Episode 109 - The Epicurean View of Friendship
Date: 02/17/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2396-episode-one-hundred-nine-the-epicurean-view-of-friendship/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 109 opens the Epicurean treatment of friendship with sections 65–66 of the Torquatus passage in Cicero’s On Ends. The episode centers on DeWitt’s “summum bonum fallacy” — his argument, developed in a 1950 Classical Weekly article and in Epicurus and His Philosophy, that Epicurus’s actual word was telos (goal/end), not summum bonum (supreme good), and that this distinction matters because summum bonum implies a ranked list of goods while telos names a single end. The group examines Vatican Saying 78 (“of these the one is a mortal good, the other immortal”), discussing whether “mortal” and “immortal” there mean infinite duration or degrees of blessedness, and whether friendship or wisdom is the immortal good. Torquatus presents three Epicurean ways of discussing friendship — beginning with the view that our own pleasure remains primary, but friendship cannot be dissociated from pleasure just as virtue cannot — and the mythological friend pairs Theseus and Pirithous and Orestes and Pylades are identified as Torquatus’s examples of the rarity and greatness of genuine friendship. The episode closes with Cassius’s declaration that pleasure as the telos can only be properly understood within the full context of Epicurean physics, canonics, and ethics — “This is Epicurean philosophy, not hedonism.”
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 109 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 the poem and we’ve turned to the presentation of Epicurean ethics found in Cicero’s On Ends. We’ve now completed a long but important section stressing the importance of Epicurean emphasis on epistemology and natural science, and today we turn to section 65 on friendship, which will take us several sessions to complete. But let’s get started today with Martin reading today’s text.
Martin:
One topic remains which is of prime importance for this discussion — that relating to friendship, which you declare will cease to exist with pleasure be the supreme good. Yet Epicurus makes this declaration concerning it: that of all the aids to happiness procured for us by wisdom, none is greater than friendship, none more fruitful, none more delightful. Nor in fact has he sanctioned this view by his language alone, but much more by his life and actions and character. And the greatness of friendship is made evident by the imaginary stories of the ancients, in which numerous and diversified as they are, and reaching back to extreme antiquity, scarce three pairs of friends are mentioned, so that beginning with Theseus you end with Orestes. But in truth, within the limits of a single school, and that restricted in numbers, what great flocks of friends did Epicurus secure, and how great was that harmony of affection wherein they all agreed. And this example is followed by the Epicureans in our day also. But let us return to our theme — there is no need to speak of persons.
I see then that friendship has been discussed by our school in three ways: some denying that the pleasures which affect our friends are in themselves as desirable to us as those we desire for ourselves — a view which certain persons think shakes the foundation of friendship — still defends their position, and in my opinion easily escapes from their difficulties. For they affirm that friendship, like the virtues of which we spoke already, cannot be dissociated from pleasure. Now since isolation and the life without friends abound in treacheries and alarms, reason herself advises us to procure friendships, by the acquisition of which the spirit is strengthened and cannot then be severed from the hope of achieving pleasures. And as enmity, spitefulness, and opposition are hostile to pleasures, so friendships are not only the truest promoters but are actually efficient causes of pleasures as well — to friends as to himself. And friends not only have the immediate enjoyment of these pleasures but are elate with hope as regards future and later times. Now because we can by no means apart from friendship preserve the real richness of life strong and unbroken, nor further can we maintain friendship itself unless we esteem our friends in the same degree as ourselves, on that account this principle is acted on in friendship, and so friendship is linked with pleasure. Truly we both rejoice at the joy of our friends as much as at our own joy, and we are equally pained by their afflictions.
Cassius:
Martin, thank you for reading that for us today. These three numbered sections are the first half of the material that we’re going to cover over the next several weeks on friendship, and we could have read on and finished the section, but there’s a lot in what we’ve already read — especially in the very beginning of it — that we need to lay the groundwork for. We are finished this week finally with our discussion of epistemology and natural science and the things that were raised in those connections over the last several weeks, but we’re going to need to bring that information with us in this discussion because we have some pretty complicated issues to talk about.
And we jump into them at the very beginning of section 65. We set the tone here by saying that all these things we’ve discussed in the past — including pleasure as the greatest good, the role of virtue, the role of natural science, the role of the Epicurean view of how to apply reasoning properly — all of those things we’ve covered have been important, but Torquatus says that one topic remains of prime importance, and that relates to friendship. And it’s interesting that he introduces the discussion by pointing out that this is Torquatus talking basically to Cicero — Torquatus is saying to Cicero and to these opposing schools: “You declare that friendship will cease to exist if pleasure is the supreme good.” So we’re kind of getting into a dare — I’d say even almost an Ayn Rand type of discussion here — in terms of where do you place yourself versus your friends. Do you consider your interests first? Do you consider the interests of your friends first? Are they somehow on the same level, or how do you evaluate these things? Because I think what Cicero and these other people are basically saying is that if you consider your own pleasure to be the supreme good, then you have by definition ruled out the idea of having a friend in the classic way that these other people think about it.
So first of all the issue is raised that if pleasure is the supreme good then you can’t even have friendship. Anybody want to comment on that before we go further? Joshua, you may be muted if you’re talking, or you’re thinking?
Joshua:
Thinking quietly.
Cassius:
Thinking about Ayn Rand?
Joshua:
You know, I’ve read this text all the way through at least twice — one of them was for the recording that I did — and I’m continually amazed at how new the material seems to me every time I read it. It’s so dense with material here. It’s so good. But you’re right to say that immediately as we get into this passage we’re presented with a number of difficulties. In fact I think we encounter a difficulty immediately when we say “if pleasure be the supreme good.” I don’t know if you want to go into that right now, but we do have a thread going on the forum that references DeWitt — who we certainly recommend as one of the great academic sources on Epicurean philosophy. Do you want to go into that now?
