Category Archives: epicurus

Laughter as a Philosophical Practice

At the same time we must laugh and philosophize, do our household duties and manage our business, and never cease proclaiming the sayings of the true philosophy. – ES 41

Recently, a fellow SoFE member cited this saying to me, stressing that we MUST laugh, that it is an order, not a suggestion. This was in the context of a discussion on how, of all the attributes that a person needs in order to be able to profit from the study of philosophy, the person’s attitude or disposition (diathesis) is surprisingly more important than many other attributes. Yes, we want students of philosophy to be knowledgeable, and ideally happy, but even if they’re beginners with little more to offer, so long as they have a good disposition, slowly they will profit, learn, and become happy with the use of the tools that philosophy gives. If they have the wrong attitude, they will not profit.

Epicurus expressed this by saying that his Doctrines are not for everyone, but only for those who are “armed for happiness“. We are left to determine what it means to be armed, or prepared, for happiness. It seems to imply that a certain attitudinal training, or the cultivation of healthy and happy dispositions, is required. Later Epicureans (like Philodemus of Gadara and Diogenes of Oenoanda) also stressed the importance of diathesis in their writing, with Diogenes stressing that our dispositions are under our control.

But why must laughter be part of our practice of philosophy, and part of our art of living (techné biou)? Laughter is a concrete instance of pleasure, manifesting and asserting itself as sound vibration, as tremor and movement in the body and mind, making itself concrete. Some specific object of our attention produces a concrete joy. Our disposition or attitude can not be known by others, except if it produces concrete instances of pleasure, the signs of which are laughter and other behaviors. If we cultivate a certain disposition, if we are armed for happiness, there have to be “fruits”, signs, observable expressions of this in our behavior: our willingness to laugh at ourselves and at events, an ease of enjoying simple things, our gratefulness, etc.

Furthermore, the cultivation of a sunny disposition creates a positive feedback loop or virtuous cycle. Studies suggest that just as people who are always angry, look mad and ugly, similarly people who are happy and confident are also more attractive. Laughing makes us radiant, and is contagious.

The Laughing Philosophers

It makes sense that laughter should be one of the basic philosophical exercises in our school. Epicureans fall within the lineage of the laughing philosophers, which begins with Democritus–the inventor of atomism–who was called the “laughing philosopher” because he made cheerfulness his cardinal virtue, and because he laughed frequently at the folly of human nature. I delve a bit more into the relation between laughter and materialism in this essay about the history and utility of comedy.

Friederich Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, elevated laughter to the status of a holy practice.

Laughter is holy. All good things laugh. – Nietzsche

But he went further. You see, Nietzsche specifically chose the prophet Asho Zartosht as the mouthpiece for his own philosophy for a reason. (I am using the Persian name in order to differentiate the historical Zartosht from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra). It may surprise some that the Iranian prophet Zarathustra himself was a laughing philosopher: there’s a legend that says that he was born laughing. The first monotheistic prophet appears at the dawn of recorded history, is pre-Abrahamic, and therefore not yet tainted with the asceticism or with the Platonist hatred for the world that we would see in later “prophets”, and which would find its most sick expression in figures like the “prophet” Mani–who blended Platonism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism into what seems like a mishmash of world-hating ideas.

In contrast, the Persian philosopher and moral reformer Zartosht was not at all a world-denying philosopher. He said: “Happy is the one who brings happiness to others“, and one of the main mantras of Zorostrianism (the Ashem Vohu) equates Asha (righteousness, truth, or justice) with Ushta (pleasure, happiness). Ushta (happiness), then, became the sign that righteousness was being properly honored and practiced in the world. This reminds us a bit of Epicurus’ Principal Doctrine 5.

Nietzsche chose Zartosht as his spokesperson because he considered him a worthy philosophical enemy, one whose ideas could still be reformed and useful. Like Zartosht, Nietzsche conceived of a cosmic battle–but not between “good” and “evil”. Nietzsche’s Neo-Zoroastrian battle is a battle between Laughter (light, lightening up, dancing, leaping) and the Spirit of Gravity, which pulls us down and represents a regressive instinct. Nietzsche’s “Ahriman” (“evil” “spirit”) is recognized for its inability to laugh.

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!

When Asho Zartosht spoke of “spirits”, the word he actually used was Mainyu. This translates into “mentality”, or “disposition”. Spenta Mainyu translates as something like “Progressive, or Constructive Mentality”, while Anghra Mainyu is “Regressive, or Harmful Mentality”. Another name for Anghra is Aka Mainyu (the “Sick, or Evil, Mindset”). Asho Zartosht taught that these two basic dispositions are “twins” congenital to human nature, born together in our souls, and the more we “feed” them, or “sacrifice” to each, the more they strengthen. He taught that we co-create our worlds through these two basic mentalities by our choices and rejections of concrete thoughts, words, and deeds.

However, as his philosophy evolved within the context of its religious trappings, these “Mainyu” became mystified. Spenta Mainyu evolved into the Christian Holy Spirit, while Anghra Mainyu evolved into the Devil. People adopted an obscure and superstitious interpretation of them, moving away from the original psychological insights.

As Epicureans, we reject the mythologized and absolute understanding of Regressive and Progressive Mentality as two cosmic forces. Instead, we may look at our choices and rejections in terms of what type of mentality is behind each impulse we feel, perhaps by naming them “the better” and “the worse” mentalities at the time–since our cosmological model is not absolute, but always relative or relational. This would help us to practice paying closer attention to our choices and avoidances, and to our dispositions, cultivating the healthier ones (which are advantageous for our happiness), and rejecting the sick ones (which are harmful to our happiness).

Laughter as a Practice

I’ve written an introductory set of considerations for how to practice Epicurean Saying 41, which is the most overt call for laughter as a philosophical practice in our extant Epicurean writings.

Laughter yoga has demonstrated effectiveness in reducing pain and is used in therapeutic settings with cancer patients. Ultimately, it is up to us as individuals to choose to develop a regular practice of laughter, and to incorporate it in concrete ways into our hedonic regimen. This can be as simple as a weekly gathering of family or friends, a funny movie, or a formal session of laughter practice.

