review of Epicurus and Apikorsim

The following is a review of the book Epicurus & Apikorsim. The Influence of The Greek Epicurus and Jewish Apikorsim on Judaism, by Yaakov Malkin.

Do not fear the Gods. – Philodemus of Gadara
Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. – Ecclesiastes 12:13

Apikorsim is the term used in the rabbinic Judaism for a heretic. The word originates in the term Epicurean, and testifies to the huge threat that Epicurus’ doctrine posed to the religious life of the Jews during the hellenistic era. In fact, it was the intense hellenization of Judea that prompted the radicalization of religious Jews under the Maccabees, and Philonides of Laodicea contributed to this process as an Epicurean missionary.

When I began reading the book, after watching a video where the author seems to refer to Apikorsim as just a euphemism for secularism, I wanted to know whether he had a clear understanding of Epicurean doctrine. I did not find an introduction to Epicurus’ canon, but I was very happy to find that, early in the book, Malkin accurately explains the physics and the ethics of Epicurus. After finishing the book, I believe that the lack of thorough familiarity with the canon was a minor weakness, as it would have helped him to much better articulate why we Epicureans believe what we believe, and it would have helped to more clearly express some of the ideas in the book. He mentions the “principles of justice”, for instance, but no clear details are given and no mention is made of hedonic calculus.

He also accentuates the importance of friendship, and even cites the moral example of Rabbi Sherwin Wine, the founder of the Secular Humanist Jewish denomination who beautifully embodied the ideals of friendship in his own life. This is in line with both Epicurean and Jewish traditions: in Israel, the rabbis are frequently treated as pop celebrities. Like other Jewish denominations, SHJ also boasts compilations of traditions, interpretations, anecdotes and teachings by humanist rabbis which comprise their own separate wisdom tradition within Judaism.

After doing this, he is concerned to show Apikorsim not always as Epicureans in the full doctrinal sense, but as a sister historical tradition to hellenistic Epicureanism, one descended from it yet distinct, and characterised by being an affront to orthodox Jewish religious views, as well as by the tension between being part of a people and being an individual with views that are at odds with the majority of one’s people. Like many other aspects of Judaism, concerned as it was initially with God’s supposed role in history, the Apikorsim identity for Malkin is a historical narrative, an atheistic counter-history of Judaism. When detailing the specific beliefs of the Apikorsim, Malkin cites three main points.

  1. Belief in free choice and in man’s sovereignty
  2. The importance of enjoyment and in bettering life; in fact, elsewhere he characterizes Epicureanism as a philosophy that improves life
  3. Belief in the prudent pursuit of pleasure

Concerning this last point of Apikorsim doctrine, Malkin defends it and says that happiness is anti-religion, that it is un-Christian, a provocation of the church. Hedonism is recognized as another key point of contention with religion.

Apikorsim can in theory be as orthodox as any other Epicurean, although they do not strictly have to be Epicurean in Milken’s narrative–he cites the rabbis arguing that Spinoza was “the greatest of the Apikorsim”, which again reminds us that the Apikorsim label originates with the rabbis. Orthodox or not, they are kindred spirits, and the cross-fertilization of Epicurean and Jewish ideas is facilitated by a shared iconoclastic (idol-smashing) attitude in both traditions, which encouraged the Apikorsim to smash the Jewish god like the last idol standing long before Nietzsche and Richard Dawkins made the clarion call to do so.

One key argument the author makes is that Jewish culture has always been diverse and boasts a lively non-religious and anti-clerical intellectual tradition, one that was at one point greatly influenced by the ideas of Epicurus, that replaced the centrality of God in Judaism with the laws of nature, and that sees orthodox Judaism as “a mythological culture”.

It becomes clear as we read this book that apikorsim is a label and identity that was initially imposed by hostile religious Jews with derision, that is it is imposed from outside by rabbis (the so-called “sages of the Talmud”) who cursed and argued against the Apikorsim amongst them, but then the author takes the historical label used generically for atheistic Jews throughout history, and wears it proudly. He argues that atheistic Jews have always existed, and that they’re also part of Judaism, that Jews are not a people of only one religion or only one philosophy. Apikorsim are now out and proud as one of the philosophical tribes who have always existed at the margins of Judaism for millenia, as attested in ancient writings.

Some of the assertions of the book seem a bit forced. Ecclesiastes and Job are characterized as Epicurean works. Judging from the initial quotes in my review, it’s easy to admit similarities and influence, but difficult to argue that Ecclesiastes is an Epicurean book in the strict sense. It does say that this is the one life, and that we should enjoy and be merry, and it does deny the existence of an afterlife. As for Job, Malkin argues that it rejects that god is just and says nature is neutral, that it is an existentialist and atheistic book where God makes a pact with the devil to destroy the life of Job. It depicts God as an anti-hero, a villain. This, again, seems forced as an argument that it’s an Epicurean work, as the teachings consider such evil fairy tales as impious.

