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Episode 174 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 27 - Chapter 12 - The New Hedonism 03

Date: 05/19/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3055-episode-174-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-26-chapter-12-the-new-hedonism-03/

Summary

Section titled “Summary”

Episode 174 opens the subsection “The True Nature of Pleasure” in DeWitt’s Chapter 12. Cassius notes that DeWitt is not approaching this biologically — the section is a philosophical clarification of what it means to call something “pleasurable” at all. DeWitt’s key claim is that pleasure is “cognate and connate with us” — connate meaning born with us (like innate), cognate conveying shared origin — and that pleasure is not an appendage attachable or detachable from normal life but an ingredient or component of life itself, just as pain and disease are abnormal. Cassius connects this to Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens, where an Epicurean speaker makes the point that the color orange doesn’t exist apart from things that are orange — pleasure similarly doesn’t exist apart from beings capable of experiencing it. The implication for the Chrysippus hand analogy is explored: the hand in its normal, pain-free state is already experiencing pleasure; the foundational state of a healthy organism is pleasure, not a neutral emptiness. Joshua introduces the term “homeostasis” to describe this baseline, and Cassius and Joshua briefly debate whether the word captures the active, functioning quality Epicurus intends — agreeing that homeostasis works as a metaphor only if we’re explicit that the pain-free state is the pleasurable state. DeWitt then draws the analogy of pleasure to health and pain to disease, citing Vatican Saying 37 (“human nature is vulnerable to evil, not to the good, because it is preserved by pleasures and destroyed by pains”) and noting that Lucretius in the proem of Book 1 depicts animals joyously (laeta) filling themselves from the rich pastures (pabula) of the earth. The episode addresses Principal Doctrine 2 (absence of sensation is nothing to us), connecting it to the point that “living without pain” and “pleasure” are effectively two names for the same thing, which also partially explains why DeWitt characterizes life itself as the highest good — you cannot separate life from pleasure. DeWitt’s next point is that the soul-body parity in Epicurean philosophy (both mortal, both born simultaneously, both interdependent, cosensitive, and coterminous) directly contradicts the religious and Platonic view that the soul is superior to and hampered by the body. Cassius illustrates the diseased consequences of soul-body dualism by citing the historical spectacle of inquisitors weeping while torturing heretics, convinced they were benefiting the victim’s soul by destroying the body. DeWitt introduces the mens sana in corpore sano tradition — Juvenal’s phrase, which DeWitt calls “pure Epicureanism,” along with Petronius and Horace expressing the same prayer for health of mind and body — but DeWitt notes the irony that the dualistic good is expressed in these sources as a prayer, leading him to cite Vatican Saying 65 (“it is idle to seek from the gods what a man is capable of providing for himself”) and a Horace passage: “It’s enough to petition Jupiter for what he gives and takes away; may he grant length of life, grant the means of living — as for the quiet mind, I’ll provide that for myself.” The flesh-mind distinction in Epicurean texts is addressed next: PD 20, Vatican Saying 33, and Vatican Saying 51 are read, establishing that the flesh alone recognizes only immediate appetites and lacks the mind’s capacity for memory, anticipation, and the awareness that death makes an infinite prolongation of life unnecessary. Joshua draws a contrast with Stoic thinking — Marcus Aurelius tries to talk himself out of bodily pleasure, treating it as an obstacle to reason; Epicurus says pleasure is the solution, not the problem, and pain is the thing to overcome. Joshua also notes the sharp contrast with Buddhism, which treats the body as a hindrance to full development of the mind — entirely opposed to Epicurean parity. Cassius discusses ataraxia through the sea analogy: what you want when sailing is calm waters, not dead calm (a calmed ship with no wind cannot sail); the analogy implies movement and activity, not inertia. This leads to an extended discussion of the Odysseus and Sirens episode from Homer: Odysseus had his crew plug their ears with beeswax and had himself lashed to the mast, allowing him to experience the Sirens’ song without acting on it — an illustration of choosing to experience a pleasure that contains danger, through prudence, rather than simply avoiding it altogether. Cassius also credits forum member Fernando for pointing out that Odysseus needed friends to help him accomplish this — he could not have tied and untied himself — making it an illustration of friendship enabling pleasures one could not access alone. The episode then moves to three paradoxes that DeWitt says Epicurus introduced in response to Plato: (1) limits of pleasure are set by nature, beyond which no increase is possible; (2) pleasure is one and not many; (3) continuous pleasure is possible. Cassius explains the philosophical stakes: Plato’s Philebus (beginning at 27e) explicitly argues that pleasure and pain admit of “more or less” and have no limit, which Socrates uses to conclude that pleasure therefore cannot be the good. Cassius reads Seneca’s Letters 66.45 as a particularly clear statement of the Platonic objection: “What can be added to that which is perfect? Nothing — the ability to increase is proof that a thing is still imperfect.” If pleasure can always be increased, pleasure cannot be the good. Epicurus’s answer is Principal Doctrine 3: “The limit of the quantity of pleasure is the removal of all pain.” Cassius notes that this is often misread on the internet as saying “pleasure equals the removal of all pain,” but it is a statement about the quantitative ceiling of pleasure, not a claim that this is all pleasure is. The episode closes with the Torquatus passage (12): “Let us imagine an individual in the enjoyment of pleasures great, numerous, and constant, both mental and bodily, with no pain to thwart or threaten them — I ask what circumstance can we describe as more excellent than these or more desirable?” — read as the clearest ancient summary of pleasure’s ceiling as the proper goal of life. Martin has nothing to add. Callistheni says the episode solidified her understanding of core ideas she had read but not fully heard presented together. Joshua notes the group is still not halfway through Chapter 12, which is the meat of the entire book, and there is much more to come including the categories of desires.

