Episode 063 - The Perils of Romantic Love (Part 3 - End of Book 4)
Date: 03/26/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1920-episode-sixty-three-the-perils-of-romantic-love-part-3/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Book Four final lines: heredity and resemblance to parents and grandparents (explained via “concealed seeds”); why some couples cannot conceive (seed too thick or thin, or partner incompatibility); the role of diet and sexual position in conception; the prostitutes-vs.-wives passage (which Brown’s 1743 translator refused to render, inserting Dryden’s poetic version instead — the group switches to Munro); and the closing water-drops-on-rock passage on habit generating love. Charles reads.
Discussion covers: Martin on recessive genes as the modern parallel to Lucretius’s “concealed seeds”; Elaine on autoimmune incompatibility and Rh factor as material explanations for partner-specific infertility; modern medical uncertainty about whether sexual position affects conception odds; Dryden vs. Munro vs. Bailey on the wives passage; childbirth mortality in antiquity (worse when physicians arrived, Elaine notes); why the final passage on habit generating attraction raises a Platonic-beauty problem that Lucretius himself may not have fully resolved; and a closing roundtable on whether Lucretius is telling Epicureans to avoid romantic love altogether — the group’s verdict is no, forewarned is forearmed. Cassius references Jefferson’s Head vs. Heart letter as a companion reading.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 63 of Lucretius Today. I’m your host, Cassius, and together with my panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com Forum, we’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’ poem and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. For anyone who is not familiar with our podcast, please check back to Episode 1 for a discussion of our goals and our ground rules. If you have any questions about that, please be sure to contact us at EpicureanFriends.com for more information. In this Episode 63, we will complete Book 4 and at the same time complete our discussion of the Perils of Romantic Love. Now let’s join Charles reading today’s text. Note: the majority of today’s text is from the Munro translation, as we explain after the reading.
Charles: If in the mixing of the seed the female draws in and snatches with sudden force the male seed, the child — if the female seed be prevailing — is like the mother; as it is like the father if his prevails. But those who you observe express jointly the resemblance and mingle the features of both parents are formed equally from the juices of both; for then the mutual ardor of both has justly tempered the conflicting seed, which, raised by the stings of Venus, is sent in due proportion through all the limbs. The success of the battle is equal; neither is victor nor vanquished. It happens sometimes that children are like their grandfathers and resemble the persons of their remote ancestors, because the parents have frequently many seeds concealed and variously mingled in their bodies which preserve the features of the family and are delivered down from one to another. These Venus forms into different figures as the qualities of the seeds require, and represents a complexion, the voice and hair of the progenitors; for these no less arise from proper seeds than the face, the body, or any parts of it. And a female child proceeds partly from the father’s seed, and a male from the mother’s; for the issue always consists of the seed of both, but the greater likeness it bears to the one than to the other, it partakes more than a just proportion of the seed of that sex, which you easily apprehend whether the child be male or female.
Nor do divinities above ever destroy the prolific virtue of the seed, or prevent a man’s being called father by a number of sweet children, or curse him all his life with unfruitful love, as some vainly think, and therefore with much concern stain the altars with the blood of many victims and make them smoke with clouds of incense to implore a blessing upon the showery seed and promote conception — but to no purpose. They tire out the gods and fatigue the oracles; for they are frequently unfruitful because the seed is too thick or too thin. The thin seed will not stain the parts where it was injected but soon dissolves and flows back, and the thick has no effect because it is sent out heavy and condensed, or does not carry home to the mark, or it cannot rightly penetrate the passages, or if it does it is not at all disposed to mix kindly with the female juice. For the harmony of love between the sexes varies widely. Men are more prolific with some women, and women conceive more readily and swell with their burden after the embrace of some men than with others. Many women have been barren in a first and second marriage and been fruitful at last, have borne lusty boys and blessed the family with a sweet offspring, and men after marrying several times without issue have at length found out a wife of a constitution agreeable to their own and supported their old age with many children. Of such great importance is it that seeds may agree and blend with seeds in a way to promote birth, whether the thick comes into contact with the fluid and the fluid with the thick.
