I originally redesigned this site for my short stories, pictures, artwork, poems, and erotic
stories and photos, occasional essays on music and art. However this site has evolved into a personal blog. I use it for some of the things I just mentioned, but the primary purpose of this blog is now to record various events in my life and the lives of people close to me. I still use this site
for journaling and my more personal stories.
I still plan to include wild
topics that few other blogs would deal with. I also like to use satire.
I still write
books and much of what I write for those books will appear here. I will also
use this site to promote books I have already written and will occasionally
present excerpts from those books here.
I
used to write under the name សតិវ អតុ. Now, since I am retired and not worried about getting fired I can use my real name, SJ Otto. That is short for Steve John Otto. The old name printed there is Steve Otto in the Khmer alphabet or Sanskrit.
There is no main theoretician for this
site. Originally it was the ancient philosopher Aristippus/ Ἀρίστιππος. Even though there is no theoretician here, I still appreciate some of Aristippus' ideas.
The Cyrenaic school of philosophy is a major influence on
my basic philosophy of life. I am a Maoist (first) and an Epicurean (second).
But there are other important influences on my philosophy of life and the school of Cyrenaic
The Cyrenaic school was not as sophisticated as
Epicureanism. In fact the Cyrenaic school died out after about a hundred years
while Epicureanism became a philosophy that has continued throughout history
with some followers in today's world.
So why do I need Cyrenaics? Because they had a major
difference over the concept of pleasure. The Epicureans believe that pleasure
is the absence of pain. But the Cyrenaics saw it quite differently:
"The removal of
pain, however, which is put forward in Epicurus, seems to them not to be
pleasure at all, any more than the absence of pleasure is pain. For both
pleasure and pain they hold to consist in motion, whereas absence of pleasure
like absence of pain is not motion, since painlessness is the condition of one
who is, as it were, asleep."[1]
I agree totally that pleasure needs a form of motion--it has
to be something. If a person gets pleasure from bowling, the are only getting
pleasure while they are bowling, not before or after. They may get pleasure
from talking about it, afterwards, or anticipating it, but the real pleasure is
an activity. Likewise a person who likes to drink alcohol is having that
pleasure for a specific time. They start drinking, they are in the process of
drinking and the drinking comes to an end. Usually pleasure is an action and it
eventually comes to an end. That differs a great deal from simply avoiding
pain.
However Epicurus and many other philosophers also believed
that pleasure could come from the act of reasoning. This could be interpreted
as believing that philosophy itself can create its own pleasure:
"When we
say, then, that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of
the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality—as we are understood to do by some,
through ignorance, prejudice, or willful misinterpretation. By pleasure we mean
the absence of pain in the body and trouble in the soul. It is not an unbroken
succession of drinking feasts and of revelry, not sexual love, not the enjoyment
of sturgeon and other delicacies of a luxurious table that produce a pleasant
life; it is sober reasoning—searching out the grounds for what we accept and
what we reject, and banishing those beliefs through which greatest tumults take
possession of the mind."[2]
I also believe this has relevance. The accumulation of intelligent
and useful ideas can produce pleasure. At the same time I feel a need to make
the world a better place. That is where Epicureanism differs from Marxism and
Maoism (a variety of Marxism):
"The philosophers
have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change
it."
-Karl Marx[3]
And that clashes with Epicureanism:
"Nothing is so
productive of happiness as to abstain from meddling, from engaging in difficult
undertakings, and from forcing yourself to do something beyond your power. For
all this throws your nature into turmoil. We must free ourselves from the
prison of business and politics."[4]
On the other hand Epicurus said that making friends was more
important than the gain of material things, so he was not telling people to
selfishly isolate themselves and strive for material possessions;
"Of all the
things that wisdom tells us can insure happiness throughout life, by far the
most important is the acquisition of friends. The same conviction that inspires
confidence that nothing we have to fear is eternal or even of long duration,
also enables us to see that even in our limited life nothing enhances our
security so much as friendship. All friendship is desirable in itself, even
though it stems from a need for help."[5]
So I don't take these philosophies dogmatic to the point
where I hang on every word. There are things about all these philosophies
that I don't always agree with. But for Marxism or Maoism—changing the world, I
have other blogs for that.
This site is mainly for personal stories. There is always
some overlap. I will occasionally discuss politics here, but mainly this is for
stories about the less political side of life. And as Mao Zedong said:
"Throughout
history, new and correct things have often failed at the outset to win
recognition from the majority of people and have had to develop by twists and
turns in struggle. Often correct and good things have first been regarded not
as fragrant flowers but as poisonous weeds. Copernicus' theory of the solar
system and Darwin
Comments on religion are also involved here. I don't hold to
any "faith" such as Christianity. Most of the philosophies I follow
don't believe in religion, god/gods or the afterlife. Epicurus did not deny the
existence of the gods, but he felt they had little to do with humanity. All
these philosophies tell us to concern ourselves with this world and not to
worry about life in the next (should it exist at all and most of these philosophers
don't believe in the after-life).
We will live the best we can for our present lives. We have
no guarantee there is anything else to experience. We will seek pleasure and friendships
but not excesses.
[1]
Diogenes Laertius/ Διογένης Λαέρτιος, Lives
of the Eminent Philosophers, (The Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge ) 2000, p. 219
[3]
Karl Marx, Theses
On Feuerbach: Thesis 11 (1845),
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm#018
[4]
Epicurus, ibid.
[5]
Epicurus, http://www.humanistictexts.org/epicurus.htm#Happiness
[6] Mao Zedong/毛泽东, On "Let a
Hundred Flowers Blossom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend," Five Essays on Philosophy, (Foreign Language Press, Peking)1977, p.
114.
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