Episode 103 - Corollaries to the Doctrines of Epicurus - Part Three
Date: 01/07/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2305-episode-one-hundred-three-corollaries-to-the-doctrines-part-three/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”First episode of 2022. Martin reads De Finibus lines 60–61, which include: death hanging over the foolish like the stone over Tantalus; the role of memory, present awareness, and anticipation in the wise man’s happiness; the statement that “no greater pleasure can be reaped from a life without end than from this which we know to have its allotted end”; and the direct attack on Stoics who say “nothing good exists excepting that vague phantom which they call morality.”
Discussion covers: the grammatically difficult sentence about emancipation from superstition and dread of death (Reid vs. Rackham comparison); Tantalus mythology — the stone hanging over his head as an analogy for those paralyzed by the fear of death; Epimetheus and Prometheus (hindsight and foresight) as a contrast to Epicurean optimism about future pleasures; Vatican Saying 47 on facing fortune; the swerve as the philosophical basis for human free will versus Stoic determinism; the attack on Stoics in section 61; the X-Files analogy for why Stoicism would be correct in a Stoic universe but wrong in ours; David Hume on miracles as an illustration of Epicurean epistemology; and Joshua’s “pleasure engine” concept — the idea that the Epicurean builds a life whose natural output is pleasure.
Cassius closes with thanks to Joshua (full Torquatus audio reading), Nate (Principal Doctrines), Don (Letter to Menoeceus commentary), and Martin for unbroken participation.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 103 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. At this point in our podcast 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’re continuing to examine a number of important corollaries of Epicurean doctrine as presented by Torquatus in this narration. Now let’s join Martin reading today’s text.
Martin:
There’s also death, which always hangs over them like the stone over Tantalus; and again superstition, which prevents those who are tinged by it from ever being able to rest. Moreover, they have no memories for their past good fortune and no enjoyment of their present. They only wait for what is to come, and as this cannot but be uncertain, they are wasted with anguish and alarm. And they are tortured most of all when they become conscious, all too late, that their devotion to wealth or military power or influence or fame has been entirely in vain — for they achieved none of the pleasures which they ardently hoped to obtain, and so underwent numerous and severe exertions.
Turn again to another class of men: trivial and pusillanimous, either always in despair about everything or ill-willed, spiteful, morose, misanthropic, slanderous, unnatural. Others again are slaves to the frivolities of the lover; others are aggressive, others reckless or impudent. While these same men are uncontrolled and inert, never persevering in their opinion — and for these reasons there never is in their life any intermission of annoyance.
Therefore, neither can any fool be happy nor any wise man fail to be happy. And we advocate these views far better and with much greater truth than do the Stoics, since they declare that nothing good exists excepting that vague phantom which they call morality — a title imposing rather than real — and that virtue being founded on this morality demands no pleasure and is satisfied with its own resources for the attainment of happiness.
But these doctrines may be stated in a certain manner so as not merely to disarm our criticism but actually to secure our sanction. For this is the way in which Epicurus represents the wise man as continually happy. He keeps his passions within bounds. About death he is indifferent. He holds true views concerning the eternal gods, apart from all dread. He has no hesitation in crossing the boundary of life, if that be the better course.
Furnished with these advantages he is continually in a state of pleasure. And there is in truth no moment at which he does not experience more pleasure than pain. For he remembers the past with thankfulness. And the present is so much his own that he is aware of its importance and its agreeableness. Nor is he dependent on the future, but awaits it while enjoying the present. He is also very far removed from those defects of character which I quoted a little time ago. And when he compares the fool’s life with his own, he feels great pleasure. And pains, if any, before him have never power enough to prevent the wise man from finding more reasons for joy than for relaxation.
It was indeed excellently said by Epicurus that fortune only in a small degree crosses the wise man’s path. And that his greatest and most important undertakings are executed in accordance with his own design and his own principles.
And that no greater pleasure can be reaped from a life which is without end in time than is reaped from this which we know to have its allotted end. He judged that the logic of your school possesses no efficacy either for the amelioration of life or for the facilitation of debate. He let the greatest stress on natural science. But that branch of knowledge enables us to realize clearly the force of words and the natural conditions of speech and the theory of consistent and contradictory expressions. And when we have learned the constitution of the universe, we are relieved of superstition. We are emancipated from the dread of death, are not agitated through ignorance of phenomena, from which ignorance more than anything else terrible panics often arise. Finally, our characters will also be improved when we have learned what it is that nature craves.
