Episode 096 - The Proof That Pleasure (And Not Virtue) Is the Supreme Good
Date: 11/15/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2249-episode-ninety-six-the-proof-that-pleasure-and-not-virtue-is-the-supreme-good/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Joshua and Don read De Finibus Book 1, Sections 12–13, covering Torquatus’s two key arguments: the “best life / worst life” thought experiment (Section 12), and the argument that virtue is instrumental to pleasure rather than good in itself (Section 13). This is also Don’s final episode before a sabbatical.
On Section 12: The “best life” is described as one filled with pleasures great, numerous, and constant — both mental and bodily — with no pain threatening. Cassius flags this as highly controversial among commentators, some of whom dismiss this passage as a distortion of Epicurean philosophy because it explicitly includes bodily pleasures alongside mental ones. The panel defends the passage as consistent with other Epicurean sources (the fragment about pleasing sights and tastes; the Letter to Menoeceus). Don connects “does not allow his past pleasures to slip away” to Vatican Sayings 17 and 19 on the gratitude of memory.
The “worst life” passage prompts a comparison to the Book of Job, and a discussion of whether Torquatus’s argument is descriptive (“this is how people naturally react to pleasure and pain”) or normative (“this is how they should react”) — and whether Hume’s guillotine (you cannot derive an “ought” from an “is”) applies here. Joshua argues Torquatus is making a descriptive claim about natural human reactions; Cassius pushes back that one must have already accepted Epicurean physics and epistemology to find the argument persuasive against a religious or Platonist opponent. Martin: “if people make different premises than us, of course they will come to different conclusions.”
On Section 13: Virtue is like a physician’s skill or a pilot’s art — praiseworthy not for its own sake but because it accomplishes pleasure. Joshua brings up Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens and the fictional confrontation between Epicurus and Zeno — Zeno says “I feared you yesterday; I fear you doubly today,” because a philosophy that grounds pleasure in wisdom and tranquility is more dangerous than mere Cyrenaicism. Don makes the analogy to medicine: “the words of the philosopher are empty if they do not result in a life of pleasure.” Joshua cites John Adams’s letter to Abigail on the stages of learning — noting that Epicurus would reject Adams’s deferral of philosophy to future generations.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 96 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 am 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. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, 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.
At this point in our podcast, we’ve completed our first line-by-line review of the poem and we have temporarily turned to the presentation of Epicurean ethics found in Cicero’s On Ends. Today, we continue with that material starting with Section 12. Now let’s join our panel for today’s discussion, with Joshua and Don reading today’s text.
Joshua:
Again, the truth that pleasure is the supreme good can be most easily apprehended from the following consideration. Let us imagine an individual in the enjoyment of pleasures great, numerous, and constant, both mental and bodily, with no pain to athwart or threaten them. I ask, what circumstances can we describe as more excellent than these, or more desirable? A man whose circumstances are such must needs possess, as well as other things, a robust mind subject to no fear of death or pain — because death is apart from sensation, and pain when lasting is usually slight, when oppressive is of short duration, so that its temporariness reconciles us to its intensity, and its slightness to its continuance. When in addition we suppose that such a man is in no awe of the influence of the gods, and does not allow his past pleasures to slip away, but takes delight in constantly recalling them — what circumstance is it possible to add to these to make his condition better?
Don:
Imagine, on the other hand, a man worn by the greatest mental and bodily pains which can befall a human being, with no hope before him that his lot will ever be lighter, and moreover destitute of pleasure either actual or probable. What more pitiable object can be mentioned or imagined?
But if a life replete with pains is above all things to be shunned, then assuredly the supreme evil is life accompanied by pain, and from this view it is a constant inference that the climax of things good is life accompanied by pleasure. Nor indeed can our mind find any other ground whereon to take its stand, as though already at the goal, and all its fears and sorrows are comprised under the term pain. Nor is there any other thing beside which is able merely by its own character to cause us vexation or pangs. In addition to this, the germs of desire and aversion and generally of action originate either in pleasure or in pain. This being so, it is plain that all right and praiseworthy action has the life of pleasure for its aim.
Now, inasmuch as the climax or goal or limit of things good — which the Greeks term telos — is that object which is not a means to the attainment of anything else, while all other things are a means to its attainment, we must allow that the climax of things good is to live agreeably.
