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Despite this I find it very difficult to find places where I can provide a valuable input on the forum. I feel like most of my questions will eventually be answered by reading more.
Please don't hold back questions or thoughts! That's largely what we are here for and you've read plenty to have lots to say! Thanks for sticking with us!
Thanks wbernys you are right - I have fixed it now.
Episode 339 of the Lucretius Today Podcast is now available. This week our episode is entitled: "Stoic Views of Knowledge And The Emperor's New Clothes."
I certainly can’t see this as consistent with Epicurus.
I don't see it to be consistent with Epicurus either, but it IS a good illustration (apparently) of how someone can use persuasive logic and reach disastrously wrong conclusions.
And I think that's why Epicurus held that it is not necessary (or perhaps even appropriate?) to construct elaborate logical arguments about why pleasure is the goal of life. It sounds like certain later Epicureans decided to try to do just that, and I wish we had more texts so we could judge how successful they might have been. But probably Epicurus was right that pure logic is not the best approach to this question, and that's one reason he warned against the improper use of logic.
Thanks for the cite there Pacatus.
Wow that is a good catch in the news!
After a long run with this thread, we are going to disable it unless and until we figure out how to stop including people who are long inactive on the thread. That will reduce the number of less-than-useful notifications all users receive.
To me, this is not the same question. As I understand it, the question is specifically regarding one's own life or death.
I could defend that being a related question in the sense that if you think life is not worth living in general then you're not likely to think it's a good idea to bring more children into the world. Strictly speaking I agree they are not the same question but I suspect the causes of one are related to the causes of the other.
nevertheless cling to it tenaciously, and live with the contradiction.
(Seems like an argument for psychological hedonism!
)
But sadiy and tragically, some don't, and they carry out what Lucretius mentioned some do .... which is why i don't accept the persuasiveness of PH -- but let's not get sidetracked on that.
Nice try Cassius but NO. I listened to part of the "debate" and came away with a yawn.
I'm glad you made that comment because I was not suggesting that people needed to watch that video to deal with this question. I thank Don for posting the link but I haven't been able to stomach Jordan Peterson myself enough to watch it.
I'm interested in the general commentary here. I presumed everyone would say "of course life!" but I'm not so sure any more that I should presume that.
It is quite possible to arrive at this conclusion without any logical inconsistencies.
I think you are right. Logic can be used in support of the idea that life is better than death, but it can also be used for the reverse. Ultimately it is not logic but FEELING which is the key element.
Such a person must be alive in order to say that, thus demonstrating their preference for being alive, and contradicting their claim.
Another excellent use of self-contradiction, showing that they are either not a consistent thinker or being intentionally misleading.
Presuming they are more on the "not consistent thinker" edge of the range, for reasons that we might choose to find sympathetic (so we continue to talk to them!) what else can be said to help them see that their position is damaging?
Or is this position so ingrained in the people who would ask the question in the first place that little help is possible?
I'm not trying to seed this just to start conversation but I can predict who among us might have some interest in this topic so I am going to go ahead and prod:
These are just three that come to mind, but I think this is a basic question that most all of us need to be prepared to answer (if we're not already).
I don't recall whether I got to watch that full debate last time but I'll get to it this time. Thankfully Jordan Peterson seems to be fading away. Hopefully we can express some of the issues in this thread for those who don't watch the video or just want to grapple with this directly.
Stated another way, such a person might say:
How would Epicurus react to this point of view? This is not just an off-the-wall hypothetical - I think we essentially this attitude held sometimes in the most unexpected places.
The implication here is that "externals" are not important,
As Joshua likes to say on the podcast - "WHAT!!!????"
I don't see that implication at all. There's no presumption that you have lived in a bed of roses, only that you would prefer to live and experience SOME pleasure, even at the cost of some pain, rather than not live at all.
I think what we see in these discussions is that people are presuming lots of things about their own orientations that are not necessarily entailed at all in the summary statements.
