The Greek myths […] could not tell us of the conquest of Death by Love, because they could not know it yet; but they did know what it was not. They — the Greeks with their legends — were not just pessimistic. They were heroic pessimists.
Orpheus descends into Hades to retrieve his bride, Eurydice. In the account we read in Virgil’s Georgics, the point of the tale is already slightly smoothed, blunted. Orpheus has made the mistake of looking back on her countenance, when he is almost home. He has emerged in the sun, but she is still in the shadows. As he looks back, she recedes, disappears; she is now lost forever. In modern “education” we used to weep for the tragedy. He almost succeeded. It is a tragedy, strictly in the Roman pagan sense.
But it was a tragedy in the Greek sense, first. If we go instead to Plato, and listen to the aristocratic Phaedrus in the Symposium, we learn that Orpheus was thoroughly in the wrong, in his attempt to retrieve Eurydice. He was bound to be punished. His mistake was not a technicality. His living descent into Hades was a challenge not only to the gods, but to nature, and to the truth of things. His love for Eurydice, so affecting in his mournful dirges — moving everyone to tears — was not true love. A coward, he would not die for it.
Hades has presented him with a wraith, in Eurydice’s outward form. Inevitably, this illusion would dissolve in the sunlight. And the fate of Orpheus was now set — the fate of an eloquent softie, who loves an imaginary woman — a woman he had created from the start. He will die at the hands of the real ones he rejected. He will be torn apart by the Maenads, as by wild beasts. His lyre will be destroyed. This is the fate of our shallow romantic star; the pretty boy whose lyre and whose voice had once been an enchantment.
Boethius deals with that backward gaze, in the Consolations of Philosophy. We who seek to lead into the light of the upper day — we triumphalist philosophers — are bound to look back into the Tartarean cave. And when we do, the clarity of our “vision” will be obscured; then ruined, totally. To guide we must be guided; or all will be lost.
David Warren, “A backward glance”, Essays in Idleness, 2021-02-09.
May 17, 2021
QotD: Orpheus and Eurydice
May 10, 2021
QotD: Against the notion of the “Social Contract”
In all of his political writings, Scruton takes on the Left for scorning existing norms and customs, and for promoting a “culture of repudiation.” The Left is “negative.” It dismisses “every aspect of our cultural capital” with the language of brutal invective: accusing every defender of human nature and sound tradition of “racism,” “xenophobia,” “homophobia,” and “sexism.” Like 1984‘s “two minutes of hate,” this language tears down, intimidates, and can never build anything humane or constructive — it is nihilistic to the core. At the same time, Scruton wants to reach out to reasonable liberals who eschew ideology and who still believe in civility and the promise of national belonging. His conservatism can discern the truth in liberalism (another Aristotelian trait) while the partisans of repudiation see half the human race as enemies.
Daniel J. Mahoney, “Beyond the Culture of Repudiation”, Claremont Review of Books, 2018-06.
April 22, 2021
QotD: Moderation in war
Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, 1913.
April 8, 2021
QotD: Thomas Hobbes and his “state of nature”
One reason I had such a hard time teaching this stuff to undergraduates back in my ivory tower days was that, ironically, we can imagine a much more “realistic” State of Nature than Hobbes could. We even had a TV show about it: Lost (in which, I’m told, one of the characters was actually named “John Locke”). A large group of strangers, unrelated by blood or affinity, would never be shipwrecked on a deserted island in Hobbes’s day, but we Postmoderns have no problem imagining a large international flight going down. Assume everyone survives the crash, and there’s your State of Nature – a much better one than Hobbes’s.
Under those very specific conditions, something like what Hobbes says might come to pass. In reality, of course, we seem to be much likelier to pull together in a disaster than to immediately go full retard, but let’s envision the most apocalyptic scenario, in which every guy who can bench press his body weight (assuming such still exist on international flights) immediately tries to lord it over everyone else on the island. There, and only there, the stuff Hobbes says about equality is true – the strong guy can beat up the weak guy, and enslave him, but the strong guy has to sleep sometime …
… so pretty soon there are no more strong guys, only various flavors of weak, clever guys, and now they have to band together, because you need three or four of them to accomplish the physical labor that one strong guy could’ve before they murdered him in his bed. And so on, you get the point, eventually everyone grudgingly lays down his arms and starts working together for mutual survival.
