Episode 110 - The Epicurean View of Friendship (Part Two)
Date: 02/23/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2405-episode-one-hundred-ten-the-epicurean-view-of-friendship-part-2/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”The second session on Epicurean friendship works through the remainder of sections 66–70 of the Torquatus passage in Cicero’s On Ends, with Joshua reading the text. The group maps out the three Epicurean views of friendship: (1) the orthodox position that friendship is always instrumental to pleasure yet inseparably linked with it — the individual’s own pleasure remains primary; (2) that through shared experience and intimacy friendship deepens until affection persists even when immediate interest is not served; and (3) the “treaty of alliance” view, in which wise men esteem their friends no less than themselves. Discussion turns to selfishness versus altruism — contrasting Ayn Rand’s framework with Epicurus’s focus on the ultimate result rather than which side “wins” — and Principal Doctrine 28 on the security friendship provides is connected to the text. Joshua invokes the A Beautiful Mind bar scene (John Nash’s game-theory epiphany) to illustrate how acting for a friend’s interest can serve your own. The episode closes with Cassius noting that only two paragraphs of Torquatus remain, followed by a reflection prompted by Joshua’s mention of the Herculaneum infant cradle — answered with Gandalf’s line from The Lord of the Rings: “all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 110 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 talk you through the 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.
Today is our second session on the Epicurean view of friendship. Now let’s join Joshua reading today’s text.
Joshua:
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 as enmity, spitefulness, and scorn are opposed to pleasures, so friendships are not only the truest promoters, but are actually efficient causes of pleasures — as well to a man’s friends as to himself. And friends not only have the immediate enjoyment of these pleasures, but are elate with hope as regards the future and later times.
Now because we can by no means apart from friendship preserve the agreeableness 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 vexations. Therefore the wise man will entertain the same feeling for his friends as for himself, and the very same efforts which he would undergo to procure his own pleasure, these he will undergo to procure that of his friends. And all that we said of the virtues, to show how they always have their root in pleasures, must be said over about friendship.
Here is, almost in these words, it is one and the same feeling which strengthens the mind against the fear of eternal or everlasting evil, and which clearly sees that in this actual span of life the protection afforded by friendship is the most powerful of all.
There are, however, certain Epicureans who are somewhat more nervous in facing the reproaches of your school, but are still shrewd enough. For they are afraid that if we suppose friendship to be desirable with a view to our own pleasure, friendship may appear to be altogether maimed as it were. So they say that while the earliest meetings and associations and tendencies towards the establishment of familiarity do arise on account of pleasure, yet when experience has gradually produced intimacy, then affection ripens to such a degree that, though no interest be served by the friendship, yet friends are loved in themselves and for their own sake.
Again, if by familiarity we get to love localities, shrines, cities, the exercise ground, the park, dogs, horses, and exhibitions either of gymnastics or of combat with beasts, how much more easily and properly may this come about when our familiarity is with human beings? Men are found to say that there is a certain treaty of alliance which binds wise men not to esteem their friends less than they do themselves. Such alliance we not only understand to be possible, but often see it realized, and it is plain that nothing can be found more conducive to the pleasantness of life than union of this kind.
From all these different views we may conclude that not only are the principles of friendship left unconstrained if the supreme good be made to reside in pleasure, but that without this view it is entirely impossible to discover a basis for friendship.
Cassius:
Those topics we’ve chosen to discuss here and given such a primary place of importance — and one reason for that is pretty clearly that, in fact, just as this section discusses, friendship is really the most important instrumentality to living a pleasurable life. But now that I listen to you read it, and we did a little bit of discussion before we got started, it becomes more clear to me that what’s going on here is that to some extent this is a test case for all that’s gone before. Friendship is something that everybody feels strongly about. And what I think we’ll end up discussing today — when we talk about the three ways he says this is looked at within the Epicurean school — I think we’re going to see that this is really a great test for your position on whether pleasure is ultimately either the greatest good, the goal, the guide, or whatever you’d like to consider it to be at the summit, or whether something that’s near and dear to us — even as friends are — can become goals in and of themselves.
There’s lots of interesting stuff here. We’ll try to cover the whole section that you just read today, because he is presenting it as three separate alternatives, and I think we ought to dive into that — how they’re divided up and what those details are. But I will repeat at the very beginning the point that people talk about all the time with Epicurus: obviously he’s identified friendship as something extremely important in preserving a happy and pleasurable experience in life. And so we don’t want to lose sight of that fact in the details that we’re about to dive into. Friendship is something that everybody of whatever philosophy or religion has and considers to be important. But Epicurus does point it out specifically as one of the things that you certainly have to have in order to successfully live a pleasurable life. In fact I think on the forum recently we had some posts where we were identifying two things in particular that Epicurus had stressed — one of them was friendship and the other was prudence — as extremely important instruments towards pleasurable living.
