Real life for epicures

LISTEN. What is real? What can we know? Those questions headline today's Happiness readings in How to Be an Epicurean.

So much of what we call reality is mere convention, so much of what we think we know is hearsay and hand-me-down. Convention is real, but less enduring than the atoms and their natural configurations. We generally give it an outsized place in our imaginative depictions of the social reality programming (social-programming reality?) we call real life. Its elements include "institutions such as universities, senates, and film studios" that exist "only in virtue of our beliefs about their importance and usefulness." They are evanescent. So are we. Enjoy, while you can.

So do ghosts and gods and unicorns and angels and witches and Sherlock Holmes exist? Sure, they're as real as the words we coin to describe them. How real is that? Ask an English major, or a philosopher whose only expendable coin is language.

But if you ask William James, he'll remind you that words are often inflated and unsupported by anything solid and sustained. They lack the glimmer and twinkle of really real life, as we encounter it only in immediate perceptual experience.  "Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught..." As for facts, they require fact assessors. Hence, all that specious political talk about alternatives-yours, mine, ours.

Fact is, the world of macro-objects and animals is real enough but not exclusively so. It would be naive to think so. But first-person subjective experience is paradigmatically real for people like us, it's "the best we can do." We'd better take it seriously. Trust, but verify, as the old actor said.

"Social conflict based on different fears and perceptions is deeply unpleasant." So we shouldn't reside in our fears and presume only to admit our own personal perceptions. We dispel fear by facing and engaging difference.

Finally, we can talk about what kind of empiricist an epicurean ought to be. I favor the radical (not the Humean) variety.

"...In the deservedly famous chapter on “The Stream of Thought” James takes himself to be offering a richer account of experience than those of traditional empiricists such as Hume. He believes relations, vague fringes, and tendencies are experienced directly (a view he would later defend as part of his “radical empiricism.”) James finds consciousness to be a stream rather than a succession of “ideas.” Its waters blend, and our individual consciousness—or, as he prefers to call it sometimes, our “sciousness”—is “steeped and dyed” in the waters of sciousness or thought that surround it. Our psychic life has rhythm: it is a series of transitions and resting-places, of “flights and perchings” (PP 236). We rest when we remember the name we have been searching for; and we are off again when we hear a noise that might be the baby waking from her nap..." SEP... Principles of Psychology ch XI, The Stream of Consciousness

Time and life are but the streams we epicures go a'fishin' in... For real.