"How malicious philosophers can be! I know of nothing more venomous than the joke that Epicurus made at the expense of Plato and the Platonists: he called them 'Dionysiokolakes'. Literally and primarily, this means 'flatterers of Dionysus', that is, the tyrant's appendages and toadies; but it also suggests: 'They are all actors, there is nothing genuine about them' (for the term 'Dionysioklax' was a popular term for actor). And that last part is the really malicious remark which Epicurus hurled against Plato: the theatricality which Plato, along with his pupils, deployed so well, the way they set themselves in the scene, things Epicurus did not understand. Epicurus, the old schoolmaster from Samos, sat tucked away in his little garden in Athens and wrote three hundred books—out of fury and ambition against Plato—who knows?
It took a hundred years until Greece came to realize who this garden god Epicurus was.
Did they realize?"
I chose Nietzsche as my modern Epicurian for several reasons that I will hopefully get to explicate more fully on Wednesday. But here is the basic run-down:
Materialism: Nietzsche denies the existence of morality. He sees it as culturally relative, arbitrary, and fabricated. What he does see as real is the physical world. In place of morality, Nietzsche offers psychology "the queen of the sciences", and believes that the "will to power" is what individuals should use to guide their actions. Nietzsche believes that existence, action, reality take precedence over the absurd language games that many other philosophers liked to play.
Ethics: Nietzsche's ethics are, in a way, a reinterpretation of hedonism. Although very different from Epicurus' version, it is nevertheless concerned with conquering and gaining pleasure through power. All in all, it's highly egoistic.
Hatred of Stoicism:"So you want to live 'according to nature?' Oh, you noble Stoics, what a fraud is in this phrase! Imagine something like nature, profligate without measure, indifferent without measure, without purpose and regard, without mercy and justice, fertile and barren and uncertain at the same time, think of indifference itself as power — how could you live according to this indifference? Living — isn't that wanting specifically to be something other than this nature? Isn't living assessing, preferring, being unfair, being limited, wanting to be different? And assuming your imperative to 'live according to nature' basically amounts to 'living according to life' — well how could you not? Why make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be?"
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