Then again, if we grasp a firm knowledge of phenomena and uphold that canon which almost fell from heaven into human ken — that test to which we are to bring all our judgments concerning things — we shall never succumb to any man’s eloquence and abandon our opinion.
Martin:
Just right immediately a remark. So there is one sentence I really don’t get the way it’s structured.
Cassius:
Which one?
Martin:
It’s that part: “and when we have learned the constitution of the universe, we are relieved of superstition. We are emancipated from the dread of death, are not agitated through ignorance of phenomena, from which ignorance more than anything else, terrible panics often arise.” This doesn’t make sense grammatically. How do we link to the rest?
Cassius:
He’s saying that ignorance of the way the universe works, more than anything else, leads to terrible panics arising — because people do not understand the constitution of the universe.
Joshua:
Well, what I wanted to clarify here: the emphasis should be on “which.” You know, we are “emancipated from the dread of death, are not agitated through ignorance of phenomena from which ignorance more than anything else, terrible panics often arise.” So it’s the ignorance of phenomena — the dread of death and all that — from that ignorance, terrible panics often arise.
Cassius:
It’s interesting that that section you’re reading there is almost a mirror, stated again in very similar words, of what I’ve put at the top of the homepage of the EpicureanFriends Forum. This linking of understanding of the constitution of the universe to how everything else works — how it’s necessary to understand that before you can understand epistemology, before you can have confidence in anything else — this is a huge point.
Martin:
I still don’t understand the grammar there. I understand roughly what it means, but I still don’t see how the grammatical construction is correct.
Cassius:
It’s awkwardly worded with lots of clauses in it. He’s just cramming all of Epicurean philosophy almost into that one sentence with a bunch of clauses and sub-clauses. Does that help? Keep asking the question, Martin, because this is the kind of thing we’re trying to do — make things clearer.
Martin:
So the content I perfectly agree with. But of course, if the grammar is faulty somewhere, I may misunderstand. That’s why I would like to see the construction.
Cassius:
The focus of what you’ve been saying has been on the part about “ignorance of phenomena.” We’re using the Reid translation instead of the Rackham translation that a lot of other people use. It would be good to compare the way Rackham did this sentence as well, because he tends to be sometimes a little smoother. But the reason we went to Reid is because sometimes Reid is more literal, and even though it’s more difficult in construction, sometimes you can pull more meaning out of it.
One thing I do want to clarify, Joshua: when I read that sentence, I think I said “superstition” as “suspicion.” When we have learned the constitution of the universe, we are relieved of superstition.
Joshua:
Ah. Yes. Rackham translates that this way, Martin: “Secondly, a thorough knowledge of the facts of nature relieves us of the burden of superstition, frees us from fear of death, and shields us against the disturbing effects of ignorance, which is often in itself a cause of terrifying apprehensions.”
Martin:
That one is grammatically correct.
Cassius:
Yes. So it’s really the weird translation here in the text. I would say this is an example of just how important it is to look at different translations when you’re trying to pull meaning out of these texts. Rackham is very good and very smooth, but there are significant differences between what Rackham does and what Reid does. Reid is more literal to the Latin and Rackham probably took more liberties and thereby made it more understandable. But then at that point, you’re relying on Rackham to have gotten it right.
Let me say a couple of things. These sections that we’re reading in Torquatus in general — it’s just such a good summary of Epicurean philosophy that I think this Torquatus material ought to be some of the early reading that anybody who studies Epicurus ought to be looking into. It’s really more clear in many ways than the Letter to Menoeceus or the Letter to Herodotus in certain instances. It’s more of a high-level summary of everything. And we’ve been talking about virtue and pleasure and so forth, but as he gets to the end of this letter — which is where we are now — he’s just providing a really condensed outline of a lot of the basics of the philosophy that don’t get talked about very often.
And I just think this is an incredibly good reference text, which is why I am so appreciative to our panelist Joshua, who has read the entire section of Torquatus in one sitting and made that available on EpicureanFriends.com, on Facebook, and on YouTube — free for everybody to download and listen to. I really can’t recommend that enough — it’s an hour or so to listen to, but to hear the entire presentation by Torquatus at one time is extremely helpful to see how it all fits together.
So with that rant, let’s go back to the beginning. We’re just going to keep most of that material in, Martin, even if we don’t end up talking about each paragraph today, because it all fits together so much. And looking back to where we started in section 60, we’ve finished talking about how the goal of virtue is pleasure and virtue is not an end in itself. We talked last week about the issue of mental versus bodily pleasures and how people should avoid the mistake of thinking that bodily pleasures are so much more important than mental pleasures. And so now we’re moving to an even more rapid-fire list of other issues that Epicurus brings up.