But let’s talk about this in general to organize the discussion. The section is introduced by saying that friendship has been discussed by our school in three ways, and rather than attempt to do them sequentially, let’s see the forest before we examine the trees. What do we think these three ways are, in general, at the beginning of our discussion?
Martin:
I mean, the first one is the obvious one — the obvious advantages we get from alliances. So we start building friendship with this one to have all these advantages listed there. But because we then do things together, we maybe even go through tough times together and make it through, and this will create bonding. And then this bonding becomes something where the friendship becomes something on its own, even after the objectives have been achieved. We will still continue this friendship. And so then this friendship appears to be something on its own — but actually we gain a different kind of pleasure from it. Just enjoying this friendship, even though the issues for which we started the friendship have been resolved already, and we no longer need that particular friendship for those purposes. But once we have this bonding we like to be with a friend and do things together, and so in that way we still have some pleasure. So this is the second one. For the third I need to get some help.
Cassius:
I was going to say: after you finished I was going to say please put them one, two, and three — but then you did at the very end discuss the one, two, and three, and so that’s clear enough at the moment. It’ll be interesting to see if at the end of our podcast today we’re able to state it more clearly than we can at the beginning. Joshua, how would you break those down?
Joshua:
Well, the first thing I should clarify maybe for listeners is that we’ve just sort of done this up in the last ten minutes, haven’t we — trying to break these down? Yes, yes. It’s possible that we have made a mistake here. But it seems to me that if I could break them down one, two, and three:
The first way that friendship has been discussed by the Epicurean school is to say that while the pleasure of the individual is always foremost — that’s always the goal — in the proper pursuit the only thing really to be pursued in itself — this is the first view — friendship nevertheless is instrumental for that pleasure. So while we always, according to this first view, will take our own interests first, friendship is a great promoter — as it says there, one of the truest promoters and efficient causes of pleasure. And maybe I shouldn’t have said that, because that sort of invites commentary in itself.
The second way is, I think, sort of what Martin expressed very well: while in the early stages of friendship you start out concerned primarily with your own interest which is the pursuit of pleasure, you eventually build up through common experience and common struggle and common success to the point where your friendship with this person is not necessarily instrumental strictly for the pursuit of pleasure. What comes to mind here is something that’s said in weddings between romantic partners but could be said between friends as well — something like “in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad.” Eventually your familiarity with your friends and your fondness for them, and that bond that Martin was talking about — you sort of build up to the point where even in bad times you don’t want to forsake your friends.
And then the third view is sort of this idealized view of friendship where from the very beginning you start out with the understanding — and the term used here is “treaty of alliance,” so think of something like NATO, which is actually very poignantly in the news right now — and the idea that you take your friend’s interest as your own. Perhaps with the view that that’s going to be instrumental for your pleasure, but the immediate concern with this third view of friendship from the very beginning is that you esteem your friend no less than you esteem yourself. So that’s the way I would try to break down the three.
Cassius:
I’m going to agree with much of what you just said, Joshua. And one of the first things that I agree with is what you said about the fact that everybody always needs to remember in these podcasts: we’re doing the best we can, but we’re not professional philosophers, and we operate under the same handicaps that everybody else does. We’re working through all this ourselves at the same time that we’re bringing you the podcast. We hope that everybody will work through it on their own as well, and maybe even talk with us about it — that’s what we have the forum for. We’ll certainly have a thread that goes along with this particular episode.
So the first important thing is that all of us reserve the right to revise or extend our remarks at any time in the future — or even totally flip-flop and take the opposite position from what we’re taking right now. At least I would, because I could certainly see the possibility of looking at this a couple of different ways.
My next point is this: from one perspective it looks like the focus is on the origination of friendship and then its continuation — as if the controversy is about whether it can originate in different ways and then continues in different ways. So it’s sort of an issue of how it originates and develops over time. But I’m beginning to reject that as the major issue, because I’m thinking at this moment that the major issue is a subset of the big philosophical question: is pleasure at the top of the pyramid, and is everything else judged by whether it brings pleasure or not? Because I begin to see the possibility that the second and third options are wavering from that ultimate position of Epicurus — that everything has to be judged by whether it brings pleasure. And of course even as I say that, there’s a difference probably between bringing pleasure and being pleasure, and that may be part of it as well. It sounds like at some point they’re transitioning into thinking that pleasure may mutate from being an instrumentality to something good in and of itself — maybe it becomes pleasure itself. But I don’t think they could go to the point of saying that it becomes good in and of itself without deviating too far.
Looking at this first view of friendship, it seems to be saying that we’re looking to friendship as instrumental towards pleasure. The conclusion you would almost drive from that is: if the friendship stops being pleasurable, you would stop the friendship. Whereas in the second view it seems to say that you develop this bond of affection — and I don’t take it to mean that friendship sort of becomes good in itself apart from any concern about pleasure. I certainly don’t think Torquatus would be saying that. But I think what eventually happens in friendship is that you get sort of this meta-level pleasure through friendship. Even when things aren’t going great, even when you and your friend maybe are not getting along, there’s this store of memory built up between the two of you, and you’ve been through so much and understand each other so well, that even when there’s pain being derived from the friendship there’s also this meta-level experience of pleasure — this sort of background pleasure. I’m thinking of something like background radiation in the universe: it’s the stable constant thing that’s always there. There are the daily ups and downs, but that doesn’t go away.
