Episode 102 - Corollaries to the Doctrines of Epicurus - Part Two
Date: 12/31/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2289-episode-one-hundred-two-corollaries-to-the-doctrines-part-two/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Joshua reads De Finibus lines 56–59, covering the corollaries on mental versus bodily pleasure: the removal of pain is itself a pleasure; memory and anticipation amplify both pleasures and pains beyond their bodily source; and the diseases of the mind — measureless desire for riches, fame, power, and lustful pleasures — are the root of wretchedness.
Discussion centers on the Bull of Phalaris — Diogenes Laertius records that “even if the wise man be put on the rack, he is happy,” but also adds “yet when he is on the rack, then he will cry out and lament.” The panel works through what Epicurus could mean by this: the wise man does not suppress the pain (unlike the Stoics), and the Epicurean position is not that the mind can will pain away — rather, that mental pleasures from memory and anticipation can offset it, and that “happiness” over a life cannot be destroyed by a single painful episode.
Other topics: the Cyrenaics’ focus on present bodily sensation versus Epicurus’s emphasis on mental pleasure; the “house divided against itself” metaphor for a mind at internal strife; Ayn Rand’s “emotions are not tools of cognition” versus the Epicurean approach of listening to rather than suppressing feelings; the distinction between “happiness” as a concept versus “pleasure” as a feeling; and Joshua’s point that prevention — actively engineering your circumstances through friendship, prudence, and engagement — is at least as important as learning how to respond to problems after they arise.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 102 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, 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. 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, and we invite you to ask questions, make suggestions, and give us your reactions to the things you hear in our podcast.
At this point in the podcast series we’ve completed our first line-by-line review of Lucretius’ poem and we’ve turned to the presentation of Epicurean ethics found in Cicero’s On Ends. Today we continue to examine a number of important corollaries to Epicurean doctrine. Now let’s listen to Joshua reading today’s text.
Joshua:
By this time so much at least is plain: that the intensest pleasure or the intensest annoyance felt in the mind exerts more influence on the happiness or wretchedness of life than either feeling when present for an equal space of time in the body.
We refuse to believe, however, that when pleasure is removed, grief instantly ensues — excepting when perchance pain has taken the place of pleasure. But we think, on the contrary, that we experience joy on the passing away of pains, even though none of that kind of pleasure which stirs the senses has taken their place. And from this it may be understood how great a pleasure it is to be without pain.
But as we are elated by the blessings to which we look forward, so we delight in those which we call to memory. Fools, however, are tormented by the recollection of misfortunes. Wise men rejoice in keeping fresh the thankful recollection of their past blessings. Now it is in the power of our wills to bury our adversity in almost unbroken forgetfulness, and to agreeably and sweetly remind ourselves of our prosperity. But when we look with penetration and concentration of thought upon things that are past, then, if those things are bad, grief usually ensues; if good, joy. What a noble and open and plain and straight avenue to a happy life!
It being certain that nothing can be better for man than to be relieved of all pain and annoyance, and to have full enjoyment of the greatest pleasures both of mind and of body, do you not see how nothing is neglected which assists our life more easily to attain that which is its aim, the supreme good? Epicurus — the man whom you charge with being an extravagant devotee of pleasures — cries aloud that no one can live agreeably unless he lives a wise, moral, and righteous life, and that no one can live a wise, moral, and righteous life without living agreeably.
It is not possible for a community to be happy when there is rebellion, nor for a house when its masters are at strife. Much less can a mind at disaccord and at strife with itself taste any portion of pleasure, undefiled and unimpeded. Nay, more, if the mind is always beset by desires and designs which are recalcitrant and irreconcilable, it can never see a moment’s rest or a moment’s peace.
But if agreeableness of life is thwarted by the more serious bodily diseases, how much more must it inevitably be thwarted by the diseases of the mind? Now the diseases of the mind are the measureless and false passions for riches, fame, power, and even for lustful pleasures. To these are added griefs, troubles, sorrows, which devour the mind and wear it away with anxiety — because men do not comprehend that no pain should be felt in the mind which is unconnected with an immediate or impending bodily pain. Nor indeed is there among fools anyone who is not sick with some one of these diseases. There is none, therefore, who is not wretched.
