Episode 144 - Diogenes of Oinoanda (Part 4) Virtue Not The Highest Good
Date: 10/21/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2703-episode-one-hundred-forty-four-diogenes-of-oinoanda-part-4-virtue-not-the-highes/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Martin reads Fragments 29, 30, and 32 of the Diogenes of Oenoanda inscription — the concluding section of the podcast’s examination of that text. Fragment 29 states the Epicurean purpose for pursuing philosophy: not wealth or fame but happiness through the goal craved by nature, since neither wealth nor political office nor luxury nor romantic pleasures nor anything else can secure it while philosophy alone can. Fragment 30 declares that the inscription is placed in public for everybody: different countries give different people a homeland, but the whole compass of the world gives all people a single country and a single home; Diogenes is not pressuring anyone to accept what he says unreflectively, not even on matters concerning religion, but invites acceptance together with his reasoning. Fragment 32 delivers the climactic virtue-versus-pleasure argument: if the dispute with the Stoics were only about the means to happiness, and they wanted to say virtue, that would be true and there would be nothing to argue about; but the dispute is about what happiness itself is, and so Diogenes shouts to all Greeks and non-Greeks that pleasure is the end of the best mode of life, while the virtues — inopportunely transferred by others from the place of the means to that of the end — are in no way the end but only the means; virtues do not make provision for the birds flying past, and “it is for the sake of this nature that the virtues do everything and exist.” Callistheni observes that modern society has relegated philosophy to academia whereas in Epicurus’s time it was considered essential to life; she draws the practical contrast between aiming for an abstract ideal of virtue (which tends toward ritualized, obsessive behavior that loses sight of the ultimate goal) and choosing and avoiding based on what actually brings pleasure. Discussion of Polyaenus the geometrician follows — Cassius raises the story that he abandoned geometry on becoming an Epicurean, and Martin cautions that this detail may be a literary invention of Frances Wright rather than established history, while Cassius traces the analogy: just as Polyaenus should not have abandoned geometry (if he found pleasure in it) but should only have stopped treating geometry as the goal of life, virtue is not to be abandoned but is not to be mistaken for the end either. Joshua joins the episode midway and synthesizes the two central points of Fragments 29–32: philosophy is to be pursued for a pleasurable life, and that purpose applies equally to all people regardless of origin. Cassius’s modern analogy — “being a good person” versus “being a happy person” — argues that the Epicurean position is not that goodness should be abandoned but that it is the best means to happiness and cannot be defined independently of that goal. Joshua argues that humans are to all appearances merely natural, that any account of life’s meaning must be equally applicable to non-human organisms, and that the Epicurean view creates a fundamental chasm between itself and every philosophy or religion that treats the soul as supernatural and the body as something to be subdued — illustrated by Saint Jerome beating himself with rocks and Saint Benedict throwing himself into a bramble bush to mortify the flesh; Martin notes that the Vatican has repeatedly discouraged such self-mortification. The closing segment surveys the geographical reach of Epicureanism: Joshua cites a review of Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve that oddly claimed Epicureanism was rare even in antiquity, then refutes it by cataloguing the second-century flourishing across the Roman Empire — the Diogenes inscription in Asia Minor, the mosaic at Autun in France bearing second-century portraits of Epicurus and Metrodorus with their inscriptions (Epicurus: the text of Principal Doctrine 5; Metrodorus: “We are born only once, it is not possible to be born twice — you who are not master of your tomorrow postpone the joy, but life is lost within the time limit, and each of us dies busy”), and Philodemus’s works from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum — all flourishing at roughly the same time that Christianity was rising to dominance. Cassius argues that the Epicurean school was not displaced by the superior reasoning of Stoicism or Platonism but only by the absolutist force of the new religion from the east. Callistheni suggests that the inscription serves as an ideal prototype for a modern Epicurean pamphlet. Cassius cites Cicero’s satirical “send him a pamphlet!” directed at the Epicurean senator Calpurnius Piso (father-in-law of Julius Caesar) as evidence that Epicurean pamphleteering was real and recognized, and closes by announcing that the next series of episodes will use Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy as an organizational framework to present a general overview of the philosophy.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 144 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 ancient Epicurean texts and 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 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. This week we’ll complete our discussion of the inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda. Now let’s join Martin reading today’s text.
Martin: There are many who pursue philosophy for the sake of wealth and fame, with the aim of procuring these either from private individuals or from kings, by whom philosophy is deemed to be some great and precious possession. Well, it is not in order to gain any of the above-mentioned objectives that we have embarked upon the same undertaking, but so that we may enjoy happiness through attainment of the goal created by nature. The identity of this goal and how neither wealth can furnish it, nor political fame, nor royal office, nor a life of luxury and sumptuous banquets, nor pleasures of choice love, nor anything else, while philosophy alone can secure it, we shall now explain after setting the whole question before you.