The first topic is to talk about death hanging over people like the stone of Tantalus — which is probably worth explaining, Joshua. What’s that one about?
Joshua:
No, I actually did not know this one. I felt compelled to look it up. When I think of Tantalus, I think of him as one of sort of three or four classical punishments of the Greek afterlife — which, for the most part, is not a place of punishment. This is a distinction between Hades and the Christian hell: in hell, you assume you’re being tortured for all eternity, whereas in Hades you become sort of a wandering shade, pale and wondrous wise, as I think Lucretius puts it. But there are a couple of people who, because of their crimes on Earth, are deemed to be deserving of torment for all time.
One of them, of course, is Sisyphus — rolling a stone up a hill, it falls back down, and he’s got to push it back up. Ixion was another one with a wheel. Tantalus — in my mind I’d always associated him with the things he wanted being constantly out of reach. He was standing in water with a fruit tree hanging over him, hungry and thirsty. But every time he reached for the tree, the branches would pull back. And every time he bent to drink, the water would recede. And so for all time he’s stuck between hunger and thirst, unable to satisfy either.
What I didn’t know about was this part about the stone hanging over his head. I went to Wikipedia for that. Apparently it has something to do with “over his head towers of threatening stone” from Pindar. It’s connected to the myth of a golden dog that was stolen or something.
Actually, what I think his worst crime was: he was serving a banquet for the gods at one point — which is a pretty amazing opportunity for a mere mortal — but because he was such an evil person, he offered up his son Pelops as a sacrifice. He cut Pelops up, boiled him, and served him up in a banquet for the gods in order to test their omniscience. The gods became aware of the gruesome nature of the menu and did not touch the offering. Only Demeter, distraught by the loss of her daughter Persephone who was spending part of the year in Hades, absentmindedly ate part of the boy’s shoulder. Then the Fates were conscripted to put the boy back together again, but they had to use a piece of ivory to rebuild his shoulder.
He’s also noted as the mythological founder of the House of Atreus — which would be the house of Agamemnon, his wife Clytemnestra who ended up murdering him (in the Aeschylus play), and of course Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia — which, of course, is a Lucretian reference, the horrors of religion. Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter to give the Greek fleet wind in their sails. So there we’ve got two examples of human sacrifice: Tantalus sacrificing his son to test the omniscience of the gods, and Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter to placate them. In one case the gods are horrified; in another, one god at least is satisfied.
Cassius:
Well, Joshua, you’ve gotten a lot more detail there than I was expecting. And what you’re talking about in terms of the tree and the water fits exactly with the colloquial English use of “Tantalus” — to be tantalized by something. But the point of the stone specifically is the one I was thinking of. In the context here, the stone teetering and balanced over his head — and he’s always thinking it’s about to fall, but it never does. That’s a way some people are about death: they’re transfixed on it, can’t take their eyes off it, can’t put it behind them and get on with their life. They’re just always consumed and obsessed with the idea that they’re about to die.
Joshua:
I see in this passage also references to mythology that you can pull a lot of meaning out of, if you know them. I just wanted to mention two more Greek myths that come to my mind on this subject: the legends of Epimetheus and Prometheus. And what those two names actually mean are hindsight and foresight. Part of what Prometheus was eternally punished for — being bound to a cliffside and having his liver eaten out every day by an eagle — was precisely foresight: stealing fire from the gods and giving it to man. So here, like in the Bible in the Garden of Eden, there’s a punishment for having too much knowledge, or seeking too much knowledge about things to come. But in Epicurean philosophy, it’s precisely the opposite. We need to remember where we came from and we need to have an idea about the future if we’re going to have any hope of happiness. Because remaining in willful uncertainty about the future is an invitation to dread about the future. Epicurus talks about putting stock in future pleasure as a good thing — looking at death and seeing in that a chance for more pleasure than you’re experiencing right now.
Cassius:
Yeah, there are several really big issues that you’re hitting on here that Torquatus is hitting on too. One of which is exactly what you just talked about — how Epicurus offers a system by which you consider your past memories of good things, also your enjoyment of the present, and also your enjoyment of thoughts about the future. All of those are important mental pleasures that you have at your command in most every instance of life — that you can focus on and use to dispel present pains or concerns. So you’ve got his emphasis on the past, the present, and the future pleasures as part of the mental issue.