At this point, I need to point out something fundamental about Thomas Hobbes, that y’all probably don’t know. Hobbes always considered himself first and foremost a mathematician. But he wasn’t a very good mathematician. He’d thought he’d discovered a way to “square the circle,” for instance, and that’s not a metaphor – that was really a thing back then, and Hobbes’s attempt got ripped to shreds by real mathematicians, who thought they were thereby discrediting his metaphysics and, by implication, his political philosophy …
… fun stuff, but irrelevant, the point is, Hobbes was a bad mathematician. So bad, in fact, that even I, a former History professor who needs to pull off a sock every time I have to count past ten, can see the glaring flaw in his “geometrical” political theory: IF it’s based on “the State of Nature,” and we legitimize the Leviathan because that’s what gets us out of the State of Nature, then once we are free of the State of Nature, what’s the point of the Leviathan?
Hobbes didn’t see it that way, of course. He thought that we really did revert to “the war of all against all” the minute the social contract was broken, and in his context – the English Civil Wars, recall – that’s not unreasonable. But what about all the periods of “normal” government? You know, those periods of peace we created the Leviathan specifically to secure? If we get those – and there’s no point to the exercise otherwise – then we seem to have created an all-powerful government that, while it CAN do everything, really shouldn’t do anything.
Severian, “Hobbes (II)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-11.
March 31, 2021
QotD: The first and only “inalienable” right
It would’ve been far better to have kept the trio in Locke’s original words – life, liberty, and property – but even that wouldn’t have saved us, because the proposition is flawed from the beginning. The full quote is:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness …
… and pretty much all of that is wrong.
As we’ve seen, it was a major part of Hobbes’s project to prove that men do in fact have such rights, because it’s not at all “self-evident.” That was the whole point of the Wars of Religion – heretics have NO rights, because they have put themselves beyond the pale of the human community. For the Wars of Religion to end, political legitimacy had to be secularized.
That was Hobbes’s goal. That’s what the “State of Nature” thought experiment was about. Does man has any rights in himself, that flow only from his existence as a human being? In other words, does he have rights NOT endowed by his Creator?
Hobbes argued that we DO have such rights, of course … but, crucially, we only have the full exercise of them in the State of Nature. For Hobbes, all rights are, at bottom, the right to self-defense. Getting out of the State of Nature involves laying at least part of that right down – “alienating” it, in the Latinate English of the 17th century – creating in the process a “corporate person” who “represents” us all. Far from being “inalienable,” then, Life and Liberty, at least, have to be alienated, at least to some degree, if civilization is to exist at all …
… at least according to Hobbes, and do you see what I mean about people trying to adopt his terms while dumping his conclusions?
Hobbes had plenty of examples to hand, writing as he was in the last, nastiest phase of the Wars of Religion. According to Hobbes, the Leviathan – who, let’s recall, can be a Senate or something just as easily as a monarch – absolutely has the right to your life and liberty, since your voluntary surrender of them is what creates the Leviathan in the first place. How else could wars be fought in the gunpowder age? A medieval king leading his personal affinity into battle didn’t have to worry about political theory. An Early Modern king, fielding armies of tens of thousands, did. Without an animating ideology, they’re just mercenaries – ask Machiavelli how that works out.We’ll skip over that “pursuit of happiness” crap, since that’s probably just Jefferson’s noodle-headed way of alluding to Classical political theory, and circle back to the start: “all men are created equal.” As we’ve seen, this was central to Hobbes’s “State of Nature” thought experiment … but, as is obvious to anyone with real-world experience, it only applies there.
Severian, “Hobbes (II)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-11.