And on this point it matters much on what diet life is supported; for by some foods seed is thickened in the limbs and by others again it is thinned and wasted. And what modes the intercourse goes on is likewise of very great moment; for women are commonly thought to conceive more readily after the manner of wild beasts and quadrupeds, because the seeds in this way can find the proper spots in consequence of the position of the body. Nor have wives the least use for effeminate motions; a woman hinders and stands in the way of her own conceiving when thus she acts, for she drives the furrow out of the direct course and path of the share and turns away from the proper spots the stroke of the seed, and thus for their own ends harlots are wont to move, in order not to conceive and lie in childbed frequently, and at the same time to render Venus more attractive to men. This our wives have surely no need of.
Nor is it from the gods or the darts of Venus that a woman of ordinary beauty is sometimes beloved. She often secures the affection by her discreet conduct, by the sweetness of her deportment, and an exactness in the decency of her person, so that a man may spend his life happily with her. To sum it all up, it is custom that reconciles the delights of love; for tread upon anything with constant blows, though ever so slightly, it is overcome at last and crumbles to pieces. Have you not observed how drops of water falling upon a hard stone, by length of time, wear it away?
Cassius: Thank you for reading that today, Charles. And with that we’ve reached the end of Book 4. It’s always been interesting to me how the last line of Book 4 is a question: “Have you not observed how drops of water falling upon a hard stone, by length of time, wear it away?” It always struck me as kind of an unusual conclusion. This is the end of our discussion of the romantic love section, and before we reach some general conclusions about it, let’s discuss the details of today’s text. It’s good that we have a doctor who is female no less to discuss this with us, because there may be a few sections that may not be correct medically.
Elaine: I’m sure I’ll call you away.
Cassius: We should hear from Martin first. Yes. Okay, yeah.
Martin: I mean, of course in the normal case it’s really one-on-one — it’s just that the appearance is dominated depending on one way or the other. But what you correctly observe — that there are concealed seeds carried in humans — this is then something of genes, which do not show up but may show up later in later offspring.
Elaine: And again I will express the same caveat that I have expressed previously: to make this line up with current evidence, you kind of want to end up passing it through a metaphor, and I would resist doing that. But I think the observation is correct — that sometimes you can see resemblances to prior generations in children, and that’s obvious. So he observed that; he was trying to explain it. His explanation itself is not actually correct, but now we would explain some of these things by recessive genes — not by different particles that were somehow concealed. But if you metaphorize it and pass it through that you can make it look closer than it is. I would resist that, but he did make this correct observation about resemblances.
Cassius: Elaine, on that point I would say that you’re probably right to resist metaphorization, at least until you’ve really gone through the detail of what he’s saying and made sure you understand what it is he’s saying. My generalization from it would be that I think there are several sections in what we’ve read today that repeat the same point — that his explanation of why children can resemble their parents or grandparents is interesting, but I think what he’s saying throughout is these things happen without the gods dictating. Especially in the second paragraph, where he makes these points — he’s coming up with a general material process.
Martin: Yeah, yeah, right. And that’s — if you want to call that a metaphor I guess you can, but no, that’s the theme. The theme is not a metaphor. We risk wanting to make the details match and they’re really not exactly right, and it causes us to miss the interesting parts of the details if we do that.
Elaine: I think this is really fascinating that he describes the sex of the child as being from a battle — like the woman wanting a girl, her seeds trying to fight with a man’s for who wins out. It’s really funny.
Cassius: Oh my goodness, Elaine. That may go back to the point about just the last sentence again — these guys are constantly referring to striking and blowing. And that derives from their atomistic viewpoint — they really have got to the point of analyzing everything in terms of billions of balls hitting each other.
Martin: Oh yeah, yeah, good point. And also I still wonder if it has to do with personal experience — seeing things as battles. You can get the impression in the ancient world that everybody’s walking around with a sword and a spear, constantly ready to stab each other. Sometimes that’s right.
Cassius: And maybe that’s true, I don’t know. I think I would love to see his reaction to finding out about the X and Y chromosomes — and that to have a girl you’ve got the sperm with an X chromosome, but it’s coming from the male. That would have changed his model very, very interesting.
