Episode 139 - Letter to Menoeceus 06 - On Pleasure (Part Two)
Date: 09/12/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2655-episode-one-hundred-thirty-nine-the-letter-to-menoeceus-06-pleasure-part-two/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Joshua reads sections 130–132 of the Letter to Menoikeus — “independence of desire we think a great good,” the definition of pleasure as freedom from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind, and the declaration that prudence is more precious even than philosophy — recorded on the twenty-first anniversary of September 11, which Joshua uses as a frame: the people who flew planes into buildings that morning were as certain of their beliefs as any religious martyr, which proves that passionate conviction is not evidence of truth, and that the only reliable standard is the evidence-based method the Greeks pioneered for reasoning about how to live. The central philosophical tensions of the episode are two: first, whether Epicurus’s statement that “by pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul” is meant as a complete definition of pleasure — the group concludes it cannot be, because reading it as an identity makes the sentence about pleasure limits into a tautology (“the limit of the absence of pain is the removal of all pain”), and Vatican Sayings 50 (“no pleasure is a bad thing in itself”) and 51 (indulge your inclination as you please, provided it does not break laws, harm neighbors, damage your body, or waste your means) demonstrate that all pleasures are legitimate by nature and only their practical consequences can give cause to avoid them; second, whether a Bentham-style spreadsheet of hedons and dolors is the right way to pursue choice and avoidance — the group concludes it may be useful as a one-time clarifying exercise but that life is not a spreadsheet and prudence, which Epicurus calls more precious than philosophy, is better understood as good judgment developed through experience than as a mechanical procedure. The episode features an extended discussion of luxury, bread and water, and desire: Vatican Saying 63 (“frugality too has a limit, and the man who disregards it is like him who errs through excess”) is read alongside the bread-and-water passage — where Don’s forum research into the Greek word masa (everyday barley bread, not a punishing privation) clarifies that Epicurus is recommending a normal simple diet, not a cave-dwelling asceticism — and Cassius argues that the goal is to accustom yourself to living without dependence on luxury, not to condemn luxury itself. The closing discussion of virtue quotes J.S. Mill’s recognition that no Epicurean theory assigns a higher value to pleasures of mere sensation than to pleasures of intellect and feeling, Shakespeare’s “virtue itself turns vice being misapplied” (Romeo and Juliet), and Richard III’s self-description as clothing naked villainy with holy writ, as illustrations that virtue is a tool for the pleasant life and not an end in itself.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 139 of Lucretius Today. I’m your host Cassius, and today we continue with the Letter to Menoikeus on the topic of pleasure. Let’s join Joshua reading today’s text.
Joshua: And again, independence of desire we think a great good, not that we may at all times enjoy but a few things, but that if we do not possess many we may enjoy the few in the genuine persuasion that those have the sweetest pleasure in luxury who least need it, and that all that is natural is easy to be obtained but that which is superfluous is hard, and so plain savors bring us a pleasure equal to a luxurious diet when all the pain due to want is removed, and bread and water produce the highest pleasure when one who needs them puts them to his lips. To grow accustomed therefore to simple and not luxurious diet gives us health to the full and makes a man alert for the needful employments of life, and when after long intervals we approach luxuries disposes us better towards them and fits us to be fearless of fortune. When therefore we maintain that pleasure is the end, we do not mean the pleasures of profligates and those that consist in sensuality, as is supposed by some who are either ignorant or disagree with us or do not understand, but freedom from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind. For it is not continuous drinkings and revelings, nor the satisfaction of lusts, nor the enjoyment of fish and other luxuries of the wealthy table, which produce a pleasant life, but sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance, and banishing mere opinions to which are due the greatest disturbance of the spirit. Of all this the beginning and the greatest good is prudence, wherefore prudence is a more precious thing even than philosophy. For from prudence are sprung all the other virtues, and it teaches us that it is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently and honorably and justly, nor again to live a life of prudence, honor, and justice without living pleasantly, for the virtues are by nature bound up with the pleasant life and the pleasant life is inseparable from them.
Cassius: Thank you, Joshua. This is some of the most important material in all of Epicurean philosophy, and we need to spend time on every phrase. Before we get into the content, Joshua you had something to say about the date we are recording.
Joshua: We are recording this on the twenty-first anniversary of September 11. I think it is relevant here because we are asking: what standard of proof is good enough for deciding how to live? The people who were motivated to fly planes into buildings that morning were as intensely certain of their beliefs as the early Christian saints who faced the lions in the Colosseum. That argument once impressed me — surely those people must have known something because no one would give up their life without good evidence. After September 11 that argument became impossible for me to accept, because the same extreme conviction was present on both sides, and I do not believe the hijackers were right. The only reliable method is the one the Greeks developed: humans engaging in argument and examining evidence to figure out what is true. And that is the context in which we approach what Epicurus is saying today — no supernatural authority, no divine list, just reasoning from nature about how to live.