“Life is not serious: only graveyards are serious“. – Atheist Indian guru Osho, in his sermon against the repression of laughter

Nature has no masters: Lucretius, Epicurus, and Effortless Action

“Nature does nothing, and yet nothing remains unaccomplished.” – Tao Te Ching, with “nature” replacing the Tao

Wu Wei (Doing Nothing 無爲) is a key concept in Taoism and in Chinese philosophy. Encyclopaedia Britannica defines wu wei as:

the practice of taking no action that is not in accord with the natural course of the universe.

Which reminds us of the Epicurean insistence of living in accordance with nature, defined as living pleasantly (rationally and pragmatically following the pleasure impulse and evading the pain signals). According to The School of Life,

It means being at peace while engaged in the most frenetic tasks so that one can carry these out with maximum skill and efficiency. Something of the meaning of wu wei is captured when we talk of being ‘in the zone’ – at one with what we are doing, in a state of profound concentration and flow.

… so that it seems that wu wei is a way of acting that does not interrupt the natural flows, including those of sentience and attention. Wu wei also is associated with the enjoyment of things without clinging or yearning. A metaphor for this is the bee which goes from flower to flower, enjoying the nectar freely, and moving on. We also see the logic of wu wei in the Lathe biosas (Live unknown) teaching, and in the focus on natural and necessary pleasures which are easy to get.

In Taoism, the focus is less on accepting that which you cannot change (as the Stoics do), and more on acting efficiently and effortlessly. A clear, non-mystical understanding of wu wei helps to remind us of the wisdom of choosing our battles, and choosing the most efficient and opportune moments and circumstances in which to act. According to this essay by LR:

A better way to think of it, however, is as a paradoxical “Action of non-action.”

This is very problematic for us, since Epicurean philosophy frowns upon unclear speech. But wu wei is far from a mystical and unpragmatic idea. It’s applied effectively in many fields, including business, politics, and martial arts.

Over 20 years ago, when I studied tai chi under an instructor who had been trained in China, he explained wu wei to me by teaching me that in addition to evading or dodging a blow and allowing the opponent to tire and hurt himself in various ways, we can also use the momentum from our own bodies and the strength of our legs when we counter-attack. This, too, is wu-wei, and it’s not just effortless: it’s efficient. He struck a blow once from a position of being steady on his feet, and then another one with a dancing motion, using his legs to add momentum to the blow. This second blow was, naturally, much stronger than the first (because he used momentum and I felt the weight of his whole body), and it pushed me back. He then said: “THAT is wu wei”. I was planning to move to Chicago in a month, so my tai chi classes were brief, but I always remembered this encounter, and the sense that the Sensei was on to something.

Sometimes wu wei is about the use of observable factors over which we may have no control, and sometimes it’s about the employment of the few other factors over which we DO have control, but that when applied at the right moment and in the right way, create much more effective ways of acting in the world thanks to the assistance of nature. According to this essay,

Another example of Wu Wei is the cutting of wood. If you go against the way the tree grew, the wood is difficult to cut. The wood, however, splits easily if you cut against the grain. When sawing wood, many people are in a great hurry to power through the block and do not realize they are splintering the back edge. Instead, a skilled carpenter will let the saw do the work, patiently allowing the blade to glide across the wood without causing any splinters or tiring themselves out.

Wu wei reminds me of the way in which sleep assists in neuroplasticity and in the process of memorizing and learning. Before we are able to perform a task thoroughly and subconsciously, without even thinking about it, many neural connections must happen in our brains, and these neurons do their repair work at night while we sleep. We do our active memorizing and learning while we’re awake, but (arguably) the most important work happens at night, when the brain really goes to work on learning. We must give up the power over the tasks or information that we’re learning, and allow the brain to rest, in order to learn. Without this effortless aspect of the process, learning does not happen. According to this study:

… during sleep, the brain must also stabilize key synapses to prevent what was learned the previous day from being eliminated by new learning experiences…

… the REM stage may make learning before sleep more resilient to interference from subsequent learning.

Unlike non-REM sleep, the sharp fall in plasticity during REM sleep was only seen among the volunteers with a task to learn.

This suggests that the stabilization that occurred during REM sleep was focused exclusively on synapses involved in learning this task.

Darwinian natural selection provides us another example where, without much effort on the part of sentient beings, things continue along their course, and even evolve into a magnificent variety of lifeforms. If some mutation, or some instinctive behavior, results in advantage for a creature, then that creature is more likely to survive and pass on their genes while others do not. Over time, only the better adapted creatures will remain. Like water, nature in all things takes the path of least resistance.

Another application of wu wei happens in communities where engineers of the beaver species have interfered with human communal engineering decisions. Scientists have figured out that if you play the soundtrack of running water, upon hearing it, beavers will begin to build dams by instinct. So they are using this to manipulate beaver behavior as needed. Rather than fight the critters, rather than make countless efforts, rather than be in control, humans simply need to encourage the creature to do what it’s programmed by nature to do whenever it hears running water.

We must not force Nature but persuade her. We shall persuade her if we satisfy the necessary desires and also those bodily desires that do not harm us while sternly rejecting those that are harmful. – Epicurean Saying 21

I have long considered that pleasure ethics often involves a practice of applying the same technique that we apply with the beavers, with ourselves; a practice which–in my view–requires insight, wisdom and self-compassion.

Epicurean Effortless Action

I have shared all these case studies on effortless yet efficient action in order to show that, while sometimes our instincts are triggered in vain, most of the time it does make sense to trust the wisdom of nature. A clear insight into wu wei may help us in our choices and avoidances, to more efficiently choose our efforts, and to act in a manner that is more confident, more efficient, less anxious, and yet paradoxically less in need of control. But what does Epicurean philosophy say concretely concerning effortless action? Epicurus’ Principal Doctrine 26 says:

The desires that do not bring pain when they go unfulfilled are not necessary; indeed they are easy to reject if they are hard to achieve or if they seem to produce harm.

Epicurus offers us two criteria in our choices and avoidances that justify not pursuing unnecessary pleasures: if they’re hard to achieve, or if they’re harmful, then it’s easy to dismiss them. This first criteria, of course, reminds us of wu wei (effortless action), and also the Doctrine seems to imply that it is desirable to live in such a way that our choices and avoidances tend to produce pleasures that generally require little effort.