Those who find this good in virtue and virtue only, and dazzled by the glory of her name fail to perceive what it is that nature craves, will be emancipated from heresy of the deepest dye if they will deign to lend ear to Epicurus. For unless your grand and beautiful virtues were productive of pleasure, who would suppose them to be either meritorious or desirable?
Yes, just as we regard with favor the physician’s skill not for his art’s sake merely but because we prize sound health, and just as the pilot’s art is praised on utilitarian and not on artistic grounds because it supplies the principles of good navigation, so wisdom — which we must hold to be the art of living — would be no object of desire if it were productive of no advantage. But it is in fact desired, because it is to us as an architect that plans and accomplishes pleasure.
I am now aware what kind of pleasure I mean, so the odium of the term must not shake the foundation of my argument. For seeing that the life of men is most of all troubled by ignorance about the goodness and badness of things, and on account of this blindness men are often robbed of the intensest pleasures and also are wracked by the severest mental pains, we must summon to our aid wisdom, that she may remove from us all alarms and passions and, stripping us of our heedless confidence in all false imaginations, may offer herself as our surest guide to pleasure.
Wisdom indeed is alone able to drive sadness from our minds and to prevent us from quaking with fear, and if we sit at her feet we may live in perfect calm when once the heat of every passion has been cooled. Verily, the passions are unconscionable and overthrow not merely individual men but whole families, and often shake the foundations of the entire Commonwealth. From passions spring enmities, divisions, strifes, rebellions, and wars; nor do the passions only air their pride abroad, for they do not merely attack others in their blind onset, but even when imprisoned within our own breasts they are at variance and strife one with another. And the inevitable result of this life is of the bitterest kind, so that the wise man alone, who has cut back and pruned away all vanity and delusion, can live contentedly within the bounds prescribed by nature, emancipated from all sorrow and from all fear.
I ask what classification is either more profitable or more suited to the life of happiness than that adopted by Epicurus. He affirmed that there is one class of passions which are both natural and needful, another class which are natural without being needful, and a third class which are neither natural nor needful. And such are the conditions of these passions that the needful class are satisfied without much trouble or expenditure, nor is it much that the natural passions crave, since nature herself makes such wealth as will satisfy her both easy of access and moderate in amount; and it is not possible to discover any boundary or limit to false passions.
But if we see that all human life is agitated by confusion and ignorance, and that wisdom alone can redeem us from the violence of our lusts and from the menace of our fears, and alone can teach us to endure humbly even the outrages of fortune, and alone can guide us into every path which leads to peace and calm — why should we hesitate to say that wisdom is desirable in view of pleasures and un-wisdom to be shunned on account of annoyances?
Cassius:
Why should you hesitate? Because you’ll be thrown out of every college and school and church in the United States and the world. That’s why you should hesitate. So you should be very clear about what you’re saying.
Thank you, Don and Joshua, for reading that. There’s so much in this section today, and hopefully we can get to all of it. But every time you read it, it can bring out things that you haven’t even thought about before. What caught my eye when Don was finishing that section is that the natural and necessary discussion is included within the discussion of wisdom — he starts talking about wisdom, switches to the natural and necessary classifications, and then comes back to wisdom again. So the natural and necessary discussion is intimately tied to wisdom in general. That should have been obvious to me a long time ago.
But that’s not the beginning of where we are today. We have to start back at section 12, approximately line 40, with this illustration of the supreme good.
Don:
I’ve just had an exciting couple of minutes. I realized there was a wasp trapped in my car with me.
Cassius:
Oh no!
Don:
I think I got it out. I’m not sure.
Cassius:
That’s an example of our practical considerations coming before the discussion of the philosophy, for sure. That is a perfect example of why mental anxiety is put on a level with physical pain as an evil thing.
Don:
There you go. Exactly. There is no way to imagine the best life including sitting in a car with a wasp just buzzing around you, getting ready to strike at any moment.
Cassius:
Certainly not. Okay, so again: “The truth that pleasure is the supreme good can be most easily apprehended from the following consideration.” He goes into a description of two individuals. One is in the enjoyment of pleasures great, numerous, and constant, both mental and bodily, with no pain to thwart or threaten him.
