Episode 173 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 26 - Chapter 12 - The New Hedonism 02
Date: 05/13/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3047-episode-173-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-26-chapter-12-the-new-hedonism-02/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 173 continues Chapter 12, “The New Hedonism,” picking up from Episode 172’s discussion of the difficulties surrounding the words “good,” “guide,” and “hedonism.” Cassius opens by returning to DeWitt’s page 219 and the Plutarch/Usener 423 passage: “That which occasions unsurpassable joy is the bare escape from some dreadful calamity — and this is the nature of good, if you apprehend it rightly and then stand by your finding, and not go on walking round and round and harping uselessly on the meaning of good.” DeWitt describes this as Epicurus “cutting the Gordian Knot,” and Cassius explains the legend — Gordius, king of a city in Asia Minor, tied an impossibly complex knot around his ox cart and proclaimed the man who could undo it would be king of all Asia; Alexander the Great simply sliced through it with his sword. The application: Epicurus’s answer is not to untie the philosophical knot laboriously but to cut through it by appealing directly to the feelings as nature’s criterion. Joshua notes that after a word-search through the entire Latin text, the phrase summum bonum appears in Lucretius only once — in the proem of Book 6, reversed as bonum summum — where Lucretius says Epicurus “showed the highest good toward which we all are aiming.” In Book 2 (line 167), by contrast, Lucretius calls pleasure “the guide of life” (dux vitae) but does not use the summum bonum formula there; Joshua connects the Book 2 passage’s closing reference to “that mankind may not come to an end” to the continuation of the species rather than individual self-preservation. The group discusses Cicero’s De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum as the source framework, with finis corresponding to telos, and examines DeWitt’s controversial conclusion that for Epicurus the highest good is life itself, since the strongest emotions are those occasioned by narrowly escaping death — though Cassius notes this cannot be the whole story since Epicureans could sacrifice their own lives for friends. Don is absent from this episode. The episode moves to DeWitt’s subsection “Pleasure Identified as the Telos,” tracing how the Stoics had, through “incessant needling,” shaken some Epicureans’ confidence in their founder — and how the canon (with feelings as one of three authoritative criteria alongside sensations and anticipations) was Epicurus’s answer to reason-based logic games. DeWitt introduces Eudoxus of Cnidus, the pre-Epicurean philosopher who had also identified pleasure as the good based on all creatures’ behavior, and Cassius recommends Gosling and Taylor’s The Greeks on Pleasure for further background on Eudoxus. Joshua connects this to the “noble savage” theme in Amerigo Vespucci’s accounts of Native Americans and Thomas More’s Utopia, where the spectacle of people living closer to nature reflected European civilization’s own sense that something had gone deeply wrong — though Joshua notes the Wikipedia article on “noble savage” and Rousseau usefully complicates the picture. The episode then addresses the deepest question of the subsection: is Epicurus, in making nature a “judge and teacher,” inadvertently committing to a form of teleology — making nature into a purposive God (Zeus)? Cassius reads DeWitt’s resolution on pages 221–222: the preceding atomists had overlooked that if strict determinism prevailed, human volition would be impossible; Epicurus corrected this by postulating that sufficient free play in atomic motion permits genuine human agency — the swerve. Joshua extends this: humanity is not only an emergent property of atomic motion but also an evolved species, and it is precisely that dual heritage that gives humans the capacity to look to nature as a guide. Joshua reads a long passage from Darwin’s Origin of Species on the eye — Darwin confessing the eye’s apparent design “seems absurd in the highest degree” before explaining how natural selection can produce it through gradual increments — to illustrate that nature neither plans what eyes are for nor writes a schedule for how any individual should live. Cassius closes the philosophical arc: nature gives pleasure and pain as the guideposts, but how one lives day to day is entirely up to the individual. DeWitt’s key concluding formulation is read: “There is no purpose in nature, but in the process of non-purposive creation she has brought into being a purposive creature, man, and for him, being capable of reason, a telos is conceivable.” Martin has nothing to add. Callistheni offers a thoughtful closing: she found the episode’s meditation on atoms lacking free will but humans possessing it to be moving and even awe-inspiring — not in a supernatural sense, but in the sense that contemplating these things touches a core need for meaning and reinforces that our choices matter. Joshua picks up on Callistheni’s point about choosing and avoiding as a preview of what lies ahead in the chapter. The episode closes with a preview of next week’s subsection, “The True Nature of Pleasure.”
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 173 of Lucretius Today. We’re in our second week of discussing Chapter 12, “The New Hedonism,” and we left our discussion last week talking about the difficulties and ambiguities surrounding the discussion of things that are good, the word “hedonism,” all sorts of summary issues that we keep coming back to in the discussion of Epicurean philosophy and will probably always discuss because there are so many different perspectives on them. This week let’s go back and point out what DeWitt has to say about Epicurus’s description of the greatest good. DeWitt says on page 219 of his book, quote: “That which occasions unsurpassable joy is the bare escape from some dreadful calamity, and this is the nature of good if one apprehend it rightly and then stand by his finding and not go on walking round and round and harping uselessly on the meaning of good.” And DeWitt says this passage marks the summary cutting of a Gordian knot — the meaning of good upon which Plato had harped so tediously. Epicurus finds a quick solution by appealing to the feelings — that is, to nature as the criterion. It is their verdict that the supreme good is life itself, because the strongest emotions are occasioned by the threat of losing it or the prospect of saving it.