Not the man who denies the gods worshipped by the multitude, but he who affirms of the gods what the multitude believes about them is truly impious. – Epistle to Menoeceus

One strong point of Epicurus & Apikorsim is the severe critique of Plato, who is frequently characterized as a totalitarian philosopher who has left a heinous legacy which influenced the Christian Empire during the Dark Ages and many other evil and authoritarian regimes throughout history. The author also frequently cites Norman DeWitt, and says that his “book is one of the most comprehensive” on the subject of Epicurus. DeWitt is, indeed, considered one of the most important scholars by traditional Epicureans, and a good one to read if we want to get a glimpse of Epicurus on his own terms.

One interesting thesis presented by the author says that Epicurean principles guide the way in which we approach the tensions between free market economy and the welfare state. He cites consumerism as an example of Epicurean influence in modern culture, which it is not, in fact it’s a sign of lack of Epicurean insight within the culture. Epicurus gave us a curriculum for controling our desires, and former Uruguayan president Jose Mujica specifically cites Epicurus as a role model against consumerist values. Malkin is right, however, to antagonize traditional religion’s irresponsible doctrine that unbridled reproduction without fighting poverty is a good idea. A healthy model of economic growth is always needed.

The thesis is interesting, and we concede many of his points. In fact one letter by the Epicurean American founding father Thomas Jefferson was recently dug up where he argued that capitalism required protections against war-profiteering. This has been a recent topic of discussion in the Epicurean facebook group.

Towards the end of the book, Malkin discusses the legacy of Hiwi Al-Balkhi, one of the great Apikorsim cultural heroes. His writings were preserved only by hostile sources arguing against the anti-religious points he made.

Afterthought and Conclusion: a Covenant of Friendship

One afterthought that occured to me, having read this great volume, has to do with Epicurean contractarianism and what it may contribute to SHJ’s way of articulating its own identity within a legalistic, covenant-based tradition such as Judaism. In religious Judaism, the covenant comes from God and is imposed against the will of the “chosen”. A secular appropriation and re-interpretation of the covenant might be what Michel Onfray calls the “hedonic covenant”, where “I promote your pleasure in order to secure my own”. Might the secular humanist denomination of Judaism be able and willing to apply the contractarian theory to develop a working model of communitarian ethics, and to articulate in contractarian terms what kind of community it seeks to become?

Mitzvot (duties, commandments) are a central concept in Judaism, however they cannot emerge from God in a secular covenant of free men and women, but only from free agents engaging in binding contracts and oaths, so that if someone makes an agreement with others to follow this or that rule, then Apikorsim mitzvot are born. Otherwise, it is problematic to argue for a duty-based ethics without God or some kind of (potentially oppressive) caste system. A covenant of friendship might set the terms not only for what courtesies the members of SHJ owe each other, but also for what celebrations and traditions they will carry forward as choosing Jews, and can also serve to explore the nature of egalitarian friendship in clear terms. It would be an opportunity to philosophize around the pleasures of friendship. What could be more Epicurean?

Epicurus & Apikorsim is an important contribution to the history of Epicurean ideas, and unfortunately also the history of the persecution and violence that these ideas have encountered by the religious authorities. It’s also a proud affirmation of their value, and even reaffirms the theory that Epicureanism is, indeed, a kind of religious identity on par with Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and the rest. And like all identities, it is reinforced when for its sake people experience violence and abuse from others, as has been the case with the Apikorsim.

Finally, the book is also an affirmation of Jewishness, and of Jewish resilience and survival. Ataraxia here becomes Shalom, and natural philosophy syncretizes with cultural traditions unique to one people, seeking to reconcile the unending tension between nature and culture.

Judaism is unique in that it’s not just a religious tradition: it’s also ethnic and cultural, the product of a complicated history. Non-religious Jews have frequently felt like strangers in a strange land governed by superstition and religion, oftentimes hated by their religious peers. In fact, the author of Epicurus & Apikorsim recently received threats as a result of his work promoting secularism in Israel. In the end, Malkin’s work and the work of the SHJ denomination is meant to preserve the culturally-Jewish identity of secular Jews, whom the orthodox Jewish authorities oftentimes scare away. Apikorsim is, after all, part of the Jewish experience.

Further Reading:

Epicurus & Apikorsim. The Influence of The Greek Epicurus and Jewish Apikorsim on Judaism
Tending the Epicurean Garden

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Review of The Book of Community

The following five reasonings comprise, together, a long and in-depth review of The Book of Community, by the collective of bloggers known as Los Indianos.

The members of Las Indias make up a coop whose communal experiments have been inspired, in part, by Epicurus’ Garden, and who have written in the past about Epicurean philosophy. In my exchanges with them, many new insights have emerged that expand our understanding of key Epicurean concepts.

