Episode 094 - Torquatus Explains Pleasure As The Goal Of Life
Date: 11/06/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2228-episode-ninety-four-special-general-discussion-recap-of-poem/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Continuing through Cicero’s De Finibus Book 1, with Don reading sections 33–36. Torquatus explains why pleasure is the telos: no one pursues pain for its own sake; pain is only incurred to obtain greater pleasure or to ward off greater pain. The Torquatus family examples follow — including a Torquatus ancestor who executed his own son for breaking formation in battle — which Torquatus presents as fully consistent with Epicurean philosophy: even that extreme act was directed toward the preservation of the army and the people, which is where pleasure ultimately lay.
Discussion covers: the long tradition — Stoic and Christian — of praising pain and censuring pleasure, from ancient Stoics through St. Jerome and the medieval flagellants; the Lucretian phrase dux vitae (guide of life, from Book 2 around line 170) as perhaps a better frame than summum bonum (highest good), since “guide” captures something living and contextual rather than a static abstract standard; Don’s question about whether pleasure itself is the goal or whether the “pleasurable life writ large” is the goal, with Martin answering “word play”; the map-versus-territory analogy (Joshua, who makes maps professionally) — at some point you have to stop perfecting the map and go live; and the question of absolute moral rules, prompted by the son-execution example and Martin’s comparison to Sun Tzu and the question of the death penalty.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 94 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who lived in the age of Julius Caesar and who wrote On the Nature of Things, the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. I’m your host Cassius and together with our panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum, we’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’ poem and we’ll 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.
At this point in our podcast we’ve completed our first line-by-line review of the poem and we’ve temporarily turned to a presentation of Epicurean ethics found in Cicero’s De Finibus as narrated by Torquatus. But before we start with today’s episode, let me remind you of our three ground rules. First, our aim is to bring you an accurate presentation of classical Epicurean philosophy as the ancient Epicureans understood it, which is not the same as presented by many modern commentators. We hope that our fresh perspective will encourage you to rethink the meaning of Epicurean philosophy for yourself. Second, we won’t be talking about contemporary philosophical or political issues in this podcast, and in fact we’ll stay as far away from them as possible. We want everyone to understand that Epicurus had a unique philosophy of his own. Epicurus was not a Stoic, a Humanist, a Buddhist, a Taoist, an Atheist, a Marxist, or a modern politician of the left or right, and it is very unfair to Epicurus and to ourselves to try to force Epicurean philosophy into one of those modern boxes. Third, Lucretius’ poem is mainly concerned with the many details of Epicurean physics, but we’ll always try to learn from those details what they mean for the best way to live our own lives. Lucretius will show that Epicurus was not obsessed with luxury, but neither did he teach minimalism or asceticism, as you often find written on the internet today. Epicurus taught that pleasure is the ultimate guide of life — not supernatural gods, not the abstractions of idealism, and not absolute notions of virtue. Epicurus taught that there are no supernatural beings, no fate, and no life after death. That means that any happiness we’ll ever have must come in this life, which is why it is so important not to waste time in confusion. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive to you, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics.
Now let’s join our panel for today’s discussion, with Don reading today’s text.
Don:
But that I may make plain to you the source of all the mistakes made by those who inveigh against pleasure and eulogize pain, I will unfold the whole system and will set before you the very language held by that great discoverer of truth and that master builder — if I may style it so — of the life of happiness.
Surely no one recoils from or dislikes or avoids pleasure in itself because it is pleasure, but because great pains come upon those who do not know how to follow pleasure rationally. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or wishes to win pain on its own account, merely because it is pain, but rather because circumstances sometimes occur which compel him to seek some great pleasure at the cost of exertion and pain. To come down to petty details, who among us ever undertakes any toilsome bodily exercise except in the hope of gaining some advantage from it? Who again would have any right to reproach either a man who desires to be surrounded by pleasure unaccompanied by any annoyance, or another man who shrinks from any pain which is not productive of pleasure?
But in truth, we do blame and deem most deserving of righteous hatred the men who, enervated and depraved by the fascination of momentary pleasures, do not foresee the pains and troubles which are sure to befall them because they are blinded by desire; and in the same error are involved those who prove traitors to their duties through effeminacy of spirit — I mean because they shun exertions and trouble.
Now it is easy and simple to mark the difference between these cases. For in our seasons of ease, when we have untrammeled freedom of choice and when nothing debars us from the power of following the course that pleases us best, then pleasure is wholly a matter for our selection and pain for our rejection. On certain occasions, however, either through the inevitable call of duty or through stress of circumstances, it will often come to pass that we must put pleasures from us and make no protest against annoyance. So in such cases, the principle of selection adopted by the wise man is that he should either by refusing certain pleasures attain to other and greater pleasures, or by enduring pains should ward off pains still more severe.
Holding as I do this theory, what reason should I have for fearing that I may not be able to bring our Torquati into accord with it? You, a little while ago, showed at once your copious memory and your friendly and kindly feeling for me by quoting their examples; yet you neither perverted me by eulogizing my ancestors nor made me less vigorous in my reply. Now I ask, what interpretation do you put upon the actions of these men? Do you believe that they attacked the armed foe or practiced such cruelty towards their own children and their own flesh and blood absolutely without giving a thought to their own interest or their own advantage? Why, even the beasts do not act so, producing such tumult and confusion that we cannot see the purpose of their movements and attacks. Do you believe that men so exceptional achieved such great exploits from no motive whatever?