Principal Doctrine 30, on the other hand, offers us two criteria to classify some natural desires as arising from groundless opinion:

Among natural desires, those that do not bring pain when unfulfilled and that require intense exertion arise from groundless opinion; and such desires fail to be stamped out not by nature but because of the groundless opinions of humankind.

Notice the second criterion involves the desires that require intense exertion. Here again, we find an ethics of effortless (or low effort) action in Epicurean Doctrines, tied to the accusation that the justifications for exertion involve faulty thinking not based on the study of nature.

We see in Epicurean pleasure calculus and in wu-wei a tendency to affirm nature, as well as some distrust of culture or artifice. We also see a tendency to follow the path of least resistance. But when we read Lucretius and consider Epicurean physics, wu wei comes into a different relief.

Effortless Action and Epicurean Atheology

The fullness of the pragmatic repercussions of these considerations, ordinary and seemingly unrelated as they are, is carried to its conclusion by Lucretius. This is the beauty of Epicurean philosophy: it rationally and pragmatically weaves cosmology, physics, epistemology, and ethics into a single, coherent tapestry.

If you grasp these points well and hold to them,
you will see at once that nature is free,
liberated from her proud possessors,
doing all things on her own initiative,
without divinities playing any part.

Lucretius, On the nature of things, Book II

… which, of course, has repercussions for how we should live our lives (the ethics). The gods do not govern, create, or interrupt the workings of nature. Therefore, even if we attribute an artistic-aesthetic or ethical role to the gods in our lives, we need not worry about appeasing them. This, too, allows us to engage in more effective action in our environment, as it protects us from the degrading superstitions of the mobs who are forever appeasing gods out of unwarranted shame or fear.

Without gods managing everything, nature is free. Nature acts according to its own laws and cycles, which are unconscious and impersonal, and it is by prudently acting in accordance with (or not against) these cycles and laws that we act most efficiently.

How Do We Memorialize our Fallen?

The noble man is chiefly concerned with wisdom and friendship; of these, the former is a mortal good, the latter an immortal one. – Vatican Saying 78

“Of all the things that wisdom provides for a happy life, by far the greatest is friendship.” – from Jesús’ instagram feed

By now some of you will be aware that our friend Jesús (SoFE member and one of the admins of the Spanish SoFE group) passed away around the 20th in a bicycle accident. Jesús was a professor of political science in Venezuela. His way of dealing with all the things that have been happening in his country was through the frequent use of comedy and cynical commentary. He was instrumental in the last two years in translating many writings for the Spanish page of the Society of Friends of Epicurus. He often carried a copy of Epicurus’ Doctrines with him for study and remembrance, and some of his friends and/or students reported that he had been sharing the Epicurean Gospel with them. He was a very smart and sincere Epicurean, and thanks to his steady participation in our monthly zoom meetings, our Eikas had become a bilingual event. We’re going to miss him.

This is not the first time we lose an Epicurean in our circle. It leads us to philosophize about these questions: How do we properly mourn our Epicurean Friends? How can we remain considerate and respectful of family members who do not share our values, while also properly honoring the memory and the sincerely-held beliefs of our Friend? What funerary and/or memorial traditions will we implement? Principal Doctrine 40 reminds us that we should “not grieve the early death of the departed, as though it called for pity.” The practice recommended for remembering our fallen is known as “pleasant remembrance”. Initially, this may be difficult to achieve, but over time we should fill the hole in the world left by the departed with pleasant memories.

The celebration of Eikas on the Twentieth of every month was originally a memorial service honoring the Epicureans who have passed, and furnishes a great opportunity to pour our libations and remember him. Therefore, we did a private memorial toast to the memory of Jesús during our Eikas zoom meeting this weekend.

The Reemergence of the Roman Epicurean Burial Tradition

Maybe this may teach us something about the utility, in times like these, of having healthy ecumenical relations with Christians. When we learned of Jesús death, we also learned (from his brother) that his mother would probably not allow a non-Christian funeral. After all, she named him after Jesus Christ and is very Catholic (and devastated). One of the first things we are learning from this is that funerals are for the living. They help bring closure and comfort to the survivors. As Philodemus the Guide reminded us in his scroll On Death, the person who has died is not there, and does not benefit in any way whatsoever from funeral rites.

Therefore, we must consider that, for the Christian survivors, it is normal that they will want to remember him according to the rites and traditions of Christianity, and that for the Epicurean survivors, it is normal that we will want to remember him according to our own traditions. For this reason, after speaking to his brother, it was important for us to respect the Christian family’s ways of mourning, and we figured we would simply mourn and remember Jesús in our own way privately, but our friend Alan did share imagery inspired by the inscriptions that were used by Roman Epicureans on their tombs with some of the friends and students of Jesús, and some of them expressed that it would be a nice gesture to honor his sincerely-held Epicurean beliefs in some way. After all, his beliefs were a big part of what made him who he was, and part of why people loved him.

He was loved by many in his community. One of his friends said: “He will be immortal to us“.

So we were very pleasantly surprised when, after the funeral, we received an image of Jesús Guevara’s tomb. Someone who saw our post (perhaps one of his students?) had traced the image that our friend Alan had made to memorialize him over the fresh cement on his tomb. As you can see, it’s very crude, but it’s an authentic expression of the resurgence of Epicurean culture in the 21st Century in a part of the world that is deeply Catholic … and (we must acknowledge) it’s also a token of comfort, solidarity, and compassion on the part of people who are (in all likelihood) Christians, but who respect us enough and have enough compassion, kindness, and tolerance, that they prefer to honor the sincerely-held beliefs of our fallen rather than erase them, or sugar-coat them. For this, we are deeply thankful.

We only get one life, it’s very short, and sometimes we don’t get a chance to articulate our love for each other. If Jesús was still here, I’d just want to say thank you, I love you, and we will not forget you. I invite my readers to take the time to call your friends that you haven’t seen in a while–for (as the Havamal says) “a path that is neglected, slowly fills with weeds”. Peace and Safety.

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.

Passages on the Soul, from Epicurus’ Epistle to Herodotus

The Letter to Herodotus is available here in its entirety. A commentary on the Epicurean Doctrine of the Psyche is here.