Cassius:
Why don’t we go ahead and address that, but let’s not forget to come back and also deal with the flip side of it — because what we’re about to talk about is the question of whether pleasure is in fact the supreme good or not. And I should say this: part of the reason that we chose this particular translation is that when we were looking at it before we started, it seemed like this translation takes more care perhaps than some of the others to be more literal. But there’s no doubt that what we’re about to do is place a lot of stress on a couple of words and the way they are stated here in English. It would behoove anybody who’s really getting into this to study some alternate translations and even try to get back into the Latin if possible, and see if they agree with the way that this is being translated. So there’s that issue. But now yes, Joshua, let’s go into the question of whether pleasure is — in the words of this translation — “the supreme good” or not. But before you do, one more thing: I’ll remind everybody that this is section 65 out of this material that we’re reading, but this same issue has already been raised early in the Torquatus material, because the whole discussion was set up by Torquatus saying back in section 29 that 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. Epicurus places this standard in pleasure, which he lays down to be the supreme good, while pain is the supreme evil.
So we started out very early in this passage with Torquatus planting the premise that Epicurus held pleasure to be the supreme good. And I’ll go a little bit further before I turn it over to Joshua: what DeWitt has argued in his book — and in an article entitled “The Summum Bonum Fallacy” — is that it’s important for us to stress the difference between “the supreme good” versus words like guide, or goal, or other considerations. He thinks that the Latin “supreme good” is not necessarily something that is clearly the way Epicurus stated it, and in fact what we should talk about today too is instances where Epicurus seems to question the wisdom of those who obsess over words like “the supreme good.” Joshua, where would you like to take that?
Joshua:
You know, I’m over here looking for the Latin text of De Finibus so I kind of am struggling to keep up here. But did you just read DeWitt on this subject?
Cassius:
No, I referenced DeWitt but I did not read him. I read the earlier section in Torquatus talking about the highest good, and I referenced that DeWitt questions that the way Torquatus set this up is really the way that Epicurus would have set it up. But I did not attempt to go into the details of DeWitt’s argument. So you take it from there and the thread that’s on the forum right now.
Joshua:
Yeah. So I gather that this is in chapter eight of Epicurus and His Philosophy — I believe that’s what’s being quoted here. This was a thread that was started by SmoothieKiwi. We talked about something else that was brought up a few weeks ago. But what he has quoted here is this: “As a criterion the feelings may take precedence over reason. Plato, for example, argued endlessly about the meaning of good. Epicurus scorned this dialectic and arrived at a simple solution. His line of attack is as follows: the greatest good must be associated with the greatest pleasure. This greatest pleasure is easily identified — what causes the unsurpassable joy is the bare escape from some terrible calamity. This joy arises from the saving of life, the escape from shipwreck, for instance. Therefore life itself is the greatest good. To think of pleasure as the greatest good is an error. Pleasure is the telos — which is the Greek word for the end or the purpose or the goal — and is not to be confused with the greatest good. The testimony of the feeling functioning as a criterion is decisive.”
Cassius, what do you interpret that to mean?
Cassius:
Well, this is a big problem — one of many big problems that impend here — because to me the word in Greek was telos, as Joshua has just informed us, and that means goal or end. And this was translated by Roman writers into summum bonum, which means “highest good.” And I have not been able to determine yet if that’s in fact what Cicero uses — I think we’re going to find that it is, but we need to keep that tentative for the moment.
Let me say this: this issue is not only in DeWitt’s book — I think you’ve referenced chapter eight — but it looks like he wrote an article in Classical Weekly in December of 1950 entitled “The Summum Bonum Fallacy,” in which he goes into the same argument, perhaps in a slightly different way than he does in the book. I think it’s basically consistent. But he is implying in what I’m reading here that summum bonum is what Cicero has right. And so I’m tempted to channel Don here and give an answer, because typically when this question comes up Don’s response is to give a litany of words — sort of a scattershot — you know, he’ll say that pleasure is the good, the end, the purpose, the goal, the telos.
Joshua:
I’m glad you clarified that, I was thinking to myself: oh my gosh, he’s saying something negative about Don using the scattershot approach. But no — in fact I think that’s a positive thing. And it’s actually the best approach. I think that’s what Epicurus does in many cases — he uses a sequence of words to paint the picture, to give you some reference points. He doesn’t really necessarily attempt to define it as much as he uses these analogies, or uses these other words that are similar, so that it helps you get a fix on it.
Cassius:
So what Don does is give us these other words that are synonyms or related to the same concept.
Joshua:
Yeah, and in three different languages coming from three very different cultures, so it seems to cover all the bases — or so we hope.
Cassius:
I’m quite happy to proceed under the assumption that Torquatus here and Cicero are presenting it correctly, and that maybe DeWitt has a point to make but hasn’t stated it as clearly as he might have — although he seems really firm in his position. But I think for the purposes of going through this text we almost need to restrain ourselves. We just have to point out the different positions without any attempt to say that one of them is necessarily the right one and one of them is clearly wrong. I think that’s what I’m intending to do anyway.
Joshua:
Yeah, no, I think that’s a great approach here. In fact, Cassius, I’ve got the Classical Weekly article in front of me, and the very first paragraph says: “The aim of this writing is to show how the lack of a definite article in Latin obliterated the doctrine of Epicurus that life itself, and not pleasure, is the greatest good, and it will also be shown how the recovered doctrine explains certain verses of Maximus.” I read that because to me that brings out the issue. “The greatest good” implies that there is a greatest good — and I’m not so sure that I’m firm that Epicurus held there to be a… well, what does “greatest good” mean if not that you can rank them, that you’ve got a list of them and you can put them in order and one of them is at the very top? Because he’s also taken the position — and we may even be discussing that today — that really there’s nothing good… well, it depends on what your definition of “good” is. Is anything that is not pleasurable good in and of itself?
Cassius:
Well, this is the ambiguity that the word telos very clearly resolved. Because while you could in theory have a number of different “goods,” if you’re identifying one of them as “the greatest good” that implies, as you said, other goods. But the word telos makes it very clear: it’s the goal. There’s only one goal. There’s only one end — which is the other word that Cicero uses, of course, implicitly, by his title when he says De Finibus, “On the Ends of Good and Evil.” What is the end of the good life? It’s the pursuit of pleasure. And I would relate it to what Torquatus has previously said too, in terms of what does nature give us in order to choose and to avoid, other than pleasure and pain. It’s like there’s only one green light, one “go” sign in life, and that’s pleasure. There’s only one red light, one “stop” sign in life, and that’s pain. But of course it’s tremendously complicated to know how to interpret those. In the end there’s only two — there’s only pleasure, there’s only pain. And if you look at it in that high-level, almost abstract way, I think you can conclude that pleasure is obviously the greatest; it’s the goal. But then does that translate into allowing you to say that there are other goods besides pleasure of which pleasure is the greatest good? And again I think that just depends on your definition of the word “good” and whether you think there’s only one of them or whether you think there are any number of them.