Certainly to say something like "it is better to be alive than dead" cannot be analyzed without reference to presumptions. Someone can have all sorts of different pespectives on various parts of life but "it is better to be alive than dead" is a generalization that has to be understood as a generalization. It IS valid and helpful to make generalizations even while at the same time we recognize that there are exceptions. In fact, that is why it is the "exceptions that prove the rule." We are able to geeneralize and reach a rule exactly because we are able to separate the concept of "always" from "most of the time." "Most of the time" is a perfectly valid concept even though what is being referenced is not "always" the case.
So there is no implication that there are not circumstances in which we would be better off dead, but those situations are the minoority of cases. There is no fatalism OR determinsm that requires that we obtain bad results in life.
We have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time and say yes "sometimes" terrible pain is in face inescapable and we are better off dead, but that "most of the time" terrible pain is not inescapable and we are NOT better off dead.
Nietzsche is all over the board at various phases of his life but I find this to be consistently stated by every commentator I have seen, so I think it is correct:
Its purpose is to test your life-affirmation;
In other words, it is a test for your appreciation of whether you really find your life desirable, in that if you do you will want the opportunity to live life as long and energetically as possible.
Or as Epicurus says, you will find that life is desirable. There is nothing to harm us in being dead, but unless we are in some unusual situation where life is not worth living (which Epicurus says would be the charactistic of a very small man - who has many reasons for ending his life) then the focus is on the fact that death holds no pleasure - nothing positive - for us either.
[126] But the many at one moment shun death as the greatest of evils, at another (yearn for it) as a respite from the (evils) in life. (But the wise man neither seeks to escape life) nor fears the cessation of life, for neither does life offend him nor does the absence of life seem to be any evil. And just as with food he does not seek simply the larger share and nothing else, but rather the most pleasant, so he seeks to enjoy not the longest period of time, but the most pleasant.
And he who counsels the young man to live well, but the old man to make a good end, is foolish, not merely because of the desirability of life, but also because it is the same training which teaches to live well and to die well. Yet much worse still is the man who says it is good not to be born but ‘once born make haste to pass the gates of Death’.
[127] For if he says this from conviction why does he not pass away out of life? For it is open to him to do so, if he had firmly made up his mind to this. But if he speaks in jest, his words are idle among men who cannot receive them.
Vatican Saying 38: "He is of very small account for whom there are many good reasons for ending his life."
Edit: It seems I can never find this reference when I am looking for it because I forget the "good" so I am typing this to help future word searches. This saying explains why only a small man will have many reasons for ending his life.... many reasons to commit suicide.... many reasons to end his life.... lots of reasons to commit suicide...." and this is part of the analysis in the letter to Menoeceus that life is desirable.
While the "big picture" issue of how to present Epicurus was what spurred my additions to this thread, I do think it is probably also worth confirming issues raised in the quoted section which presumed a negative answer:
(1) Would we wish to live indefinitely (or immortally) if we could?
(2) If we did remember past lives and knew that we would return after death, would that be viewed as a good thing.
I would say the answer to (1) is clearly yes, and the answer to (2) is only slightly less clear.
As with any hypothetical the devil is in the details.
Option one is not altogether different than the decisions we already make which influence how long we are going to live. We can eat right and exercise and take care in our activities and live longer, or we can disregard those and say "we don't care" how long we live. So option one is easier to relate to without hedging too much on the details of the hypothetical.
Option two would require more definition of the hypotheticals terms, but I think that too can be viewed relatively simply (as Nietzsche seemed to be doing it). It can be framed simply as if your consciousness could return in the same form as you are now in some future world, would you want that to happen? Given a basic framework of the desirability of life I would say that too is a clear yes.
But I won't be surprised if there is some discussion needed on these.
Yes I will readily admit that some people come at this for reasons that are understandable due to unfortunate personal situations, and I have no desire to criticize any individual who may be sincerely in a bad place or mistaken as to their rhetoric.
But words have consequences, and the choice to focus on a "half empty" view of life has many bad ones, and should not be held up as an accurate or desirable view of Epicurus.
There's a philosophical conflict going on in the world that is creating a lot of unnecessary suffering. The embrace of life is the the right direction, not normalizing a fixation on suffering as an acceptable attitude for most people in most normal situations.