Cassius: Anything else in that first paragraph, or there might be more to talk about in the second paragraph, because that’s where he really is talking about saying that this doesn’t arise from the gods?
Cassius: Yeah, I think we could move on to the second one. But this one contains several interesting points — interesting to me — about how some men will have children with some women but not with others, and vice versa. And I don’t know about this thick and thin — I meant to check and see if there’s anything to that. I’ve not heard of it before. That doesn’t mean there isn’t anything to it. But the conception part is interesting because obviously one way to explain what he observed would just be that maybe the woman was with some infertile men and then was with a fertile man and conceived, and vice versa for the man. That’s a simple way to explain it.
Elaine: That would be one way, right. But there can actually be autoimmune reactions that women will have to some men, so that they can reject pregnancies in some cases from an immune reaction — I’ll say autoimmune, it’s just an immune reaction to the pregnancy. And there are some implications about fitness and evolution from differences between the partners and the success of those genetic combinations that may be favoring more variety. That’s a whole area that is out of my professional area — I really don’t know that much about it — but there are some factors other than just being fertile or infertile that have to do with the combination of the partners.
Martin: For some reason my mind turned to blood types and how certain people take the blood of other people more successfully than others.
Elaine: Well yeah. And of course until very recently in human history we couldn’t do anything about things like Rh incompatibility. Until very recently that would not be really a conception issue — that’s further out when you get to the fetal stage. But let’s say an Rh-negative woman has a partner who is Rh-positive, and the pregnancy has Rh-positive from the father. If she has been pregnant before — which can have been an unrecognized pregnancy like a miscarriage she didn’t even know she had — she can have antibodies to that Rh, and later in the pregnancy that will cause an immune reaction against the fetus, which would be fatal except now we give Rhogam, which is antibodies to block her own antibodies against her fetus. But that’s further out. There are other things that can happen earlier, and there can even be cases where you don’t know that you’ve even conceived. Who else has a comment on this section?
Cassius: He’s explaining it again as a material process — right — and throwing in the references to how useless it is to tire out the gods and fatigue the oracles, when in reality the problem is not that the gods have decided not to give that person children, but there are physical reasons for them not having children.
Elaine: Yeah. Zeus is too exhausted that day.
Cassius: Okay. Well, as we move to the next paragraph, we’re starting to have some dietary suggestions, or maybe the absence of dietary suggestions is the problem, because he brings up that diet can affect fertility but then he doesn’t really go into specific suggestions for what you should or should not eat.
Elaine: Yeah, he doesn’t. I mean, if you’re starved — if your body fat drops too low in women, it suppresses ovulation. The evolved basis would probably be that there’s no nutrition to support the fetus, so there’s no point in wasting fertility. There’s a problem with some women who are athletes — if their body fat drops too low, if they want to conceive they have to gain some body fat sometimes.
Martin: Isn’t there a series of sort of traditional herbal recommendations about what people should eat or should not eat in order to improve their sexual productivity? I think that’s probably what he’s talking about here.
Cassius: Oh well, you know, that’s another possibility. And of course that gets back to — I think it’s Jerome who is the church father who says that Lucretius killed himself in a fit of insanity after taking a love potion. So we’re almost kind of talking about that here, although he’s really just talking about what you eat affecting your ability to produce children. And then the position —
Elaine: Okay, so there actually are — I did research this because I remembered you mentioning it was coming up — there is no research to tell us so it doesn’t mean that this is wrong, but there’s no research that says one position makes you more likely to conceive than another. But on several of the standard medical sites like WebMD there are articles by OBs saying — “but it would make sense” — which doesn’t mean that’s the way it is. But you remember, reason is tricky and doesn’t always line up with evidence. It makes sense to them to think that the positions most successful would be those which bring the sperm closest to the cervix, and what he’s describing — what we’d call doggy style — would also often be a position where greater penetration could happen, and so the sperm would be deposited closer to the cervix. Possibly. But we don’t have direct evidence.