I’ve used the analogy of the bowling alley before — maybe you remember it. When you’re bowling, for kids they’ll put up the little bumpers on the side. Your goal is to knock the pins down; the opposite of your goal is to fall in the gutter. And so pain — rather than being an alternate goal — is almost like the bumpers on the side. They tell you: don’t do this, don’t go too far this way, because your goal is pleasure and you’re trying to get to the end. And the end of course — in Epicurean philosophy, the way I interpret it — is to maximize the feeling of pleasure over a whole human life. And pain, while we think of it as a great evil (and to live a life of torture and huge pain would be a terrible thing), pain can be useful in guiding you toward the goal, which is pleasure, because pain is the thing that tells you not to, say, put your hand on the hot stove — which is the opposite of pleasure in a sense.
Josh, two more quick things — and I may have already said these, but I keep thinking they’re so important. The first is that DeWitt’s more incisive points include the observation that pleasure and pain have no meaning except to the living. Which implies that life itself is a prerequisite — you have to have life in order to appreciate pleasure or follow it or have any relevance to it at all. So from a certain perspective, life is your most important asset. Unless you have that asset — unless you are alive — this whole discussion of pleasure and pain means nothing.
The second thing: you just quoted the passage from DeWitt about the escape from some disaster being the most intense pleasure — but remember right after that is where he goes on and criticizes the Aristotelians and the Peripatetics for walking around uselessly debating without end the meaning of the word “good.” And I think that last part is almost maybe more important than the first part in terms of giving us Epicurus’s viewpoint on this whole subject. We may be wasting our time right now obsessing over the meaning of the word “good.” It may be that Cicero has led us down this path by setting this whole thing up this way. It may be that the Roman Epicureans by this point were used to debating the Stoics and these other people, and had agreed to or acceded to this method of saying “okay, we’re going to talk about the greatest good” — and it may be that Epicurus really didn’t put it in those terms.
And as we saw at the very beginning of the Torquatus material — you know, there’s this whole argument that was made that Torquatus’s illustrious ancestors had acted for reasons other than pleasure, and Torquatus said: no, pleasure was ultimately at the root of everything they did, even punishing their own children. I think in one case, what did he do — did he execute his son?
Joshua:
Yeah, he executed his son for starting the battle too quickly.
Cassius:
I’m quite happy, Cassius, to proceed as you said — that talking about pleasure and debating it endlessly is not fruitful, and maybe we should go into the issue of friendship just accepting the terms here that pleasure is the good and any other goods are instrumental. Are you happy with that term?
Cassius:
Well, I’m very happy with the term “instrumental,” but that really is where we’re going to be going with the rest of what we’re discussing today. Obviously, related to the question of are there multiple goods or is pleasure the only good, we’re going to come to this question of whether friendship itself is a pleasure or whether friendship is a tool or aid toward pleasure — which I think is very closely related to what we’ve just been discussing.
And that’s the second part of the sentence: “Yet Epicurus makes this declaration concerning it” — meaning friendship — “that of all the aids” — and I’m going to underline that word — “that of all the aids to happiness procured for us by wisdom, none is greater than friendship, none more fruitful, none more delightful.” So we have a lot to discuss there about whether friendship is itself a pleasure or whether it is a tool for pleasure, because I think that’s kind of at the root of where he set this up. These people who are saying that Epicureans destroy friendship because you hold pleasure to be the supreme good and you don’t hold virtues to be the supreme good — they’re kind of equating friendship as a virtue and saying that these things are good in themselves and you should pursue them for what they are. Whereas Epicurus is saying that you don’t pursue anything unless it leads to pleasure. So you’ve got that tension: is friendship itself a pleasure, or is friendship a tool toward pleasure?
Joshua:
Well, I see that you brought in Vatican Sayings and Principal Doctrines — there’s one missing here.
Cassius:
Which one?
Joshua:
What’s the one where he says — I can’t remember how it goes really, but the conclusion is that friendship is an immortal… what was it?
Cassius:
Ah yes, yes — let’s find that.
Martin:
Yes, Cassius. I’m sorry we’re not bringing you in here, and it’s not too early to get some of your comments. Anything so far?
Martin:
I know, so I’m on guard. I’m listening to what you’re saying. It sounds agreeable to me — or in a way I just didn’t make up my mind on this one and I can’t say anything about it at this point.
Cassius:
Yes, Joshua — your answer is Vatican Saying 78: “The noble soul occupies itself with wisdom and friendship; of these the one is a mortal good, the other immortal.” Well, there you go. And so thank you for bringing that up so that you can explain that one to us. What’s your explanation of that one? I’m not even sure which one’s mortal and which one’s immortal.
Joshua:
I hope they’ve got it arranged in parallel so we can presume that it’s friendship that is the immortal good. That has always been my understanding of that.
Cassius:
Yeah. Definitely. Can you read that to me again?
Joshua:
Yes, Vatican Saying 78 — I’m pretty sure this is the Bailey translation: “The noble soul occupies itself with wisdom and friendship; of these the one is a mortal good, the other immortal.”
Cassius:
And now Joshua, before I turn it back over to you, DeWitt has another explanation of this as well — if I remember correctly — and it’s related to the definition of the word “mortal” and “immortal.” But you go ahead and comment.
Joshua:
Well, I mean, that just completely confuses everything, doesn’t it? Because what that Vatican Saying is saying — or if it’s been translated correctly or more literally — is that there are multiple different kinds of goods. And friendship… you know, that’s probably where I get this, because I’m very fond of saying that friendship is the greatest pleasure, and you’ve corrected me on that a number of times, and I’ve been quite happy to be corrected. Because we generally understand that while there are many different kinds of pleasure, all pleasure is the goal. There’s no pleasure that’s better than any other pleasure. The pleasure that’s better than other pleasures is the pleasure that doesn’t invite further pain — that’s typically the criterion we use. But all pleasure is in itself worth pursuing.