One of the most fruitful conversations has been the natural community discourse, which differentiates between Platonic, imagined communities versus real, inter-subjective and interpersonal communities. This distinction is much more crucial than we may initially think. Indianos argue against involvement in politics based on the view that it replaces natural community with Platonic, imagined identities that do not necessarily constitute real communal life, real conversation and interaction. They even argue that Epicurean cosmopolitanism was a reaction again the citizen identity conferred by the polis–city-state–and that the early Gardens constituted communal experiments timidly suggestive of the ideals of statelessness. While reading the book, further insights emerged on the subject of natural community. Here is a quote from the review:

The Book of Community, among other things, expands on a conversation that inspired me to blog about natural community based on some of the insights that the Indianos have shared on their blog … Indianos interestingly cite how in 1993, Robin Dunbar published a study that predicted “the maximum size of a human group” to be 147.8. This is known as the Dunbar number, interpreted as “the cognitive limit in the number of individuals with whom any person can maintain stable relationships“. This seems to not only vindicate the doctrine on natural community which was initially formulated as a result of my exchange with the Indianos, but also attaches a specific number of individuals to the size of a natural community.

In the book, they explain in detail the lathe biosas teaching on why political involvement is bad for organic communities because manufactured narratives tend to compete with communal ones, they call for the use of ceremony in order to strengthen community, they celebrate autarchy and criticize the narrative of the “common good”. Please enjoy the five-part series of articles on community.

Part I: Book Review
Part II: Community Vs. Polis
Part III: Ceremony
Part IV: On Productive Autonomy
Part V: Learning in Community

Further Reading:

The Book of Community: A practical guide to working and living in community

English translation of Las Indias’ Review of Tending the Epicurean Garden

Epítome Published in Spanish

According to Norman DeWitt, ancient Epicureans used to study a Little Epitome, which is extant today as the Letter to Herodotus, and would later on graduate to the Big Epitome for which, he suggests, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura was used although some other volume must have been used during the first couple of centuries prior to Lucretius.

In celebration of his tradition and to encourage and facilitate the systematic study of its writings in Spain and Latin America, the Society of Friends of Epicurus recently released a Spanish-language Epítome: Escrituras Epicúreas (Spanish Edition), a collection of the ancient writings of our tradition with commentary and a study guide by Hiram Crespo, author of Tending the Epicurean Garden (Humanist Press, 2014).

The work is written in chapter and verse format, both for ease of reference and to dignify the considerable historical value of its content. It includes a Spanish translation of Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings and the Epistles to Moeneceus, Pythocles and Herodotus, in addition to a summarized chronicle of the lives of the Scholarchs and great masters of the tradition up to Philodemus of Gadara, as well as the Spanish translation of nine reasonings based on the surviving fragments of the Herculaneum Scrolls.

Epítome: Escrituras Epicúreas (Spanish Edition) is available from amazon.

Reasonings on Thus Spake Zarathustra

Zoroaster4

Nietzche’s Zoroaster, the Atheistic Prophet 

When Zarathustra was alone, however, he said to his heart: “Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead! – Thus Spake Zarathustra

Why did Nietzche choose to appropriate the figure of the Persian prophet to achieve his most important philosophical and spiritual project?

The historical Zarathustra (aka Zoroaster) did not just invent the idea of the One God (Ahura Mazda, whose name meant Wise Lord) and write the first Bible (the Avesta), but also proposed the duality and eternal, cosmic confrontation between good and evil (monotheistic morality, with the Holy Spirit / Spenta Mainyu and the Evil Spirit / Angra Mainyu as equal in power), of the final judgement, of the Messiah or World Savior to come in a future Age (whom he called the Saoshyant), and almost all of the ideas that later became staples of Christianity.

As part of this cosmology of eternal battle between the forces of good and evil, the tradition of expelling spirits and exorcism is a major concern in Zoroastrian religion which takes up a significant portion of the Avesta, and we see a great concern with hygiene related to this that reminds us of the Old Testament.

For all these reasons, Nietzche chose Zoroaster instead of Abraham as the first monotheist and the inventor of God. Because Zoroaster created the original monotheistic morality, it should be Zoroaster’s responsibility to reform the philosophical foundations of our civilization now that they have crumbled. Therefore, Nietzche makes him undo what he did, revert the other-worldly cosmology that he created and produce a naturalist one for this world, to give meaning to the Earth.

I conjure you, my brethren, remain true to the earth, and believe not those who speak unto you of superearthly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisoned ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them!

Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the dreadfulest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth! – Thus Spake Zarathustra

An Epicurean Assessment

The concept of the meaning of the Earth is central to Nietzche. Like Lokayatas, atomists and others, Nietzche believed that there is no other world, that this is the only reality. In that sense, he was a naturalist. He’s properly classified as an existentialist who did not believe that things had inherent meaning. It’s within this framework that his mission then becomes to fashion new meaning, which he believed could be done through art, culture, music, literature, etc.

