Quiz Sep19

Aristotle, Epicurus, & meaning... & today we sign up for midterm group reports. At least one member of each group also needs to sign up as an author, to post a project summary, supplemental readings or links to readings, and a quiz.

Lenoir, Happiness: A Philosopher's Guide 1-3 (Aristotle, Epicurus). WATCH: Aristotle on Flourishing: How to Live a Good Life? LISTEN: Aristotle & flourishing; How Do I Live a Good Life? (HIp); Epicurus (SoL);Epicurus on Happiness LISTEN:Epicureanism (IOT); Epicurus the greatest philosopher? (IOT); Terence Irwin on Aristotle's Ethics (PB).

1. Are curiosity and awareness both prerequisite to living happily and well, according to Lenoir?

2. Which French essayist said happiness is amplified when we take deliberate delight in it?

3. What aspect of pleasure have post-Darwinian biologists emphasized?

4. For Aristotle, happiness requires what tandem quest?

5. Who said 90% of happiness depends on health?

6. How did Viktor Frankl differ from Freud on the question of meaning?

Supplemental quiz questions?

DQ:

• Do you agree with Epicurus that "we must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness," and with Lenoir that "we really can be happier if we think about our lives, if we work on ourselves" etc., or do you side with Camus who said if you look for happiness you'll never find it? Can they all be right?
• If there's no "recipe" for happiness, can you still be a good and happy "cook"?
• Do you like Lenoir's "rambling" approach to happiness? (8)
• What do you think of Flaubert's dismissal of our subject? (9)
• COMMENT: "If philosophy doesn't help to make us happy... what's the use of philosophy?" (10)
• If you've been watching Ken Burns' Vietnam: In view of the widespread contemporary interest in Buddhism as a happiness philosophy, what do you make of the Vietnamese monks who immolated themselves in protest of the Diem regime and the war?
• COMMENT: "I love life too much to wish to be permanently happy." (11)
• Is it easier for you to say what makes you happy, than to say what happiness is? What's the difference? (13)
• What are your biggest fears? How high do fear of gods and death rank on your list? Are you comforted by the thought that your particular "agglomeration of atoms" will disperse at death? Does the Epicurean solution work for you? (24)
• Do you know anyone happily lacking in curiosity and awareness? Do you ever wish you were less susceptible to living the examined life, a little more like Gump or Pooh but not like Trump? (See #4)
• What do you do to amplify your own happiness? Is there a danger of changing it, in the very process of observing and savoring it?
• Comment on Darwin's statement: "The vigorous, healthy, and happy survive and multiply."
• (Related to #1) Do philosophers of happiness necessarily import an intellectualist bias into their work when they insist on the role of reason, reflection, contemplation etc. as indispensable to real flourishing?
• What priority, and how much time, do you give to the pursuit of mens sana in corpore sano? (26)
• Can you imagine surviving an ordeal like the holocaust with your capacity for happiness intact?

Please suggest additional DQs.

Podcast - Lenoir's Happiness... Podcast - Back to the garden
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How Honesty Could Make You Happier

I’ve been keeping an honesty journal for the past several months. With honesty much in the news lately — you might even say honesty is having a cultural moment — I wanted to reflect on my own. My 6-year-old daughter once told me that telling the truth made her feel “gold in her brain.” Could upping my personal honesty light up a pleasure center in my own brain?

My plan was to jot down different instances throughout the day where I had to make a choice about honesty and notice how it felt.

The day I started the journal, the same 6-year-old daughter asked me during her bath if the cat really went to sleep last year, and if that actually meant that I had killed him. I rinsed her hair and sighed, wondering if I should wait to start this honesty project until my children were grown. But I braved it and told her that yes, I had made the choice for him to die, because he was suffering and I wanted him to be at peace. She lost interest about halfway through my explanation, which was O.K. with me.

It struck me that the choice to lie or be honest was often a choice between two equally undesirable things. Telling my daughter the truth did not make me happier, but lying wouldn’t have either.

 

A bigger opportunity arose with my 8-year-old son. Though he didn’t know anything about the journal, after a few weeks, he seemed to open up in a new way, asking me things he was too embarrassed or scared to ask before, like what the word “pimp” meant and why people kill themselves. In fact, one of my biggest takeaways was that we shouldn’t lie to children when they are asking us about grown-up words or ideas — otherwise, they will just ask Siri. If it’s between YouTube and me to explain prostitution, I pick me... Continue reading the main story

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Postscript. Up@dawn 9.16.15-
Back to the garden
Podcast

Good classes again yesterday, continuing to explore what's good about the good life ofeudaimon in CoPhi, and in Happiness wondering if it's as easy to dispel our instinctive fear of oblivion or a punitive post-existence in a supernatural afterlife as Epicurus said it is.

I'm not the only one, it emerged, who as a small and trusting child was taught and inadvertently terrorized by a bedtime prayer before the age of reason:

"Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take."

Another "aging professor [who] lanents his shrinking brain" has recently noted the abusive aspects of that little rhyme.

I don't blame my parents, who with the best of intentions simply transmitted an old religious meme that's been kicking around unchallenged for eons (or since 1711, allegedly). They didn't talk much about Hell or eternal divine retribution in our home (leaving that unpleasantness to the preacher and Sunday School teachers), nor do I think they thought about it much themselves. And therein lies a huge but non-malicious cultural error of omission that philosophy must rectify.

It was in the name of philosophy that I thus responded as I did to the student who yesterday insisted the error is not that of those who instill fear in their young, but rather of those like Epicurus and me, who would slough it off. It's not unreasonable or irrational, he suggested, to fear a god who just might be crazy enough to commit the innocent children he loves (as George Carlin reminded us) to the flames.

So I testified to my own Epicurean moment, as a youngster, when the whole frightening fable just no longer felt real. The student said a belief that makes you uncomfortable (bit of an understatement, that) might still be true. Yes, I said, but discomfort might be reason enough to explore other worldviews. And, I added, "if there's a retributive god out there, may he strike me down. No, wait: may he strike you down."

It got a laugh, but there's a serious point here. So many believers (and non-believers) are so frequently devastated by life's various natural calamities and moral calumnies, that faith loses all credibility as a shield against punitive bolts from heaven. Heaven loses all credibility as a saving alternative to hell.

And that's why Epicurus and his Garden friends would applaud Professor Dawkins' bus billboard campaign. (Unlike him, though, I think they'd prefer to leave "probably" on the bus.)

I was asked if I agree with Dawkins' rhetorical extremity, in calling religious indoctrination "child abuse." I don't use that language myself, as there seems a crucial distinction between the unwitting harm of much indoctrination and the exceptionless malevolent harm of assault and torture. My parents were no torturers. Most religious fundamentalists are not torturers. But they do inflict harm, in the form of an unfounded fear. I forgive them, they know not what they do.

And I say, with Epicurus: Relax, and enjoy. We are stardust, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden. Park that bus right here.