Happy Twentieth to Epicureans everywhere. We are grateful to our friend Alan, who devoted many hours of work to the script and video for Parable of the Hunter, which places before the eyes Epicurus’ Principal Doctrine 5. Please watch, like, comment and share the video. We also published Vegetarianism as a Life Choice for Epicureans, based on our discussions in the Garden of Epicurus group.

We also became aware of the We Are All Epicureans Now episode of “Young Heretics”. He’s not Epicurean, and fails to grasp the idea of pleasure as a faculty, but he does invite people to a deeper study of Epicurean ideas.

This Lucretius lecture by David Goodhew, titled ‘Life, love, death and atomic physics’ was quite enjoyable. It focuses on a few particularly brilliant passages by Lucretius, to show his genius and the many layers of art in his poetry.

I’d like to thank my Patreons Anthony Adams, Steve & Carmel, Roberto Kingsley, Tom Samuels, Ron Warrick, and my dear friend Jason, whose support has been a great morale booster and who has been a steady presence in SoFE for many years. If you’d like to support the work I do, please consider a one-time donation or a Patreon subscription.

On Language, Clarity, and Power

In recent weeks, I had the pleasure of reading The Book of Sh_zd_r, a work by a SoFE member (Nathan) who also authored the Dude’s Letter to Menoeceus, which was published back in May of 2020. He’s also an admin in the Epicurean memes for hedonistic beings Facebook group.

“The beauty of our poetries flows from sincerity” – Book of Sh_zd_r

The book is an artist’s manifesto on the use of language for creative self-expression, and a critical evaluation of the many ways in which language and power are intertwined. This, plus the Hermetic-like undercurrent that runs throughout the work (Hermetic as in the tradition of Hermes, the Divine Scribe), was my favorite part of the Book of Sh_zd_r. 

The first half of the book is (appropriately) written in a beautiful conlang (constructed language)–an artlang (artistic language) from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, and the second half is in English, but still uses multi-colored fonts and other artistic devices. The Book of Sh_zd_r is a work of art, first and foremost.

The latter part of the book includes some musings on grammar, and historical notes that accentuate the connection between power and language. The use of language as art, and the deconstruction of some of the trappings of language and power, makes the work disruptive and subversive. It reminded me of ideas I encountered while reading Black Orpheus and learning about the Négritude movement:

Sartre argues in Black Orpheus that liberating literature for Africans must be poetic, and that prose can’t be used because the French language evolved elsewhere, is too analytical, and can’t express the Black reality and psyche well. There are also the problems of inherent bias: we see examples of how whiteness is associated with innocence and virtue, while Blackness is associated with brokenness or with crime, with being soiled (so that Sartre says that “As soon as (the Black man) opens his mouth, he accuses himself“). Language is power, and Négritude calls for the wielding of power by these “Black Evangelists” to make the French language theirs and make it express the Black reality–so that Sartre says that “to build his truth, (the Black philosopher-artist) must first destroy others’ truth”.

Relabeling: a Technique of Empowerment

One of the therapeutic practices in Epicurean tradition is that of relabeling (renaming, or re-categorizing). In modern psychotherapy, this is sometimes known as cognitive restructuring, and is used together with other techniques to help people diminish their catastrophic or harmful thinking patterns.

Relabeling is an empowering practice whose power dynamics becomes most obvious when seen in action and placed before the eyes. For instance, Lucretius uses this technique to take back power when passionate love has power over him (or perhaps over some other patient of passionate love). We must imagine that, in the initial stage, the patient would have felt crushed and overpowered by his infatuation with the object of his desire or passion, but through re-labeling said object in many unflattering ways and re-imagining it as ugly, old, dirty, smelly, or with other undesirable attributes, the passion subsides and the patient slowly regains power over his mind, emotions, and states.

That (re-)naming is an act of power is an ancient idea that mystified many ancient peoples. Ancient Egyptians believed that hieroglyphs had magical power because they are “words that stay”, and they divinized the concept of magical words in the deity of magic, Heka (who represents words of power). Later, authors of the Bible attribute the power of naming all the animals and all of nature to Adam, the mythical first member of the human species, so as to say that this linguistic faculty of naming is one of our “superpowers”. But we do not need to be mystified by the power of language, simply to understand it and to employ it for our ethical purposes.

