Episode 156 - Lucretius Today Interviews Dr. Emily Austin - Part One
Date: 01/18/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2825-episode-156-lucretius-today-interviews-dr-emily-austin-part-one/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 156 is the first part of a special two-part interview with Dr. Emily Austin, Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and author of Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life (Oxford University Press, November 2022). The regular panel is expanded to include Don from Ohio, a former regular who returns for this special occasion. Emily describes her path from 20th-century analytic philosophy to ancient Greek philosophy — originally focused on Plato and the fear of death — and how she came to write the book after a challenge at a conference where colleagues assumed no one would want to write the Epicurus volume in Oxford’s Guides to the Good Life series. She presents the fourfold remedy as the best map of what makes Epicureanism distinctive: God presents no fears, death presents no evils, the good is easy to get, and the bad can be endured. On hedonism, she defends Epicurus as a psychological hedonist who thinks humans are animals navigating the world through pleasure and pain, and traces resistance to this view largely to Puritan cultural conditioning. She distinguishes necessary goods from what she terms “extravagant” pleasures (natural but unnecessary), arguing that the “ascetic mistake” — making Epicurus oppose extravagances entirely — misses what is distinctive about him. On the fear of death, she emphasizes that the most useful Epicurean argument is not merely that non-existence is not bad, but that the desire for endless life is itself a corrosive desire that prevents satisfaction with what one currently has. The contrast with Stoicism is sharpened: Stoicism tells people that bad things are part of a divine plan and thus secretly good; Epicurus says bad things are simply bad, but offers friends, memories, and pleasant distractions as tools to endure them. The episode also addresses the Lucretius “cliff” passage charitably (the shipwrecked sailors are often there because of greed), discusses Montaigne’s deep engagement with Lucretius, Lonesome Dove’s character Gus as a literary Epicurean (with Call as his Stoic counterpart), and the cultural phenomenon of “guilty pleasures” as a product of anti-pleasure conditioning.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to a special two-part episode 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. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean text and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you too 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 we are very pleased to bring you an interview with a special guest, Dr. Emily Austin, Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. Dr. Austin is author of the book Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life, which was published in November 2022 by the Oxford University Press as part of its Guides to the Good Life series. Dr. Austin graduated from Hendrix College in Arkansas and received her doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis in 2009. Since that time she’s been teaching philosophy at Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Dr. Austin’s book has been getting great reviews, in large part due to her combination of philosophical detail with a friendly and engaging approach. We’ll be calling her Emily during most of the podcast, but don’t let that informality cause you to underestimate her work. Dr. Austin applies both her academic credentials and her teaching skills to the task of showing how Epicurean philosophy differs sharply from Stoicism and how it stands for a truly positive approach to life that is not grounded in asceticism, but in the central and uncompromising appreciation of pleasure in the pursuit of happiness. We’ve broken the interview down into two parts. In this first part, we introduce you to Dr. Austin and to her approach to Epicurus. In part two, we’ll dive even deeper into the philosophy that inspired Lucretius to write his poem and our team at EpicureanFriends.com to bring you this podcast.
Our normal podcast panel is with us today and because this is a special episode, let’s take a second to introduce each of those. First, a podcaster who has not been with us recently but is back for this special episode — Don from Ohio.
Don:
Hi. It’s a pleasure to be here this morning and I am very happy to take part in the conversation.
Cassius:
And we have with us also Callistheni from Georgia.
Callistheni:
Hi there. I’m glad to be here.
Cassius:
And we have Joshua from Iowa.
Joshua:
Very good morning. I’m very much looking forward to our conversation today.
Cassius:
And Martin, originally from Germany, now from Thailand.
Martin:
Good morning.
Cassius:
Okay. Thanks everybody. It’s great to have everyone with us today. Dr. Austin, tell us about yourself.
Emily Austin:
Yeah. It’s great to be here. Thanks, Cassius. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. So like you said, I grew up in Arkansas, in Little Rock. And I majored in philosophy in college, went to graduate school. Actually, I hated graduate school and I quit for a year. And then I went back and completely changed my interest in philosophy. So I went to graduate school to study 20th-century analytic philosophy and somehow ended up studying ancient Greek philosophy. And like you said, I now live in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and I’ve lived there for quite a long time. I have recently spent my summers in Wyoming and I’m hoping to spend summers there in the future, in part because I now have a job as campground host for the National Forest Service at a campground in Wyoming. So I like to say that I split my time between North Carolina and Wyoming.
Cassius:
Well, great. What we’re going to be doing today is talking about both Epicurean philosophy in general and your book in particular. And so our format will be: I’ll introduce a topic, Dr. Austin will respond, and then our panelists will make comments and ask follow-up questions. So Dr. Austin, what made you decide to get interested in Epicurean philosophy in the first place? And tell us about the writing of your book, which is published by Oxford University Press, part of a series, I understand. So tell us about the background of your book.
