Episode 172 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 25 - Chapter 12 - The New Hedonism 01
Date: 05/05/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3040-episode-172-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-25-chapter-12-the-new-hedonism-01/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 172 opens DeWitt’s Chapter 12, “The New Hedonism,” marking the first chapter in the book devoted entirely to pleasure and ethics after the long groundwork of epistemology, physics, determinism, and soul theory. Before entering the text, the group spends considerable time on the word “hedonism” itself: Cassius argues it functions as a slur in modern usage, carrying persistent Cyrenaic connotations of mindless sensory indulgence, and notes that the Cyrenaics, unlike Epicurus, did not accept calm states or memories and anticipations as genuine pleasures. Joshua adds that even the lowercase “epicurean” (meaning dainty food and fine wines) reflects this same misrepresentation, and Don points out the Roman myth of the Vomitorium as a room for purging between courses — a slander that attached itself to Epicureans in antiquity as well. The group agrees that Epicurus considered himself a philosopher in the fullest sense, and that the label “hedonist” obscures far more than it reveals. Turning to DeWitt’s opening paragraphs, Cassius summarizes DeWitt’s claim that Epicurus handled the problem of pleasure with such “superior precision” that ancient inquiry on the topic was effectively exhausted after him, with subsequent schools merely bickering over his findings; Joshua notes that no major figure after Epicurus (with Aristippus of Cyrene coming before him) championed pleasure as the telos in anything like his systematic way, partly because Epicurus’s expansion of pleasure to include all pain-free states represented a fundamental innovation. The group reads from Torquatus in Cicero’s De Finibus — every creature from birth seeks pleasure and recoils from pain while still uncorrupted by culture — and extensively discusses why Epicurus looked to newborns rather than adults as his observational standard: newborns have not yet been shaped by cultural indoctrination and represent nature in its pure original state, a point Cassius emphasizes will apply equally in 320 BC Athens and in 2023. The discussion of nature as the norm leads to Cassius’s suggestion that Epicurean philosophy might more aptly be called “naturism,” which Don gently corrects (the word is taken by nudists), before the group settles on “nature furnishes the norm” as the operative principle, with pleasure and pain functioning as nature’s stop-and-go signals. Don explains the Greek telos — goal, limit, endpoint — and the group explores whether nature provides any purpose or goal at all, concluding it does not in the teleological sense: Joshua uses the analogies of Darwinian natural selection and DNA self-replication to show that what looks like goal-directed behavior is simply mechanism without intent. Don then draws on the LSJ lexicon to unpack agathon and tagathon: the latter (with the definite article) becomes the Latin summum bonum, and the Greek word carries connotations of brave, serviceable, and capable rather than purely abstract “good.” The episode addresses DeWitt’s subsection titled “The Summum Bonum Fallacy,” where DeWitt controversially argues that life itself — not pleasure — is the highest good in Epicurus, since pleasure and pain have no meaning apart from living beings; Cassius reads the Plutarch/Usener 423 passage in which Epicurus himself warns against “strolling about and parading meaninglessly about the good” (a pointed jibe at the Peripatetics), and the group discusses Vatican Saying 78 on wisdom as a mortal good and friendship as an immortal good. Martin and Callistheni offer closing remarks, with Callistheni noting that the episode clarified for her that Epicureans thought of themselves as philosophers — following nature’s guidance — not as people who simply decided having a good time was the goal of life. Don and Joshua close by observing that Augustine’s declaration that Epicureanism was “so cold not a single spark could be struck from it” was premature, just as DeWitt’s own claim that Epicurus had exhausted the subject deserves scrutiny; the group looks forward to continuing through the full range of Chapter 12’s sub-topics on pleasure in coming weeks.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to 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’ll walk you through the Epicurean text and we’ll discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. 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. We’re now in the middle of a series of podcasts intended to provide a general overview of Epicurean philosophy based on the organizational structure employed by Norman DeWitt in his book, Epicurus and His Philosophy. Now let’s join the discussion.
Welcome to Episode 172 of Lucretius Today. We are now in Chapter 12 of DeWitt’s book, and before we start, let me do a brief recap of where we are and how we got here. We’re more than halfway through the book at this point, and we have now for the first time come to a chapter that’s devoted entirely to the issue of ethics and pleasure. But what we have done in the episodes leading up to this is give a history of the school, sort of a philosophical context for where Epicurus was himself jumping into the questions about how to live and the nature of the universe and so forth. We’ve gone through epistemology, we’ve gone through sensations, anticipations, and feelings, we’ve been through physics, we’ve been through determinism, we’ve been through last week the question of the nature of the soul, sensation, and the mind. All of that is the foundation for where we’re going to be talking for the next several weeks on this chapter entitled “The New Hedonism.” Obviously, Plato, Aristotle, and all of the major philosophers had an awful lot to say about the issue of pleasure up to that point. There’s a great book out there called The Greeks on Pleasure by Gosling and Taylor that goes into that background in great detail. But now as we come to Chapter 12, we’re going to talk about what Epicurus brought to the table and how he applied the conclusions that he had reached in epistemology and physics to his own version of the discussion of pleasure — one of the first sub-chapters of which is entitled “The Summum Bonum Fallacy.” And he is going to take a position on that and certain other issues that not all of us are going to think is the final word by any means. But in going through the details of these questions, I think we’ll all come out with a better understanding at the end. These are questions that can appear to be easy on the surface, and yet the further you dive into them, the more of a rabbit hole they turn into.