Now that’s a statement that we regularly debate in our discussions about whether DeWitt has exactly the right perspective on that. But certainly the passage from Epicurus, which is preserved from Plutarch — and unfortunately it’s not from one of the letters of Epicurus or the Principal Doctrines — does clearly seem to be saying something important: that overly obsessing on the meaning of the word “good” can be a problem, and that the way to cut through the ambiguities and confusion about it is once again to look back to the feelings, which is what he has also said is what nature has given us as the only way to know what to choose and what to avoid — which is pleasure and pain. And by looking to what DeWitt is categorizing as one of the strongest emotions that you can possibly have — which is what you experience when you escape the threat of death or have some experience that really reinforces to you how short life is and how quickly you can lose it.
We were talking before we started the show today that there are several passages in Lucretius, two in particular, that are worth mentioning here in this section. First of all, since we’re talking about the summum bonum formulation — in Book 6 of his poem, Lucretius opens up with the discussion of the significance of Epicurus and what he meant to the world of philosophy. Joshua, do you want to go ahead and talk about that, where the phrase summum bonum in Latin appears? I do have two specific examples in Lucretius — pleasure as “the guide” in Book 2, but then in Book 6 he refers to summum bonum, in unfortunately a little bit less precise way.
Joshua: Right, and that’s the issue. You know, I did a word search through the entire text at one point, in every book of Lucretius. I did it in the Latin text. The only place where he uses the phrase summum bonum — and he uses it actually in reverse, bonum summum, which you can do in Latin — is in that proem of Book 6. So it’s kind of interesting. Lucretius talks more about pleasure. He talks about it all throughout the book, but he only mentions the summum bonum once, and that is as I said in the proem of Book 6. You can find it pretty easily on the Perseus Tufts website. I’m actually going to read the translation from Rolf Humphries: “So he, meaning Epicurus, cleansed our hearts by words of truth. He put an end to greeds and fears. He showed the highest good toward which we all are aiming, showed the way, a straight and narrow path. He taught besides what evils are here and there confront the lives of men, how this is natural as well as manifold, and may occur by chance or violent intent.” And it goes on like that.
Cassius: We say it’s a difficult passage because the problem — and the problem in this book by DeWitt in general — is that Lucretius doesn’t specifically say what he means by the words “supreme good” or summum bonum, and you’ve got that other passage, don’t you, from Lucretius where he does expressly use the word “pleasure” — presumably in Latin, voluptas — but not in reference to the supreme good, but in reference to the guide of life?
Joshua: Right, I do have the other passage. So in distinction — where in Book 6 he called it that Epicurus had set forth what is the highest good towards which we all strive — in Book 2, Lucretius, in the context of discussing religion and supernatural gods and so forth, said this on line 167: “But some, in opposition to this, ignorant of matter, believe that nature cannot without the providence of the gods in such nice conformity to the ways of men vary the seasons of the year and bring forth crops, and all the other things which divine pleasure, the guide of life, prompts men to approach, escorting them in person and enticing them by her fondlings to continue their races through the arts of Venus, that mankind may not come to an end.” Lucretius is describing divine pleasure as dux vitae — the guide of life — and the rest of that sentence also leads in the same direction, about prompting men and enticing them, in that case so that mankind may not come to an end. So there, Lucretius is talking about pleasure as the guide of life, as opposed to Book 6 where he says that Epicurus has set forth what is the highest good towards which we all strive but does not use a particular definition of what that highest good is. He says that Epicurus “showed the way, constrained to a straight course,” and showed what there is of ill in the affairs of mortals everywhere, but he doesn’t specify a single or specific description of a goal. It’s not like he’s pointing to the summit of a mountain and saying there the summit is the definition of your goal. When you’re climbing a mountain it’s pretty easy to identify that, but in terms of just life itself, he’s not articulating — he’s not calling it a life of pleasure, he’s not calling it blessedness, he’s not calling it ataraxia, he’s not calling it aponia, he’s not calling it anything in particular in this passage.
Cassius: And we can compound the issue slightly further by citing the title of Cicero’s book, which is De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum — “On the Ends of Good and Evil.” So “end” or “goal” would be a rough translation of the Greek word telos, and then you’ve got dux, which is a Latin word in Lucretius translated as “guide,” and then here again we have summum bonum. So I don’t expect us really to come to a conclusion on this today, but DeWitt clearly has his own opinion, and he mentions it here in the book in several places — that he thinks that for Epicurus the highest good is life itself, which is where he comes away.