What the motive was I shall examine presently. Meanwhile I shall maintain this: that if they performed those actions which are beyond question noble from some motive, their motive was not virtue apart from all else.
He stripped the foe of his necklace — yes, and he daunted himself to save his own life. But he faced a great danger — yes, with the whole army looking on. What did he gain by it? Applause and affection, which are the strongest guarantees for passing life in freedom from fear.
He punished his son with death — if purposelessly, I should be sorry to be descended from one so abominable and so cruel. But if he did it to enforce by his self-inflicted pain the law of military command and by fear of punishment to control the army in the midst of a most critical war, then he had in view the preservation of his fellow countrymen, which he knew to involve his own.
And these principles have a wide application. There is one field in which the eloquence of your school has been wont especially to exert itself — and your own eloquence in particular, for you are an eager investigator of the past — I mean the stories of illustrious and heroic men and the applause of their actions viewed as looking not to any reward but to the inherent comeliness of morality. All such arguments are upset when once the principle of choice which I have just described has been established, whereby either pleasures are neglected for the purpose of obtaining pleasure still greater, or pains are incurred for the sake of escaping still greater pains.
Cassius:
Don, thank you for reading that. Last week was one of our longest episodes in the history of our podcast, and this week could follow along in the same line. There’s so much in this material, and this particular text is so important in understanding Epicurean philosophy. It really brings right in front of you some of the most controversial issues that people don’t always talk about on the internet, but we are going to talk about them and dive into the most controversial aspects of Epicurean philosophy. Anybody want to say anything in general before we get started? Because especially in the first couple of passages we have today, I almost think we’re going to need to go line by line. There’s so much in them that’s worthy of comment.
Before we get started, we have our usual panel: Martin, Joshua, and Don. Any general comments?
Joshua:
Let’s dive right in.
Cassius:
The very first line: “that I may make plain to you the source of all the mistakes made by those who inveigh against pleasure and eulogize pain.” Who is he talking about? What’s going on there? Why is he even talking about the mistake of those who criticize pleasure and praise pain? Do such people really exist?
Don:
Yeah, certainly his chief target here, I imagine, is going to be the Stoics, who are — if not necessarily eulogizing pain — seeing the endurance of pain as a virtue or a duty and pleasure as a distraction. And as he says later, it’s enervating — not just a distraction but a sort of moral failure for someone who views duty or honor or virtue as the highest good.
Cassius:
We could spend the rest of the day talking about that very subject. And of course this is written by Cicero in around 50 BC, so this is not Epicurus himself or the original Epicureans talking — this is someone who has lived through an ensuing 200 years of Stoic obnoxiousness and criticism of pleasure. Not that I feel strongly about it.
Don:
No, not at all.
Cassius:
But you know many people who are probably listening to this podcast are going to come to this idea that the Stoics don’t really criticize pleasure — they want pleasure of a different kind, they want you to be calm and so forth — and many modern Stoics do not even admit that Stoicism praises pain and criticizes pleasure in the same way that the ancient Stoics did. So one of the premises people need to understand is that when you dig back into the origins of Stoicism it is very plain that the Stoics considered — and not only the Stoics, but to some extent Plato and Aristotle and many of the other Greeks — they considered pleasure to be a disruption from the life of wisdom, from the ability to calmly and rationally assess everything in life and contemplate truth and so forth. So they don’t consider pleasure just to be an “indifferent” — the Stoics like to use that word. It’s not just an indifferent; it’s actually something to be avoided so that you can be serious and focus every bit of energy you have on the pursuit of virtue.
And that’s exactly why that whole strain of thought was preserved by the Christians — because the Christians saw it as the suffering servant, and “pleasure is sin” and all that sort of thing. That’s why the Stoics got transmitted and Epicurus’s books got burned.
Don:
I’m glad you brought that up, because that was going to be my next point. As Cassius has said, this is roughly 50 BC — it’s too early to be criticizing Christianity, but it’s never too early for that.
Cassius:
Sorry. That’s a fair point.
Don:
We have talked a little bit about St. Jerome because St. Jerome is the transmitter of one of the only — and probably spurious — biographical details about Lucretius’s life. But if you look at a painting, almost any painting of St. Jerome, he is almost always pictured with a rock in his hand. And that rock — the purpose of the rock was so that he could beat his own chest bloody as atonement. And part of what he was atoning for, as he records in this sort of hallucinatory dream in which he encounters God face to face, was the pleasure he got from reading Cicero. So beating himself bloody with a rock — that seems to me to be eulogizing pain in a sense, and certainly conveying opposition to pleasure.
Cassius:
You’re absolutely right to make that point. And I always think of the medieval flagellants — those who would walk through the towns whipping themselves and so on.
Martin:
But these things are actually against Christian doctrine — how do you mean?
Don:
Not at least not at the time, I don’t think.
Martin:
At least nowadays, when there’s still some practice like this in the Philippines, this is not supposed to be acceptable. You can’t actively do this. I think the modern Stoics have come to realize that this isn’t good — good optics.