Emily Austin:
Right. So most of my research has been on Plato historically. And I didn’t really know anything about Epicurus until I got to graduate school. The rise in Stoicism, and kind of the research interest in Hellenistic philosophy in general, has made it more common for undergraduates to know some stuff about Stoicism and Epicureanism, but it’s not part of the standard undergraduate education. So when I went to graduate school, I didn’t know much of anything about Epicurus. And I zeroed in on a research project on Plato and the fear of death. And whenever I would tell people that I work on death in ancient Greek philosophy, they would say, “Oh, Epicurus.” And I thought, “No, Plato.” But I realized that that was something I needed to know. And so I started working on Epicurus and my advisor taught a graduate seminar on it. And I discovered that I really liked Epicurus and I had an idea about Epicurus on the fear of death. So I started working on that and ended up publishing a paper on Epicurus and death. But then during my pre-tenure years, I wrote almost exclusively on Plato. But after tenure, I taught a Hellenistic philosophy class, in part again because people are so interested in Stoicism these days. And there’s nothing quite like teaching something to make you really get it. So by that point, I really liked Epicurus, but I didn’t have any designs to write a book on him.
Actually, I was at a conference with some friends and they were talking about this Guides to the Good Life series and how sort of novel it was and how they were interested in writing a book for it. One woman wanted to write the skepticism volume and another guy wanted to write the Plato volume. And then they just said, “But who would possibly write the Epicurus volume? No one.” And I thought, well, that doesn’t sit right — I’m a philosopher. So I needed to contest that. And I started giving this defense of why Epicureanism was really good philosophy for the series. And I found myself so passionate that I wondered whether I should be the one to write the book. And I went back and talked to my students and I said, “Well, I’m not sure I should write a book that’s too close to an advice book.” And they asked why. And I said, “Because I’m not terribly good at living — I’m not a life coach.” But they convinced me to do it. And I approached the editors and I had to convince them that Epicurus was a suitable philosophy for the volume, but eventually they came around too. And I wrote the book and it was the most satisfying writing experience that I’ve had as a philosopher.
Joshua:
Emily, I want to pick up on something you said — that this was the thing that you most enjoyed writing. I think Cassius and Callistheni and maybe Martin — we had a conversation with somebody the other day discussing various books pertaining to Epicurean philosophy. And the point that this person made was that he could tell reading your book that you really enjoyed writing it. So it’s interesting to see how that comes through in the text. Sometimes you read books on philosophy and the person who’s writing the book is bored and the person who’s reading the book is bored. One thing I can say about Living for Pleasure is I don’t think anybody’s bored — and certainly I wasn’t when I read it. It’s been very interesting to read it. Your book only came out in November, so it’s interesting to see the way in which in some ways it has actually already changed the conversation. So I’m happy you enjoyed writing it; I’m happy you wrote it, because it’s a very good book to read, and it’s certainly a book that I’m going to turn to again and again in our interest on this subject.
Emily Austin:
That’s great to hear. It’s mainly that — I guess it was two reasons. One is that I got to sort of unleash the parts of my prose style that are not welcome in formal writing. You can’t be terribly playful in a philosophy journal article. But also, I think — and this is something I say at the end of the book — it actually helped me a lot to write it, because there are a lot of things that I thought, “Well, that’s not a healthy thing to care about in life,” but I couldn’t exactly explain why. And having to sit down and justify some of Epicurus’s claims that I agreed with, but to actually give them some sort of underlying justification — I found it difficult but also clarifying for myself. So it wasn’t just that it was fun prose-wise, but that — it seems a little cliché to say I grew from the experience, but I think that’s true.
Cassius:
I totally believe you on that point, because my experience in doing this podcast has been that I have learned so much more about this subject from having to come up here every week and defend it in front of an invisible audience. So I totally understand that point. And like I said, I’m just happy you undertook the time and what it took to do it. And now that we’ve heard you here and in some of the other interviews that you’ve done, I’m ready for the audiobook version.
Emily Austin:
Oh, me too. Yeah. Somebody asked me about that. And I don’t know how that works through Oxford, and I think a lot of people record their own work. And I had thought about that, but I’m still a little terrified of my voice being recorded. I’m getting past that enough that I might be willing to do it.
Joshua:
Yeah, that was me. That was the first question I asked you: when’s the audiobook coming out? Because it’s such a great book and the character of the person writing it really comes through. And so to have it read is a real experience that hopefully I can look forward to one day.