And then he also mentions this passage marks the summary cutting of a Gordian knot. It occurs to me people might not be familiar with that story. There was a king in some local area in Asia Minor, and his city was beset by — I don’t remember what it was, plagues, drought, whatever. They appealed to an oracle, and the oracle said that the next man to enter the city on an ox cart should be crowned king and that will solve our problem. And so the next man to enter the town on an ox cart was this man named Gordius, and he was made king. The problem went away, but when he came to the end of his life he still had his ox cart, and he tied a fiendishly difficult knot around the post of the ox cart and said that the person who could undo this knot will be the king of all Asia. And in the legendary story that survives, it was Alexander the Great, after he conquered Persia, who took out his sword and just sliced through the knot — and did go on in his own view to be king of all Asia.
That’s an interesting story and does follow what DeWitt is implying here: that you don’t answer the question by accepting the premises of the person posing the question. Sometimes you just slice through it and deny the premises, deny the alleged complexity, and reach a more common-sense or obvious conclusion. If the point is to get rid of the knot, you can slice through it a whole lot easier than you can untie it. And that’s what DeWitt is alluding to here, and perhaps what Epicurus is alluding to as well. He’s clearly criticizing the obsessive attempts to define or describe the concept of “the good” in ways that are so abstract and so maze-like that nobody seems ever to come to a conclusion about it. You would think that it’s important to come to a conclusion about something as significant to everyone as what is the best thing in life, or the greatest good of life. You would think that would be such an important and pressing issue for everyone that there should be no confusion about it, and yet the way the question is stated in philosophy it becomes just totally unsolvable — and something that becomes so distracting and divisive and in fact destructive of practical living that many people just tend to walk away from the question and throw philosophy entirely away, because they think it has no usefulness whatsoever if it cannot answer such a simple question.
And it’s certain that even as DeWitt postulates life itself as the greatest good — as DeWitt often does, and as we talk about here in many of these episodes — there are different meanings of the word “good.” Epicurus also stated that at times you’re going to give up your own life to save that of a friend. If sustaining your own life was the only goal — the only criteria against which everything else was judged — then you would never do such a thing. And DeWitt has been very clear about pointing out these other issues involving giving your life for that of a friend and so forth. So even as he says that life itself is the greatest good, he’s stating that in a particular context which has to be sorted out.
Joshua: Yeah, and one more thing on that point is that in that dux vitae passage where he says that pleasure is the guide of life, it goes on to mention the arts of Venus as being generative to life. So clearly there he’s talking about sexual pleasure and the role that plays in continuing to generate future generations of the species. So it’s clear in that context that you can also look at it through the lens of your mother. If you have to give up your life to save your child, that’s another thing that immediately comes to mind when you read that passage.
Cassius: The version of it that I read came from Munro, but the final words were that “mankind may not come to an end.” Well, if that’s the translation, that’s a reference to the species itself, but not the individual within the species. He’s not saying even there, perhaps, that Venus and pleasure are leading you to self-preservation. He’s saying that they’re leading you, perhaps, to the preservation of your species, your family, friends, and those you value, whether it happens at that moment to be you yourself or not.
Joshua: Right. And the proem of Book 1 is rife with that kind of language, talking about the influence of Venus coming with the spring to encourage the growth of new life.
Cassius: The next subheading is entitled “Pleasure Identified as the Telos.” Are we ready to go?
Joshua: Yes, we’re ready to move to that. Perhaps with this introduction or caveat that pleasure can be viewed as the good, pleasure can be viewed as the telos — we’re now going to shift our perspective and talk about pleasure as the telos. Or the guide. I can give you what Don’s opinion on this I think would be — that it doesn’t matter if you call it the guide or the good or the end or the telos or the goal, whatever it is, it’s pleasure at the top. Unfortunately, he’s not with us today to say that himself.
Cassius: Yes. So in the first sentence here of “Pleasure Identified as the Telos,” DeWitt says the next step after his whole argument on the summum bonum is to apprehend clearly by what procedure the end or telos is identified as pleasure. And he says the nature of this procedure and of the attitude which determined it was one thing in the time of Cicero and quite another in the time of Epicurus himself. Do we want to go down that line of thinking?
Joshua: Well, this issue of formal logic and the development of Stoicism — the Stoics were making things into logical problems that clearly Plato had to some extent viewed them as too. But even Cicero — and again, when you read the entire book On Ends, it’s really enlightening. You see that Cicero is clearly not a Stoic himself, and Cicero brings very aggressive and pointed criticism onto the arguments of the Stoics. It’s basically the point that we’re making: that to a large extent the Stoics had turned many of these issues into a word game, a logic game, as opposed to taking a more common-sense position towards things, which Cicero himself was advocating as you go through the rest of the book. I wouldn’t say that Cicero was as critical of the Stoics as he was of the Epicureans, but it’s clear when you read On Ends that Cicero was not happy with the way that the Stoics were making a logic game out of these issues.
