Episode 095 - Understanding The Paradoxical "Absence of Pain"
Date: 11/10/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2248-episode-ninety-five-understanding-the-paradoxical-absence-of-pain/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Martin reads De Finibus Book 1, sections 37–38 — the passage asserting that “the greatest pleasure is that which is enjoyed when all pain is removed,” followed by Torquatus’s response to Chrysippus’s famous statue argument. The panel works through both passages carefully, as they are dense with implications.
Key discussion: What does “absence of pain is the greatest pleasure” actually mean — and does it mean numbness or anesthesia? (No — Martin points out that numbness/boredom is itself a kind of pain; the state of no pain is a positive, felt condition.) The distinction between kinetic (active, varying) and katastematic (stable) pleasure is examined — Don suggests katastematic pleasure is analogous to biological homeostasis. Joshua’s analogy from the Getting Things Done system: at some point you have to stop perfecting your map and go live, and the same applies to analyzing pleasure. Martin’s approach: train intuition through feedback, make decisions quickly, and don’t obsess over the hedonic calculus. The vessel/gas-tank and bowling-bumper analogies are debated for what they say about whether the goal is moment-by-moment or lifetime-long (Martin: both).
Chrysippus’s statue argument (extended hand feels no lack, therefore pleasure is not the supreme good) is assessed as not-even-wrong — the premise applies equally to virtue or God and doesn’t single out pleasure in a meaningful way. Torquatus’s response: the argument only works against the Cyrenaics (who require active bodily pleasure), not against Epicureans, since for Epicureans the hand in a painless state is experiencing the highest pleasure.
Cassius closes with concern that overanalyzing these questions is exactly the Stoic trap that drives people away from Epicurean philosophy.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 95 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. At this point in our podcast we’ve completed our first line-by-line review of the poem, and we’ve temporarily turned our attention to the presentation of Epicurean ethics found in Cicero’s De Finibus. 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 will 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 will 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 Martin reading today’s text.
Martin:
But let what has been said on this occasion suffice concerning the brilliant and famous actions of illustrious men. We shall indeed find a fitting opportunity by and by for discussing about the tendency of all the virtues towards pleasure. At present, however, I shall show what is the essence and what are the characteristics of pleasure, so as to remove all confusion caused by ignorant people, and to make it clear how serious, how sober, how austere is that school which is esteemed to be pleasure-seeking, luxurious, and effeminate.
For the pleasure which we pursue is not that alone which excites the natural constitution itself by a kind of sweetness, and of which the sensual enjoyment is attended by a kind of agreeableness; but we look upon the greatest pleasure as that which is enjoyed when all pain is removed. Now, inasmuch as whenever we are released from pain we rejoice in the mere emancipation and freedom from all annoyance — and everything whereat we rejoice is equivalent to pleasure, just as everything whereat we are troubled is equivalent to pain — therefore the complete release from pain is rightly termed pleasure. But just as the mere removal of annoyance brings with it the realization of pleasure, whenever hunger and thirst have been banished by food and drink, so in every case the banishment of pain ensures its replacement by pleasure. Therefore, Epicurus refused to allow that there is any middle term between pain and pleasure. What was thought by some to be a middle term — the absence of all pain — was in his sense not only pleasure, but the highest pleasure possible. Surely anyone who is conscious of his own condition must needs be either in a state of pleasure or in a state of pain. Epicurus thinks that the highest degree of pleasure is defined by the removal of all pain, so that pleasure may afterwards exhibit diversities and differences but is incapable of increase or extension.
But actually, as my father used to tell me when he wittily and unanimously ridiculed the Stoics: there is in the Ceramicus a statue of Chrysippus, sitting with his hand extended, which hand indicates that he was fond of the following little argument — “Does your hand, being in its present condition, feel the lack of anything at all?” “Certainly of nothing.” “But if pleasure were the supreme good, it would feel a lack.” “I agree.” “Pleasure, then, is not the supreme good.” My father used to say that even a statue would not talk in that way if it had the power of speech.
The inference is rude enough as against the Cyrenaics, but does not touch an Epicurean. For if the only pleasure was that which, as it were, tickled the senses — if I may say so — attended by sweetness overflows them and insinuates itself into them, neither the hand nor any other member would be able to rest satisfied with the absence of pain apart from a joyous activity of pleasure. But if it is the highest pleasure, as we believe, to be in no pain, then the first admission that the hand in its then-existing condition felt no lack was properly made to you, Chrysippus; but the second improperly — a claim that it would have felt a lack had pleasure been the supreme goal. It would certainly feel no lack, on this ground that anything which is cut off from the state of pain is in the state of pleasure.
Cassius:
Martin, thank you for reading that for us this morning. We did not read as much text today as we have in the past, because this material — these three paragraphs — are so packed with information and important material that we really need to go through them very, very closely. They’re not only packed but they’re very complicated and they’re very controversial in what they mean. But our panel is going to explain them all with absolute clarity to everyone today. Right, Don?
Don:
Sure, let’s go for it.
Cassius:
All joking aside, this is incredibly important material and we’re going to do the best we can to try to at least introduce the issues that surround it. All books have been written trying to explain the issues that are discussed in these passages, and we’re not going to be able to cover all those details today. But it is our purpose to try to bring to everyone a common-sense and practical understanding of how to apply Epicurean philosophy.