Our friend Cassius, of NewEpicurean.com, argues that Nietzche did not agree with our school on one important point, that is the issue of clarity of expression: he wrote often in parables, metaphors, and obscure language. It seems at times that he is speaking in code. The Nazi appropriation of his philosophy is the most concerning example of how this leads to misuse of people’s ideas. For the record, Nietzche was NOT a white supremacist.

However, we must appreciate Nietzche on his own terms: that his philosophy was clad in parable was consistent with his own proclaimed values.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzche fashioned his own, personal new mythology and cosmology (here, myth is meant not as a lie but as a narrative that produces meaning in life), using the creative tools that he proposes people should use in their philosophical projects. In this way, he was just being authentic. His masterpiece is as much a work of philosophy as it is a piece of art that carries within it a cosmos, a worldview with its own aesthetic sensibilities.

The Despisers of the Body

If meaning of this world is the cure that Zoroaster brings to humankind, then what is the disease? It is the death cults, the worldviews that teach that there is an OTHERworld, and that we live in this world only for the sake of that OTHERworld for which there is absolutely no evidence. Since it is to the OTHERworld that people go when they leave this world, that OTHERworld is full of ghosts, it is full of death. If we live in this world for the sake of that world, we are living for the sake of death.

The existential repercussions, the misery, the evils that are birthed by this Earth-hating original sin are innumerable. In The Perils of Alienation I discussed some of these evils.

Everywhere resoundeth the voices of those who preach death; and the earth is full of those to whom death hath to be preached. Or “life eternal”; it is all the same to me. If only they pass away quickly!

The preachers of this OTHERworld-focused morality and worldview are evil parasites to the new prophet, but they also invite Zoroaster’s pity. They’re also mortals and seekers of meaning.

Here are priests: but although they are mine enemies, pass them quietly and with sleeping swords! Even among them there are heroes; many of them have suffered too much: so they want to make others suffer. Bad enemies are they: nothing is more revengeful than their meekness. And readily doth he soil himself who toucheth them. But my blood is related to theirs; and I want withal to see my blood honoured in theirs.

The Overman

Here is perhaps one of the most misinterpreted ideas in the Nietzchean wisdom tradition. The Overman (sometimes translated as Superman, in German Ubermansch) is an artist-philosopher, a self-creator who makes his own life and meaning. In a naturalist, evolving cosmos empty of Gods and of inherent meaning, mortals need an ideal to pull them forward and to build meaning with. Hence, Zoroaster teaches that man is a rope between the ape and the Overman, who then embodies our destiny and whatever narratives we build around the Overman are our self-chosen guiding visions for becoming and for the future.

One of the great misuses of Nietzche’s philosophy took place during the Nazi period. The Nazis also appropriated and distorted many other ideologies and fields of knowledge, from Christianity to Odinism to anthropology. The transcendental projects related to the Overman are not projects of eugenics, however this does not mean that these projects must be excluded from the Overman. This is not an either/or matter. The Overman must be fashioned independently by each individual. There’s at least one passage that calls for procreation as one way to transcend:

Not only to propagate yourselves onwards but upwards; thereto, O my brethren, may the garden of marriage help you!

But we know from other passages that the Overman derives his identity not from his lineage, his racial or national background, but from his self-chosen destiny. The identity of the Overman is anchored in the future, not in the past, which is why so many transhumanists identify with Nietzchean philosophy and why Nietzchean ideas feature prominently in so much of our science fiction.

In chapter 56, “The Old and New Tables”, Zoroaster calls for a new atheistic nobility that must rise to oppose the theistic populace and rulers. He is referring to our ongoing evolution from ape to Superman, our perpetual need to ever overcome ourselves, to the passing of the generations and how we are all bridges between the previous and the future generations. This nobility is not backward-looking and does not derive its identity from its roots, its race or familial lineage but from its self-chosen future:

O my brethren, I consecrate you and point you to a new nobility: ye shall become procreators and cultivators and sowers of the future.

Unto your children shall ye make amends for being the children of your fathers: all the past shall ye thus redeem!

It is precisely to make amends for the mistakes of our ancestors that this nobility must rise, to break with the past. And elsewhere he says:

Ye lonesome ones of today, ye seceding ones, ye shall one day be a people: out of you who have chosen yourselves, shall a chosen people arise: and out of it the Superman.

Zarathustra then talks about how the life-hating beliefs of the world-maligners are often given undeserved credit because they’re ancient. The false-honor of old, established beliefs is therefore understood as having a degrading and ignoble effect on the soul. It is within this content that Zoroaster calls for new projects of nation-building, community-building and people-building that are rooted in noble ideas, not noble lineage.