Cassius:
Could you say that again about the pleasure that’s better than another? Say that again.
Joshua:
Yeah, I said that if we were going to sort these things, we would say that the pleasure — let me rephrase that — the pleasure you would choose among competing pleasures is the one that invites less pain in the long run. But at the most basic level there is no choosing between two pleasures, because equally they are the goal.
Cassius:
Oh boy. Martin, any comment?
Martin:
Right. A second — no, no, you know, that goes back to that other question, Joshua. About — I don’t think it’s obvious that we can simply judge the greater pleasure by the one that is longest over time. There’s also this issue of — and I don’t want to use the word “intensity” necessarily — but for example, you’re going to die for a friend at some times. And I don’t know that you rate that in terms of the number of days under which you experience the pain. It’s more a question of some other intensity-style ranking. So when you say that we choose to pursue a pain over a pleasure at the moment, I just think we have to be careful that in the end the analysis is: is it going to produce greater pleasure or end up in less pain? But the part I’m struggling with is the clause “over the rest of your life,” because I don’t want to imply that this is a 70-year period that you have to sort of come up with an average over your 70 years. Have I made that hopelessly dark? Do you understand even why I’m calling a question on it?
Joshua:
Yeah, I was struggling at first, but I think I probably did say “in the long run.” Yes — those words always send off a little bit of a warning bell in my mind, because “long run” to me always implies a time measurement. And I don’t think it’s safe to imply that the time measurement is the ultimate. It’s certainly one of the factors, but it’s probably not the only factor. And I think if we start to imply that time is the major factor then we’ve got a real contradiction with what’s stated in the Letter to Menoeceus, because Epicurus specifically says there that you don’t choose the longest, but the best, among the choices at the banquet.
Cassius:
Do you remember what I’m talking about there?
Joshua:
Yeah, and I think I do. But you remember the way I put it — I said it “produces less pain over the long run.” And I’m good with “less pain,” but when you say “over the long run” — well, the reason I say that is because the pain may not be apparent early on.
Cassius:
Right, right, right. And you’re right, I’m probably obsessing too much over that time element. Because all you’re really saying is “ultimately” — and you’re not really trying to say it’s purely a matter of days or weeks or months or years. You’re just saying that in the end, when you add it all together however it is you want to add it — in the scales of justice you’ve got pain on one side and pleasure on the other, and you always want the pleasure side to have more content in it.
Joshua:
Right, right.
Cassius:
So I’m sorry — we got off on that tangent. I don’t even remember at the moment how I got us off on it. Do you remember where we were?
Joshua:
Not particularly. We have, yeah — basically a handful of problems here. The first was whether pleasure could best be described as a “good” or an “end.” The second problem is: are there multiple goods? The third problem is: is friendship a kind of good, or a kind of pleasure, or is it a tool in pursuit of happiness or pleasure?
Cassius:
I know where we were, Joshua. We had just read the mortal versus immortal good Vatican Saying — I believe number 78: “The noble soul occupies itself with wisdom and friendship; of these the one is a mortal good, the other immortal.” And the reason I launched off on that is that DeWitt has a section in his book about defining “mortal” and “immortal” as “blessed” — in a way that does not necessarily mean an infinite amount of time. Because it doesn’t make sense to talk about pleasure in terms of an infinite amount of time, right? None of us are allotted that — nor friendship. But clearly he is saying in Vatican Saying 78 that friendship is somehow a more blessed good than wisdom. Which only compounds the consternation of an Aristotelian or a Platonist or somebody who holds that wisdom is the greatest good or the goal of life. But if Epicurus is saying that friendship is a tool that brings more pleasure than does wisdom, I guess that’s something you could understand. Of course Torquatus has been talking about prudence — so is prudence the same thing as wisdom? I feel like wisdom maybe casts a slightly broader net than prudence, but I couldn’t really articulate that. Martin, you got an idea there?
Martin:
Yes, because prudence has this thing that it’s specifically to avoid problems, danger, pain, and to assure pleasure, whereas wisdom is more general than that. So prudence provides the tools, but it’s not geared towards specific goals.
Cassius:
I agree with that. I think prudence has an implication that you simply just have good judgment — no matter how much or how little knowledge you might have. You can be prudent in terms of having good judgment. But when you talk about wisdom, to me that implies sort of a wider scope of knowledge. When you say somebody’s wise it kind of implies that they know a lot, which I think is somewhat different. But we’re going down another rabbit hole probably. You’d have to go back to the Greek of Vatican Saying 78 and try to look for alternate translations of that and try to figure out what it might mean.
But I think probably again DeWitt gives us some hints in terms of looking at the question of what the words “mortal” and “immortal” really mean. In fact one of the things that DeWitt says in his book is that Epicurus did not assert himself that the Epicurean gods were necessarily immortal. I remember DeWitt says that is asserted by some of the later Epicureans — maybe even Lucretius or Philodemus or somebody — but DeWitt argues that Epicurus himself did not say that the gods were living an infinite lifespan. So he says it’s really more targeted towards the word “blessed” as opposed to measuring how much time it is. But you’ve also got to struggle with the use of the word “good” here too — and by the way, “blessed” — yes. It’s always just a struggle of definitions if you let yourself go too far in that direction.
But again, that’s where Epicurus seems to be hitting back at these other people who struggle with the definitions. He seems to be implying that too much obsession about definitions is a really unwise thing to do. I think the implication is that you can connect with pleasure and pain as feelings and use prudence to unwind your own personal affairs, and if you let yourself get caught up in too much definition-twisting you end up not only wasting your time but causing yourself trouble.
But okay — you were right that we needed to incorporate Vatican Saying 78 in our list of relevant passages. Now that we’ve completely covered Vatican Saying 78 and understand totally what it means — let’s go back to the Torquatus text. And let me say — actually, let me get your opinion on one thing. The commentators will generally say that the Vatican Sayings are not necessarily attributable to Epicurus himself.