On the Occasion of the Birth of the Hegemon

For many years, we have had difficulty establishing with certainty the date of the birth of Epicurus. This is because the Attic calendar–whose months were mentioned in Epicurus’ Last Will and Testament–was not widely used. It was very much a local calendar, and was lunisolar, which adds great confusion for us who are used to our (solar) Gregorian calendar. The Birth of the Hegemon should naturally be our biggest holiday, our equivalent of Christmas, Mawlid, or Buddha Purnima, so at the SoFE we decided it was time to fix the date and to start developing traditions around the holiday of the Birth of the Hegemon.

The Lunisolar Calendar Discussion

We looked into various possible solutions. I considered adapting the Attic calendar into a simplified lunisolar calendar, abandoning the traditional and difficult-to-pronounce Greek month names and replacing them with the generic “First Moon”, “Second Moon”, etc. as names for our months. Some years would have twelve moons, and others would have thirteen. According to Wikipedia:

The year was meant to begin with the first sighting of the new moon after the summer solstice.

This would have been easy enough, as there are plenty of lunar calendars online we can consult. In his final will, Epicurus describes “the customary celebration of my birthday on the tenth day of Gamelion in each year“. Gamelion was the seventh month, which typically falls in January-February. But in 2020-2021, the summer solstice coincided with the new moon, and therefore the lunisolar months came very early. According to space.com, there was a new moon on June 21st of 2020, which is right at the solstice, so the solstice coincided with the New (Lunisolar) Year.

If we count seven new moons from there, we will see that space.com sets the seventh new moon of year 2,361 of the Age of Epicurus as December the 14th.

Therefore, the tenth day of the seventh moon in this simplified lunisolar calendar, counting from December 14th, would have been the 23rd day of December of 2020–which would have been the Birth of the Hegemon in our simplified lunisolar calendar. However, in the ancient Attic calendar, each month began with the “first sighting of the new moon”, which in this case was probably one or two nights after the New Moon of the 14th of December of 2020. We are beginning to see how difficult it is to plan ahead for this, which creates many disadvantages.

When we say that we are in the Year of Epicurus 2,361, we calculate that from 2020 (current year in the Gregorian calendar, which begins the lunisolar cycle of 2020-2021), plus 341 (Before Common Era, the year of his birth).

When I consulted with the other members of the SoFE concerning the problem of the date of this holiday, we considered the possibility of adopting a private lunisolar calendar merely with the intention of clearly calculating the Birth of the Hegemon every year, and we had to carry out hedonic calculus between this option and sticking to our familiar Gregorian calendar for the sake of simplicity, ease, and custom. The idea of fixing the Birth of the Hegemon to the Gregorian calendar prevailed. While I am not averse to the idea of a lunisolar calendar, the utility of this is limited, since the only major lunisolar holiday we celebrate is the Birth of the Hegemon.

Also, we customarily have zoom gatherings on the Twentieth of every month (or sometimes on the most convenient date close to the Twentieth), which makes it advantageous to merge the Birth of the Hegemon and the Twentieth on its given month, and also helps us to respect and to make the best use of each other’s time.

Therefore, the Society of Friends of Epicurus has officially set the holiday of the Birth of the Hegemon to be henceforward celebrated on the 20th of February every year.

Meaning of Hegemon

Epicurus was known as the Hegemon by his disciples. We pronounce this word according to the US conventional pronunciation found here. This word is related to “hegemony”, which translates as:

preponderant influence or authority over others. – Webster Dictionary

Other translations of the word are political, and do not apply to the ancient usage. This does not mean that he is infallible, or a prophet. He’s the founder of our School, our moral example due to his empirical thinking, clear and frank speech and clear thought, freedom from superstition and harmful beliefs, his pleasant disposition, his autarchy, his friendliness, and his kindness. He was the first Epicurean, the one whose name (and a portion of his identity) we make our own when we call ourselves Epicureans. The name Epicurus means “Friend” or “Ally”, and we know that friendship was holy to the first Epicureans, so in our Koinonia we strive to be true Friends and allies to each other.

We recognize only Epicurus of Samos as our Hegemon. His successors (diadochi) of direct lineage in the Garden of Athens were known as Scholarchs (Hermarchus, Polystratus, Zeno of Sidon, etc.) The Age of the Scholarchs lasted over five centuries. No one today can claim direct lineage, and so there are no Scholarchs today.

Under the Scholarchs, were the kath-hegetes (Guides)–people like Philodemus of Gadara, Philonides of Laodicea, Diogenes of Oenoanda, etc. In our SoFE lineage, this is the only office that we recognize as still potentially existing today.

In Celebration of the Birth of the Hegemon

Today is for remembering some of the key events in the biography and some of the key features of the character of Epicurus of Samos through poetry, declamation, and other art forms. We encourage all followers of Epicurus to write their own poems and statements in memory of the Hegemon for this day and to publish them on social media, or to share Lucretian and other relevant sources.

Today, we Hail the Hegemon and we invite all followers of Epicurean philosophy to learn about, toast, celebrate, and remember Epicurus in your own way. We wish you a pleasant Hegemon Day. Peace and Safety!

This is by Matt:

Hear these words O children of Nature’s swerve.
Let us rejoice in the freedom we desperately deserve.
Of prudent wisdom long obscured by shame.
Professed by Epicurus of noble fame.
Lucretius penned in days of old.
Across the gap of time, a truth so bold.
Arise the days of hedonic measure.
Restoring the truth of humankind’s pleasure.
Dispel the fears of death’s illusion.
Release humankind from all confusion.
Again I say, O children of Nature’s swerve.
Be frank in speech and keep your nerve.
Be ready now to strike your blow.
For Epicurus, his Garden and all who know.
The days shall come when the world will extol.
That pleasurable living was indeed the goal.

Non-Spoiler Review of “The Epicuriana” Novel

A Non-Spoiler Review of The Epicuriana Novel by Friend Harmonious

“I AM EPICURUS”

The Epicuriana follows in the tradition of A Few Days in Athens, presenting itself as the reconstructed remains of a Herculaneum scroll recovered by archaeologists in the modern era. It is a fictional, historically plausible (though not always accurate), philosophical coming-of-age and romantic novel that explores the life of Epicurus primarily from his boyhood years through to later developments in his life as he travels across Ionia, amassing followers and spreading his new philosophy of tranquility and friendship.