So let’s begin line by line. The very first line: “But let what has been said on this occasion suffice concerning the brilliant and famous actions of illustrious men. We shall indeed find a fitting opportunity by and by for discoursing about the tendency of all the virtues towards pleasure.” So right there, Torquatus is making the point that for the time being he’s not going to talk about how virtue does lead towards pleasure in actual life — he’s going to put that aside and start with something else. He describes it as: “At present, however, I shall show what is the essence and what are the characteristics of pleasure so as to remove all confusion caused by ignorant people.”
Don:
Yeah, and I thought it was interesting — I actually looked up what the original Latin was for “ignorant people,” because I think “ignorant” has a lot of semantic baggage with it. The actual Latin term he uses there is imperitus, which is defined a number of ways: inexperienced in anything, not knowing, unacquainted with, unskilled, without experience. So these people don’t really have even experience with what is actually in Epicurean philosophy. They just have a stereotypical view of it — that’s the way I’m interpreting “ignorant people.”
Cassius:
It’s interesting to me to think about whether Cicero, in reading this, was considering himself to be among the people being classified as ignorant here. That gets back to what we discussed — I think Cicero thinks that he knows all and sees all and is right. So Torquatus is talking as if the main problem is confusion by people who don’t understand the philosophy, but he’s talking to Cicero who really knows it very well.
Don:
At least according to Cicero.
Cassius:
At least according to Cicero, yes indeed. Maybe I should finish that first sentence there: “and to make it clear how serious, how sober, how austere is that school which is esteemed to be pleasure-seeking, luxurious, and effeminate.” Let me comment on “effeminate” for just a second — it’s not a good word to be using. I think that the proper meaning of it here would not be a reference to sex or anything like that, but it’s more about cowardice.
Don:
Yeah, I had the same feeling with that particular word in the translation. The Latin term is mollis, and it basically means to make soft or to become unmanly in the stereotypical way. So that’s the connotation of mollis.
Cassius:
Right. The word has such bad connotations today, but I do think it has a very important meaning here, because the whole attack that Cicero and the Stoics and so forth have on Epicurean philosophy is: you’re so much of a coward that you’re not willing to do what’s necessary to really achieve the best life you could possibly achieve. You’re just looking for softness, luxury, rest, and relaxation. You’re not up to the challenge of the best life that you should be living.
Don:
Exactly. And it goes back to the whole metaphor that they used about calling the Epicureans eunuchs — “you can make a eunuch out of a man, but not a man out of a eunuch” sort of thing.
Cassius:
Yes. The background being that you want to use your life the best way you possibly can — it’s not a matter of glory, but you want to get what there is to get out of life and not be misled, not be distracted, not just procrastinate. You’ve got to seize the day, as Horace would say. And I find it interesting that Torquatus describes the Epicurean school as “serious and sober and austere” — continens, sobria, severa are the three Latin words he uses right there.
Joshua:
Well, I am curious about this line you’re trying to draw here. Particularly as it surrounds that word “effeminate” — it seems like you’re making this something more about duty or virtue, is that right?
Cassius:
Well, I’m just saying that I think the heart of what he’s describing when he uses the word “effeminate” is really a synonym for cowardice or softness. And I don’t think that’s an inherent aspect of feminine nature or women or anybody else. I think it’s much better to focus on the real character attribute that’s being discussed.
Don:
No, no, I think you’re right. I mean, the whole idea of that word from what I can see in the standard dictionaries is that they’re characterizing the Epicureans as soft and unmanly and tamed — “soft, effeminate, unmanly, weak.” That’s how the ignorant people are characterizing the Epicureans. Or the Stoics, who also characterize the Epicureans, whether they’re ignorant about Epicurean philosophy or not.
Cassius:
Exactly, exactly. Okay. Well, let’s plow forward then into this next sentence, which is going to be very important to unwind. “For the pleasure which we pursue is not that alone, which excites the natural constitution itself by a kind of sweetness, and of which the sensual enjoyment is attended by a kind of agreeableness.” Let me stop right there. What is he saying when he says “it’s not that alone”?
Don:
He seems to be saying that while those things are pleasure and therefore good, that’s not the whole of what we mean by the word pleasure. It’s not merely “eat, drink, and be happy, for tomorrow you die.”
Cassius:
Yeah. Let’s get close to something like a definition of the word pleasure, which we were talking about a couple of weeks ago and couldn’t really get a handle on. But here he says that at least part of what pleasure means is “that which excites the natural constitution by a kind of sweetness and of which the sensual enjoyment is attended by a kind of agreeableness.” So we’ve got two criteria of what this physical pleasure seems to be. I’ll be interested to go forward to see how he describes the rest of the picture.
Don:
I would agree with that. It strikes me that this is what, if you ask somebody to describe pleasure, the definition they’re going to give — and I think what Torquatus is saying is, well, that’s part of it, but we’re going to talk about the all-encompassing idea of pleasure. And we don’t have to read too many words to get the rest of the sentence: “but we look upon the greatest pleasure as that which is enjoyed when all pain is removed.”
Cassius, that’s just — if he had said “but we look upon also as pleasure that which is enjoyed when all pain is removed,” that would itself be a very interesting topic. But he doesn’t say “also.” He says “we look upon the greatest pleasure as that which is enjoyed when all pain is removed.” So we need to discuss how that which is enjoyed when all pain is removed is pleasure — and how it is “the greatest pleasure.” There are two things going on.
Don:
I think we need to start tying in some Principal Doctrines here. There’s that Principal Doctrine where he says the limit of pleasure is reached with the removal of all pain. In some translations it’s very specific — it’s a quantity. “The limit of quantity of pleasure is reached when all pain is removed.”