Cassius:
Joshua, thank you for reading that for us today. We were coming back after a short episode last week because of the Christmas vacation. I hope everyone has had a good holiday season so far. We introduced the subject last week of the relationship between mental and bodily pains and pleasures — how you compare the two, what their relationship is, and so forth. And it’s a very deep subject that has lots of implications to it that we can discuss today in much more detail, since we now have Joshua back with us and have a panel of three.
So just as a reminder: the main thing stated last week was that even though mental pleasures and pains spring from bodily pleasures and pains, the important thing to remember is that it does not follow that pleasures and pains of the mind do not greatly surpass those of the body. Because with the body, we perceive only what’s present to us at the moment. But with the mind, we perceive the past and the future also. It’s certainly a common criticism of Epicurean philosophy that the pleasures of the body are all that Epicurus was ever concerned about, and we’re going to spend a lot of time here talking about how that’s just not true at all.
So starting with line 56, Josh?
Joshua:
Yeah. The first sentence we just heard is more or less a restatement of what you said. The pain and pleasure of the body is limited to the present, but the pains and pleasures of the mind extend all the way back into the past and extend infinitely forward in the future in terms of hope and fear and memory.
So as we go through this, I think one of the challenges — as you rightly said, this is a controversial teaching — is going to be wrangling with the idea that the mind has some power to govern or to moderate the pain of the body.
Cassius:
Right. The idea being that no matter what’s going wrong with your body, your mind has complete power to do that. That’s something we’ve tried to stay away from, isn’t it?
Joshua:
I guess we have to be careful exactly the way we say it. I don’t think the mind can make the pains of the body go away — if there’s a pain in the body, there’s a pain in the body. But it can offset that with pleasure. You know, there are so many general topics to discuss in a subject like this. One perspective seems to me to be that he seems to acknowledge that your life is going to be a bundle of pleasures and pains all the time. You’re not just one feeling at any particular moment. And to some extent, it is a question of what you choose to focus upon. In focusing, you can make the other thing recede into the background. But to say the mind can completely control that — that would be where we’d have to be careful. That’s certainly a Stoic position: that through willpower you can just dismiss everything else.
Cassius:
Well, let me just say — here’s what I’m thinking. I’m trying to decide if we should bring in the Bull of Phalaris here or if we should do it later, because that becomes an interesting exchange. And to be honest, I can’t remember where that exchange takes place in Cicero.
Joshua:
It’s somewhere in Cicero, I think, where he’s accusing Epicurus of having a position that a man inside the bronze bull could still be feeling pleasure. And I remember that DeWitt talks about that as an example.
Cassius:
Does it also occur in Diogenes Laertius?
Joshua:
Yes, there’s a phrase in Diogenes Laertius about a man under torture still being happier. There are so many big-picture issues that we have to set the table with before we dive into the details.
Cassius:
And I’m not even sure, going back to where we were last week and the week before, it almost seems like Epicurus is constantly dealing with errors — and he goes from one error to another, to another. The error in the last several sessions was thinking that virtue is the end of life rather than pleasure. And now he’s dealing with another error: thinking that the pleasures of the body are more important, by definition, than the pleasures of the mind.
Joshua:
He may be distinguishing himself from the Cyrenaics as well.
Cassius:
They didn’t take the position that pleasures of the body were the only thing?
Joshua:
I think it was both. The Cyrenaics are focused on the present pleasure and the bodily pleasure — so it’s not about mental pleasure.
Cassius:
When I picture the Cyrenaic idea, it’s “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you will die.” So I don’t think they’d cordoned off mental pleasures as having particular importance in their world. As you’re saying, it’s pleasures of the moment — pleasures you can enjoy right now because tomorrow isn’t promised.
And so I want to get to the bull as well. I do think that sections 56 through 59 all seem to be focused on this issue of mental pleasure versus bodily pleasure. Does anybody see any other major topic in what we’re discussing here?
Joshua:
There is an interesting couple of words at the end of the first sentence: “when present for an equal space of time in the body.” Isn’t there something in one of the letters — something about how a short space of time and a long space of time amount to the same thing if you judge that time by wisdom?