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 174 of Lucretius Today. We are in our third session of discussing Chapter 12, “The New Hedonism.” We’re beginning today with the section entitled “The True Nature of Pleasure.” We’ve completed last week the discussion of pleasure as the telos and the discussion of pleasure as the good versus pleasure as the goal. Now, after having discussed those, DeWitt turns to the true nature of pleasure. When I read that title, I’m thinking: now he’s going to discuss the biology of what it means when some nerve endings fire off in the brain — what really is pleasure? And of course that’s not the direction he goes at all. He’s still in a very philosophical mode here, discussing these issues at a deeper level, not going into the biology at this point, but asking us to think more carefully about what it means to say the word “pleasure,” what it means to refer to pleasure. And it’s especially interesting, I think, in terms of what we’ve been discussing and the general position of Epicurus that pleasure is the absence of pain and the greatest pleasure comes when all pain is absent, and issues like that.

But let’s not go too far into it without just going with what DeWitt has to say here. He starts his subsection off by saying that while the identity of the end, or telos, is declared to have been established by nature, recourse must be had to observation and reflection to determine what can be truthfully predicated of it. Tied in with this problem is the question of the true relation of pleasure to pain. DeWitt believes — as in many cases — that Epicurus’s views have been misunderstood or even misrepresented. He says here, quote: “Pleasure, he declares” — referring to Epicurus — “is cognate and connate with us. And by this he means not only that the interconnection between life and pleasure manifests itself simultaneously with birth and by actions which precede the capacity to choose and understand — he also means that pleasure is of one nature with normal life, an ingredient or component of it, and not an appendage that may be attached and detached — yet meaning pleasure is a normal accompaniment of life in the same sense that pain and disease are abnormal.”

And before I turn it over to Joshua, we’re going to talk about what “connate” and “cognate” means. But I’m thinking to myself that perhaps this relates to, in A Few Days in Athens, Frances Wright’s discussion in which the student Theon is talking to several more experienced Epicureans and they’re discussing Aristotle. And they go into this issue of how Aristotle had held that a quality such as “orange” can exist in some type of independent, essential existence apart from things. And the point made in distinction to that by the Epicurean speakers there was that orange does not exist apart from things that are orange. And to me I’m relating this with what DeWitt is saying here — that pleasure and even pain don’t exist in the abstract. They exist only in terms of things that are painful or things that are pleasurable. And if I’m reading what DeWitt is saying here, when he says that pleasure is of one nature with normal life, an ingredient or component of it and not an appendage that may be attached and detached — that’s significant. Pleasure is not an appendage to a normal healthy life in this Epicurean perspective. Pleasure is the normal, productive, and pain-free life. If there are only these two things going on — pleasure and pain — then if you’re living without pain, you are living pleasurably. And I’m thinking that DeWitt has a very interesting point here that probably relates to him saying previously that he thinks life is the greatest good, because if you look at life without pain as pleasure, which I think Epicurus is doing, then you’ve just got another way of saying pleasure is the greatest good — because you’re saying that pleasure without life is nothing. There is no such thing as pleasure without life. So maybe that’s a partial justification for DeWitt’s perspective when he starts talking about life itself being the greatest good.

I also wonder if this does not relate again to this Chrysippus example of the hand in Torquatus, where we’re talking about the hand in its normal condition — which is not experiencing pain — being considered not only to be experiencing pleasure but the greatest pleasure, because it has no pain whatsoever. I would think that that might be an illustration of this principle: that life in its non-painful experience is in fact pleasure, or at least that would seem to be a premise of the discussion between Torquatus and Cicero there. So at any rate, let’s go back now to when DeWitt says pleasure is “cognate and connate” with us. What does he mean by that? Joshua has looked into that.

Joshua: Yeah, the confusion for me, Cassius, was whether these two words were really all that different, because what they both seem to mean is that “connate” — which is very similar to the word “innate” — simply means that it was born with us. But “cognate” kind of has a very similar meaning but also different meanings in, for example, language, where two different words have the same root word in different languages. So it’s interesting, and I can’t quite get my head around that part of it. But when you read what comes a little bit later in this paragraph, it does become kind of clear that what he’s saying really is that pleasure is not only born with us, but that pleasure doesn’t exist apart from things that feel pleasure. There’s no essence of pleasure that floats free on its own — you drove that home with your metaphor of the color orange, that orange doesn’t exist apart from things that are orange. But that’s also true of pleasure. It doesn’t make sense to talk about rocks experiencing pleasure. It’s living things that experience pleasure to some degree or other, and it’s always been a part of our makeup and there’s nothing we can ever do really to get away from it. That’s the other part of the equation.