Joshua:
Yeah, I could see that being very possible.
Cassius:
Why don’t we break the conversation down and go ahead and start talking about the details of the first of the three, and we’ll see by the time we get to the end whether any or all of us would revise what we’ve said at the very beginning. If we look at sections 66, 67, and 68, it appears to me that probably this is intended to be either the position of Epicurus himself or the orthodox Epicurean position. At any rate, this first one appears to be — I don’t want to say “majority” — I’ll just say that maybe this is represented to be Epicurus’s opinion. You know, Torquatus has done this several times. And of course Diogenes Laertius talks about the differences of opinion, but Torquatus has previously brought up the idea that Torquatus himself disagreed with Epicurus as to the necessity of an elaborate logical argument about the nature of pleasure. That was in the beginning of what we started discussing here. So I don’t know that he takes a clear position in these three as to which is his own. But it’s interesting to think about: would everybody agree that this first one looks like it’s the orthodox Epicurean position?
Joshua:
Well, it is under this heading that he does quote… yeah, that’s probably true too. That’s a good point.
Cassius:
And that’s not a bad thing — exactly right. Because that’s why three paragraphs are devoted to it, and we’ll take that up, showing that that’s not a bad thing for the reasons that we’re about to go into. And in his opinion, he says “in my opinion they easily escape from any difficulty” in those who argue against their position. Because that’s basically fundamental: Epicurus takes the position that pleasure is the goal and everything else is judged by whether that action ultimately produces more pleasure than pain or not. So this first view: friendship arises as an instrumentality towards pleasure, remains an instrumentality towards pleasure, and as Joshua phrased it eloquently, that’s not a bad thing. It’s totally philosophically defensible, it makes sense under the scheme of the philosophy, and there’s no reason whatsoever that we should allow ourselves to be backed into a corner or embarrassed or to apologize for that position.
So we need to spend some time talking about the argument here about why that’s not a problem. I guess the first point is that they affirm that friendship, like the virtues of which we’ve spoken already, cannot be dissociated from pleasure — that a life without friendship abounds in treacheries and alarms, and so therefore reason herself advises us to procure friendships by which our spirits are strengthened, and that can’t be severed from the hope of achieving pleasure. So that’s one way to say it. Any comment on that, because we’ll go to the second paragraph if not?
Joshua:
Well, let me slightly complicate the entire conversation with two additional factors to consider. One is this issue of security that constantly comes up in Epicurean writings, and that Norman DeWitt has characterized as something like a catchphrase — which we cannot find in the material — of “peace and safety.” Friendship seems to be not only instrumental toward pleasure but also forms a part of the foundation of a secure and unassailable life.
Cassius:
Now you’re just saying there that a secure and unassailable life, safety — is a pleasure, I guess, right?
Joshua:
Well, yeah, it’s a necessary precondition for pleasure — maybe. I don’t know I’d commit to that idea. But it’s difficult to live a pleasant life if you’re constantly being troubled by outside influences. In fact, fear in particular is thought to be sort of the great enemy of a life of pleasure, which is why we have to get over our fear of death and get over our fear of the gods. And when you look into the Principal Doctrines and the Vatican Sayings there’s quite a lot about affording protection against other men. I think friendship is one component of that. But I wouldn’t say that safety is good in itself any more than I would say friendship is good in itself, because both of them are instrumental toward the good which is pleasure.
Cassius:
Okay. Was there a second point you wanted to make too when you started off?
Joshua:
I guess I don’t even know. Let me bounce this idea off you, because there is that quote — which I think you yourself, Cassius, have taken issue with — in Diogenes Laertius, in which he says something to the effect of “nor will the wise man marry, but sometimes he will marry.” We don’t have an extensive consideration of the idea of pair-bonding or marriage or anything like that in the key Epicurean works. But when you talk about friendship there’s a way you can bring that conversation into it, because hopefully the person you’re married to is a good friend. Yes. So those are two things to consider as we go forward. I don’t know that I have much more to say about them.
Cassius:
I certainly agree that the issues of friendship and marriage, while they’re not identical by any means, are closely related. You certainly want the marriage relationship to be a friendship relationship as well, if possible. And so just the understanding of what the friendship relationship is is going to be critical to both. I don’t really know what the other Greek philosophers say about the nature of friendship. I guess I’ve heard somewhere that Aristotle talks about a friend being a second self, or something like that. You brought some stories today, Joshua — are there other classic Greek attitudes towards friendship that we ought to be considering?