But one of the premises of his sentence when he says “this cannot but be uncertain” — that’s a reminder of the whole Epicurean position on fate and determinism. Epicurus establishes through his philosophy that there is no fate, the gods are not mandating a certain reaction and certain future for everybody, and that you have some control over your future. This is right there in the Letter to Menoeceus as well: that there are certain things that you can control and certain things you cannot.
When he says here “they only wait for what is to come,” he’s criticizing the people who just simply take a resigned attitude — “whatever will be, will be,” que sera, sera.
Joshua:
I picture an anxious rabbit crouching behind a bush, just waiting to be eaten by something. That’s the image that comes into my mind.
Cassius:
That’s right. And what I wanted to bring in here — since we are recording this on the second day of the new year — I posted this on New Year’s Eve: from Diogenes of Oenoanda, that 80-foot-long inscription on his wall. He says: “But if we assume it to be possible, then truly the life of the gods will pass to men, for everything will be full of justice and mutual love.” So here’s an example of an Epicurean exercising, in spite of the uncertainty about the future, a fundamental optimism about the future.
And I think that’s the key attitude here. Whatever happens, you’re going to have the opportunity to experience pleasure in spite of it. Because probably what’s going to happen tomorrow is going to be more or less the same stuff that’s happening today. Eventually, yes, you will die, which is not overly optimistic in itself. But knowing that until you die you have a rich, fulfilling life of pleasure ahead of you — and not just pleasure, but friendship and studying philosophy — knowing you have a chance for all of that ahead of you, when you get to the question of death and understand what it means, it’s not something to be feared.
And the key takeaway for me is what I tried to articulate in the last episode: in spite of the fact that a lot of this is not in your control, some of it is. There’s a portion that you do have a certain element of control over. He’s going to go on in this passage to say “fortune only in a small degree crosses the wise man’s path.” So there’s a wide window there for you to operate. And while you’re operating, you should act as Epicurus acted — as a master builder for human happiness — and be an architect of a future that will bring you pleasure.
Cassius:
I’ll jump in and say I completely agree with what you’re saying. I do observe sometimes — again, this gets back into tranquility — yes, I think an Epicurean is going to generally have a very positive, upbeat attitude towards life. Just because you’re going to die eventually and your soul isn’t going to live forever playing harps in heaven — that’s not a reason to sit around moping and feeling sorry for yourself. It comes through in much of Epicurean philosophy, especially Lucretius and his intensity, that learning the truth that you’re going to die and your soul isn’t going to live forever is liberating and freeing and gives you the ability to enjoy the life that you have now.
I can’t pass up Vatican Saying 47, and I’m going to read the translation from Christos Yapijakos in Athens: “I have anticipated thee, fortune, and entrenched myself against all thy secret attacks. And I will not give myself up as a captive to thee or to any other circumstance. But when it’s time for me to go, spitting contempt on life and all those who vainly cling to it, I will leave life crying aloud a glorious triumph song that I have lived well.”
And to me, that has always encapsulated what you’re talking about, Joshua. When you say optimism — there’s always the issue that people are going to say, well, being an optimist versus a pessimist, neither of those is quite right. We’re not talking about blind optimism here. We’re not saying everything’s going to turn out right automatically. There’s no equivalent in Epicurean philosophy of “all things work together for good for those who love the Lord.” You don’t have complete control over the events of life. But if you understand the philosophy and you understand how the world works, you’re prepared to take action to organize your life and to deal with problems in an intelligent way that is most likely to produce a successful result.
And in fact, I think that’s in the Letter to Menoeceus too, right, Joshua — that it’s better to have a bad result from a well-reasoned action than to simply be lucky?
Joshua:
I’d have to go pull the actual — I don’t know if you remember that particular phrase or not.
Cassius:
Martin, do you know it?
Martin:
Oh, it’s something like that. Yeah.
Joshua:
As Philodemus said, apparently, according to Don, most Epicureans have an appalling lack of command of the texts. So I’m probably a little bit guilty of that myself. But yeah, I think you’re on absolutely the right track there. One of Epicurus’s formulations that I rather like is: “there’s no necessity to living with necessity.” And then there’s also in the Letter to Menoeceus the section about how it would be better to believe in the fables of false religion than to give in to the determinists. In other words, if you don’t believe you have any control at all over your life, then you’re in the worst possible position — you’re totally a leaf blowing in the wind. Epicurus is saying that when you understand nature, you’ll see that you’re not just a leaf blowing in the wind.