The Good

It is deeply character-driven, exploring the intimate lives of Epicurus and those who contributed most importantly to his maturation both as a man and as a philosophical innovator, including but not limited to his father Neocles, mother Chaerestrata, and his childhood friend Servilia and her father Valerius. It includes flashback episodes to Epicurus in boyhood and concludes with a brief glimpse of Epicurus at the end of his life, and thus spans effectively his entire life.

It is clearly very well researched, drawing on a rather substantial bibliography to inform the historical plausibility of its narrative – though not completely avoiding all anachronisms and historical impossibilities.

It explores various themes such as the unpredictability of necessary and chance events, and how one’s actions as a free agent can affect dramatic changes with lasting consequences in one’s life. It touches on themes of Epicurean friendship and the love between friends (as distinct from Platonic or familial love, which are held in contrast). It explores a broad spectrum of human emotions as well as the fear of the unknown and of death.

The flow of the text certainly has the ability to evoke emotion in the reader and I found myself hooting and laughing and having other pleasant emotional responses occasionally throughout the reading of the text.

There are many interesting sequences throughout the novel, with Epicurus meeting and interacting with new characters who are pivotal to the development of the plot and of his own character. For example, there is a humorous and somewhat vicious encounter with a tag-team of Aristotelians who infiltrated the private house discussions of Epicurus and company while at Mytilene, an amusing conversation between Epicurus and the Gymnasiarch of Mytilene, and a number of adventurous episodes between Epicurus and the characters involved with the plotline of delivering Epicurus from Colophon to Lampsacus, including the captain of the ship, Master Panyotis, and a ragtag band of pirates, the latter of whom experience the fruits of Epicurus’ hoplite training skills firsthand.

One other reviewer had this to say of The Epicuriana after reading the whole work:

“[It is] A lovely personal story which mirrors the struggles and doubts of many of us today, but comes a full circle when we reflect on the past and the present. I still find it so interesting that [Epicurus’] struggles within himself, doubts, situations and successes have been repeated throughout the ages – perhaps we as people should spend time to look back at these ancient writings to learn for our future. But perhaps we are in too much of a hurry to make our own mistakes! The story really makes you think.”

The Bad

I wish that it had explored Epicurus’ friendships with Hermarchus and Metrodorus more. An individual chapter depicts a dialogue between Hermarchus and Epicurus, but the discourse was centered primarily around addressing the accusations and concerns of sexual impropriety in the Garden as advanced by the apostate Timocrates. Metrodorus is only very briefly present and his character is of singular dimension. Unfortunately, Polyaenus does not make an appearance as far as I remember, neither do any of Epicurus’ brothers (Neocles, Chaeredemus and Aristobulus), who are reported by Diogenes Laertius to have been members of the Garden School.

There are numerous minor historical anachronisms, such as the author positing that Epicurus heard the lectures of Aristotle in person in Athens, which is impossible because Aristotle had left Athens by the time Epicurus arrived, leaving his disciple Theophrastus in charge of the Lyceum (whom Epicurus may actually have heard lecture). Another glaring anachronism was evident when Epicurus was reflecting on the various philosophical schools vying for influence in the agora of Mytilene, and pauses to briefly consider the Stoics. Zeno of Citium had not started the Stoic school until a number of years after Epicurus had already established the Garden in Athens. These events (when Epicurus was still much younger and on Mytilene) being well before that time are an obvious impossibility. These inaccuracies caused me to suspend belief in some cases. The taking of certain liberties may have been deliberately chosen by the author to advance the narrative – if so, then I would view these as a disservice to the reader, as it is partly the duty of the presenter of historical fiction to clarify when they are deviating from the factual timeline.

There is also a contemporary timeline exploring the Herculaneum papyri scholars who are uncovering The Epicuriana scroll. The character relationships there are notably less interesting and fleshed-out than the ones in the ancient timeline. We only return to this timeline a few times and it may have sufficed to just leave it wholly out of the work.

The prose is impressive but is perhaps a bit too lavish in its use of rare or otherwise obscure vocabulary, especially being a contemporary piece of writing. Be prepared to have a dictionary or thesaurus near at hand to accompany the reading experience. In many cases, it would have sufficed to convey a similar meaning choosing less opulent words for the sake of the comprehensibility of the reader. It definitely interrupted the flow. These occurrences struck me somewhat as an attempt to signal the author’s own facility with language.

There is a bit too much inter-familial intrigue and melodrama for my taste, bordering close to soap opera. Without going into too much detail, it would have been tolerable if that was only central to one major plot reveal, but that’s how all the major plot reveals went.

Conclusions

I would still recommend reading A Few Days in Athens over it for an early student of Epicurean philosophy. I would only recommend The Epicuriana after one has the historical and philosophical facts clearly sorted in their mind and after having been exposed to the primary sources and the biographies by Diogenes Laertius and Norman DeWitt.

It is some pleasant and sweet fun for someone who is confident that they would be able to recognize where it goes wrong and not be susceptible to misinterpretation. I moderately recommend it.

On the Evolution of Language

The following is a commentary on the essay titled New Evidence for the Epicurean Theory of the Origin of Language: Philodemus, On Poems V, by Jacob Mackey and Epicurus, On nature, Book 28 by David N Sedley.

As we have seen before, the founders of Epicurean philosophy were deeply concerned with the role that language plays in our apprehension of the nature of things. The canonical faculty of prolepsis (anticipations) is tied to the use of language, and its place in the canon implies that language can be a shortcut to recalling things that were at one point empirically available to our other faculties. But language conventions can betray prolepsis, sometimes purposefully, as we see in the case of metaphors.

We are not necessarily against poetry. Philodemus says that poetry gives pleasure through excellence of diction and content. We may say that “mountains vomit clay into rivers”, and by context most people will know that we are speaking metaphorically. But we must never forget the utility of words in their context. This expression is fine when we speak poetically, but in his Epistle to Herodotus, Epicurus starts by saying that words are only useful if their clear meaning is kept in mind.

Epicurus clashed with Dialectitians from Megara. Among them, Diodorus Cronus (who was an extreme conventionalist), said that language isn’t natural. From these facts, we can imagine that Epicurus was arguing against them that language (and other phenomena) do exist and are natural.