Cassius:
Well, here’s one of the themes of what we’re going to be discussing for the rest of the podcast today. Presumably most of the people listening to our podcast are interested in how Epicurean philosophy differs from Stoicism. Dr. Austin has brought up already that there was certainly a lot of argument between the schools in the ancient world and that argument continues today. While we don’t want to make this podcast focused entirely on contrasting Stoicism and Epicurean philosophy, probably the most important thing for our listeners to hear would be what Dr. Austin thinks about the major aspects of Epicurean philosophy that distinguish it, and what are some of the most important principles to take away from the question of why someone should want to study Epicurean philosophy.
Emily Austin:
Yeah. So I mean, that’s obviously a big question, so I’ll just try to zero in on some stuff that I think does appeal to my students and myself. So one thing about Epicurus is that even more than the Stoics, I think he believes philosophy is in the service of living well — by that I mean philosophy is almost useless unless it serves that purpose. So a lot of people think of philosophy as impractical, and Epicurus thinks that if it is impractical, then it’s not worth doing. So people should naturally be drawn to taking Epicurus seriously as a contender simply because we all want to live a good life.
And Epicurus is a hedonist, which makes him very distinctive in the ancient world, because a lot of the arguments of his predecessors either just completely dismissed hedonism as a life fit for beasts, or when they did take hedonism seriously, they marshaled a series of arguments to the effect that it couldn’t be what we aimed at — we had to stop thinking about pleasure, or it was always going to be downstream, not what we should focus on. So one thing is that taking Epicurus seriously as a hedonist makes him very distinctive.
The later Epicureans chose a series of commitments of Epicureanism to distill into what’s called the tetrapharmakos, which is the fourfold remedy. And while I think there’s a lot of other stuff that happens in Epicureanism, and taking Epicureanism to just be the justification for these four principles is a mistake, they do draw out some big themes. And so as you probably know, but maybe listeners don’t, the fourfold remedy has four components: God presents no fears; death presents no evils; the good is easy to get; and the bad can be endured.
The first two, I think, are actually in some sense the most interesting differences between Stoicism and Epicureanism. So when Epicurus says that God presents no fears, some people have mistaken Epicurus to be an atheist, but I think that much like other ancient Greek philosophers, he’s just sort of a revisionist. He thinks that most people have the wrong view of the gods. Epicurus has a very controversial view: he thinks that the gods don’t play a role in creating the universe. The universe was not designed by the gods — the Stoics think it was. And then the gods don’t intervene in life either to benefit or to harm or capriciously. So they don’t interact with us. In fact, Epicurus thinks they don’t get invested in us; they don’t really care what we do — that would be beneath them. And so there’s a sense in which Epicurus thinks that one of the great fears people have is that they suffer the wrath of God either in this life or the next, for reasons they don’t even understand. And Epicurus wants to get rid of that fear. So he has a God that doesn’t create the universe, doesn’t intervene in it, and doesn’t punish or reward people. And I think that’s very controversial, but I find it pretty compelling because it solves a lot of problems.
And then the idea that we shouldn’t fear death — that death presents no evils — is another thing that’s very central to Epicureanism, and in part that’s from his hedonism. Hedonism says that what is good for us is pleasure and what is bad for us is pain. So we have incentive to pursue pleasure but also to avoid pain. One of the sources of anxiety, again, is the idea that the gods could be angry at us, but another is that death is the end of our existence. Epicurus offers a series of arguments to the effect that that’s not bad for us — that death ending our existence is not bad. He has two main arguments. The first is that non-existence is not bad. And so because it’s not bad, we shouldn’t fear it. But the other is that it’s actually bad for us to wish for an endless life — that we make a mistake by thinking our life needs to be very long. He thinks the reason is that we’ll never be satisfied with what we have if we think we need more. If we need another day and another day after that, then this day will never be enough for us. So part of his plan is not just to get rid of our fear of non-existence, but also to have us orient our lives towards satisfaction with what we have rather than always needing more.
So those are the first two. And then the second two are more concerned with the practical philosophy. The good is easy to get, and the bad we can endure. When people say the good is easy to get, they think: “Right, yeah — tell that to the poor working mother.” And one thing to know is that for Epicurus, what counts as good, at least at root, is what’s necessary for a good life for creatures like us. And he thinks that if we organize our individual and to some extent our community priorities correctly, we’ll be able to get the necessities. And the necessities are not just food and water and shelter — it’s also the sorts of things that give us a sense of security: knowing that you have friends who will be there for you, knowing that you know how to navigate the world and understand it through science. So there’s a bigger group of things that are necessary than we think of as bare necessities. But Epicurus thinks if we prioritize, we can get those things. And then there are other things Epicurus thinks are good — fancier versions of those things that can include various kinds of extravagances. He thinks those are actually often very available without struggle; they’re not necessary, but they really contribute goodness to our lives. What distinguishes them is that they’re not the sorts of things that give you anxiety.