Cassius:
Or a pinball bouncing off the bumpers in the machine.
Joshua:
Yeah, pinballs. A pool table — billiard balls. The difference between a billiard ball on a pool table and the atoms in Epicurus’s theory is that those billiard balls do not have the ability to swerve. And although you get into all those issues about mechanisms and so forth — what Epicurus is observing is that we’re not billiard balls, because the atoms that make up our souls, our beings, do have this capacity apparently to swerve, because we see that we have some degree of free will. The billiard balls do not have free will, but we happily do in Epicurean philosophy.
Cassius:
Well, why don’t we at least try to finish the first paragraph before we quit for today? “For they achieve none of the pleasures which they ardently hoped to obtain, and so underwent numerous and severe exertions.” So what is he saying there? Martin?
Martin:
Yeah. Those guys he’s talking about just use the wrong means to achieve pleasure. They were looking for other things than pleasure, which they thought would give them pleasure. But when they achieve those with a lot of effort, they still don’t experience that pleasure.
Cassius:
One of the reasons they don’t is because they were off chasing these other goals instead of realizing that you must have a sound, true philosophy in order to decide what the right goal is. And that’s a problem, because some people seem to have the idea that their version of optimism is: “if I can only get this one thing, if I can only pile up enough wealth, then I can start to live pleasurably.” But that’s not Epicurean philosophy. Epicurean philosophy is: start yesterday. But if you didn’t do that, start today. Don’t wait until you have money or you’re retired or you’ve achieved some role you sought for a long time. You can start right now.
And as I think he said elsewhere in this, one of my favorite quotes: “We should be ashamed not to have learned these things when we were children.” Nothing complicated about it. We’re going to get to that before the end of the Torquatus section.
Joshua:
What I see is line 32. He says: “Surely no one recoils from or dislikes or avoids pleasure in itself because it’s pleasure, but because great pains come upon those who do not know how to follow pleasure rationally.” So he continuously makes this point that a lot of people are just simply mistaken about how to follow pleasure, about what the goal in life is. And the first step in the process of curing these problems is to understand a correct philosophy of the universe — a worldview where you understand both the constitution of nature and also the epistemology about how the constitution of nature feeds into your process of obtaining knowledge and deciding what it is you can have confidence in.
So we talked about that little section of people who get it wrong — their devotion to wealth or military power or influence or fame has been entirely in vain. That’s not the only class of people that he has problems with, is it?
Cassius:
He goes — going into 61 if you want to go into that — he says: “Turn to another class of men: trivial, pusillanimous” — which I guess means cowardly — “either always in despair about everything, or ill-willed, spiteful, morose, misanthropic, slanderous, unnatural. Others, again, are slaves to the frivolities of the lover; others are aggressive, others reckless or impudent. While these same men are uncontrolled and inert, never persevering in their opinion — and for these reasons, there never is in their life any intermission of annoyance.”
So when he says “never persevering in their opinion” — he seems to be contrasting that with what he imagines is the ideal Epicurean: someone who has gained a measure of control over their life, who is not just sitting there waiting for things to happen to them, but who is willing to do the necessary work to build a life that will yield happiness today and in the future. And who will get their opinions about the important things right — things like what happens when you die, the nature of the gods, the fact that they don’t intervene in human life. Without having a solid foundation of philosophy, he says there is never any intermission of annoyance in their lives. Not only do they not have continuous pleasure — they end up basically with continuous pain.
And Joshua, of course, I’m very glad you decided to take us into 61, because we’ll conclude the episode today with 61. And we should never fail, whenever we have the opportunity, to attack the Stoics. Let me read that:
“Therefore, neither can any fool be happy nor any wise man fail to be happy. And we advocate these views far better and with much greater truth than do the Stoics, since they declare that nothing good exists excepting that vague phantom which they call morality — a title imposing rather than real — and that virtue being founded on this morality demands no pleasure and is satisfied with its own resources for the attainment of happiness.”
And of course this could only be said by Torquatus — it wouldn’t be said by Epicurus because at that point the Stoics were not as well developed as the enemy of Epicurean philosophy as they were at the time of Torquatus. But this is a direct application of the things we’ve been talking about: the views that we’re advocating about living justly and happily are advocated with much greater truth by us than by the Stoics, since they’ve made this mistake of saying that there’s nothing good except virtue or morality. And the ultimate stupidity is to say that virtue or morality demands no pleasure at all and is satisfied with its own resources for the attainment of happiness. That would be “virtue is its own reward” — which is probably as opposite to Epicurean philosophy as any statement could be.
