سلام به دوستان زبانشناس.
امروز داشتم نامه اپیکور به یکی از دوستانش رو میخوندم، نامه ای که از خلال سده ها به دست ما رسیده و خیلی خوب و مختصر، فلسفه اپیکور رو توضیح داده. متأسفانه ترجمه ای فارسی از آثار به جا مانده از اپیکور که مستقیم از زبان یونانی انجام شده باشه نداریم و من از ترجمه انگلیسی استفاده کردم. البته یک ترجمه فارسی از روی نسخه انگلیسی هست که متأسفانه سخت خوان است، ولی به هر حال فایل pdf این ترجمه رو در پایان به اشتراک میذارم.
اپیکور، فیلسوف بزرگ یونانی در این نامه به شرح دیدگاهش درباره زندگی می پردازد. اپیکور فیلسوفی ماتریالیست بود و با پیروی از دموکریتوس، معتقد بود که اشیاء از ذراتی به نام اتم ساخته شده اند و این ذرات پس از مرگ پراکنده می شوند. به باور اپیکور، چیزی به نام روح نامیرا و زندگی پس از مرگ وجود ندارد و مرگ چیز ترسناکی نیست و نباید از آن هراسی به دل راه داد (نگاه کنید به پاراگراف second در همین نامه). اپیکور بر این باور است که خدایان وجود دارند، اما در کار آدمیان دخالتی نمی کنند. همچنین نباید باورهای خرافی عامه مردم را به خدایان نسبت داد.
مهم ترین نظریه مطرح شده در این نامه، دیدگاه اپیکور نسبت به لذت است. او لذت را اصل و پایه همه چیز می داند و به همین دلیل فلسفه اپیکور به فلسفه لذت گرایی مشهور است، اما همانطور که خود در این نامه تصریح می کند، مراد وی از لذت عیاشی و افراط گری نیست و بیشتر لذت گرایی سنجیده و معتدل را در کنار ساده زیستی توصیه می کند. اپیکور به همراه دوستانش در باغی در آتن که به باغ اپیکور معروف بود زندگی می کردند و با هم به بحث و گفت و گو می پرداختند و از ساده ترین چیزهایی که زندگی به آنها داده بود لذت می بردند. اپیکور در سال ۲۷۰ پیش از میلاد چشم از جهان فروبست.
آشنایی با فلسفه خوشبختی اپیکور:
فلسفه اپیکور بسیار زیبا و کاربردی است. متأسفانه با ظهور مسیحیت این فلسفه به حاشیه رفت، اما از دوران رنسانس به این سمت توجه به اپیکوریسم رو به افزایش بوده. در فرهنگ خود ما هم دیدگاه اپیکوری در شاعرانی مانند رودکی، خیام و حافظ به روشنی دیده می شود. کتاب مائده های زمینی نوشته آندره ژید نیز بر پایه رویکرد اپیکوری نوشته شده است.
قصد داشنم تنها بریده هایی از نامه اپیکور را بیاورم، ولی نکات مطرح شده در آن به قدری ژرف و مهم اند که تصمیم گرفتم تمام نامه را که چندان طولانی هم نیست در اینجا قرار بدم. امیدوارم که همه ما توصیه های این حکیم بزرگ را در زندگی به کار ببندیم و زندگی خوب و خوشی را تجربه کنیم.
Letter from Epicurus to
MenoeceusNo one should postpone the study of philosophy when he is young, nor should he weary of it when he becomes mature, because the search for mental health is never untimely or out of season. To say that the time to study philosophy has not yet arrived or that it is past is like saying that the time for happiness is not yet at hand or is no longer present. Thus both the young and the mature should pursue philosophy, the latter in order to be rejuvenated as they age by the blessings that accrue from pleasurable past experience, and the youthful in order to become mature immediately through having no fear of the future. Hence we should make a practice of the things that make for happiness, for assuredly when we have this we have everything, and we do everything we can to get it when we don’t have it.