For we have had this writing inscribed in public, not for ourselves but for you citizens, so that we might render it available to all of you in an easily accessible form without oral instruction. And we contrive this in order that even while sitting at home we might be able to exhibit the goods of philosophy — not to all people here indeed, but to those of them who are civil-spoken. And not least we did this for those who are called foreigners, though they are not really so. For while the various segments of the earth give different people a different country, the whole compass of this world gives all people a single country — the entire earth and a single home, the world.
I am not pressuring any of you into testifying thoughtlessly and unreflectably in favor of those who say this is true, for I have not laid down the law on anything, not even on matters concerning the gods, unless together with reasoning.
I shall discuss fully shortly the virtues and pleasure now. If, gentlemen, the point at issue between these people and us involved inquiry into what is the means of happiness, and they wanted to say the virtues, which would actually be true, it would be unnecessary to take any other step than to agree with them about this without more ado. But since, as I say, the issue is not what is the means of happiness, but what is happiness and what is the ultimate goal for our nature, I say both now and always, shouting out loudly to all Greeks and non-Greeks, that pleasure is the end of the best mode of life, while the virtues — which are inopportunely messed about by these people, being transferred from the place of the means to that of the end — are in no way an end but the means to the end. Let us therefore now state that this is true, making it our starting point.
Suppose, then, someone were to ask — though it is a naive question — who is it whom these virtues benefit? Obviously the answer will be: man. The virtues certainly do not make provision for these birds flying past, enabling them to fly well, or for each of the other animals — they do not desert the nature with which they live and by which they have been engendered. Rather, it is for the sake of this nature that the virtues do everything and exist.
Cassius: Thank you, Martin. We’re close to wrapping up the fragments of Diogenes of Oenoanda that we’ve selected as being some of the most important to talk about. Martin has just read Fragment 29, which talks about the purpose of pursuing philosophy; Fragment 30, which makes a very important point about how the message of Epicurean philosophy applies to everybody no matter where they are; and Fragment 32, which talks about the relationship between virtue and pleasure.
Let’s go back to the beginning, which is Fragment 29. The emphasis there is the purpose of pursuing philosophy, because Diogenes points out that many pursue philosophy for the sake of wealth and fame — but Diogenes emphasizes that it’s not the Epicurean purpose to pursue those objectives. The objective in the Epicurean scheme is, quote, “so that we may enjoy happiness through the attainment of the goal craved by nature.” Fragment 29 says that the identity of this goal and how neither wealth nor political fame nor royal office nor luxury nor basically sex nor anything else can procure it, while philosophy alone can secure it — and that we are having this inscription placed in public, not for ourselves alone, but to make it easily available for everybody. Martin, what has your experience been in how the pursuit of Epicurean philosophy has enhanced your happiness, if at all?
Martin: Yeah, of course, through knowledge and applying the hedonic calculus. And I’ve done that before I got consciously aware of Epicurean philosophy, so that means this is not something with a clear before and after — it’s just something I grew into by myself.
Cassius: The whole idea of pursuing philosophy may seem strange to certain people because they think it’s so impractical and detached from reality, and that you must have some special interest in it — like stamp collecting or something — in order to want to pursue it. But the Epicurean perspective is different: it’s not an end in itself, although it is pleasurable to study philosophy, as Epicurus makes the point in the Letter to Menoikeus. It’s not an end in itself, but pleasure comes during the pursuit of philosophy. In fact, it is the identification of the pleasurable life through philosophy that is the important insight. If you don’t know what your goal is — as a phrase we read from Diogenes of Oenoanda puts it: who will seek what he can never find? You’ve got to decide what you’re seeking in order to make any progress toward achieving it. And Epicurean philosophy has identified the reasons why we should conclude that there are no supernatural gods telling us what to do, that there are no absolute rules floating in the air, and that the real key to deciding what to choose and what to avoid is basically the feelings of pleasure and pain — that ultimately those feelings are the bottom line of everything we do in life. It’s for those resulting feelings that we do the things we do and avoid the things we avoid. Callistheni, what do you think about the pursuit of philosophy as a tool for happiness?
Callistheni: Well, it seems like it’s going to depend on how you define philosophy and how you think of it. Perhaps now in our time the idea of philosophy is considered rather academic and intellectual, whereas back in the time of Epicurus there was a much different idea of philosophy — something considered very important to life, something many people studied. That’s really a regression instead of an advancement for the current age, because what everybody in most cases pursues nowadays is wealth and politics and office and luxury and sex and romance, because they think that’s the road to a happy life. And what they need to understand from the Epicurean perspective is that it is philosophy alone that can tell you how to pursue those things — and in what amount — without getting burned by them, while still enjoying the pleasures that can come from some of them to some extent, without letting them get out of control and cause you more pain than pleasure. You just can’t pursue these things without a wider philosophical framework of how to approach them.