Joshua:
That’s right. Clearly some of them were not written by Epicurus.
Cassius:
Right, right. So just take Vatican Saying 78 with a slight grain of salt.
Joshua:
Absolutely. In fact, to talk about “mortal versus immortal” goods it kind of has that poetic ring to it, as if somebody was waxing eloquently in some text somewhere and it struck somebody as a really good line but might not actually be something that Epicurus wrote as a textbook example of his philosophy.
Cassius:
Yeah. Okay. So — taking the example of the infant baby tossed onto the borders of the light, and not inquiring too much — we’ll inquire a little but not too much — as to the definition of pleasure and the good and the mortal and immortal and the blessed: what’s the best way to pursue pleasure that you see in this text?
Joshua:
Well, you know, that’s a question. And I hope — I don’t know whether you had the time this week — every time I read this I skip over it. I have not looked for the meaning of the story of Theseus or Orestes. Joshua, have you by chance done that? Do you know who they’re referring to there?
Joshua:
Well, he’s referring to different pairs of friendship. I guess for me the classical example would be Castor and Pollux. But in Greek mythology, you know, it’s a kind of folk wisdom. And so just as you’ve got stories about relationships between parents and their children, you’ve got stories of relationships between travelers and hosts. So you’ve got the hospitality element in there. We should expect to see something about friendship. And it seems to me that what Torquatus here is saying is: when you survey the whole view of mythology and ancient history, you don’t find very many pairs of really great friends. And so the inquiring reader who is looking to us to explain the stories of Theseus and Orestes is about to be disappointed in this episode of the podcast, because I don’t believe we’re about to talk about the details of their lives unless you know them, Cassius, because I don’t.
Cassius:
Theseus’s best friend was Pirithous — king of the Lapiths.
Joshua:
I knew I could count on you. Well, you can sure count on Wikipedia. Pirithous had heard stories of Theseus’s courage and strength in battle, but wanted proof, so he wrestled Theseus’s herd of cattle and drove it from Marathon, and Theseus set out in pursuit. I don’t know what happened afterward, but that certainly would be the basis for a strong and lasting friendship — though to go steal your friend’s cattle and push them to another town, but I’m sure there’s more to the story than that.
Cassius:
Right, right. And there’s some mention of these two in the Iliad and their various exploits. Pirithous took up his arms and the pair met to do battle, but were so impressed with each other they took an oath of friendship, and they joined the Caledonian boar hunt. Let me give you a second if you’re able to find anything on Orestes — because I think that is one of the things we want to talk about during these sections on friendship. We also have threads going on at EpicureanFriends about the idea that we want to develop friends in our own personal lives, which includes online activity. And I certainly consider you guys — and the people that I’ve been dealing with for some years in discussing Epicurean philosophy — I consider to be my friends in as deep a way as most people that I have grown up with in many ways. But at the same time, online has its limitations. We want to have friends in our personal, local, real-world existences. We should not just like the idea of friendship and do nothing to achieve it.
But the reason I say that right then is that that strikes me as a good example: if Theseus and Pirithous became such close friends because of this episode in their life where they had this confrontation and became impressed with each other’s abilities, even though they were at that point adversaries — I think that’s really a key to the real-world formation of friendships. You have to go through experiences with each other over time, even when those experiences start off being adversarial. Once you have experiences with other people and work together with them towards resolving common problems, I think that’s probably where a lot of the deepest friendships eventually are formed. There usually has to be some basis for the friendship. Sometimes I guess there’s love at first sight, and maybe there’s friendship at first sight, and you just get an instinctive feeling that this person you’re dealing with is your friend — but I suspect that in most cases you’ve got to have some kind of shared experience with them over time before you can really understand them and trust them and really have a friendship that grows. So even that little brief excerpt from Wikipedia probably helps us illustrate the necessity of that shared experience.
Joshua:
Anything on Orestes? Yeah, in fact it comes from a dialogue — Erotes, or Affairs of the Heart — attributed to Lucian. I don’t know if that attribution has stood up to the test of time or not, and I have not read this work. But it says here: “Pylades suffered more than his friend by the punishment which pursued Orestes.” So in other words, Orestes was punished but Pylades actually suffered more — which actually goes into something we’re about to talk about here. “And Pylades stood by Orestes when he was condemned, nor did they limit their tender partnership to the bounds of Greece, but sailed to the farthest boundaries of the Scythians, the one sick, the other ministering to him.” So it sounds like they had some kind of a shared unpleasant experience or even punishment and they went through that together, and they were actually cousins and grew up together.
Cassius:
Okay, so again you’ve got shared experiences there. And then even shared suffering it sounds like produces a stronger friendship. A good time to ask if Martin has more comment.
Martin:
Yes. I just saw that — all the time by just not looking carefully, I read this. I misunderstood this sentence. The way I see it now, the sentence doesn’t make sense to me. It starts off: “The greatness of friendship is made evident by the imaginary stories of the ancients, in which numerous and so on.” So this set me at the stage — there have been plenty of old stories in which friendship was part of it. But no — then it comes in: “hardly any of these stories contained anything about friendship.” And I don’t think that is the case.
Cassius:
I do kind of share your issue with the way this is phrased. I think in the end what this means is that yes, there are lots of imaginary stories of the ancients, and yes, there are only a few who really describe friends — but those few that describe friends are among the most brilliant. That’s the implication here. But you’re right, it is kind of interesting — I get it, I guess that means friendship is a scarce commodity. Friendship is something that doesn’t happen every day. Friendship is something that you just don’t find on every street corner. You have to work at it — it’s a pearl of great price, maybe. What do you get out of that, Joshua?
Martin:
All right, go ahead, Martin.
Martin:
I don’t think so. I mean, friendship is not something that rare. Especially later in the text — it shows it — we won’t survive without it, essentially. So that means I think it still doesn’t make sense, the construction here. It really contradicts what is written there.
Cassius:
Because you’re right, it then turns around and talks about how many friends Epicurus was able to secure. But I think you can probably reconcile it. Can you reconcile it, Joshua?
