Neo-Epicurean Life Hacks

[bennyboy]

In Epicurean epistemology these three natural faculties - aesthesis, pathos, and prolepseis - all provide valid data when this data is correctly interpreted, only misinterpretations can produce error.

This statement borders on religious. If you can't cure your cancer, you weren't praying right. If you can't achieve happiness, you were "misinterpreting the data." Both ways leave intact the apparent integrity of the system of ideas, while completely disregarding the failure of the system to bring good to the person following it.

As for animal desires, Epicurus attempted to demarcate which desires correspond to human needs. Said desires operate using the pleasure/pain mechanism. It is the combination of the empirical evidence, with the observations of what provides pleasure and eases pain, together with the correct use of our cognitive faculties, which determines the extent to follow which kind of desire.

Except that we have an understanding of the goal of those desires, and we can clearly see that they may not result in long-term happiness. Reproduction, for example, is a hedonic risk: death or misfortune of the child is likely to destroy a person's attempts to seek a cessation of suffering, possibly for the rest of that person's lifetime. Not mating, and not having children, can also have a negative effect on one's psychology-- loneliness, regret, boredom, etc. So how is one to escape the suffering inevitably caused by participation in our role as continuers of genetic fitness? Clearly, it is the disengagement of the self from that hedonic feedback mechanism which is required-- not any particular action aimed at "pleasing" the pleasure centers of the brain, so to speak.

Clearly, we are emotionally rewarded by acts which serve genetic fitness. But it is not so clear that in serving the "needs" of genetic fitness, we are ensuring a future of peace and happiness. Epicurus, apparently, didn't understand the principles of evolution.

In this framework, there is no "greater good" than the happiness (e.g., health, flourishing, inner peace, imperturbability) of the individual. You are welcome however to help the people of Africa if this leads to personal fulfilment which outweighs the sacrifices made towards this. Due to human nature as a social animal, if this is how you are constituted: the good of the welfare of these Africans, and the virtue of helping them, thus becomes an instrumental good and instrumental virtue towards your own individual happiness.

What if your house is burning down? Would you be so forgiving if I decided that not running in to save your family would improve my chances of seeing my own again? Sure, sure, nobody gives a shit about little African kids-- they're hardly even people, right? But what if it's someone you think matters?

I do reject the dogmatic approach of Epicurus. I do not claim to promote a universalisable normative ethic. I restrict discussions of the good to "good for the individual" and "good to the individual", and consider discussions of "good in general" to be somewhat nonsense.

Okay, here's the central point, to me. I'm still waiting for a "life hack." So far as I can see, Epicureanism is just another word for normal behavior. We ALREADY seek to minimize pain and maximize happiness. We already observe through life the things that cause pain and the things that reduce it, and change our views as we age (i.e. after sufficient observation).

What I want is advice. How should I live according to the principles that you've described? How should an Epicurean philosophy inform my views, my decisions and my actions? In short-- what is it good for?