Cassius: And that is exactly the background that has to be in place before any of this material can be read correctly. The person who comes straight to this passage without having absorbed the physics and the absence of the supernatural will read “freedom from pain in the body and trouble in the mind” and think they now have the Epicurean prescription for the good life — when in fact they have missed the entire foundation.
Joshua: Starting with independence of desire: this is not a prescription for throwing away your possessions and living in a cave. He is saying you need to be willing to endure hardship and lack of luxury because you will encounter times when you have no choice, and you need to be prepared for them. That is not a general rule that you must always settle for the simplest things. When you have the choice to pursue pleasures that are not strictly necessary, there is nothing wrong with that. There is no moral fault in pursuing a pleasure or satisfying a desire that is unnecessary.
Cassius: Vatican Saying 63 makes this precise: frugality too has a limit, and the man who disregards it is like him who errs through excess. He is hitting the same point over and over: there is no magic number of things to pursue, no absolute test of going only for bread and water, and at the same time no absolute goal of pursuing every luxury. There is a sliding scale dependent on our circumstances and what we determine to be most pleasant for us.
Joshua: The other point I want to make early is this: when someone unfamiliar with Epicurus hears that pleasure is the goal of life, it is natural to ask what pleasures should I pursue. The answer is that there is no absolute list, because people are different. What I find most pleasing is probably different from what Callistheni or Martin find most pleasing. Even Lucretius points to this: hemlock is poison to humans but goats eat it without problems; humans flavor food with marjoram but pigs detest it. Variation exists not just among individuals but across species. No one has the authority or knowledge to say authoritatively which desires every person should pursue. Epicurus never gives a list. He says that young creatures of all kinds pursue pleasure — and they pursue different kinds.
Cassius: So the desirable approach when discussing this with someone is not to immediately jump to natural and necessary desires and compose a list for them. The question of what pleasures should be pursued has no absolute answer in Epicurean philosophy, and looking for one is already the wrong approach.
Callistheni: What came up for me when I read this is the distinction between physical and mental pleasures, and how you know whether something is actually pleasurable — only by its felt result. If something does not produce a good feeling, it does not qualify as a pleasure for you. That seems obvious but it matters, because so much of modern life is driven by abstract goals and concepts of perfection rather than by actual felt experience.
Joshua: Mental pleasures are crucial and often underemphasized in these discussions precisely because they afford their own justification and do not cause controversy in the way bodily pleasures do. C.S. Lewis has a passage where he says a man who sits in church and feels nothing may find that if he takes up a difficult theological text and works through it with a pencil clenched in his teeth, his heart will sing unbidden. That is the nature of mental pleasure. Friendship involves a mental pleasure. The memory of past pleasures is a mental pleasure. Both are every bit as valid as the pleasures of food and touch.
Cassius: J.S. Mill recognized this too. He wrote that there is no known Epicurean theory of life which does not assign to the pleasures of the intellect and of the feelings and imagination and of the moral sentiments a much higher value as pleasures than to those of mere sensation. He wrote that in an essay called higher and lower pleasures. And the Torquatus material confirms it: the pleasures and pains of the mind can be more intense than those of the body, partly because we have the ability to project them forward and backward in time in ways the body cannot.
Callistheni: I want to return to the question of whether all pleasures are legitimate by nature. Cassius you were getting at something earlier about there being no moral fault in unnecessary pleasures.
Cassius: Vatican Saying 50: no pleasure is a bad thing in itself, but the things which produce certain pleasures bring with them disturbances many times greater than the pleasures themselves. And Vatican Saying 51 says to a young person: you may indulge your inclination as you please, provided that you do not break the laws or good customs, do not distress any of your neighbors, do not harm your body, and do not squander your means. As long as those conditions are met, Epicurus is saying indulge as you please. The converse of no pleasure is a bad thing in itself is that all pleasures are good. They are reported to us as good by nature. Only their practical consequences can give cause to avoid them.
Joshua: Torquatus makes the same point: were it not for the requirements of work or some other pressing need, no one should be criticized for pursuing a particular pleasure. It is purely the practical result — the pain that sometimes follows certain pursuits — that is the problem. Not the pleasure itself.
