John Gray: belief

Transcript context

…If someone set their views up to minimize disappointment in life, do you think their resulting philosophies and attitudes would be much different from yours, or the same? I don’t see myself as minimizing disappointment. I think that’s a rather miserable go in life. It’s better to be regularly disappointed and intensely disappointed, if what you’re being disappointed in was worth pursuing and experiencing. Many love affairs lead to disappointment, but if you decide then, “I’m not going to have them,” I think that’s a rather miserable view of life, which, by the way, is one of my objections to traditional Epicureanism and Lucretianism. Traditional Epicureanism and Lucretianism aim for happiness by setting the bar so low that you can’t be disappointed. If you look, and if you think of what’s absent in Lucretius’s view of the good life or in Epicurus’s view, what’s absent? Anything that causes turbulence of mind. Lucretius says explicitly, “You shouldn’t fall in love with other people. Have lots of promiscuous sex. Find some slaves, get it out of your system, so you don’t need to fall in love. If you don’t fall in love, you won’t then be unhappy, because when you fall out of love . . .” He says that explicitly. In a gentler way, it also underlies Epicurus’s philosophy. Science is not valued, remember, in Epicurus, except as a means for improving the comfort of life. There isn’t a scientific quest, a semi-mystical scientific quest, as there was in Europe at the start of the Scientific Revolution. Most of the leaders of the Scientific Revolution were astrologers or mystics. Of course, Newton was a numerologist and a fundamentalist in his reading of the Bible. They all had attached great spiritual and mystical significance to science. Epicurus and Lucretius didn’t. It was just a tool whereby we could be made more comfortable. Highly competitive sports, the virtues of war, the martial virtues — they’re not there either. It’s very minimal. If you think of what an entirely Epicurean world would look like, there’d be no faith or religion because that’s led to masses of — Sure, but that’s you, right?…

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