Joshua: I seem to remember, Cassius, that you even have — before we even get into the text itself — some issues with the word “hedonism” right there in the chapter title. So before we even get into the text, do I remember correctly that you have certain misgivings about the word hedonism itself?
Cassius: Yes. That’s the word that’s thrown around in most discussions of Epicurean philosophy. We try in the modern world to put things into categories. And to the extent that hedonism is a reference to pleasure, my view is that we would not necessarily consider Epicurean philosophy to be “pleasureism.” It is a sweeping worldview of all sorts of different aspects of life — from the nature of the universe to the nature of thought and the nature of the body and so forth. And as we all know from reading Epicurus, we don’t always choose pleasure. We choose pain at times when it leads to less pain in the future or greater pleasure. So there are many, many different moving parts to Epicurean philosophy that in my view can be poorly served if we just use the word “hedonism” in the wrong context. Obviously, when you’re talking to professional philosophers who are familiar with these issues, they understand that there are people who place pleasure near the top of their priorities, and so it makes sense to call them hedonists. Let’s talk about what the alternatives or equivalents to hedonism are. If you’re not a hedonist, what are you?
Joshua: Virtue would be one, with the Stoics, I would think.
Cassius: That’s a very good question. What’s the opposite of a hedonist? Yes, you wouldn’t call the Stoics “virtuists” or their philosophy “virtuism.” And then you wouldn’t call religious people “religionists.” To some extent, that makes sense — religionism, deism. Platonism, yes. And so there are probably some other possibilities as well. Would you say Platonism is really rationalism, or logicism — what category would Plato go in?
Joshua: The word that all of these other people would have used to describe themselves — but probably not people like Epicurus and Aristippus — would be “philosophers,” lovers of wisdom, as opposed to heedless pleasure-seekers. And I think Epicurus would have certainly considered their own views to be wisdom or true philosophy.
Cassius: Oh, yeah. He called everybody that studied with him a philosopher — that they philosophized together.
Joshua: Yeah. But everybody else thought that the Epicureans were basically like pigs.
Cassius: Correct. Exactly. “Hedonism” is a negative slur word almost. At least when we use it today, to call somebody a hedonist is not a positive thing to say about them. And that, at least to me, gets at its persistent Cyrenaic connotation, because from what I’ve been able to understand about the Cyrenaics, they were definitely into the pleasure of the moment — eat, drink, and be merry and all that sort of thing — because they didn’t accept the idea that either feeling calm was a pleasure, or that pleasurable memories were actually pleasure. It was all about the sensory input that was pleasure to them. So that whole idea of the modern hedonist is really a Cyrenaic stereotype, it seems to me.
Joshua: Yeah, and a Roman stereotype. Because there’s this persistent myth that people today still believe, which is that the Romans, in the middle of a feast, would go to the Vomitorium and basically throw up everything they just ate so that they could go and eat more. Does that sound like fun to you?
Don: The Vomitoria were real rooms in the ancient world. They were the sort of hallways on either side of a stage that the people would enter and leave the stage from. So that’s what a vomitorium is. But this idea that people were so utterly shameless and depraved and “hedonistic” in the ancient world that they would dash off to the special room just for throwing up, so they could go back and eat more — wasn’t that one of Timocrates’ slurs against Epicurus? That he would like throw up so he could eat more? Do I remember that correctly?
Cassius: Yeah, in addition to all of the orgiastic issues. Exactly. There’s a term you don’t hear very often — orgiastic issues. This is a great way to start the episode, Don. I’m really glad you brought that up.
Joshua: You know, I’d defend any of these guys, especially the Cyrenaics. I suspect they didn’t go around calling themselves hedonists necessarily. They were referred to as Cyrenaics.
Cassius: Like I said previously, our purpose here is not to show that we’re virtuosos in the use of words. Our purpose is for us to understand Epicurean philosophy better, to explain it to people in an understandable way, using words and explanations that mean something to people. And the truth, whether bitter or not, is that the word “hedonist” / “hedonism” is a slur in modern language. It’s not fair to Epicurus to consider him totally depraved in that kind of way. It’s not fair to the Cyrenaics, or frankly anybody who is going to accept the label of being depraved, which is what we read into the word hedonism immediately.
Joshua: Yeah, exactly. And it’s a whole idea that even the lowercase “epicurean” — meaning dainty food and fine wines and all that sort of thing — it’s that hedonist stereotype that has bled into that too. And it sounds like even from the ancient world the Epicureans were stereotyped that way.
Cassius: Right. It’s just natural or the way of the world that controversy and antagonism arise when you start taking positions that certain views are right and certain views are wrong. People get upset about that. They don’t like thinking that they are incorrect or mistaken about views that they hold very tightly. And stereotypes are a way to make it easy for people to think about things. If you put somebody in a box and label that box with a particular label — and if you don’t like those people, you put a derogatory label on it — then you don’t have to think about them anymore. Whenever you refer to them, you just use that word and it’s like everybody knows that those nasty people over there, those wild Epicureans and their orgiastic issues.
