Gratitude without providence

Or, "Count your blessings and be glad of them" for atheists.

Epicurus advises that in old age, infirmity, or ill health we take pleasure in the grateful recollection of past times of pleasure and happiness, rather than bemoaning our current miseries or short and awful prospects.

But there is no providence in Epicurus' view, and so this is not a case of being grateful to, but only of being grateful that.

There need not be anyone to thank, you see.

And that is a most interesting observation, from a man who died so painfully.

Even before the Renaissance

Inferno, Canto X.

Dante's contemporary references all seem so out of place in this work.

A pair of 13th Century Florentine Epicureans is introduced.

Were they actual atheists?

Did they believe, of the pagan gods, what Epicurus did?

What did they believe of the Christian God?

Four centuries before Gassendi and Hobbes.

Five before La Mettrie, Helvetius, and Holbach.

An Epicurean Thanksgiving weekend

Thursday, just the wife and I.

A 12 pound Turkey roasted with a bag of very lightly seasoned stuffing inside it, the stuffing prepared beforehand with a little water and a quarter pound of butter melted in.

Gravy out of a jar.

24 ozs of canned yams prepared with nearly a quarter pound of butter and 2/3 cup of brown sugar and cinnamon to taste, sprinkled with crushed pecans.

Tasty.

Leftovers packed for the fridge, white and dark meat, and also stuffing, in separate baking dishes, moistened with stock made fresh from the neck and giblets (not the liver), covered with aluminum foil.

Leftover yams packed in a sealed plastic container.

Friday, again just we two.

Leftovers nuked.

Saturday, the big meal with the kids and grandchildren.

Meat and stuffing heated in the oven in those baking dishes.

Another can of yams prepared as above, to go with the leftovers, all of it heated in a big orange frying pan.

Hawaiian rolls and butter.

Instant mashed potatoes prepared with light mayonnaise, and nuked frozen niblets.

Shiraz and Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc.

Giant Eagle pumpkin and apple pies.

Redi-Whip and crushed pecans applied.

The chardonnay was great with the meal.

The shiraz was splendid with the pies, and after.

Making good memories to enjoy when things are not so good, as Epicurus recommends.

Or any time.

Les Miserables

Hugo spends about the first hundred pages or so of Les Miserables portraying for us the saintliness of Monseigneur Bienvenu, Bishop Myriel of Digne.

He declaims against atheism, which he identifies with Epicurus, Hobbes, and a vision of human life as an egoist war of all against all, and urges an empty theology that is not even a bare theism, and a view of Christ, poverty, and goodness that hears only Jesus's command to give all you have to the poor.

It's rather slow going, but then our author moves on and brilliantly tells the story of Jean Valjean's early life, crime, punishment, early days after his release, and rescue from his profound and repulsive badness by the brave and selfless Bienvenu.

Valjean as a young man lives with and is the sole support of his widowed young sister and her seven children, one a mere infant.

He is an illiterate and unskilled workman relying on day labor for all.

In the midst of one harsh winter there is no work and a day comes when there is nothing for the family to eat, literally nothing.

Valjean, consumed with hunger and desperation, punches through the glass window of a bakery and runs off with a loaf of bread.

The baker pursues and spreads alarm, and he is overtaken and captured.

Within days he is sent in chains to the galleys, sentenced to five years in conditions of inexpressible horror four attempts at escape from which earn him extension of his sentence to 19 years.

Hugo in words and Valjean wordlessly in his heart agree the theft was wrong, but damn society's heartlessness for the poverty and hunger that occasioned it and the appalling injustice of such punishment, and Valjean is crushed into remorseless hatred of society, mankind, and the whole creation.

Hugo ties that same heartless cruelty of society, that appalling punishment, and the profoundly vicious criminality of Valjean they have brought about, all three, to the vision of atheism, or atheist vision of the world, described above.

There is a brief section of those first hundred or so pages on Bienvenu in which the bishop visits a dying old revolutionary.