Martin:
I think he means exactly that. If you read the next sentences it gives the details. So that means if once we feel more hungry after eating, then this is called in itself pleasure. But if we want to get at the maximum level, then we need also this mental pleasure on top. Actually — and I think we have to address this — it says at least in the translation that “the greatest pleasure is that which is enjoyed when all pain is removed.” It’s not the removal of the pain that is pleasure; it’s the fact — or are we saying that pleasure takes the place of pain, so that whenever you are filled with pleasure, by definition all pain has been removed?
Don:
Yes, that’s an interesting way to put it, because there are two different ways you could take that. You could say that the act of relieving pain is in itself pleasurable, or you could say that it’s basically a binary state where either one of them is on or the other one is on.
Martin:
Exactly, exactly. And we do feel it when the pain goes away — we can feel that as pleasure. So it’s somewhere in there. For example, after I hurt myself and the pain is still there but going down, the hope that it will disappear quickly is in itself pleasurable. But that’s only essential pleasure of the moment, and then when that pain is completely gone, then it is maximized as this contribution to the maximum.
Cassius:
Let me try to frame a couple of things we’re going to be discussing for the rest of the episode. As I look at these passages denominated as 37 and 38, the rest of passage 37 appears to me to be largely the point that Martin was making just now — example after example about how removal of a pain results in pleasure. Then in section 38, he turns to the point that I think Don was making — that there’s no middle ground between pain and pleasure, and so you’ve got a sort of definitional: if you only have two things and you don’t have one, then you have the other.
So maybe one way of looking at all this is that there are a lot of underlying presumptions going on here that have to be thought about when you take what would appear on its face to be a very simple statement. “The greatest pleasure is that which is enjoyed when all pain is removed” — that seems simple. But the Epicurean foundation and the Principal Doctrines, going back into the fundamentals of nature about the way the universe works, are built as a structure underneath this. And you can’t forget what was already established when we studied nature, including Principal Doctrine 2 about how all good and evil comes to us through sensation.
And maybe this is the ultimate point I want to make early and often: does this statement mean that our goal in life is to achieve numbness? If not, why not?
Don:
Because pleasure is an active principle — you feel pleasure. So even if it’s ataraxia or tranquility or whatever you call it, you feel that as a positive.
Cassius:
Now you say that pleasure is an active principle. But I challenge you to go to Wikipedia or any other article on the internet and read about Epicurus and pleasure. You will be told that the highest pleasure in Epicurean terms is katastematic pleasure, which stands for stable — and it’s the opposite of active, because there are two types: katastematic and kinetic. Kinetic is active, katastematic is whatever it is but it’s not active because the active is the kinetic. So what you’ve just said is that pleasure is active — how do you reconcile that?
Don:
My interpretation of katastematic — and I don’t know whether I ever heard that word pronounced before, but katastematic sounds good — my interpretation of katastematic is that it’s stable and kinetic is something that changes over time. So the examples that Epicurus gives for the katastematic pleasures are ataraxia and aponia — no pain and tranquility — those are stable conditions of the body. I’m coming around to the idea that it sort of coincides with the biological term of homeostasis: your body’s in homeostasis, everything’s working well, everything’s good, it’s nice and stable. Whereas if you are excited or joyous or gleeful — I think Epicurus uses euphrosyne and chara as examples of kinetic pleasures in the Letter to Menoeceus — there’s sort of change over time, and you can have higher or lower levels of excitement or joy. But something like ataraxia or tranquility is a stable state where it doesn’t — you’re just humming along. I always like the metaphor of calm seas whenever it comes to ataraxia. There’s an ancient Greek metaphor that has to do with calm seas as a metaphor for ataraxia. So it’s a stable condition as opposed to something that’s up and down or changes.
Cassius:
I thought a minute ago you described pleasure as something that’s an active principle — is that still okay with you or no?
Don:
I think “active” in the sense that it’s something that you feel, that you experience. Yeah, you experience it.
Cassius:
And again, that goes back to your point about the whole idea that we can only experience pleasure when we’re alive and sensing things and have sensations. That’s why death is nothing to us.
Martin and Joshua, who would like to tackle this next? The question is basically — for people who listen to the podcast who’ve read so much about Epicurus on the internet — when they read “the greatest pleasure is that which is enjoyed when all pain is removed,” describe to those people what we mean when we say “that which is enjoyed when all pain is removed.”
Martin:
Just to comment on that, it doesn’t mean numbness. Because if we are numb, we basically can feel bored, and that is some kind of pain. So we want some pleasure, some more active type of pleasure being added, even though if we do not feel physical pain — because boredom is a pain. And that means we are not yet at the maximum level of pleasure that is meant by this. So we want also the pain from boredom to be removed.
Don:
I like that. Yeah, that does help, Martin, because obviously numbness does have that connotation of an unpleasant experience — when your jaw is numbed at the dentist’s office, it may not be painful but you wouldn’t characterize it as something you wish to experience either.
But going beyond that, once you eliminate numbness as something we’re talking about, there are so many questions that go back into the issue of whether there is a single best kind of pleasure to experience or not. I don’t think we’ve really even solved that question.
Cassius:
I still go back to the idea that that has to do with desires — it’s the choice-worthiness of particular pleasures at a particular time. Well, then what are we discussing here when it says “the greatest pleasure as that which is enjoyed when all pain is removed”? What do those words “the greatest pleasure” mean?