Joshua: Yeah, this whole conversation we’ve had so far is a really good example of how important it is to be flexible when we talk, and to be clear that words have various meanings in various contexts, and it’s important for us to keep those contexts in mind and just be as articulate and clear as we can about what we mean when we say something.
Cassius: DeWitt is not attempting to slam Epicurus with a term that is negative when he talks about a lowercase “hedonist.” Right. Yeah. Well, that’s great. So we’ve discussed the chapter title. We’re off and running. So the irony of this whole thing shows up in that first paragraph, where DeWitt says that in his structure of doctrine, Epicurus took up the various aspects of the problem of pleasure and handled them with such superior precision that this line of inquiry, so far as antiquity was concerned, became exhausted.
Joshua: It’s kind of like in Lucretius where he says that the earth when it was first formed out of atoms was really fertile, but it’s kind of run out of things to generate. It’s that kind of idea. But it’s that issue of the “superior precision” that interests me, because we’ve been talking about the word hedonism in broad strokes and in bold stereotypes. But there’s a whole lot of detail that gets missed when we talk about it in those terms. And I guess that’s going to be the point of the chapter — to go into all that detail.
Cassius: You know, Joshua, we’re not going to read paragraph by paragraph, but as DeWitt continues there in the sentences after the ones you just read — we were joking before we started about how DeWitt can be kind of over the top, implying that Epicurus was just so brilliant that nobody else had anything to say after he was gone. But as DeWitt continues his paragraph, what he says is that, quote, “after his time, the various schools merely bickered over the tenability of his findings, thus the justification is excellent for entitling this chapter ‘The New Hedonism.’” And we were joking about it — I hadn’t really thought about that — but I really can see the argument that after Epicurus, you really have not had another major leading figure who was identified as making pleasure the good. Do we have anybody like that who follows after Epicurus? Or does he really stand at almost the end — and now the beginning — of the whole chain of making pleasure the good? Does anybody else go in that direction?
Joshua: In the ancient world, I mean, there was Aristippus of Cyrene, of course, but he came before Epicurus. Beyond that, no, there’s no great treatment of the subject that’s really put forward except in negative terms. And I think one of the reasons for that might be that Epicurus was willing to make pleasure such a wide spectrum of experiences — because he accepted the fact that you could have pleasure through the use of your mind, through memories and anticipations and that sort of thing — and also that if the other philosophers thought there was a neutral state, if you weren’t feeling pleasure or pain it was a neutral state, whereas Epicurus was like, no, that sense of not feeling any pain is a pleasure in and of itself too. So that was another innovation that he was able to include within his spectrum of what pleasure meant.
Cassius: And that observation that you just made is going to underlie almost everything we discuss in this chapter, because by expanding that definition of pleasure to include any state in which you’re not in pain, you’ve really made a huge change in the way things are going to be discussed. And Cicero and others accused them of being unfair and ridiculous and out of line in doing that. But as DeWitt said in the last chapter, who’s at fault really here? Was it Epicurus’ fault for calling all of your experiences when you’re healthy and not in pain “pleasure”? Or was it the fault and the error of the other side to decide that that state is not pleasurable? So maybe we’re talking about whether the glass is half full or half empty. And by the time we finish talking about all those things we may be thinking that it’s all just an interminable word game. But there are incredibly important issues that flow from the way you talk about and label your experiences in life. This whole issue — as Don just said — of the neutral state, whether that exists or not, you can decide in the end that it’s a word game for purposes of logic, or you can consider that it’s really true in your personal experience. But that’s where Epicurus is going here in producing a new hedonism, according to DeWitt. He’s drilling down and attempting to do what Aristippus and others previously had not done, which was to dig in on the question of what really is the guide of life. Is there another dimension in heaven with God telling us what to do? Is there some kind of determinism? Is there some kind of rationalism out there? Epicurus rejected these other paths and decided that he was going to correct what he saw as the deficiencies in the arguments that Aristippus and others in the past had made. So it’s a fascinating subject that we’ll have a lot more to say about as we go through this.
As we go through paragraph number two, DeWitt starts pointing out one of the innovations that Epicurus latched onto in this preliminary discussion. Aristotle had been studying life and biology more so than Plato had been doing, and DeWitt makes the point that Epicurus follows more along with Aristotle in that sense. But what DeWitt says here is that Epicurus was following the lead of his predecessors when he found in the behavior of animate creatures the evidence for identifying pleasure as the end — or telos — but he improved upon their procedure by narrowing his observations to the behavior of newborn creatures which are yet possessed of neither volition nor intelligence. Now as Aristotle might have been doing, you can look at living creatures like Joshua and Don and Callistheni and all of us here who are talking with each other, and make deductions about human nature by looking at people who are adults in the prime of life. And it would be easy to ask yourself — well, why should you look at infants who haven’t had any experiences and who don’t have any of the wisdom that a fifty-year-old person has? Why shouldn’t you look at the fifty-year-old person as your example to find the nature of good instead of a baby? That’s ridiculous — isn’t it? And you have to think about that question and you should have a ready answer to it in order to understand Epicurean philosophy. But just to throw that out there for a minute — why not look at fifty-year-old people instead of babies for your standard of how nature would have us act ethically?
