هَلۡ يَسۡتَوِيٱلۡأَعۡمَىٰ وَٱلۡبَصِيرُ أَمۡ هَلۡ تَسۡتَوِي ٱلظُّلُمَٰتُ وَٱلنُّورُۗ
Cicero in the De finibus bonorum et malorum takes issue with Epicurus for making a peculiar statement about pleasure and commentators since have made a dichotomy about this idea and attributed to Epicurus himself. Only recently has there been speculation regarding the merit of viewing Epicurus this way, and whether or not the two (ideas) is not actually one (within the same process). The dichotomy is described as the difference between kinetic and katastematic pleasure. Cicero wonders why Epicurus admits that pleasure is not without the pleasure of eat, sleep, sex, etc., but that the highest pleasure is the pleasure of being “pain-free”. Cicero says “the absence of pain makes for a strange pleasure”. Commentators since have developed on this dichotomy, kinetic pleasures being pleasure ‘in movement’, say the taste and smell, while katastematic pleasures meaning stable, pleasures that result from having satisfied desire. But is there really a dichotomy? It’s interesting that Plato wrote on this very thing in the dialoge Philebus and he says something Epicurus echoes, that pleasure and pain cannot exist simultaneously. There is a conjunction being made within the intersections of in/out, being/becoming, is/am, and perhaps this says more about the mirror than what stands before us, or how we stand before it, or after it.
Perhaps, here too, sex is being dichotomized. Is sex, the way it is thought, a pleasure to be had, or a means by which to attain to another pleasure, peace perhaps? I wonder whether there is a marriage here, a one not without the other. Is there a right idea and does it require something like an order of operation?
“The good is twice described in the Philebus as perfect, self-sufficient and seeked by all conscious beings. And the good does not have a contrary: it is not the one end of a scale whose evil would be the other end; it is a measure on any scale.“
Soc. Would you consider that there was still anything wanting to you if you had perfect pleasure?
Pro. Certainly not.
Soc. Reflect; would you not want wisdom and intelligence and forethought, and similar qualities? would you not at any rate want sight?
Pro. Why should I? Having pleasure I should have all things.
Soc. Living thus, you would always throughout your life enjoy the greatest pleasures?
Pro. I should.
Soc. But if you had neither mind, nor memory, nor knowledge, nor true opinion, you would in the first place be utterly ignorant of whether you were pleased or not, because you would be entirely devoid of intelligence.
Pro. Certainly.
Soc. And similarly, if you had no memory you would not recollect that you had ever been pleased, nor would the slightest recollection of the pleasure which you feel at any moment remain with you; and if you had no true opinion you would not think that you were pleased when you were; and if you had no power of calculation you would not be able to calculate on future pleasure, and your life would be the life, not of a man, but of an oyster?
What is the difference? That pleasure is not inextricably interlinked with pain, that they could not exist simultaneously, that darkness is not inextricably interlinked with light, as clear as night from day, what can be said of the same? Play is unique, and sexuality, of its surrounding, the outline of its shape that is our own boundaries, the influence of its affect that is this desire, that cannot lie upon reflection about what stirs passion in the heat of passing moments, is also unique. This trouble that psychoanalysis must surmise in order to legitimate its own diagnostics regarding confessions, is that very allure and incessant seduction, the sense of which not only engulfs and enflames the body, but to this day baffles the speculative mind. This puzzle, and the confusion that arises from it, engenders not only growing pains in the face of paternal and societal demands, but in the heart that has not come to recognize what it beats for. The nerves therefore always already narrate a nervousness inherited by this dimension of ‘personhood’, projected and introjected with conditions that beg to be transgressed, and in secret. This danger is constructed not only upon a burning desperation for relief, but by its situation at the intersection of stigma and taboo, resulting in conditions condoning a sphere of life exiled to secrecy. There are organizations today that realize the real way to combat this danger is to allow for safe spaces where desire can come to grips by finding its name, it’s meaning, it’s syntax, an order of operation in order to be understood, in order to act surgically, explicitly, that is, with good sense. For what good sense can be made of pleasure that would hurt oneself or the other(s)? What we are talking about is pleasure, not pain, sexuality and not violence. The line between pleasure and pain is elementary. Necessary pains are no more pleasing pains as guilty pleasures are painful pleasures, for both the former and latter are oxymorons. It is no surprise, therefore, to find, in the scholasticism surrounding pleasure, obsession, overwhelming, jouissance, orgasm, ecstasy, beating, not only ‘naturally’ in ‘sensitive