Joshua:
I’m looking for the phrase: “virtue being founded on this morality demands no pleasure and is satisfied with our own resources for the attainment of happiness.” Basically, it’s the idea that once you’ve attained this vague and illusory sort of absolute morality or virtue, not only will you not look for pleasure — because pleasure is a kind of distress from that point of view — but you also get the promise that you can endure anything. I see in Stoicism a tendency to idealize a position that I’m not really sure is possible for any human to actually achieve. But it is the logical result of their physics and their understanding of the universe: that there is a divine fire and intelligence behind the universe moving towards a particular end, that has set this virtue out as its goal.
Cassius:
And you’re right, it’s totally impractical. And for many of us today who are practically oriented, we think it’s ridiculous to suggest what they’re suggesting. But I suppose if you’re an ancient Athenian philosophy student, or maybe you’re an Oxford or Cambridge philosophy student today taking tests and asked to pursue the logical conclusion of something, you can understand where the Stoics were coming from. And if their view of the universe were correct, I would say they’re correct in what they conclude. But their view of the universe is not correct in an Epicurean position, and that’s why they’re wrong. But you’re not going to know that they’re wrong unless you understand what the difference is about the view of the universe. That continual issue — the connection between the ethics and the underlying physics of the way the world works.
Joshua:
And one way I put this sometimes is by reference to the American television show, The X-Files.
Cassius:
Go ahead, explain.
Joshua:
Which might seem out of left field. But in the universe of The X-Files, you have paranormal things happening all the time. And you’ve got these two agents, Mulder and Scully. One of them is deeply and profoundly skeptical about paranormal activity. And I always think: we’re in whatever season we are now, you’ve seen this again and again and again. In the universe you’re living in, this stuff really does just happen. So skepticism sort of becomes the wrong position from that point of view. Whereas in our universe these things don’t happen, which is why skepticism of supernatural phenomena is for me sort of the default position. But it isn’t in that universe.
So I think you’re absolutely right. If the universe we were in was the universe of Platonism and Stoicism, then the conclusions of Stoicism would certainly be correct. So it’s important to understand what the nature of the universe actually is so that you understand that it’s not that universe, and that your response needs to be consistent with the universe we actually live in.
Cassius:
And of course, somebody is going to respond to you, Joshua — a Christian, Jew, Muslim, whatever religious person. They’re going to say: “Well, that’s your opinion, Joshua. You don’t know what the true nature of the universe really is. You’re not God. You’re not omniscient. You haven’t even been outside of planet Earth, much less to the far reaches of the universe. You cannot be confident in your position.”
And rather than put you on the spot by asking, “Therefore, how are you confident in your position?” — I think the answer that’s the other link of the Epicurean chain is the epistemology. You have to understand the Epicurean positions on what truth is, what reality is, and what tools and methodology make sense to use in deciding what is true and what is false. The standard of omniscience — “nothing can be determined to be true unless God tells me” or “nothing can be determined to be true unless I am standing in the middle of the universe looking at everything at one time” — that is not a valid criterion for determining truth. But unless you think about those issues, then people can very easily be led to believe that word games are sufficient to prove something, when they are not and should not be accepted to be.
Joshua:
What I’m thinking of right now is a quote by David Hume where he’s talking about miracles, using the principle of taking the argument that assumes the least. He says — I’m going to paraphrase — in the case of the conception of Jesus: “Which is more likely — that an eternal God inseminated a human woman, or that an unfaithful woman should tell a lie?” In one of those cases, we know something that happens all the time. In another case, we know something that has apparently never happened. So that would be an example of how we can examine claims of the supernatural.
But ultimately, yeah, I think your conclusion is right. And you’ve got the Thomas example in the New Testament — the doubting Thomas example. Thomas had been a disciple and supposedly seen all these miracles. But when Jesus comes back from the dead, Thomas doesn’t believe it and insists on physical proof by touching the wounds. And then Jesus says something about “blessed are those who believe without seeing.” Really, Thomas becomes a vehicle in the story that makes a virtue out of credulity. That’s certainly a huge theme of all of this. The virtue of credulity — believing things you don’t have evidence for — is preached in all revealed religions. But Epicurus teaches the opposite: you need evidence for everything that you believe.