Joshua: Well, one answer to that is that fifty-year-old people all behave differently, but newborns are all the same, because newborns, unlike fifty-year-olds, haven’t been exposed to culture and schooling and all of the pressures that are put on the mind to conform and adapt to the way that our particular society is built. Newborns are prepared for any number of possible lives, but by the time you’re fifty you’ve lived a life, or a part of one, and that is going to inform how you think about all different kinds of issues. A fifty-year-old in Japan is going to be probably different and have different ideas than a fifty-year-old in America or in Europe or in Africa.
Cassius: But why is that experience not a feature rather than a demerit? Like you said, there’s more divergence perhaps in the way they act, but why doesn’t that give you a richer field for research to make your ultimate conclusions about the way to live? Why would you look back to an infant of a species that barely even resembles an adult being? I’m of course channeling arguments that Cicero made and recorded in certain of his works. But why not take advantage of the experience that comes from being an adult and use those observations as your basis?
Joshua: The reason is that Epicurus is looking for the human mind in something like its pure original state. I’m not talking about a blank-slate state, but the state in which the human mind is only reaching for certain things. Here’s what infants don’t have the power to do: infants don’t have the power to put off one thing because they can conceive of something greater in the future. It’s what they do in the moment that suggests to Epicurus that pleasure is worth pursuing — because that’s what they pursue — and that pain is to be avoided — because that’s what they all try to avoid.
Cassius: And Joshua, I believe you brought up in the past that not only was Epicurus looking at infants, but he was also looking at animals that aren’t acculturated and aren’t indoctrinated into different kinds of education. You’ve voiced that concern before, I believe with the example of the cockroach — that you’re looking at that level too.
Joshua: Yes, the principle of the cockroach: any philosophical claim about the mind or the good that applies to humans has to also take into consideration lower orders of animals. And that’s true about the question of whether there’s an afterlife and all of these other issues.
Don: Are both of you saying that he’s looking back to determine from infants what nature would say, as opposed to what something else would say — rationality, logic, whatever?
Cassius: Culture in general, yeah. What are people like before you impose those limitations and structures on top of them? What’s underlying all of that — I think that’s what Epicurus is looking for.
Don: And to answer your question, Cassius — what underlies all of that is nature and humanity.
Cassius: Yeah, that’s the word I’m wanting to make sure we bring out. I think that is an accurate way to summarize it. In fact, going back to the initial question of the new hedonism, I think you could make a gut argument that Epicurean philosophy is better described as “naturism” — or something that indicates that it is nature to which we’re looking for the answers to all these questions. And it’s not obvious that we should do that, necessarily. Like I said, Cicero and others would say that you should not look to the cockroach or to a cow out in the field or to an oyster in a shell or a pig as an example for human conduct, because — don’t you know — humans are the rational animal, and we have the ability to use logic and reason, that is a spark of divinity within us that’s so much more important and so much higher than what a cockroach or a cow or an oyster or a pig could ever identify with.
Joshua: Humans have language, which is really the seminal difference. But language, like everything we’re talking about here, just comes from nature. It all eventually in the end can be traced back to nature — which is why DeWitt repeatedly in this book says nature furnishes the norm.
Don: I do have to say, Cassius, your suggestion of calling it “naturism” — that word’s already taken, I think, by people. Another word for them is nudists.
Cassius: But it all does come back in the end — even when we start talking about pleasure and pain as nature’s stop-and-go signals, when we start talking about justice in the later Principal Doctrines, it talks about the justice of nature. So I do think it’s worth emphasizing that, again, we’re not pursuing pleasure just because we’ve decided personally that pleasure is what we want to do. We’re following pleasure and avoiding pain because we’ve reached the conclusion that nature has created us in this way. And nature may not have an intelligence and an intent in doing it. Nature is not our friend in that sense. Nature doesn’t have a goal for our lives specifically. Everything that happens isn’t for good because nature has planned it that way. But we’ve ultimately reached the conclusion that rather than making things up in our own minds about other worlds and divinities and heavens and hells and so forth, it would be better to simply make sure we’re dealing with reality. And maybe the ultimate definition of the word reality is just what nature has provided to us. So I do think that as we go through this — as we debate the nature of all these different questions about pleasure and pain — it does come back to ultimately vetting the question, testing the answer according to whether it makes sense according to nature.
In Cicero’s De Finibus, Torquatus says: “The problem before us, then, is what is the climax and standard of things good, and then Epicurus places this standard in pleasure, which he lays down to be the supreme good, while pain is the supreme evil, and he founds his proof of this on the following considerations: every creature as soon as it is born seeks after pleasure and delights therein as its supreme good while it recoils from pain as its supreme evil and banishes that so far as it can from its own presence, and this it does while still uncorrupted, and while nature herself prompts unbiased and unaffected decisions.”
We’ll come back to the rest of that explanation, but: nature herself prompting unbiased and unaffected decision-making at this stage, where you certainly are at least at that moment free from the corruption of false opinions. No matter what our own opinion is, we think there are others out there that are false. As you grow up and become exposed to so many different divergent arguments, you just know that some of them are not right. So anyway, the point of this opening has been the new hedonism. There’s a reason why the chapter is called that, but we’re looking to nature ultimately as the standard.
