I've been going through a total existential crisis for awhile. I'm terrified of death. Both for myself and my loved ones. And because of this pandemic, every time I feel weird I get a panic attack. I've run through every single religion desperate to find some way to find peace with my mortality, but nothing felt right. Is there any philosophy out there that can help me find peace?
I may be stretching a bit here, but Epicurus laid out the methodology for empirical study over a thousand years before the European renaissance and enlightenment revived his thinking.
He was right that life came from a type of natural evolution. He was mostly right that diseases were spread by something tiny spread by filth and touching. He was onto something with atomism, in that it was more accurate than any of his peers to actual physics. He was right that the soul and consciousness emerged from material atoms in movement. He even predicted a bit of quantum science when he said that atoms were not deterministic, but had some kind of random swerve and eschewed the crude materialism of his predecessors.
He also taught slaves and women as equal in his garden, didn’t own slaves, taught for free, was volcel but orgies were probably going on at his 24/7 garden parties.
Marx wrote his thesis on him. The dude was certainly onto something. Way ahead of his time, millennia ahead of his time
Edit: Also he also called laws of thermodynamics. He believed all atoms that exist have always existed and will always exist, and therefore believed matter could not be created or destroyed but only rearranged. He didn’t know about the Big Bang, but he did get some of the big picture correct
wow, and yet it seems like he is barely taught in universities since undergrads are only dimly aware of him as a contemporary of Plato and not much else. Would be interesting to learn why he didnt get more recognition and academic prestige to be studied alongside Plato and Aristotle.
Well for one 90% of his work is lost because it was destroyed by Roman Christians who deemed it heathen. What we know of Epicurus is often in short epistles or secondhand from his followers. Cicero devotes a few chapters to him but really strawmans him and is quite uncharitable. The elite of Athens were quite hostile to his thinking, which was mostly to not own slaves, do the minimum required for content conditions and then gain friendships. Those things made it quite the punching bag for the government and the aristocracy, which preferred Plato.
Ah, the base-superstructure relationship strikes again lol