January 18, 2021
QotD: Francis Bacon on what we now call “Confirmation Bias”
“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it” wrote Francis Bacon in his 1620 Novum Organum, one of the major early works of the European Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. Today, we call this confirmation bias. We don’t form opinions based on the evidence — we often shape the evidence to suit our opinions. We attribute importance to facts which back our preferred theory and dismiss as unimportant those which do not. “It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human intellect to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives; whereas it ought properly to hold itself indifferently disposed towards both alike,” Bacon added. We continue to cling to ideas which have been discredited, a phenomenon called belief perseverance. Or worse, our faith in discredited ideas becomes even stronger when we are presented with contrary evidence — the backfire effect. Or we focus on successes and ignore failures, a phenomenon called survivorship bias. Bacon reminds us of the story of Diagoras of Melos, who was shown a picture of those who had escaped shipwreck after making vows to the gods hanging in a temple. Diagoras asked where he could find a picture of those who made vows to the gods but drowned anyway.
Bacon wrote that humans are afflicted with “idols of the mind,” and he identified four. The first are idols of the tribe, flaws in thinking common to all people that come from human nature itself. Second are idols of the cave, or den. All of us, Bacon argued, have a cave in our mind where the light of reason is dimmed, and this cave varies from person to person depending on his or her character, experiences, and environment. Third are idols of the marketplace, associated with the exchange of ideas. As language can never be perfectly precise, it’s possible for falsehoods to develop and spread as a concept as explained by one person to another. Finally come idols of the theatre, ideas which have been presented to us and taken root so deeply and firmly they’ve become hard to remove. In Bacon’s time, this was the philosophy of Aristotle, which had become so fundamental to Western thought that even parts of it which could easily be disproven remained unchallenged for centuries. To manage the effect of the idols, Bacon proposed “radical induction” — the forerunner to the modern scientific method.
Adam Wakeling, “George Orwell and the Struggle against Inevitable Bias”, Quillette, 2020-08-08.
November 14, 2020
The Decline of the Great Library of Alexandria
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 27 Mar 2019Presented by Ms History. The Great Library was a center of knowledge. Its decline was not the single cataclysmic event that may seem to think, but its slow decline is perhaps, even more tragic. It is history that deserves to be remembered.
This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As images of actual events are sometimes not available, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.
All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Non censuram.
Ms. History Guy is an avid reader and former reference librarian, and reviews around 100 books per year. Feel free to follow her progress or befriend her on Goodreads where she goes by the name “Heidi the Reader”: https://www.goodreads.com/MsHistory
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheHistoryGuy
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.
Awesome The History Guy merchandise is available at:
teespring.com/stores/the-history-guyScript by JCG
#history #thehistoryguy #library
October 18, 2020
QotD: Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal recurrence”
This is exactly why he was not a militant atheist in the way we understand the expression today. He felt no need to concern himself with the veracity of Christianity’s claims about the afterlife, something we cannot be sure about. He seldom railed against the theological pretensions of Christianity or the absurdity of religion because to him the only thing that mattered was how religion affected us. He objected to Christianity because he saw it as nihilist and life-negating. It taught people to be meek, humble and to accept their lot. Nietzsche was an empiricist in that he wanted people to fulfil their life in the here and now, something that Christianity was hostile to.
Yet Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence belongs strangely to the realm of metaphysics and dualism. Its fatalism and determinism contradicts Nietzsche’s exhortation for each of us to become our own masters and to become who we truly are. While he did not believe in free will, he did believe that the Übermensch could harness and master the forces of his inner “will to power”. Contrarily, the eternal recurrence condemns us to history and supernatural fate. The notion of “eternal recurrence” reeks too much of his youthful dalliance with Schopenhauerian metaphysics.
This is perhaps why Nietzsche rarely mentioned it, and made even less effort to explain it in the books published in his lifetime. It seems too much of a flight of fancy, and the only time he spoke of it in all seriousness is when he recounted one day in August 1881, when walking in the Swiss mountains, when he had a kind of strange, rapturous religious experience – the day when the notion of “eternal recurrence” came to him in the first place.