Martin:
It means there’s no further increase quantitatively, because we are already at the maximum.
Cassius:
What are some examples of the type of pleasure that you think would constitute the greatest pleasure? Isn’t the only thing that is said to experience complete and total pleasure all the time — the Epicurean gods? They are the only ones who experience total and complete pleasure.
Don:
And then everybody else has pleasure varied over their lifetimes. I think that’s a very legitimate observation, because you’re right — only the Epicurean gods could have confidence of being able to sustain their state forever. As humans, we cannot have that confidence; we know it’s going to come to an end, and yet we reconcile ourselves to it. But even within our human context there does seem to be something he refers to as “the greatest pleasure.”
Martin:
It does not experience it so for a while it can be at that, but then of course there may be other things coming in — either if it’s something where we do not really move but where we sense it in a pleasurable way, eventually somehow boredom will kick in again. So that means then we may want to do something. If our circulation is at a level where we feel like moving around, then we want to get out of that physical rest and do some activity.
Cassius:
I have another way of asking the same question that I want to ask before I forget it. You remember we started this passage by Cicero discussing that all philosophers agree that there’s something which is your ultimate goal, which everything else is a tool to achieve — are we still talking about that here in this passage? Are we able to identify some specific thing that we ought to always have in front of us as our ultimate goal in life? Is that something that’s experienceable?
Don:
I don’t think he’s necessarily talking about that in this particular passage here. I think the character of Torquatus has already established that pleasure is the goal — the summum bonum — and now he’s just talking about pleasure itself, the maximum pleasure that you can experience. We’ve established that pleasure is the highest good. Now we’re saying that the maximum amount of pleasure you can experience is the absence of pain.
Cassius:
Alright, we’ve gone too far without hearing from Joshua.
Joshua:
So I guess I have two concerns here. One of them relates to something Don said when he brought up the Epicurean conception of the gods — and that is that we spend a lot of time talking about this, and the question really as it relates to humans is purely hypothetical, because we can’t reach a state entirely without pain. This is my second concern and I’m hesitant to say this out loud. Typically when new people come to the forum, this is one of the questions they really try to answer for themselves. I’m sure I was the same way. I want people to ask these questions. But my concern is that in my experience, the more you analyze pleasure, the more it loses its charm.
Cassius:
That’s a good way of saying it.
Joshua:
Yeah. I’m trying not to reach for another analogy, but —
Cassius:
No, I think analogy is exactly the way Epicurus says you explain things. We haven’t gotten to the end of this section in Torquatus, but he talks about analogy and comparison as the correct method of thinking. So I don’t think you should shy away from using analogies. Go ahead.
Joshua:
Okay. There are certain circles in which a particular book is discussed called Getting Things Done. This book is about establishing a system that processes all of the inputs that you have in your life and then turning them more efficiently into outputs so that you have more time to live your life. The problem with people who are really into this kind of thing is that they spend more time thinking about their system, about efficiency and about getting things done, than they spend actually doing it.
And with pleasure I think it’s the same way. If we spend a lot of our time really analyzing pleasure from all these different angles, in a sense it makes it difficult to just appreciate pleasure in and of itself.
Don:
You’ve just stabbed me in the heart, because I’ve just been reading some David Allen — Getting Things Done — this morning. And I find that I fall prey exactly to what you’re talking about, Joshua, that you think there’s some system that is going to solve everything for you and you obsess over the system instead of actually getting anything done. You do have to have some kind of a system and prioritize and translate your ideas into reality. But if you stay at the level of obsessing over the procedure — and the word we discussed last week, “finality” — you have to make a decision and act on it, realizing that you wish you had more information and maybe next week things will be better and so forth. But you can’t do that because of the nature of human life. You have to go ahead and take action. I struggle with that myself.
Cassius:
Don’t mistake the tools for the goal — right? But the tools are useful. It’s not that the tools are bad things; you have to have them to some extent. But you have to keep them in priority.
Martin, I gather you don’t have that problem. Help us with it.
Martin:
Yeah, instead of sitting down and spending hours estimating the coefficients of the matrix I would need if I was to do the hedonic calculus by actual mathematics, I’ve trained my intuition. And I check back: if I had a plan to fulfill a desire, did I really get the pleasure I expected, or even a better one, or worse? This feeds back into my intuition, and with intuition I can make these decisions very fast. So as soon as I know I’m confident I have enough input and now is the time, then I go ahead with it. I don’t need to obsess about the system because I know I have one based on past experience already, so there’s no more need to obsess about it.
Cassius:
That’s an important point. Now this is probably the appropriate point to remind everybody of the quote from Epicurus in Plutarch about how the escape from some terrible disaster is the meaning of good for those who can understand the question — and “don’t go walking around uselessly talking about the meaning of good.” But that’s the point he’s arguing there as well. It’s possible — and I have this suspicion about a lot of Cicero’s arguments — that this is an example of going down the rabbit hole, obsessing over some detail of a word game that catches us in a trap we never get out of.
Joshua:
Cassius, that raises an interesting question for us. We’re dealing with people who are just now getting interested in Epicurean philosophy who want to talk about these questions. Some of us have been dealing with this for a long time, and you seem to have more patience than I do for analyzing pleasure. My question is: how do we stay open to the conversation when we’ve kind of already settled it for ourselves — even if the way we settled it doesn’t really make all that much sense on paper?