people’, but existing absolutely as long as fantasy is denied a mind. What good sense can be enacted from desire unable to think of itself, and therefore unable to name itself, to know itself and belong to itself? If mind is divorced from the pleasures of the body than so is any understanding of pain. A mind unable to make sense is confined to dreams and nightmares. Is this sublimation of sense not the terror of the sublime itself? Terror therefore, of a danger that cannot be thought or spoken about, a fear arising from what could possibly be hiding, a fear driving the need to hide. Is this not the fear that fear belongs to? It is no surprise, therefore, to find, in the scholasticism surrounding pain, that knowledge, among other things, is also paranoid. Paranoid at what mind could find out. But if knowledge is knowing what is known, how could fear belong to mind if not for the fact that the body, being fully divorced from the mind, reduced its capacity to instinct, confined to moments of presence, desperate for relief from unthinkable and unnamable burning desires. Is this the intersection between rationality and irrationality? A hospital for the body and prison for the mind is nothing more than an asylum. Institutionalized in this way, thought cannot think itself or be thought as itself by the very fact that it remains without the freedom to know, to become a body of knowledge free to name, as free to be free and become itself and recognize itself as itself, not only to act on behalf of itself but to be itself. Ignorance as unrecognizable reflection, schizophrenia as a danger to personhood because it is the very unrecognition of personhood. In this way, ignorance comes to be synonymous with a condition of being exiled from existence itself. Imagine the prospect of being socially surrounded with people like this. Who will be happy? Who won’t be hurt? The last century of psychological literature revolving sex show that human beings are ignorant of their own thoughts and feelings. What is being questioned now is what qualifications make it possible to consider those thoughts and feelings as ‘their own’? If this is common sense, than good sense belong to none but the uncommon. That is the difference.
“… the body dissolves into language. The body that eats, that works, that dies, that is afraid- that body just isn’t there.”
The distinction Epicurus makes between kinetic vs static pleasures is the crown jewel of his brilliant analysis of pleasure, and no one should call themselves an Epicurean if they fail to understand this. Ataraxia, literally “unperturbedness”, generally translated as “imperturbability”, “equanimity”, or “tranquillity”, was for Epicurus the highest form of pleasure and life, and it was impossible for the person who lived solely for the sake of pleasure because they are never truly at peace. Prudence and chastity are built into Epicurus’s idea of the good life. That’s one thing I find wrong. Just like people who eat themselves into obesity, people are fucking themselves into misery. Acknowledge the tone of this confessor
There is no reason NOT to fuck as many people as you please to. morality, demurity, chastity, virginity are all spooks. be smart and you won’t get an std or unwanted pregnancy. there’s literally no consequence. if you want a few extra years to slut around before getting a husband just keep in shape and take care of your skin. the majority of women are obese trash who age themselves 10+ years.
Despite how much “pleasure” they claim to be receiving in their life, does this individual seem like a genuinely happy person? Look at their reasoning capability here
he can only know you fucked 50+ guys if you tell him
Does this sound like a person who can secure a happy life for themselves? Can you imagine this person ever reaching a state of equanimity, having to constantly put on a facade, hiding who they really are and what they really think from the person who they’ve chose to spend their life with? This person will never find real peace, and therefore pleasure, and therefore freedom. People read De Sade without understanding that he was in prison when he wrote those works that speak to an unrelenting life of passion. That is the the Bastille speaking, those are the thoughts and feelings of a prison cell. Epicurus invited women, slaves, and free men alike into his school because he believed, down to his metaphysics, that we were born to be free. Free from unjust requirements from without but also caprice from within. His school’s flourished from coast to coast for centuries. And when the Roman Empire crumbled and Christianity came those communes naturally turned into churches, thy remain so today, because the lives they lived then was essentially the same as that of the early christians. Peaceful living, simple pleasures, a life of knowledge towards the greater good of the community being the freedom of all people’s from all evils. Epicurus wasn’t an idiot.
The devout Father John Tauler relates this personal experience: For years he had prayed God to send him someone who would teach him the real spiritual life. One day, at prayer, he heard a voice saying: “Go to such and such a church and you will have the answer to your prayers.”