Joshua: I’d agree with that — that’s a good summary of the first two paragraphs.
Cassius: Well, I think this is the first two paragraphs, because we now have in this third paragraph where DeWitt goes back to this argument that because the soul is corporeal, just like the body, there is no split, there is no dichotomy between body and mind — with the body and the soul being both on a parity, so to speak. And from this parity it followed that the good or telos, which as a unit was pleasure, must also be dualistic: a sound mind and a sound body. Since we’ve used the word “good” or telos, let’s go ahead and talk about those two words for just a second. Obviously everybody has an opinion on what “good” means, but Don — telos — what does it mean in Greek?
Don: Telos is the goal, or the limit, or the end point — that’s the whole idea of it. It’s the end of the race, the goal at the end of the race, that sort of thing.
Cassius: Would you concur with that, Joshua? I know you’ve had some posts on the forum about the word as well.
Joshua: Yeah, yeah, I think you’re right. What it’s become is a whole branch in philosophy called teleology, which is the idea of looking at everything that exists with a view to its purpose. But that’s a much broader topic than what Epicurus — or I think even most of the ancients — were looking at, which is: what is our purpose, almost? What is the goal to which we should aspire? And even there: does nature have a purpose for us? No, I come down with the word no. The way that I’ve always interpreted telos and “good” and summum bonum and all those sorts of things is: the point to which all of our actions point. It’s like, why do we do what we do, and Epicurus gives the answer to that — that it’s pleasure that we’re always trying to point towards, even whenever we choose pain in a particular moment. We’re doing it because we want more pleasure in the future, and we’re willing to go through this particular pain because we anticipate more pleasure on the other end of it. So we’re always pointing towards pleasure. Our arrow always points towards pleasure. Our path always leads towards pleasure in the widest possible sense. There is no purpose to the universe. People who are looking for the universe to tell them to pursue a particular career — no, the universe isn’t doing that. If you want to pursue that career you go ahead and pursue it, but the universe is not pointing you toward any particular way. The only thing that nature gives you is that pleasure feels good and pain feels bad, which is why we want more pleasure than pain in our lives.
Cassius: I agree completely with what you just said, and Lucretius takes it even further when he talks about how the eye doesn’t develop with the intent of allowing you to see.
Joshua: Exactly. It doesn’t work like that. And by the way, one of the most famous images when people think of Darwinian evolution is this image of the ape on all fours, and through several iterations it becomes man standing on two legs. That’s considered an outdated model. It’s not wrong to think of things having progressed through those stages, but it’s wrong to think that that was the goal to begin with. Evolution being natural, there is no goal. It’s just a response to stimuli, and everything proceeds from there. “Survival of the fittest” is always sort of thought of as the strongest and the bravest. No — survival of the fittest just means that you survived, so evidently your genes were doing something right in fitting into the environment.
Cassius: That’s a really good point, Joshua. I think you said that well. Let me emphasize what we’ve just been saying. Are we in agreement that nature gives the feeling of pleasure and pain as guides, but that nature does not provide a goal or an ultimate goal?
Joshua: I would agree with that as far as it goes. But you have to almost get a little more complicated than that. The reason that we have things like pain — even though nature of course couldn’t put it in these terms — is because without a faculty of pain we would very quickly die. Pain is the way to keep us from doing things that are harmful to our bodies. Nature once again doesn’t have that in view. When our molecules get assembled into a body, it’s the successive generations of experimenting and recreating new situations and new dangers and new scenarios, and having endured all of that — our genetic material having endured all of that — we get to a point where we have faculties like pleasure and pain as a reward-and-punishment circuit to tell us what things are beneficial for our lives and what things are harmful or dangerous.
Cassius: Okay, you just said “for our lives.” Would it be fair to say that nature has a goal for us to live?
Joshua: I don’t think nature cares whether we live or die, actually. So you wouldn’t use the word “goal” to describe anything, because I can imagine somebody arguing that if there’s any goal whatsoever that nature has in the most basic possible terms, it might be the sustenance of life. But I think using the English word “goal” brings along connotations — it’s sort of like, if you get here, you win. It’s more like a North Star. It’s a direction to point yourself. You’re never actually going to get there. But pleasure and pain — it comes down to just: pleasure feels good and pain feels bad, and so it’s better to feel good than it is to feel bad.
Cassius: Help me out, Joshua. I’m floundering here. I just really want to hit home this issue on the goal or the purpose, because I think it makes sense to talk about it in these terms.
Joshua: One way to put it would be: consider the cancer cell, which starts out as a normal functioning cell but through a particular mutation gets put into this kind of overdrive where it keeps dividing and dividing and creating new cells and those grow. It’s not like there’s an intent to cause problems or do something bad. The self-replicating molecule deoxyribonucleic acid — DNA — that is basically at the heart of who we are: it self-replicates because that’s just what it does. There’s no purpose or goal there. So everything that has happened around that molecule — which has made up our bodies and in the end our minds, our consciousness — is rooted in that very simple process of self-replication. One way to put it would be: the reason some species live a very long time and we don’t is that by the time you’ve already had children, your self-replicating molecule has already replicated, and then there’s not much more need for you. So those are the terms we can put it in, just to explain this idea of the goal or the purpose: nature doesn’t have one.
