It has been some time since I have wrote about Epicureanism, I alas fell for the belief system of christanity, but that’s a blog post for another day.
This blog is simply a read along guide to a video I created on YouTube recently. I believe it is a powerful platform to “strike a blow for Epicurus”.
Epicureanism is still under appreciated as being a philosophy so clear, so practical and so, well, pleasent. The joy I have experienced (truly experienced not in a theoretical way) by practising this philosophy of old is beyond anything.
The great thing about it is, this philosophy doesn’t want you:
- To provide someone in with money to listen to a talk
- To believe in supernatural beings who may or may not like you depending on there mood
- To believe in something without evidence
Instead it does want you to:
- Spend your money on things you enjoy
- Believe in your own faculties and what your body tells you not what a guru or priest tells you
- Ask for evidence, use science and be skepticism (which will be eased)
So who was Epicurus? He was a man living 5-4th century BC. Epicurus was an interesting man and many a book (albeit a lot of them seem to paint him with a bad brush, so not much has changed since 2500 years ago) has been writing on him.
He was a materialist, he believed that everything in the universe was physical (atoms and void).
He indeed believed in the Gods but his Gods weren’t soon transcended ethereal spirits but rather atom and void beings like us, and they did not give a single damm about us.
Epicurus through the evidence of life ( looking at how infants reach for their mother and cry when in pain, by looking at non human animals and by his own experiences) believed that the goal of our lives was to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
To live a good life it did not require a belief in the ideal idea of Good, Just, Love or a Table that existed in the somewhere. Rather he said the good life is pleasure and it is something that anyone can have fairly easily. By anyone he truly meant it Male, female, slave and freeman were a welcomed into his garden as true friends.
The main two faculties we have are pleasure and pain, these faculties allow us, when used for the end of a pleasurable life, allow us to live pleasurably.
These faculties are pre reason, in other words they simply provide us with data. We must then, according to Epicurus use our reasoning faculties to choose which actions are worth pursuing. It is impossible to live pleasurably without living wisely.
However don’t get it mixed up, reasoning itself has absolutely no value outside of its ability to digest the data and choose the pleasurable path. In other words we use reason insofar as it allows us to live pleasurably. We do not reason outside of this.
Everything must have the goal of pleasure in mind, kindness, justice and wisdom are all means to the end of the human life which is pleasure, they have no meaning outside of this. We do not believe in abstract ideas such as virtue for the sake of virtue, we believe in what is empirical and evidential in our lives.
In the video I linked I mentioned utilitarianism however I shouldn’t have as I did not know of the abstractions contained within
Cassius writes
First, Eoghan mentions "Utilitarianism" as an offspring of Epicurus' philosophy, but as that term is generally used, "Utilitarianism" is generally interpreted to replace pleasure as a feeling of the individual with the abstraction of some kind of (allegedly) "objectively" measured sum of pleasure of the many. This breaks the consistency of and is different from Epicurus' philosophy, so there is a very important distinction there to keep in mind.In the end as Cassius points out correctly we can only know of our pleasure and not the pleasure of the many.
The tetrapharmakos is simply this
Don't fear god,Dont fear god because he doesn’t exist only the material exists
Don't worry about death;
What is good is easy to get,
What is terrible is easy to endure.
When you’re alive death isn’t here and when your dead you won’t experience it.
Anyone (granted freedom from mental illness and neurotypical brains) can find pleasure easily, food, friends, exercise, pets, reading, relaxing etc... these are all pleasurable (Epicureanism is individualistic we all share some pleasures but others might find pleasure in painting where I find it dull)
What is bad is easy to endure. This is a tough one to accept, the death of a loved one for example whom you have many fond pleasurable memories. Keep in mind although they will be missed, they are not suffering take solace in this fact.
Thank you for reading and watching the video.
recommendations
Norman deWitt “Epicurus and his life” is the best place to start outside of the primary sources.
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