What it comes down to, I think, is this: when he says that pleasure is innate in us, it’s not an appendage that can be attached or detached — it’s always kind of there on some level. So when you remove pain, the natural state, the state of nature that we exist in, is one of pleasure. And so pain therefore is the opposite of pleasure, but it’s not the ideal function, the normal function. “Homeostasis” is a word that is sometimes used on this point. The homeostasis of mind and body does not necessarily have pain as part of it. Pain is a signal that something has gone wrong.

Cassius: Josh, well, you’ve used the word “homeostasis.” Explain what you mean by that.

Joshua: It’s simply this idea, particularly in medicine, that when things are working normally, you tend to have things in balance — and that you get signals in areas of the body when stuff goes wrong.

Cassius: What I gather from your use of the word is the question: does the metaphor fully capture what we need? What I usually do is break down the Latin roots to get to a comfort level with what a word is conveying. “Stasis” and “homeo” — in this case — don’t necessarily convey to me exactly what I would have been looking for. “Stasis” to me means “state.” What does “homeo” convey?

Joshua: It means “like” or “similar.” Homeostasis is a tendency toward a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements.

Cassius: The difficulty I have with “tendency towards equilibrium” — equilibrium of what? If homeostasis means stability, continuing on without interruption — that’s no problem for me at all. But I’m just wondering: it needs to include something about the healthy functioning of it. Just because it’s steady doesn’t mean it’s healthy. My dead body is going to be steady in a certain sense when I die.

Joshua: It does include that, yes. If you consider, for example, that pain is a violation or a departure from equilibrium, and that pleasure in this analogy is this enduring constant state of equilibrium, then you have to get rid of pain somehow.

Cassius: Well, then that’s the point we’re talking about today. Because in what you’ve just said, you’re equating equilibrium with the pleasurable normal state. And as long as we’re clear about that, I would think we have no issue. But I guess maybe that’s the issue that we’re talking about — is the normal state something that we should consider to be pleasurable? Epicurus is pretty clearly saying that it is. And so if we were to use the word “homeostasis” to describe what we’re talking about, one of the premises would be that we are considering the normal healthy state to be a state of pleasure. Would you agree with that?

Joshua: I do agree with that. And what that leaves for pain is that pain is a signal that something has gone wrong somewhere. This can be in the body, this can be in the mind, this can be simply something like dissatisfaction in your life. It’s a signal that something has gone wrong. And I mean, you put your hand on a hot stove accidentally — the pain is telling you to take your hand off the stove before you injure yourself.

Cassius: Okay, then that’s a good segue into the third paragraph here, which is I think equally interesting. Because what DeWitt says is: “It follows from this that pleasure is not to be opposed to pain alone, because all creatures pursue the one and avoid the other. The two, pleasure and pain, are true opposites because they stand in the same relation as health, which preserves, and disease, which destroys.” So now we’re going to go down a line of discussing the analogy between pleasure as healthy operation versus pain as a diseased or destroying operation. Do you agree with that analogy?

Joshua: For the most part, yes. What you don’t want is constant pain for no apparent reason. Isolated pain that gives you information about how to return to healthy operation or pleasure is useful in a way, but it’s not good — it’s still bad. Pain is always bad, pleasure is always good. I’m simplifying the language here, but you sometimes have to endure pain, but you don’t do it for its own sake. It’s to get to pleasure — to get to either some better, more immediate, or more intense kind of pleasure, or to get to a longer-lasting kind of pleasure.

Cassius: Yeah, the healthy body is going to feel pain when it’s exposed to something painful, but it’s not going to feel pain in the absence of being exposed to something painful. And then DeWitt cites in support of this Vatican Saying 37, which he translates as: “Human nature is vulnerable to evil, not to the good, because it is preserved by pleasures and destroyed by pains.” This may be taken to mean that pleasure, as it were, is nutriment to the human being as food is, and that human nature reaches out for pleasure just as each living thing by natural impulse reaches out to its appropriate food. And for further support of that, DeWitt says that Aristotle himself had said something similar — that it may well be that in the lower order of animals there is some natural good superior to their scale of existence which reaches out for the kindred good — and he summarizes Epicurus as saying that Epicurus considers that all creatures seek pleasure as if food, and avoid pain as if poison. Which I think extends his analogy of suggesting that living in the absence of pain is in fact pleasurable, and that that’s what you’re seeking to do: to attain that pleasure, or any types of pleasures that sustain your existence as opposed to undermining it.