Epicurus’ views concerning language evolved. He had begun adopting Metrodorus’ process of using conventional words (rather than the pedantic practice of some philosophers, who are very particular about their choice of obscure language) by the time he wrote On Nature 28:

“I now see, as I did not then, the particular difficulties concerning this class, of having correct names for individual things … as you (Metro) also used in those days to assign names without adapting certain conventional usages, so that you should not make plain the principle that by assigning any name one expresses an opinion, and see and reflect upon the indiscriminate treatment of words and objects.”

We see a distrust of words, and we see their preoccupation with avoiding the addition of opinion when we express ourselves, and a recognition of the great difficulty of this in our choice of words. We know that Lucretius mentions “opinion” as a category that does not belong in the canon. The argument here is that to name something is to express an opinion, which may be true or false. So the addition of opinion is a sign that a definition of a word is non-canonical, has no empirical basis, and is not based on true prolepsis.

In addition to these concerns, Epicurean anthropology recognizes three stages of the evolution of language.

First Stage: Nature teaches words

The founders believed that initially, language started by ananke (necessity) as a reaction to external stimuli. This view is held today by people like linguist Noam Chomsky, who has argued that there exists in the human brain an “inborn universal grammar”. But the ancients didn’t have a scientific field of linguistics. They only had empirical attestations from nature. They likely observed the role that certain calls have in certain communities of monkeys (if they came across them in their travels) or birds, who use calls to warn each other about the presence of predators, for mating, for warning enemies who enter their territory, and for other rudimentary uses. Award-winning studies of human reaction to the noise made by nails on a chalk board seem to indicate that this may an ancestral vestige of primate warning calls:

The authors hypothesized that it was due to predation early in human evolution; the sound bore some resemblances to the alarm call of macaque monkeys, or it may have been similar to the call of some predator. This research won one of the authors, Randolph Blake, an Ig Nobel Prize in 2006.

Second Stage: Reason develops language

So, the initial sounds and grunts made by our ancestors were wild, that is, invented by nature. Later, as humans became civilized, the founders argue that language was developed further by logismos (reason), which refined the first words. Since this stage is distinct from the third stage, I imagine that this stage did not involve an intellectual class, but emerged naturally from the intelligence of average language-users and from the pragmatic necessities of their interactions with each other and their environment.

Third Stage: Reason adds new discoveries

It’s in this final stage that the philosophers of the first Garden believed to be operating when they engaged in the practice of reassigning names. This is a practice that Confucian philosophers have also, interestingly, engaged in for the sake of clarity. It’s possible that this is a widespread practice among the intellectual classes of many cultures, and responds to real, universal problems of sophisticated human communication.

It’s also here that poets get to work on inventing novel ways of utilizing words, and sometimes these innovations end up having great utility, while at other times this creates confusion and obscures speech for the entire community.

Epicurus generally doubts the utility of definitions and insists that people use words as they are used commonly–and yet sometimes (as in Principal Doctrine 1, which uses the definition of the word “gods” rather than the word itself) it’s clear that he trusts the definition more than the word, because the word has been so corrupted by the culture that it’s best to clearly define it in conversation.

To the first Epicureans, the legitimate practice of word-coining was born from utility, rather than for aesthetics. When I wrote Tending the Epicurean Garden, my editor insisted that I avoid using Greek terms that no one was familiar with, and this has been a recurrent problem in the teaching mission of the Society of Friends of Epicurus, and in many of my projects of content-creation for many outlets. Rather than kinetic and katastematic, I had to refer to dynamic and abiding pleasure. Many emerging fields of scientific inquiry, new inventions, and modern media and technology, have also produced the need for many new words. This process of word-coining will never end, for as long as there is human civilization.

Further Reading:
Against the use of empty words

The Parable of the Hunter

“There are many scenarios that we can think about where either justice or prudence is lacking, and so the life of pleasure is not complete and cannot be labeled Epicurean. These exercises of putting before our eyes various hypothetical scenarios, or thinking back to real ones we’ve encountered, may help to demonstrate what the founders were thinking about and discussing when they established Principal Doctrine 5.”

In a previous article, Hiram discussed action theory within Epicureanism and offered the training tool of the ‘Four Sisters’ of pleasure, prudence, nobility, and justice. Let us put the following hypothetical scenario under the scrutiny of our eyes to understand better how the ‘Four Sisters’ tradition shapes our actions and inform the decisions we make within the Epicurean framework.

The Parable of the Hunter

A long time ago, the world was cold and life was harsh. Deep in the Ice Age of Europe, there existed a hunter-gatherer tribe, a band of early humans. One member of the tribe was designated as the Hunter, whereas other members of the tribe filled different roles in the community. They naturally developed amongst themselves a proto-economy of bartering – the Hunter provides meat, and in return receives other gathered foods, crafted goods, and services in exchange.

Normally, all the members of the tribe would wait out the winter, relying on the food supply they had built up over the warm seasons. However, it has been a particularly harsh winter and the food is running out. With careful rationing, it looks like there is only enough food for the tribe to last a month or so before starvation sets in.

In a measure of desperation, the community decides to set aside a large share of its remaining food for the Hunter’s personal needs on the promise that the Hunter will go off into the wilderness for a period of time and return with an animal to alleviate the coming hunger. After sharing, the tribe has less than two weeks’ worth of food remaining, whereas the Hunter’s food is enough for him to survive the frigid landscape without help for about as long as the tribe would while waiting for him, not longer. He will need to keep his energy up if he is to be successful in the hunt, and carrying back an animal will also be very tiring. So, he will be consuming more food than his friends and family back home. The Hunter gives his word, SWEARING AN OATH that he will return before what little they have left runs out.

After the Hunter has left and wandered far enough away from the tribe to not be observed, he sits down by a fire to collect his thoughts and develop a plan of action. A number of options are present to choose from.

He feels a PAIN in his stomach and so eats some of the berries from his pouch, mildly addressing his hunger. He also reduces the pain of thirst with a swig of water from his leather waterskin. After doing so, he reflects on the PLEASURE of consumption and realizes that he can continue to indulge these pleasures because of the large amount of food in his bag. He could abandon his mission and keep the food for himself, continuing to eat and drink until he is beyond satisfied. However, he quickly realizes that this would cause him to run out of food much faster than he had planned, and hunger would quickly set in again before he has the means to ensure his long-term satisfaction. Recognizing this, he decides to continue the hunt and re-evaluate his situation when closer to his prey.