Cassius:
Let’s talk about that at length, because that’s maybe the number one issue confronting all of us in everything we do here. People who want to struggle with this question — it is a rabbit hole if you stay with this question and never move past it. Frankly I think that’s the number one issue that kills Epicurean philosophy in the modern world, that stops people from spending more time with it and understanding it better.
That’s the first thing they’re confronted with on the internet when they read about Epicurus: “Epicurus held the greatest pleasure is the absence of pain. He divided pleasure into katastematic and kinetic. Kinetic pleasure is active pleasure and the only use you have for active pleasure is to get to the state of katastematic pleasure. But katastematic pleasure is not really active and you don’t really feel it — it’s just something that’s out there that you get when you get rid of pain.” And people say: now isn’t that a cute way to describe life? It makes no sense. It’s a turn-off to people who just want to live their lives with some kind of a practical explanation and a practical guide. Nobody gets past it. It turns into a word game. It turns into a synonym for Stoicism and everybody thinks that the Stoics are real cute too because they have these indifferents and these other ideas about how to get past pain. And everybody agrees that happiness is the goal, so why don’t we just all get along and forget about all these details?
I’m sorry to get wound up on that, but that is from the beginning and probably till the end the point that you’ve raised, Joshua — how do we get past it? How do we acknowledge the issue is there but not get stuck at that point? Because that’s where we frequently get stuck. We’ve got to acknowledge to people that the question is a valid and important one, we have to give them an answer, but you’ve got to move past it if you’re going to accomplish anything.
Don:
That’s like — way to encapsulate the problem.
Cassius:
It’s my experience that people who get stuck on that just move on. They hear it, they think that it reinforces Stoicism, and they walk away with a sort of eclectic collection of aphorisms from different philosophers. I think there’s more to be gained from Epicurean philosophy by staying with it and understanding where he’s coming from on all these other issues rather than getting — not traumatized but — anesthetized by it. A lot of people read into this that being in a state of sort of anesthesia is the goal of life. They find that consistent with Stoicism and the Stoic “indifference to pain.” But I just don’t think that’s the case.
I find it interesting that you use the term “anesthesia” there, Don, because the actual Greek word in Principal Doctrine 2 about sensation — anesthesia literally means “not sensing.” And the word used in that Principal Doctrine is actually the one that “anesthesia” is derived from. So he’s basically equating sensation with life. And therefore anesthesia — numbness, just floating without any stimulation whatsoever, without even any thoughts — is to me the opposite of what Epicurus is suggesting.
And I think it’s important to point out that ataraxia or tranquility does not equal numbness. If you’ve ever been out on a sunny day, close your eyes and feel the heat of the sun on your face and just let your cares wash away — that’s an active feeling of tranquility. You’re not in a coma.
Joshua:
Here’s something where I would draw an interesting distinction. Sometimes when you come out of the dentist’s office and they’ve numbed part of your mouth — I never feel better than after I’ve come out of the dentist’s office and I don’t have to go back for like six months. But the numbness in the mouth is not a good feeling. The knowledge that I don’t have to go back, on the other hand, is a great feeling. So what is the difference? There’s nothing particularly pleasurable happening to me physically — it’s just that knowledge that this negative stimulus has been removed. But it’s different from the actual physical numbness, which I don’t enjoy.
Don:
I think you’ve set up a really good contrast there between the mental satisfaction or pleasure that you get out of knowing you don’t have to go back, and the physical discomfort that’s still in your jaw. So there are two different things going on there.
Cassius:
And as a human being, last time I checked, Joshua, you were a human being — you get to experience multiple things at the same time.
Don:
Yes, but in the same place you can’t get the conflict about pain and pleasure being in the same place at the same time.
Cassius:
I think you can feel your toe and your ear if one of them is stuck with a pin and the other one is somehow being massaged. This is a hobby horse of mine about the whole idea of multitasking — there is no such thing as multitasking in the sense of true simultaneous attention. You attend to one thing and then you attend to another thing. But you’re concentrating on one: you’re taking pleasure — to use Joshua’s example — in the idea that “oh man, that’s done for another six months,” and then you’re like, “oh, but my jaw, I’m drooling all over myself and this is not a pleasurable experience right here.” But man, I don’t have to come back.
Don:
The point that Joshua raised about leaving the dentist office — I think it would be important for us to mention that later on, not in the material we cover today, but later on Torquatus makes the explicit point that pleasures and pains of the mind are frequently much more intense than pleasures and pains of the body. Because the mind knows that the future is out there as well. What I would hear in Joshua’s analogy is that the mental pleasure of knowing you’re not going to be back in the dentist office anytime soon far and away outweighs any discomfort from the numbness.
Cassius:
And the other side of that is that the anxiety of anticipating your next dental visit is very often worse than the physical pain you actually get from going to the dentist.
Don:
Oh yeah, right, yep.
Cassius:
And it doesn’t necessarily mean that mental pleasures are quote-unquote “better” than physical pleasures. They’re just different kinds of ways to experience pleasure.
Don:
Well, you’re shying away from “greater and lesser” or “intense or less intense.” But what I think you’re correctly saying is that there’s no absolute ranking.
Cassius:
Right, right. “Value judgments” — that’s where I would use the word “better” or “worse” or “noble” or “ignoble” or “worthy” or “less worthy.” Those are criteria that come from Stoicism and would not be appropriate here. “Greater and lesser” — that’s where we get: all pleasures are good but not all pleasures are choice-worthy in any particular context.