“Leaving the Chorus”: the Doctrine of Hesuchia

Principal Doctrine 14 gives us another layer of commentary on the relationship between language and what Foucault would have called pervasive, or dispersed, power:

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.

Here, Peter St. Andre translates hesuchías (ἡσυχίας) as “solitude” (I may have translated it as “retreat”, since this is the same word used in orthodox Christianity for the tradition of the desert fathers), and he translates exchoréseos (ἐκχωρήσεως) as “breaking away from the herd”. But let us look at the prolepsis of this last word: it implies exiting or leaving (ex-) the chorus.

What is a chorus? A chorus is a group of people who (in theater, or in some event) are all saying the same thing in unison. The implication is that all the members of the chorus think alike, so that “chorus” comes to imply convention and peer pressure, as well as the erasure of the individual and his private ideas. “Exiting the chorus”, in this context, means leaving the power dynamics of societal peer pressure, and not blindly repeating what others are saying–or taking it as truth–until we have chosen and applied the criteria for truth to those propositions. It means thinking for ourselves, rather than being circus seals trained to clap mindlessly as part of the show.

Doxa 14 is the first of three Doctrines that focus on autarchy (15 focuses on economic autarchy, and 16 on existential autarchy). It sets the stage for these other two Doxai by inviting us to separate ourselves from the crowd, and it cites safety as one reason for this. Now, we all have to give up some level of personal sovereignty in most of our relations and in the execution of our responsibilities, but by expressing their invitation to avoid giving up our autarchy in terms of exchoréseos in a Doctrine that introduces autarchy, the founders are inviting us to a more dignified life of self-sufficiency and self-rule by specifically evading the power dynamics that are expressed verbally and collectively, which are represented as “a chorus” (a group of drones that all think and say the same thing).

The “diffused power” in the chorus is expressed via language, and in concrete words. The chorus represents here the degrading loss of our safety and personal sovereignty, and so leaving it is a pre-requirement for our enjoyment of a dignified level of autarchy and for our ability to free our practice of philosophy from the demands of the polis and of mindless collectives. There is a different type of safety in being part of “the herd” (as we see in nature), but this safety is accused as false and degrading by this Doctrine.

Philosophy requires withdrawal from “the crowd” so that we may be able to think for ourselves rather than blindly repeat what people in our social circles are saying (and blindly believing the underlying and expressed premises of whatever they are saying). By virtue of PD 14 being an authorized Doxa, the founders were saying that this act of autarchy, of personal sovereignty, of “exiting the chorus”, is necessary for the practice of philosophy.

But if we are robbed of our power by the collective voice of “the chorus”, this also seems to imply that we retain, regain, and express our power by the willful and skillful use of our individual voices. So I believe this Doctrine means (among other things) to restore our voice (which is to say, our authority) as individuals who enjoy autarchy / personal sovereignty.

Meleta on Definitions

At the Society of Epicurus, we’ve been delving into in-depth meleta (study and deliberation) of the forty Principal Doctrines of Epicurus for months, and deriving great pleasure from the new insights we have gained.

I noticed that when one reads the 40 Principal Doctrines systematically, the very first thing one finds in the very first words of the very first Doctrine is distrust of words. The editors of the Doctrines chose the definition of “gods” (immortal and blissful animals) for the sake of clarity, rather than the word “gods” to convey their meaning.

This is because we sometimes do not trust words as much as their clear definitions.

This issue of mistrusting words is one of the first problems addressed in Epicurus’ Epistle to Herodotus (beginning from Fragment 35 of Book X of Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers), where he instructs his disciples to always clearly define words prior to any philosophical investigation in order to avoid being carried into error by the use of empty words. 