What’s interesting about this passage for me — we talked a lot in the last episode about two kinds of pleasure, and the highest good as being pleasure equivalent to the absence of pain. What I particularly enjoy in this paragraph is these three or four words: “both mental and bodily.” What Torquatus is stating right from the get-go in section 12 is that bodily pleasures — not merely mental pleasures, not only freedom from anxiety — but bodily pleasures are also an embodiment of the good, which is pleasure itself, and worth pursuing in their own right. We would apply hedonic calculus to decide which ones to choose and which ones not to choose, but there’s no sense that bodily pleasures are to be shunned. They are a respectable facet of the good life.
Don:
Amen. Well played.
Cassius:
And let me say this before I forget — that assertion is so controversial. There are many articles I’ve read where commentators assert that this particular passage in Cicero is a total distortion and fabrication of Epicurean philosophy. They say that Cicero cannot be trusted, that he’s totally contradicting himself and contradicting Epicurus. Even from the first, when I was reading the Norman DeWitt material, there’s an article he pointed to from someone — Parker or Porter or something like that — who wrote about Cicero’s presentation of Epicurean ethics, and there was that discussion in that article and it occurs in other places as well. Because you pretty much have to take a position: is this a correct statement of the Epicurean best life? Or is this something absolutely inconsistent with the Letter to Menoeceus and other things you read in Epicurus about tranquility being the sole definition of the best life?
And I think it’s obvious where my flag is planted, because I believe this is a correct statement here. The only thing that makes sense is consistent with the rest of the philosophy. But I do think this is an extremely controversial passage.
Don:
The part about “great, numerous, and constant, mental and bodily” — I think some of the other translations talked about intensity of pleasure or something like that. But there’s just no getting around, as I understand the original Latin words here, that these are active pleasures that are being discussed as part of the picture.
Cassius:
Now, when you start talking both mental and bodily, I love that too because it sweeps everything. I cannot imagine a type of pleasure that is neither mental nor bodily, frankly. So there’s just a bright line to draw here. How do you relate this description to tranquility? I certainly don’t reject tranquility. I would say tranquility is a part of it — it’s in the part where he says you possess a robust mind that is subject to no fear of death or pain, you have no fear of the gods, you don’t allow your past pleasures to slip away, and you take delight in recalling them. Imagining the individual with pleasures great with no pain to thwart or threaten them — to me, that is the condition that would include both aponia and ataraxia. If you have no pain or threat of pain, I think that would eliminate both of those.
Don:
I would include ataraxia and aponia as part of the mental pleasures that he’s talking about, that are great and numerous that you experience. And I think people often equate ataraxia with numbness — I completely reject that characterization. I keep thinking of ataraxia as: you’re outside on a warm summer day, you close your eyes, you’re looking up at the sky and feeling the warmth of the sun on your face, and your cares have washed away. That to me is a description of ataraxia. It’s a feeling, not a numbness or an anesthesia. And it’s part of what my goal for life would be. I wish to be tranquil, but I also wish to do all sorts of other things that I would not call tranquil — like going to the moon. There’s not a whole lot of tranquility in strapping a rocket to your back and going to do all that, but I would personally love to do something like that. I think it’s a legitimate goal that an Epicurean would identify — some very adventurous goal as something they want to do as part of their life.
Cassius:
Well, I keep coming back to that fragment — or I can’t remember whether it’s a fragment or a Vatican Saying — “I cannot conceive of the good without the pleasing sights and pleasing tastes and pleasing this and pleasing that.” And it just seems like the people who are going to call this section of Cicero completely contrary to Epicurean philosophy don’t take that particular fragment seriously, or even the sections of the Letter to Menoeceus where he’s talking about the same thing. There are multiple pleasures you’re going to take in your life, and the fact that people are trying to say that it’s one thing — I just don’t think there’s support for that unless you can tie yourself into an academic pretzel.
Martin, to what extent do you identify this section here as something that you can match to your own view of life?
Martin:
I see nothing different in there.
Cassius:
Nothing jumps out at you as a problem here.
Martin:
I suppose someone could argue that it’s not necessary to give elaborate descriptions of things and just point to pleasure or to kittens or puppies as examples of what the goal is. But I don’t see a problem here.
