Late-1960s communal retreat was judged escapist exactly as fourth-century Epicureanism was
Evidence
For those of us too young to remember firsthand the intellectual and moral quagmire of the late 1960s, this attitude can easily sound irresponsible or escapist. In fact, fourth-century Greece passed much the same judgment on the school of Epicurus, whose students avoided public service and chose to live in obscurity. One of the school’s harshest critics was Epictetus. Like other Stoics, he prized civic duty, and he thought the Epicureans needed to get real: “In the name of Zeus, I ask you, can you imagine an Epicurean state?…The doctrines are bad, subversive of the State, destructive to the family…Drop these doctrines, man. You live in an imperial State; it is your duty to hold office, to judge uprightly” The Epicureans’ rebuttal might have been similar to Houriet’s: They were changing themselves first. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 174
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to Odell’s broader defensive project in this book: showing that withdrawal-style living has a long lineage of being accused of escapism, which she will then complicate. Also parallels the history-of-retreat literature. — connects to: Epicurus pioneered communal retreat as anti-city philosophy — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 144; Even Epicurean retreat was framed as self-change for a new world, not mere selfishness
- QUESTION: The analogy to Epicurus gets used twice in this chapter — worth checking how Odell uses it to frame today’s attentional retreat as a defensible Epicurean move, or whether she distances herself from it.
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Epicurus pioneered communal retreat as anti-city philosophy — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 144; Even Epicurean retreat was framed as self-change for a new world, not mere selfishness