Epicurus
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Nor is life a spectator sport. It is a full contact event requiring your action and participation. You are part of “Team Humanity” and you need to give it your all. Do what you love to do (as long as it does not hurt others) with passion and enjoyment and you will no doubt do it well. Learn to balance your life and share your passion and enjoyment with others, in particular, those you care about most. Sharing your life interests with others will enrich them as well if you believe and feel passionately about what you do. The act of sharing with others will help you balance your own existence as well. It will insure that you dont simply engage in narrow, selfish pursuits to the exclusion of other aspects of your life and the important people in it. The act of sharing means you have to reach out, engage and understand the interests of others in order to involve them in yours as well.
Epicurus Letter to Menoeceus is about life and explains it from a philosophers point of view. In it he discusses pleasure, pain, death, fear, judgment, destiny, ignorance and many other debatable issues that humans experience. The one idea that struck my attention is from a passage about pleasure and morals. He doesnt use the word moral but rather implies that morals are connected to pleasure. The passage states, “Pleasure is our first and kindred good. It is the starting-point of every choice and of every aversion, and to it we come back, inasmuch as we make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good thing.” Epicurus simply indicates For example, a man or woman who is willing to give up their life for their country would be pleasing himself or herself as well as the country. That is a huge sacrifice that one may make in order to fulfill their desire to do something good. Epicurus suggests that pleasure is our first thought that is good. So in order for something to be good it must be pleasurable to anyone including yourself. He also states that pleasure is our first and kindred good. This suggests that from the time that we are born we associate good as something pleasing. Infants learn that eating, sleeping, being changed to be more comfortable, cuddling, having a blanket for warmth, and any other physical needs are all good or pleasing to the baby. As we grow our pleasure comes from our emotions as well as our physical desires. The parent of a child receives his or her pleasure from the caring and nurturing of the child. According to Epicurus, our choices are based on pleasure. As we age our form of pleasure transfers from a physical need to our emotional needs. When we evaluate a situation we tend to think about what would be best or the most pleasing to us. An example of this is that I choose to go to school because it makes me happy to have an education and so I can feel secure in my future. My choice was made from an evaluation of how pleasing it would be for me, had it not been pleasing I would have altered my choice. Both the feelings of security and happiness were evaluated before I made my decision. Epicurus also mentions feelings and how they effect our judgment of good. Since our choices are based on pleasure they effect our morals or our judgment. When a person considers another persons feelings over their own is a value that is instilled in their morals when they are young. For example people that have children place their pleasure on the happiness of their child. From this the child is learning the pleasure of pleasing others and that it is good. Epicurus entwines the idea that pleasure is connected to our judgment of everything that is “good”. He began by talking about pleasure and how it is the first thing that we learn. He then says that we consider the amount of pleasure something will bring us before we make our decisions about things. Then he brings in the idea of how pleasure is a feeling and that we make feelings our basis for determining if something is good. From all these feelings and judgments we are given our morals. So if we didnt have feelings would it be possible to have “good” morals? Word Count: 619
Epicureanism
Epicurean physics is atomistic, in the tradition of the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus. Epicurus regarded the universe as infinite and eternal and as consisting only of bodies and space. Of the bodies, some are compound and some are atoms, or indivisible, stable elements of which the compounds are formed. The world, as seen through the human eye, is produced by the whirlings, collisions, and aggregations of these atoms, which individually possess only shape, size, and weight.
In biology, Epicurus anticipated the modern doctrine of natural selection. He postulated that natural forces give rise to organisms of different types and that only the types able to support and propagate themselves have survived.
Epicurean psychology is thoroughly materialistic. It holds that sensations are caused by a continuous stream of films or “idols” cast off by bodies and impinging on the senses. All sensations are believed to be absolutely reliable; error arises only when sensation is improperly interpreted. The soul is regarded as being composed of fine particles distributed throughout the body. The dissolution of the body in death, Epicurus taught, leads to the dissolution of the soul, which cannot exist apart from the body; and thus no afterlife is possible. Since death means total extinction, it has no meaning either to the living or to the dead, for “when we are, death is not; and when death is, we are not.”
The cardinal virtues in the Epicurean system of ethics are justice, honesty, and prudence, or the balancing of pleasure and pain. Epicurus preferred friendship to love, as being less disquieting. His personal hedonism taught that only through self-restraint, moderation, and detachment can one achieve the kind of tranquillity that is true happiness. Despite his materialism, Epicurus believed in the freedom of the will. He suggested that even the atoms are free and move on occasion quite spontaneously; his view resembles the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics.
Epicurus did not deny the existence of gods, but he emphatically maintained that as “happy and imperishable beings” of supernatural power they could have nothing to do with human affairs, although they might take pleasure in contemplating the lives of good mortals. True religion lies in a similar contemplation by humans of the ideal lives of the high, invisible gods.
So firmly