Cassius:
I do see this list of characteristics as probably one of the clearest I’ve ever seen in any Epicurean text. And maybe that leads me to a transition: before we move on to the bad side of life, we ought to probably talk about what type of argument this is. I sometimes wonder whether he’s appealing to anticipations here — we don’t talk about anticipations very much lately. His argument is not necessarily the kind that is going to bowl over everybody. He’s submitting to us that if we think about a person in this state of pleasure and confidence and continuity and absence of pain and tranquility and all these other good things, he’s setting up the argument as if everybody’s going to agree with that once it’s just put forward, as if it’s self-evident.
I don’t think it is self-evident that everyone will agree, though. So what do you guys think — what’s he appealing to as his ultimate standard of right and wrong? To what truth tribunal is he submitting this?
Joshua:
What this really is, Cassius, as you sort of implied, is a thought experiment. And I think you’re right to say that after merely reading this passage, people who disagree with Epicurus — who think the pursuit of pleasure is not the proper end of life — are not going to be convinced. You’ll find instances in the works of the antagonists of Epicurean philosophy where they’ll use their own thought experiments to portray pleasure as a bad thing. Imagine a person who just pursues pleasure and their business is going into the toilet and their family relationships are destroyed — it’s easy to do. It’s easy to think of a person heedlessly pursuing pleasure as not just a laughing stock but almost immoral. It’s immoral to put your own personal, selfish pursuit of pleasure ahead of your duty to your country, to your fellow citizens, to your family. Someone would do the same thought experiment but simply arrange it differently.
And whenever you brought that up, they almost set up a straw man in the idea of the pursuit of pleasure. That’s more of an argument against the Cyrenaics than it is against Epicurus, but they lump all the “hedonist” philosophies together and treat them as one monolithic thing. That does a disservice to Epicurean philosophy but a service to their opponents because it makes it easier to argue against.
Cassius:
Don, have you read A Few Days in Athens by Frances Wright?
Don:
I have not read the whole thing.
Cassius:
Gotcha. She does have a particular point in that book when Epicurus and Zeno sort of come head-to-head and argue directly with each other — which is not how most of the book goes. And in that section, Zeno has this interesting transformation. Prior to meeting Epicurus face to face, he had believed all of the slanderous rumors about him — the heedless, drunken orgies and all of that. And then, granted this is all totally fictional, he has this interesting quote where he says to Epicurus: “I feared you yesterday because you were poisoning the minds of young Athenians with the pursuit of heedless, mindless pleasure. And now I fear you doubly today.” Because now that he understands the totality of the philosophy, he can see that this is even more dangerous than he thought — because it’s wrapped up in a way that appeals to people who wouldn’t normally be appealed to by mere Cyrenaicism.
Don:
Oh, that’s good. I like that. In other words, knowing what I know about valuing mental pleasures and avoiding the fear of death, this is going to cause even more problems than if you were just having drunken parties every night. It would be better for Athens if you were a Cyrenaic than if you were a sober philosophical Epicurean.
Joshua:
And which in itself is a kind of thought experiment — the whole book can be seen as a thought experiment in a way.
Cassius:
Exactly. And it does point to something interesting in Cicero, which is that there’s actually a medieval writer — Lorenzo Valla, I believe — who argued that the only way to really be a true Epicurean is to be a Christian. Because when you factor in an eternity in hell, there’s no amount of pleasure in this life that outweighs the pain that you’re going to experience in the life to come. So in order to pursue pleasure intelligently, you have to be a Christian — because you have to get the golden ticket into heaven in order for the hedonic calculus to work out in your favor in the long run.
Joshua:
Oh, that’s very — I hadn’t heard of that before. That’s a very clever argument. I’m not saying it sounds good, I’m just saying it’s very clever.
Cassius:
We’re going to have to find out who actually did that and put it in the show notes.
Now, section 13 is where we begin the transition to talking about how virtue, since it is not good in and of itself, must be productive of pleasure. He’s going to go through a long discussion of each of the major virtues and how the goal of each virtue really is pleasure.
Don, you’ve had a lot to say about where we go from here on section 13 and so forth.
Don:
I think this goes back to what I’ve characterized — and it’s certainly not original with me — as instrumental goods. He’s going to talk about the instrumental goods of wisdom and the virtues, and they are instrumental because they move us towards pleasure. Pleasure is the one you’re aiming for. The examples here — wisdom as architect, the physician’s skill, navigation — go back to the whole idea that the words of the philosopher are empty if they do not result in a life of pleasure.