Don:
Good optics, there you go, exactly. But you know, back in the day, it was all about suffering and pain and you know you are sinful creatures and you need to atone for your sins. And even Jesus atoned for the sins of the world through being killed and whipped and all that sort of thing. So that whole strain of the pain and suffering being good — that’s a long, long history in Christian circles.
Martin:
But that still doesn’t make sense within Christian doctrine, because in the Christian doctrine you received life as a gift from God, and if you damage that life by intentionally hurting yourself you basically distance yourself from God. And I think Christianity also has that same Jewish tradition of valuing life highly. So I think at that time there must have been intellectual Christians who knew this and who would not praise this kind of misguided action.
Cassius:
Well, Martin, you’re certainly right that Christianity values life. But Christians are supposed to view themselves as being in this world but not of this world. The life that they value is the chance that this life gives them to partake in the eternal life to come hereafter. And if pleasure is the road to sin, then an argument can be made within Christian theology that you need to harden the flesh against pleasure specifically to protect the life to come.
Martin:
But you still shouldn’t endanger your life by hurting yourself.
Don:
Oh yeah. St. Jerome was one of the Church Fathers — the translator of the Vulgate Bible that became the text of the Catholic Church for centuries. Beating himself with a rock is not a practice which most other Church Fathers followed. Well, did St. Augustine throw himself into a thorn bush?
Cassius:
I think there are one or two of them who cut off their own genitals or things like that — there are examples. It’s always interesting to hear Martin’s perspective on this, because he’s from Europe and things are somewhat different at times in Europe and the United States. It’s interesting, Martin — there’s still a strong strain of this in some Catholic circles in the United States. What comes to mind is Mel Gibson and The Passion of the Christ movie — the glory of the suffering of Jesus is what saves humanity. So that whole strain of the “suffering servant” through whom God saves humanity from the lure of the world — which is really the pleasure of the world — has a very long history.
Martin:
I think this privilege of suffering was Jesus’s only. It’s not the job of the ordinary Christian to incur the same thing.
Cassius:
Martin, I certainly appreciate and agree with your statements. They do make sense. And to relate that back to what Don was starting down a few minutes ago — it’s kind of the same thing as with modern Stoicism. The modern Stoics realize that the “optics” of pursuing virtue as an end in itself are really not of interest to 99% of the people in the world. So they’ve just cut out the whole history and the whole background and the whole rationale of Stoicism, which was originally a theistic, fate-oriented idea — “everything is divine, everything is going to work out” — almost in the Christian sense of “everything works out for good for those who love the Lord.” It’s, from my point of view, a deeply religious orientation towards life. But the modern Stoics have absolutely backed away and attempted to cut out all of that. It seems to me some of them are consistent — they talk about the history and point out this contradiction — but the great majority of them are basically psychologists in the realm of dialectical behavioral therapy, and it’s the “manly man, stand up to your pain, take a cold shower” strain. But they try to avoid even this issue: why are we doing this? They imply that they’re almost Epicurean — they imply that what they’re doing in being so hard on themselves is that it’s going to bring a reward in terms of implicitly happiness. But the ancient Stoics were very clear that virtue was supposed to be its own reward, and that if you were looking for some reward as a result of going through all this pain and effort, you were by definition not included in those who are truly virtuous. You’ve shown by the fact that you’re looking for a reward that you don’t understand Stoicism at all.
Anyway, we’re not past line one yet. But I want to insert here — we got to “master builder of the life of happiness.” Now I think I’m using the Rackham version when I say “master builder of human happiness” — but those words have always echoed in my mind, that Epicurus is the architect of human happiness.
Don:
I found it interesting to go back to the Latin on the Reid version. It translates “the life of happiness” — in Latin it’s something like beatae vitae — and that translates directly from the Greek for makaríōs zên, the blessed life, the happy life, the fortunate life, the prosperous life. Epicurus uses makaríōs zên in the Letter to Menoeceus. So that’s a direct translation from the Greek.
Cassius:
And that’s the same word from which the Beatitudes come — “blessed are the meek, blessed are this, blessed are that.” The same Latin word used in the Beatitudes. So it’s that sort of blessedness, happiness, fortune. And of course those are the two aspects of Epicurus that people should never let out of their mind: he is the master builder of happiness, but he’s also the great discoverer of truth. Those two things go hand in hand and are not separate. You’re not really going to understand what he means by the life of happiness unless you understand the truth of his viewpoint of the nature of the universe.
Joshua:
Another line I want to point out real quick: “for those who do not know how to follow pleasure rationally.” So that’s one of my hobby horses — that reason is not thrown out the window by Epicurus; it’s a vehicle to make the right choices, to follow pleasure.
Cassius:
That’s right. One thing I want to keep in mind as we go forward — Torquatus is going to give a couple of examples of people who choose pain because it yields greater pleasure later on. We’ve talked about why you should pursue pleasure, but there’s a real idea in Epicurean philosophy that the pursuit of pleasure is a description of nature as it is, not a prescription for human behavior as it should be. So this is something to keep in mind — pleasure as descriptive rather than prescriptive. It’s not “you should pursue pleasure” — it’s “whatever you’re doing, in a way you already are pursuing pleasure.” So the rational pursuit of pleasure is to understand that you are already pursuing pleasure, and now you’re going to try to figure out how to do it more intelligently.