Cassius: As DeWitt says here, these arguments had, through the incessant needling of Stoic adversaries, shaken the confidence of many Epicureans in the word of their founder. As a reference in Diogenes Laertius, you’ll see several references to Torquatus himself, and Cicero is talking about their varying opinions — as to whether there are three versus four legs of the canon, and various arguments as to how much detail and logical argument is necessary to prove that pleasure is the good, and differences of opinion as to whether friendship arises solely out of self-interest or how friendship itself should be viewed.
The main point is one you’ve been driving home, and you’ve been referring to logic, but as DeWitt is going to make this point throughout the book — and as we really hammered home in that chapter on the canon — the feelings are one of three appeal points in the canon, and there’s no place for reason as a source of primary information about the world we live in. Reason operates on the information that we get from the world, but it’s not a direct line to God or nature. And Epicurus, as it says here, recognizes nature as the norm, or as furnishing the norm. That’s a quote we’ve probably already quoted several times throughout this book, and we’ll quote it more, because this is one of the main takeaways from DeWitt’s book — that Epicurus is looking to nature as the guide, and as setting the guide.
And DeWitt makes reference here to a philosopher named Eudoxus who had lived just before Epicurus and had also declared pleasure to be the good. He took his start from the observation that all creatures — whether rational or irrational, mankind or lower orders of animals — pursued pleasure and avoided pain. And the confirmation for the truth of this observation was founded in the behavior of all creatures toward pain: that there’s no living thing that senses pain that doesn’t shy away from it and try to go toward pleasure if at all possible. And he goes on to say — if we may accept as authentic the tradition as reported by Aristotle — it would seem that Eudoxus thought of the pursuit of pleasure as comparable to the instinct of wild creatures to seek their proper food and to avoid the opposite. And how many times does Lucretius talk about that? He talks about it on both sides: oranges don’t grow on apple trees, everything needs its proper seed, but everything also needs and pursues its proper nourishment. It just takes one more step beyond that to get to the main point, which is that pleasure is what is instinctively pursued by all forms of life that are capable of experiencing it.
Joshua: Yeah. I don’t have any additional detail to bring to that part of the discussion, but I recall from my reading that for someone who would like to look into Eudoxus and follow this lead — I remember in the Gosling and Taylor book, The Greeks on Pleasure, there is a section on Eudoxus, and if DeWitt is correct here he certainly would be somebody to look into.
Cassius: Nobody’s ever alleged that Epicurus was the very first to suggest that pleasure was the controlling factor of life. Epicurus was building on a lot of philosophers that came before him, and DeWitt’s point here is that not only Eudoxus but also to an extent Aristotle — there was already this line of thinking in Greek philosophy that nature furnishes the norm and what nature gives is pleasure and pain as the guide. A lot of the angst about all this seems to be: to what extent should that leading by nature be given the primary role, or whether there’s something else that comes in front of it? But it’s not like Epicurus was the first to discover pleasure and pain as guiding forces. He was extending a line of thought that existed long before him as well.
DeWitt says: “Thus the originality of Epicurus did not consist in recognizing nature as furnishing the norm, but in working out the principle to its limit, which he did by setting up the canon” — as Joshua was just discussing — “in which the feelings are equivalent or parallel with the sensations and the anticipations as a separate appeal to the authority of nature.” In fact DeWitt says further that Aristotle himself suggested that the evidence drawn from the behavior of irrational creatures may actually be superior in value to the evidence drawn from that of rational creatures, and that Cicero reported that Epicurus had said: “every living creature the moment it’s born reaches out for pleasure and rejoices in it as the highest good and shrinks from pain the greatest evil and so far as it is able averts it from itself.” That’s part of the Torquatus sections of Cicero that we talk about regularly.
Joshua: I just want to bring in again this quote from Amerigo Vespucci, who traveled to the New World and said that he discovered the Native Americans and said that their mode of life could be described as epicurean — that it’s the artifice of culture and a state church and you could go on and on down the list, but it’s those things that separate you from really intuiting this main point. And for a long time people not only refused to intuit this main point but were abhorred by the suggestion that it could possibly be true. But then you go and find other people in other places who are living different lives, haven’t been exposed to the culture you have, haven’t been exposed to the education or the legislation that you have, and you find that they’re living very differently, and that they — like other people in the world and like flowers and animals — have found a larger role for pleasure in their lives. Of course I don’t want to assume too much from what Amerigo Vespucci had to say about the Native Americans, but it reflects — and you see this in Thomas More’s book Utopia as much as anything else — it reflects a kind of worldly sickness about their own culture and civilization that somehow everything had gone very, very wrong.