On Self-Overcoming

Epicurean therapeutic practices were used in antiquity as part of a process of constant self-betterment, and seem to be vindicated in Zoroaster’s doctrine on self-overcoming, which is related to the Overman. He argued that rather than judge envy as a sin, we should own our envy instead of judging ourselves for it, and that we should seek to cultivate the things we envy in others, as it is obvious that we find them desirable. In other words, the impulse towards the Overman can be found through sincere introspection.

There is one area of controversy here: the transhumanist movement believes that, as part of self-overcoming, people should seek to physically enhance themselves, even up to the point that they may be able to challenge death.

Epicurus, on the other hand, calls mortals to accept their natural limits and never to attempt to be more than humans and mortals. He was a naturalist who taught that by giving up our arrogant, unnecessary fantasies about immortality, we would find peace and ataraxia. Nietzche shared Epicurus’ anti-clerical message and criticized OTHERworldly promises and fantasies of an immortal life. But would Nietzche, as a naturalist, have agreed with some version of transhumanist immortality, if that ever materializes?

The other controversy here concerns the use of violence, which was advocated by the Nazis, in the implementation of transcendental projects related to the Overman. Our friend Cassius argues on this point:

So long as that is not interpreted as domination over other people, I think what Nietzshe was mosty saying is that the overcoming that we have to do is overcoming the limits placed by society!!!

That is why I think Nietzche and Epicurus are compatible on that point. That is a perfect example of how it is important to be careful with Nietzsche. If, as I indicate, he is saying to overcome the limits PLACED BY RELIGION AND SOCIETY AND MORALS, then he is correct. If he means “overcome the limits of nature”, then he would be wrong, but i do not believe that is what he meant or did say.

The Epicurean view on self-overcoming is that the acceptance of our natural limits confers tranquility, gratefulness, satisfaction, and imperturbability, and leads to the goal of a pleasant life established by nature itself. It is from cultural corruption that we acquire most of what must be overcome through philosophical hygiene, and the Overman can be a naturalist moral ideal in this regard. Here is Cassius’ opinion on this matter:

I agree with that, but the controversy arises in where those limits are. Yes we will die eventually, but should we strive to live as long as possible, if so how long, etc? I think Epicurus would say: Yes, the limits are there, but where they are EXACTLY is a matter of circumstance, and we should work to extend our lives of pleasure as long as possible.

Three Stages of Self-Overcoming

Like Sufi masters and teachers in other traditions, Zoroaster even maps out his followers’ stages of spiritual development for them along with the important tasks and states related to each stage. They are somewhat reminiscent of the three gunas, or qualities of material nature, in the Vedic tradition: tamas (ignorance), tamas (passion) and sattva (goodness).

In the first stage, man is compared to a camel, which is a beast of burden that lives in chains and must be docile and submissive. In this stage, man sees himself as worthy of mercy and lives on its knees, a slave of tradition.

When he realizes his degraded state of existence and seeks to emancipate himself from it, he becomes a lion. His previous state leaves him angered and indignant, and he begins smashing the old idols.

In the mature stage, he ironically becomes child-like because the third stage is creative: he forges his own morality and worldview. He has reached existential maturity and authenticity.

The Men of the Crowd

The criticism of the men of the crowd in our tradition is part of a larger trend among thelaughing philosophers, an assorted list of naturalists who mock and question traditional authorities and societal conventions, always based on philosophical insights into human nature and into the general study of the nature of things which oftentimes reveals the holes in the belief systems of the herd. Therefore, many of these philosophers profoundly distrust the views of the men of the crowd. Nietzche says:

Older is the pleasure in the herd than the pleasure in the ego: and as long as the good conscience is for the herd, the bad conscience only saith: ego.

Hence the need that philosophers have felt throughout the ages (this is seen in all cultures, from Indian sadhus, to Greek Cynics, to European intellectuals) to avoid the men of the crowd. Cassius Amicus adds:

One chapter I like in particular is chapter 51, “On Passing By”. I think that is a good application of the principle in PD39 that if you can’t be friends — just PASS BY – don’t force yourself into a confrontation.

He was here referring to Epicurus’ Principal Doctrine 39, which states: “The man who best knows how to meet external threats makes into one family all the creatures he can; and those he can not, he at any rate does not treat as aliens; and where he finds even this impossible, he avoids all dealings, and, so far as is advantageous, excludes them from his life“.

Note: Against the Men of the Crowd, a diatribe against anti-empiricists that calls adamantly for the development of evidence-based critical thinking skills, is included as part of the Elemental Epicureanism course and text. For more information, you may also visitElementalEpicureanism.com, a NewEpicurean.com project.

The Ungodliest Uttering

In many ways, Grandfather Nietzche is reminiscent of the sages of our own tradition, who were known for their use of powerful mantras or formulas as remedies for spiritual diseases. Thus Spake Zarathustra almost feels like an atheistic Qur’an or Bible when it boldly proclaims in chapter 52, which is titled The Apostates, the quintessential monotheistic declaration of faith to be “the ungodliest uttering”.