Joshua:
Oh, that’s good. I like that. One of the things I hear you saying is the consistency of the approach: you’re not bucking against nature by any means in pursuing pleasure. You’re just basically following what nature has constructed you to do.
Cassius:
Yeah. Because he’s going to get into this discussion of his ancestors as we go forward, and Torquatus had some very notable historically important ancestors in the Roman Republic. Some of them did noble things, some of them did horrible things. But the point he’s trying to make is that in every single case the pursuit of pleasure is behind everything they’re doing. They’re not necessarily reaching out for pleasure directly, but they’re doing these sometimes horrible things because they expect that pleasure — not just for themselves but for their countrymen — is going to be the result of that.
Joshua, I think you’re making the main point of the presentation here. But before we continue to hit on that point, I don’t want to miss another opportunity to address the Stoics. When Torquatus talks about people who don’t know how to pursue pleasure rationally, he’s being too charitable to the Stoics in my mind — he’s giving them an out. I’m perfectly happy to give anybody we come into contact with nowadays the benefit of the doubt that they’re just mistaken, that they don’t understand the philosophy. But I do not think that applies to everybody. I do believe there are people who have actually embraced pain knowingly, not just because they’re in error, but because they’re really corrupted or perverted in their goals for philosophy and their goals for life. So I’ll drop that point there — but it’s interesting to me that in this paragraph he’s setting it out from a perspective I think is actually too nice to them. People need to understand that it’s not just a matter of mistake, and that not everybody’s your friend and not everybody’s trying to assist you.
Okay, end of that particular attack on the Stoics. Maybe we can begin to move past the first passage. The latter part of the first passage makes the argument that who among us ever does anything unless we hope to gain some advantage from it? And then the last question: who would have any right to criticize somebody who pursues pleasure if it’s unaccompanied by any annoyance? If there’s no cost to pursuing that pleasure in terms of pain or any other disruption, why should you not pick up a rose and smell it?
Don:
My contention is that that is a restatement of Principal Doctrine 10 right there at the beginning of section 33. Okay, the Principal Doctrine 10 translated by Hicks is: “If the objects which are productive of pleasures to profligate persons really freed them from fears of the mind — the fears inspired by celestial and atmospheric phenomena, the fear of death, the fear of pain — if further they taught them to limit their desires, then we should not have any reason to censure such persons, for they would then be filled with pleasure to overflowing on all sides and would be exempt from all pain whether of body or mind, that is from all evil.”
And so my contention is that right here at the beginning of section 33, Torquatus is basically restating that, because he’s saying we do blame and deem most deserving of righteous hatred those who do not foresee the pains and troubles which are sure to befall them because they are blinded by desire. So it’s not that what these people do is not pleasurable — there’s no question that it’s pleasurable — but you need to determine whether it’s going to bring you greater pain in the end or not. The people who just follow pleasure blindly and not rationally are going the wrong direction.
Joshua:
I’d like to talk a minute about Cicero himself, because obviously he does not view pleasure as the goal of life. There’s a book — one of the early books written in Latin, I believe, by Cato the Elder — called De Re Rustica, and it’s all about how to manage your country estate, your farm, your villa. And he presents it, if I remember correctly, as a duty of the Roman landowners — this is not something you’re doing for fun, this is your social obligation as a member of the equestrian or noble class. And Cicero certainly had land in the countryside — he had land at Tusculum, at Cumae, and so forth. And the way he talks about pleasure, it’s as if he doesn’t see that his own villa is pleasurable. He’s presenting it as a duty. And I’m like: wow, it must be so horrible to have this grave task of managing your country villa and estate for the duty and glory of Rome. That must be just awful.
Cassius:
Let me tie that together with what Don was just saying, because I think they’re closely related. The issue is that Torquatus is talking here as if everybody would agree, of course, that pleasure is desirable in itself, and that nobody would have any right to criticize pleasure except for the fact that it brings bad consequences. I don’t think that is a given. And that’s exactly what Joshua has just brought up — not everybody agrees that pleasure is desirable in itself at all. Cicero may have seen his properties there as something he considered to be a duty or part of his virtue as a Roman citizen, and I don’t know that Cicero would agree with this argument that the only reason to object to pleasure is because it brings pain.
I’m seeing this as a sort of insider Epicurean argument — and I think people need to understand that everybody doesn’t even accept this perspective. Because these people who push virtue say that virtue is its own reward, and pleasure is not even to be part of the equation.
Joshua:
Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. I don’t think Cicero viewed pleasure as something good in itself. When he’s talking about his wealth and his status in the government of Rome, his quaestorship at Lilybaeum in Sicily — I don’t think he would see that as being directed toward the end of pleasure, because he doesn’t admit to seeing pleasure as being good in itself.
Don:
Yeah. And I think using the word “admit” there is probably a good thing, because it all depends on how you’re going to define it. I mean, he obviously gets some sort of pleasurable feeling from it — I refuse to believe he wouldn’t — but you can define that away. You can say, well, it’s not really pleasure that I feel, it’s the duty I am doing to Rome, my virtue and all this kind of stuff.
Cassius:
When I think of Cicero, one of the things I think about is the embodiment of a very vain person. He really really cared about his reputation, and he would not want people to think of him as being someone hopelessly lost in the pursuit of pleasure.