Cassius: Yes, for some reason that reference to the Native Americans reminds me that for such a long period of time in Western writing there’s this allusion to the so-called “noble savage.” It seems like people recognized instinctively that while we might look down our noses at the technology or the way people live in certain ways, there’s a certain nobility that we appreciate — not only in primitive tribes and people who are living out in nature, but just in animals themselves. “Nobility” is certainly a word of praise, and they seem to be living in accord with nature in a way that we find to be attractive, that we find to need no further justification. There’s this constant tension between living according to nature versus — well, what’s the opposite? If you want to say that hedonism is a bad word, what are the alternatives to pleasure and pain as the guide? It’s religion, it’s rationalism, and so forth. But there’s an instinctive appreciation when you look at people who are close to nature that they’re living in a way that it’s hard to criticize.
Joshua: I associate that phrase “noble savage” with Rousseau, and there’s a Wikipedia page on that which I encourage people to read. There’s a lot of conflicting opinions on this, and one of the main ideas is that this idea and others like it have caused a great deal of grief for Native Americans and other tribal peoples around the world through stereotyping. But it does serve an interesting point, because I’m focusing not so much on that side of it but on the side of it where Thomas More is so distraught and so fed up by the world he’s living in that in order to even have a discussion about change being possible, he has to remove it an ocean away and into another culture, in order to even have a conversation about it. So it just shows how bad things had gotten by More’s day.
Cassius: DeWitt goes on and says that it is doubtful whether any other item of Epicurean invention is the equal of this in logical acumen. Either way you go back to pointing to nature and realizing that it’s life that nature has given you, and pleasure and pain that nature has given you as well, as the ultimate criteria of the way things should be — the way things have been created and are existing — and that is the standard to look to, and not something that you’ve invented yourself or that you cannot justify according to reality.
And so DeWitt extends that further and says that this appeal to the evidence afforded by the newborn and by the senses has its effect on the terminology, and results in Epicurus saying that the infant still being in a state of nature is “not yet perverted,” and that these words afford a hint of the perversion ascribed to the study of rhetoric and dialectic and mathematics, which Eudoxus was judged lucky to have escaped. That’s a reference, I think, to that line about setting sail as far from culture as you can — which we regularly discuss as not an invitation into anti-intellectualism, but an invitation to think about the foundations of what you’re believing and to make sure you separate yourself from prejudice and perversion of ideas.
And that’s a very good point, because you can imagine people listening and saying — well, I’m not interested in living like a muskrat, or a pig. I’m not interested in living like a pig and just focusing on day-to-day pleasures in a state of nature. I want to have museums and galleries and concert halls. I want libraries. I want a steady supply of books to read. People might think that Epicurus is advocating here not just pleasure but a kind of back-to-the-land movement of the ’70s. And I really do think this could be a huge stumbling block for some people.
Joshua: Oh yeah, you brought up a great point, and I’m not so sure that a back-to-the-land movement or things like that is necessarily negative. But I think you’re exactly right to focus on the fact that Epicurus is not advocating primitivism, or simply living without clothes in the desert, or emulating the way that animals live or anything like that. He’s suggesting, I would argue, that you evaluate your culture and decide whether it is consistent with the way that nature would have developed it naturally, as opposed to errors that have somehow crept in through religion or false philosophies over time. He’s not at all saying that you would not want to have libraries or everything that we have in civilization itself. He’s saying that there are libraries and methods of civilization that are consistent with nature, and there are those that are not. You’re not fleeing all culture just so that you can live in the desert yourself. You’re fleeing the culture that is corrupt so that you can establish your own culture that is not corrupt.
Cassius: Yeah, the key point to take away is that you don’t have to bring down the system. But what you have to do, all throughout your life, is a constant process of questioning your assumptions — questioning whether the things you do just because your parents did them, or whatever, questioning whether that is really going to accord with your philosophy. The sentence here in DeWitt that I was looking to bring out was: “Her word is true philosophy” — the vera ratio so often invoked by Lucretius. The point being that all philosophy is not corrupt, all culture is not corrupt, all intellectualism is not corrupt. But some parts of it, some types of it, are. The only way you can decide what is corrupt and what is not is to dig into it, then grab on, then rebuild the part that is true and correct and uncorrupted, and get rid of the part that’s not worthy of being kept. By no means would it be the equivalent of saying that Epicurus was against philosophy itself to say that he was against all culture and all learning and all intellectualism — and of course that’s the furthest thing from the truth. He’s telling you that a systematic study of nature is the key to the best life, and coming up with a true philosophy, a true form of reasoning, a true form of understanding about the way things are, is your objective. It’s by no means to get rid of all understanding. There are people who do advocate things like that — there’s a thread of anarchism and other related ideas that run through certain types of philosophy — and Epicurus I don’t think should be associated with that at all. He was in the process of pointing towards and developing a true philosophy, a true attitude towards divinity and to humanity’s place in the universe.
Joshua: Yeah, and then the Principal Doctrine I was looking for was 25: “If you do not on every occasion refer each of your actions to the ultimate end prescribed by nature, but instead, in the act of choice or avoidance, turn to some other end, your actions will not be consistent with your theories.” He’s identifying the proper end by which you will then judge all your actions and choose and avoid based on a correct understanding of things. He’s not saying just forget understanding, forget wisdom, forget prudence, forget all those things that philosophers talk about. He’s saying yes, in fact you have to use those to guide your life — just get them right and don’t use ones that are corrupted and are going to lead you in the wrong direction.