Zoroaster envisions the old gods as an ancient Epicurean would envision them: full of bliss, healthy, laughing, dancing, ecstatic. The old gods “laughed themselves to death”, he says. The jealousy of the monotheistic God is, to the innocence of an Epicurean heathen, a contradiction, an insult, a blasphemous projection of our own weaknesses and evils.

With the old Deities hath it long since come to an end: and verily, a good joyful Deity-end had they! They did not “begloom” themselves to death: that do people fabricate! On the contrary, they laughed themselves to death once on a time!

That took place when the ungodliest utterance came from a God himself: the utterance: “There is but one God! Thou shalt have no other gods before me!” An old grim-beard of a God, a jealous one, forgot himself in such wise: And all the gods then laughed, and shook upon their thrones, and exclaimed: “Is it not just divinity that there are gods, but no God?” He that hath an ear let him hear.

The Adrian Del Caro translation is clearer. It says: “Is godliness not precisely that there are gods but no God?”

This bizarre twisting of scriptural references constitutes, to all effects, liberation atheology. The death of God is as relevant an epiphany as any previous one, a true cosmological event that had its beginnings when the jealousy of the desert God revealed itself. This god would be the last to fall, but fall he would eventually.

Towards the end of Thus Spake Zarathustra, Zarathustra exhibits a prophet’s moral stamina and spiritual leadership in the Worship of the Ass scene. Here, he has surrounded himself with the higher men, which appear to be prototypes of the kinds of people for whom Nietzche is writing, as he does not have the herd as his intended audience. It appears that the higher men have concluded that it’s better to worship an ass than to worship nothing and to be atheistic. Zarathustra then confronts them, calling them wicked just as the ancient prophets did with the idolaters in the monotheistic scriptures.

The Worship of the Ass episode has the effect of being Zarathustra’s version of Moses coming down from the holy mount and finding his chosen people worshiping the calf. Under the new code, the new spirituality that he preaches, Zarathustra considers any and all act deification a transgression.

The Earthquake Discloseth New Fountains

Now, the process of doing away with the old, with the false morals and wrong views of those that came before us, is a destructive and disruptive process for sure, one that can be extremely disorienting for many. One passage says:

For the earthquake- it choketh up many wells, it causeth much languishing: but it bringeth also to light inner powers and secrets. The earthquake discloseth new fountains. In the earthquake of old peoples new fountains burst forth.

Notice, again, how Nietzche appropriates apocalyptic imagery straight from the Bible and Quran. He also compares the work of the philosopher to an earthquake, whose role is that of destroying worlds and rebuilding them, of re-creating the cosmos.

The Ugliest Human Being

In the narrative, the ugliest human is he who has killed god. The god-killer is despised because he has rejected that which gives meaning to the men of the crowd. This passage is at once a contemplation of the spiritual crisis that happens once religion is irrelevant, and a contemplation of the very real prejudice that atheists suffer. The ugliest man here takes refuge in Zarathustra:

They persecute me; now you are my last refuge. Not with their hatred, not with their bailiffs – oh such persecution I would mock and be proud and glad!

Zoroaster falls, and then finds the strength to stand up again after beholding the ugliest human, but that does not mean he isn’t terrified. The ugliest human does not mind the hatred of religious bigots, but Zoroaster’s terror worries him. The death of God is a great cultural precipice, and since man is a rope between ape and superman, it is only the beginning of a new transition to a great work, to a great awakening that will be difficult. There is a huge existential task before the god-killer. Zoroaster is overwhelmed with pityat the sight of the ugliest human, to which this human replies:

Thou hast divined, I know it well, how the man feeleth who killed him, the murderer of God. Stay! Sit down here beside me.

To whom would I go but unto thee? Stay, sit down! Do not however look at me! Honour thus mine ugliness!

They persecute me: now art thou my last refuge …. Their pity is it from which I flee away and flee to thee. O Zarathustra, protect me, thou, my last refuge, thou sole one who divinedst me: Thou hast divined how the man feeleth who killed him. Stay!

The ugliest man flees from pity, and prefers shame, deeming it appropriate. His eyes are wide open and his soul sober when he beholds the human condition, calling not for pity but for constant overcoming.

You are ashamed of the shame of the great sufferer.

In the text, a god that is all-seeing and all-pitying, who witnesses all of our failings, is deemed shameless (perhaps because, if such a hypothesis were to be accepted, this god yet chooses not to invervene). The killing of god is likened to revenge on a witness. In the end, Zarathustra then lets the ugliest human crawl into his own cave and live like the prophet did, in solitude, away from the men of the crowd.