There’s so much to talk about and so little time. One thing we should try to keep in mind today — let’s at least try to cover what the controversies are so that even when we run out of time we would at least have introduced people to some of them.
When I look at the rest of line 37, I see where he’s discussing the removal of annoyances. People who get into the study in greater detail are going to want to follow that argument, because in the development of Greek philosophy there’s what they call the “replenishment theory of pleasure.” There are people who try to go down that rabbit hole and categorize pleasures into: here’s some pain that needs to be removed, like hunger that needs to be satisfied by eating. They list all these needs — hunger/food, thirst/water — and suggest that all pleasure can be viewed as the satisfaction of some kind of need. But even these Greeks will talk about how when you smell a rose you didn’t expect to, that’s a pleasure everybody would acknowledge — but it was not because you lacked smelling the rose that it was a pleasure. So the whole issue of categorizing pleasures into many different types is fraught with danger, though it’s out there.
One of the best descriptions of it is in Gosling and Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure — a book that goes into great detail on that. But you almost have to devote a large part of your life to studying Greek philosophy to trace all the details of their arguments about the nature of pleasure. Those arguments were going on and were probably an essential underlying context to this discussion here.
Does anybody want to talk about the details of “removal of pain as pleasure”?
Don:
Here’s a question. Can we say — the phrase that always keeps coming up here is “the removal of pain.” Can you say: is that the same thing as saying “pleasure is added”? Because if you have two things and you have more of one and less of another, can you say that whenever there’s no more pain to be removed, you’re at maximum pleasure?
Cassius:
I think the answer is yes to that. You come up with all sorts of analogies. One of the ones I think about is the gas tank — when you fill it, you’ve filled it with gasoline, the air that was in the tank is gone, and the tank is full.
Don:
I mean, some of the Epicurean writings are about the removal of pain. But it just always strikes me that you’re concentrating on what you’re taking away as opposed to what you’re adding. The vessel analogy — you’ve got a vessel full of a liquid or oil or something. Just because you drain one — whether you want to call the oil the pain and the pleasure the water — just because you drain one, it doesn’t change the size of the vessel.
I’m thinking of a cup that’s half oil and half water. If you keep adding water to it, eventually all the oil is going to be pushed out because it floats on top, and you’ll end up with a cup of water. Which would be a full cup of pleasure in this particular analogy.
Cassius:
You’ve essentially drained all the oil from that cup, but the cup is not decreased in size. The cup is still there at the same size — it’s just full of pleasure, or water, at that particular point.
Joshua:
I mentioned earlier that you might think of this as a binary state. I think there’s an analogy to another argument in Epicurean philosophy — specifically atomism. I’ve read about people who have really gone in deep on Epicurean atomism and what it means for the smallest particle to be indivisible. There’s a school of thought that the atoms which are physically indivisible are also intellectually indivisible — you can’t even conceptualize what one half of an atom would be. And when an atom crosses a specific line, the whole atom is over the line. So when you’ve crossed that line from pain to pleasure, it’s like you’ve crossed it all at once. How terrible is that analogy?
Cassius:
I think there’s a lot of good material in it, but it probably needs a little more clarification. Are you saying it’s a conceptual jump that’s impossible to make for some reason? Or are you saying that once you define it as a binary you can’t be sitting on the fence?
Joshua:
Basically it’s the binary state — you’re either on one side of the line or the other. There is no middle. Two options. This side of the line, that side of the line.
Don:
There might also be an analogy here between atoms and void. You can either have atoms or you can have void, but you can’t have some middle sort of existence somewhere. So that at least may be analogous to pleasure and pain.
Joshua:
I don’t even know what to think at this point. I feel like the human life, along with its mental life — the physical and the mental combined — is a composite. And so in a composite you’ve got atoms and void. So in your mental composite you probably can experience two different things at once.
Cassius:
Great question — and is the vessel we’re talking about a human life taken in total, or is it an individual moment? That reminds me of your bowling alley analogy from last week — that you’ve got the pins at the end of the alley that you could consider to be your goal, but at any particular moment in your life you’re somewhere rolling down the lane. And even if your life is cut short and you never hit the pins, you still have to evaluate whether you think you’ve lived well or not.
Joshua:
So then the idea is the pins are sort of what everybody thinks of as a full life — you live 90 years and die peacefully in your bed. If that doesn’t happen to you, the Epicurean analogy would be: did you at least enjoy the game?
Cassius:
I don’t think Epicurus would hold by any means that the ball has to reach the end of the alley and strike those pins. You’ve got all sorts of discussion in Epicurean philosophy about even committing suicide under certain circumstances, and obviously hard questions about what happens when you die young. Does Epicurus say by definition that every person who died in their teens had a wasted life? I don’t think he would say that.
Don:
Yeah, it’s more like — how you conduct your life is the important thing, not the length of it.
Martin:
We certainly plan not only from one moment to the next but we may have some short-term plans, mid-term plans, long-term plans. And if death comes before these, it’s not a problem. But if we live that long and we didn’t do the long-term plan, then we are not at maximum pleasure for what really matters now. So if we live long, we like to have prepared for these pleasures which we need more time to prepare for than those which we can prepare on a whim.
Cassius:
I like that. And there are a number of passages — I don’t know if they’re in the Principal Doctrines or the Vatican Sayings — but you do have instances in which the end of life is discussed, and sometimes the description used is that if you followed Epicurean philosophy properly, you come to the end of your life as to a safe harbor. What exactly does it mean to be a safe harbor? To me, if you haven’t throughout your life dealt with the issue of your own mortality — if you don’t have a good sense of where you’re at philosophically when you get to the end — some things are just going to crop up on you that you’re not equipped to deal with.