Joshua:
I’m sorry — friendship. Yes, we’re talking about friendship. Are there classic Greek attitudes towards friendship — perhaps other than what I think I’ve heard Aristotle say, a “second self” — are there other classifications of it that you guys remember that we ought to be talking about?
Martin:
Nothing that comes to mind immediately.
Cassius:
I don’t even know — is friendship a virtue? I’m getting resistance to that idea. I couldn’t quite — as I think about asking the question — I’m not sure what the category is. I think it’s probably not. It would make sense that it’s more like the commitments which come with friendship, so that fulfilling those commitments would be virtuous. But the friendship itself just doesn’t fall into that category of being a virtue.
Martin:
Yeah, I would agree with that.
Joshua:
I do, Cassius, have a good little anecdote for the marriage issue. This comes from Socrates: “By all means marry. If you get a good wife you will be happy. If you get a bad one you will be a philosopher.”
Cassius:
So have we started the second paragraph? I think the second paragraph is basically an elaboration of the point that we can by no means apart from friendship preserve the agreeableness of life strong and unbroken, nor can we maintain friendship unless we esteem our friends in the same degree as ourselves. And so friendship is linked with pleasure, and we rejoice at the joy of our friends as much as at our own, and we’re equally vexed by their pains. And just continuing on: “Therefore the wise man will entertain the same feeling for his friend as for himself, and the very same efforts which he undergoes to procure his own pleasure he undergoes to procure those of his friends.” And then he again analogizes this to the virtues — which again probably is an indication that friendship is not a virtue. “And all that we said of the virtues, to show how they always have their root in pleasures, must be said over about friendship.” And then it goes into the noble declaration by Epicurus — about one and the same feeling which strengthens the mind against the fear of evil. I forget which one that is — it’s one of the Principal Doctrines in the twenties, right? I know you’ve got it memorized, Martin.
Martin:
It’s Principal Doctrine 28.
Cassius:
Go ahead, Joshua.
Joshua:
Oh, I was going to say — as it happens I do have a story. This comes from the film A Beautiful Mind, featuring the great mathematician John Nash. Something you just read there triggered this in my mind: “he will undergo the same efforts to procure that of his friend.” So this might involve some confusion, because what we’ve already said about the first view of friendship is that it’s always instrumental and that’s not a bad thing. But what he seems to be saying is that you would undergo the same effort to procure pleasure for your friend. And that might immediately be confusing.
But in the film A Beautiful Mind, there is that moment when there’s a couple of lads in a bar and they’re getting ready to approach these women, and Nash has this epiphany where he says: if you immediately go for the prettiest of them, the rest of them are going to feel spurned and they won’t want to talk to you. So the thing to do is not to pursue the interests of yourself but to pursue the interests of the group — for yourself, or something like that. How does he phrase that anyway? The conclusion is he goes for one of the less attractive women, which makes the prettier woman feel put out, and therefore likely to accept the advances of one of the other guys, and that way everybody gets a date for the night.
Cassius:
Think about what your illustration and what we’re talking about — and Principal Doctrine 28, which is: “The same knowledge that makes one confident that nothing dreadful is eternal or long-lasting also recognizes in the face of these limited evils the security afforded by friendship.” And so I don’t think I see any real contradiction to be worried about whether you are placing your own interest first or the other people’s interest first for a particular moment or for some period of time. You’re still doing it because you want to live a pleasurable life. So I don’t think there’s any problem in defending — I think the position he’s taking is exactly the right one.
The next line is: “Therefore the wise man will entertain the same feeling for his friend as for himself, and the same efforts he would undergo to produce his own pleasure, these he will undergo to produce the pleasure of his friend.” And that’s the same situation as with virtue. Obviously I’m partisan and predisposed to accepting Epicurus’s position. But it does seem to make sense to me that the foundation is that pleasure is the ultimate goal, and anything that produces pleasure is something that’s smart to do. Friendship is in his observation one of the smartest things you can do to procure a happy life. And in order to be real friends with somebody else, you have to at times put them first — you have to let them eat first, or give them a bigger portion at food, or whatever. That’s the nature of friendship: it’s a give-and-take situation. But that doesn’t change the goal. I think only somebody who’s really confused about time issues would be overly concerned about this, because there are going to be times where you let your friend go first and do more than you do. But the reason you’re doing it has not changed — you’re not forgetting the original reason you started with friendship in the first place.
Why don’t we use that as a transition and move to item number two? And as part of introducing that, it’s always interesting to me when he talks about “there are certain Epicureans who are somewhat more nervous in facing the reproaches of your school.” If he’s talking to Cicero, it’s probably not specifically the reproaches of Stoicism, because Cicero has made clear in a number of places that he’s more of an Academic and not strictly a Stoic. So these criticisms of the Epicurean position are not necessarily coming from Stoicism but from traditional Platonic and Aristotelian Greek philosophy.