Cassius: Going forward briefly into Fragment 30, one of the things that’s interested me about that one is that he acknowledges in placing this inscription in the public square that not necessarily everybody is going to profit from it. He says that we’ve contrived this not for all people here indeed, but for those of them who are civil-spoken. He’s acknowledging that Epicurean philosophy is not the possession of a particular people — it’s not uniquely Greek, and not only Greek people can understand or profit from it — but he’s also acknowledging that while the entire world can profit from it to the extent that they can receive it, not to all people will it be accessible. There’s a phrase like that in Diogenes Laertius as well, where the translation is “well-constituted” — that not everybody is able to philosophize. While that probably applies to those too young or those with some mental disability, it is interesting that he doesn’t necessarily expect everybody to be able to understand or profit. That has an application in terms of what we can expect for those of us who think Epicurean philosophy is a very desirable way of thinking: it’s not going to be a good idea to expect that just because we think it’s attractive and makes the most sense, everybody is going to agree with it. Martin, any comment on what is going on in his mind when he talks about those of them who are civil-spoken?
Martin: Yeah, you know, there was a comment I think Don made on the forum this past week about evangelization and pamphleteering. It’s interesting that Cicero said something about one of the Epicureans having pamphlets for the occasion, which indicated that they did circulate written material. But the bottom line is that not everybody wants to talk about philosophy, not everybody’s interested in it, and especially when you start talking about the religious aspects, there’s going to be much resistance to ideas that are controversial like those in Epicurean philosophy.
Cassius: And then turning to Fragment 32, which is one of the ones I think is extremely interesting for people today who read about Epicurus in the context of Stoicism and this issue of the relationship between virtue and pleasure. Of course this is being written around AD 100; the Stoics and Epicureans have been sparring back and forth for several hundred years by this point. And this issue has remained: what is the relationship between virtue and pleasure? Which, of course, it’s covered in Principal Doctrine 5 — that the two go hand in hand, which is basically the Epicurean position. But there’s always this back and forth about whether virtue is an end in itself, the cliché being “virtue is its own reward.” So the way Diogenes of Oenoanda answers that question is this section of Fragment 32, which I think is well worth repeating:
“If, gentlemen, the point at issue between these people and us involved inquiry into what is the means of happiness, and they wanted to say the virtues, which would actually be true, it would be unnecessary to take any other step than to agree with them about this without more ado.” So he’s laying the foundation that the means to happiness is virtue even under the Epicurean worldview. Then he goes on: “But since, as I say, the issue is not what is the means of happiness, but what is happiness and what is the ultimate goal of our nature, I say both now and always, shouting out loudly to all Greeks and non-Greeks, that pleasure is the end of the best mode of life, while the virtues — which are inopportunely messed about by these people, being transferred from the place of the means to that of the end — are in no way an end but the means to the end.”
Maybe it sounds like verbal sparring and not that important, but I think both the Epicureans and Stoics of the ancient world saw this to be extremely important. If you say the goal implies one goal — that there is one thing that is the ultimate end and the ultimate reason that you do everything else — and if you have to come up with one thing that is the ultimate goal, it is very important from the Epicurean point of view to identify that it is pleasure and not virtue itself, because you pursue pleasure for the sake of pleasure. Pleasure is a feeling that gives you a reward, an emotional response that is irreducible. There’s nothing behind pleasure as a reason for it other than the feeling itself. But virtue is not in that same category, because there is no God, there is no absolute rule that says virtue must be pursued. So you have to ask: why are you being virtuous? And despite all the attempts to answer that question from the Stoic and Platonic perspective, in the end it has always made sense to me — and it seems to be the Epicurean argument — that if you’re not getting a reward, if there’s not a reason to pursue virtue, you’re left with an empty goal that has no benefit in and of itself. It’s only pleasure itself, as a physical or mental feeling, that is of its own worth pursuing.
Callistheni: Thinking about this, it seems that it creates two different paths for how one makes choices and avoidances. Because if virtue is the end goal — aiming for perfection in everything you do and not for any kind of feeling of pleasure — if you’re going for some abstract ideal, somehow thinking that that will result in happiness, you’re going to make different choices. For example, in how you organize your environment you’re going to get really strict with yourself and create order, because somehow there’s the cliché “cleanliness is next to godliness” — this idea of the perfection of things. Your choices are going to go toward that ideal state even if it doesn’t bring you happiness; you’re occupying yourself with some kind of behavior that’s almost ritualized in an attempt to somehow find happiness from that. But with Epicureanism, choices and avoidances rest on the understanding that virtue is just a tool toward the final end of pleasure. So you don’t go all out with your virtue for the sake of some idealized way of doing things. You realize that you’re choosing according to what brings pleasure, so life is much more easy and not so strict. It’s more going with the flow and seeing what really works for the best pleasure and happiness.