He went and at the door of the church he found a beggar, barefooted and in rags. He greeted the mendicant saying: “Good day, my friend.”
“Thank you, sir, for your kind wishes, but I do not recall ever having had a ‘bad’ day.”
“Then God has certainly given you a very happy life.”
“That is very true, sir. I have never been unhappy. In saying this I am not making any rash statement either. This is the reason: When I have nothing to eat, I give thanks to God; when it rains or snows, I bless God’s providence; when someone insults me, drives me away, or otherwise mistreats me, I give glory to God. I said I’ve never had an unhappy day, and it’s the truth, because I am accustomed to will unreservedly what God wills. Whatever happens to me, sweet or bitter, I gladly receive from his hands as what is best for me. Hence my unvarying happiness.”
“Where did you find God?”
“I found him where I left creatures.”
“Who are you anyway?”
“I am a king.”
“And where is your kingdom?”
“In my soul, where everything is in good order; where the passions obey reason, and reason obeys God.”
“How have you come to such a state of perfection?”
“By silence. I practice silence towards men, while I cultivate the habit of speaking with God. Conversing with God is the way I found and maintain my peace of soul.”
There are monkeys, all kinds
There are reptiles, all kinds
There are birds, all kinds
There are fish, all kinds
Then the bug, all kinds.
One day they all combined.
But the whale stayed behind.
“Poverty brought into accord with the law of nature is wealth.”
As opposed to an ideology, a Philosophy has to do with a pursuit of knowledge motivated by nothing but an interest, passion, love for the subject matter itself. All of the greatest and most important philosophical works were motivated by people who were interested in the subject matter as an end in itself. Ideology is always a means to some other end, specifically ideas working towards some sort of correlation with the world and extrapolating for the purpose of self improvement, gain, reproduction, etc. Thinking is good, but people who think about thinking find themselves in a class of their own, and those who pursue it relentlessly, those who pursue the capacity to understand, pass through as many forms as possible, collect as many moments and secure them in the instant for no other purpose then the possibility for thinking to continue, because thinking is good, instead of leading to a deadlock, where thought is no longer free to ponder the mystery, those people belong to a conversation, glory, they have a seat at the table, immortality.
The longest doctoral thesis at Harvard ever written was by Henry Kissinger entitled ‘The Meaning of History’. Kissinger, at 25 years old, asks how we can reconcile our knowledge that events seem to occur irrevocably with our inward experience of freedom. Kissinger realized that within the very exploration of these metaphysical concepts by preceding thinkers the very terrain of meaning became navigable and as a consequence, the fate of humanity and its history as a choice to be made by the possibility established by these sets of knowing had become a reality. What will we do? How will we know? The answer to these questions will mean the destiny of the world, and they will only be revealed to those who seek to know what is truly good.
Kissinger begins “The Meaning of History” by posing its central question as a paradox– i.e., actions in retrospect appear inevitable, yet we act with the conviction of choice. Kissinger asks how we can reconcile our knowledge that events seem to occur irrevocably with our inward experience of freedom.
Kissinger confronts a second question in his introductory chapter– the question of historical understanding. […] Kissinger poses this epistemological question:
“Is history an open book… that contains in itself all the asperations of mankind as well as the key to the world’s purpose? Or does history reveal a series of meaningless incidents, a challenge to our normative concepts, only through conformity to which it can obtain significance? Is meaning, in short, an attribute of reality or a metaphysical construction attendant on our recognition of significance?”
How Kissinger answers this question of historical understanding is significant. He concludes that the meaning of history cannot be derived empirically from the facts themselves. He rejects the principle of verifiability proposed by the logical positivists; the latter maintain that facts are true if they correspond to reality. Kissinger argues that anthropological research shows that different cultures create their own views of reality– facts are by no means absolute. […] Kissinger writes that “an inward experience cannot be proved by empirical data. A philosophy of history without a profound metaphysics will forever juxtapose surface data and can never satisfy the totality of man’s desire for meaning.” Instead, we must approach history philosophically, because the questions we ask of it will determine the answers it yields.
“Thus meaning represents the emanation of a metaphysical context. Just as every man in a certain sense creates his picture of the world, just as the scientist can find in nature only what he puts in it in the formulation of his hypothesis, just as every question determines at least the range of answers, so history does not exhibit the same portent to everybody but yields only the meanings inherent in the nature of the our query. Therefore, too, the philosophy of history is inseparable from metaphysics, and involves a deep awareness of the mysteries and possibilities not only of nature but of human nature.”