Patrick West, “Nietzsche and the struggle against nihilism”, Spiked, 2018-08-03.
October 17, 2020
History Hijinks: Greek Wise Guys
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 16 Oct 2020When I first studied Ancient Philosophy in college I thought it was engaging and interesting to discuss and whatever, but only years later did I come to appreciate the true hilarity of these Wise-Guys.
SOURCES & Further Reading: Plato’s Dialogues (Apology & Republic), Aristotle’s Ethics, Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen, and when direct sources aren’t available, there’s a bucketload of great write-ups from Stanford: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pr…, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/de…, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ar…, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pl…, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/so…
This video was edited by Sophia Ricciardi AKA “Indigo”. https://www.sophiakricci.com/
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
PATREON: https://www.Patreon.com/OSP
PODCAST: https://overlysarcasticpodcast.transi…
DISCORD: https://discord.gg/kguuvvq
MERCH LINKS: http://rdbl.co/osp
OUR WEBSITE: https://www.OverlySarcasticProductions.com
Find us on Twitter https://www.Twitter.com/OSPYouTube
Find us on Reddit https://www.Reddit.com/r/OSP/
October 16, 2020
“The Art of War” – Wisdom of Sun Tzu – Sabaton History 089 [Official]
Sabaton History
Published 15 Oct 2020Sun Tzu says: “The Art of War is of vital importance to the state. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin.” The Chinese Art of War by Sun Tzu is one of the most influential books in history. Throughout the centuries it would accompany generals, statesmen, and philosophers alike. Those who follow his teachings, who safeguard themselves against defeat and make sure of victory before the battle is fought, will triumph. Those who know everything about themselves and their enemies will achieve supreme excellence.
The Art of War by Sun Tzu Text: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/132/1…
Support Sabaton History on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory
Listen to “The Art of War” on the album The Art of War:
https://music.sabaton.net/TheArtOfWarWatch the Official Live Clip of “The Art of War” here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYoK1…Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShopHosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Brodén, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Community Manager: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Editor: Karolina Dołega
Sound Editor: Marek Kaminski
Maps by: Eastory – https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory
Archive: Reuters/Screenocean – https://www.screenocean.comVisual Sources:
– Pictures of Ming Dinasty courtesy of Yprpyqp from Wikimedia
– Pictures from the period of Opium War courtesy of Massachusetts Institute of Technology © 2010 Visualizing Cultures
– Wellcome Images
– Major National Historical and Cultural Site in China
– Pictures of The Art of War book courtesy of vlasta2, bluefootedbooby on flickr.com
– Metmuseum
– Picture of Eastern Han Calvary courtesy of GaryLee Todd from Wikimedia
– Granger Archive
– Hallwyl Museum
– Nomura Art Museum
– The icons from The Noun Project: Man by vanila, Asian woman by Jaime Serra, Wise Man by Éléonore SabatéAll music by: Sabaton
An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.
© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.
October 13, 2020
QotD: Generalizations
H.L. Mencken, Men versus the Man: A Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H.L. Mencken, Individualist, 1910.
October 12, 2020
QotD: Three lessons on weapons handling in moments of danger
The first and most important of these lessons is this: it all comes down to you.
No one’s finger is on the trigger but your own. All the talk-talk in your head, all the emotions in your heart, all the experiences of your past — these things may inform your choice, but they can’t move your finger. All the socialization and rationalization and justification in the world, all the approval or disapproval of your neighbors — none of these things can pull the trigger either. They can change how you feel about the choice, but only you can actually make the choice. Only you. Only here. Only now. Fire, or not?
A second is this: never count on being able to undo your choices.
If you shoot someone through the heart, dead is dead. You can’t take it back. There are no do-overs. Real choice is like that; you make it, you live with it — or die with it.
A third lesson is this: the universe doesn’t care about motives.
If your gun has an accidental discharge while pointed an unsafe direction, the bullet will kill just as dead as if you had been aiming the shot. “I didn’t mean to” may persuade others that you are less likely to repeat a behavior, but it won’t bring a corpse back to life.