Don:
Right, right. Yep. He was the Roman par excellence as far as that goes.
Cassius:
Yeah. And I think that’s the practical reason it’s good to keep this difference between the Stoics and Epicureans in mind — these people have been very clear in their philosophy that pleasure is not the goal, and pain is not only not to be avoided but is actually something good to endure. So you do have to think about where people are coming from, and appreciate that if you don’t accept the premise that pleasure is ultimately the highest good, then you’re not going to accept this argument that Torquatus is making right now. It’s complicated and subtle, and I know I personally don’t always articulate it well, but I think that’s one of the levels that people need to really think about — how important it is to zero in ultimately on what the goal is, because to a large extent everything else revolves around that.
Joshua, you mentioned before we started recording a passage from Lucretius that you thought would apply here. What was it?
Joshua:
Yes, this is Book Two at about line 170 in the Loeb edition. I’ve got two different translations of the section here. In the Loeb edition it says “which divine pleasure, the guide of life” — and in Latin that is dux vitae dia voluptas — “persuades men to approach herself, leading them and coaxing them through the ways of Venus to get their generations, that the human race may not come to an end.” And in the Rolfe Humphries translation it’s “our guide to life, the radiance of pleasure.”
So it’s interesting here that Lucretius is not using the word summum bonum — the highest good — and he’s not using the word telos — which means end in Greek. He’s using “the guide to life.” Pleasure in a sense here occupies a separate category from good, which I think helps us get a little bit out of the weeds we fell into on the last episode where we got bogged down talking about whether pleasure is the only good or whether there are other instrumental goods besides pleasure.
Cassius:
Joshua, I don’t want you to lose your train of thought, but I want to insert here that the preceding section you’ve omitted came up because Lucretius was talking about those people who assert that gods are necessary to have all these things happen. He’s talking about the fact that it’s not necessary for there to be gods to control the universe and move it in a particular direction — because in the place of gods, which do not exist, the force that performs that function is “divine pleasure, the guide of life.”
Joshua:
That’s a great point, because that’s the first part of that line. He says “but some” — and then every edition you’ll see a footnote mark there, because the editors want to say “Stoics and Platonists is who he’s talking about here.” And in Book One in the hymn to Venus, he actually uses an entirely different word for pleasure — for Venus — he says sola gubernas: “you alone govern the nature of things.”
Don:
And that’s the dux — you said dux vitae —
Joshua:
Yes.
Don:
One thing that has always seemed to me to be an obvious question is: why isn’t it in the first couple of Principal Doctrines that pleasure is the guide of life? There are things from which you can derive that, but that’s one of the reasons I keep that quote from Lucretius that Joshua has reminded us of in my mind — because that actually, I think, is what it comes down to. And one of the most succinct phrases — even of course there’s all sorts of things in the Letter to Menoeceus about how pleasure is the beginning and the end of a blessed life and so forth — but I would add right up there, if you’re looking for passages from Epicurean philosophy that support this idea that pleasure is the ultimate goal or the ultimate guide, that turn of phrase from Lucretius is one of the best.
Joshua:
And that really brings up — I was just going to make a few points about that Latin word dux. That word has a huge amount of English derivatives. “Education” is one, because education is — or was designed to be — a way of leading students out. Air ducts are the infrastructure that leads air from one place to another. And even “deductive logic,” that particular form of logic where the premises necessarily lead to the conclusion. And then even the word “duke” — the word “Il Duce” was Mussolini’s title.
Cassius:
And that’s exactly the point that Don has just raised — there’s a definite subtlety of difference between words like “leader” versus “guide.” I certainly agree with Don that “guide” has much more of that — although it depends again, like everything else, on your perspective. If you were analogizing pleasure as Venus, then perhaps I can see justification for saying that Venus is your leader. But you’d have to be very clear about your context and what you’re talking about. Consider too that the Latin dux also gave rise to the English word “duke.”
Martin, I asked for your comment — do you have thoughts about whether “guide” or “leader” is the right word for the role that pleasure has?
Martin:
I mean, the word “guide” makes sense, but I would point out another use of this word dux — “duchy” should be derived from this one too. And this is how Mussolini called himself, so that’s not just a guide you could follow or not — it was a dictator you had to follow. I see that as the point that Don raised: there’s definitely a difference between “leader” versus “guide.”
Cassius:
I think I have to keep in mind that there are many aspects to something and many different explanations that have validity depending on the perspective at a particular moment. And this is how we got into it — even though I agree with Don that I much prefer the word “guide,” there will be contexts in which the word “leader” would apply too. And that’s the lovely thing about going back to the original Latin: you can bring out all those different flavors of meaning. Whenever you stick with one English word that you already know, it’s like, okay, well, that’s what that is. But you go back and look at what was actually written and you’re like, oh, this is a little bit more deep than I had originally thought.
I will say I’ve been pondering the idea — because we often say that pleasure is the goal — but I’m still wondering whether pleasure and pain are the guides you use to get to the goal, which is a pleasurable life, and whether that’s the ultimate goal and pleasure is the means to get there. I’m still wrestling with whether “capital P pleasure” is the goal or whether it’s the “pleasurable life writ large.” And I’d be interested to hear any of your takes on that.
