I promised my family to start exuding wisdom as soon as I hit 60 years of age commanding their awe and admiration (or at least some respect, or some attention). My daughter dismissed it as another case of FOPUD (fatherly over-promise under-deliver) and preemptively reset my age to tenderfooted 59 so I can go on spouting immature gibberish for another year when she is going to reset my age again.

However, it is my duty and responsibility, as a parent, to prove my children wrong and thus debilitate, or at least disequilibrate, their burgeoning aplomb. I plan to achieve this imperative educational objective by serving niblets of wisdom too meaty and marrowy for them to swallow, let alone digest.

I hope they (or anyone else) will not mistake it for nourishment and choke on it.

It is an excellent summary of the main points of the Epicurean philosophy. The author debunks a lot of the myths people believe when the say they are “Epicureans” but two widespread errors are not corrected:

1. Right at the beginning of his article the author asserts that “According to Epicurus, reason teaches that pleasure is good and that pain is bad, and that pleasure and pain are the ultimate measures of good and bad.” This is an error and it is corrected by Cassius Amicus in an analytic comment on Facebook: “Epicurus’ rejected Plato’s espousal of “reason” as a tool of knowledge over the senses/anticipations/plain-pleasure mechanism. The point is that in order to be valid, ALL conclusions from reason must arise from and be constantly checked against the reality we judge from the three legs of the canon of truth. The modern tendency of many of us (including me) is to presume that “reason” is the key to correct thinking and living, but that is not what Epicurus said. Yes, properly applied, reason will validate the conclusion, but the real tools of determining truth are the information derived from the three legs of the canon. There are many citations for this, but the one I use most often is in Cicero’s De Finibus where in the Epicurean argument Cicero records that Epicurus held logic to be virtually worthless, and stressed how it is meaningless unless it starts from correct premises — from the three legs of the canon, to which reason is subordinate.’
2. The author of the article in Psychology Today commits the “summum bonum” fallacy when he asserts that “Epicurus agrees with Aristotle that happiness is an end-in-itself and the highest good of human living. However, he identifies happiness with the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain rather than with the pure exercise of reason.” Norman W. DeWitt has convincingly demonstrated in his ‘Epicurus ad His Philosophy’ that “to  Epicurus pleasure was the telos ['finis' in the sense of 'the goal'] and life itself was the greatest good.”

Epicurus developed an impressive range of training and coaching tools to enable his followers to live a happy life in accordance with his philosophy. These techniques had been successfully used unchanged for an almost unimaginably long span of time: 800 years. Many of themhave been ‘borrowed’ by the Stoics, and from them, by many Christians, re-branded as “spiritual exercises” – for instance by Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus (better known as the “Jesuit order”.) as demonstrated by Paul Rabbow in his ‘Seelenfürung’ and by Pierre Hadot in his ‘Exercises Spirituels et Philosophie Antique’.The author of the article in Psychology Today does not mention this fact.

Emotional well-being (aka happiness / eudaimonia) was the only subject taught in the Epicurean garden schools. For 800 years: from 300 BE to 500 CE. The Christian Emperors changed the topic for the next 1500  years: unhappiness has been taught in school ever since the cultural takeover by Church(es) and Platonic Academia.

Are we contemplating an eudaimonistic revolution?

chased by my daughter in the

dewy morning grass

Joe Heller

True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.

I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22′
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!”

–Kurt Vonnegut

The New Yorker, May 16^th, 2005

I am really thankful to Bob Sutton for reprinting the poem in his book and also in his blog: http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/kurt_vonnegut_a.html

And I am, of course, thankful to Kurt Vonnegut for outing Joe Heller as a true Epicurean.

1. fond of or adapted to luxury or indulgence in sensual pleasures; having luxurious tastes or habits, especially in eating and drinking.

2. fit for an epicure: epicurean delicacies.

3. ( initial capital letter ) of, pertaining to, or characteristic of Epicurus or Epicureanism.

