Pocket Notes on Epicurus

[imomus]

As I get older I find myself spending more and more time "in the empire of the senses". Not in the kind of extreme, obsessive pursuits that phrase implies, though. No, just enjoying my body, my sense impressions.

Swimming, being scratched, sex, alternating between the sauna and neck-high dips in cold water, playing with my rabbit in the garden, meeting an artist and talking about art, sniffing herbs at the local market, enjoying the patterns of Turkish headscarves, taking photographs, discovering a charmingly shabby wabi sabi room (Kim's Vietnamese store on Lausitzer Platz!)... These are the sort of things that make my day.

Which brings us to Epicurus, a thoroughly sensible old satyr born in February 341 Before the Christian Era. Christ -- a short-lived, life-disliking guerilla -- is so important for us that we throw the whole calendar into reverse when he arrives, seeing everything before him as a lead-up, and everything afterwards as a consequence of his 33 turbulent years stuggling with his Father, the devil and Rome. He's so important that we've turned our seasonal agricultural festivals (the winter one, the spring one) into events in Christ's life (his birth, his death). When they're clearly really about, you know, winter and spring and natural planetary cycles. Alas, Christ isn't quite important enough for us to ask our leaders to follow his teachings, like the ones about refraining from killing or taking revenge.

But anyway, there are other philosophers. Bloody good ones, some of them, who would make life better if we listened to them. Epicurus lived to a ripe old age and believed that politics and argument was a waste of time. Here are some of the elements of his thinking, plucked from the Wikipedia entry about him:

* All good and bad derive from the sensations of pleasure and pain.

* If pain is chosen over pleasure in some cases it is only because it leads to a greater pleasure. (I lowered myself into that cold water yesterday knowing that the hot sauna would feel even better afterwards.)

* Moral reasoning is a matter of calculating the benefits and costs in terms of pleasure and pain. (Yes, but for whom? Is altruism a sensual pleasure?)

* Epicurus was commonly misunderstood to advocate the rampant pursuit of pleasure, when what he was really after was the absence of pain (both physical and mental, i.e., anxiety) - a state of satiation and tranquility that was free of the fear of death and the retribution of the gods. (This sounds quite similar to "the middle way" in Buddhism.)

* The opinion of the crowd is, Epicurus claims, that the gods "send great evils to the wicked and great blessings to the righteous who model themselves after the gods", when in reality the gods do not concern themselves at all with human beings. (Ha, I'm thinking about Kafka when I hear that!)

* Epicurus explicitly warned against overindulgence because it often leads to pain. For instance, in what might be described as a "hangover" theory, Epicurus warned against pursuing love too ardently. However, having a circle of friends you can trust is one of the most important means for securing a tranquil life. (Research has actually shown this to be the case. Drugs don't make you happy, but trustworthy friends do.)

* In contrast to the Stoics, Epicureans showed little interest in participating in the politics of the day, since doing so leads to trouble. He instead advocated seclusion. (I think this is a very "Japanese" attitude to politics.)

* Epicureans reject dialectic as disoriented: parelkousa. (I'm fond of dialectics, but it's quite possible that pursuing them is a big mistake, in terms of happiness, anyway.)

* Epicurus, in his work On the Canon, says that the criteria of truth are the senses, the preconceptions and the feelings. Epicureans add to these the focusing of thought into an impression. (Some people are really down on people who think with their senses, preconceptions and feelings. You're supposed to think analytically, hold out for evidence, and leave your feelings out of it. But books like Blink show we do a lot more with our gut feelings than we know, and do it, on the whole, rather well.)

* All sense impressions are real, while opinions are not real and tend to change. (Opinion is over-valued. But it's easy to share opinions. To share impressions well you really have to be an artist.)

* Epicurus taught at home. His garden can be compared to present-day communes. He admitted women and slaves into his school. (That's very important. There's nothing worse than a talking shop where everyone's the same gender, the same social class, the same race, and it's all opinion, opinion, opinion).

Perhaps I'll take my Pocket Notes on Epicurus into the sauna with me next time. Not literally, of course. In that hot pine cabin where the scented air reaches around your back like scalding fingers, nobody has pockets.