Cassius:
You’re right. There’s something that says a long discourse and a short discourse have the same goal, or something like that. I’ve seen variations of that one.
Joshua:
There’s also a Vatican Saying — number 19: “Infinite time contains no greater pleasure than limited time, if one measures by reason the limits of pleasure.” And number 20 is basically the same point as well. So this issue of the span of time is definitely significant. Because what we’re skirting around here is the whole idea of the limit of pleasure. He doesn’t go into it in this passage, but it’s kind of background for everything he’s talking about here.
Cassius:
Yeah. And he does even mention the part about what happens when you remove a pain — does it immediately get replaced by a pleasure or not? And what is that type of pleasure? And he mentions in that section that it’s not necessarily the same type of pleasure that stimulates the senses.
But I don’t want to ignore the bull any further. What you’re talking about, of course, is the analogy or the hypothetical about what happens to the wise man who is boiled alive inside of the bull — which is a torture mechanism that they came up with at some point. The question is: is a wise man going to be unhappy while he’s being tortured? Joshua, is that a decent statement of the general issue?
Joshua:
Yeah. So it’s a bronze bull, made of metal. It has an opening on the side that locks somehow — you put the criminal inside the bull, then you light a fire underneath it, and you can imagine the rest. I believe it was invented by an Athenian craftsman and proposed to Phalaris, who was a tyrant king of Sicily. That’s where the name “Bull of Phalaris” comes from.
But the point is made whether it’s this bull or whether it’s any other painful death or torture mechanism — and so you bring in Epicurus’s death itself, who died, I think, while passing kidney stones.
Cassius:
Yes, that’s what I understand the situation to be.
Joshua:
Right. So at the end of all these analogies, you have this basic problem: when you’re enduring terrible physical pain, are you still able on balance to live a happy life? Because you can still experience the pleasures of the mind if the mind has not been totally shattered by the pain.
Cassius:
The reason we bring up this particular analogy is because, as I think we’ve hinted at, this is a very controversial one. The idea that Epicurus would have claimed that you can be happy even under torture — that’s a very controversial idea. It is stated in Diogenes Laertius. This is a passage I cite a lot. He says, talking about the wise man: “when once a man has attained wisdom, he no longer has any tendency contrary to it or willingly pretends that he has. He will be more deeply moved by feelings, but this will not prove an obstacle to wisdom.” That’s a very controversial statement — one I always throw at those who think that Stoicism and Epicurean philosophy are the same.
He continues: “a man cannot become wise with every kind of physical constitution, nor in every nation.” And here’s the key sentence: “And even if the wise man be put on the rack, he is happy.”
So Epicurus has apparently stated publicly that even under torture, the wise man is happy. And if I remember correctly, what Cicero does is ridicule that as if Epicurus is saying that the wise man is experiencing pleasure by being under torture — and Cicero says that’s obviously not true and Epicurus is absurd. So that’s what you’re bringing up to discuss, Joshua — that “happy” is a word we’re going to have to focus on, because the wise man is probably not experiencing complete pleasure while he is under torture. But he could be attempting to offset that pain through the memory of better times and pleasures in the past, and maybe even of the future.
But can he will that pain completely away?
Joshua:
No, I think I completely agree with you — I don’t think it is possible to just will it away, particularly under the kind of extreme torture we’re talking about here.
Cassius:
And Joshua, I’m doing you a disservice — I should have continued to read two more sentences from Diogenes Laertius. It says: “even if the wise man be put on the rack, he is happy. Only the wise man will show gratitude and will constantly speak well of his friends alike in their presence and their absence.” And here’s the next part: “Yet when he is on the rack, then he will cry out and lament.”
So there’s a second sentence there saying that when he’s under torture, he’s going to cry out in pain. He’s not going to be able to ignore the pain.
Joshua:
The way you read that — I don’t have the text in front of me — but it sounds to me like you’ve got the main man who’s going to be happy on the rack, but he’s going to be in anxiety when his friends are in trouble. And when his friends are on the rack, he’s going to be crying out in agony. That’s the way I’m hearing it.