Cassius: And that is why the sentence “by pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and from trouble in the soul” cannot be read as the full and complete definition of pleasure in Epicurean philosophy. If you take it as an identity — pleasure simply equals absence of pain — then the passage elsewhere that says “the limit of the quantity of pleasure is the removal of all pain” becomes a tautology. You end up saying the limit of the quantity of the absence of pain is the removal of all pain. Which is obvious and tells you nothing. He has to be saying something more.
Joshua: The tautology point is key. A tautology resolves to A equals A — it adds no new information. If you read pleasure and absence of pain as identical, every sentence Epicurus writes becomes circular. Replace every use of the word pleasure with the phrase absence of pain and you get an indecipherable result. He is clearly defending himself against the accusation that he was a greedy sensualist — he is saying we do not mean that kind of thing. But he is not giving a complete definition of pleasure in one line.
Cassius: So the practical conclusion is that the goal is not simply to eliminate pain but to clear away pain so that pleasure can be experienced unmixed with anything painful. The pain is what gets in the way of the pleasure. The pleasure is still the thing you are pursuing.
Martin: I would put it this way. When we become aware of a lack and it creates desire, and we cannot fulfill that desire soon, the continued lack causes pain — trouble in the mind. One of the best ways to get rid of that trouble is to take action to fulfill the desire. So even under this formulation, it does not mean you should shun desires or refuse to fulfill them. It means the opposite — fulfilling them is usually the most efficient path to removing the pain the unfulfilled desire creates.
Cassius: Now on the spreadsheet question. Someone on the forum mentioned Bentham’s hedons and dolors — units of pleasure and units of pain that you add and subtract to calculate the net pleasure of an experience. Is that the right way to pursue choice and avoidance?
Joshua: I do not think it is necessary or helpful to do that explicitly and continuously. We naturally perform a version of that calculation by intuition combined with reasoning, dynamically, every time we encounter a desire. As a one-time exercise to clarify your own values, maybe useful. But if you are spending all your time thinking about how you should pursue pleasure, you are probably closing yourself off from actually experiencing it.
Martin: A one-time exercise can be useful. But you do it dynamically as a normal person. You do not carry a running chart.
Cassius: Which brings us to prudence. Epicurus says prudence is more precious even than philosophy. What does he mean by prudence?
Joshua: Prudence to me implies good judgment developed through experience, not encyclopedic knowledge or a memorized list of rules. The person who is prudent does not necessarily have every fact at command, but has the ability to take the available facts and apply them to a successful result. It is practical wisdom. It is somewhat like not putting all your eggs in one basket — but knowing when the situation actually warrants concentrating your resources rather than diversifying.
Callistheni: And it scales with the commitment involved. Deciding whether to go for a walk does not require much deliberation. Choosing between two careers is worth a great deal of deliberation. The amount of time prudence suggests spending on a decision tracks with how consequential and hard to reverse the decision is.
Cassius: And nature will teach prudence whether you want to be instructed or not. People learn it by being burned. Experience teaches you which desires are going to yield more pain than pleasure. That is the way nature instructs.
Joshua: On the bread and water passage — Don did detailed research on the forum, tracking down the Greek word masa. In Spanish, masa is the corn flour used to make tortillas. In ancient Greek it is everyday barley bread — not a punishing deprivation but simply what common people ate every day. Epicurus elsewhere writes: send me a pot of cheese so that when I like I may dine sumptuously. So he is not asking you to suffer. He is asking you to not become dependent on luxuries you might not always have.
Cassius: And the lobster analogy shows how variable this all is. Lobster was once so plentiful and cheap it was fed to prisoners. It is now one of the most expensive foods you can order. Value and luxury are not fixed. They are moving targets.
Joshua: Which is why you cannot follow a fixed list. And it connects to the virtue question. Shakespeare captures it: virtue itself turns vice being misapplied. If you take virtue to be the goal or end of life, you have a problem — because a virtuous act can yield a bad result, and an act commonly considered vicious can yield a good one. And Richard III describes himself as clothing his naked villainy with odd old ends stolen forth from holy writ, seeming a saint when most he plays the devil. The lesson: if virtue is treated as the end, it becomes infinitely manipulable as a label.
Cassius: And that resolves to the point Epicurus makes explicitly: it is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently and honorably and justly, nor to live prudently and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. The virtues are tools for the pleasant life. They are bound up with it, inseparable from it, but they are not the goal. The goal is the feeling of pleasure itself — what life resolves to when you get down to it. Not a concept, not a list, not an analysis. The actual feeling. We will come back next week to complete the Letter to Menoikeus. Thank you all.
Joshua: Goodbye.
Martin: Bye.
Callistheni: Goodbye.