Cassius: Let me go back to Torquatus for just a second and read some of the rest of what we stated earlier to elaborate on this. He says, quote: “So he says we need no reasoning or debate to show why pleasure is matter for desire, pain for aversion. These facts he thinks are simply perceived, just as the fact that fire is hot, snow is white, and honey sweet, none of which facts are we bound to support by elaborate argument. It’s enough to draw attention to the fact. There’s a difference between proof and formal argument on the one hand and a direction of attention on the other. Moreover, seeing that if you deprive a man of his senses there is nothing left to him, it is inevitable that nature herself should be the arbiter of what is in accord with or opposed to nature. Now what facts does she grasp, or with what facts is her decision to seek or avoid any particular thing concerned, unless the facts of pleasure and pain?”
So I read that because this is going to be behind all of this discussion. Is there really anything more in nature telling us what to do and what to avoid, other than pleasure and pain? We all seem to be in agreement. Nature does not have a goal that we should grow up to be an astronaut or an auto mechanic, or that we are going to do anything in particular with our lives. But nature does provide pleasure and pain to everybody — no matter what your philosophy, religion, background, culture, race, any of that stuff — you have pleasure and pain ultimately from the moment you’re born, and that’s what to ultimately look to for guidance from nature.
But when you start talking about a couple of words — we’re talking about “goal,” we’re talking about “guide” as a word that Lucretius seems to use very specifically in his poem, and then there’s also the word “good.” Don, when “good” is discussed in Epicurus, what’s the Greek that’s generally used there?
Don: Agathon is usually the word, but whenever we talk about the greatest good, it’s tagathon — so it has that extra t at the beginning to give the idea that pleasure is the good, the tagathon. That’s the word then that we’re translating as “good.”
Cassius: We could spend hours talking about what the word “good” means. Do you have any particular insight as to any slant or connotation that the Greeks are putting on agathon and tagathon? Because we’re going to have to go down this road for a little while, talking about what it means that something is “good” — since we’ve just been discussing for the last few minutes that nature doesn’t tell us anything other than pleasure and pain. So what’s the definition of “good”? Nature tells us something is pleasing, but that’s not the same word as telling us that it’s “good.”
Don: Well, I think at least in my mind it would come back to the fact that something is pleasing is, for lack of a better way to put it, good for us. Nature doesn’t necessarily put value judgments on things, but as a living, sensing being, it’s good to feel pleasure and it’s bad to feel pain, and those are the words that we give it as living, sensing beings. Isn’t the Epicurean position that there is no good but pleasure and no evil but pain? I believe I do remember reading that somewhere.
I’ve gone to our friends at Liddell and Scott — the LSJ Greek-English Lexicon — and agathos is given a really long entry, so I’m not going to read the whole thing, but some of the connotations are kind of interesting to consider. Agathos could refer to things that are, of course, “good” — but of a person it can connote well-born or gentle. The opposite is kakos, so kakos is the Greek word for evil or bad. But they also note that agathos can refer to being brave or valiant, or capable — good in a moral sense — or things that are serviceable, that serve a useful purpose, that’s a benefit or a blessing. There’s an idea that it serves a useful purpose, it’s capable of doing beneficial things — that’s at the heart of what agathos means. And then whenever you put that t at the beginning and get tagathon, then that’s the highest or best good thing. And that’s the word — tagathon — that gets translated into Latin as summum bonum. Does that help at all, or am I successfully muddying the waters?
Cassius: I think it helps. And one of the things I’m doing here is — as DeWitt usually does, he gives an introduction and then he goes into detail, there’s sort of a telescoping method of presentation — I really think we probably need to begin to bleed over into the first of his subsections, which is this issue of the Summum Bonum question. His title for the subsection is “The Summum Bonum Fallacy.”
But again, let me go back to Torquatus one more time, and he begins his entire discussion of Epicurean philosophy by saying this: “I shall plead my case on the lines laid down by the founder of our school himself. I shall define the essence and features of the problem before us — not because I imagine you to be unacquainted, but with the view to the methodical progress of my speech. Here’s the question: the problem before us, then, is what is the climax and standard of things good, and this, in the opinion of all philosophers, must needs be such that we are bound to test all things by it, but the standard itself by nothing. Epicurus places this standard in pleasure, which he lays down to be the supreme good, while pain is the supreme evil.”
But even at this moment, as we are talking about this, there are serious questions in my mind about this whole framework of analysis. It clearly is the framework that everybody is using, but I often struggle in my own mind whether Epicurus himself really agreed with this framework of presenting things in terms of “good” and then “the greatest good” in particular. So why don’t we discuss that for a few minutes. We’ve said that nature gives us pleasure and pain, but has nature told us “good” and “evil” other than through pleasure and pain? And why is there a climax of things good? Why is there a single good, or a highest good? This is the subsection title — DeWitt’s “The Summum Bonum Fallacy” — where he goes into discussion of what the Greek and Latin words would have been and the ambiguities. DeWitt’s whole thing about how Latin doesn’t have a definite article — I just think that’s a Trojan horse that I don’t accept at all, because there are any number of languages that don’t have definite articles that can be just as expressive as languages that do. So I think he’s going down a blind alley on this one personally.