And then the bad is easy to endure. To some extent he might be overselling his wares there, because really bad things are not easy to endure. But he does think he has a set of strategies to help people get through bad things. And so one thing that’s distinctive about Epicureanism as opposed to Stoicism is that when somebody suffers a grave misfortune, the Stoic response is: “Well, this is part of a universal plan. God set in motion the origins of the universe, and that God made things good. So everything that happens in the universe is good. When your child dies, regardless of whether you understand why God did that, it was for a good reason.” When you have a universe like Epicurus’s that wasn’t designed — and certainly wasn’t designed for good — then you don’t find yourself saying, “Oh, well, these bad things are actually good in a way I don’t understand.” They’re just bad. And so what Epicurus wants to do is say, those don’t get rid of your chances for living a good life, and there are ways that you can handle them. Here he has this super distinctive view: when we suffer a misfortune, we need friends — that’s just something he thinks we need and they help get us through it. But also he thinks that if we live a really pleasant life filled with rich memories, we can sort of dip into that bank of memories to distract us and get through the difficult times. So he doesn’t think it’s easy to endure in the sense that it’s not bad — he thinks that there are tools that a person who has organized their life well will be able to draw on to get through adversity. Those include friends, but also memories and other kinds of pleasant distractions.
There are lots of other parts of Epicureanism that are fascinating, like his views on justice and deep into the views on friendship. But I do think that fourfold remedy gives you a map of what makes Epicureanism distinctive: just the revisionist theology, the conception of death, and the idea that if we prioritize things we can get what we need and endure what’s bad.
Cassius:
That is one of the best expositions of the fourfold remedy I think I’ve ever heard. So thank you very much for that. I do also appreciate the way you formulated the first and second lines, because I’ve often seen them given as almost commandments in some translations — like “Don’t fear God, don’t worry about death.” And to me, I’ve never seen that in the texts themselves. It’s more, to me, observations of how things are as opposed to commandments. And I think you’ve done a great job in paraphrasing and translating those in a much more accurate and approachable way. So thank you very much.
Emily Austin:
Yeah, sure.
Cassius:
Dr. Austin, as you started your answer there, what objections will many people make? They’ll agree with almost every item that you’ve listed in practical terms as sounding like a good idea. But in the end, they just cannot live with the idea that pleasure can be an accurate or full description of what ought to be the goal of life. How would you deal with this question of: ultimately, can pleasure really be the foundation of what life is all about?
Emily Austin:
I go back and forth about this. Part of me just thinks that for Epicurus, we are animals. And the way that we get to know the world is through our five senses, but also our feelings of pleasure and pain. And so in some sense, he would just think, well, that’s where everything has to start. And so in some sense, we’re just hedonists by nature. We feel pleasure is good and pain is bad, and that’s the way we navigate the world. And so insofar as we figure out what a good life for creatures like us would look like, we’re still always going to be doing that through reflection on pleasure and pain. And that makes it sound like he could start from pleasure and pain and then just go way off into duty and obligation, which I don’t think he does. So I do think he thinks that what we fundamentally want is pleasure and what we fundamentally don’t want is pain. And the thing that he wants us to be able to do is to reason well about those things.
When other people say, “Oh, well, pleasure just can’t be all there is,” I think something like: well, describe to me your good life. And I don’t think people can do it without thinking of all of those things as contributing to a rich human life. Now some people will say, “Oh, but I just really love pain.” I find that super weird. And that comes out more when people say, “Epicurus is opposed to ambition,” or “Epicurus is opposed to, you know, CrossFit or something.” So I think oddly what people object to is not so much that pleasure is good — they just really think that a lot of the things that cause pain are good. And so they think, well, surely I can’t avoid things like ambition. Pain is part of the human existence. So sometimes I don’t think they think it’s about duty; they just think pain is good.
Cassius:
I think you raise a good point there, because even in that, it seems to me — if people are going to say, “Well, you know, I love the pain of a hard 5K run or marathon” — if you dig down, there’s still, it seems to me, pleasure in the fact that they’re completing the run, that they’re doing something that they find challenging and they’re taking pleasure in that. So even at the root of that, it seems there’s still pleasure in there.
Emily Austin:
Yeah. I mean, I agree. I think Epicurus is a psychological hedonist, which essentially means that when we pursue things, we are pursuing pleasure. So I don’t think he thinks that if someone says, “Oh no, I don’t do a marathon for pleasure, I do it for a sense of obligation,” Epicurus would say, “Well, that’s what you think you’re doing it for, but you’re really doing it for pleasure.” But I think even if it weren’t the case that all our actions are aimed at pleasure, whether we agree with that or not, that is a good example of where if you ask someone why they do it, it would eventually end in pleasure. So I think a lot of it is just — sometimes I think it’s just that the culture is so opposed to pleasure that you have to convince people that they themselves are not really, upon reflection, opposed to pleasure.