And what he says is that those people are afraid that if we suppose friendship to be desirable with a view to our own pleasure, friendship appears to be “maimed as it were.” And so apparently in their nervousness they come up with this attempt to appease the other side. They say: well, Epicurus may have said that the earliest meetings and associations arise on account of pleasure, but that’s not the whole story. Once you experience intimacy and suffering and pleasures over time, then affection ripens to such a degree that though no interest is served by friendship, yet friends are loved in themselves and for their own sake. And so they use the example that we get familiar with loving places, seeing cities, even the exercise ground, and dogs and horses — so how much more easily can we develop familiarity with other human beings? So go ahead, Martin — I want to hear your perspective on that.
Martin:
Actually, I don’t see a contradiction between the way you read it and my reference to this bonding. So that’s the same. Also, actually, I mean even though he puts it now here separately, it’s already mentioned above at least implicitly. “Truly we both rejoice at the joy of our friends as much as our own joy” — that already expresses this in a different way. So it’s basically the same thing already. So the second view of friendship shows up in the earlier paragraphs a bit already.
Cassius:
Well, Martin, let me ask you this — and it may help other people who are listening as well. What do you think it is that these other Epicureans are nervous about? Because the way Epicurean philosophy is often misrepresented is that it’s selfish.
Martin:
For example, if friendship is started in the way that one sees all the advantage for himself in a selfish way, and the other side doesn’t really have it, the one who has all these advantages then uses manipulative techniques — like a psychopath — and then manipulates that other person or that other person’s weakness in some way to still get into that friendship. So this would then be something that could be attacked. But in a more common and actual way, the advantage is for both sides. So as much as we have advantage from starting a friendship, the other person also has advantage. And this is what makes a friendship grow. If it’s not there, it’s most likely to fall away and not become a real friendship.
Cassius:
You know, before I go back to Joshua, I think you’ve hit on a very important term that anybody discussing this subject has to think about, and that is this issue of selfishness. When you use the word “selfish,” and of course for those listeners who are familiar with Ayn Rand — I have to think back to what I’ve read from her material. And if you use the word and take sides, any sympathy that I ever might have had in the past for the Randian analysis of this is pretty much gone. From this perspective you’ve got these people who are obsessed with selfishness and their promotion of it, and then you have the opposite logical position: altruism. So they’re always taking sides. They’re saying that you have to look at it as a matter of either your own desires that have to be fulfilled, or the desires of the other person that have to be fulfilled. So there’s a battle of taking sides — you’ve got these desires that are in conflict with each other. And then there are some people who say: well, let’s just not put them in conflict, let’s just try to balance them out and make them even, as if the whole issue is about taking sides.
Now I look at that very differently after having read Epicurus, because I think Epicurus is concerned about pleasure. He’s saying: what is the ultimate result of your actions? He’s trying to tell you not to worry about putting your own side over the other person’s, or putting the other person over yours. He’s telling you that the goal is to look to the result — do whatever makes sense to produce a pleasurable life as a result of any decision that’s in front of you. From that kind of logical point of view, I would say it sounds to me like it’s equally wrong to consider selfishness to be good or to consider altruism to be good. You don’t always put other people’s — and certainly altruism is a broader topic, and we’re supposed to be talking about friends and not just other people in general — but it is a related issue. Are you supposed to always put your friends’ desires and pleasures above yours, or always put your own above theirs? I think Epicurus is saying: look at it from the point of view that your ultimate goal is pleasure, and at times you’re going to put the other person’s ahead of yours, at times you’re going to put yours first, but you’re never losing sight of the ultimate goal of living a pleasurable life.
After that terrible rant, Joshua, what do you think?
Joshua:
Well, I think what you’re touching upon there, Cassius, is what I badly illustrated with my earlier little story from A Beautiful Mind, because what we’re really getting into here is the game theory of friendship. And part of that is: sometimes acting for my friend’s interest even if it’s against my interest might ultimately be in my interest. And I think that’s really a core part of this — whether it’s because of something like security that it provides me, or maybe I want to make more friends, and if I’m a good friend to this friend even when it causes pain or vexation or suffering, maybe I’ll be more likely to attract other friends that I would quite like to have in my life. So there is an element of strategy involved here, which is not the terms that most people would prefer to talk about friendship in.
And then the other thing I find interesting in this paragraph is the argument by way of the horse. You know, “well, I love my horse, so I guess…” — I don’t know about horses, but I could accept two dogs. I’m a big dog person. I’m probably more loyal to my dog than to many other people, and vice versa. I don’t know about the exercise ground, though, or the park that’s listed here. But Joshua, before we go off on that — how would you answer the question I asked of Martin? What is it that these Epicureans facing the reproaches of the Academy are nervous about?