Joshua:
I think what he’s driving at here is that while in the stories of the ancients friendship is rare, that doesn’t mean it actually was rare — but in the stories it’s very rare. But then he goes on to say: “within the limits of a single school, and that restricted in numbers, what great flocks of friends did Epicurus secure, and how great was that harmony of affection wherein they all agreed, and his example is followed by the Epicureans in our own day also.” So what he’s really saying here is — and of course it’s an Epicurean speaking, so I don’t know whether you want to take that at face value — that the Epicureans were unusually known for friendship. And that given the fact that Epicurus did succeed in finding so many friends, that’s just another example of the greatness of Epicurus. So the argument from that point of view is: you can say what Martin is saying — friendship may be great but there’s not that many instances of it in the stories — but look around you at Epicurus. He had many, many friends, which we all agree is friendship being a great good. And that just shows the greatness of Epicurus.
Martin:
But it still doesn’t make sense. I cannot remember all the names, but I know more than three stories — almost prehistoric. The oldest novel preserved in the world, Gilgamesh, this is about friendship. And it’s about two men who also fought against each other at first and then became friends, and very close friends. It was even to the extent that in this very old novel I see very modern concepts already realized — even a bisexual relationship — so that friendship went that far between Gilgamesh and — I forgot now the name of his friend. So that is one story. Then there is a story of Damon — who tried to kill the tyrant but was discovered, and when he was sentenced to death he asked that he be given three days off before, to marry off his daughter. And then his friend would stay in as a guarantor. But because Damon had trouble coming back after he married his daughter, then the friend was about to be executed in his place. But Damon made it right in time, and then of course the friends hugged each other and the tyrant had a warm heart and asked to be a friend with both of them together. And there are plenty more stories. I guess there must also be stories of friendship in those well-known stories I read in my youth from Odysseus — there will definitely be friendships in there.
Cassius:
Yeah, Martin, I think you’re right. I could come up with a whole bunch of names just from Greek stories. I mentioned Castor and Pollux. But then you’ve got — was it Hercules who killed the Hydra, and every time they sliced off one of its heads, his friend had to sear the stump with a torch or whatever it was? You’ve got Achilles and — well, now I can’t remember the name. But luckily we can put an end to the section by observing that Torquatus gives us the direct answer to Martin and to what Joshua just said: quote, “there’s no need to speak of persons — let’s return to our theme.” And that’s exactly what we should probably do at this point. Even though we observe that “the example is followed by the Epicureans in our day also.” So anything else before we return to our theme?
Joshua:
No, I don’t think so.
Cassius:
Okay. So although that word “flocks” — doesn’t it — “what great flocks of friends”?
Joshua:
Yes, I kind of think he should have said “herd” to refer to pigs, instead of making it sound like geese or sheep.
Cassius:
Perhaps maybe we’ll eventually make a footnote of this and say that of all the arguments that Torquatus makes, perhaps this one is the least persuasive to Martin, at least in terms of how he argues about friendship.
Okay, carrying on. Let’s go back to the theme. And the first sentence we go to in section 66 says that friendship has been discussed by our school in three ways. And before we started this morning I tried to jot down — well, what are the three ways? And I’m not sure I could denominate them in three ways. But clearly the first one is the issue that some Epicureans take the position that the pleasure of our friends is not as desirable to us as the pleasure we desire for ourselves, and they say that even though they take that position — that our own pleasure is the primary reason for friendship — they still defend their position, and in Torquatus’s opinion escape from their difficulties by affirming that friendship, like any other virtue already discussed, cannot be dissociated from pleasure.
Okay, you — you said “pleasure cannot be dissociated from pleasure.”
Joshua:
Friendship, friendship — friendship cannot be dissociated from pleasure.
Cassius:
Yes, I was attempting to unwind that sentence and I probably made it more convoluted than if we had just read it.
Joshua:
Actually, no — you turned it into a tautology.
Cassius:
Yes, yes, yes. So this first group that he’s talking about — they take the position that it is our own pleasure that we desire for ourselves that is more important than the pleasure of our friends. But that position does not destroy the basis of friendship, because just like any other virtue there’s an inseparable bond between friendship and pleasure. So there’s no reason to be thinking that you’re caught in any kind of a logical difficulty by saying that your own pleasure remains paramount.
We are right back into a linguistic difficulty, though, because he says that friendship “like the virtues of which we spoke already” — so friendship continues to be slightly elusive, doesn’t it? Is he saying that friendship is a virtue? Is he saying that the virtues are tools, and therefore is he saying that friendship is a tool? Or is friendship a pleasure itself? It’s an ongoing difficulty in the text, and we’re probably not going to come up with an answer to that question today. But at least we are illuminating what the question is.
The position he’s arguing is that even though they are different, you can’t dissociate the one from the other. That’s an interesting argument in itself. It’s almost at an atomic level — almost like a molecule or something. He’s insisting that they are two separate components and yet insisting that they cannot be dissociated from each other. Why does he care if they can’t be dissociated?
I might have to ask Martin this question. What mathematical property is this — if friendship is pleasure and virtue is pleasure, then friendship is virtue?
Joshua:
I don’t think Cassius is going to like that line of research.
Martin:
Well yeah — what’s the principle that if one thing equals another, and that other thing equals something else, then A equals C? If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C — what do you call that?
Cassius:
I think it’s the transitive property. There is a name but it’s basic logic. But it’s also insisting — oh boy, you’re right about the linguistic aspect of it. But when you say A equals B and B equals C and A equals C, does that mean that A and B are identical with each other? I don’t think it implies that, does it?
Martin:
I mean, if we put it there in the mathematical sense — yes. And if we don’t want to mean it like this then we shouldn’t try to express it with mathematics. And that means that logic doesn’t really apply.
Cassius:
Well I think that would also involve your question of nominalism — if you’re saying that two things are identical with each other but you’re calling one of them A and one of them B, then you’re giving a name to something that’s really just totally arbitrary, because they’re the same thing in the first place. You’ve got to unwind the meaning of the name aspect of it. If you’re saying that A equals B and yet you’re giving them different names, why call them A and B if they’re identical? Well, I don’t think any of that was really helpful.