Cassius: I’m surprised at that — I would have thought there would have been tons of research on that.
Elaine: Yeah, but everything I’ve read says we don’t have any evidence about that. So somebody needs to do a PhD project. But I’ve also read that there is supposed to be an effect on the sex of the child.
Martin: No, so if the sperm is deposited closer, it’s more likely to get a male fetus?
Elaine: No, I looked that up too and that is unclear — no high-quality research that I was able to find. That’s a common folk understanding, but yeah. And if there’s some reproductive science person who wants to chime in and tell me I’m wrong, that would be awesome. And then the moving around — I think that not moving around is more of a cultural thing, that you’re not supposed to be enjoying it too much. The moving around is more likely to lead to coitus interruptus, and from that perspective it makes sense. But if you’re moving so that the penetration is deeper, then it would be deposited closer to the cervix. And I can’t imagine — if you don’t move maybe you don’t orgasm, and I have read that female orgasm increases the chance of conception because the muscular contractions carry the sperm. So, yeah — I’d be careful with this ancient reproductive science if you’re trying to conceive. Maybe talk to a reproductive specialist and not go by this.
Cassius: We should probably note — and we discussed this before we started recording — that when we read today’s text we read the majority of it from the 1743 Daniel Brown edition, but we should note for people listening that when we got to this section we switched and read the Munro version. Because in the middle of the 1743 translation he inserted a note that said — quote — “I can translate no further; Dryden in his Miscellany goes on in full vigor and keeps up to the original.” And so what the 1743 edition did was to just insert the Dryden translation into his own. And Dryden’s translation is a poetry version and not as literal. So we went to the Munro version for the reading of that particular section. But it’s interesting how this translator considered this particular section of Lucretius to be so — I guess — risque that he did not want to translate it himself and went to allow somebody else.
Martin: And he said “wives have no need to render Venus more attractive to men.” Like — huh. Well, you know, when they do.
Cassius: Oh wow. So I guess what he’s really talking about there is that prostitutes attempt to move more so as to not get pregnant, and I guess if you put the wives comment in context with that, he’s not really saying anything negative — he’s just saying our wives have no need to avoid pregnancy. I don’t know. Let me read what Brown actually says in that last sentence: “But common harlots in conjunction use, / Because ‘tis less their business to conceive than to delight, and to provoke the deed — / A trick which honest wives but little need.” Now see — that’s from Dryden’s poetry version. I guess you don’t like that one?
Elaine: Well, I mean, it’s just not true. And what does “honest” have to do with it?
Cassius: Yeah. That’s probably a really good example of one of these poetry-version guys taking poetic liberties and making it wrong — making it seem kind of juicy but altering the meaning. When you read Munro or Bailey, do you get the same thing? Bailey says: “such motions harlots are wont to make for their own sake, that they be not filled with seed and lie pregnant, and also that the act of love may be more seductive to men. But not of this is seen to be needful for our wives.” You know, so that’s just — it’s not true.
Elaine: And coitus interruptus is not an effective pregnancy prevention method, folks.
Cassius: Yeah, but at that time it was maybe one of the few things available. I think they did have some form of contraceptives back then, but anyway — don’t rely on that.
Elaine: But this whole thing of needing to seduce their partners — that would be to make sex more enjoyable for them. I mean, that’s an issue for longtime partners. If they want to enjoy sex, they actually have to put in some effort. And that’s pretty funny.
Cassius: I see a shade of difference in meaning there. I just don’t like reading the poetic versions because I want to try — and I know it’s dangerous to try to drain out every ounce of meaning from a particular word — but when someone has altered the literal meaning so that the lines will rhyme, I feel like that puts you at a greater distance from the original meaning.
Martin: Well, sure. But these two — Munro and Bailey — definitely say that wives don’t need to seduce their husband. I get that clearly even out of the Dryden version.
Cassius: Well, I think you could read that to focus on the fact that prostitutes don’t want to get pregnant because that takes them out of their occupation for a while. But the second part also says “and also that the act of love may be more seductive to men.” On the other hand — couldn’t you say that a wife doesn’t need to seduce her husband in the same way that a prostitute would, because the wife loves her husband and enjoys having sex without going to the extremes a prostitute might?