We might, of course agree to exclude the foodies but the rest of the world might ignore our decision.  But even after the arbitrary exclusion of the first two established meanings of the word we would have at one end of the  remaining wide spectrum  the people who have heard that it is not the same as being a foodie , plus,  on reading Lactantius’s  “if god is willing to prevent evil, but not able?…then he is not omnipotent..”  they feel  they like it and repost it on Facebook’s Epicurus wall (every month or so). At the other end might stand those people who would live in an Epicurean community an Epicurean way of life, communally practicing the teachings.  We could agree, of course, that by barely subscribing to a set of principles, like for instance the Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings, and the Letter to Menoeceus, or maybe even just the Tetrapharmakos,  one should be entitled to  describe oneself as a n“ Epicurean”. Or maybe as a “non-practicing Epicurean” or “principled Epicurean” or “philosophical Epicurean” etc.. The above mentioned  general principles are general enough to be acceptable for the vast majority of those people who value a minimum level of rationality and honesty, even though they might have been baptized/incorporated/engulfed  into some vast and vague and abstract worldview ‘community’ like  Christianity, or Buddhism, or the Islam – or any of their local branches.

Without practicing the teachings the subscribers to a set of Epicurean principles might be no more ‘Epicureans’ as the majority of Christians and other members of the established mass-religions are.  (I never stop being astonished  by seeing  the word “Christian”  describe an  honest Amish craftsman and Ken Lay,  the Christian  Extraordinaire. )What is the meaning of the word Christian then? And what should be the meaning of the word “Epicurean”? Or what word or combination of words should more or less appropriately describe the non-foodie branch of practicing Epicureans?

Maybe we should start by agreeing on whether being a member of an Epicurean community is a necessary element of designating someone or oneself as Epicurean. The freemasons decided that there is no such thing as a freemason outside of a lodge. Can or should this principle be applied to self-proclaimed Epicureans? Or shall we try to develop a more precise terminology?

As you see, we have two problems to deal with

1. define what we mean by the word “Epicurean”

2. then find a better word for it

We can, of course eschew the challenge and go on messing up the terms further describing our own personal mixture of  philosophical and/or psychological and/or sociological ingredients as “Epicureanism” or even “Neo-Epicureanism”.

Dear Friends of the Epicurean Philosophy, I am happy that you make Epicurus’s voice heard again.

His is the only Gospel that has been valid unchanged for 2300 years.

He has taught us how to break free from our fears and from the slavery of unnecessary and unnatural desires by finding out what we really need.

Epicurus has shown us the proven pathway from pain to pleasure and how we can lead a happy life by cultivating mental peace (ataraxia) and companionate love (philia).

His teachings will never lose their liberating relevance because they are based on the study of the nature of things.

The more people follow in his footsteps the better place our world will be to live in.

Stefan Streitferdt

author of the Epicurean happiness guidance

“From Pain to Pleasure: The Proven Pathway to Happiness”

If you like my book AND its author you will buy it from my own eBook-store where you can get besides the paperback  edition also the eBook version for half the price.

From Amazon’s sales I get almost no royalties whereas if you buy directly from me a small amount  will remain to help foot my huge hospital bills.

To encapsulate a felling or a thought in as few words as possible: this endeavor engendered the literary genre of the Japanese haiku. It also produced the famous four-fold cure (tetrapharmakos) of Epicurean practical wisdom :

• There is nothing to fear from God
• There is nothing to feel from death
• Good things can be acquired
• Bad things can be endured

It sounds simple. It shows the state of mind you can reach after consciously practicing the Epicurean conduct of life by daily reflections and mental exercises under the guidance of an Epicurean coach as Epicurean self-educating communities were practicing it unchanged in 800 years (300 BCE – 500 CE). It has been boiled down to this concentrated formula by the Epicurean community in the famous Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, maybe by their in-house instructor, the philosopher  and poet  Philodemus of Gadara, or his disciples, but more  probably obtained collectively, as happiness itself is obtained.

Today I tried to boil it down further, the way cooks keep on reducing their stock. What I found at the bottom of my mental saucepan was this:

You can dissolve all your fears when you realize how little you really need to lead a blissful life.

My goal was to show not only the end-result but also indicate that it takes your individual decision and efforts to reach that state. The three-letter word ‘can’ must hint not only at the individual’s responsibility in making choices that further his own happiness but also at the fact that it might take the assistance of like-minded friends and experienced guides and coaches to reach that goal. And maybe long years of dedicated practice.