Martin:
That could very well just be word play.
Cassius:
Okay, Don — Martin has said an awful lot there in very few words. But Joshua, could you restate the question?
Joshua:
I’m wondering whether the Epicurean goal — because we often say that pleasure is the goal — I’m wondering, because Epicurus himself uses the word telos and talks about things other than specifically the word pleasure, and there’s the makaríōs zên, the blessed life, eudaimonia — those are sometimes called out as the goal. Is that the goal and pleasure is the way to that goal? Or is pleasure the goal itself? And is that just word play?
Cassius:
Oh, now Joshua has a complete grasp of the question and is about to answer in absolute terms that will enlighten generations to come.
Joshua:
I’m not sure that I’m going to do that. But I am going to make an analogy. When you’re a kid and you go bowling, they put up those bumper rails for you. Don, I’m trying to get the sense — are you talking about pleasure and pain as being each side of the rail?
Don:
Yeah, yeah, yeah — steering — and that’s striking all the pins, you know, the pleasurable life, that’s the goal.
Joshua:
So the sort of moment-to-moment day-to-day pleasures — that’s one of the rails, the other rail is pain, and by playing the game over time you reach what the actual goal is, which is the pleasurable life writ large. And in bowling that’d be the high score. Right?
Don:
Right.
Cassius:
I could go along with that analogy. I do not think you have carried out your assignment yet, Joshua, of answering that question — so it’s too early to bounce it back to me. Have you got anything further other than a bowling analogy?
Joshua:
I do think that’s the metaphor I was going for. So I applaud you for coming up with it on the fly.
Cassius:
Joshua, why do you think Martin categorized the question as basically word play?
Joshua:
I guess one of my questions, just right out of the box, is: is it even a valid question, or is it just definitional? Because if the goal of life is a pleasurable life, then a pleasurable life is just a bunch of little pleasurable moments throughout your life all coupled together. That’s basically macro-pleasure versus micro-pleasure. You know, when you’re dealing with young earth creationists you run into this problem over the theory of evolution, where they’ll say “I accept microevolution where you have minor changes within a species, but what I don’t accept is macroevolution where you have changes from one species to another.” And the counter argument from the scientific community is: there’s no real distinction between these two things. Macroevolution is just a bunch of little instances of microevolution all coupled together. So a life of pleasure, if that’s the goal, is just a bunch of little pleasurable moments all coupled together. I think I might be agreeing with Martin here that there’s some word play going on.
Don:
I like that. It’s like — I believe in one, but I don’t believe in a million. Well, if you believe in one and you add a whole bunch of ones together you come up with a million.
Cassius:
If pleasure is the pleasurable life writ large, then your day-to-day momentary pleasures are sort of — you’ve got to bank those in a sense. Even if you choose a particular pain right now — my go-to example is always exercise — I exercise because I want to lead a healthier, longer, pleasurable life, without illnesses. So that’s the pain you go through for the pleasure down the road. You’re trying to get a large positive balance in your pleasure bank account, and occasionally a pain debit from that account is necessary so that you can accrue a larger pleasure credit. And then at the end of your life all those little deposits you’ve made come together to form a whole that is a life of pleasure.
What’s the Greek saying — “judge no man happy until he’s dead”?
Don:
Oh yeah, I’ve heard that.
Cassius:
It presumably means you can’t know what’s going to happen until the moment you die, so stay vigilant and make sure you’re pursuing pleasure — because things can go off the rails.
Is happiness a feeling or a concept, or both?
Don:
Oh lord, what have I done?
Cassius:
Well, my perspective — to jump in at this moment, given all of our discussions over the last couple of months about this — would be to point back to the analogies that I associate with Don lately: how the map is not the same as reality, and how Martin has been talking about how propositional logic and mathematics are models that are useful to us but don’t constitute reality themselves. And my answer to “is happiness a feeling or a concept” today would be that’s why Martin’s “word play” answer rang true to me. We’re making an effort to draw a map, we’re making an effort to understand formulas and so forth, but it’s always going to fall short.
I think that’s what we talked about last week — that our effort to encapsulate these things in words is always going to fall short, for the same reason that mathematics and maps fall short. And in the end, I think, maybe there’s something really profound in Epicurus’s argument that the reason you accept that pleasure is desirable is: you point to it. You point to how all these many examples of young animals pursue pleasure. How we feel it without processing it through reason. Ultimately, life is an experience and not a concept.
Joshua:
So this whole map-versus-the-territory thing is great, because my career is making maps. I do that every single day. Part of the problem with making maps is — in a commercial setting, ultimately the goal needs to be profit, and in order to make a profit, you can’t spend your whole life making a map of one parcel or one lot. You have to sort of sketch it out in broad strokes in a day or two and get it out of the office. And it’s kind of the same in philosophy: there’s a moment when you have to — because we are mortal, we have a finite amount of time — at some point you have to set that aside and just go live. Once you’ve established in broad strokes that pleasure is the goal or the guide of life, at a certain point you have to actually go do the thing. You have to go pursue pleasure and build a life that will lead to pleasure. And for that you need the master builder — and that is Epicurus.