Elaine: No, I don’t think so. Judging by the high frequency of nearly celibate marriages after a long time — I’m not putting all this on just women, let me say it’s a two-way street — but if both partners don’t make an effort, it’s going to quit happening. They’ll get bored. That seems to be what happens to people.
Cassius: We certainly need to bring our full panel in for this discussion. Martin, what do you say about that?
Martin: Yeah, I would say not necessarily bored — it’s just we’re busy with other stuff, stressed out, work, and then it just happens that it becomes less often. But if then the wife makes the effort of seducing the husband, this can increase the frequency again, and the other way around of course as well.
Cassius: You know, I’d have to agree with that. I mean, yes — Charles, of course now you’re at 20 years old, but still what do you think?
Charles: Well, I mean, I agree with Martin — things can get in the way and you can forget about it. But if the partners are actually making an effort to seduce each other, isn’t it less likely that you’ll get distracted and decide to watch television instead of having sex? I mean, possibly.
Elaine: And it really is — he is making a contrast like: “wives have no need of effeminate motions” — it just sounds like you don’t even need to move. That does not sound like it would be a whole lot of fun. So nothing about the pleasure of the woman is mentioned here as being important. Don’t women have a need of pleasure?
Cassius: Well, that’s what we brought up a few weeks ago with some of the very soft antiquated misogyny.
Elaine: Well, to me it doesn’t even seem soft — seems pretty glaring.
Cassius: I think maybe perhaps if you were a woman it would strike you differently. I’m finding this particular section and the different translations more interesting because I’m just seeing the possibility that you could read this as being focused on the issue of someone like Memmius — who he’s writing it to — wanting to have a lot of children. You could take the context that Memmius, you’re not going to have any problem having sex with your wife regularly because you want a lot of children. However, that’s not the problem that prostitutes are after — they’re not interested in having your children. So your wife —
Elaine: Cassius, do you realize that childbirth was one of the major causes of death for women back then?
Cassius: Yeah, that would be true. Unrelenting consecutive pregnancies were not something that would have actually appealed to most women.
Elaine: That’s a good point. Something that a woman reading this is probably more likely to be aware of — and y’all didn’t even think about it. Do you know what I’m saying?
Cassius: Go ahead, Martin.
Martin: Yeah, I think this risk of dying from pregnancy — that actually came when the doctors came in, about several hundred years ago. The hand washing certainly did not help. But it was still a significant cause of death for women even before physicians came along.
Cassius: Wait a minute — are y’all saying that childbirth became more dangerous when physicians came in onto the scene? Is that what you’re saying?
Martin: Oh yeah, yeah, that’s true. That’s true.
Elaine: But it is also not true that it was perfectly safe before then — it was much more dangerous back then than it is now. And it’s also — y’all have never been pregnant, I will just say — there are women who really enjoy pregnancy, but for a lot of us it is fairly physically unpleasant. There’s a lot of vomiting and pain. And that’s not modern; that’s just part of it for a lot of us. So without any kind of effort to space out pregnancies, women would be spending most of their time being pregnant rather than having pleasure.
Martin: That’s a good point. And my wife told me the second one — I would have to bear it myself. I tell you — so it didn’t happen.
Charles: One of my girlfriend’s biggest fears is actually dying in childbirth. Yeah, it’s not so likely now, but it’s more common in the US than it is in other developed countries.
Cassius: You know, let me ask this question. I’ve spent some time on this part for several reasons, one of them being the issue of inserting Dryden’s poetry version into the middle of the 1743 edition. And while I don’t think everybody’s agreeing with me that there are significant differences between the poetry version and the narrative version — let me ask this question: why do you think Lucretius went into this detail? Does this add something to his general argument about not relying on the gods?
Elaine: I don’t know that it adds anything to the materialist explanation. The strategies used by prostitutes — maybe it’s just a continuation in his mind of the issue of posture being a major factor in whether you conceive or not.