Cassius: That’s very well stated. What you’ve brought up in my mind is almost the issue of people becoming obsessive and compulsive about all sorts of things — they pick up some habit or some standard practice and ritualize it, as the word you used, which is an excellent word, into an end in itself, and eventually forget that there’s any other goal to be pursued. There’s the analogy in the Epicurean material about Polyaenus, I believe is the name — the geometrician. There was controversy about the fact that before he became fully an Epicurean he was just a master geometrician, and after he became an Epicurean, supposedly according to the critics, he gave up geometry just to pursue pleasure. The response to that — and it’s an argument that’s in Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens — is that the reason you pursue geometry is to pursue pleasure. If you find pleasure in geometry, you’re going to continue to pursue it just as you would before. You’re just not going to get confused that geometry in itself is the goal of your life. And that kind of confusion is what leads people to get consumed with, again, obsessive compulsive behavior — losing sight of what the ultimate goal is in the first place.
I believe this past week, Callistheni, you posted a thread about people who are confronting suicidal thoughts. And there’s a section in Lucretius where he talks about how ironic it is that it’s often people who fear death or fear the gods unjustly who get led by this very fear of death into such despair that they end up committing suicide — the irony being that it was the fear of death in the first place that led them to this spiral of despair. So it’s certainly one of the key aspects of Epicurean philosophy that is so important to identify clearly in your mind: the goal of living is to live happily, and everything else you do, every decision you make, everything you engage in, is subordinate to that goal. If it enhances your happiness, you do it. If it detracts from your happiness, you don’t do it. And you don’t let any kind of activity — where you get so obsessed with perfection and being the best in your field — take over your life and become all-consuming to the point of leading you to make terrible decisions in other aspects of your life that really undermine your ultimate total happiness.
Martin: I agree with your explanations now. The only thing is we may need to add for Polyaenus: that the abandoned geometry might have been an invention of Frances Wright in her novel, so that means this is not something we can state as a historic fact.
Cassius: Right, the material that Frances Wright wrote always has to be looked at from that point of view. We can put this in the show notes and see what we can find. I think there are other references to this but I’m not sure whether it’s in Cicero or Diogenes Laertius or somewhere else.
Martin: Cicero has a remark on this one but it doesn’t really indicate that Polyaenus abandoned geometry. I don’t think we can take Cicero’s account as claiming that. Something to the effect that if Epicurus had said to listen to Polyaenus as a geometrician, he’d have been better off — something like that, if I remember. But that would be compatible with Polyaenus’s abandoning or reducing his study of it, but Cicero doesn’t claim it.
Cassius: Right. And of course that sounds similar to the criticism that Epicurus should have followed Democritus more directly than he did when he came up with the Swerve, which was not within the Democritean view of things. So there’s that criticism of Epicurus, with the implicit basis being that he should have been more obsessive in a certain way — that he should have followed Democritus more slavishly, or that he should have listened to Polyaenus — instead of deducing that in the end the goals of geometry serve the life of happiness, as opposed to serving themselves.
And in fact I suppose we could include here in this Fragment 32 the next sentence, which has been a little bit difficult for me to understand over the years: “suppose, then, someone were to ask — though it is a naive question — who is it whom these virtues benefit? Obviously the answer will be: man. The virtues certainly do not make provision for these birds flying past, enabling them to fly well, or for each of the other animals — they do not desert the nature with which they live and by which they have been engendered. Rather, it is for the sake of this nature that the virtues do everything and exist.” The last part of it I think really does bring it home. Virtue does not exist on its own. “It is for the sake of this nature that the virtues do everything and exist.” When Epicurean philosophy identifies that the only thing nature has given us is feeling — has given us pleasure and pain by which to make decisions — the point here is that virtue is one of those things, like logic, like reasoning, like any other number of tools available to us, that don’t exist by themselves. There is no such thing as courage floating in the air, or wisdom floating in the air. The virtues don’t desert the nature by which they live and by which they were engendered — it’s for the sake of that nature that they do everything and exist. You don’t live to be virtuous; you are virtuous in order to live happily. Which would imply, of course, that what constitutes virtue becomes very difficult to define as an absolute — and Epicurus is suggesting that we really evaluate whether something is virtuous not in isolation but in accord with the results that come from it.
I can’t think of any better way to proceed than to have Joshua join us and help us summarize the meaning of the inscription. Joshua, how are you today?
Joshua: I’m here, yes.
Cassius: So now that Joshua’s joined us — as we discussed at the beginning of the episode, there are a couple of major points being made here. In Fragments 29 and 30, the purpose of philosophy is the pursuit of a pleasurable, happy life. And as we read in Fragment 30, we’re talking to people who are “civil-spoken,” but we’re talking to basically everybody: while different people live in different countries, the whole compass of the world gives all people a single country, the entire earth and a single home, the world. And Diogenes is not pressuring anyone into unreflectively and thoughtlessly accepting what he says — not even on matters concerning religion — but is presenting it together with reasoning. The emphasis on identifying happy life as the purpose of philosophy, the purpose of everything we do, is a perspective that applies to everybody, not just to those of us who happen to have a particular background or interest in philosophy. It’s really a truth that applies to everyone, and it’s not just something to be asserted or accepted on faith but is supported by the reasoning that Epicurus has produced.