Joshua: To me — I’m agreeing with you to the extent that I think his suggestion for the answer is perhaps the blind alley — but I do think the question he’s asking is incredibly important and one that doesn’t really get asked enough. We do need to decide what the word “good” really means. Are there multiple goods? Is there a single highest good? Summum bonum is the word in the Latin that was being used, and that would certainly seem to imply a highest or best good. In my mind, the idea of “highest” is not necessarily a value judgment. The highest is the one that’s at the top of the heap that everything else is pointing to. That’s always been my interpretation. It’s for lack of a better analogy — pleasure is at the top of the mountain and that’s where all of our paths are heading as far as what we should be looking for. Or pleasure is the highest star in the sky that we use to guide our paths by, because we’re always trying to maximize our pleasure over time and minimize our pain. We’re always pointing towards that particular highest point. That’s the sense that I get from “highest” — I don’t see it as a value judgment other than the fact that it’s the one to which everything else points.
Cassius: Joshua, anything else? What’s interesting to me is that this is not the only category he has on this question, because Vatican Saying 78 says that “the nobleman is chiefly concerned with wisdom and friendship; of these the former is a mortal good, the latter an immortal one.” So now we’ve got “goods” and “highest goods” and “mortal goods” and “immortal goods.”
Don: I would be happy to check the Greek. Which Vatican Saying was that again?
Cassius: Vatican Saying 78.
Don: It is agathon. That’s the word that’s used there.
Cassius: Okay. But hey, before we go too much further, let’s go back and make sure we remind everybody of the Plutarch excerpt about not going around uselessly walking and talking about the meaning of the word “good” for all sorts of reasons. Does anybody know that one off the top of your head? Because that one ends up being arguably very closely on point.
Don: Usener 423, Plutarch — “that Epicurus actually makes a pleasant life impossible”: “Not only is the basis that they assume for the pleasurable life untrustworthy and insecure, it’s quite trivial and paltry as well, inasmuch as the thing they’re delighted in as their good is an escape from ills, and they say that they can conceive of no other, and indeed that our nature has no place at all in which to put its good, except the place left when its evil is expelled. Epicurus too makes a similar statement to the effect that the good is a thing that arises out of your very escape from evil, and from your memory and reflection and gratitude that this has happened to you. His words are these: ‘That which produces a jubilation unsurpassed is the nature of good, if you apply your mind rightly and then stand firm and do not stroll about parading meaninglessly about the good.’”
Cassius: That’s an obvious jibe at the expense of Aristotle and the Peripatetics, right? Because that’s what the word “peripatetic” means — they walked about and discussed philosophy. So that’s part of the explanation on that quote: you can end up spending your whole life walking around in circles and never come out of that circle if you get caught in it without some way to extricate yourself from this dilemma of what is the basis for good. It’s the question that we talk about in terms of virtue as well. What is the justification for calling something virtuous? What’s the justification for calling something good? Is there something out there that’s good that is desirable in and of itself? And if so, what is the justification? What is our connection? What is our ability to know whether something is good or not?
Joshua: And Epicurus comes down and he says pleasure is the only thing you can say is in and of itself good. Which makes perfect sense when you’ve said that nature only gives us pleasure and pain as faculties through which to choose and avoid — it would be logically crazy to come up with another answer. If you say that nature has only given us pleasure as the tool by which to judge what is desirable, then how in the world are you going to be able to judge the good without pleasure, unless you go outside of nature? Which takes us back again to that original point about the importance of considering nature to be the standard.
Cassius: Yeah, exactly. And that’s where acculturation and indoctrination and education comes in. Your society can tell you one thing is good and that you can’t trust pleasure, and pleasure is bad — and we have a whole culture built around that with our Puritan ethics in the United States and things like that. But nature’s the one that says pleasure makes you live and pain will make you die.
Joshua: Yeah, I agree with that. But there’s that famous phrase that people who frequent gyms will use: “No pain, no gain.” Right. But they’re pointing towards more pleasure after the pain — they’re going to be in better shape after the pain.
Cassius: Yeah. And that’s the key issue — you’ve got this one thing that is the gravity well of everything else in your life.
Joshua: Well put! I like that. Nicely done. Yeah. And so everything else that gets you there, that’s instrumental in getting you there — this connects back to the instrumental good. But sometimes pain is necessary to go through in order to get there. And even Epicurus says that you can’t live pleasurably without living nobly and justly and that sort of thing. And so those are all instrumental ways to get to pleasure. But pleasure is the guiding star, that summit of the mountain — whatever analogy or metaphor you want to use — that’s where you’re always trying to point. Even if you’re in the gym and “no pain, no gain,” you still want to be more healthy and you still want to have more pleasure in your life.