The founders sometimes found words that were simply inadequate, and felt the need to reform their expression for the sake of clarity in their study of nature. They had a practice of re-defining words according to the evidence of nature, so that their expression would always be aligned with nature. We know, for instance, that the Epicurean Guide Polyaenus wrote a treatise “On Definitions” which is not extant, and one of the 37 books On Nature by Epicurus is titled “Against the use of empty words“. Here, it is revealed that Metrodorus and Epicurus had been discussing the best rules by which it is possible and advantageous to re-define words, with Epicurus insisting that using common words as they are commonly used is the best policy, although they had gone back and forth over the years on this, and Epicurus in this book admits that his thinking has evolved on the matter. The ancient Guides’ preoccupation with the adequacy of language, and insistence on clarity, was not unique. Two millenia later Wittgenstein (who championed and insisted on clear speech) said:

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

The second and third phases in the evolution of language, according to Epicurean anthropology, is where philosophers, inventors, cultural creatives and others coin new words and lead the ongoing process of rationally perfecting the shared language. Wittgenstein says that each language, dialect or jargon is a “game” into which are embedded rules and notions that act as a social contract for the users of the language. We could say much more about this, but we risk going on a tangent, and this deserves a separate discussion.

And here is the intersection between the worries of the Kathegemones (Epicurean Guides) and these considerations concerning the entanglement of language and power: was clarity the only criterion in language reform? Can we identify clear patterns in whatever confusing tendencies were they fighting in their native Greek language? Were they fighting Platonic, or political, webs of power that had gotten entangled in common (koine) Greek language?

To what extent might it be advantageous and practical for modern speakers of English, Spanish, and other languages who practice Epicurean philosophy together to go through a similar process of purging or perfecting our own languages, for the sake of clarity–the only rhetorical requirement we have–and in order to embed and will our own social contract into our jargon?

From the third stage in our doctrine on the evolution of language, we know that the founders believed that philosophers have to be actively engaged in the natural and inevitable process of language evolution, otherwise the vehicle of expression will always be mediocre and the utility of language will be limited. The fact that they established this Doctrine, we imagine, served to justify their linguistic projects, which meant to purge their language game of unwanted traits and steer it in an ethically correct and choice-worthy direction. I imagine they did this, concretely, through a slow and organic editorial process that involved all communication and content, since they were always known to be careful in their expression.

But, did the founders create a basic naming language, a type of conlang (as some modern Epicureans have speculated) made up of a small number of concepts that were unavailable in the culture? Or did the Guides simply coin a few expressions and words? Since language is inherently communitarian and collective, I wonder to what extent they saw these projects as a natural extension of their self-concept as a sect, as an ethically and culturally autonomous philosophical tribe with its own mores.

Did clarity become the only requirement in our rhetorics after failed experiments to communicate efficiently, or was it so from the onset? How did this preoccupation with clear speech evolve? We know that Epicureans were known for their suavity, or sweet speech, as well as their clarity and conciseness, and that this served their ethical purposes. Are there any additional criteria for perfecting our communication?

From reading Epicurus’ insistence (in “Against the use of empty words“) that people should use common words as they are commonly used, we may infer that he believed that some of the other Kathegemones may have previously gone too far in their language-reform experiments. However, it is difficult for us today to gauge exactly the extent to which Epicureans reformed koine Greek.

In our circle, we have for many years discussed the need for taking back words that have been monopolized by Christianity and other Platonized religions and ways of thinking (words like gods, soul, salvation, virtue), and we’ve discussed the inadequacy of some words, and whether we should use Greek terms that are obscure, or words from our own language. When I wrote Tending the Epicurean Garden, my editor insisted that I coin an English translation for katastematic (I ended up coining the term “abiding pleasure” for the book), and to avoid obscure Greek terms in general. Curiously, Epicurus himself might have agreed, since he established clarity as his only rhetorical criterion.

In recent years, there have been efforts from some feminists, and some in the LGBT community and allies, to reform English to make it more gender-neutral and to move away from patriarchal language conventions. Many Churches and synagogues are moving towards gender-neutral language for God. English is a great language for this, since–unlike Semitic and Romance languages–it does not use gendered nouns. These efforts are, to some extent, praise-worthy (and also natural, because language naturally evolves) … but they also reach what some of us may consider ludicrous excesses, and make it seem prudent to be pragmatic and generally conservative in our efforts to perfect our native languages.

Further Reading:
Wittgenstein: A Wonderful Life (1989)
PHILOSOPHY – Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Book of Sh_zd_ar