Cassius:
Oh, I think you hit the nail on the head there, exactly. I think it’s definitely a cultural thing — thank you Puritans for establishing what we call American culture. Yeah, I think a lot of it is, yes, definitely.
Emily Austin:
Those people were weird. I did a lot of study of the Puritans, and in fact they were the people who got me interested in death, because I took a history of death in America course in college, and it was the most fascinating class I took in college. And so when I went to graduate school, I was already kind of primed to be thinking about death-related things. But the Puritans had the weirdest views about death of anybody I’ve ever run into — which is a topic for another day. But yes, the fact that they launched our culture explains a lot of our dysfunction.
Cassius:
Agreed. You know, it’s interesting that one of the early English translations of Lucretius comes from a very interesting Puritan woman named Lucy Hutchinson — a poem which she did not publish, would not allow to be published, but she sent it to the Earl of Anglesey with a note attached saying, “If this was still in my hands, I would burn it; I disavow every penny in this poem and regret my wanton dalliance with impious books,” I think is how she puts it. So you’re right, it is a very interesting movement.
You mentioned something a bit ago about how Epicurus could have gone in the direction of obligation and duty, but didn’t. I think there are going to be people, particularly people reading Lucretius, who are actually going to take that as a point of criticism. I’m thinking particularly of this scene that Lucretius paints of himself standing on an eminence looking over the ocean and seeing a dire shipwreck, seeing all of these people struggling in horrifying pain, people drowning — and thinking to himself, “Sure glad I’m not out there doing that right now.” But you handled this, I think, rather well in your book, so I wanted to give you a chance to maybe go into it a little bit here and hopefully put a better light on it.
Emily Austin:
Yeah, that’s a really beautiful passage, and you can tell that Lucretius is really proud of his poetry there. But yeah, I’ve made my peace with it. You’re right that it sounds amazingly condescending — almost literally, because he’s on a cliff looking down on them. There are parts of me sometimes that just want to say, well, Lucretius is not always having his best day; sometimes he’s just smug. But I do think that he is criticizing the ways that some of our pernicious desires — or counterproductive desires; in my book I call them corrosive desires — can lead us to do things that put us in peril. And some of those things I think he’s describing are things that you wouldn’t be in those situations if it weren’t for bad desire. I think even he thinks the people who are subject to shipwreck in that part are on a boat because they’re traders, so they’re off to get riches. They sail the sea to get money, and that’s a very risky venture. And so here they are about to be shipwrecked because of their greed. And I think he thinks the same thing explains war — the people who are in battle are there not necessarily because they themselves are greedy; perhaps they were conscripted or forced into the war, but because human beings are greedy for power or land.
So there is a sense in which I can see how he thinks: these are the things that result when people give rein to their corrosive desires. But I do think that there’s a certain condescension in that, because I think that for me, the point of Epicureanism is not to become a sage or a saint. I don’t think that’s really possible. And so there’s a sense in which that’s not a good way to convert people — to say, “Hey, you guys are all idiots and I’m kind of mocking you.” I think there would be a gentler way to say wars start because of corrosive desires, and shipwrecks are often the result of greed.
Cassius:
Yeah, I kind of agree with you. I think we could probably give Lucretius the benefit of the doubt here by saying he doesn’t see himself as being in an ivory tower in this case. He wants everyone on that cliff and he’s trying to do that through his poem — but not everyone’s going to get up there, would be a way to put it.
Joshua:
Yeah, my father, whenever he would tell a joke that didn’t land — something entirely corny and no one would laugh — he would say, “They can’t all be gems.” And so I think that sometimes we just have to give people that. Maybe Lucretius just really wanted to write that passage, and maybe he shouldn’t have, but it’s not reason to give him up.
I’ve also seen that passage in Lucretius as a way of making sure that you have gratitude for the situation that you find yourself in — so that you’re not necessarily taking schadenfreude from the people that are in the shipwreck, but you are grateful for the situation that you find yourself in. So that’s how I’ve tried to spin it in my own head.
Emily Austin:
Yeah, I think that’s right. I think there are lots of ways to give a charitable reading of Epicurus there, and I think there are good reasons to do that. But I do understand why some people read that passage and consider it cruel.
Cassius:
Oh, definitely agree. Dr. Austin, you’ve mentioned death several times and the Puritans’ view of death. It’s always seemed to me that it’s an important part of Epicurean philosophy that the reason you’re pursuing living well is that if you know that your life is short and you’re not going to be living in heaven in the future — if you only have one chance — you’re going to take life very seriously and make sure you don’t waste your time. With your past study of death, I’m wondering if you see a connection between one’s view of death and one’s view of Epicurean philosophy.