THE PRECONDITIONS OF HAPPINESS
I. You should do and practice all the things constantly recommended to you, with the knowledge that they are the fundamentals of the good life. First of all, you should think of deity as imperishable and blessed being (as delineated in the universal conception of it common to all men), and you should not attribute to it anything foreign to its immortality or inconsistent with its blessedness. On the contrary, you should hold every doctrine that is capable of safeguarding its blessedness in common with its imperishability. The gods do indeed exist, since our knowledge of them is a matter of clear and distinct perception; but they are not like what the masses suppose them to be, because most people do not maintain the pure conception of the gods. The irreligious man is not the person who destroys the gods of the masses but the person who imposes the ideas of the masses on the gods. The opinions held by most people about the gods are not true conceptions of them but fallacious notions, according to which awful penalties are meted out to the evil and the greatest of blessings to the good. The masses, by assimilating the gods in every respect to their own moral qualities, accept deities similar to themselves and regard anything not of this sort as alien.
Second, you should accustom yourself to believing that death means nothing to us, since every good and every evil lies in sensation; but death is the privation of sensation. Hence a correct comprehension of the fact that death means nothing to us makes the mortal aspect of life pleasurable, not by conferring on us a boundless period of time but by removing the yearning for deathlessness. There is nothing fearful in living for the person who has really laid hold of the fact that there is nothing fearful in not living. So it is silly for a person to say that he dreads death—not because it will be painful when it arrives but because it pains him now as a future certainty; for that which makes no trouble for us when it arrives is a meaningless pain when we await it. This, the most horrifying of evils, means nothing to us, then, because so long as we are existent death is not present and whenever it is present we are nonexistent. Thus it is of no concern either to the living or to those who have completed their lives. For the former it is nonexistent, and
the latter are themselves nonexistent.Most people, however, recoil from death as though it were the greatest of evils; at other times they welcome it as the end-all of life’s ills.
The sophisticated person, on the other hand, neither begs off from living nor dreads not living. Life is not a stumbling block to him, nor does he regard not being alive as any sort of evil. As in the case of food he prefers the most savory dish to merely the larger portion, so in the case of time he garners to himself the most agreeable moments rather than the longest span.
Anyone who urges the youth to lead a good life but counsels the older man to end his life in good style is silly, not merely because of the welcome character of life but because of the fact that living well and dying well are one and the same discipline. Much worse off, however, is the person who says it were well not to have been born “but once born to pass Hades’ portals as swiftly as may be.” Now if he says such a thing from inner persuasion why does he not withdraw from life? Everything is in readiness for him once he has firmly resolved on this course. But if he speaks facetiously he is a trifler standing in the midst of men who do not welcome him.
It should be borne in mind, then, that
the time to come is neither ours nor altogether not ours. In this way we shall neither expect the future outright as something destined to be nor despair of it as something absolutely not destined to be.
THE GOOD LIFE
It should be recognized that within the category of desire certain desires are natural, certain others unnecessary and trivial; that in the case of the natural desires certain ones are necessary, certain others merely natural;
and that in the case of necessary desires certain ones are necessary for happiness, others to promote freedom from bodily discomfort, others for the maintenance of life itself. A steady view of these matters shows us how to refer all moral choice and aversion to bodily health and imperturbability of mind, these being the twin goals of happy living. It is on this account that we do everything we do—to achieve freedom from pain and freedom from fear. When once we come by this, the tumult in the soul is calmed and the human being does not have to go about looking for something that is lacking or to search for something additional with which to supplement the welfare of soul and body. Accordingly we have need of pleasure only when we feel pain because of the absence of pleasure, but whenever we do not feel pain we no longer stand in need of pleasure. And so we speak of pleasure as the starting point and the goal of the happy life because we realize that it is our primary native good, because every act of choice and aversion originates with it, and because we come back to it when we judge every good by using the pleasure feeling as our criterion.Because of the very fact that pleasure is our primary and congenital good we do not select every pleasure; there are times when we forgo certain pleasures, particularly when they are followed by too much unpleasantness.