Joshua:
Oh, it says somewhere in here that friendship may appear to be “altogether maimed.” And why does it appear to be maimed in their point of view? Oh, because the idea from maybe Cicero and others is that — this gets back to the idea of virtue. And I think that even if friendship is not in itself a virtue, acting dutifully or virtuously toward your friends is clearly going to be important to someone like Cicero. And so to say that my friends are just sort of vending machines to give me pleasure from time to time — that’s not the kind of thing that Cicero is going to be impressed by.
Cassius:
Yeah. It really strikes me as you say that: they’re just scared of being classified as pleasure seekers. It’s like the word is so poisoned, the concept is such a negative one in their eyes, that they cannot accept that justification for anything other than the most superficial events of life. I mean, they might say “I take pleasure in eating ice cream” — but as far as any relationships that are more important than that, pleasure is just banished as a motivation.
Right — well, let’s go to the third one. And I think even though it doesn’t say “third” here, Joshua, I think you’ve pointed out that it is the third one in section 70. It doesn’t say “others” but it says: “Men are found to say that there is a certain treaty of alliance which binds wise men not to esteem their friends less than they do themselves.” And they say that this alliance we understand to be possible but often see realized, and that nothing’s more conducive to pleasantness than a life of this kind. So we have the third position presented in approximately two sentences, as opposed to two or three full paragraphs devoted to the other two.
So Joshua, first — how do you distinguish the third option from the other two?
Joshua:
Well, the reason I think it is the third option is that — you’re right, you know, in the first paragraph we have “some” people, and then in section 69 we have “there are however certain Epicureans,” and there’s not that kind of distinction marker in section 70. I’m hanging a lot on the word “are” — “men are found to say that there is a certain treaty of alliance which binds wise men not to esteem their friends less than they do themselves.” I think this is kind of giving ground over to the Ciceronian position that we were talking about a little bit ago — saying that you do right by your friend, not because you necessarily put pleasure as the answer first and foremost. What it really results in here in the last paragraph is sort of just cloaking the problem in language that confuses it rather than clarifies it. Because nowhere in here does it say, “Well, okay — why do you have a treaty of alliance with your friends? What’s the ultimate goal of that?” It does kind of say in the end “nothing can be found more conducive to the pleasantness of life and union of this kind” — but there’s no frank admission that pleasure is the goal.
Cassius:
Yes. Yes. That’s a good point. I’m placing too much reliance on the English of this particular translation, but the words that stick out at me — “treaty of alliance” and then the word “binds.” I don’t know if that actually exists in the Latin. That “binding” might come from something different. But I see sort of an appeal to some kind of duty — or some kind of abstract, almost ideal treaty of alliance. Very least, an obligation.
Joshua:
Yes, an obligation — that you have an obligation. Which I guess, consistently with it being the third one that’s given the least treatment, is just a sort of generic, ambiguous acknowledgment of an obligation without really a rigorous attempt to define where it comes from, or how strong it is, or why you should follow it. It’s just sort of a “okay, yeah.”
Martin:
I don’t see it as a duty or obligation, because we went into this friendship treaty on equal terms — voluntarily. So it’s a commitment. It’s not an obligation imposed on me — it’s a commitment that I will stand by this treaty. And then it’s not an obligation, not a duty, because it’s not imposed on me. I committed that I will stand by it. I guess that raises questions about under what circumstances a treaty should be or could be broken. But that has been covered elsewhere in Epicurean texts — if conditions are changed so that the reasons for the treaty are no more applying, then we can consider whether we dissolve the treaty.
Cassius:
You know, when you say that, that reminds me that there’s really not a reference here to the example of dying for your friend. Unless I miss it somewhere in this discussion, they really haven’t brought in the example that sometimes your concern for your friend’s pleasure — or whatever — are going to be so strong that you would actually die for them.
Martin:
But it’s implied — it’s implied. Because if you talk about security and friendship for security, it means you stand together when there’s an external threat. And that means it may happen that someone dies in order to defend the friends together.
Cassius:
Well, as I don’t know that we’re ready to close quite yet by any means, but we can sum it all up in this last sentence: “From all these different views we may conclude that not only are the principles of friendship left unconstrained if the supreme good be made to reside in pleasure, but that without this view it is entirely impossible to discover a basis for friendship.”
Several things in there that we’ve been talking about recently. If that is another reference to the “supreme good,” that would be of interest — but then the very last phrase: I’ll start by talking about “without this view it is entirely impossible to discover a basis for friendship.” That’s kind of an echo of the argument Colotes made — apparently writing a book that without the theory of Epicurus, a pleasurable life is impossible. It’s an echo of that argument — that without Epicurus providing this basis for friendship, there would be no basis for friendship. He’s sticking it back to them. They’re saying that the Epicurean view destroys friendship, and the Epicureans are responding: not only do we not destroy friendship, we provide you the only real basis discoverable for friendship.