Joshua: Yeah, you’re definitely right there. I was looking at the Latin text of Lucretius because in the proem to Book 1, Lucretius makes reference to wild animals sort of dancing over the fields — but the word for the pastures is pabula, which is nutriment or food, and then it’s laeta, which is sort of joyousness or a kind of light-hearted pleasure. So it’s that idea that the wild animals are made joyous by having a rich and abundant source of food. I think there’s probably a metaphorical layer there. And then he goes on of course in that book to describe how these same animals will dare rapid currents to get to other pleasures, like love for the purpose of reproduction, and so on.

Cassius: Well, this first section — before we go to the second section — I’m stuck with the word “appendage” and thinking to myself that that’s a really good way of thinking about this issue. That once you’ve identified life in the absence of pain as pleasure, then you really have a different way of looking at the entire subject. And so when the heading is “The True Nature of Pleasure,” we’re not talking again about the biological or electrical processes involved in pleasure — we’re looking at the true nature of pleasure in the sense of a true perspective: that pleasure is not some extravagant thing that you don’t need, that you can just add on to life to make it better, but that the better perspective, the truer perspective on pleasure is that your life itself is pleasurable. And if you want to think about anything as being an appendage or temporary situation, it is in fact pain that is the temporary experience that you sometimes choose to undergo in order to get greater pleasure. But the steady state of confident continuation of your life itself is already experiencing pleasure.

Of course, my constant problem — that I’m looking for under every bed like a communist hiding in the 1950s — is this issue of just thinking that life is supposed to be nothingness and complete inertia, a coma-like state. But if your underlying principle is that life is not a coma, life is not inactivity and inaction, but the healthy functioning of the organism in ways that are pleasurable to it, then most of those problems I think would largely evaporate. And so that would be an example of taking Epicurean philosophy and really trying to put yourself in the shoes of Epicurus — accepting at least for the moment his perspectives and his premises, and then thinking about what deductions those would lead you to and what applications they would have. This issue of considering life in its normal everyday experience as pleasure results in a lot of different consequences that you might not expect.

Joshua: And because you use the word “healthy functioning” there — and I think that’s very good — the removal of pain simply leaves a sort of normal functioning slate on which you can live the rest of your life. Because the other side of the equation is: even if you thought that the good was to go live in a cave somewhere, we simply, most of us, don’t have the option to do that. I have to live a normal functioning life and go to work in the morning. And so having that base status of pleasure is there, but that’s not the only pleasure that I’m allowed or required to pursue. There are other aspects or areas of pleasure that I can pursue on top of that. And so to say that as long as you’ve gotten rid of all pain, that’s it — that’s all you have to do — well, it might be all you have to do, but there’s no hint in the ancient texts that that’s all you should do.

Cassius: Right. And you use the analogy of getting up and going to work in the morning in order to survive and so forth. You know, there’s so much involved in perspective. Because as much drudgery as we can consider it to be — to get up and go to work in the morning — I was seeing a poem this weekend that prompted me to realize that when you get to the end of your life and you’re ninety-something years old and you can’t even get up out of bed for the pain and the lack of strength in your body and mind, the idea of getting up to go to work in the morning and going through a normal workday will seem like paradise in comparison to the state that you’re in at that point. In relation to nothingness, in relation to death, even the most humdrum aspects of life can seem to be just like paradise. The total absence of pain from that perspective we conclude to be pleasure, or even the best pleasure. But the total absence of pleasure would be, I think, death, nothingness — and that’s pretty much what Epicurus says in Principal Doctrine 2: absence of sensation is nothing to us, and that’s where we are after we die. But anyway, rather than worry about being nowhere, let’s talk about how the good and pleasurable living applies both to mind and to body.

Joshua: Yeah, he starts off saying: “When once the association of pleasure with health and pain with disease has been established, the next step is to recognize the good as dualistic, being concerned with body and soul alike.” By the way, that word “disease” — if you break it down — is simply “dis-ease,” a lack of ease. Which kind of suggests the whole story right there. He goes on to say: “This teaching is ultimately derived from the denial of immortality. The belief in immortality confers upon the soul an adventitious superiority of importance and upon the body an adventitious inferiority.” And that’s a huge point, and we’ve seen grotesque examples of that historically. This idea that the body is something to be crushed — “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” — it’s very contrary to what Epicurus was thinking. Because the next sentence says: “The belief in the mortal nature of both soul and body, and their simultaneous birth and their continuous interdependence, their cosensitivity and coterminous existence, conferred upon the two a parity of importance. The claims of the body are just as important, just as valid, and just as necessary to the continued function of a healthy life as the claims of the mind.”

Cassius: Yes. So before DeWitt goes into the positive side of the discussion about the health of the mind and the health of the body, he makes this comment — that you just made, Joshua — that this is in strong contradiction to the religious or otherworldly perspectives of other philosophies or religions that somehow the mind is superior to the body. When you start with the presumption that the mind and the body are cognate — that it’s all working together, begins together, works together, ends together — then you do consider them both equally important. We know from other passages that the pains and pleasures of the mind can at times be more significant to us than those of the body, but there are also times when the pains of the body can certainly override and consume our awareness for short periods of time. There are stories of the people engaged in torturing heretics weeping while they’re doing it, because they’ve been led into this maze of thinking that somehow by torturing the person — by subduing their body — they can somehow correct the mind. And so while this causes them pain they feel like they’re doing it for the benefit of the person being tortured. It’s diseased thinking, and it seems to be the theme of the chapter.