Cassius:
That could be true, or it could be a misreading by both of us. Somebody trying to dig into this is going to have to look at that text and decide whether the focus has shifted from the wise man himself or to his friends. I don’t have a strong opinion about that.
Joshua, I can certainly see why you raised that point, because not the least of which is the division that occurs — I think I’m reading from the Bailey version of Diogenes Laertius — where he seems to have inserted another thought in between. So we’ll have to, for the purposes of the podcast today, hold that thought and come back to it when we have a chance to study it more deeply.
But I wonder if you could say — what difference does it make? You could torture a wise man by torturing his friend. If the wise man had that Stoic reserve of total imperviousness to pain because of his wisdom, then that Stoic wise man wouldn’t cry out when he himself is on the rack or when his friend is on the rack. It’s not going to make any difference, is it?
Joshua:
Yeah, I can’t imagine any Stoic would present the case that way. But that does seem to be the implication of the whole structure of the philosophy. But I’m not well read enough in Stoicism to be sure.
Cassius:
Well, I don’t want us to go too far back off into discussing Stoicism, but I think this would be an area where if you had some Stoics here in our panel — which hopefully we’ll never have — you’d probably have the modern Stoic versus the ancient Stoic. I do believe that an ancient Stoic would say that they took their philosophy to its logical conclusions: virtue and wisdom are the only thing worth having in life, and when you have those, you won’t be affected by anything else. The Stoic wise man is impervious to bodily pain or even mental pain because he has virtue, and virtue is complete in and of itself.
Joshua:
Yeah, I don’t doubt that. There are other traditions in the world where the same kind of total indifference is the goal. I remember reading a story in Buddhism once where this young person went to live with a group of monks, and then one of the older practitioners died. And the other monk said to the new monk, “Well, we don’t have to go begging for food today because he’s left some here.” And the new monk immediately threw up because he didn’t want to eat the dead man’s food. And then the older monk who was still living said, “Get out of here — if you’re not willing to become indifferent to this kind of thing, you’re not going to make it.”
Cassius:
I think that’s a good illustration. And this is an issue that we regularly run into with people as we’re discussing Epicurean philosophy — they tend to approach it from a very practical, very modern point of view. They’re looking at Epicurus talking about how to compare bodily pain to mental pain, and they’re looking for some kind of self-help psychology mechanism to fine-tune their own life to be as happy as possible. And I do think that’s there. But when you get really rigorous about philosophy, you have an ancient Stoic and a rigorous Buddhist who are really mentally looking out at what they think are the logical conclusions of their philosophy. And that Buddhist example is perfect — if you’re rigorously going to be a Buddhist, then you’re not going to have any concern about where that food came from.
So what is the conclusion that we draw from the bull and torture?
Joshua:
I do believe that the ancient Stoics would take the course of indifference while their friends were being tortured. But I want to talk a little bit here about something that I think is largely absent from this passage from Cicero. It’s all about how to respond when things go horribly wrong — when you’re being tortured, or your friends are being tortured. But it doesn’t offer much of a prophylactic — a way to live your life so that you can fence off most of these troubles. And probably that’s on purpose because you can’t fence off all problems forever. But it’s nice to look at ways you can protect yourself from the kind of problems we’re talking about here.
What he says in section 18 is: “What a noble and open and plain and straight avenue to a happy life!” Certainly we want a happy life. So how do we get it, Cassius?
Cassius:
Right. And I think the answer to where you’re going with that is that Epicurus is telling us: as children, as babies, as small animals, we all pursue pleasure and instinctively know that’s the right thing to do along with avoiding pain. What causes most of our troubles is that we make mistakes and get led off on different paths about what our goal really is.
He started off this discussion with a long presentation of the error of pursuing virtue instead of pleasure. And now having established that pleasure is in fact the goal — just like you thought when you were a child — he’s now going after the mistakes some people make about how to pursue pleasure. And he needs us to realize that the pleasures of the mind can be at least as important as the pleasures of the body. You know, I’m going to relate this to a discussion that’s going on right now on the forum about the gods and what role they have. Whether they’re real or whether they’re mental constructs — that’s an interesting debate. But the number one important issue is that there’s no supernatural god and we need to not worry about it.