Joshua: What we get here is a unique Epicurean voice from the second century, from an unusual place again in Asia Minor, but talking about the same kind of things as we get in all of the other Epicurean texts — the reason that we pursue philosophy, what we expect to get out of it. And one of my more favorite passages is that description of reaching out to the people that are called foreigners: “though they are not really so, for while the various segments of the earth give different people a different country, the whole compass of this world gives all people a single country — the entire earth and a single home, the world.” Every extra source we have from the ancient world dealing with Epicureanism is such a benefit to us because while they all talk about the same things, they do it in slightly different ways, and Diogenes of Oenoanda seems to have a unique voice, just as Lucretius has a unique voice.
Cassius: Just before you arrived, Joshua, Callistheni had made the point that the inscription included perhaps both recitations of some of the doctrines and also commentary — his own summary, his own spin on what he thought was the most important material and how it should be applied. This Fragment 32 would be a great example of that. This is not anything that I think we’re aware of as being a text that dates back to Epicurus himself, but “I say both now and always, shouting to all Greeks and non-Greeks” — that certainly sounds like commentary and emphasis by Diogenes personally about what he thinks is important. Which is again the kind of thing we have to think about ourselves as we discuss Epicurean philosophy: there’s a tremendous number of interesting details and rabbit trails we could follow, but we have to make a choice as to what’s important to talk about.
Martin: Coming back to Joshua’s comment on Fragment 30, I think this is important because other text fragments from elsewhere may indicate something like “not all people were considered capable of understanding it.” But this one is correcting that — it means in principle it is really for everybody. It just may be that some people need to figure it out, and that might be the difference between different people: for some it’s by tendency more easy, and for others there are more difficulties to overcome.
Cassius: Right. And what we see is the outside view looking in from Cicero, which is that it’s working — Cicero makes the complaint that the Epicureans are just scooping up adherents from the crossroads. He says something to the effect of: they’re good people, there’s nothing wrong with them, but is it really possible that they understand this philosophy while I, Cicero, do not? But Diogenes of Oenoanda seems to think that it’s within the compass of everybody to get a grasp of the major points of Epicurean philosophy — and while you can spend a lifetime studying it, it’s not hard to explain and it’s not hard to understand.
But apparently there are a lot of people in the world who have a difficulty with the material that’s in Fragment 32 — this relationship between virtue and pleasure. It seems like there’s no greater grounds for people to come to blows in discussing Epicurus than this issue, which Diogenes of Oenoanda is presenting right here on his wall to everybody, including foreigners, in a way that emphasizes — when he says that he’s shouting it out to all Greeks and non-Greeks — that it is pleasure that is the end of life, while the virtues are the means to the end and not the end in themselves. Joshua, that’s such a huge point. What’s your take on that relationship and why the Epicureans would be emphasizing it so much?
Joshua: Well, I think it’s not uniquely said here, and in fact one of the good sources for this would be Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens, where she talked quite extensively about the relationship between virtue and pleasure and what is the actual goal of philosophy. It’s clear from all Epicurean sources that the real goal — and not just of philosophy but of life — is to pursue a life of pleasure. But Diogenes is writing in the context of a culturally Greek world where it is virtue that most people at least tell themselves they want to strive for. And he says it maybe more clearly here than it’s said elsewhere: he shouts clearly to all Greeks and non-Greeks that pleasure is the end of the best mode of life. You get something somewhat different in Torquatus, but even Torquatus goes into it and says that even those who behave as they think for the purpose of behaving virtuously — what is the goal of that? The goal is still pleasure, the goal is still happiness. So it’s a struggle that never ends, this struggle between pleasure and virtue and which of them actually constitutes the end or goal of life — but Diogenes of Oenoanda is unequivocal. He knows exactly where he stands on this, and it’s the same place that Epicurus stands, the same place that Lucretius stands.
Cassius: You know, correct me if you think this analogy is not a good one, but if I were trying to explain this to people on the public square somewhere in the United States in 2022, the word virtue is not exactly on the tip of the tongue of most common people at the local shopping center. It’s not a word that’s even used much in common conversation. But I think it’s probably fair to substitute the idea of being, quote, “a good person.” Even most people on the street understand what it means to want to be a good person. And I think that Epicurus would say the very same thing: it is not being a good person that is the goal of life, but being a good person is the best way to achieve a pleasurable life. You evaluate what it means to be a good person — and the things that a good person would or would not do — with that goal of happy living in mind. But there is no divine or absolute definition of a good person that everybody must comply with, and if you focus so much on the idea of being, quote, “a good person,” you can become, as Callistheni was discussing earlier, you can go off in a direction of habitual behavior — ritualistic behavior was the word Callistheni used — and totally lose sight of what the ultimate goal of your life is.