So as far as where we’ve been so far in this chapter, I think what DeWitt is saying makes perfect sense as an explanation of the premises of where Epicurus is going. In the next section or two, what DeWitt points out is that we don’t see famous Epicurean phrases that we can attribute to Epicurus or even Lucretius that make that exact point in the same way, but that the same point does survive from several other related sources of the Greek and Roman world. He cites Horace, and then Petronius, and then Juvenal, where he ends up quoting the phrase that we do recognize: mens sana in corpore sano — sound mind and sound body. And DeWitt has said elsewhere in this book that that’s — I think to quote him exactly — “pure Epicureanism.” Juvenal in that quote will go on to talk about virtue and other things, which do invite some questions, but as far as it goes right there, I think that’s quite good. And Petronius just above that — “they wished one another health of mind and health of body” — because both are equally important. If the soul and the body are on a level state of parity, then you have to take care of both. And he cites a passage from Horace to the same effect: “Grant me, child of Leto, health to enjoy them, and I beseech you, also with soundness of mind.”

Joshua: Yeah, now that is slightly problematic, isn’t it? Because “child of Leto” in that case is Apollo — Apollo and Artemis are the twins of Leto. And so to ask a god for health of mind and body would be a slight departure from Epicurean principles. But of course Horace is a poet, and as we know from particularly his earlier writings, he was himself convinced by the Epicureans.

Cassius: Yes. And that leads us to what might be actually a tangent in DeWitt’s discussion as well, because he doesn’t refer to the Horace/Leto example as his reason for doing so, but then he says that in each of these three instances that he’s given, the dualistic good is something to be prayed for. And he cites Vatican Saying 65: “It is idle to seek from the gods what a man is capable of providing for himself.” And here’s a note that I made in the thread for today’s episode — I’m not familiar with this other fragment, but DeWitt cites a source in which Epicurus is quoted as having said: “Each individual is physically constituted from the very beginning of his being for a definite span of life, so that while he cannot live a longer term, he may live a shorter.” He then cites Horace making a statement: “It’s enough to petition Jupiter for what he gives and takes away. May he grant length of life, grant the means of living — as for the quiet mind, I’ll provide that for myself.”

So whether this is poetic license — like perhaps Lucretius in his poem — or whether Epicurus said these kinds of things himself, the key point is that you’re not expecting the gods to give you anything in response to your prayer, but perhaps it’s an acknowledgment that how long you live is something that’s not ultimately within your control. You can certainly shorten your life, but as far as extending it — that’s often beyond our capacity. And part of the problem is that if you put too much reliance on the idea of praying to the gods for things that you could just be working toward yourself instead, well, in some cases no amount of work is going to solve the problem — but also no amount of prayer is going to solve it. There are things you have to just accustom yourself to in this life. It’s like he says in the Letter to Menoikeus: accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to you, because there’s no getting around that ultimate problem. The ultimate path that we all must take, the ultimate fate of our bodies and minds, leads us to death.

Joshua: And DeWitt carries on his discussion here by talking about what Epicurus does — he contrasts the mind to the flesh. We’re going to talk a little bit about the use of this word “flesh.” The health of the body was described, quote, “as the stable condition of well-being in the flesh.” DeWitt also cites Principal Doctrine 20: “It’s the flesh that finds the limits of pleasure boundless, and infinite time would be required to furnish it. But the intelligence, taking into calculation the end and the limit of the flesh and dispelling the fears about eternity, renders the whole life perfect.” And then Vatican Saying 33: “The cry of the flesh is not to hunger, not to thirst, not to shiver with cold.” And Vatican Saying 51: “You inform me that the stimulus of the flesh disposes you inordinately towards indulgence and sexual intercourse.”

The direction of what’s going here again is that there is emphasis in Epicurean philosophy both on the mind and on the body. And the upshot of all of that is that while these two — the mind and the body — do exist on a co-equal level of parity, they do also have their differences. The mind, by virtue of being a mind, is aware of things that the body would not be aware of in absence of them. We have all kinds of phrases about the reproductive habits of rabbits, but rabbits don’t have minds — I don’t think — that allow them to understand the past and the future and that there’s a limit to these things and that eventually both mind and body are going to die. And it’s required that the mind understand that because of the way things are, you’re not necessarily missing out on anything by your life having a definite endpoint. And that gets possibly off our topic from “New Hedonism,” but certainly that’s the point that Epicurus is making: that the flesh simply knows its appetites and knows the current moment. The flesh itself doesn’t have — as you said, Josh — memory. The flesh just knows what it wants right now. But the mind has the ability to process the past, the present, and the future, and to realize that the future is not going to be essentially different than the past, and even though we would like to experience more pleasant experiences over time, those experiences are not going to be essentially different than the ones we’ve already experienced — so that immortal time is not necessary in order to live a full life right now.