Haunted by the Shadow 

Zarathustra later on encounters his shadow (his subconscious self), which has been with him in all of his wanderings and laments feeling aimless and not having a home. At first, he tries to run away from his shadow, but of course he can’t. He then confronts it, saying:

To such restless ones as you even a jail ends up looking like bliss. Have you ever seen how captured criminals sleep? They sleep peacefully, they enjoy their new security.

Beware that you are not captured in the end by a narrow belief, a harsh, severe delusion! Because now you are seduced and tempted by anything that is narrow and solid.

His encounter with the shadow reminds him of the dangers of wandering, perhaps a metaphor for the process of constant transition, self-betterment and self-overcoming. In the process of fashioning meaning, one is tempted to settle for creeds that constitute prisons for the soul.

Holy Laughter and the Devil of Gravity

The antidote for this danger becomes child-like laughter and dancing, Nietzchean sacraments which perhaps replace the Zoroastrian Spenta Mainyu (the Good, cheerful Spirit) and which oppose the evil influence of the Nietzchean devil of gravity, which here replaces the Zoroastrian Angra Mainyu (evil spirit).

I want to run alone, so that things clear up around me again. For that I’ll yet have to be long on my legs and like it. But this evening at my place – there will be dancing!

We must not forget that the historical Zoroaster falls within the tradition of stray-singers and drunken poets whose role it was to concoct ecstatic experiences; hence the ecstatic drink known as soma/haoma of the Vedic and Avestan traditions, and the kvasir of the poets in the Nordic tradition. There is a freedom-seeking shamanic and Dionysian aspect to this wanderer, and like all shamans, Zoroaster must be child-like, innocent, and he must never forget to dance. This is not the first or only reference to dancing as liberation. In a passage that should be deemed prophetic, if we consider the recent Charlie Hebdo events:

I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance. And when I saw my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn: he was the spirit of gravity. Through him all things fall. Not by wrath, but by laughter, do we slay. Come, let us slay the spirit of gravity!

The historical Zoroaster was extremely concerned with how to banish and exorcise evil spirits that bring torment, dis-ease and sadness. Perhaps this influenced Nietzche in his choice of Zoroaster as the hero of his personal mythology. In Nietzche’s worldview, there’s a battle in this world between the forces of freedom/lightness and the forces of gravity. One laughs, dances and liberates, the other one pulls down and does not know how to laugh. He frequently speaks of the devil of gravity.

This day is a triumph; he is already retreating, he’s fleeing, the spirit of gravity, my old arch-enemy.

Anyone who thinks that atheists lack a deep spirituality that resonates deeply with the human soul, hasn’t read Thus Spake Zarathustra. Like the shamans of primal cultures, the Nietzchean Zoroaster is a facilitator of meaning for his people, the exorcizer of bad spirits, the conjurer of good spirits, and even has animal spirit assistants which seem to represent his spiritual strengths. Nietzche recognizes that these motifs are human, all too human, and so he uses them in his profoundly spiritual art.

Within the new, naturalist morality and cosmology of this world, the Holy Spirit of ancient Zoroastrianism has been replaced by new charms, the most powerful of which is laughter. Zoroaster teaches that the Higher Man wears the crown of laughter, and equates the good (as it is made tangible and real in this world) with pleasure and cheer:

Laughter is holy.

All good things laugh.

Laughter and dance represent the impulse that leads to spiritual freedom and that saves us from gravity. Elsewhere, he speaks of laughter as a charm, as a spiritual power related to courage.

I want to have goblins about me, for I am courageous. The courage which scareth away ghosts, createth for itself goblins- it wanteth to laugh.

The Honey

In the last part of the book, in the passages related to The Honey Sacrifice, Zarathustra argues that old age feels like being a ripened fruit: when one ages one gets sweeter and calmer, happier, more tolerant of others’ failings. It has frequently been noted that it is easier for older people to attain ataraxia.

In A Few Days in Athens, Frances Wright’s Epicurus explains:

In our ripened years, supposing our judgement to have ripened also, when all the insidious temptations that misguided him, and all the disadvantages that he has laboured under, perhaps from his birth, are apparent to us, it is then, and not till then, that our indignation at the crime is lost in our pity of the man. – A Few Days in Athens, Chapter 2

Nietzche’s maxim: “Human, all too human”, seems to be the reflection of one man of wisdom on this matter.

The Morning Sun

At the end of Thus Spake Zarathustra, the higher men all thank Zarathustra for teaching them to love this Earth. The novel closes by referring to them as the children of Zarathustra and to his rising like a new sun to give meaning to this world.

“Well then! The lion came, my children are near, Zarathustra became ripe, my hour came. This is my morning, my day is beginning: up now, up, you great noon!”

Thus spoke Zarathustra and he left his cave, glowing and strong, like a morning sun that emerges from dark mountains.