Joshua: Yeah, the other issue with virtue is that while it might be worthwhile to live virtuously so as to live pleasantly, pleasure has a much more immediate foundation or impact in nature. And as Epicurus will always do, he starts his inquiry with nature. Pleasure has an immediacy that is understandable to everyone, I think, and virtue is a lot more arguable — you could have two different groups who are both saying their goal is to live virtuously but they have entirely different definitions of what constitutes living virtuously. Pleasure is something where you can’t really argue about it too much, because it’s sort of “I know it when I see it” — whatever Supreme Court justice said that about obscenity, yes.
Cassius: That’s such a huge point that people tend to gloss over it. What is “the good”? People act as if of course, of course, we know what it means to be a good person. But we really don’t — because unless you’re looking to some definition from the Bible or from some religion, you don’t have a definition of those words. And we would say the same thing about Plato or just any kind of idealism or absolutism at all. You’ve got to state — as we said in Fragment 30 — together with your reasoning, the basis for your assertion. Epicurus presents nature and says that nature gives us the feelings of pleasure and pain by which to make decisions, and that ends up being the basis for decision-making about what to do in life. There is no absolute good and no absolute evil other than what we derive through pleasure and pain. But people don’t want to grapple with that ultimate realization — that’s the place you have to start. What is the basis for everything that you do? What are you going to accept as your authority — nature and the feelings of pleasure and pain, or some other standard of what is good and evil? And Epicurus says those other standards do not exist, which is what comes from the atomist physics and epistemology in the first place. The idea of should your ultimate goal be that of being “a good person” or that of being “a happy person” — presenting it in that way can be very controversial, but it’s clear that Epicurus is saying the good person is a happy person, and there is no good person who is not happy. Again, Principal Doctrine 5: how these things go hand in hand, and if they don’t go hand in hand, then you’ve got some other standard you’ve arbitrarily picked rather than the feelings of pain and pleasure.
Joshua, this is not something I’d put in this way before, and I’d like to see what your comment is. The sentence that comes after the shouting passage says that the virtues do not make provision for the birds flying past — the virtues do not desert the nature with which they live and by which they have been engendered; rather it is for the sake of this nature that the virtues do everything and exist. Reading that today for some reason it’s striking me with greater clarity than it usually does — that’s a pretty clear statement that virtue doesn’t exist on its own, and again if you equate the good with it, the good doesn’t exist on its own. They are part and parcel of the living beings that engender them and by which they live. Would that be consistent with your take on that sentence?
Joshua: I think so, yeah. And you know, there’s a tendency for humans to think of themselves as separated from nature in a way — whether you think that you’re marked off as a special creation or whether you think that you’ve just risen above nature. But to me any real account of our place in the universe has to also take account of the cockroach and its place in the universe. It doesn’t make sense for me to talk about the meaning of life if that question doesn’t equally apply to non-human animals and organisms. We’re part and parcel of nature, and so any question we ask about ourselves has to be a question that is grounded in nature. If you think that you’re a soul riding around in a body and that when the body collapses the soul is going to go off and live somewhere else for eternity, you’re going to have a different answer to these fundamental questions than if you consider yourself and your soul to be fundamentally natural and to perish when the body dies. So there’s a fundamental chasm that exists between the Epicurean issues — nature, death, pleasure, life — and most of the answers that everybody else is coming up with, because they don’t want to deal with this problem that humans are to all appearances merely natural. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Some people think that’s a bad thing.
Cassius: Oh yeah, that’s a great comment. And when you have that perspective, going back to the issue of what is our relationship to other people — if you know this to be true for yourself and for your friends as well, that your life is short and it’s so important to properly use the time that you do have, I can certainly identify with Diogenes of Oenoanda or Lucretius in wanting to take this information and attractively package it and present it to people who don’t currently have it, so that at least it’s available to them — just as Diogenes says here, not pressuring people, not forcing people who don’t want to believe it or are dedicated to something else. But once you have this viewpoint there is a benevolent motivation to explain what the possibility is of the errors that people are making, and that if they would just step back and look at the bigger picture and examine some very basic issues, they could profit tremendously from doing so. That reminds me of the quote from Lucian that we have on the front page of EpicureanFriends.com: that the purpose of his writing Alexander the Oracle Monger was “to strike a blow for Epicurus, the man whose holiness and divinity of nature were not shams, who alone imparted true insight into the good, and who brought deliverance to all that consorted with him.” Those are almost apocalyptic or religious words to describe the situation, but nevertheless it’s this insight into the ultimate questions of what’s good and bad that’s a necessary first step if you’re going to help yourself or your friends escape the grip of errors that are plaguing their lives with unhappiness.