And I think what Epicurus is doing with the god situation is exactly what you said — pointing to the goal and defining the direction that you should be going in. You don’t get to the happiest life just by sealing yourself in your cave with water and bread and cheese. There are tremendous opportunities of all sorts of mental and emotional pleasures out there that can be pursued successfully if pursued intelligently.
So I would say one issue he’s addressing here in this section would be the mistake that some people make — even people who consider themselves to be focused on pleasure — of just focusing on bodily pleasures of the moment without thinking about not only the bad results of pursuing them sometimes, but the other opportunities available in terms of mental pleasures and friendships. The pleasures of relationships clearly can and do surpass the pleasures of the body. You have to have food and water and drink and so forth to survive. But those alone are not sufficient to provide the happiest life.
So let me just pick out a couple of other sentences. The second sentence: “We refuse to believe that when a pleasure is removed, grief instantly ensues, except when perchance pain has taken the place of pleasure. But we think, on the contrary, that we experience joy on the passing away of pains, even though not that kind of pleasure which stirs the senses has taken their place. And from this it may be understood how great a pleasure it is to be without pain.” I think he’s talking about how you’re not just focused on immediate bodily stimulations, as the Epicureans are so often accused of being.
Joshua:
I’m kind of intrigued by section 58 here. He says: “It is not possible for a community to be happy when there is rebellion, nor for a house when its masters are in strife; much less can a mind at strife with itself taste any portion of pleasure, undefiled and unimpeded.” This framing is very common. There’s a passage in the Bible that says something like “a house divided against itself cannot stand” — and of course in his seminal speech, Abraham Lincoln used the same expression. What’s interesting is that Lincoln was starting with the house divided as a metaphor more broadly for the nation, whereas what Torquatus is doing here is using the community as a metaphor for the individual mind. He’s going the reverse direction.
Cassius:
Yeah, it’s interesting to notice. And I think it’s pretty effective. I mean, I guess most of us have had enough experience to know that if the members of a family are arguing with each other all the time, how unpleasant that can be, and how little can be accomplished. And so we apply that to our minds. Cognitive dissonance comes to mind — that if your mind is constantly going in different directions, if you’re constantly debating with yourself, if you’ve got analysis paralysis, then you never accomplish anything. You’ve got to be able to select from among the options before you before you can pursue one.
Martin, we haven’t heard much from you today.
Martin:
It’s probably because I don’t have something to say about it.
Joshua:
Let me see if I can pick something else out of here. He goes right on after talking about the community divided against itself as a metaphor for the individual mind divided against itself, and says: “but if agreeableness of life is thwarted by the more serious bodily diseases, how much more must it inevitably be thwarted by the diseases of the mind? Now the diseases of the mind are the measureless and false passions for riches, fame, power, and even for lustful pleasures.”
And he goes on to say “to these are added griefs, troubles, sorrows, which devour the mind and wear it away with anxiety.” But what he doesn’t seem to address — at least I’m not seeing it here — is the kind of mental sickness that doesn’t come from a philosophical problem and can’t be solved by one.
Cassius:
You’re talking about clinical issues.
Joshua:
Right. Well, you know, that’s one of the things we read briefly when we were going back over Diogenes Laertius. One of the things in that list of the wise man is that “a man cannot become wise with every kind of physical constitution, nor in every nation.” So I think Epicurus would recognize that if you’ve got diseases of the mind that derive from the physical constitution of your particular mind, you’re not going to be able to deal with those philosophically. You can’t heal a medical problem by thinking about it in most cases.
Cassius:
Yeah, and so after we’ve had the discussion about those clinical problems, then we’re into these other issues — broadly speaking, things like greed and jealousy and grief and sorrow and anxiety. Those are broadly the main categories he’s talking about here. So what it partially becomes here in the end is how to moderate the way you think, how to moderate your own desire, and how to control the way you respond to events that happen to you.
And so what I’ve just said will naturally invite a comparison to Stoicism. But I don’t think it needs to. We all have to find a way to decide how our mind is going to respond to grief, for example. And what that doesn’t necessarily include is a presumptive indifference to grief. The agony of grief — in order to remove it — I don’t think it requires indifference. I think it requires a kind of mental and emotional healing.