Cassius:
Let me invite a comparison. I want to look at this particular passage — physician’s skill and navigation. He says: “Just as we regard with favor the physician’s skill not for his art’s sake merely but because we prize sound health, and just as the pilot’s art is praised on utilitarian and not on artistic grounds because it supplies the principles of good navigation, so wisdom — which we must hold to be the art of living — would be no object of desire if it were productive of no advantage. But it is in fact desired because it is to us as an architect that plans and accomplishes pleasure.”
Now I’m going to read to you a passage from John Adams’s letter to his wife Abigail, written in 1780. John Adams was a great admirer of Cicero and probably read the very words we’re reading now.
He’s writing this letter from Paris and he says: “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography and natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”
What John Adams is saying is that he has an obligation to study certain things, and it’s notable to me that philosophy does not factor into his own generation’s work. Epicurus would say it’s essential — you have to study philosophy when you’re young, you have to study philosophy when you’re old. You cannot defer the study of philosophy to future generations. And yet Adams — I guess a Ciceronian in a way — is doing exactly that.
Joshua:
I think Adams is thinking of philosophy almost as an academic discipline — disconnected from the real world. But back in Epicurus’s time, philosophy was literally “how do you live your life? what wisdom are you going to bring to the practice of your life?” And I would make an argument that Adams is almost taking an Epicurean stance without even realizing it. He’s taking pleasure in the idea of providing a better world for his children. He is pursuing a long-term goal with the pleasures of future generations in mind.
Don:
Yeah, and certainly Adams would not have admitted it.
Cassius:
Right — like Cicero, Adams would not have admitted it. I have a feeling that Cicero would rip Adams up one side and down the other for that little illustration, because Cicero from the Roman perspective would have said everybody has to be prepared to fight their own battles all the time. So the idea that you could fight battles and then generations ahead would no longer have to fight any battles — I think that would be foreign to Cicero.
But that’s exactly the perspective that I think you’re saying Epicurus would have: everybody is constantly in need of wisdom. Your circumstances around you are going to change from day to day to month to year, and there are no absolute formulas like Plato would suggest, no books like these religious leaders would insist that you can just pick up and read. The things that happen today and tomorrow are going to be new and unique, and you’re constantly going to have to apply the principles of thinking — the epistemology, the physics, the ethics — and you have to understand them yourself or you’re just going to be lost.
Joshua:
Yeah, definitely. When I was in college, philosophy was like the classic waste of time. What are you even doing? But really it’s the most important thing, because the worst thing I can imagine is getting to the end of your life and then studying philosophy and realizing: “Oh, I got it all wrong the whole way through.” I guess you can make an argument from the Epicurean point of view that well, now that you’ve realized that, at least you can live that way going forward. But there is a certain emotion involved that I’d hate to get to the end and not have even analyzed the problem. And most people don’t.
Don:
I think it’s important to remember that the actual word philosophy means to love wisdom and to practice wisdom. And the Latin word Torquatus uses here is sapientia — and some of the basic definitions in Lewis and Short are: good taste, good sense, discernment, discretion, prudence, intelligence, forethought. All those things are wrapped up in that one word. We think of philosophy today as an academic discipline disconnected from the real world. Back in Epicurus’s time, it was literally “how do you live your life?”
Joshua:
You know, if I were to reply to “how’s your day going?” with “oh, it’s been good, I’ve been pursuing wisdom all morning” — in the casual age we live in, the pursuit of wisdom is hopelessly pretentious. But you have to deal with that and engage the world anyway.
And I think it’s interesting that right there Torquatus says “wisdom indeed is alone able to drive sadness from our minds and to prevent us from quaking with fear.” Having all those connotations of that word — it’s like, okay, I can see where you’re going.
Cassius:
And where we’ve been going is where we are now — near the end of this episode of the Lucretius Today podcast. And part of what we need to do in today’s closing is to recognize the contributions and to state our appreciation for Don having been involved over the last — I don’t know whether it’s seven months now?
Don:
I think seven months.
Cassius:
We really appreciate Don stepping in and helping us finish Lucretius — almost all of Book Six, I think, is what Don was here with us for. And he’s now going to take a sabbatical.