These are hard lessons, but necessary ones. Stated, in print, they may seem trivial or obvious. But ethical maturity consists, in significant part, of knowing these things — not merely at the level of intellect but at the level of emotion, experience and reflex. And nothing teaches these things like repeated confrontation with life-or-death choices in grave knowledge of the consequences of failure.
Eric S. Raymond, “Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun”.
August 5, 2020
Red Toryism, limited government and other Canadian political sinkholes
In his latest article in The Dominion, Ben Woodfinden talks about the political void where most Canadian conservatives keep their notions about what “conservatism” actually means in the Canadian context:
Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.
This passage is from the Red Toryism essay:
Modern Canadian conservatism champions “small government”, seemingly without having any theory of what the state is actually for. Absent such a framework, it is difficult to identify governing priorities let alone to develop a philosophically coherent blueprint for action. When Conservatives get elected, they often have no idea of how to achieve the “fiscal responsibility” they preach. A series of ad hoc actions and policies follow, and the predictable result is failure to roll back the state in any significant or lasting way.
This, predictably, did not please everyone, and in a political landscape where we often still think that the divides between left and right are really about “big” versus “small” government, this was to be expected. But a conservative theory of government needs to escape this paradigm.
While conservatism is a broad tent, one unifying feature should be a commitment to limited government. But limited government is a term that often gets conflated with ideological “small government” that sees most of the modern state as illegitimate, and would eliminate most of it and leave the state to provide just the most minimal night-watchman functions. But small government, while a valid view to hold, is not limited government, and conservative government cannot just be about small government.
Limited government means constitutional government that is accountable and constrained by the rule of law, and while there are aspects of the modern state that need to be reformed, tamed, and limited, conservative government cannot just be about trying (and failing) to shrink the state. Conservatives have too often, I think, adopted the rhetoric of small government, without actually being true believers, and in the process they find it very difficult to actually reform and shape the state because they have put little thought into what government actually ought to be about.
Let me give you an example. Recently my friend Asher Honickman and I wrote a column for the National Post calling for a “parliamentary revival.” One specific and important reform we want to see is an expanded House of Commons to 500 MPs. More MPs would make for better party, and parliamentary government. But multiple people, including well connected conservatives, privately told us that while they think this is a good idea, one reason it won’t happen is because conservatives will just look at it through the lens of more spending of tax dollars on politicians. Instead the conservative impulse is to just try and shrink the size of legislatures to save a little bit of money.
In this case small government ideology actually gets in the way of reforms that would help make government more accountable, and limited. MPs should be held accountable and have their spending and salaries heavily scrutinized, but the cost of 150 more MPs would be nothing in the grand scheme of things.
This misses the point. More MPs would make for more accountable and better parliamentary government, and allow parliament, instead of both the bureaucracy and judiciary to increasingly take over more and more of lawmaking and governing that should be done by elected officials. The choice isn’t between more government or less government, in this case it’s a choice between who you’d rather be governed by; MPs who can scrutinize the government more, legislate with more freedom, and who you can hold to account, versus unelected bureaucrats with minimal oversight and limited accountability to elected officials.
In short, a conservative theory of governance should prioritize limited government, but in some cases this might require an attempt to strengthen (and more spending) on certain parts of government to constrain other parts.
It’s a rare Canadian conservative who’s willing to be quoted as saying that any part of human life is not automatically part of the remit of the federal government … how do you carve a “limited” government philosphy out of that?
QotD: Responsibility
The sort of thing I mean is when a British Conservative Party politician says, perhaps to a room full of people who, like me, take the idea of personal liberty very seriously: Yes, I believe, passionately, in personal liberty. The politician maybe then expands upon this idea, often with regard to how commercial life works far better if people engaged in commerce are able to make their own decisions about which projects they will undertake and which risks they will walk towards and which risks they will avoid. If business is all coerced, it won’t be nearly so beneficial. We will all get poorer. Yay freedom.
But.