Emily Austin:
Yeah, I do. One of the things that didn’t occur to me — strangely, it did occur to me to some extent, but I didn’t think when I started the book that I would write a chapter about the desire for a sort of limitless life. If you reject immortality, but you just want to prolong your life as long as possible, I hadn’t thought of that as a desire that Epicurus really wanted to get rid of. So I guess the main thing I hadn’t realized is that prolonging your life is a corrosive desire for him — a desire to have more and more. And so I do think that once you realize that the desire that a lot of these CEOs have to live immortally through technology, that Epicurus wouldn’t approve of that and why he wouldn’t — I do think that changes your attitude towards daily living.
So although the phrase “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” is associated with Epicurus, he never wrote it as far as we know. But I do think that captures something about Epicureanism — not the idea that you spend your day at some drunken wine party every day, but that there is a sense in which once you realize that this could be your last day, that kind of resets your priorities. But also I think the thing that affected me in a certain way — because you might think, you know, this idea is something like “your each day needs to be the best day it can be” — more for me I realized that this is enough. So once you get into a mindset where you’ve organized your life well and you’re satisfied, then the next day is sort of like a gift, right, instead of something you expect. And the joke I tell myself is something like: “I’ve had a good run. And if it ends, then it ends. But this has been really good.” And so when you get in that mindset where what you have is satisfying, then it’s not like you don’t want the next day — but it’s really nice when you get it, and it’s not expected.
It helped me more to think about being satisfied with what I have than any of the arguments about how non-perception or annihilation is not a harm. I think those are good arguments and I think they distill a certain kind of fear. But to me, the idea that desire in the future is in a certain way harmful — and that once you stop doing that, you can organize your life in a way to be satisfied — that’s what clicked.
Cassius:
Yeah, that brought to mind — I did a quick search here as you were talking — the fragment that goes: “He who needs tomorrow least, most gladly greets the coming day.” So that’s exactly what you were saying.
Emily Austin:
Yeah, exactly. I was really struck by that. And I mean, I think that’s just true. Epicurus thinks that living itself, when you’re living the Epicurean life, is pleasant. And so the idea that you get to do it more is great. You don’t have to do it more. But yeah, the idea that you wake up the next day and you’re like, “I’m still living a really good life” — if you didn’t expect that, that makes it more pleasant. And the way that Epicurus thinks about everything that is not strictly necessary for your wellbeing — it’s a hit of pleasure.
Cassius:
And I’ve maintained on the forum too that Epicurus really encourages us to take pleasure in the everyday things, that it’s not all about the big giant trips to Rome or life on the beach or something like that — that he really wants us to take pleasure in those little everyday things that happen to us as well.
Emily Austin:
Yeah. I guess I like the “as well” there, because one of the things I hesitate to do — a lot of people like to take away those big trips to Rome or these sorts of things that we consider in some sense, unfortunately, as overindulgent, sort of like guilty pleasures almost. I think those are really important to Epicurus. They’re just things that are better insofar as they’re rare and you can savor them. It’s not like they’re on your bucket list such that your life will not have been worth it if you don’t make it to Rome. But I do think that he thinks that all sorts of things can enrich your life. But yeah, I think the main things are the things that are within reach.
One of the things I mentioned to one of you is that I kind of went down a rabbit hole with the novel Lonesome Dove. One of the reasons: I read it actually before this happened, but I noticed in the introduction that Larry McMurtry described the character Gus — who’s just a totally lovable character — as an Epicurean, and his friend Call as a Stoic. And I thought, well, to what extent is McMurtry working with a real conception of Epicurean here, because he was hyper-educated, probably one of the most well-read novelists in American literature at the time. And one of the great lines that Gus has is something like — there’s this woman and she wants to go to San Francisco, and he says something like, “Life in San Francisco is still just life,” and that you’re better off taking pleasure in smaller things like comfortable beds and tasty food, and of course because he’s trying to seduce her he says something like “feisty gentlemen such as myself.” But there is a sense in which what he really does want you to do is focus on the pleasures that are easy and within reach and simple. But I think he does think trips to Rome really do add something — or enrich an already good experience, maybe that’s a better way to say it.
Cassius:
No, I think you’re spot on with that. For one thing, you’ve definitely made me want to go back and read Lonesome Dove again.
Emily Austin:
No, it is really funny to do because I found myself wanting to write about it and then I was like, “Oh, I’ll just go down a rabbit hole.” So I did scribble some stuff out. But yeah, it’s actually — there’s a lot more Epicureanism than you would think. And my thought is that he probably got it from Montaigne, who did write a lot about Epicurus. McMurtry did a lot of French literature and Shakespearean stuff, so I think that’s where he got it if I were guessing. But there is a lot of Hellenistic philosophy in Lonesome Dove, oddly.