Cassius: So it’s a challenge to consistently and constantly be questioning your assumptions — not only about your own life and the choices you’re making, but about the world around you and whether it’s the most conducive possible world to the kind of life you want to live.
Right now — okay, we’ve been discussing pleasure as the guide; the topic of this chapter is the new hedonism and the role of pleasure and pain. And in focusing on nature establishing pleasure and pain as the guide of life — or wherever you end up on what you think the word “good” means, or the phrase “the highest good” — DeWitt now turns to the question: okay, if you’re saying that nature has established these things, does that mean that nature has a goal for you? Does that mean that nature has intelligently, consciously, in the place of a god, made a certain set of decisions to create this ending to which we’re supposed to conform? Are we in fact, as the Stoics would seem to do, turning nature into an intelligent God? Is nature Zeus? No, of course not. DeWitt, I think, rather simply answers that question, starting with where he thinks that the early atomists began the conversation and then seeing where Epicurus took off.
So he says at the bottom of page 221 and the top of page 222: “In the reasonings of the preceding atomists there had been a flaw. In effect, they had reached the conclusion that a non-purposive nature had at last produced a creature endowed with volition and intelligence as contingent capacities, but they had overlooked the fact that this human volition would be incapable of exercise if the universe were ruled by inexorable physical law, which is a form of necessity. Epicurus corrected this oversight by postulating that a sufficient degree of free play prevailed in the motion of the atoms to permit man to exercise his volition.” And this is the famous doctrine of the swerve that we get in Lucretius.
Joshua: Yeah, the question that DeWitt has raised here is: is nature a purposive being, the equivalent of a God, which has established from the beginning of time that mankind should have an end of a particular type? And I think what you’ve just done is read his answer. The previous atomists who had followed a strict determinism were kind of in a trap: if we’re talking about some kind of a goal for humanity, then that must mean — if everything has been ordained determinately from the beginning of time — that there’s some kind of chain all the way back to some kind of beginning, that this goal was there. I think what DeWitt is saying here is that by articulating that the atoms can swerve, Epicurus realized that while nature itself is just atoms moving through the void and in many cases does operate totally mechanistically, because the atoms can swerve, over time nature has ended up producing a creature like humanity that itself can develop a goal for itself.
Cassius: This is a really interesting point. I’m beginning to realize what DeWitt’s saying for the first time as I listen to you read it, Joshua. The universe itself — Epicurus is saying — has no goals, because it is simply what it is: the atoms moving through the void. But humanity as an emergent product of a certain number of these atoms can have a goal, because one of these emergent properties is this free-will agency that makes having a goal something appropriate to discuss. While the atoms don’t have any goals, humans as an emergent feature of a part of the universe do have goals within their frame of reference. Is that what you see him saying?
Joshua: No, I think you’re absolutely right. And we could take it one step further today, because we have an advantage that they didn’t. Although Lucretius started to go down this line, it’s not just that we’re an emergent property or phenomenon in nature from nature — we’re also an evolved species. And so it’s that particular heritage, which wasn’t chosen from the beginning (there is no guiding light or divine fire to tell evolution what to do), it’s the result of that eons-long process that has left us where we are as people living in nature, with everything we’ve been endowed with and all the problems that we have from birth. But it’s precisely those twin heritages — that we are emergent properties of the movement of atoms and energy, and also that we are the result of an evolved species — that give us the capacity to look to nature and to find in that our guides. And he refers here to pleasure and pain as the guides of life.
Cassius: You might also say that the pain is equally the guide of life — in the negative direction, right? I’m trying to avoid pain and pursue pleasure. And it’s because we come from nature and because we are evolved in that sense that we can look to that and find in it our purpose — although nature doesn’t have one for us.
You know, this bears some discussion here. As we talk about it now, it’s something that I don’t know that I’ve reflected on enough. It goes back to this: you say that nature has set a standard. Why follow nature’s standard? Why grant nature any higher deference than your own standard? How you would like the universe to be yourself — you can do a better job than God in designing the universe and the way human affairs go. Why not use your own standard of good and evil, of right and wrong, and place it higher than nature’s standard? Maybe the issue is just what perspective you’re really placing on nature as the norm. Are you looking to nature to tell you whether to be a capitalist or communist? Are you looking to nature to tell you every decision in your life that you need to make in total detail? Do you expect that nature has written a book of your life from the beginning of time that you’re supposed to read the pages and follow along? Or is that just simply the wrong perspective on nature in the first place — that we can’t and shouldn’t look to nature for that kind of guidance, but there’s another type of guidance from nature that is essential to look to?