Joshua:
As you said, you could die at any age — so at any age you have to be prepared. That’s why he says you have to study philosophy when you’re old and when you’re young.
Don:
That’s right. I went to the Letter to Menoeceus to get exactly that quote — that’s got to indicate the importance of what we’re talking about right now, that it’s one of the very first things he says in the Letter to Menoeceus.
And I’ve read too that you can take pleasure in planning for things. Even if you die before they come to fruition, you’ve already taken pleasure in the planning process. And then if you do get to put those plans into action, that’s even better.
Cassius:
I see that we’re going to have to begin to think about coming to a conclusion for today. Why don’t we try to use this statue analogy as the way to come to a conclusion. Don, before we started you said you had some information on the statue that’s involved.
Don:
It’s the statue of Chrysippus. The reference is that it’s in the Ceramicus — in Greek, the Kerameikos — and that’s actually the district in Athens outside the Dipylon Gate where the Garden was situated as well. It was also the burial grounds with tombs and graves all along that section of the city. So I’ve always found it kind of interesting that Epicurus decided to establish his Garden among the memorials and graves, to remind everybody of their mortality.
Cassius:
Who wants to try to explain what this Chrysippus statue analogy is and why somebody thinks it’s a good argument — or a bad one — because this is the issue of the statue with its hand extended and this argument about whether the hand is feeling the supreme good or not? It’s very difficult for me to even unwind why somebody thinks this is a good argument.
Don:
So — okay, you’ve got the statue in the Ceramicus. I assume Ceramicus has something to do with ceramics.
Cassius:
Yes, the potter’s district — where all the Attic pottery was made.
Don:
Okay. So there is a statue of Chrysippus in the Ceramicus sitting with his hand extended, which hand indicates that he was fond of the following little argument: “Does your hand, being in its present condition, feel the lack of anything at all?” “Certainly of nothing.” “But if pleasure were the supreme good, it would feel a lack.” “I agree.” “Pleasure, then, is not the supreme good.”
So the argument here is: you’ve got this Stoic holding his hand out, asking you — if pleasure is the supreme good, then your hand ought to be feeling a lack of pleasure in it right now. And if your hand doesn’t feel that lack, then pleasure must not be the supreme good.
And I think the “I agree” is part of some sort of Platonic dialogue — Chrysippus is asking some unnamed questioner this, and the questioner is saying “I agree,” and then Chrysippus draws his conclusion. But the argument is supposed to be so obvious that “even a statue would not talk in that way if it had power of speech.”
Cassius:
I kind of agree with Cassius — I don’t really understand what it’s supposed to mean. If virtue is the supreme good, do you feel a lack of virtue in your hand right now?
Joshua:
There you go. Right. By what mechanism does your hand even begin to sense virtue? That doesn’t even make sense. The argument here is not even wrong — it’s completely nonsensical to me.
Don:
“Not even wrong” — I like that.
Cassius:
If God is the supreme good, do you feel a lack of God in your hand? Well, if you don’t feel a lack of God in your hand, then God must not be the supreme good — by that logic. I feel like this is an argument that can only be made with pleasure, but he says here that it should apply to anything, not just pleasure.
Don:
And I think that is an excellent observation — they’re just singling out this one supreme good that they’re arguing about.
Cassius:
The Stoics like Chrysippus were masters of logic, and there must be some logical consistency from their point of view. In this particular example I find it even difficult to identify what the logical consistency is, other than some kind of a premise that if you’ve got a living thing — and you could consider your hand to be a living thing — the premise seems to be that any living thing must either experience its supreme good or feel something missing in it.
Don:
Here’s what I want to do. I want to tie in this Stoic argument and compare it to the Epicurean argument with the infant child. What we would say is: when you observe an infant child completely devoid of language or culture or learning, responding totally in accordance with nature — its nature is to reach for pleasure and recoil from pain. This is the argument the Epicureans make. But then I could see a Stoic going — what would it even mean for a baby to reach for virtue, where virtue is the highest good? I could see a Stoic looking at that and saying, “Well, that argument doesn’t even make sense.” Kind of like what we’re doing here.
So how do those two tie in together? Are they similar?
Cassius:
Similar in the way that they both have their underlying premises that you have to accept in order for the argument to make sense. You almost can’t argue against either one — it’s set up so that every answer but the one the questioner wants you to reach is destined to fail. The premise in the Chrysippus argument — “if pleasure were the supreme good, the living thing would feel the lack of it” — is a very complicated observation that I don’t know I accept at all.
Don:
I find it interesting that the Loeb edition does not say “supreme good” — it just says “but if pleasure were a good, it would want pleasure.” And that is interesting, because it takes us right back into that argument about whether there are multiple goods and how to define “good.”
Martin:
I pretty much tend toward the side that it just doesn’t make sense. I’m sitting here with my hand — I’ve got a little bit of a twinge in my thumb, it’s a little cold. You know, it could feel better. But I mean, it’s not like it’s any sort of great philosophical insight to say “my hand is cold and there’s a little twinge in my thumb, so my hand wants pleasure.” It just seems like such an overwrought sort of argument.