Cassius:
Nicely done. I very much agree with your comment about the limitations on our time being a key aspect of all of this. There’s an analogy in the legal frame as well: a lot of the law ends up being just a compromise with the fact that ultimately you have to come to finality. When people have disputes they’re probably never going to agree. At some point you just have to bring finality to the situation. You’d like to think that you’re doing the right thing, but in the end all you can really do is come to a resolution right now and move on with life.
And that’s a practical application. The thing that ran through my head as Joshua was talking was the fragment: “A philosopher’s words are empty if they do not heal the suffering of mankind. Just as medicine is useless if it does not remove sickness from the body, so philosophy is useless if it does not remove suffering from the soul.” It has to have a practical application.
I want to tie together an English word that you used a couple of times — “finality” — with the Latin word used in the title of what we’re talking about today, which is De Finibus: on ends. You have to bring finality to it. That seems to be Cicero’s project here — we’ve got to sort this problem out. And then at some point you’ve got to go out and actually do it.
Joshua:
What’s the aphorism — “the meaning of life is a verb and not a noun”? Because it’s an active process. You experience life. You’re not looking for some noun that is the meaning of life — life has to be experienced. And the reason we try and follow a particular philosophy is to make the most fortunate and blessed life that we can, which is an experience we expect to live through and feel, and is not just a definition or a concept floating in our minds.
Cassius:
If we don’t eventually experience something… “Death is nothing to us” — I can’t quote the rest of it either.
Don:
“I should be reprimanded for my inability to have it memorized by now.”
Cassius:
Join the club. But no — “death is nothing to us, for when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.” And the formulation that I attribute to Norman DeWitt — the line I remember from his book — is that “pleasure and pain have no meaning except to the living.” All of the stuff that we are talking about has no meaning to us unless we’re alive to feel it and experience it.
We’re probably going to have to talk about coming to an end of this particular episode before too much longer. But I think this part of it is a very good place for us to find an ending — since we’re talking about endings. In the end we’re choosing between experiences versus concepts. That’s the Platonic version, isn’t it — Plato and these other guys suggesting virtue in a very strong sense is another idea. Experience versus ideals. And unless we can experience the ideals, that’s the definition of impracticality: an ideal that can’t be experienced is impractical.
I think that we’ve actually got past section 33. I think the rest of those sections that we read at the beginning of today’s episode are basically restating what we’ve been talking about. He’s saying the same thing in different ways all the way up through line 36. So I think we’ve done a pretty good job of covering the material, and I encourage people to go back and read those sections and cogitate on the different permutations. But I do want to talk just a little bit about section 36 itself. He says: “There is one field in which the eloquence of your school has been wont especially to exert itself — I mean the stories of illustrious and heroic men and the applause of their actions viewed as looking not to any reward, but to the inherent comeliness of morality. All such arguments are upset when once the principle of choice which I have just described has been established.”
That one’s got to hurt a little bit for Cicero when he hears it. One of the things that Cicero is famous for — in a small way — is that when he was quaestor at Lilybaeum in Sicily, one of his great achievements was that he found the grave of Archimedes, which had been lost. The citizens of Sicily thought that Archimedes was sort of a mythological character who didn’t really exist. But Cicero found his grave. So Cicero going to the past to come up with these heroic men and make morality plays about their lives — but Torquatus says: all such arguments are upset when once the principle of choice I have described has been established. So even these great men that Cicero wants to eulogize — even they were doing what they were doing in the pursuit of pleasure, not virtue, not duty. And the choices are the important things.
Joshua:
Yes, and we can still do that in the present. That’s what Torquatus is saying — it’s like, we’re making the same choices that they’re making. We don’t really need to look to them as exemplars; we can make these choices on our own.
Cassius:
I think what we need to do to bring this episode home is to now decide if there are any other isolated points we want to be sure to include before we stop. Because I know that you guys have just raised one in my mind which I do not want to let this episode go by without confronting. Torquatus — we have not read all the detail, but some of the material before this section is where Cicero first raised the issue of the Torquatus family. We need to be very specific about what’s being talked about here. This Torquatus is justifying his family’s military history on Epicurean grounds — and not only a military history, but this particular episode that they’re talking about was a very famous Roman episode where one of the Torquati sentenced his own son to death because his son had been too aggressive in beginning a battle — he must have decided to run out ahead of the rest of them to start the battle himself before he received the order to do so.
So this is a very military example that we’re confronting. After which this leader Torquatus sentenced his son to death for having violated the rule. I don’t think they lost the battle. He could have easily decided to reward his son for what he had done, but he decided that — as he evaluated it — he was going to sentence his son to death, and he executed him.
So this particular set of examples is something that people today need to understand as one of the controversial aspects of some of these passages. The assertion being made here in these ancient Epicurean texts is that there is no reason that an Epicurean would not be just as militaristic if the circumstances called for it, or active, or aggressive, or even executing somebody — doing things that we don’t normally associate with Epicurean attitudes or activities. This Torquatus is being very aggressive here in saying that all of these things can be reconciled with Epicurean philosophy because the ultimate goal is where you have to keep your focus. That goes back to Principal Doctrine 10, which Don raised earlier.