I’m trying to sort out this difference here, because Epicurus is pointing — as DeWitt is saying here on page 221 — was Epicurus, in making of nature a judge and incidentally a teacher, involuntarily ascribing to her purposiveness and admitting that he himself is a believer in teleology — of everything moving towards some particular goal? That’s such a deep issue to unwind.
Joshua: It’s a very good question. What nature does — of course, not with purpose, not by choice, not even conscious of doing it — is just leave us this heritage as beings in nature. And it doesn’t matter if you’re on the International Space Station or in a forest out somewhere in the middle of the countryside: you’re in nature either way. We’re all in nature all the time. That heritage leaves us with things. You could say, for example, it leaves us with two hands. We live in a world built for people with two hands because we have two hands. It’s not that nature wanted us to make stringed instruments that require two hands to play — it’s just that we have two hands, therefore we made them. I don’t know if that helps, but it’s the same kind of thing with pleasure. Nature has in very broad strokes filled in some of the picture, but the detail level is totally up to you. Nature hasn’t written a book. Neither has God, for that matter. Do you find those analogies helpful?
Cassius: Yes, I think so, because this is where we seem to regularly go back in discussing Epicurean philosophy and how nature relates to our ethical conclusions. If you know that there is no pilot steering everything; if you know that your life is a function of your body being in a particular configuration for seventy-five or so years and that once that period is over you totally cease to exist; if you know that ultimately everything is made up of atoms and void, but that your senses — your eyes, your ears, your ability to touch things — those are key to a certain level of experience that produce this emergent world around you, which is the really only world that you have; and that because of the way your atoms are configured you find some things to be pleasing and some things to be painful, and that this is all registering in your mind as feelings of pleasure and pain; and you can construct in your mind all these other allegories and fictional characterizations of things, but that ultimately they’re not sanctioned by the universe itself, they are things that you create — if you have all of that understanding of the way things really are, that’s going to have a practical impact on the way you live your life. And so while nature is not ending up telling you whether to be an astronaut or a nurse or a gravedigger, nature has given you an awful lot of information about where you came from and where you’re going, from which you can derive some pretty obvious conclusions about how to spend your time. These facts of nature are not a living being-teacher in front of you telling you what move to make next, but they are a frame of reference that gives you the ability to make an intelligent choice yourself. And if you don’t have that understanding — if you don’t understand that there’s a swerve and that you have agency and control over your future — then you’re going to make a totally different set of decisions about how to spend your time.
Joshua: Yeah. And I can talk once again about this quote from Lucretius where he says that the eye didn’t develop in order to let you see — actually Charles Darwin took that point, by the way. Charles Darwin claims that he never read Lucretius, but I’m going to read this passage and let’s see if we can arrive at an opinion on that claim. He says: “To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox Populi, Vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor — as is certainly the case — if further the eye ever varies, and the variations are inherited — as is likewise certainly the case — and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated, but I may remark that as some of the lowest organisms in which nerves cannot be detected are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should be aggregated and developed into nerves endowed with this special sensibility.” That’s quite a long passage, but the idea being that nature doesn’t start out with a plan for allowing you to be able to perceive light or to see, any more than nature starts out with a plan for you to be able to make stringed instruments with your two hands. It doesn’t work like that. And it also doesn’t work on the level of what you should do as the highest purpose or goal in your life. Nature gives you the guides, and it’s for you then to take over and to decide what you’re going to do and how you’re going to live. And what Epicurus and the Epicureans noticed is that — say what you will, and there’s a long passage in Torquatus on this — say what you will, you’re already acting as if you were pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. You’ve been doing that the whole time. The key thing is just to recognize that you’re doing it and then do it better.
Cassius: Yeah, I agree with everything you’ve just said there. Also — speaking of nature not starting out with a plan — when we started this podcast today I had no plan whatsoever that we were going to be talking about these issues, but it is appropriate that we have done this. And again, this is one of those interesting issues that DeWitt brings out. We’re talking about this chapter, “The New Hedonism.” We’re supposed to be discussing pleasure and pain and how to apply it, and we’re going to do that and talk more about these intricacies of the specific choices between pleasures and pains. But the perspective that you bring to it is critical in determining how you’re actually going to make those decisions. If pleasure and pain are somehow intentionally given by nature for a particular purpose, then that has to be considered in the decision-making process. If not, then that is another set of conclusions.