Joshua:
Right. Yeah. And I think you could say the same about troubles, sorrows, and anxiety. Anxiety is a huge problem that a lot of people are suffering from. But in most cases there are measures you can take — to moderate your expectations, to try to balance these griefs and troubles with other pleasures and with long-term hopes. If you’re unhappy in the situation you’re in, you can use that to galvanize you to change the situation.
Cassius:
Well, the very last thing you brought up is one of the big points as well, in that a Stoic or certain types of other Greek philosophers would say that it’s not possible for you to control any of those things. Because fate and determinism are so strong that you have no real control over anything that happens to you. And so the only thing you can do, therefore, is accept your fate and get used to it. And that leads, in my mind, to words like indifference and apathy.
I really see many of the things you’re discussing, Josh, as coming back to that deeper question of whether the mind can, through devotion to virtue and willpower, rise above all of these physical and real-world annoyances and thereby be impervious.
Versus Epicurus, I think, taking a very different perspective: that clearly your mind is an important part of reacting and preventing bad things from happening, but that you have to pay attention to the reality of your feelings. Never suppress them, never ignore them — work with them and not against them. Working with them meaning you understand that feeling ultimately is the only thing that matters in life, and that your goal is not to mentally, through logic, overcome all of the feelings and emotions and pleasures and pains of life, but to understand how reality works and thereby maximize the agreeable aspects and minimize the disagreeable aspects.
Your mind is the critical part about it, because Epicurus says that the wise man is going to order through reason the majority of his life. Nobody thinks Epicurus is anti-reason or anti-mind. But he is realistic about what the mind can do and what it cannot do, which is where the Stoics and Platonists are just totally out of school by thinking the mind is able to do things that Epicurus would say it just cannot do.
This one has so many implications that it’s hard to even categorize what they all are.
Joshua:
Yeah. What I’m noticing is this is a particularly difficult topic to speak about extemporaneously, because you do have to be very careful in the way you use your words when you’re talking about diseases of the mind and how you can solve them. We don’t want to appear to be offering clinical advice. But the philosophy does offer certain options — particularly choosing pleasures over pains — which we call the hedonic calculus, or choice and avoidance. So there are options.
Cassius, how difficult can it be to talk about it when Epicurean philosophy can be summarized as “what’s good is easy to get and what’s bad is easy to avoid”? Isn’t that all you need to know?
Cassius:
Ha. I think there’s a little more that has to be drilled down into there. That’s your point about being able to think about things in outline form and in terms of the highest level principles. The Tetrapharmakon is clearly a very high-level summary and viewpoint. You have to look at each of those words and think about what each of them means and how you got to this point in Epicurean philosophy in order to make any sense out of it.
And that’s what Cicero does so effectively with the bull and the torture example. He’s saying Epicurus says the wise man is going to be happy even when he’s under torture — ha, how ridiculous! And if you don’t understand the background, then that becomes an effective argument.
Joshua:
Cassius, I’m curious. Have you ever seen the show The Good Place?
Cassius:
I cannot even identify what that could possibly be about, so no.
Joshua:
It’s relatively recent, and it’s one of those shows I almost can’t believe ever got made, but it’s turned out to be incredibly popular. The premise is you start with a character who has died and allegedly she’s in The Good Place — and then as you go through, you find out more. But really the core essence of the show is a prolonged discussion of ethical and moral philosophy. One of the more famous passages is they’re talking about the trolley problem, and there’s a professor of ethical and moral philosophy who’s rather wishy-washy on the subject. And because they’re in a realm where the supernatural is possible, he just snaps his fingers and suddenly they’re on the trolley, bearing down on the people who are about to be killed. And I think that what Cicero did with the bull was just like that — he snapped his fingers and said, okay, we’re in the bull now. Show me how you can be happy when you’re under the most agonizing torture imaginable.
Cassius:
Yeah, and it’s very effective. And it’s almost as if Cicero was known for that kind of thing. It’s almost as if being a lawyer is not always a good thing. But you’ve got to be able to respond to it.