The fierce man of the people repudiates atheism and the bishop accepts the legitimacy of the Revolution, even conceding his own moral inferiority to the dying hero.

When he is self-righteous, religious, sentimental, moralistic, or even merely political, Hugo is awful.

But he is all the same a magnificent talent, and his narrations of incidents, actions, and events, as well as his revelations of character in them, are wonderful and compelling.

I have read Les Miserables unabridged in English twice and French once.

I am reading it again.

An apology for cowardice

Partridge, chapter 3, book 12, provides a very amusing refusal of the role of soldier after lamenting in no Christian, but a very Epicurean, vein that death is the end, altogether.

A view not in the least contested or even deplored by Tom.

Nay, he endorses it, though he deplores Partridge's attitude toward soldiering.

Reading Fielding's masterpiece, Tom Jones.

Fitting that Fielding quotes Horace all over the place.

Inequality

Once a man has enough, it is a matter of indifference whether others have vastly more.

Why?

Is he deeply in debt?

Robert Downey Jr. is a fine and intelligent actor throwing himself and his talent away on trash.

Fun for the more stupid audiences, sure.

But trash.

If it's just for the millions it's a bad deal.

How many 30 room mansions with their own swimming pools and golf courses do you need?

That's odd.

I don't even need one!

The vanity of great wealth

Epicurus teaches that some desires are vain, such as those that create this market.

They are also motivated by vanity - and malice.

Flawless diamond sells for $22.1m

Health and long life or pleasure and a shorter one?

How far will you torture yourself to prolong your tortured life?

Continued smoking would have put me in a wheelchair and made me little better than a paralytic, so I quit in 1999.

Since then it's been a constant war with obesity - successful on and off - and its threat of stroke, heart attack, and diabetes type II.

Interest and happiness can certainly clash.

But if you can delay death only by taking out of life the things you are still able to enjoy, what then?

At some point you have to say to hell with it.

Your doctor will disapprove, but he is wrong.

He thinks longevity is everything.

That is inhuman and absurd.

What should the 400 pound man do?

What does "To thine own self be true" mean to him?

Look at poor Marlon Brando.

Did he see that coming when he was 30?

I think not.

Amoralism and divine law

Imagine God making law with no moral facts to guide him.

God, entirely happy in himself, needing nothing, wanting nothing, lacking nothing.

God, perfect, changeless, complete.

Epicurus thought it absurd.

The pithy wisdom of insanity, or animal and human nature compared, with a view to understanding virtue, happiness, and the just or good state, in relation to poverty and wealth

Is it fair to say that, empirically, only the most severely damaged humans choose homelessness?

Alcoholics, drug addicts, the most viciously abused of children, and the mad?

In the ancient world, anyway as far as Hellenistic times, the relation of mentor to pupil was particularly intense and personal, sometimes almost cult-like.

And, as we know, among the common perquisites of cult leadership are these two, that the women - and the men and the children - are yours for the taking and the followers give you all their money.

These thoughts in mind, what are we to make of the Dog Philosopher?

On the other hand, do the homeless write books or compose tragedies?

Might that whole poverty-schtick have been no more than one of his stunts, enduring no more than a few days, weeks, or years?

Or might it have been a regular phase in the Cynic training or career? - an idea that seems not to have occurred to Robin Hard, editor of the Oxford paperback, Diogenes the Cynic, Sayings and Anecdotes.

See his remark that Antisthenes would have had no use for the Cynic robe and backpack and could not himself have taught Cynicism to Diogenes because he was married and owned a house.

But, to be fair, that impoverished dog's life was regarded by the later tradition as at once the whole of the Cynics' life of virtue and happiness and, according to RH, a "short cut" to the very same virtue and happiness advocated by the Stoics, without the trouble of scholarship or the demands of theoretical reflection.

Anyway, the stories of Diogenes cast an odd light on the figure of Socrates and the City of Pigs in Republic, Bk. II, don't they?