But … “responsibility”. We should all have freedom, yes, but we also have, or should have, “responsibility”. Sometimes there then follows a list of things that we should do or should refrain from doing, for each of which alleged responsibility there is a law which he favours and which we must obey. At other times, such a list is merely implied. So, freedom, but not freedom.
The problem with politicians talking about responsibility is that their particular concern is and should be the law, law being organised compulsion. And too often, their talk of responsibility serves only to drag into prominence yet more laws about what people must and must not do with their lives. But because the word “responsibility” sounds so virtuous, this list of anti-freedom laws becomes hard to argue against, even inside one’s own head. Am I opposed to “responsibility”? Increasingly, I have found myself saying: To hell with it. Yes.
I have often been similarly resistant to the language of Christianity, of the sort that dominates what is being said in churches around the world today. How many times in history have acts of tyranny been justified by the tyrant saying something like: We must all bear our crosses in life, and here, this cross is yours. “God is on my side. Obey my orders.” The truth about the potential of life to inflict pain becomes the excuse to inflict further pain.
Brian Micklethwait, “Jordan Peterson on responsibility – and on why it is important that he is not a politician”, Samizdata, 2018-03-30.
August 4, 2020
QotD: Epicureans are not hedonists
Many people consider that a fair summary of the Epicurean philosophy, named for its founder, the Athenian philosopher Epicurus who lived from 341-270 B.C., a few generations after Plato. It is a natural mistake. After all Epicurus did say that “Pleasure is the starting-point and goal of living blessedly.”
A common Greek word for pleasure is “hedone,” whence our word “hedonism.” A hedonist, we know, is someone who devotes himself to sensual pleasure. Add that to the fact that Epicureanism is a deeply materialistic philosophy — “all good and bad,” Epicurus says, “consists in sense experience” — and it is easy to see why people often conclude that Epicureanism advocates sensual abandon.
Easy, but mistaken.
For in fact, Epicureanism is a deeply ascetic philosophy. It preaches the gospel of pleasure. But it defines pleasure in such a way that no hedonist worth his salt would embrace it.
A hedonist is someone devoted to pleasure in the positive sense: he seeks to gratify his senses.
An Epicurean is devoted to pleasure in the negative sense: he seeks to avoid pain. “We do everything we can,” Epicurus wrote, “for the sake of being neither in pain nor terror.”
It is a melancholy fact that the human frame, while capable of great joy and pleasure, is susceptible to even greater pain and misery. The pleasures afforded us are delicate blossoms; the pains we are susceptible to are like a raging wildfire in comparison. Epicurus and his followers took note of this fact. Indeed, it was a fact that mesmerized their imaginations.
Epicurus says that pleasure is the goal of life. But what he taught was immunity to pain. “The removal of all feeling of pain,” he wrote, “is the limit of the magnitude of pleasures.” There was a core of common sense about the Epicurean approach to life. He advised his followers to live simple, healthy lives, to shun extravagances of all sorts. Of course, that is something many philosophers, indeed many friends and parents, would also advise. There is nothing distinctively Epicurean about the injunction to live simply and soberly.
There are three things distinctive about Epicureanism. One is its identification of pleasure with the absence of pain. Another is its emphasis on sense experience as the ultimate reality. The third is its identification of tranquillity as the aim or goal of life. (The Greek word is “ataraxia,” i.e., not troubled, not disturbed: note the privative character of the Epicurean ideal.)
If it is to succeed, Epicureanism must deliver us not only from physical pain but also from anxiety and mental anguish. The prospect of death, Epicurus knew, upset many people. Hence he and his followers expended a great deal of effort trying to remove the sting, the fear, from the prospect of death.
Epicurus offered two things to battle the fear of death: an attitude and an argument. The attitude was one of mild contempt: the right sort of people, he implies, do not get in a tizzy about things, not even about death. The argument is equally compelling. “Get used to believing,” he says, “that death is nothing to us.”
Roger Kimball, “Coronavirus, Flynn and Epicureanism”, American Greatness, 2020-05-02.