Joshua: I think that’s a very good point. And just one more thing on this issue of whether humans are part of nature: it was very often the view that humans have two aspects — the soul, which is supernatural, and the body, which is natural — and that the project of life is to subdue the flesh so that the spirit may soar, however you want to put it. But if we could have brought Epicurus’ message to, for example, Saint Jerome — although Jerome knew about it — he wouldn’t have had to beat himself bloody with a rock in order to subdue the flesh, because he would have understood that his flesh was part of him and he was part of nature. And there is no reason to do what Saint Benedict did, which was throw himself into a bramble bush. This purposeful inflicting of pain on yourself to draw a finer distinction between the flesh and the soul is a position you cannot arrive at reasonably if you start with Epicurus’ major points.
Martin: In this regard, the Vatican has repeatedly discouraged people from injuring themselves, because they falsely interpreted the separation between soul and body in that way. Like the two people Joshua just mentioned. So repeatedly the Vatican has clearly said we should not do that. So it’s not only from the Epicurean side but also by proper application of even Christian teachings that you arrive at the same result.
Cassius: Okay, well, as we begin to come to the end of today’s episode, we’re probably also at the end of this examination of the inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda. There’s a lot more material that’s in it, unfortunately much of it in fragmentary condition, but for purposes of our podcast we’ll bring the examination to an end today. So why don’t we close the episode with any general comments that anybody wants to make about the inscription itself and how it fits into their view of Epicurean philosophy. Any other general thoughts as we close on Diogenes of Oenoanda?
Joshua: It just occurred to me that simply the geographical reach of Epicureanism throughout its whole history — I was reading a review of Stephen Greenblatt’s book The Swerve, and the person who wrote the review made the slightly strange claim that Epicureanism was rare, not just rare after the Middle Ages but even before them. And I thought that couldn’t more clearly contradict the historical record. One of the reasons we know that is because of the sheer breadth or reach of the Epicurean empire. It stretches from essentially Asia Minor — which is where we’ve been located for all of this inscription — to Egypt in the south, particularly centered in the city of Alexandria, where there are I think maybe two or three named Epicureans associated with that city. Of course we don’t have their books surviving. Obviously there’s Epicurean presence in Greece and Rome. But even as far afield from Asia Minor as France, where you’ve got this famous mosaic — what they call it, the House of the Authors, or the House of the Greek Philosophers, at Autun — and it has a mosaic or mural on the wall with portraits of some of the early Epicureans. I can’t immediately recall which ones are on the wall. I’m thinking Metrodorus and Epicurus.
Cassius: I think you’re right about that. The city is spelled A-U-T-U-N — Autun. I think Bernard Frischer used that to argue about which direction the arm was placed in the ancient statues of Epicurus.
Joshua: Yes. There’s an inscription associated with each one, and for Epicurus it says — and this is essentially the text of Principal Doctrine 5 — “it is not possible to live with pleasure without living in a careful, good and just way, nor to live in a careful, good and just way without living with pleasure.” And for Metrodorus: “We are born only once, it is not possible to be born twice. You, however, who are not master of your tomorrow, postpone the joy. But life is lost within the time limit, and each of us dies busy.”
Cassius: Another constant theme — how important it is not to procrastinate in attempting to pursue our goals of happy living. So in addition to Diogenes of Oenoanda and his inscription, you’ve got this mosaic in the House of Authors at Autun in France — Autun was actually founded by Augustus, as Augustodunum. So you’ve got Epicurean influence there. And in addition to that, we’ve got the works of Philodemus, which have been partially recovered from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. So it’s very, very strange how some of this stuff gets preserved. We’re lucky to have as much as we do.
Joshua: One thing I might point out is that the mosaic in this house of authors in France was also dated from the second century — about the same time as the inscription.
Cassius: About the same time as the inscription. And again about the same time that Lucian was writing his work against Alexander the Oracle Monger. So clearly there’s an important flourishing all across the Roman Empire — in France, in Asia Minor, in Greece, in Rome, in Alexandria, all at about the same time, and about the same time that Christianity is really coming into its own.
Cassius: And that’s the point I want to make as we think about this: here we are several hundred years after Epicurus, and there’s no evidence that the influence of other philosophies had run the Epicurean school out of business. It’s not like the blinding brilliant insights of Stoicism had led everyone to abandon Epicurus. It’s not like Neo-Platonism or any philosophy of idealizing logic or abstractions had swept away the Epicurean viewpoint. It was something else that eventually led to the submergence of the Epicurean viewpoint — the influence of this new religion from the east that eventually swept everything else away in its path. So the Epicurean viewpoint was not defeated by a better philosophical outlook, by the superior reasoning of Stoicism or Platonism or Aristotelianism or any other Greek philosophical outlook. It was superseded only by an absolutist religious viewpoint.