If you read the part I quoted, this is not being written by people who are saying that they are coming from a particularly bad place. This is written by people who think that they are accurately categorizing Epicurean philosophy the way that Epicurus promoted it. And I don't doubt their sincerity either -- this viewpoint has become the drumbeat for hundreds of years and you're not going to escape from it if you don't affirmatively work to punch your way out.
I find find the attitude i quoted offensive, and I feel offended on behalf of the ancient Epicureans that the modern "authorities" would take their philosophy of pleasure and embrace of life and turn it into into an excuse for seeing death as the ultimate reward of life rather than pleasure.
Thank Apollo or whoever that Epicurus did include in his letter to Menoeceus a reference to the desirability of life and ridicule of those who say it would be better to never have been born, or once born hasten to death.
If he hadn't included those references we'd be facing an even steeper hill to climb than we already are!
EDIT: And for the sake of absolutely clarity I will repeat: I am not intending to criticize Jack Gedney or anyone else in particular. We are hundreds of years into a major problem and no person alive now was a major contributor in creating that problem. All each of us can do now is decide if we are going to be part of perpetuating the problem or helping push back against it.
Today I finally made some progress in reviewing the book "Nietzsche and Epicurus." I am probably only about half way through it. While there is definitely a lot of useful information in it, at least at the present I would not recommend it.
Here's an example, which I find to be a represenhensible outlook, but also an outlook that is indicative of people who want to place "relief from pain" as the center of Epicurean philosophy rather than pleasure. Because of course if relief from pain is your main concern, you wouldn't want to live forever (because you'd just keep encountering more pain and suffering.
And you would NOT want to experience eternal recurrence, whether you could remember yourself from lifetime or lifetime or not, because of course by golly that would mean that you or someone else was experiencing the pain and suffering of being alive.
To repeat I find this to be both profoundly inaccurate and truly reprehensible ---totally opposite to both the spirit of Epicurean philosophy and the specific statement of Epicurus in the letter to Menoeceus that life is desirable.
But this is where you get to when you analyze Epicurus from an essentially negative / Buddhist perspective and conclude that the most important thing for any Epicurean is to avoid even a moment of pain. Truly a death-wish and death-worship:
Let us sum up the Epicurean treatment of the doctrine of eternal recurrence. Lucretius claims that a proper grasp of recurrence demonstrates the irrationality of our anxiety about future recurrences. We believe that we have grounds for anxiety about our future selves because we assume that this recurrence of the same configuration of atoms means we will once again experience the same sufferings we presently endure. Yet, Lucretius argues, we ought to have no fear for the future because we are psychologically insulated from our future selves. Just as we will not be there when we die, so too Lucretius claims we will not be there when we recur. As we have seen, Lucretius’ argument is flawed on two separate fronts: on an ‘identity’ reading, Epicurean metaphysics does not warrant the non-identity of recurrent individuals, and on a ‘concern’ reading, it provides non-mnemonic grounds for anticipating or fearing future recurrences
Indeed, against Lucretius, it seems that the Epicurean notion of recurrence must compound my present suffering. Epicurean physics requires that I must admit that I will suffer again, rather than sink into eternal oblivion at the moment of death. The knowledge of my return must intensify and compound my present suffering because I know that I will experience it again and again. I cannot live tranquilly in the knowledge of eternal oblivion, but I must suffer in anticipation of the repetition of my past, present and unknowable future sufferings.
Lucretius’ Epicurean therapy aims to show that death is redemption from the recurrence of life. Epicureans do not want recurrence (the return to life) or, indeed, immortality (the extension of life). To Lucretius the prospect of definitive death is preferable to immortality or recurrence because it eliminates all possibility of pain and sorrow. Since the only pleasure Epicureans value is the absence of all pain, death delivers this end definitively. Lucretius suggests that death is not terrifying since it is like a restful sleep, except it is an eternal, unbroken sleep in which ‘no longing for ourselves [will] trouble us’ (3.920).
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