Cassius: The difference is going to come up here because DeWitt is about to quote ideas of Stoical indifference. And one difference is that if you read Marcus Aurelius, he’s got passages where he’s trying to talk himself out of experiencing bodily pleasure in some interesting ways — that’s not one of the functions of the mind in Epicurean philosophy — to talk the body out of experiencing pleasure, or to talk it into not needing those pleasures to function. The pleasures of the body are worthwhile in themselves and there’s nothing wrong with them as long as they don’t implicate you in a raft of other problems, and most importantly as long as they don’t implicate you in more pain than you get from the pleasure.

Joshua: Yeah, that’s a great point that I was not prepared to make, but you’re exactly right. That’s why he no doubt goes into this discussion that “the stable condition of well-being in the flesh” is not a condition of indifference but a condition of appreciation of what you have — and that you don’t need an unlimited amount more of it in order to appreciate what you have. And that just bears repeating over and over: you’re not suppressing pleasure like a Stoic would seek to do, as if he’s identifying pleasure as the problem and wishes to disassociate himself from it. Epicurus is saying pleasure is not the problem — pleasure is the solution. Pleasure is the normal way of functioning that you wish to embrace and appreciate for what you have. The knowledge that it doesn’t continue indefinitely does not mean you should push away that which you have.

Cassius: As I think about trying to express that — it’s just a crazily different perspective. To say that because you can’t have an unlimited amount of pleasure, you’re going to say “I don’t want any pleasure at all” — I’m going to take my ball and go home. Exactly, a bitterness — “bitterness” seems to be a good word for a lot of that attitude. Because they can’t have things their own way, they don’t want anything at all. And it seems to me that’s about as self-destructive an attitude as you could possibly get. Because nature doesn’t do what you want nature to do, you’re just going to disassociate yourself from nature and come up with your own scheme of things and denounce what nature does provide to you.

Joshua: This would also be a good place to mention a similar sort of view in Buddhism, I think. Some people who try to connect Epicureanism to Buddhism are going to stumble on this issue, because Buddhism does have this idea that there is a dualism between the mind and the body, and that the body is a hindrance to the full development of the mind — and that’s totally contrary to what we’re reading here, and it’s totally contrary to what Epicurus was saying. Pleasure is not an obstacle to be overcome. It’s in fact pain that is an obstacle to be overcome.

Cassius: Probably hard to overstate how significant this is. You can focus on the experiences of the moment and certainly during the moment there can be suffering, there can be pain, there can be all sorts of unpleasant things. But if you look at the bigger picture, you also have to have an assessment of it. And if your assessment of life itself is that life is bitter, life is suffering, life is to be dissociated from — and you wish you’d never been born, as some of these people seem to feel — I don’t see how you could possibly have a more diametrically different attitude than what you read from Epicurus. Because he’s saying the exact opposite: that life is to be embraced, life is pleasure at that summary level. That’s the way you look at things. You look at life as a short period in which you’re alive, out of an eternity before birth and after death in which you’re not going to be alive, and you focus on the big picture and don’t let the big picture be destroyed by some temporary experiences of pain or distress. The phrase I seem to be saying a lot lately: “perfect is not the enemy of the good.” Just because you can’t have an eternal life of perfection doesn’t mean you’re going to throw away all that’s good in your existing life, which is not perfect. I would think that would be a very perverse conclusion to reach, but it seems to be the conclusion that a lot of other philosophies and religions do reach — to which Epicurean philosophy would be the antidote.

Joshua: Yes, yes, that’s very good. So just as we were basically talking about the word “ataraxia” and the proper perspective about how life is pleasure rather than pain, DeWitt closes this section with the metaphor of how ataraxia implies not just a coma, not death, not the absence of any experience, but the analogy of the sea and tranquility. Things that we often think of in terms of whether we have rough seas, smooth seas, smooth sailing, and so forth.

Cassius: Yeah, I think it’s good because he talks about all of these words in reference specifically to trouble at sea. And so what you want when you’re at sea is calm waters — but you don’t want things to be so calm that you can’t sail. That would be the other extreme — once again — of healthy functioning. When you get out into an area of the ocean where there’s no wind, you’ll die; you’re stuck.

Joshua: Yeah, and of course total and perfect calm in mind and body would be a state of death. And we don’t want to pursue that either. So you don’t want your little craft to be swamped because things are so turbulent and troubled, but you also don’t want to be becalmed — stood still, arrested.

Cassius: I hope that gets around some of these issues relating to words like “ataraxia,” because I do see this as a constant problem. “Ataraxia,” the way some people read it, does seem to imply that the body is in some ways an obstacle or a hindrance to the mind, and I don’t think that’s true. The related analogy being one we’ve discussed recently as well — it’s almost like we should call you Captain Joshua or something — because the related analogy is the “ship in the port is safe but that’s not what ships are for” kind of thing.

