Slagn Farsescu (Epicureanism and στέρεσις)
excerpted from interview in Pancevo, Serbia - 2010
Int. - Can you explain your theory of
Epicureanism/Positivism that you have established in a number of books and
articles on Greek Philosophy?
SF - The basic thesis is that if one can not believe in
truth and goodness one believes ultimately in pleasure. Pleasure is to the Epicurean what truth and
goodness is to the Platonist. The
pursuit for the Platonist is not necessarily pleasurable.
Int. - They are opposed?
Or mutually exclusive?
SF - The Platonist is also a partial Epicurean, their
pleasure is often gained through the pursuit or at least the acknowledgment of
an objective truth and goodness. It is a
different type of pleasure, however, and has become exceedingly rare as the
pleasure principle and the divine economy in the modern world has moved more
and more to material gain and interests.
The world of ideas has been eclipsed.
The people running even places like Harvard in America are now from the
business world, not from the Academy. The Platonist would say that you can not
obtain this goal, perfect goodness and truth, the kalon in Greek. It is an ideal, inspiration, but can not be
subjectified. In this way Heidegger was
a Platonist, his concept of ἀλήθεια.
Int. - You wrote somewhere that you came to the idea of
ποστέρεσις (Posteresis) and στέρεσις (Stereisis) from the lawn mower. Is this true?
SF - In some way, they were ideas brewing for some time but
Heidegger writes in the beginning of the lecture from the early 30s that Plato
used allegory because our sense of things never quite approaches the truth
closely enough. An image can actually
get closer to ideas than words maybe.
And in this way the lawn mower had this affect. It is the idea of transgression really, that
the transgression is not enjoyable unless it is shared, unless the act and the
victim of the act is not made evident in some way. So I was living, teaching at a small college
in the rural United States and I had this terrible lawn mower and I would be
out trying to mow this rather large and absurd lawn in front of this very
modest house. And I noticed as soon as I
would start up the neighbors would pull out their enormous riding lawn mowers,
like small tractors really. And I think
they really enjoyed this, showing off their toy, using this toy, but really
using this toy in the face of this other toy, this tool in the face of this
other tool, me. And then one day one of
the neighbors offered to mow my lawn for a small fee with his riding
mower. I no longer had to push my mower
around the yard. And I noticed the
neighbors didn't mow as much, at hours when I would see them mowing, I took
their joy of mowing out of them a little by not struggling with my mower. And wealth I think is like this. If it can not be related to lesser wealth or
even greater wealth then it is really meaningless. But this in a way, this kind of minor
schadenfreude really has a lot to do
with Epicureanism vs Platonism.
Someone with a larger mind in pursuit of greater things in
life would have other things to worry about or get joy out of something other
than the relationship between the larger and smaller mower. But this is what the immediate sterility of Epicurean
positivism does, it makes mountains of joy out of very limited mole hills. And then this becomes systematic. So at the highest level of the politeia you
have this very small sense and mentality at work. And why not?
If there is no thought beyond today, if there is no Posterity beyond the
yard, then what is meaningful is only this interchange between yourself, the
relation of yourself and those around you.
And why would this not become saturated with schadenfreude?
-Int. - But the argument is that it delimits progress.
SF - Absolutely. I think you could probably make the argument
that great civilizations were selfishly motivated for Posterity. They were concerned with legacy and this
concern compared them eventually to other civilizations which in turn led to
deeper thinking. Even our science and
technology today is very temporal, fully in Steresis. It serves immediate reward. And the economy of course is based on more
and more immediate gratification, down to milliseconds. In the positivist center we live in,
everything seems to be driven by action, but it is thought that precludes
everything. This is what Heidegger was
getting at when he was looking into ἀλήθεια, un-hiddenness, as the early Greek
- pre-Plato; pre-Aristotle; pre-Western conception of truth - not as something
correct but as uncovering an opening, and this has to be ongoing because it
continually hides itself through time.
Cultures have to be very careful of their relationship with Chronos.