Cassius: I’m not sure that comparing prostitutes to wives really makes any difference to his general point. So that might be something people talk about when they discuss whether Lucretius deviates from Epicurus — when and if Lucretius adds things of his own into the Epicurean arguments. Potentially this could be something where he’s just going into some additional detail for his own sake. But the general point being, I guess, that what you eat and your posture and the positions you’re in are going to be the mechanistic explanation for whether you conceive or not, and to some extent whether they’re male or female.
Cassius: All right, so we move to the last passage of Book 4. I actually noticed that in the 1743 edition he adds “to sum it all up” in there, but I don’t see that in Munro or Bailey. So our 1743 translator may have been so traumatized by having read that section that his final paragraph also remains slightly altered by that trauma.
Elaine: That’s funny.
Cassius: But what do you think about the last passage? He’s still thinking about beauty, but then he brings it back in the end to the mechanistic explanation of blows — you do not to get drops of water falling on stones after a long course of time scoop a hole in those stones. That’s the summary of his section on romantic love — the final words.
Martin: Yeah, but it’s like that — I can in my experience already confirm this. So if I go often to the same stores, at the beginning some female shop assistants don’t look like anything attractive to me, but just by the habit of seeing her every week over a long period, I noticed several times I developed a crush for the woman. So then —
Cassius: Well, what looks familiar — yeah, right. You’re right. The ordinary then becomes a feature you particularly like about her, whereas before you would not even have considered that feature as attractive. But so here’s the part that to me doesn’t — I don’t know, it’s a little confusing. When you remember that beauty isn’t anything without pleasure — there’s no Platonic notion of beauty here, no belief that there are absolutely beautiful proportions — it almost sounds like this is saying that there’s such a thing as a woman of objectively lesser beauty apart from the eye of the beholder. Whereas really, if you’re taking pleasure in looking at a person, then they are beautiful. So this doesn’t really make super good sense, and I kind of wonder if Lucretius has kind of lost track of what’s going on right here.
Elaine: Yeah, I’m relating.
Charles: Go ahead. If you really wanted to, he would just pull up the argument he made in Book 3 about looking up at the stars and no longer being marveled.
Cassius: Well, that’s actually an example of the contrary — of getting used to something so that you don’t really perceive the beauty of it anymore. So that could happen too. He’s talking about the opposite. I would frame it more as changing your experience of pleasure, so that your appreciation for beauty encompasses your experience with your partner, and you begin to have an experience of pleasure in seeing them that you didn’t have before you knew them. That would make sense. But to say they were — as this is almost implying — objectively less beautiful, that doesn’t go with the rest of the philosophy. I’m reminded of some of the recent discussions we’ve had on the forum about how you can generalize in many cases, but just because you can come up with a general prediction based on experience, that doesn’t mean there’s some absolute eternal rule that mandates that result. You know, people have general ideas in their minds about who they find beautiful, and you can certainly predict with some degree of accuracy if you know the people and their cultural background — but that doesn’t mean that because you can predict it, there’s some divine or absolute property of beauty that a thing has or does not have. The obvious cliche is “beauty’s in the eye of the beholder.” So much of the eye of the beholder — but is everything in the eye of the beholder?
Elaine: Yeah, that’s the way you’d have to kind of philosophically dissect that statement. You could say pleasure and pain is in the eye of the beholder as well, and yeah, that’s a hundred percent correct, because it’s a feeling — so it has to be. Any word like “beauty” — beauty contains pleasure, and Epicurus said it doesn’t mean anything without pleasure. You would have to pick another word. So all beauty has to be an experience of the beholder; there’s no other way to have it. But because we’re biologically similar and share cultures, there’s going to be a lot of similarities between what people find beautiful. And a lot of it is probably evolutionarily driven — people who preferred partners with certain physical attributes did so because that was a marker for fertility, so they produced more children.
Cassius: You’ve said it very well — better than I was attempting to say it. With so much of the general point being that the Epicurean perspective is not an absolute one: it’s not based on there being Platonic ideals, it’s not based on there being essences within something. It’s a contextual and in many cases relativistic type of viewpoint. Ultimately there’s no right or wrong answer dictated — certainly there’s not a right or wrong answer dictated by God or by the universe itself. There’s only your feelings, your observations, your analysis — a result of what you bring to the table.
