Epicurean citizens

LISTEN. Ted Simmons gave quite a nice Hall of Fame induction speech, thanking his friends the (Jon) Hamm family and invoking the Beatles  ("the love you take" etc.). But what a stark illustration of today's poem: “How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth/Stol’n on his wing my three and twentieth year!” #23 was eternally young in memory. Time!

In Happiness we turn to the Epicureans, who I generally and favorably distinguish from their Stoic cousins as more assertively pursuant of happiness, less accepting of unhappy fate, more inclined to assign disappointment not to an abstract "nature" with which we've failed to "harmonize" but to a correctable failure to identify and deconstruct our various worries and fears. The Stoics and Epicureans both offer good therapy, but the Stoics sometimes seem too quick to accede to conditions we might have hoped to alter. Acceptance, when all attempts to ameliorate an unwelcome status quo have failed, is admirable. Premature acceptance is unfortunate.

But... are Epicureans good citizens? Have they retreated too deeply into their Garden to engage responsibly in the affairs of the polis? That's one of the questions we first raised when we last took up this topic in this course. It's still open. We may be stardust, and golden, and billion year old carbon (etc.), but aren't we also every bit as much products and stewards of our own time and place? Can we be Epicurean communards and still discharge the duties of properly concerned citizens?

Looking forward to discussing that in Happiness today and MALA tonight.

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An old post:

LISTEN. It's on to Catherine Wilson's Epicureanism: A Very Short Introduction in Happiness today.

We're catching up, since Tuesday's class was pre-empted by the panel discussion on Suffrage and the Constitution. The Epicureans famously retreated to their Garden commune, in pursuit of life's simpler and less mediated pleasures. Would they have been engaged at all in the sort of civic activism that brought women the vote in 1920, or that is attempting to bring young people out to vote in 2020, or that tomorrow will bring citizens (the younger the better) out to demand action on the climate crisis? Would they have acknowledged any "urgent need of acting now," if that perturbed their garden delights? Where can we find the right balance between personal gratification and public commitment?

Those are some of our questions today. Others include

• Is it in fact foolish to fear "complete and personal annihilation"? -“To fear death, then, is foolish, since death is the final and complete annihilation of personal identity, the ultimate release from anxiety and pain.” ― Titus Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of Things... Gutenberg etext
• Do you think Epicurus was on the right track in thinking of atomic "swerve" as a "basis for free will"? 11 If they swerve randomly and unpredictably, how does that refute or challenge determinism? Or is his point that we can try to emulate their example and be random and unpredictable ourselves? Is random unpredictability really another name for freedom? (Remind me to tell my undergrad pub story...)
• Does Epicurus's analogy of atoms to "dust motes dancing in a sunbeam" remind you, as it does me, of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot ("a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam" 12)? Do you see any parallels between Sagan's cosmic philosophy and Epicureanism? What about the "multiplicity of worlds" hypothesis vs. the view of Christian salvation as limited to "one small corner of the many world universe" etc. 16
• Do you think it will ever be possible to discover how and why the structure and activity of atoms in the brain and nervous system give rise to consciousness and the subjective feeling of selfhood?
• Do you agree that generation and dying are symmetrical processes? 51 In other words, do each of us owe the world a death? Do you find beauty and consolation in that perspective? Is death a peaceful sleep and a dispersal of spirit and soul atoms? 

Talking about these things is indeed an Epicurean delight, or can be. But gathering in the streets to demand social justice and climate sanity can too. A good Epicurean knows when to take a break in the conversation and go pound the pavements.