Martin:
No, no, no. But the whole point of this argument is that he’s saying friendship and pleasure cannot be dissociated from each other. But in saying that, is he also saying that they are identical in every respect?
Cassius:
I don’t think so. He doesn’t even say that. Then he is affirming that pleasure is different than friendship.
Joshua:
Yes. Cassius, silence is not necessarily consent in a discussion like this. You know, I’m still struggling to get my hand around this. But okay — so we’re saying what was the conclusion you just reached? Friendship is not equal to pleasure — not in every respect?
Cassius:
Right. I think you’ve got to qualify this discussion with “in every respect.” He does seem to signify that friendship is similar to virtue in its relationship to pleasure — to me that would be the key takeaway. And of course you resolve that for us completely and thoroughly back when we were discussing the virtues earlier, Joshua. So why don’t you remind us whether you decided that virtue and pleasure are identical, or whether they are different things that can’t be dissociated from each other.
Joshua:
Okay. My sort of stock answer is the one that comes to us from A Few Days in Athens by Frances Wright — when she says that everybody admires virtue, or even friendship, but nobody stoops to examine the pedestal on which it sits, which is pleasure, or the pursuit of pleasure. So virtue is something that we pursue because it’s necessary. I don’t know if I want to put it that way, but virtue is a road to the ultimate goal, which is pleasure. And friendship is the same. It’s like what we talked about recently in one of our podcasts with the issue of beauty — I think it is — where he says that “I would spit on beauty unless it brings pleasure.” So it sounds like I think that applies to virtue — that he would spit on “virtue” unless it brings pleasure. Except for the observation that it sounds like he’s taking the position that virtue cannot be dissociated from pleasure.
Cassius:
Yeah, I think that’s not entirely wrong. Certainly Frances Wright would accept that understanding, because she says something like “virtue is pleasure — if it wasn’t, I would not pursue it” or something to that effect.
What do you detect, Joshua — I detect that you are questioning the utility of talking about whether something that cannot be dissociated from something else means that they’re equal in every respect or not. I kind of detect that that’s what we’re struggling with here. We accept that they can’t be dissociated from each other pretty easily. But then this issue of: if they can’t be dissociated from each other, does that mean that they are in every respect identical themselves — and we can just use the words interchangeably? I think it’s clear that we cannot use the words interchangeably. Would you agree with that last sentence — we can’t use the words “virtue” and “pleasure” and “friendship” interchangeably? That nobody would argue that?
Joshua:
Yeah, I certainly agree with that. There’s a scene from the movie Lincoln with Daniel Day-Lewis — maybe you’ve seen it, I’ve certainly talked about it before — in which he’s discussing the morality of slavery. He is talking to two engineers and he says: “You certainly must have read Euclid.” And one of them says: “I probably read it when I was in school, but I don’t remember it.” And Lincoln says: “You know, I didn’t learn much, but what I did learn stayed learned. And what I learned from Euclid was this: things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.” So he’s using that — things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other — and I think probably that’s undergirded with some religious sentiment. But he’s using that as an argument against slavery. And I’ve always had a problem with that. You know, if you’re going to take a stance against slavery — which I certainly think is the right thing to do — using mathematics and logic is not necessarily the way to go about it. And so I think you’re right to say: I question the utility of this line of inquiry.
Cassius:
Why isn’t it productive? What’s the issue that prevents it from being productive? And again, this is kind of Martin’s territory too. But Martin — why is it, if you can say A equals B and B equals C then A equals C — why can’t you do what Lincoln was doing in Joshua’s story and say that A equals C? And I’m going to finish the sentence by saying “in every respect.” If you have A, you don’t need C. What’s the difference between A and C if they equal each other in your mathematical formula? And I think you’re going to give me an answer about the limitations of mathematics. But you tell me what you think.
Martin:
It’s again an example of Platonian-style wrong application of logic — that you assign this to be something like a statement to be used in logic, a proposition, and then use logic with it. That just doesn’t make sense like this. So maybe we can use it as some sort of analogy to express an analogy. But to state it like this just doesn’t make sense. When you’re stating it in mathematics, don’t you generally state it in the form “if A equals B and B equals C then A equals C”? Or you also use the word “let” — “let A equal B, let B equal C, then you conclude something.” You’re postulating some premise, setting up the equation to start with. You need to keep in mind that that premise you’re setting up isn’t reality. Does that at all go in the direction you were asking about?
Cassius:
There’s got to be some way of describing the limitation of this issue.
Martin:
Yeah, the thing is that the mathematical expression — that one is valid. So that theory is valid. But what you put in there — that is another question. Can you really, in this case especially in the story, make this identification? It’s not really clear even how you make this identification: A equals B, A equals C. So this is not sound — to put this then in this logical form.
Joshua:
Cassius, I’m thinking you could apply that to Lincoln’s analogy — he’s suggesting that these things are equal when in fact they’re really not. What is it that gives you this instinctive idea that Lincoln’s analogy is wrong?
You know, the thing I keep coming back to on questions like this is that theory of the Pythagoreans that 10 was the perfect number — because if you have one point that’s a point, if you have two that’s a line, if you have three that’s a surface, if you have four that’s a volume, and when you add all those up you get 10. And the conclusion they drive from that is that 10 must be the number of spheres in the heavens because 10 is perfect and the heavens are the most perfect, therefore 10 is the number of spheres in the heaven. It’s the same kind of problem I think.
Cassius:
But Joshua, you’re implying that that form of reasoning is almost absurd. Why is it absurd? Why is it so clear to us that it’s absurd? Did we have to wait until we had a telescope and could count the planets before we decided that that rule of reasoning was absurd?
Martin:
No, but the thing is: in mathematics we already know — we know the values. We have already defined the formula. If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C. We define it that way. That’s the only reason they equal each other — right? No, no, no — what axioms you start with, then you can prove it based on those axioms. But you’re saying you accept it as an axiom — we have a set of axioms and then a set of definitions, and then you apply these valid logical forms to get additional propositions. And that is then something you can prove. Now based on that: what is your axiom that tells you that A equals B? Is this some kind of Aristotelian law of identity — a thing is itself?
Cassius:
We’re going to start talking Ayn Rand again.