Cassius:
That’s great. And the other thing — you keep using the word “enriched” too, and I think that’s absolutely right. Because you bring up in the book a lot about how the whole idea is to make those memories that you can rely on in the hard times and when you get older and that sort of thing. And so I think those little pleasures — the trips to Rome, the trips to the beach — those are the ones that you replay in your mind as well.
Emily Austin:
Yeah, it’s interesting — I just used this word “enrich” and I’m kind of thinking extemporaneously, giving my take on Epicurus, and I thought: why didn’t I use that word in the book? That would have been a really good word to explain what these natural and unnecessary desires give you. Because Epicurus says you don’t need them, and it has led some people to think they don’t contribute anything. But I do think that because you don’t need them, they can enrich an experience without making it the sort of thing where if you die without them, your life has been bad.
Cassius:
You’ve done a really good job in conveying that, I think both here and in the book. I’m going to police myself here, but you mentioned Montaigne, so I have to mention this quote because it kind of ties in with a lot of what we’re talking about. He says: “I want death to find me planting my cabbages, heedless of death, and still more unconcerned about the unfinished garden.” And that says a lot to me about living for the day and not being concerned about living a long time — doubles back with something you were talking about a little bit ago.
Emily Austin:
Yeah, I mean there are people who know Montaigne a lot better than I do, but he worked through that a lot. A lot of his writing was to deal with his own fear of death and his grief. And he quoted Lucretius — I think more than anything else in his texts. And he didn’t always say “Hey, I’m quoting Lucretius” because he wasn’t all that good about citations. But I do think that by the end of his life he had figured out how to face his own mortality and how to handle grief. He talks about grief and he essentially says that the Epicurean approach is better — that he has gained more from distraction. And in that sense he’s a lot like Cicero. Cicero of course hated the Epicureans, but when his daughter died he went to his friend Atticus’s house and said that he was handling his grief by writing about philosophy — and that’s about as paradigmatic a distraction as you can get. So I think Montaigne did gain a lot from Epicurus and he did see that as one of his lifetime projects: to make his peace with death. And it’s kind of nice that he ended up capturing it in that cabbage passage.
Cassius:
Yeah, one thing that many people might not know is that his edition of Lucretius does survive. So if you read French, you can read his marginalia, and a lot of it I gather is quite interesting. He received the poem in a way that a lot of people of his time did not.
Emily Austin:
Yeah, he had a pretty large library, I think. And I would love to look at it — I’m sure if I did a little bit of internet sleuthing I might be able to. But my French is not great. I have friends, though — that’s one of the nice things about having resources of people who have good French.
Cassius:
One thing I thought was interesting that struck me as you were talking over the last few minutes — about the enriching and you use the phrase “guilty pleasure,” which I think is such an interesting term — having talked about the Puritans here, that’s one of those things that sort of wheedled its way into the cultural milieu, so to speak. Even the term “guilty pleasure” rubs me the wrong way.
Emily Austin:
Yeah, I don’t like it either. But one of the things that I find interesting about the phrase “guilty pleasure” — one of the ways it comes out that I find fascinating — is that people find something pleasant that other people don’t find pleasant. So it’s sort of like: “I have this guilty pleasure of really liking Taylor Swift, but none of my friends think Taylor Swift has any artistic merit, and so I have to describe it as like a guilty pleasure.” So I do think there’s even a sort of hedonism involved in guilty pleasures.
Cassius:
That’s a good point. Oh, I like that.
Emily Austin:
So that’s why I think the intellectual snobbery / imposter syndrome thing comes in — because I think people should own what gives them pleasure. There’s a sense where it’s sort of like, “Oh, what I need to do is find the same things pleasing as other people.” And then I think there is a guilt that some people have about extravagances that stems from either the sense that they realize, rightly, that those things are available to them and not to others — so they’re expressing a kind of reserve that’s admirable. So you don’t go on and on about your trip to Rome with a friend who’s financially struggling. But I do think that there is another sense in which when we do these things we shouldn’t feel bad that we’ve taken that opportunity that was there for us. I got this weird opportunity to go to Greece for a month and I’d never been, and I went with all these Duke students — which was itself an adventure — but I don’t want to have to apologize for the fact that I got an opportunity to go to Greece for four weeks when I’d always wanted to go. So I think that there are diplomatic times to mention it or not, but you shouldn’t feel bad that good things happen to you.
Cassius:
That’s an excellent way to put it, yeah. Let me use the “guilty pleasure” discussion to generalize for just a minute on several things that you’ve talked about. The issue of sort of intense experiences that we often associate with the word pleasure — some people see a tension between pleasure versus what they understand Epicurus to be teaching about in terms of tranquility. How do you reconcile the issue of avoidance of pain versus the pursuit of pleasure? In other words, is Epicurus saying that it is so important to avoid pain that you won’t do anything ever that leads to pain? You’ve been discussing contentment as well, not needing to live forever, those kind of issues. How does a person who’s trying to understand Epicurus integrate all that into something they can understand? Once they’ve been to Rome, should they just be content and never try to go again? And of course, what I’m talking about is sort of an issue of ambition. Can you try to bring all that into a package for us?