Cassius:
Well, to try to bring us home on this particular episode — the rest of this passage goes ahead and tries to explain it in a way that goes back over the issue of absence of pain and says: well, this argument would be very effective against the Cyrenaics, but not against Epicureans. Because since Epicurus holds that absence of pain is the highest pleasure, then since the hand doesn’t feel any pain, it’s experiencing its highest pleasure at that moment. Which probably makes sense. But again, the whole argument is very difficult.
And maybe the point we could begin to focus on as we finish the episode is this: if you spend all your life obsessing over the logical unwinding of this argument, you may never get anywhere productively further with the rest of your life. We have to decide: are we going to spend our time unwinding an argument that doesn’t even appear to make sense to us, or are we going to go ahead and live the rest of our lives — taking away the major point, which I would contend would be that pleasure as a feeling is something real, whereas supernatural gods and absolute virtues are not real? And so we go with what is real and we actually live our lives while we have time to do it.
Does anybody know any article they’ve read or a particularly brilliant analysis of this passage that they could refer to?
Don:
I don’t, actually.
Cassius:
I guess that’s our homework then. It may take a while. Next week we’re going to come back to what I think will make it very clear, because next week Torquatus is going to hypothesize: let’s think about what would be the best life, and let’s think about what would be the worst life. And I think we’ll see when we get to that example that you’re not going for some kind of undefined, ambiguous anesthesia — you’re going to a life of pleasure that is very recognizable to all of us normal people without resort to logical flip-flops to try to make sense of it.
So I think there is a way out of it, and Epicurus will point the way — he will guide the way, with dux vitae, as it were.
Now, the ancient Epicureans represented by Torquatus think it’s very important not just to use the common-sense definition of pleasure but also to unwind these logical definitions of the highest pleasure and absence of pain and Cyrenaics and active pleasure versus resting pleasure. And if that floats your boat, there appear to be no limit to the amount of time you can spend on it. But I don’t gather that Martin spends too many hours a day worrying about unwinding that, do you, Martin?
Martin:
Definitely not.
Cassius:
And that may all point back to what Cicero started this section talking about — where Epicurus insisted there’s no need for elaborate logical demonstration that pleasure is to be desired and pain is to be avoided. That may be the most profound point. It’s like the philosopher who proved that motion is possible by walking across the room — in response to some logical proof that motion was impossible. It may be that ultimately this kind of practical rejection of logical gamesmanship is the root of the solution. And I do like Martin’s explanation that his experience feeds back into his intuition, and he finds that he just can move on with his life.
So let’s go ahead and talk about closing thoughts for today. And let’s close the episode by reassuring the people listening to the podcast that we are not going to spend the rest of our lives debating the meaning of “absence of pain” and some of the definitions that go into these word games. We’re going to move on with a practical analysis of how to live your life the best way possible.
Martin, closing thoughts for this week.
Martin:
No closing thought.
Joshua:
I’m trying to think if there’s a difference between how we read Lucretius and how we read this material. Lucretius says — talking to Memmius — something about how if you doubt or stray even a little, slow old age will creep in before my argument and verse is finished, before my honey-tongued words from their rich sources pour forth to convince you. For some reason I can take as much as Lucretius can give me, because he’s talking about how the universe works and I find that endlessly fascinating. But arguing about pleasure, to me — I find it kind of dreary. I just want to experience it.
Cassius:
The whole phrase there about coating the rim of the cup with honey — to give the boy his medicine — is to me another example of how you’re pointing to the feeling of pleasure as ultimately what’s important and ultimately what will lead you through the complicated questions.
Don:
And when you do put honey on the rim of the cup and give the boy his medicine — and now you’re eating the honey — does your hand feel any pleasure? I know you’re taking your medicine and you’re having issues, but let me talk to you about your hand. There are more important things to worry about than whether or not your hand feels a lack of pleasure.
Cassius:
And what Joshua has just said is so important. People get turned off by this back-and-forth word gaming, and if these Stoics and other people who play the word game succeed in turning people off and making them think there’s no way out of these questions, then they’ve succeeded in what I think is their ultimate goal — manipulation of innocent good people who would like to know the honest answers to honest questions and would just like to live their lives and be left alone. I have friends who fit that exact category — who just think everything is so complicated, there’s no way to find the truth. And there’s a passage in Seneca — I’ll find it — this is the issue about the words of the philosopher who don’t heal or bring pleasure, and so forth, being worthless.
Don:
I think there’s an Epicurean phrase that relates to this too — the whole idea that Epicurean philosophy is very practical, very common sense, very concerned with letting people live the best life they can. Epicurus tried to reach the maximum number of people and that’s why he wrote the epitomes and the summaries and the Principal Doctrines and all those things to get it out to as many people as he could. But there’s also a lot of underlying deep philosophy behind it — and you don’t have to know all of that to get practical benefit from practicing the philosophy.
Cassius:
Okay, then my closing quote for this episode will be from line 30 of the same text here. Torquatus says: “We need no reasoning or debate to show why pleasure is matter for desire, pain for aversion. These facts he thinks are simply perceived, just as the fact that fire is hot, snow is white, and honey sweet — no one of which facts are we bound to support by elaborate arguments; it is enough merely to draw attention to the fact. And there is a difference between proof and formal argument on the one hand, and a direction of the attention on the other — the one process reveals to us mysteries and things under a veil, so to speak; the other enables us to pronounce upon patent and evident facts.”
Pleasure is good. Pain is bad. And you can’t let yourself get twisted around in a pretzel worrying about the definition of those terms.
Let’s close for the day, and we’ll come back in about a week. Thank you again, as always, for a great discussion. Have a good weekend, everybody. Okay.