Martin:
No, no, no. That one — but that one is just a valid logical theorem and can be proven with the truth table method, the easiest way. So that one is different. I’m pretty sure that — I’ll assert as a layman — that in reality the question of whether A equals B is not determined mathematically but is determined through the senses and experience in evaluating whether those two things are in fact identical to us or not. I think that’s the direction this argument goes in.
Martin:
Yeah, I mean, so we do not question that valid logical expression or theorem. But it’s not sound to arbitrarily put something into there. So that is then the problem — where the logic has been applied wrongly. The logic is correct, but putting those expressions in there to be used in this logical form — that one is arbitrary.
Cassius:
So Martin and I are totally on the same page. What about you, Joshua?
Joshua:
I’m thoroughly confused is what I am. I didn’t know I was going to get a math lesson today. But I can kind of blame myself for that. At the end of the day, I’m going to say: no, pleasure and friendship are not identical. Friendship and virtue are not identical. Pleasure and virtue — well, that was more difficult, but I’m going to say: are not identical. Epicurus said repeatedly that you have to use the first sense of a word — the sense that comes up — because you don’t want to spend an entire hour and a half arguing about pleasure and friendship and virtue. I guess that’s my answer.
Cassius:
This may seem like it was a non-productive discussion today, but I think it was very productive. I think this issue is extremely important. And in talking through it, hopefully some of the listeners won’t just turn it off but will think about it themselves, because I think you pretty much have to wrestle with these questions in order to make sense of what Torquatus is talking about here. Because this whole question of the relationship between these words — and therefore whether it’s the interest of another person versus your interest, and what is the meaning of being a friend, and so forth — all these things do have this definitional aspect that has to be wrestled with.
So let’s not try to go any further today. I think we basically opened section 65 and we joked about the part that says “there’s no reason to speak of persons, but we should return to our theme.” And I guess we did start talking about section 66 and the three ways in which our school divides the discussion. Maybe by next week I’ll figure out what those three ways are, because right now I’m not sure I could divide it in three based on what I’ve read. It’s interesting that he’s kind of segregated friendship off at the very end of this discussion — you know, he’s already covered the virtues, the issues of pleasure versus virtue, some of these epistemology and natural science questions, and he’s gone through all of these classical virtues — and then he’s reserved friendship for a special discussion here near the end of his presentation. Which I think is kind of interesting in itself. But we aren’t going to by any means finish the discussion today. So let’s talk about closing ideas. Martin, to start off — what are your closing thoughts for today?
Martin:
I have nothing to add.
Cassius:
Okay, Joshua?
Joshua:
Yeah. I think you keep using the word “tool” — that’s a very disparaging term. “You’re just a tool.” Yeah. There’s another one — because I’ve already mentioned one great quotation from the film Lincoln, I have another one that I absolutely love as well, and I think in an odd way it does kind of bear on the question — or I’ve just watched that movie too many times. But he says something to this effect: “A compass I learned, when I was surveying — it’ll point you due north, but it’s got no advice about the swamps and chasms and canyons that you’ll find along the way.” He says that if in pursuit of true north you proceed heedless of obstacles and achieve nothing more than to fall into a swamp, then what’s the use of knowing true north? So — two things: one, a compass does not point to true north, that was the script, it actually points to magnetic north. But I think these are the kinds of problems that you run into — or that people imagine they’ll run into — when you say that pleasure is the end of life, pleasure is the goal. And you say that to people today: goodness, I think if I walked up to some people in my life and said “you know, forget everything else, I think that pleasure is the goal of life, it’s the only end worth pursuing” — I can imagine some of the looks I might get. And you can imagine where it might go wrong.
And so you mentioned the word “tool.” I think that’s important. How do we know that we’re not going to pursue pleasure so recklessly that we fall into a chasm? I think we have a number of tools in our toolkit to help us avoid that problem, one of which is friendship, and then the virtues that come into it as well, and justice. But none of these things are the goal. There’s always just one goal, and that’s pleasure.
Cassius:
Did that open up a whole extra can of worms?
Joshua:
No, no, I think that was a very good summary of where we are today.
Cassius:
And rather than try — and I think we’re probably running long already again — I think what I would close on is by saying what I said to SmoothieKiwi in the threads this morning. I think I would attempt to avoid the problem that you just described, Joshua, in terms of the misunderstanding of these different words. What I think I’m coming to more and more in my own articulation of these issues — my analogy, instead of to the movie about Lincoln — my analogy would be to 300 and the clip I posted in the thread to SmoothieKiwi about Leonidas looking at the ambassador from the Persians and yelling “This is Sparta!” I would say: “This is Epicurean philosophy.” This is not hedonism, this is not “pleasureism,” this is not some concept that you can set off on its side and elevate it above everything else. You have to understand the full context of what Epicurus is saying. You have to understand how he emphasizes that you sometimes choose pain in order to achieve a result that ultimately is more to your liking. It’s not something that you can just superficially listen to some of the words and grasp the whole subject. You have to look at the big picture, think about everything that he’s saying, dive into the natural science part of it and the epistemology part of it and all the details of the way he reasons through from the physics and the epistemology up into the ethics, and only then do you begin to really see the big picture of what Epicurus was talking about.
It’s not something that can just be done quickly and superficially and then move on to something else. They weren’t called — as best I understand it from the reading — they weren’t called “Hedonists” as the name of their school in the ancient world, and they didn’t use some other variation of the word “pleasure.” It’s clear that pleasure was important to them, but in the end they were referred to as the Epicureans. And referencing DeWitt, he kind of analogizes that to Christians under the name of Christ: the word “Christian” doesn’t tell you anything unless you know the details of Christian theology and the person of Christ. He’s just another person until you know all those factual details underpinning what they allege to be the basis of the religion. And the same would be true with Epicurus — you’re not going to understand what it means to be an Epicurean and understand Epicurean philosophy until you understand all these details. To just equate it with the word “pleasure” alone and stop is just a huge mistake.
So I think we’re probably at the end of the road time-wise for today. Let’s close and come back next week and we’ll tackle this further. So thanks for your time today.
Joshua:
Thanks a bunch.
Martin:
Okay, bye.