Cassius: And let’s not close today without taking a recap on the issue: is Lucretius telling us to avoid romantic entanglements at all costs? No — I don’t think he’s ever said that. How would you describe what he’s saying? I think he’s saying be aware of potential pitfalls in romance so that you don’t get caught in them. Forewarned is forearmed. Let’s go around the table on that. Martin — is Lucretius telling Memmius and people who wish to be good Epicureans to avoid romantic entanglements at all costs?
Martin: No, of course not. It’s part of pleasure to go for those entanglements. But like with other pleasures, we need to choose how far do we go.
Cassius: Okay, Charles, your turn for that question.
Charles: I don’t think he’s saying to avoid it altogether, but his interpretation of it is far more pessimistic than any other author or writer I can think of on the subject.
Cassius: Yeah. Oh, I want to throw in that somebody who’s studying Epicurus and reading all this, I think would be very interested to read Thomas Jefferson’s Head vs. Heart letter in this context, because that letter is his own debating in his own mind the issues being discussed here in terms of the dangers and the benefits of romantic love. But of course, when you say Lucretius is being pessimistic — pessimistic can imply overly cautious or overly negative. I think most of us would agree that this is in fact a very dangerous area of life, that if you do make mistakes here you can cause yourself tremendous pain, so you have to be very careful. While on the other hand it’s also a very pleasurable area of life that we are naturally attracted to. So you can maybe say that romantic entanglements are not necessary but you can certainly see them being natural. And then you’re left with the even older question of how does one decide which pleasures in life to pursue and which ones not to pursue. Are there any rules you can refer to other than that it’s up to you to evaluate it from your own perspective?
Elaine: We had a brief discussion last night where we touched on that near the end of the discussion as well, because so many discussions of pleasure always come back to — “well give me a rule about which pleasures I’m supposed to pursue and which ones I’m not supposed to pursue. What’s the rule, Cassius? What’s the rule, Epicurus?” I’m a Stoic — I’ve got all these rules. What is your rule about what pleasures to pursue and which ones not to pursue?
Cassius: Right. And Elaine, what would you say to that?
Elaine: Pleasure is your guide, but you need to look at the entire consequences.
Cassius: Which pleasure? Which pleasure, Elaine? I go to the grocery store, I go to Target, I go to Sam’s warehouse, and there are so many things out there. I’m just so confused. I don’t know what to do. Which pleasure should I pursue?
Elaine: I don’t know, because I’m not you. But you know, when you get into that, it makes me think of research on people not experiencing as much pleasure when they have more than a certain number of choices in a given situation, because they start to worry that they’re missing out and they’re not choosing the right one. That’s kind of another topic, I guess. But it is a problem. So sometimes you might want to self-limit your available variety so that you don’t get caught up in analysis paralysis. How many girlfriends do I really need? Maybe I haven’t had enough. Those kind of questions are related. Nobody can answer those questions for you.
Cassius: But that’s an extremely deep issue, because the Stoics or religions would say “well God tells you what to do,” or Aristotle or Plato could say “we’ve got the example of the best citizens of Athens who have ever lived, and you should just look to their example and do what they do.” Right. So you really do have to have a response to that kind of question. And the Epicurean position is that we’ve identified pleasure as the goal of life. But to say pleasure is the goal of life can be of limited benefit if you’re uncertain how to make those decisions. So there’s got to be some circumstances or ground rules, and your understanding of how to make those decisions have to start somewhere. And it seems to me like one of the places that starts is that it is an individual choice, an individual decision. There’s certainly no God and there’s certainly no absolute standard that answers that question for you.
Elaine: Individual experience — and then your choice is how you’re going to optimize your experience.