Due to seasonal migration, the herds of elk have ventured far from the tribe’s village. After a trek of about a week, the perilous Hunter tracks the herd to a semi-barren woodland, with barely enough morsels of foliage left for their graze. As an accomplished Hunter does, he stalks his prey until the most opportune time to strike. It would be worse for him to miss with his bow and arrow and have to give chase to the herd once it has started to run off, so he bides his time.

While he waits for the sun to rise on the last night before his planned final rendezvous with his quarry, he contemplates the future. The winter should be ending soon and the snows will melt in three weeks or so. He notes that with the food he has been given, he could just about make it to that time if he exerts himself less from now onwards and forgets about the idea of bringing back any animal he manages to find tomorrow. What’s more, with any animal at all he would actually be in a state of abundance, relying on the elk meat primarily and saving his packed food as a backup.

These ideas are all pleasant to him at first, until his mind focuses back to the condition of his friends and family that he would have to leave behind. It pains him to think about them all dying of starvation, and what is more, he would feel a pang of guilt when they realize that he betrayed his word and won’t be coming back.

Additionally, if by some chance a few of them did manage to survive to the springtime, he would live in perpetual FEAR of being hunted, for he knows that some of the elders and youths of the tribe also have some knowledge of tracking. Such a violation could not go unpunished and they would pursue his trail until they found him and exacted JUSTICE. Taking all of these possible future scenarios in mind, he knows what the best thing to do is.

The dawn arrives and the Hunter comes upon the herd, which had not traveled much further. The elk are loosely dispersed among trees, searching for hardy berries and other edible leaves. They aren’t too picky and options are scarce. One of the animals nearest to him munches away blissfully and unknowingly. Being very skilled, the Hunter carefully sights his bow, waiting for the exact moment. He looses his stone-tipped arrow and it finds its mark. He whispers lowly a solemn word of thankfulness to the animal. After some time, he prepares a makeshift sled and loads his handiwork on it to ease his return to his tribe and his people.

After some two weeks of absence, the Hunter returns to his village to find the people just barely holding on. Hunger had set in, but not yet death. Upon seeing him, they rush over and form a cheerful parade. He greets them one by one, exchanging glances, smiles, and intimate embraces. They REJOICE to see that his journey was a success and that he has brought with him the means for all to survive to the next season. They express a deep and sincere GRATITUDE for what symbolizes to them the guarantee of the continuation of life, in spite of all the DIFFICULTIES that it may come with. The Hunter rejoices tearfully with his friends and family and derives PLEASURE not just from the RECOGNITION of familiar faces who were eager to greet him or the quenching of thirst and satiation of hunger at the subsequent feast, but also from the NOBILITY of his own personal character, which GUIDED him to CHOOSE the most pleasant possible outcome, in conformity with PRUDENCE and JUSTICE.

Dewdrops glisten in the leaves of the trees and on the blades of grass. Spring has arrived and the tribe lives on to see another day. Though all these events happened a very long time ago and all of our characters have long since departed, the BLESSEDNESS of the memories of their time spent together and the friendships they enjoyed live on as IMMORTAL GOODS.

—————————————————————

Review of the ethical considerations of this Parable:

1) Course of action solely guided by pleasure but lacking prudence and justice:

The hunter continues to pursue the pleasure of consumption without regard for his inventory or the future.

Projected Result: Short-term pleasure but long-term pain. Pleasure not at its limit.

2) Course of action guided by pleasure and some prudence but lacking justice:

The hunter considers keeping his kill for himself and not returning to the tribe, instead waiting out the winter on his own with his supply and kill.

Projected Result: A longer-term pleasure than previous, but the nagging anxiety of being hunted is inescapable. Pleasure not at its limit.

3) Course of action guided by pleasure and justice and prudence:

The hunter honors his oath and returns with the food for the tribe. He keeps faith with the tribe and in return receives the pleasure of gratitude, of seeing their faces again, of sharing meals, of recognizing his own personal character, and of being accepted into a community of loved ones providing friendship and protection from the hardships of the state of nature.

Result: Longest-term pleasure of all. Pleasure at its limit.

Prudence and the recognition of the pact of natural justice has helped our hunter to ascertain that without these, all would lead to outcomes deficient in pleasures and with significant accompanying pains in the long term. Pleasure is still the sovereign guide, but it needs the counsel and advice of practical wisdom and just action to ensure the most complete life.

This article was composed by Friend Harmonious.

PD 6: On Methods of Exegesis

Over the last few weeks, I have been publishing essays expounding the Principal Doctrines. It has been a very enjoyable intellectual exercise. I’ve learned that it’s an error to take the PD’s for granted and to think that we know everything there is to know about them. In the process of writing these essays, I have been considering the various methods of exegesis that are available to us, and what method(s) might be the most useful for each PD.

The Contextual Method

My main method has been to try to reconstruct or discern (based on the text) what discussions or conversations took place among the founders, that led to these statements being established as authoritative conclusions of the Garden. I’m calling this the method of contextualization.

Clearly, the founders meant for the 40 Principal Doctrines to stand separate from the rest of the textual evidence we have. They are meant to be the forty most important ideas that a student must either revere or study (or both). By what line of thinking, by what arguments, did these 40 conclusions attain their superior status? I began to evaluate this in my study of PDs 24 and 28, on the utility of dogmatism.

The Literal Method

Another method of exegesis (that is, interpretation) is to stick to the literal translation of the text. If we know the original Greek language, we may focus on the anticipation–the initial empirical attestation and conception of each word–in order to deconstruct each PD word-for-word, and glean clarity. These two methods are not mutually exclusive, and are both useful and necessary.

We know from sermons given by Epicurus–like the one Against empty words–that the founders were very adamant on using clear, concise language. They went as far as coining new terms when conventional language failed, as attested again by their own theory of the evolution of language. So there was no frivolous expression in the PD’s … but then there’s PD 6.

This is a case where the literal reconstruction and the anticipation of each word is necessary because the choice of words in the original was apparently so awkward, so specific, and attempted to be so clear, that most modern readers get lost in translation. So I had to contact a member of the Society of Friends of Epicurus who knows Greek, Panos, who helped me to get a grasp of what the words actually mean. Here is the original:

ἕνεκα τοῦ θαρρεῖν ἐξ ανθρώπων ἦν κατὰ φύσιν ἀρχῆς καὶ βασιλείας ἀγαθόν, ἐξ ὧν ἄν ποτε τοῦτο οἷός τʼᾖ παρασκευάζεσθαι.

