Happy Twentieth to all students of Epicurus everywhere! After a many-year-long wait, philosopher Greg Sadler finally published his Honest Review of Hiram Crespo, Tending The Epicurean Garden. It was mostly a very positive review, which I appreciated. The YouTube channel Vox Stoica also published a nearly 30-minute long video titled What is Epicureanism and is it compatible with Stoicism? Again, in spite of the source being from another School, they were mostly accurate in their depiction of the Epicurean school.
Philosophy Now has an essay on hedonism in ancient India and Greece.
After attempting to unpack the scarce quotes that Philodemus included in his scroll “On Piety” from Epicurus’ work titled On Holiness, I revisited the subject in On Natural Holiness. One of the members of the SoFE, Alan, recorded an Epicurean devotional song titled Lumen Inlustrans.
SoFE’s latest video is titled The Epicureans on the nature of the soul, and explains all the nuances and general features of our doctrine of the physical, mortal soul (psyche), which is embedded into the body and dies with it. The rectification of the meaning of the word soul according to nature is an important contributions that modern Epicurean philosophy can potentially make to our culture, where so many souls are still mystified by supernatural conceptions of the soul which keep them trapped in superstitious and fear-based creeds. These false views are based on the Platonic split between body and soul, which Epicurus was reacting against when he articulated these ideas.
This paper on Epicurus’ On Nature: Book 28 discusses the evolution of the Epicurean canon, which was ongoing even ten years after the foundation of the Garden. It may supplement the essay titled New Evidence for the Epicurean Theory of the Origin of Language: Philodemus, On Poems V, by Jacob Mackey, which evaluates the Epicurean theory of language.
I’ve published my exegetical discussion of Principal Doctrines 10-14, which focus on the pleasures of safety and privacy, and on the utility of science. I did not recently publish exegetical content concerning PD 15 because I had published, back in March, an epitome of the Epicurean Doctrines concerning wealth which is, basically, a detailed elaboration of the repercussions of PD 15 (and then some), so please refer to that essay in your efforts to deepen your study of PD 15, the “Doctrine of the natural measure of wealth”.
Our journey through the Principal Doctrines continues with PD 16, which contains taboos against the worship of Fate or of Fortune and warns us to apply reason. The main other instance where Epicurus accentuates the importance of applying reason is when we think of time (PD 19). This is because we do not directly experience past and future, except through remembrance and anticipation in the here and now. So this Doctrine is tied to an accurate understanding of the ontology of Time as an emerging feature of nature. We can not travel back and forth in time. Any enjoyment we get from the past and the future, happens now. And so, Epicurus says that a true sage that sees nature clearly, is self-sufficient in his happiness and does not postpone his pleasures.
On Sentience
sentient adjective
Definition of sentient
1: responsive to or conscious of sense impressions
sentient beings
2: AWARE
3: finely sensitive in perception or feeling– Webster’s Dictionary’s definition of sentient
Sentience is one of the most central ideas in Epicurean philosophy the name for which is not explicitly mentioned in the surviving sources. Sentience is taken for granted, for instance, in our prolepsis of guilt, merit, and causal responsibility, all of which require agency, which requires sentience.
Sentience is also what justifies the canon, which is our methodology for knowing about nature. Compare the word anaisthetei (“lacks awareness“) in PD 2, On Death, and the word aisthesesin (“if you fight against all your perceptions…”) in PD 23, one of the Doctrines on canonics. There is nothing supernatural about awareness or sentience. All knowledge is physical: rooted in the relevant perceptive or neural tissue of a sentient being, evolved by nature by natural selection, as sentience and perception provide advantage to sentient beings to help them live and escape being hunted. This does not mean that nature meant or willed natural selection, but that the path of least resistance led to the development of sentience and perception.
The second Principal Doctrine, in positing that “death is nothing to us” because there is no sentience in death, also reveals that life is experienced by us, and defined, as sentience.
And our Doctrines on justice allow for the recognition of what some scientists are calling “non-human persons”. For instance, scientists who study dolphins and whales made an official declaration some years back, saying that these animals should be considered “non-human persons” due to their high levels of intelligence. They made mention of the complexity of dolphin language, and how each dolphin responds to their own name. Some countries recognize the “non-human person” status of chimpanzees and other great apes.
According to our Doctrines on justice, if an animal is capable of making agreements with us–that is to say, if a creature becomes domesticated enough to interact with us according to certain agreements (the pet’s “house rules”), or if we are able to decipher, for instance, dolphin communication to the point where we can enter into a contract of not harming each other (and perhaps even helping each other) with a certain community of dolphins, then those animals are not only sentient, but also intelligent enough to partake in justice. They may be able to, in theory, have certain rights recognized under our laws.
And so here is one of the highest peaks of sentience: the ability to communicate clearly enough with another creature, that a consensus or agreement can be reached. Concrete instances of Justice emerge out of those interactions between the higher sentient beings, similar to how complexities and systems emerge as a result of the relational properties of some bodies (plants that are medicinal or poisonous to some creatures; allergens; a magnet’s attraction to certain rocks, etc.)
Principal Doctrine 32 is worded in a manner that is not anthropocentric, but accepts animals of all types–perhaps also in recognition of the innumerable sentient beings, including higher sentient beings, that Epicurean cosmology posits as existing in the innumerable worlds.
Which raises the question: did the ancient Epicureans ever try to imagine what it would be like to have justice between members of different planets? Lucian’s (very enjoyable) Second-Century fable titled “True History” shows that, although he was a comedian, he had an interest in extraterrestrial themes. The adventure starts with a war between the peoples of two planets. In De Rerum Natura, after describing (in a passage on the origins of warfare) an elaborate battle that included humans using animals for warfare, which drove many of the animals mad with rage, Lucretius goes on to say (in the First Century BCE):
This
We, then, may hold as true in the great All,
In divers worlds on divers plan create,
Somewhere afar more likely than upon
One certain Earth.Lucretius, Book 5 of De Rerum Natura
So that, at the end of the scene he has just painted, the poet reveals to us that we are witnessing the birth of ancient “science fiction” in a way, that the events he has just described happened most likely not on Earth, but on another of the innumerable worlds.
The Epicureans have always reasoned that the same laws of nature apply everywhere and at all times, so that we can safely infer that in other worlds we should expect things to function and behave like they do in our proximity, so long as the same variables are present. This is why the Doctrine of innumerable worlds is articulated as there existing beings “both similar to and different from” the ones on Earth in the innumerable worlds. And so if sentience evolved here, then we should expect to see it elsewhere.
Philosophical language used for sentience is also of great utility for an Epicurean who seeks to practice the Doctrines. For instance, the term qualia refers to individual instances of subjective conscious experience. When Epicurus advises us to remember past pleasure as part of our hedonic regimen, he is basically saying that we should attempt to revisit the particular qualia that were most pleasant to us in the past, so that we have a treasury of “memory-gems” in our psyche–instances of pleasure the memory of which is crystallized enough in our minds, that they can be easily recalled or remembered, and enjoyed. While other philosophers speculate endlessly about the nature of consciousness, we Epicureans may instead capitalize on the healthiest, most pleasant qualia in our practice.
Finally, many of the other philosophers have labeled humans as “rational animals”, but much of human behavior is not rational. To speak of sentient beings really is an accurate way to describe the kinds of animals that humans are, to a true and natural identity: we are sentient beings: self-sustaining bodies with the faculties needed for perceiving or feeling things.
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