Which is one of those things I like to see — major conflict back and forth, sticking it to the other side and saying: not only are you wrong, you’re absolutely absurd in your position in criticizing Epicurus. “Impossible to discover a basis for friendship” — to me that means we’re not going to look to God, we’re not going to look to virtue, we’re not going to look to some ideal floating in the sky. Friendship has a basis either in, just like everything else, bringing us a pleasurable life — or it has no basis at all.
Joshua:
I think that’s really the takeaway here. There’s an unflinching claim, planting your flag in the ground — “the supreme good be made to reside in pleasure, and without this view it is entirely impossible to discover a basis for friendship.” So we’re taking the view here that the first way of looking at friendship that he describes, of the three, is the most representative of Epicurus’s position. But to get to the heart of what we think is true, that last sentence really just hammers it home.
Cassius:
I see it too. We’ve been discussing on the forum — and maybe for the past couple of weeks here in the podcast — about whether Torquatus himself is a totally orthodox Epicurean, or whether these issues of “supreme good” might be something that developed later on to respond to the Stoics or whatever. But that is something that we can get a lot of benefit out of considering, and a lot of deeper understanding of the issues involved by even trying to discover what it is that Torquatus is talking about when he says there are different opinions.
But one thing I do like about Torquatus, regardless of all that, is that this section does seem to be an uncompromising defense of Epicurus. It includes some arguments that could be considered to be compromising, but in the end we have here in this Torquatus section a real in-your-face defense of the ultimate issue — which Torquatus has started off by saying: what is it that really ultimately, in the end, we are arguing about? And it’s the issue of pleasure versus virtue versus religion versus the different other ways of organizing your life. And I always like to include in that point that again we’re not talking about eating and drinking and just immediate bodily pleasures. We’re talking about the feeling of pleasure that all activities of life fit into — that which we find to be beneficial to us and pleasing to us. Literature, any sophisticated emotional or intellectual thing that we find to be pleasing is subsumed within pleasure. So it’s by no means a limited term. And friendship is precisely the kind of thing where you might have to employ the hedonic calculus — or the Epicurean calculus, as somebody preferred to express it — where there are occasional pains involved in friendship, sometimes things aren’t going as well as you would hope, but you endure that to get to the pleasure that’s on the other side.
Joshua:
Yes, yes. I’ll go back to something I said earlier in the conversation. I think this is set out here as certainly one of the most important things to do to produce pleasure. And I’m coming back to this idea again that maybe this is really here in this section and expanded this way because it’s a test case. In law there’s this phrase about “hard cases make bad law.” And I think some people would say that friendship — or these relations that we’re talking about — are hard cases. You just really don’t want, given your cultural conditioning, to say that you have a friend because they bring you pleasure. You want to say all these other more high-sounding things about your friends and why you have them. But Epicurus is confronting a hard case here, and the Epicureans — through Torquatus — are taking the position that no, this is not a hard case that we’re going to back down from. We’re going to double down on our position. We’re going to say: not only are we right, but you’re absolutely absurd to say that there’s any other basis for friendship than what we are saying.
Cassius:
I think this is the end of our discussion of friendship, and we are nearing the end of our discussion of Torquatus. We have at least one more session in which, from here, we turn to another sort of closing summary of this section of Torquatus.
Joshua:
Are we back — I didn’t know — time flies when you’re having fun. You mean at the end of today’s episode, or the end of Torquatus?
Cassius:
The end of Torquatus. Are we actually that close?
Joshua:
We are very close. In fact, now that I look at it, there’s really only two paragraphs left in this section of Torquatus. So we’ll have to make some decisions in the near term. I’ve been thinking we would turn to Epicurus’s Letter to Herodotus next. That may be something we can talk about. We were also talking about the fact that there’s a lot more material buried in Cicero here — this continues on and there’s a long section from Cicero that in his view refutes the Epicurean position on these things. But I think we’re better served by sticking with material that presents the Epicurean position, so that we can improve our own understanding of the Epicurean view. You know, in the world we live in, there are lots of opportunities to read negative commentary on the Epicurean position, but there’s not that many opportunities to go through the pro-Epicurean position and begin to understand it. So I think we’re better off doing that.
We only have two paragraphs left. I think we can certainly devote a full episode to these two paragraphs, because they’re kind of a loud cry of emphasis of everything that’s come before — about how important Epicurus is, and how appreciative we should be for what he did, and how all this translates into a school of philosophy that we should take seriously and even be loyal to. So we can talk all about that next week.
Cassius:
But we are just about at the end of it. So we can’t be practical and wrap off with the issue of friendship as this is right near the end of the Torquatus section — that kind of puts a whole new light on this, doesn’t it? I didn’t know that we were that close to the end. But this is sort of the last thing he wanted to really hammer home, was this issue of friendship.
Joshua:
Yes. And he started out by saying that he wasn’t really going to attempt to give a presentation of the whole philosophy — he was really going to focus on the ethical question of pleasure. But he has kind of expanded off into these other issues beyond strictly ethics. But really, ethics has remained the center. And this is sort of the final detailed part of the argument before he summarizes. I was going to say it’s the capstone. I don’t know whether that’s the right analogy, but this is the specific issue that he has chosen to illustrate everything that he’s discussed previously.