Perhaps more sardonically even on Plato's dog-guardians, also in Bk. II.

But also and more significantly on the dichotomies that preoccupied Greek ethics from first to last like those between nature and custom, convention, or culture, between internal and external goods, and between natural and vain desires.

And (thus?) perhaps also on the conventional dichotomy between classical (Hellenic) and post-classical (Hellenistic) philosophy.

"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose."

The Hellenic/Hellenistic wisdom of Janice Joplin.

And then there are echoes in philosophical pessimism right through the 19th Century.

And there is this.

To live and be free of all physical pain and discomfort

That is Epicurus's definition of happiness.

Well, almost.

But through what had happened in the past Jove had become aware of the true nature of men: that it is not enough for them, as it is for other animals, to live and be free of all physical pain and discomfort; rather, always and in every condition, they crave the impossible, and the less they are afflicted by other evils, the more they torment themselves with their desire.

Leopardi, History of the Human Race. Giovanni Cecchetti, trans.

This is a straight ahead collision between Epicureanism, ancient or modern, and not just Leopardi but any form of pessimism.

The characteristic view of pessimism is that happiness is impossible, even in the short term; suffering and wretchedness are the universal human lot; life is clearly and decisively not worth living for anyone, ever.

In a nutshell, life's a bitch and then you die - except that Schopenhauer and no doubt others follow Indian religion in supposing reincarnation in a whole succession of lives, all equally hideous.

But the pessimists, to my mind, are just so many drama queens, the whole lot of them.

Existentialists and absurdists included, come to that.

Their views differ among themselves and from the pessimists only as twists of the knife.

Dienstag quotes Unamuno from The Tragic Sense of Life, which I read some forty years ago and do not remember, writing "Consciousness is a disease."

Figuratively, of course, though not literally, for animals in general and particularly for humans, consciousness is life itself, is existence.

Death must then be the cure, or the most complete coma.

And yet, though several pessimists have drawn the lesson and actually counseled suicide, none have followed their own advice, that I know of.

Others have let themselves, at least, off with flabby excuses, pleas of cowardice in the face of death, or appeals to instinct.

Think of Schopenhauer or TV characters like Dr. House, Det. Cohle, and perhaps Sherlock Holmes.

Pshaw.

The idea that pessimism and its contrary, optimism, exhaust the alternatives is silly.

To live and be free of significant anguish, physical pain, and discomfort, most of the time, with the usual amusements and occasions of special joy along with satisfactory personal relationships, is an achievable and sufficient happiness for most humans, most of the time.

I do not say all humans.

I do not say all of the time.

I do say that is enough.

More than enough, in fact, to make life eligible, at least, as everyone's life from time to time, for longer or briefer periods, falls short in one way or another.

For that matter, the happiness of many lives is permanently marred or limited in one way or another, while yet those lives continue eligible, it seems, to those who live them.

Certainly, it's a subjective question.

But equally certainly they do not always seem wrong.

Pleasure

Schopenhauer was right to insist that pain is real, but he was wrong that pleasure is not.

On the other hand, Epicurus was right that getting pleasure as commonly undertaken generally entails a lot of trouble, not unusually more than it is worth.

Epicurus was thinking of sex when he said that, but one might also consider the use of adult beverages.

Clearly, much in either case depends on moderation and prudence.

Probably, Schopenhauer too was thinking of sex when he said that pleasure is only relief.

The German also held that, pleasure being unreal and pain only too much so, the avoidance or minimization of pain is the only reasonable rule of life.

A rule he never followed, demanding as it does, since he agreed a longer is a more painful life, a quick and painless suicide.

Sometimes, however, he claims only that pleasure occurs only with or as the relief of an always greater pain.

This is still wrong - there are, for instance, pleasant surprises that are not episodes of unexpected relief of pain - but it is not silly.

And sometimes the pleasure that comes with relief is considerably greater than the distress relieved.

Of course I, too, am thinking of sex.