And this whole episode here is an in-your-face aggressive counter to all of these Stoic arguments — to the very argument that Cicero was making, that you can’t be a good citizen and be an Epicurean at the same time, that society will just totally fall apart if you become Epicureans. And Torquatus — and obviously at this point in 50 BC the Epicurean texts and their leaders were confronting those arguments and absolutely throwing them back at Cicero and the Platonists and the Stoics and the Aristotelians and defending themselves.
Don:
There’s no absolute set of good things to do, and to some extent no absolute set of bad things to do. The morality is contextual.
Cassius:
Well, Cass — you mentioned this example of the son who broke formation.
Joshua:
Formation is absolutely key to Roman military strategy, because every single legionnaire had this huge shield which he carried on his left arm. Half of your shield protects you, half of your shield protects the guy to your left. So when you break formation, not only are you putting yourself in danger, you are exposing the guy to your left. Opening up a hole in the line.
Cassius:
Exactly, exactly. So by executing his own son — which must have been difficult for him; we could tie that back to Iphigenia and Lucretius and all that — but in this particular case he’s saying that it wasn’t virtue necessarily or duty that caused him to do that. He had the specific goal of reinforcing the importance of formation on the battlefield, which is going to save people’s lives — and maybe he also had his own standing in the eyes of his own troops in mind.
Joshua:
Yeah, absolutely. Because if you’re going to execute anybody else for doing it but your own son does it and then you don’t, you immediately lose any respect you have with the army.
Cassius:
Exactly. I’d relate it too to the example of how Epicurus said you’ll occasionally give your own life for the life of a friend. If you’re willing to give your life for something, you know you have to reconcile that with pleasure as well. And it can be done — and that’s what Epicurus is suggesting has to be done, by asking no matter what you’re about to do: what’s going to happen to you if you make this choice?
Martin:
So I want to follow up on this example of executing the son. There are more examples in literature somewhat earlier — this is also mentioned in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, that an overeager soldier who went ahead of the army was also executed. In this case it wasn’t obvious to the sub-leaders why he had to be executed, and the general then explained: to enforce this discipline so that not only those who lag behind get punished but also those who against orders step ahead — because you need to keep this army all together to keep its strength.
But I totally disagree with this view on the death penalty itself. Of course there were not many options in that time, but I think this is a violation of the contract not to harm each other, and there should be other ways found to punish this rather than killing people.
I remember there’s another case illustrated in literature from the medieval age where someone had his sister executed because she was working as a prostitute and he had made major laws against this. But we’re not going to be able to resolve those examples today. You’ve certainly raised the exact issue that we’re going to be dealing with later on in this passage when we start talking about justice and whether there are any absolute rules.
Are you suggesting that the death penalty is always wrong? Maybe not necessarily always, but in all these contexts I see what I would call a failure of leadership — a real leader would have foreseen that this is a problem and used a different method of discipline.
I didn’t hear of this during World War II, but during World War I, deserters among the allied forces would be executed. Whereas in the German military at least in World War II, it was common practice that deserters would be executed. And it seems like in ancient Rome, everything was the death penalty.
Cassius:
The death penalty for parking violations, kind of thing.
Martin:
Well yes.
Cassius:
I think to put a period to that section: the question of whether there are any absolute rules — for example, we all immediately recoil at the idea of someone suggesting that slavery could be a good idea under any circumstances. There are all sorts of examples of things we find abhorrent, and the question of whether that revulsion can ever translate into something that is an absolute rule is a very important question to examine at length. And that’s what we’ll be discussing as we continue through these episodes, specifically when we get to the justice section.
So let’s talk about closing comments for today. Martin, do you have anything further?
Martin:
No.
Joshua:
The only thing I have to say — I feel a lot better about ending today than last time. Last time it felt like we were totally bogged down, and I felt the immediate feeling with our last episode was that I had somehow wandered into Cicero’s trap and that we were puppets on his marionette strings. For some reason I don’t feel that way today. It seems like we’re getting a handle on this. That’s really my only closing thought.
Don:
This is a good place to plant our boundary stone.
Cassius:
Very good analogy. And to talk about Joshua’s analogy of “getting a handle on it” — I’m thinking again, as the days and weeks go by, that getting a handle on this material very much involves the ideas of understanding the limits of math, the limits of words, the limits of philosophy — even, I suppose, wisdom itself. It’s all the same thing.
What we’ll be discussing in coming weeks: none of those things — not wisdom, not mathematics, not words — are in themselves, in the abstract, worth living for. “Worth living for” means worth experiencing. And in the end, whether we can experience it or feel it or sense it — that seems to be the direction that Epicurus is pointing to. He’s using words and giving us philosophical conceptual arguments to help us understand that. But in the end, that’s what you were struggling with at the end of the last episode, Joshua — about whether we were caught in Cicero’s trap or Plato’s trap or just caught in the trap of philosophy in general. It is in fact a trap to think that we can logically reason our way to a moment-by-moment guideline or formula for how to live our lives. We can develop our maps and our mathematics and employ them as tools. But if we ever make the mistake of thinking that those tools are ends in themselves, then I think we’ve lost our way. And I think that’s what Epicurus is saying.
We’ll have to struggle from week to week to decide the answer to Don’s question about whether capital P pleasure is the best way to describe what we’re talking about or whether there’s some better way. But I do think we have a handle on the problem.
So, hearing no further comments, we’ll close for the day and come back in another week or so. Thanks, everybody. Bye.