You used the analogy earlier — or something you said prompted me to think about the cliché “ignorance is bliss.” A lot of problems in life, if you ignore them, will not just go away. They will get worse and worse and eventually destroy you unless you deal with them. So this idea that you can just choose what to focus on — that pain in my back, I’m going to choose to ignore it today — well, maybe that pain in your back is the early signs of cancer. If you don’t go to the doctor and deal with it, you’re going to end up dead because you didn’t listen to the warning signs.
For those people who are familiar with Ayn Rand, one of her statements was “emotions are not tools of cognition,” which a lot of her followers throw around a lot. Meaning essentially what the Stoics are saying — that you don’t learn things through your emotions, you need to put them to the side and keep them totally under control at all times. But depending on how you interpret that statement, it’s terrible from an Epicurean perspective, I think. Because Epicurus is saying you listen to your emotions and you deal with them after listening to them. You don’t just suppress them. You don’t just ignore them. You take into account what they’re telling you — just like you take into account what you’re seeing. You don’t ignore the information. It’s reported to you through the senses, and then what you do with it is what’s important. But to ignore the information is almost always going to be not a good thing.
Martin, on this question of whether the wise man is happy while he is under torture — do you have a way in your own mind that you unwind that kind of question?
Martin:
Yeah. The thing is, we had some solution to this one in the past. The way it was resolved was that happiness was essentially the summary — it’s over the whole life, reviewing the whole life until then. And about this one: he is still happy. Okay, it comes to a tragic end, which is very unpleasant. But he knows that within minutes, this torture will kill him and then he’s dead. That pain is intense and short. But all his life until then was pleasurable. So in the end, he still had a happy life.
Cassius:
Yeah. And the way you stated it, in my mind you’ve raised a lot of additional issues as well, one of which is this question of time and whether happiness is gauged solely as a matter of length of time or whether it’s gauged in some other way.
But I think the basic point you’ve raised — which I would agree with — would be that pleasure is not the same thing as happiness. Happiness is a much more abstract term. You can say with a lot of degree of confidence whether you can look at somebody and tell whether they’re experiencing pleasure at a particular moment. But to look at them and say whether that person is “happy” at that particular moment is a much different question.
Joshua, I bet you have something to say on that too — about how to define happiness in a context like this. That’s got to be part of the answer to whether the wise man is happy even while he is under torture. What does it mean to be happy?
Joshua:
My problem is that I’m sitting over here on a completely different tangent of thought. I’m thinking: if Jesus of Nazareth was happy when he was being tortured, doesn’t that kind of render that whole project rather cheap and tawdry? What’s the point of putting on this whole show if in reality he’s filled with joy when he’s undergoing the torture?
Cassius:
How dare you raise a very practical and enlightening question like that in the middle of this conversation! Because I think that’s a very important observation.
So now I’ve kind of forgotten where we are — we were talking about what it means to be happy when you’re in the bull, when you’re being tortured. And if indeed Epicurus said the wise man is happy even when he’s under torture, what did Epicurus mean by saying that?
Joshua:
It’s so difficult to talk about because in the worst moments of the pain I’ve experienced, I’ve never experienced anything in any way approximate to the kind of pain you would experience in the Bull of Phalaris.
Cassius:
Well, I’m sorry, but I have to say this at this particular moment. I think that’s one of the reasons why Epicurus defined the goal of life to be pleasure and not happiness — because happiness is something entirely different and much more difficult to talk about than pleasure. But go ahead. Now I’ve interrupted you. Do you still have your train of thought at all?
Joshua:
Well, my train of thought was more or less petering out as you interjected. But the main point I want to make is precisely what I’ve said — it’s very difficult to talk about torture because I can’t even begin to fathom it. The most pain I’ve ever felt in my life was breaking both bones in my wrist when I fell out of a tree in eighth grade. And in no way is that pain linked to the kind of pain you experience under torture.
Cassius:
Well, I think you’re just illustrating why it is such a good hypothetical — kind of like that issue of the trolley barreling down the track. It helps focus the mind on an extreme situation so that you can really have a gut check about what you think is really the right answer.
