Ok, first things first. I’ve set us up a new email address and wiki using the vanitas name, we can always change these later.
We are now reachable via:
vanitas@live.co.uk (the password is the same as for the blog)
and
vanitas.pbwiki.com
There’s not much going on there at the moment but i’ll keep playing around until i get the hang of it. Also , I’ve been looking around for some ambient music to set the mood for our web pages but so far found nothing i really like, but theses look like promising sites to dig around in: www.royaltyfreemusic.com and www.estockmusic.com – i’ll keep looking.
And now to the nature of human existence; I’ve read up a little on Epicurus over the internet and this is what i’ve grasped from it so far: part of the human soul is dispersed throughout the human body, very much atomised amongst our corporal matter – indeed even making up part of our corporal matter. It is through these particles of human soul that we develop sensation – sight and touch and so on.
So then, there are three basic human desires/pleasures:
The natural – a desire for health, comfort and general wellbeing.
The natural and unnecessary – that which we merely find pleasant; smells, tastes etc.
The empty – those unattainable desires of human construction, wealth, fame, immortality and so on.
The main purpose of the soul, its route to happiness is to maximise its pleasures and minimise its pains; the empty desires very much being a cause for anxiety and pain and so ultimately misleading and harmful. – All very nice; take pleasure in the little things, happiness is all about moderation and appreciating what you have. Except, as the human soul is physically ingrained into the human body it ceases to exist when we do, there is no greater meaning or purpose to existence. Thus life should be free from worry and repercussions, but also, as this very much sounds like a kind of existential nihilism, where there is no objective right, wrong or valid means for authority; it may not be the best foundation for our project.
“How much you have lost through groundless sorrow, foolish joy, greedy desire, the seductions of society; how little of your life was left for you. You will realise that you are dying prematurely.”
(Seneca, 5 BC – 65 AD)
In the simplest terms Seneca thought that in life we all spend very little time living. In his view there is much less of a moral judgment or even spirituality, in essence we all waste our time in idleness, excessive leisure in which the value of such time is lost due to its abundance, or else we lose time through obsessive preoccupations, in terms of vice as well as material gain or social status. In short we are wasteful with the only commodity that is truly and objectively precocious – our time. It is something that through the pursuit of other perceived gains we spend freely for everyone else’s benefit except our own.
In the same way any concentration on the past is useless and all preoccupation with the future meaningless as it may never happen. “to what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.” For Seneca, the only fair part about good fortune is that it comes and goes and so any happiness built upon fortune is unstable at best. The answer then, is to live in the immediate sensuality and spiritual pleasures of life; obsessive preoccupations over anything represent nothing more than wasted time.
Similar to Epicurus then, in many ways but just a little bit more palatable to conventional thought.
Juan PdR
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