Callistheni: After looking at these fragments, and also thinking back on the Letter to Menoikeus, it seems that what comes up here is going to be good source material — or even just an outline — for how to create an Epicurean pamphlet for now, for our times. What would we need to include? Going through and seeing that the wall is really just a big giant pamphlet in physical form and using clues from that to create what we need now. It really would be good if we had pamphlets to give out — and I don’t know who we would give the pamphlets to; that would be up to each individual to decide. But if there’s ever to be any in-person meeting of Epicureans in the future instead of just online, to have in-person meetings, it seems pamphlets would be a very good thing to have on hand.
Cassius: Yeah, the whole idea of summarizing the philosophy into an attractive written presentation and making it available — as opposed to forcing people to listen to you by yelling at them on the street corner — seems to be the way they approached things in the ancient world, and it probably makes sense today as well: to know what the really important points are, convey them in an attractive and persuasive manner, and not attempt to force a bunch of details on people who aren’t ready for them, but at least be able to introduce the major topics and why they’re important.
Diogenes of Oenoanda’s public presentation on this wall is probably, even more so than Lucretius’s poem, the best indication we have of a mature Epicurean presentation of its important points to a general audience. And even though what we have left is fragmentary, even in those sections that are fragmentary, we at least know the topics being discussed. We do see that he was discussing physics, epistemological issues, the nature of the universe — so those are not necessarily advanced topics for people who have spent six weeks reading about pleasure and happiness. They’re foundational topics that should be discussed early in the process to inform all the rest of it. Diogenes’s inscription is one of the best prototypes we have left for that.
The other example of this tendency to write and deliver pamphlets: I think the best source we have on this comes from Cicero. He’s in the Senate and he’s delivering a speech — I think on the floor of the Senate — to his fellow senator Calpurnius Piso, who is the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, and the Senate is trying to decide what to do about Caesar. And Cicero shouts out to Piso, “Send him a pamphlet!” — because both Piso and apparently Julius Caesar were inclined toward the Epicurean school. So “send him a pamphlet” was Cicero’s satirical or sarcastic way of putting it, but it reflects a truth that existed in reality, which was that they were pamphleteers. They did have a tendency to summarize their philosophy and try to get it out to as many people as possible. And the three letters that we’ve already gone through — the letters to Herodotus, to Pythocles, and to Menoikeus — are a perfect example of what that looked like. And Diogenes of Oenoanda, picking up on that same approach, is doing exactly the same thing about 400 years later in Asia Minor.
We’re planning on starting a series of very general summaries of the important aspects of Epicurean philosophy. We’re planning on using the organization plan of Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy just to help us organize the major topics in a coherent way. Over the last many episodes and several years of this podcast we’ve attempted to use the details of the surviving texts as discussion material to go over these points in detail. What we’ll do beginning with our next episode is maybe step back and take a more general approach, and as Diogenes of Oenoanda has done, as Lucretius has done, think about and talk about the broad outlines and basics of Epicurean philosophy. The details are sometimes important, sometimes they’re not. As Epicurus himself said in the Letter to Herodotus, you don’t frequently need the details, but you do frequently need a general outline in your mind of the important aspects of the philosophy. So let’s go ahead and see if anyone has any final comments on Diogenes of Oenoanda. Callistheni?
Callistheni: I found it interesting to be a part of this, so thank you. I enjoyed it.
Cassius: We’re glad to have had you, and we’ll certainly look forward to having you in the coming episodes. Martin, any closing thoughts on Diogenes of Oenoanda?
Martin: No, nothing.
Cassius: All right, thank you as always, Martin. Joshua?
Joshua: I said it in the first episode and I think it might be worth repeating that this is the longest inscription that survives from the ancient world on any subject. And as we come now to having discussed it for several weeks, it might be clear even in fragmentary form how long this inscription must have been and the trouble and time that it would have taken to produce it. So grateful that it was produced and that it survives, and for the work of the archaeologists who have rediscovered it in the modern age. Interesting to think that to a certain extent what we’ve been doing is exactly what Diogenes of Oenoanda intended. He intended to preserve these basic points for people across the world to understand the important aspects of Epicurean philosophy — and we have just been doing our small part to get that very same message thousands of years later, not just to Asia Minor but across the world. So his inscription continues to this day to serve the purpose for which it was originally erected. It may be in fragments, it may be strewn across the ground in this mountainous area of Turkey, but he has succeeded in preserving the message that he intended to preserve.
Cassius: And that’s a happy note to end our discussion of Diogenes of Oenoanda today. Thank you for being here with us. Please drop by the forum — we will put some notes up about some of the things we discussed today — and then we’ll be back next week with a new episode. Until then, thanks very much, and we’ll see you in a week.
Martin: Bye.
Joshua: Bye.
Callistheni: Bye.