Joshua: I’ve yet to find the definitive source of that particular saying, but I think the essential point is correct. The ocean analogy is helpful because what we’re doing with the ocean, our relationship to the ocean, is: we’re traveling across it from one place to another, we’re fishing, we’re doing things. But we’re not really capable of living in the ocean our whole lives. We’re not acclimated to doing that. So analogies regarding the ocean or bodies of water would seem to me at least to imply movement and the activities of life — not just a rowboat sitting unused in a pond. The fact that the boat is there in the first place indicates that a human being needs it to travel from place to place, or to fish, or to experience the pleasure of being on the pond, or just some activity of life. It’s just looking at an ocean with clear skies and few waves — that ocean is calm, yes, but our relationship to that ocean is that we want to be sailing on calm seas. We’re not just there staring at the beauty of the ocean in its calm state. We’re seeing an analogy to the way we wish to live our lives.

Cassius: And we’ve been workshopping another analogy on this point, haven’t we — which is this scene from the Odyssey in which Odysseus and his crew are coming up upon the rocky outcropping where the Sirens are singing. The normal course of things is one of two things: when you encounter the Sirens, you can either be so totally enamored with them that you crash on the rocks and founder your ship, or you can stuff your ears with beeswax and just sail right past them, totally oblivious. But Odysseus takes a different course: he has the crew fill their own ears with beeswax and lash him to the mast, so that he can’t do anything except listen. The idea that you want to experience things, and that either extreme — refusing to experience things because they might be dangerous, or crashing into the rocks — both have problems. Do you have anything else to say about that? We’ve been talking about this a lot in the last few weeks.

Joshua: Yes, this is currently one of my favorite analogies that I think has some real possibilities for expressing clearly some of the perspectives of Epicurean philosophy in a correct way. Certainly Odysseus could have plugged his own ears with wax just like his men did, but he chose not to — because he wanted to hear the voice of the Sirens. Now in my quick review of that section of the Odyssey, it appears that what the Sirens were doing was not only singing pleasantly but also foretelling the future. He wanted to hear these tales of the future as well — so there may be other implications of this. But the bottom line is that Odysseus chose to expose himself to this experience for the pleasure of what he did experience.

Cassius: And I first want to thank you, Joshua, for bringing up the analogy. But I also want to credit Fernando, who in one of our recent discussions on the forum brought up the fact that it’s also an illustration of how Odysseus was able to accomplish this through the help of his friends. He could not have lashed his own hands to the mast and then unlatched them himself. He got his fellow sailors on the boat to assist him in doing this, and this is an example of how you can experience additional pleasures in life through the cooperation and assistance of your friends that you could not do yourself without them. So there are several really promising lessons to be gotten from that episode with Odysseus. And it sounds like Epicurus himself was fond of quoting Homer whenever he could, to enlist him in his illustrations of the right way.

Joshua: I think there’s an episode about the Phaeacians which we won’t go into right now which Epicurus also cited. But Odysseus with the mast is possibly a very good example of the right way to approach pleasures of life that do entail some dangers — rather than just avoiding all pleasure that contains danger, you can find ways to prudently experience the benefits of those pleasures without the detriments of the pain that comes from it.

Cassius: And what DeWitt says in closing the subsection: “If a man has attained a true knowledge of these things and keeps his emotions within their natural limits” — maybe Odysseus did that by tying himself to the mast — “the reward is comparable to the peace which passeth all understanding.” There’s DeWitt using one of his Christian analogies. He cites Vatican Saying 78: “The truly noble man busies himself chiefly with wisdom and friendship, of which the one is an understandable good, but the other is immortal.” And even though we’re not focusing on immortality since we don’t have the ability to attain to it, what DeWitt is saying is equating “immortality” as a characterization as just the highest possible praise. He says Epicurus knows no higher praise than to call a thing immortal.

What that necessarily leads us into then is all these discussions they were having in the ancient world on issues like limits: what is the limit of pleasure? What is the limit of pain? What is the limit of virtue? Wisdom — once you’ve reached it, can you possibly come back down from it again? So that’s the next point here. DeWitt says: “Having established body and soul upon a parity — equal partners in life — Epicurus next proceeded to propound a number of paradoxes: first, that limits of pleasure were set by nature beyond which no increase was possible; second, that pleasure was one and not many; and third, that continuous pleasure was possible.”

And some of this comes in response, probably, to that dialogue of Plato’s, the Philebus. And I see in the thread for this chapter I’ve put some quotes from that in there.

Joshua: Yes, that’s particularly important, and we’re going to spend some time on it.

Cassius: Because you could list these issues out — limits of pleasure set by nature, no increase is possible, pleasure is one and not many, and continuous pleasure is possible — and just pass by those and think that they are just part of the ongoing discussion, and that we don’t have any real problem with them. But I think you can go further than that and find a great deal more by following the lead that DeWitt is giving here. Because he says specifically that these new doctrines were the offspring of controversy, because the contrary doctrines had been sponsored by Plato and his followers, who in this instance agreed for the most part with the multitude. So just to emphasize that point: what DeWitt is saying is that Plato — and really everybody else prior to Epicurus — were concerned that number one, there was no limit to pleasure. Is there a limit to pleasure?