DeWitt makes one more observation here along the same lines, which we can use to begin to close the episode for today. He says — we’ve just been discussing the determinism problem, which would mean that if determinism were correct and we’re talking about goals and guides and so forth, then nature must have given us a goal and a guide in a very specific intentional way. DeWitt says that the question still remains whether the reasoning of Epicurus is faulty when he makes a judge and a teacher of nature, who seems to deliver the verdict that pleasure is the telos and to inform man of the fact. DeWitt says that this error is not really committed even when we personify nature in the way that we do, because you have to scrutinize the meaning of the word “nature.” DeWitt says that often when Epicurus is talking about nature, he’s talking about human nature. There’s a fragment in which it is recorded that Epicurus says, quote: “Nature is not to be coerced.” And also he wrote that “it must be assumed that nature was taught a multitude of lessons of all sorts by sheer experience.” DeWitt says that when he makes comments like that, we should look upon that as referring to human nature — looking at the experience of humanity as what’s being referred to there. But that even that cumulative experience doesn’t have to be deemed purposive, even though it’s a result of the intelligent functioning of these creatures. Because Epicurus regularly uses phrases such as “the justice of nature” or “the limits of nature,” and what DeWitt is suggesting here is that this means only that the intelligent agent looks to the phenomena of nature in order to observe that there are signs where he’ll know the true nature of justice and the true limits of pleasure — in the same way that we look to the behavior of newborns to identify what we consider to be the telos of living. Both Epicurus and Lucretius personify nature, but Epicurus also personifies prudence or practical reason, making a teacher of that. DeWitt says this is figurative language and there’s no fallacy in his thought. The net result may be described as follows: “There is no purpose in nature, but in the process of non-purposive creation she has brought into being a purposive creature, man, and for him, being capable of reason, a telos is conceivable.”
Joshua: I think that’s very good. And you know, I’ve been using the two-hands analogy, but analogies like that are probably helpful to get around this idea. When Lucretius says nature doesn’t give you an eye so that you can see — it doesn’t work like that — that’s not necessarily the clearest possible metaphor, and other metaphors would be helpful. But the idea that nature gives you pleasure and pain as the guideposts on how to live your life, while the way that you live your life day to day is still totally up to you — well, it would be possible to live for pain. I don’t know, I wouldn’t want to do it, but you could. So it’s not predetermined that you’re going to live for pleasure. It’s not going to affect what happens to you after you die — you’re just not going to be alive anymore. But it’s going to affect the quality of your life, and that seems to me to be a very important question, and kind of where we get into this whole issue of pleasure and why we should live for pleasure.
Cassius: Yeah, that’s where we started the episode today — talking about Epicurus criticizing those who would harp endlessly on the meaning of the word “good” — and I think that’s where we’ve basically come at the end of the episode as well. We do have these feelings of pleasure and pain that nature gave to us, but we don’t necessarily have an inscribed invitation to become an astronaut or a doctor, or a plan for how to spend our lives while we’re here. Those are the things that we develop ourselves, using our minds, through our own circumstances.
Well, why don’t we begin to bring today’s episode to a conclusion? I know we haven’t had too much from Martin or Callistheni today. Martin, any thoughts?
Martin: I have nothing to add, thanks.
Cassius: Okay, thank you, Martin. Callistheni, any thoughts today?
Callistheni: Yes, this was a very interesting episode, and I really enjoyed the part where it was brought up that atoms don’t have free will, and yet somehow human beings have come to have this free will. That whole part of the episode I felt was quite interesting. Because reflecting back on the evolution of human beings, in some sense this is like an exercise of the mind — imagining life itself, human life, the value of human life. And I personally had a sense of inner feeling of awe arising in me — like a sense of wonder — because it’s hard to really fathom this, and yet here there’s this meditation upon the value of life, the value of human beings. If people spent time thinking about these things the world would be a better place. Parts of today were very moving for me. It touches into a core need for meaning in life, and yet there’s also the reflection on free will, where it’s important to remember — as we meditate upon free will — we realize that our choices matter, and that contemplation of our choices is an important thing to spend time on.
Joshua: Well, we’re going to have to use that last part you said, Callistheni, because I’m going to respond to it, and I thought it was very good — because it’s worth noting that this is a pretty long chapter. We’ve gone through about seven pages as of today in this chapter, but there’s a lot more to come. And the sort of the question now is: you’ve established that nature gives you pleasure and pain as the guide to life, that pleasure is the end toward which we do and should direct our lives — the question that’s going to come up pretty quickly is how do we do that well? And you mentioned choosing and avoiding, and that’s going to be a major focus as we go forward. So there’s a lot more to talk about in this chapter.
Cassius: Yes, we spent a lot of time last week just talking about the title, and we have only begun to scratch the surface of the rest of the chapter here. We’re going to begin next week on a subsection entitled “The True Nature of Pleasure,” which flows very directly from what we’ve just been talking about today. Again, it’s easy to characterize Epicurean philosophy as just practical applications of questions about pleasure and pain, and how to judge long-term pain versus short-term pain and intense versus not intense, and just these very practical questions about what to do right now. But the question of right now is derived from the question of where you’ve been and where you’re going and the big scheme of things and the overall picture. And Epicurus focuses on providing you that overall picture, from which you can then make the decisions of the moment that have to be made to actually implement the best way of life.
Okay, with that we’ll close for this week. We’ll come back next week with “The True Nature of Pleasure,” and until then please feel free to stop by the forum, ask any questions, leave comments, and we’ll incorporate those in future episodes. So thanks everyone for being with us today, and we’ll be back in a week. See you then.