Furthermore, we regard certain states of pain as preferable to pleasures, particularly when greater satisfaction results from our having submitted to discomforts for a long period of time. Thus every pleasure is a good by reason of its having a nature akin to our own, but not every pleasure is desirable. In like manner every state of pain is an evil, but not all pains are uniformly to be rejected. At any rate, it is our duty to judge all such cases by measuring pleasures against pains, with a view to their respective assets and liabilities, inasmuch as we do experience the good as being bad at times and, contrariwise, the bad as being good.
In addition, we consider limitation of
the appetites a major good, and we recommend this practice not for the purpose of enjoying just a few things and no more but rather for the purpose of enjoying those few in case we do not have much. We are firmly convinced that those who need expensive fare least are the ones who relish it most keenly and that a natural way of life is easily procured, while trivialities are hard to come by. Plain foods afford pleasure equivalent to that of a sumptuous diet, provided that the pains of penury are wholly eliminated. Barley bread and water yield the peak of pleasure whenever a person who needs them sets them in front of himself. Hence becoming habituated to a simple rather than a lavish way of life provides us with the full complement of health; it makes a person ready for the necessary business of life; it puts us in a position of advantage when we happen upon sumptuous fare at intervals and prepares us to be fearless in facing fortune.Thus when I say that pleasure is the goal of living I do not mean the pleasures of libertines or the pleasures inherent in positive enjoyment, as is supposed by certain persons who are ignorant of our doctrine or who are not in agreement with it or who interpret it perversely. I mean, on the contrary, the pleasure that consists in freedom from bodily pain and mental agitation. The pleasant life is not the product of one drinking party after another or of sexual intercourse with women and boys or of the sea food and other delicacies afforded by a luxurious table. On the contrary, it is the result of sober thinking—namely, investigation of the reasons for every act of choice and aversion and elimination of those false ideas about the gods and death which are the chief source of mental disturbances.
The starting point of this whole scheme and the most important of its values is good judgment, which consequently is more highly esteemed even than philosophy. All the other virtues stem from sound judgment, which shows us that it is impossible to live the pleasant Epicurean life without also living sensibly, nobly, and justly and, vice versa, that it is impossible to live sensibly, nobly, and justly without living pleasantly. The traditional virtues grow up together with the pleasant life; they are indivisible. Can you think of anyone more moral than the person who has devout beliefs about the gods, who is consistently without fears about death, and who has pondered man’s natural end? Or who realizes that the goal of the good life is easily gained and achieved and that the term of evil is brief, both in extent of time and duration of pain? Or the man who laughs at the “decrees of Fate,” a deity whom some people have set up as sovereign of all?
The good Epicurean believes that certain events occur deterministically, that others are chance events, and that still others are in our own hands. He sees also that necessity cannot be held morally responsible and that chance is an unpredictable thing, but that what is in our own hands, since it has no master, is naturally associated with blameworthiness and the opposite. (Actually it would be better to subscribe to the popular mythology than to become a slave by accepting the determinism of the natural philosophers, because popular religion underwrites the hope of supplicating the gods by offerings but determinism contains an element of necessity, which is inexorable.) As for chance, the Epicurean does not assume that it is a deity (as in popular belief) because a god does nothing irregular; nor does he regard it as an unpredictable cause of all events. It is his belief that good and evil are not the chance contributions of a deity, donated to mankind for the happy life, but rather that the initial circumstances for great good and evil are sometimes provided by chance.
He thinks it preferable to have bad luck rationally than good luck irrationally. In other words, in human action it is better for a rational choice to be unsuccessful than for an irrational choice to succeed through the agency of chance.Think about these and related matters day and night, by yourself and in company with someone like yourself. If you do, you will never experience anxiety, waking or sleeping, but you will live like a god among men. For a human being who lives in the midst of immortal blessings is in no way like mortal man!
مأخذ ترجمه انگلیسی آثار اپیکور:
The Philosophy Of Epicurus by EpicurusLucretius Carus, TitusStrodach, George K (z-lib.org).pdf (3.2 مگابایت)
ترجمه فارسی نامه اپیکور:
اپیکوروس.pdf (138.9 کیلوبایت)