Cassius: Okay, for our place in the text, we are still approximately on page 218 under his heading “Summum Bonum Fallacy.” And let me go ahead and raise this issue, though I don’t know that I’ll dispose of it entirely with what I’m about to say. But again, going back to what Don alluded to earlier — DeWitt can raise incredibly important questions and in my mind come up with some very creative answers. But those answers are not always totally satisfying, and the benefit of DeWitt in many cases is his bringing his experience to bear to say that we should not just accept something as obvious and move on. In this section, what DeWitt does in his unique way is end up concluding that indeed it is not pleasure that is the highest good, but life itself that Epicurus held to be most important. And if I were trying to defend that conclusion, one of the observations he makes either here or in a longer article on the same subject is that he talks about how pleasure and pain have no meaning except to the living. And clearly in Epicurean philosophy you’ve got to be living to experience anything good or bad. Principal Doctrine 2 says that if you’re not feeling anything then that’s the equivalent of death. And so you’ve got a lot of issues that do surround what DeWitt is pointing out here about the importance of being alive in order to understand pleasure and pain. It’s not like a religious perspective where there’s an abstract pleasure and an abstract pain and you somehow get credit for reaching some kind of a goal or a plateau where you’ve checked a box and therefore you’ve somehow accomplished something — that’s not the Epicurean universe at all. So where you have to go with all this is — as we will in the rest of this chapter go through the different meanings of ataraxia, aponia, tranquility, the absence of pain, all sorts of different ways of getting at these things — the biggest enemy in all of these discussions is just to leave your conclusions on a superficial level and think that something that really is not stated is being said. All of these words have, as we’ve been discussing, multiple meanings, and they have to be separated out in order to make sense of the final conclusion.
Joshua: Yeah, I think you bring up a good point about just words in general. We’re dealing with the connotations and semantic baggage of English words. We’re talking about trying to translate them from ancient Greek and from Latin, from Greek to Latin and from Latin to English. So there’s a lot of rabbit holes you can go down whenever you start looking at these individual words. Not that it’s not important, but it can really just complicate things when you’re trying to sort all that out.
Cassius: Don, that reminds me of what Joshua said a few minutes ago about why we don’t look at fifty-year-olds as the standard. Looking at a newborn infant in the year 2023 should produce pretty much the same observations as looking at a newborn infant in Athens in 320 BC.
Don: There you go. In other words — that’s well put. I hadn’t thought of that, but yeah, good point.
Cassius: We ought to be able to have some confidence that we can duplicate where Epicurus would have been going. When you start at a point like that where you have not been corrupted by false philosophies or false religions, the observations that he’s making in looking at infants ought to be the same observations we would come up with two thousand years later. And just like Lucretius talks about in several ways — one step lights the way to the next, and like a hunting dog, once you get the scent of the prey, you can go after it. The perspective we should have is not that this is all just arbitrary and all just a word game. We ought to be able, each of us individually, to do many of these same observations and think through in the same way that Epicurus did himself, and you would think that you would begin to reach similar conclusions if you start with the same premises.
Joshua: Yeah, that’s a great point. This might even be a good spot for closing remarks, because I think you really made a great point there.
Cassius: Okay, so yes, Don — there’s a whole lot more in the material over the next couple of pages that we will get to next week, but let’s go ahead and start talking about closing thoughts on what we’ve discussed today and trying to set the stage for the discussion of the chapter. Martin, anything today?
Martin: Sorry, I have nothing.
Cassius: Callistheni.
Callistheni: Yeah, I thought it was an interesting point when somebody said today that Epicurus and Epicureans thought of themselves as philosophers, not hedonists. And somehow that was sort of a new idea for me to hear — which really is quite a simple idea, but makes sense. We’re following pleasure because we think that nature gave us that as the guide, not because we’re simply arbitrarily deciding that having a good time is the best way to spend our lives. My gosh, all of the background, all of what Epicurus was doing in atomism and epistemology, was trying to reach that conclusion of what is nature telling us to do, what is the best life. You have to first address that before you just take the position that having fun or pursuing any particular type of pleasure is the way you should spend your life, because all of us have the desire not only to have fun but to be real, to be truthful, to be wise, and not to be deceived.
Don: Yeah, that whole idea of the word “philosopher” is kind of fun, because even in Epicurus’s will in Diogenes Laertius, Epicurus refers to the school basically as “those who philosophize together.” So that’s how he refers to his students and his school — it’s one word in Greek, which is kind of great.
Joshua: Yeah, that’s how you live as a god among men — to do this with like-minded friends.
Cassius: There you go. Exactly. Don, closing thoughts?
Don: No, this has been a great conversation. I think this really sets the stage. I love the fact that we spent a good portion of the conversation just on the title itself with the word “hedonism.” So that shows you the issues that come up here. This was quite an enjoyable conversation. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes in the future.
Joshua: Yeah, I’m going to echo what Don just said. It is interesting — DeWitt started the chapter by saying that Epicurus had more or less exhausted the question. I think it’s always a little too early to call curtains on something. And we see that in the fifth century when Saint Augustine of Hippo said about Epicureanism that “the ashes were so cold that not a single spark could be struck from it.” And once again, it’s a little too early to call curtains on that. So we’re going to be talking about issues like this for a long time, hopefully, and in the next couple of weeks specifically on this one issue about pleasure and the new hedonism. What are we doing right now other than talking about pleasure through the lens of Epicurus, who after all these years still remains the most identified philosopher for this position?
Cassius: Okay, well, with that, let’s go ahead and close for the day. We’ll come back next week. Please let us know at the forum if you have any questions or comments. We’ll incorporate those in future episodes. Thanks for your time and for listening, and we will be back next week. See you then. Bye.