Not very popular since the mid-20th Century, before that it was generally admitted that pain is an evil and at least innocent pleasure a good, and the hedonist view that only pleasure is good in itself and only pain thus evil was a serious competitor, along with the view that happiness is the excess of pleasure over pain.

Like egoism, hedonism has historically been offered, generally by the same people, in an ethical and a psychological version.

And again like egoism, a purely empirical hedonism, neither ethical nor quite the other, is available concerning the way things generally seem to go.

We note that humans commonly seem to give little or no weight to the interests or concerns of others as against their own, except in varying degrees for some few persons most close to them.

Likewise, they seem in practice to attribute little significance to anything but their own pleasure - or at any rate what pleases them - , their own pain, and their own happiness, taking account of those of some few others as they would those of their pets. 

Perhaps very beloved - even excessively beloved - pets, but still pets.

Perhaps not surprisingly, egoism and hedonism are often advanced by the same people.

Henry Sidgwick, contemporary of Nietzsche, professed both hedonism - more Bentham's than Mill's - and egoism.

(And also act utilitarianism, but never mind that.)

Against the pessimists he insisted that, the ordinary background tenor of life being somewhat pleasant, most of the time for most of us life is happier than not.

And the prospects for many of us, at least, and much of the time, do not make immediate suicide the prudent choice.

There is some question whether he took sufficiently into account such common phenomena as chronic though mild arthritis and the myriad episodic and impermanent pains of life.

Death is nothing to us. For a while.

Children do not fear death.

They know nothing about it.

They fear pain and sometimes anger, perhaps in the guise of a neighbor's dog.

But not death, the idea of which never so much as occurs to them until they see it in a dead animal or person, a pet or perhaps a relative.

But then, as soon as they get it, they are afraid. 

Though it still doesn't really prey upon them until they realize it inescapably will happen also to them.

That's sometime in adolescence, usually.

And then they acquire fear of death as a permanent feature of their human condition that barely lapses even for the most desperately suicidal.

Or so it seems.

Is optional participation in democracy worth the trouble?

Main Page - Epicurus Wiki

Epicurus (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Epicurus and Epicurean Philosophy

Evidently, though as a youth he took the trouble to keep up his citizenship by showing up for required military training, Epicurus taught that seeking office or kingship is not worth the trouble or the risks involved.

Information is lacking as to what he did or would have made of optional participation in the rights (or rites) of citizenship such as voting.

Too, one has to wonder, if voting were a requirement, whether it could matter how one voted, in light of such arguments, commonly made, as appear in the following post.

Should we vote?

It's not that the outcome doesn't matter.

It's not that whether or not the people can vote doesn't matter.

It's that the vote of any given individual does not matter.

Would a like argument hold for individual military service?

Oh, yes.

Ordinarily, the contribution of the anonymous troop cannot be supposed decisive.

And ordinarily, the individual has better options available simply as ways to make a living.

At best, voluntary military service in war is way too much cost for the assured benefits.

They could perfectly well win or lose just the same without you, you know.

But that doesn't mean they could equally well win or lose without hundreds of thousands or even millions of draftees.

Hence despite the floods of propaganda they can and do release on the public in wartime, even democratic leaders generally have to rely heavily on a draft law to make the price of not serving if called at least apparently higher than the price of serving.

Does necessity know no law?

Government necessity, I mean?

Against Military Conscription

No, the 13th Amendment does not remotely mean that.

Why I am against conscription - John Reed, 1917

Speech Against Conscription and War - Emma Goldman, 1917

Webster's Speech Against Conscription - 1814

Perhaps the draft law is like law in general according to some philosophers who follow Hobbes.

Each troop, draftee or volunteer, is better off with a draft than without it if the conduct it requires is such that each is better off if all comply than if none comply.

At least in such a case the draftees are not being treated like so much canon-fodder entirely for someone else’s good.

But then whether it is so rather depends on what the draftees are forced to fight and die for, does it not?