Cassius: So what you tell people is: pay attention. Pay attention to what happened to other people before you, because being human you likely have some things in common with them. Here are some things that happen to people in different situations — are you more or less like them? And what has happened to you in your life? What have been the consequences of various decisions you’ve made in the past as far as whether you got more pain or more pleasure out of them? You’re going to have to work at it a little bit and put some attention into it — pay attention to what happens when you do things, just like if you want to figure out things in physics you’ve got to make observations. You have to make observations in your own life. Otherwise you’ll have no idea whether your pleasure or pain is not just random — it’s a consequence of events and of your individual nature.
Cassius: Okay, let’s begin to wrap up for today given our time constraints. Martin, what final thoughts would you have for today and for Book 4?
Martin: I don’t really have something final on this one, but I would like to elaborate a bit on what Elaine just said. I think for me it was very helpful that before I got married I saw the really disastrous effect which a husband having an extramarital affair had on the marriage and everybody involved. So this really prevented me from just having affairs out of pleasure. I just didn’t go that way, because I saw how bad the consequences are — it’s just not worth that little bit of extra pleasure.
Cassius: Right, right. Fortunately we have some imagination and we can watch people and see what happens, and we can imagine ourselves being in that situation. So we’re not stuck with having to experience it directly all on our own.
Charles: It’s true. Not so much on today’s section, but I think Book 4 was pretty interesting. It’s been some of our most active discussions consistently, given how short it was. And I’m really curious to see where Book 5 will go with the three-age system and all that.
Cassius: Yeah, there’s a lot of interesting material in Book 5. Let me say this as we conclude: I used to think that this section of Book 4 was kind of funny to read and kind of not as significant as some of the rest, but I think that especially the last part on romantic love could be some of the most useful information to discuss in Epicurean circles. Because this issue of romantic love is a lightning rod of argument among people who will say that Lucretius and Epicurus advised against it. They’ll say that everybody knows how tumultuous it can be. And it probably is a really excellent test case for going through your understanding of Epicurean philosophy and whether you are really serious about the role of pleasure or not, because it’s awfully easy to come to the conclusion that Epicurus said don’t have romantic entanglements, and easy to say that he’s therefore ruling out of life one of the most important and most pleasurable sections of existence — telling you to abstain from pleasure for the sake of avoiding the pain that comes from it. And I don’t think that’s what they’re saying in this text. It’s probably the case that “hard cases make bad law” — that’s a cliche in the legal field. But the continuing issue we confront in Epicurean philosophy is the role of pleasure, how serious you are about taking literally what Epicurus said about pleasure being in the beginning and the end and the goal. And so to me I think this in the future will probably serve as a better point of argument than a lot of the other sections would be, because this is where the rubber meets the road. People in most cases in life they’ve been through the agonies and the joys of romantic entanglements, and they’ve often been burned — maybe always been burned once or twice at least — and yet they go back and do it again and again. And it’s the power of pleasure that draws you to it. Probably it’s just a really excellent way of focusing the mind on the ultimate implications of Epicurean philosophy. Absence of pain and simply nothingness is the opposite, I think, of what Epicurus is teaching. He’s saying that clearly there are dangers and clearly there are pains that you want to try to minimize and avoid, but in the end I think he was serious and he did mean pleasure — including romantic love. So yeah, those are my thoughts for the day.
Cassius: So next week we’ll come back and start Book 5 and talk about the origin of civilization and the origin of language, but first we’ll start out with another one of the most striking praises of the significance of Epicurus personally for Lucretius and his role in Epicurean philosophy. I believe this is the one where we compare Epicurus to a god — is it not, Charles?
Charles: I believe this is it. Could be totally wrong.
Cassius: Because Book 6 is kind of all over the place, and it ends — well, Book 6, that’s right. You’re right, you’re right. Book 6 is excellent in my view too — that’s the one talking about Athens being the source of corn and Athens being the source of Epicurus. So right, Book 5 is the really “Epicurus was a god in his effect” presentation, I think. Unless we’ve already done that in Book 4 — I should look at this before I say something like that. But each of the books starts out with a very important section and I’m sure it’ll be good no matter what it is. Okay yeah, with that we’ll come back in a week, so thanks everybody.
Martin: All right, bye bye.
Charles: Thanks, bye bye.