Cassius:
That’s the illustration of what you said a minute ago about which is more likely — for a woman who’s pregnant to tell a story about how she got that way, or for a supernatural being to have been the father. You learn from the experiences of life that certain things are likely to occur, and you get comfortable with that method of reasoning.
Precisely. Okay, let’s begin to wrap up for today. Martin?
Martin:
Nice things have been said. That’s nice to add.
Cassius:
Joshua, any closing thoughts for today?
Joshua:
What I tried to articulate in the last episode and again in this one is that because we don’t have to be slaves to necessity, we have a responsibility to be the architect of our future happiness. And the way I conceptualize this is: you want to build your life into what I call the pleasure engine. Something that just by the way it operates, a natural output is pleasure.
I’m going to continue to workshop the idea. I don’t know if it sounds entirely helpful, but it gives the idea that you need to build something in your life — a foundation that naturally yields pleasure as a result. Because just bouncing from one moment to the next expecting to find pleasure, while that often will work, too often puts you at the mercy of fate or chance or necessity. Whereas Epicurus says that for an ideal Epicurean, you wouldn’t be controlled by those things. You would have built a life that just yields pleasure as a natural output.
Cassius:
I think that’s a great theme, and I think that’s exactly what Epicurus is saying about his whole philosophy. That philosophy is the engine you’re talking about — the operating system for your computer, so to speak. And yet, once you’ve got the operating system programmed, you’re only at the beginning of what you’re going to do with the computer. You actually have to put it to use. But once you have the operating system in place, you apply it, and it becomes your engine for making sure that as many of the experiences of life as are possible to you are pleasurable, and as few experiences as possible to you are painful.
Always remembering that you have to look past the bad connotations of the words “pleasure” and “pain.” We’re not just talking about looking for immediate bodily gratifications. We’re talking about pleasure meaning all of the things of life — mental and physical — which we find agreeable to us. Knowledge, art, literature, science, friendship — all the things that give us pleasure. We pursue them because they give us pleasure. That’s the analysis of pleasure we’re talking about. It is a pleasure engine, but it is an engine of a particular type that understands that the pleasures we’re talking about are not limited to just immediate bodily pleasures.
Joshua:
And like most engines throughout history, its introduction to your life can be revolutionary. And it’s not going to operate in exactly the same way for every individual — the pleasures of an Inuit in Alaska are going to be in many cases different than the pleasures of a person on the equator, depending on your age, your background, your circumstances, all the different individual aspects of your own existence that go into what you find to be pleasurable. This engine is not going to create cookie-cutter people who are all the same. It’s going to produce individuals who become the best that they can be.
We’ve been talking about that on the forum as well — the issue of the Epicurean gods as an example, in terms of psychological motivation. You want to talk about that for just a minute as we close here?
Cassius:
Sure. This issue of being the best you can be as part of the psychological motivation. And one way I was trying to talk about it on the forum was: if someone comes to you — a child or just someone who’s not a philosophy student — and says they’re confused about what to do with their life, and they come to you and say, “I don’t know which is the best course for my life. All I know is I want to use my life in the best way possible. Tell me what the best way to spend my life is.” Do you immediately slap them down and say “that’s a bad way of looking at it,” or do you embrace that way of looking at it and then explain how to be the best? Martin, how would you answer that?
Martin:
That would definitely take my time and preparation. I mean, it certainly gave me a lot of pleasure attempting to do the best in the job I do and to have all the knowledge I need for that. So that gave me a lot of pleasure.
Cassius:
And you’re exactly right. You don’t want to be the best lawnmower you can possibly be or the best fingernail cutter you can possibly be — there are things in life that are not that important. But what we’re talking about is: in regard to your life as a whole, is it fair to say in general that you wish to live the best life that you can possibly live?
Martin:
I mean, if you measure it by pleasure, yes, that would be the life I want. But not “best” in some other meaning.
Cassius:
Right. In other words, another way of talking about it on the forum was: if someone comes to you confused about what to do with their life, they see all these different philosophies and all these different arguments about how you should spend your life. They come to you and say, “I don’t know which is the best course.” Do you embrace that way of looking at it and then explain how to be the best you can be?
Joshua:
You know, I struggle with this idea of “the best life.” I think partially because it introduces — although falsely, I know you don’t mean it this way — a question of competition. The way I would put it is: I don’t need to be the best plant in the garden of pleasure. I just want to be in the garden.
Cassius:
Well, you’re exactly right. I don’t think competition is necessarily involved. It’s not a matter of wanting to be better than everybody else. The question is: of all the different options out there, how do you know which is the best option to pursue? All the different paths you could choose from — how do you know which is the best path? A lot of people think of it that way. They haven’t analyzed the question of what is the good.