Cassius:
I think I’m going to stick with my analogy that this may be a situation where you roll out the big guns and you go after a hard case that others might think you’re going to retreat from — and instead of retreating you launch all barrels and charge right to the center of their line. And it’s interesting because, as we got to the end of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, we encountered much of the same problem, didn’t we? In the end, with this horrific account of the plague in Athens — that’s another hard case —
Joshua:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. In which you explore a philosophy of pleasure and friendship.
Cassius:
Yeah, I think we’re on the right track with that. It does kind of involve the same type of issue — it’s your relationship with your loved ones and your friends around you. You see that they’re dying in miserable ways and you’re torn by that, and you’re tempted to just discard everything you’ve learned and say “roll out the sacrificial cows, we’re going back to religion because we can’t handle this on our own.” So maybe to some extent there’s a parallel there. It’s the ultimate hard case in Lucretius — to deal with the horrors of death of your friends and yourselves and everybody you love. But you stick with the philosophy even so.
I have to think still that, parallel to what we’re seeing here in Torquatus, there would have or should have been some kind of a final climactic ending of praise for Epicurus and what he’s said, even in Lucretius. But apparently not. But here, there is going to be one — there is this presentation has a closing section that kind of mirrors the opening sections of the books of Lucretius. Because what he’s going to do in sections 71 and 72 is what Lucretius does in several of the openings of the different books, and what Lucian does at the very end of Alexander the Oracle-Monger — yes, yes, sort of the — I don’t know what you would call it — praise for Epicurus at the very end of that work. Yes.
It’s almost like I’m looking at these final two paragraphs for next week — it’s almost like we need to have somebody set them to music, have somebody sing them or something. Because they really are well stated in the English. And it’s just like the ultimate — I guess Lucretius opens with a hymn to Venus, and these paragraphs that we’re going to talk about next week are almost a hymn to Epicurus in a sense. And it gives me a chance again to mention one of my favorite lines — about being ashamed that we did not learn these things as children, and instead we have to go on learning them into old age because we weren’t taught correctly from the beginning.
Cassius:
Okay, closing comments for today. Martin?
Martin:
No, I’m good.
Cassius:
Joshua?
Joshua:
You know, I’m going to give you the option to cut this out. But as we talk about horrible things like the plague in Athens, I was looking into the Herculaneum material. I didn’t know this, but there’s a wooden sort of a crib, or like a little carriage, that survived the ash of the volcano in Herculaneum. And it’s on rockers, and it’s in pretty good condition — but they found an infant child wrapped in a wool blanket in that little cradle.
Cassius:
Gosh. Oh, it’s just — it’s terrible, isn’t it? Yeah, it was terrible. I don’t know why I’m bringing this into the podcast right now.
Joshua:
Well, it’s kind of a downer to conclude it. But really, of course, I talked about learning things as children and so forth. But you know, we can treat it the same way as Lucretius did in book six. I mean, there’s no doubt that life is full of bad things that happen to us, and we have to be ready for those things. We can choose to be a Stoic and almost deny that they occur or that we are within reach of them — and that’s just not true. When those things happen we’re touched very deeply by them. And we can deny them and try to become a Stoic, or we can become some kind of a nihilist or just absolutely depressed and give up in the face of all these problems that we know are out there. Or we can choose to focus on the pleasure that’s available to us while we are alive, and how it is possible to live a pleasurable life if we organize our lives properly. And that no matter how great the pain or the torture might be that comes our way, there’s a ready escape from it if we need it. But that eternity is a long time and we’re not going to be alive but for a short time, so we need to use the time that we have in the best way we possibly can. And not sit around agonizing over the bad things of life that we can do nothing about. I think that’s why we’re doing the podcast and discussing Epicurus — it’s constantly a temptation just to give in to depression and cynicism and say “oh me, oh my, how terrible my lot in life is, how nasty, brutish, and short it is.” But that would be a mistake from the position that Epicurus is arguing.
Cassius:
Well, I’m glad you were able to make something out of that.
Joshua:
Yeah, that’s a good place. You know, the whole episode with Herculaneum getting buried really is another example of just what Lucretius was talking about at the end of the book. These things happen, and we’re all going to die at some point, and nothing in philosophy prevents that. We just have to decide — and I think there’s a line in The Lord of the Rings that I think about. You can quote it better than I can. What’s the line?
Cassius:
Oh, Frodo says: “I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.” And Gandalf says: “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for us to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
Joshua:
That is exactly the line I was looking for. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. That’s a good line and it’s a good way to end the podcast.
Cassius:
Unless someone has something else? Hearing none, we can declare the episode over. We’ll come back with one more next week on this, and then we’ll move on further. So thanks for your time today, and talk again soon.
Joshua:
Bye.