Further Reading:

Thomas Common translation of Thus Spake Zarathustra

Tending the Epicurean Garden

My book Tending the Epicurean Garden is available from amazon and can also be purchased directly from Humanist Press. I am very thrilled that, after the many months of hard work that went into the book, I’m finally able to take others on this adventure with me to discover Epicureanism on its own terms.

There are sources on Epicureanism, but many are indirect and some are hostile. It’s important for us in the Epicurean movement that there exist Epicurean sources for our tradition that explain it on our own terms.

Another reason why this book is extremely important is that there is a huge body of interdisciplinary research that vindicates the teachings of Epicurus, which calls for an update to how they’re presented. This includes not just research by social scientists but also in fields as varied as diet and neuroplasticity.

Epicureanism is not a fossilized, archaic Greek philosophical school but a cosmopolitan, contemporary, scientific wisdom tradition that is alive and changing as new information becomes available on the science of happiness and wellbeing.

Lovers of Epicurean tradition who make a resolution to apply philosophy in their daily lives will benefit the most from the book, which is meant to set the foundation for the work of the Society of Friends of Epicurus.

The best way for Epicureanism to grow, in my view, is organically and slowly beginning with small circles of Friends. I also believe that the current generation of Epicureans has a pivotal role in the future of our tradition, and that the most effective way to revitalize our tradition is by implementing exercises based on the insights presented in the book about katastemic and contemplative practices, by nurturing their wisdom traditions, etc. Insights gained through these experiments, if shared with the larger Epicurean community, might be of great benefit to many.

I hope you find as much pleasure in reading the book as I found in writing it!

Hiram Crespo

Book Reviews

By Michael Fontaine, a Cornell University classicist, written for The Humanist, a publication of the American Humanist Association

By Greg Sadler, Philosopher and YouTuber

By David Tamayo, of Hispanic American Freethinkers

By Rick Heller, written for secularbuddhism.org

By Alan Furth (en español) for the Las Indias blog

NewEpicurean.com review by Cassius Amicus

Balance Pleasure and Structure?, from the Brian Beholds blog

Reviewer Feedback

In Tending the Epicurean Garden Crespo has given all of us a way to think about how we live—our choices, abilities, appetites, freedoms, and responsibilities. He distills the relevant scholarship on Epicureanism in a succinct and unassuming way.

Michael Fontaine, for The Humanist

Hiram Crespo has done a masterful job in describing the teachings of Epicurus and making them relevant to modern life … “Tending the Epicurean Garden” is a breath of fresh air if, like me, you have tried to read the dull prose of some professional philosophers.

Robert and Martha Hanrott, of the Epicurus blog

This is one of the few absolutely pro-Epicurean books to have been written in the last several hundred years … One can read this book without any knowledge at all of the history or doctrine of Epicurus, because the author provides a good measure of both history and teachings in the course of the book … Hopefully there will be more to come from the same author.

Cassius Amicus, of newepicurean.com

This brilliant book may certainly be the first of its kind. There are many academic introductions to Ancient Philosophy out there, just as there are countless self-help books often drawing on various spiritual of esoteric traditions. Crespo’s book is a bit of both … A highly educational and enjoyable read!

Sasha Euler, ethics professor

The more I understand Epicurus the more affinity I feel. This is rare. This guy was sticking it to the superstitious and flipping off the pretentious philosophers consumed with metaphysical nonsense. He sounds like the Christopher Hitchens of the ancient world! Don’t fear God! Don’t fear death! Trust your senses for that is how most knowledge is acquired. Have a few good friends. Concern yourself with what you can control. Find ways to minimize emotional and physical suffering and maximize pleasure with the checks and balances of natural consequences. What’s not to love? Hiram Crespo, I loved your book! Deeply provocative!

Eric Sherman, reader

Hiram Crespo’s book “Tending the Epicurean Garden” is a concise and wholesome presentation of Epicurean philosophy, which I very much enjoyed reading … The basics of Epicurean philosophy is presented in a simple, user-friendly, narrative way but at the same time, when needed, it is corroborated by current scientific findings and it is paralled correspondingly with other similar concepts from various schools of thought and cultures of Europe, Asia, the Americas and Africa.

Christos Yapijakis, member of the Athens Garden

The book presents complex material, clearly written … Secular Buddhists can clearly benefit from allowing another stream of ancient wisdom to flow into this emerging project of seeking abiding tranquility and the end of suffering.

Rick Heller, co-founder of the Humanist Mindfulness Group and contributor to secularbuddhism.org

El libro es una resumida pero muy completa introducción a los principios básicos y la práctica del epicureísmo. Pero también brinda una interesante interpretación de las enseñanzas de Epicuro desde el punto de vista de la psicología positiva, la neurociencia y otras disciplinas científicas que hoy en día corroboran gran parte del legado del maestro.

Alan Furth, Las Indias blogger

Tending the Epicurean Garden

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