This is really no different than the question of what is the good — at least from their perspective. And I think that’s part of your concern, and it ought to be part of our concern, is that you really can’t reduce these things to words and solve them logically. That’s what Plato is trying to do — to say there’s a logical answer to the best way of life. And I think Epicurus is saying that’s not a valid analysis.
My answer to your question would be: if I’m pursuing the best life or the best philosophy, you start with an analysis of nature. And once you’ve got the ground rules of that down, then you start to build your conclusions on the basis of that — which, of course, is precisely the operation of Epicurean philosophy. And the conclusion is that the best life is the life filled with maximal pleasure and minimal pain.
What’s the definition of the word “best,” Joshua?
Joshua:
Oh, really drilling down here into linguistics. I guess — highest, maximum, superlative.
Cassius:
See, I don’t mean to be cute or smart-alecky in this discussion, but I do think that’s where a lot of this confusion comes from. And that’s the way this whole book started out — that’s the way Torquatus starts out. Let me get the exact statement. He says that whatever the end of life is, we are bound to test all things else by that end, but the end itself by nothing. Here it is in line 29: “First, then, I shall plead my case on the lines laid down by the founder of the school himself. I shall define the essence and features of the problem before us. The problem before us, then, is what is the climax and standard of things good? And this, in the opinion of all philosophers, must be such that we are bound to test all things by it, but the standard itself by nothing. And Epicurus places this standard in pleasure, which he lays down to be the supreme good, while pain is the supreme evil.”
So those kind of considerations go into the issue of what is “best,” which I think is the starting place, or ought to be the starting place, for most people when they’re trying to decide which philosophy to pursue and what to do with their lives.
Joshua:
Yeah, so the word I might use is “optimal.”
Cassius:
Optimal. That’s right. Optimum is the best. Not in comparison to other people, but just for you. And you’re making that analysis based on your understanding of the nature of the universe. If indeed there is a best that somebody else has determined for you to follow, then by all means, pursue that as the best. But you’ve got to be sure whether that’s really reality or not. And that’s where Epicurus is telling you to start. And that may be where we should finish for today.
Joshua:
Not particularly.
Cassius:
Okay. Well, the last word I would say is just that I think a lot of people we come into contact with in discussing Epicurean philosophy don’t really wish to start at this level. They simply have a generalized knowledge of their life that they’re unhappy, that they’re in pain, and they want pleasure. They have this generalized understanding that things need to change in a happier direction for them. But what Epicurus is warning them about is that unless they understand the nature of happiness and what it means to be happy and the way the world works, it’s almost inevitable that the decisions they make in pursuing happiness are going to be less than optimal — in Joshua’s words.
Yes. Okay. That’s a good place to stop for today. Well, thank you both. And thanks to everybody who listens.
And again, we encourage everyone who listens to the episodes and has any questions about anything we say — or just wants to make a comment or give us suggestions on things to cover — please come to EpicureanFriends.com, where we have a thread for this particular episode and every episode.
There you will find not only Joshua’s recent recording of the entire Torquatus text — thank you for the work you did to bring that into public view. You will also find, of course, Don’s work on the Letter to Menoeceus — his wonderful translation and commentary on that text. And Nate did some work on the Principal Doctrines and the translation of those as well. So those three things you can find by going to EpicureanFriends.com.
This is effectively the first episode we’re recording in the new year. And that’s the place to include the thank-you to Joshua, to Nate, to Don, and to everyone who’s participated in EpicureanFriends this year. The works that they’ve done are to their own credit, and we’ll make sure you can always find them at the forum. And Martin, and everyone who’s participated in the podcast over the last two years — a tremendous amount of credit goes to all of you. We wouldn’t have the enthusiasm and energy to keep up with this work if we didn’t have people participating like you guys have done.
Joshua:
Absolutely.
Cassius:
Yeah. The next episode will be 104, which on a weekly schedule will be two years almost exactly.
Joshua:
Yes, indeed.
Cassius:
So thanks to you guys, to Joshua and Martin, for your participation here in this podcast. And we’re not at the end yet — we’re still only at the beginning, as Joshua would say.
Joshua:
That’s right.
Cassius:
We’ll come back next week and continue with the beginning. So thanks, everybody.
Joshua:
Thanks a lot.
Martin:
Thank you. Thanks. Bye-bye.
Cassius:
Bye-bye.