This was translated by Hicks as:

In order to obtain security from other people any means whatever of procuring this was a natural good.

It’s not clear to me why he used the past tense (“was a natural good”). If that’s in the original, it may mean that the original doctrine was meant to justify some event or action taken in the past. The Church of Epicurus translation says:

The natural good of public office and kingship is for the sake of getting confidence from [other] men, [at least] from those from whom one is able to provide this.

In this translation, we can appreciate the common interpretation of the PD as justifying ANY form of government that procures security. We could also interpret it as meaning that security is one of (but not the only) the reasons or purposes for setting up a form of government. And the Peter St. Andre translation says:

It is a natural benefit of leadership and kingship to take courage from other men (or at least from the sort of men who can give one courage).

Security, confidence, and courage all mean different things in English. The Epicuros site in modern Greek language has a version of the PD’s, the sixth of which Panos translates from modern Greek as:

With the goal of acquiring security against people, there was (always) the natural good of dominance and of kingship, through which (someone) could sometimes achieve this.

According to Panos,

I get a kinda opposite meaning of what I see in other translations. But it’s a pretty hard sentence to accurately translate …

Because of being afraid of people is right by the nature of authority and dominion, from which things (authority and dominion) if ever be able to prepare (against).

So basically the idea I get is:

It’s right to be prepared against people, just in case, because of oppression and authority.

… It does not say “it’s ok to use oppression and authority” as some translations I saw.

So the PD does not justify violence (which would go against the doctrines on justice based on avoiding mutual harm and seeking mutual benefit), or the overthrow of government (which would be out of line with the non-political nature of our ethics). Here is how Panos breaks down the words:

ἕνεκα: on account of (/regarding // because of)

τοῦ θαρρεῖν ἐξ ανθρώπων: the (tharrein)* from people
–*Tharrein: this word can mean either (a) to be afraid of, or (b) to take courage from!

ἦν κατὰ φύσιν: it was by nature (/quality)

ἀρχῆς: of authority

καὶ βασιλείας: and of dominion (/kingship)

ἀγαθόν, : good (morally good)

ἐξ ὧν : from which (genitive plural)

ἄν ποτε : at some time (/if ever)

τοῦτο: that thing (accusative sing.)

οἷός τʼᾖ : he is able (γʹ ενικ. υποτ. Ενεργ. ενεστ. | 3rd sing. subjunctive active present )

παρασκευάζεσθαι. : to be ready (/prepared)

And again:

ἕνεκα τοῦ θαρρεῖν ἐξ ανθρώπων
because of the (tharrein) from people

ἦν κατὰ φύσιν ἀρχῆς καὶ βασιλείας ἀγαθόν
it was morally good by nature of authority and dominion

ἐξ ὧν
from which (plural which: so the which must refer to: “authority and dominion”)

ἄν ποτε τοῦτο
if ever that thing (which thing? τουτο is neutral accusative singular, so it is talking about a singular neutral object. From the words above, the only candidates are αγαθόν, and θαρρείν (tharrein). I think the only word that makes sense is tharrein…)

οἷός τʼᾖ παρασκευάζεσθαι
he is able (to be) prepare(d)
(so this is subjunctive active which is something like: I expect you prepare. It’s really hard to translate exactly but it’s not that important.)

With Panos finally concluding:

So the way I am seeing this:

Because of being afraid of people is right by the nature of authority and dominion, from which things (authority and dominion) if ever be able to prepare (against).

From all that I’ve read, it seems clear to me that the Hicks translation is flawed. It says

In order to obtain security from other people any means whatever of procuring this was a natural good.

Hicks makes an absolute claim that seems out of place in Epicurean philosophy, where all choices and avoidances must be subjected to hedonic calculus. I do not see mention of “any means necessary” in the original, and I suspect this translation may appeal to people with certain military ideas.

I wish to thank Panos for his assistance. The process we see above is the literal method, which seeks to know the initial pre-conception that belongs to each word chosen for this PD, and which assumes and trusts that the founders chose their words very carefully.

PD 6 in Light of Other Surviving Passages

The idea of the PD is that security is a natural and necessary pleasure. This idea is also expressed in the Epistle to Menoeceus, so it seems indigenous and accurate within an Epicurean list of key opinions.

PD 6 appears to justify (limited) (service to a) political power or civic engagement for the sake of safety. Vatican Saying 39 associates friendship with “help in the future”, and links true friendship with safety. Vatican Saying 67 criticizes “servility to mobs and monarchs“, and seems to imply that we get more safety from friends than from politics. Finally, VS 80 posits a (partly) attitudinal definition of security, one that is in the soul and not in the realm of society or politics:

The first measure of security is to watch over one’s youth and to guard against what makes havoc of all by means of maddening desires.

A young man’s share in deliverance comes from watching over the prime of his life and warding off what will ruin everything through frenzied desires. (Monadnock translation)

VS 80 is a salvific passage. It uses the word “soterías” in the original. Soter means Savior. Epicurus was seen as a Savior by later generations because of his salvific doctrine. PD’s 10-13 also discuss a form of attitudinal safety: by learning a scientific account of the nature of things, we protect ourselves from superstition. PD 14 concludes this discussion:

Although some measure of safety from other people is based in the power to fight them off and in abundant wealth, the purest security comes from solitude and breaking away from the herd.

In light of context, PD 6 does not refer to this attitudinal sense of safety in the soul (as PDs 10-14 do), or being safe from limitless desires. It also does not refer to weapons or warfare, or constitute a call to violence. The later Lucretian jeremiad (in Book V) against the propagation of weapons after metal working was discovered, and Philodemus’ advice in On Property Management against taking up a military career, appear to confirm a general lack of affinity for warfare among the ancient Epicureans.

Based on the textual evidence we have seen, we may conclude that the necessary measure of safety for an Epicurean is mainly attained by association with friends and by avoiding certain people (PD 39). I will close with Panos’ suggested translation, and with an invitation to all sincere students to study these texts on their own.

It’s right to be prepared against people, just in case, because of oppression and authority.