Emily Austin:
Yeah, so I’ll start with just this idea of whether Epicurus is really only about tranquility, because there is a very common — I think — misunderstanding. And I mean it’s a misunderstanding even among those people who admire Epicurus, not just people who are out to mock him and set up an easy target. I think there is a sense in which people think that what Epicurus wants is tranquility understood as the lack of anxiety that stems from all sorts of things like ambition or desires about the future. And so they do focus on this idea that really Epicurus thinks you should pare down all your desires to this little class of things, and then once they’re satisfied you shouldn’t want anything else. And they’ll even say that this odd class of desires Epicurus has — he calls them natural and unnecessary — I call them “extravagant” because there’s just no way to write “natural, unnecessary, unnatural and unnecessary” over and over again in a book without killing everybody. So I call them extravagant. And there are a certain number of people who think that Epicurus thinks you shouldn’t care about extravagances at all. That’s the ascetic mistake that people make. They say he wants the necessary things, and then you shouldn’t even care about the others.
But when I started writing the book, my original working title was Doing Pleasure Right. So I really wanted pleasure to be in the title of the book. And I love my editor — she’s amazing to work with — but when she took the book forward to the Oxford people to decide whether to offer it a contract, she changed the title to something like Feeling Good. And I thought: no, I don’t want that. So she didn’t like Doing Pleasure Right for reasons I kind of understand, and so I ended up with Living for Pleasure because I really didn’t want pleasure to not be in there. Because I think that one of the mistakes people make is they make Epicurus too much like the other tranquility-aiming philosophies, and that takes away what’s distinctive about it.
So I do think that focusing on tranquility is a mistake. That said, I do think that Epicurus thinks probably the first step that most people need to take is to get rid of anxiety, because I think he thinks we have this vision of what a pleasant life would look like — and often the pleasant life is not a jet-setting kind of thing; it’s actually you have this image of like a family sitting down to a table, or a certain kind of learning experience, or something like that — and then he thinks that there’s all this background noise that gets in the way of that. So we do want to have these rich experiences, but in order to have them we have to strip out a lot of the things that make those experiences either impossible or kind of mar them. And so I do think he thinks a lot of what we have to do is clear away the anxiety, so that then we can prioritize pleasures and choose well among them and savor them. So I think what people don’t realize is that getting rid of this background anxiety is just kind of in the service of loving your life and loving the pleasures that you get. They stop at that first step. But he thinks all this anxiety is what’s making us prioritize the wrong things and have the wrong feelings, and if we could tackle that then we would clear up both headspace and time to pursue things that give us the life that technically we want — if that makes any sense.
Cassius:
Yeah, I think that makes perfect sense. And I think you really did a good job in the book of balancing that tranquility, or that freedom from anxiety — both for itself and in the service of being able to enjoy other things. So I think that really came across in the book as a constant theme that you really help people see the practical benefits of.
Emily Austin:
Yeah. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. People are so charitable — it’s a charitable impulse that makes them say, “Look, Epicurus is not about continuous partying; he even makes that clear, not about fish and extravagance.” And so they lean into that charitable impulse so far in their conception of the book that they overcorrect and they make him sort of opposed to pleasure. So I think in some sense I understand why people do that, because that’s the criticism that’s leveled against him and you want to clear that up. But I think they don’t find that middle ground that I think is clearly evidently there.
Cassius:
I’ve come around to the idea that he advocates both the pleasure that you get internally from tranquility and memories and that sort of thing, but he also endorses those pleasures that come from the outside — from being with friends, or going to Rome since that seems to be the metaphor we’ve hit upon. But I think the fact that you’re able to have a little bit more control over how you react to things internally — if you approach them with that tranquility and freedom from anxiety — that’s just what makes the whole thing work better.
Emily Austin:
Yeah. And I think — I’ve never been to Rome, let me just make that clear. I actually didn’t get a passport until I was 37, which is kind of surprising for an academic. I’m not super cultured. But there are other things about going to Rome that are important for Epicurus — so you shouldn’t go to Rome if your mother is sick, right? And so there are ways in which you have to think about what matters, and sometimes those pleasures are okay and sometimes they’re not.
Cassius:
Right, exactly. Thank you, Dr. Austin. That’s all the time we have for Part One of our interview with Dr. Emily Austin. Please be sure to subscribe to our podcast either at EpicureanFriends.com or at any major podcast provider. Look for the second part of our interview in the near future, and in the meantime please join us at EpicureanFriends.com in our study and pursuit of the philosophy of Epicurus.