And to me, the answer is that this is the error with defining happiness as the goal of life. In respect to my Greek friends, this would be the issue with eudaimonia or any other word you want to come up with to try to summarize in a single concept what the goal of life would be. After my few years of reading into Epicurus, I don’t think you can easily conceptually state what the goal of life for everybody is. I think that’s where Epicurus was focusing on the feeling of pleasure as being ultimately what you find when you drill down deep enough in any direction. Happiness as an abstraction requires a lot of mental gymnastics to think about.
And I think he’s saying that trying to conceptually identify in your mind a single concept that is so overriding that it is your ultimate goal — I think he’s saying you started on the wrong path by even thinking you can do that. That you should stay on the path that nature set at the beginning: listening to your feelings of pleasure and pain and then using your faculties as best you can to maximize pleasure and minimize pain — including mental, including physical, all types.
Joshua:
And so one thing I tried to articulate earlier, but didn’t get very far in doing, is the idea that what we’re talking about are things outside the mind that happen to the mind — like torture or problems of desire such as occur in the mind — and that you need to deal with them one way or another. But one thing I don’t see much of — and that I think is critically important, particularly as compared with Stoicism — is you have to recognize your ability, however minimal, to make changes to the immediate structure of your local world. You can make changes that prevent a lot of these problems from happening in the first place.
Epicurus has some interesting things to say about friendship — basically that we should try to make everyone we make our acquaintance with into our friend, and insofar as we are unable to make them our friend, we should at least do everything we can to ensure that they don’t become our enemy. So those are the kind of changes you can make to forestall a lot of these problems.
Obviously, grief — it doesn’t really matter what you do, that’s going to come to you eventually. But there’s a lot you can do to diminish its effect on you with what you might call engineering controls. Changes you can make in your own life to make pleasure and happiness the more likely outcome.
Cassius:
I think you’re exactly right in everything you’ve said. And I think that’s one of the most important distinctions — the Epicurean philosophy says it’s possible to do that because you have a certain amount of free will, and the rest of Epicurean philosophy is all geared towards explaining that you have to go out and understand nature so that you can do exactly that.
As you were saying that, I would cite as one text for that point the opening of Book 6 of Lucretius, where he says something to the effect that nature has brought things to exist, and then “from what gates you must sally out duly to encounter each.” I’ve always taken that as almost a military type analogy — you’ve got a fortress which you’ve erected to try to keep out these problems. But sometimes you have to sally out from the gates and go out and encounter them and defeat them so that they don’t cause you more trouble in the future.
This “control of experience” is a phrase I remember from DeWitt. I think that is core to what Epicurus was advocating — that you don’t just use your willpower to try to close out everything that’s going on around you. You get engaged with what’s going on around you so that you can prevent bad things from happening to you and enjoy good things at the same time.
Cassius:
Okay, we’re probably getting close to the end. Before we do closing statements, any general comments?
Martin:
My mind is very empty right now.
Cassius:
Okay. All right. And Joshua, now that I’ve phrased it in that direction, do you have any final words before we wrap up today’s episode?
Joshua:
No. What I’ve just said a little bit ago is for me the important takeaway: we can talk for a long time about the kind of problems that arise and how to deal with them when they arise. But the other part of that equation is doing things to prevent them from arising. So very critical, I think, to take that away from this passage as well.
Somebody said — I think a couple of episodes ago — that even once you understand the philosophy, you’re just at the beginning. You’ve just reached the point where you’re applying it. Understanding it gets you started, but then you have to live your life and apply it.
Joshua:
Yeah, I don’t exactly remember what I said three weeks ago, but I certainly agree with myself.
Cassius:
Okay, well, with that, let’s close for this week. I appreciate your time today and appreciate those who listen to us regularly and the comments that you give to us about each episode. If you have any questions or suggestions or comments on anything we say — because by no means are the things we say the last word — we’re doing the best we can, and hopefully we’ll stir some thoughts and produce in those who listen to us some responses and commentaries that will help us extend these thoughts in a more articulate way than we’re able to in the podcast. With that as our goal, we’ll do it again next week. Thank you for your time today, and we’ll be back soon. Goodbye.
Joshua:
Goodbye. Thanks.
Martin:
Goodbye. Goodbye.