{"id":5045,"date":"2017-11-11T04:30:09","date_gmt":"2017-11-11T04:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/11\/11\/the-epicurean-cure\/"},"modified":"2017-11-11T04:30:09","modified_gmt":"2017-11-11T04:30:09","slug":"the-epicurean-cure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/11\/11\/the-epicurean-cure\/","title":{"rendered":"The Epicurean Cure"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Here is Epicurus as quoted by Pierre Hadot in a book I highly recommend, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault <\/em>(Blackwell 1995, p. 87):<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

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We must concern ourselves with the healing of our own lives.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 He proposes a TETRAPHARMAKOS, a four-fold healing formula:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

 God presents no fears, death no worries. And while good is readily attainable, evil is readily endurable.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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This strikes me as just so much whistling in the dark. How can one be so cocksure that physical death is the annihilation of the self? Shakespeare's Hamlet, in his soliloquy, saw the difficulty:<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

              To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
               <\/span>For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
               <\/span>When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
               <\/span>Must give us pause . . . .<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

And is evil "readily endurable"? See for yourself whether that proposition stands up to a close reading of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago<\/em> or any other catalog of human horrors.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Hellenistic systems, the systems of late antiquity (Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism), despite their riches and insights offer us no real solution to the human predicament, a fact of which Augustine was well aware.<\/span><\/p>\n

Whether or not there is a cure, man cannot be his own doctor.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\nRelated articles<\/legend>\n
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<\/a>Philosophy as a Way of Life | New Acropolis Library<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here is Epicurus as quoted by Pierre Hadot in a book I highly recommend, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Blackwell 1995, p. 87):  We must concern ourselves with the healing of our own lives.  He proposes a TETRAPHARMAKOS, a four-fold healing formula:  God presents no fears, death no worries. And … Continue reading “The Epicurean Cure”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-human-predicament","category-spiritual-exercises"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5045\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}