Don:
Yeah, which implies that I’m going to be back with you.
Cassius:
Right. Life does tend to intervene and call people away to other things occasionally. We will expect you to continue to help us along the way on the EpicureanFriends.com forum, and as soon as you’re able and ready to come back to any kind of podcasting, we’ll be looking forward to that.
I wanted to say that before we begin to close today’s episode. Before we go to closing statements — is there anything else? There’s a lot we’re skipping over here in the final few sentences, but I think we have hit the real essence of the issue. Then there are a thousand more details that have to be discussed, but at least we’ve brought it up in a way that hopefully can help people understand the importance of the issue as they’re reading through Epicurean philosophy.
Don:
I keep coming back to the whole idea of the common-sense nature of this and the self-evident nature of it — but I think you’ve done a good job of keeping our feet to the fire and making us explain what that actually means too.
I think we have a line here that slightly complicates what we were talking about in the controversial passage earlier where he says, in parentheses: “you are now aware what kind of pleasure I mean, so the odium of the term must not shake the foundation of my argument.” Are we aware of what kind of pleasure?
Cassius:
Right, that’s after all that. I think all of them — I mean, that’s the thing. He includes bodily and mental in all of them. He’s not talking about just the pleasures of the profligates, the whole “eat, drink, and be merry” — that’s part of it, but it’s not the whole thing. He’s talking about tranquility and calm as well. He’s including all of that whenever he talks about pleasure. I think also what Joshua is going towards is that we have in this Torquatus character a person who has some degree of conflict in his own mind about some of Epicurus’s teachings. He’s already introduced at the beginning of the narrative that he believes a more elaborate explanation of the nature of pleasure is required than what Epicurus himself gave. So he separated himself out on that point. And if I recall correctly as we go further, even on the issue of friendship — and perhaps justice too — he again comes back and separates himself and says there’s disagreement even within the Epicurean community about what type of arguments to make. So I find that sentence Joshua quoted as consistent with that sort of little bit of timidity that Torquatus is taking in this whole presentation. I’m not sure that Epicurus would have said it quite the same way.
Don:
It’s a lot of cultural baggage that comes along with the term “pleasure.” Yes, a lot of subtleties.
Cassius:
Alright, Martin, any closing thoughts for today?
Martin:
No, I have nothing to add.
Cassius:
Okay. Who wants to go first, Joshua or Don?
Joshua:
My closing thought is: Don, thanks for being with us. We’ll do our best going forward and look for your return. Other than that, I don’t have any particular closing thoughts on the material.
Don:
Well, thank you for those kind words, Joshua — I appreciate it. You’ve been just a wonderful addition to this panel.
I look forward to being a listener instead of having to worry about being available every Sunday morning. This has actually been wonderful. I plan to be active on the forum and everything. So I appreciate the ability to take a little sabbatical. This will be a nice little pleasurable respite.
Cassius:
Good, and we’re looking forward — as I said earlier — to your annotated Letter to Menoeceus.
Don:
Fingers crossed. Now you’ve made it public. I guess I have brought it up on the forum too, so now I’m committed. That’s a good reminder.
Cassius:
That’s right. And I should also say that Joshua joined us in part because of Don’s imminent need to take his sabbatical. I’m hoping we’re going to be able to convince one or more other people to join us in the future as well. We’re talking to Charles, who was with us in the past, about him possibly coming back. So hopefully we can have a four-person panel and expand the discussions.
And that was going to be the point I was going to make on my closing comment: one of the things about this description of the man who’s living the best life possible that has always seemed important to me is the issue that he had confidence that he was going to be able to maintain the state he was in. And I think a lot of what we’re discussing as we talk about these arguments is something intended to help us come up with that confidence — that our positions are not just arbitrary, not just a matter of “I have my facts and they have their facts and we’ll never agree.”
If you don’t have some degree of confidence in the conclusions you’re reaching, then you’re going to necessarily have anxiety and fear that perhaps you’re wrong — and perhaps you do need to worry about spending an eternity boiling in hell, and things like that. So it’s a very complicated subject but one that’s important and well worth studying. That’s what we’re trying to do here, and we will continue to try to do it.
Best wishes to Don — hope he’ll be back soon — and we will be back again next week. So thanks, everybody, for your time today. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right, thanks.