Meaning in history lies in the philosophical approach we take toward it. Kissinger equates the philosophy of history with metaphysics, describing it as “metaphysics of a very high order.” The question he then confronts is: how did Spengler, Toynbee, and Kant address the problem of necessity and freedom in history? How did their metaphysical beliefs resolve this paradox? “In the reaction of the various thinkers to the problem of human necessity and human freedom, in their capacity to experience depths inaccessible to reason alone, lies the answer to the meaning of history.”
All men seek happiness, the bulk of which only in pleasure. To those capable, finer sublimity’s, and those cultivated, even finer still. But there are those, with senses aflame, by birth or by some divine miracle, who arouse glory and grace that would please God. To these sort nothing could tempt or sway from their pursuit. They adorn the heavens to life. Happiness is the good beyond being. The good, as subjects, are oriented toward a being beyond themselves. Whereas the happy are beyond even themselves.
“SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, which is aware of being the reality, has its object within itself, but an object which, at first, is merely its own (für sich), and is not yet in actual existence. Existence stands opposed to it as a reality other than its own; and the aim of self-consciousness consists in carrying out what it is “for itself” so as to see itself as another independent being. This first purpose is to become conscious, in that other self-consciousness, of itself as an individual, to turn this other into its own self. It has the assurance that this other already is essentially itself.
It repudiates sense and science
The highest gifts possessed by men-
It has gone over to the devil,
And must be o’erthrown”
World Spirit culminating in Absolute Knowledge for dasein‘s Absolute Conciousness would be der einzige, and being one and only as unique, would it not be totally concerned with the Epicurean trifecta; 1 the easiest path to procuring pleasure and minimizing pain for the perceptual body 2 mental hygiene/exigencies of life through the study of philosophy 3 most important, the cultivation of Virtue, (ie. Equanimity, Peace of Mind) through alert and vigiliant prudence? When What-Is understands the limits, not expecting more than reason-able, “shall he live like a God amoungst men”? In a letter to Menoeceus Epicurus says “the right understanding of these facts enables us to refer all choice and avoidance to the health of the body and the souls freedom from disturbance, since this is the aim of the life of blessedness”. In his book on metaphysics Aristotle says divine mind- mind fully actualized- “thinks itself, and it’s thinking is a thinking of thinking”.
“If the head could be converted into a sort of shack for animals one might turn a pretty penny, small animals that profit one their eggs and fur, as one must leave and so make certain business arrangements. There was a certain stone that did very well in the middle of a wood, but then that is not for me. As a child I had wanted to become an automobile, but then I grew up to be 30 years old. To do useful work like lifting one’s hand into the air and pinching the underside of a cloud. The walking of the black squares on the linoleum in mother’s kitchen might be turned to profit, say by hooking a string to one’s ear which could be attached in a distant city to a dummy’s mouth, or across the Atlantic to a Dutch windmill on a day when there is little wind. Or a yawn might be used as a prelude to sleep. I said to mother the head might be used to keep tropical fish in, and one might carve out a small income — a mailorder business so to speak, mailing oneself in a coffin — saving the costs of a book-keeper by, so to speak, having the business in one’s head. Mother slapped me across my mouth, which one is hard put to interpret. Not to feel too useless these days I keep myself busy smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. I am not against spending my time sleeping just as long as I am doing something with my time. Had I more arms and legs I would seriously consider becoming the frame for an umbrella — with some sexual arousement my penis could be used as the handle — Is it not already used to help old ladies up and down stairs. Sometimes I just breathe. Did you ever do that. I say to mother, look I am breathing. I get little recognition — or mother is scanty with praise only that I might not rest on my laurels — that I will keep a firm and steady gaze into the darkness that others choose to call the future. I seek a land where I might become of some use — or rather my use might come to some recognition — that in other words, mother might come eventually to write her congressman of my worth — and that the daily papers might be filled with picture stories, titled: He Smokes A Cigarette — He Can Breathe — Etc. And that crowds might stand outside the house cheering me as I sleep. Perhaps I should kiss the face of the kitchen clock for luck. Perhaps its little hands with rapture would encircle my neck, and we might be happy. I am sure happiness is not too far away.”
The fruit of that righteousness will be peace; its effect will be quietness and confidence forever.
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