DeWitt focuses on two statements from Plato’s Republic in which Plato is talking about pleasure being insatiable. But I think you can find a more clear statement of this in the Philebus, as Joshua has mentioned. I have those citations in the forum. Basically you start reading at Philebus 27e, where Socrates specifically asks the question: “Have pleasure and pain a limit, or do they belong to a class which admits of more or less?” That gets to be a relatively complicated argument to follow, and you really have to take some time to think about what they’re getting at. But I think what you can do in another source — this comes after Epicurus, but Seneca has the argument in an even clearer form in two letters. This is probably in my reading one of the most clear statements of the question. Seneca to Lucilius, 66.45: Seneca says — “What can be added to that which is perfect? Nothing — otherwise, that was not perfect to which something has been added. Nor can anything be added to virtue either, for if anything can be added thereto, it must have contained a defect. Honor also permits of no addition, for it is honorable because of the very qualities I’ve mentioned. What then — do you think that propriety, justice, lawfulness do not also belong to the same type, and that they are kept within their fixed limits?” And then this — which I think is the summary: “The ability to increase is proof that a thing is still imperfect.”

Which means, I think, that if you suggest that more pleasure is always possible — that more pleasure is necessary to reach some goal that you’ve stated in your mind — that is a logical proof that whatever state you’re in, you’re not in a state of completion. You haven’t lived a full life; you haven’t achieved the goal you’re looking for. So the ability of something to increase means that it’s not a perfect or a final goal. Of course, what Plato, the virtue-focused philosophers, and these sources are alleging is that virtue itself is complete — that justice is a completed term that has nothing higher than it, that wisdom is perfection, that when you reach the summit of the mountain in that sense there’s absolutely nothing higher than that. And they looked at Epicurus and the contention that pleasure should be the good and said: pleasure can’t be the good because there’s no limit to it. Pleasure can always be made better by adding more to it. It’s not like you can be “more wise” by adding more wisdom — if you’re wise, you’re completely wise. That would be their distinction.

And so this issue of whether pleasure has a limit is a really important one for deciding whether pleasure can be the goal of life or not. In the Philebus, Socrates argues down the other side and they end up deciding that pleasure can always be made better — so really pleasure is not the good. This issue has to be confronted, and Epicurus had to come up with an explanation of what is then the limit of pleasure. If you’re going to suggest that the highest good — your goal, your ultimate experience in life — is a single concept, then that concept has to be something that expresses perfection within itself: that it is full, that it is complete, that it is pure. There’s a “pureness” argument also in the Philebus that’s related to this as well. But the basic issue is as in Seneca: the ability to increase is proof that the thing is not perfect, that it is still imperfect.

And so we go into this discussion here in DeWitt about — what then is the limit of pleasure according to Epicurus? If the best has to have a limit, then the best — meaning pleasure — had better have a limit. And what is the limit of pleasure in Epicurean philosophy? Well, what he says in the Principal Doctrines is that the limit of the quantity of pleasure is the removal of all pain. Epicurus actually has two responses to this argument — two limits of pleasure, I should say. One is what he says there: the limit of the quantity of pleasure is the removal of all pain. But also that death of course is the final limit of pleasure. His other response to that argument was to turn it around, particularly when it came to the gods: if the gods are perfect, then they should not be able to have wants or desires sufficient to create or to interfere in the affairs of men. So not only did he answer their original question, but came back at them with that one.

Joshua: Yes, and the word “limit” is another one of these words that we really have to be clear about. The word “limit” has the meaning of a boundary at times; it has the meaning of “the most possible.” We tend to think of it as meaning “the best.” And so when we read Principal Doctrine 3 — “the limit of the quantity of pleasure is the removal of all pain” — we either consciously or unconsciously, or through the influence of commentators, think that that means “the best pleasure is the removal of all pain.” And it certainly does have that meaning in part. But you must then think about what “best” means, and then dive back into this issue that Plato and Seneca are talking about — is the “best” something that has a completion to it, or is the “best” something that’s always improving and growing? And they came to the conclusion — which probably makes logical sense — that the “best,” if you’re using that word to describe something you’re creating in your mind as the perfect form of that thing, must have a ceiling.

Cassius: One thing we might say just briefly here is that Principal Doctrine 3 is very specific in its language: “The limit of the quantity of pleasure is the removal of all pain.” But when people read this and then spread it around on the internet, what they end up saying really is that “pleasure equals the removal of all pain” — but that’s not true. Epicurus doesn’t say that, and it’s actually contrary to a lot of what he did say. He’s talking very specifically here about one specific aspect of pleasure: the ceiling or limit. It’s not that when you remove all pain, that’s all pleasure ever is. There are additional pleasures that you can add to that. But the base layer of pleasure — the healthy functioning mind and body — is already pleasure. And that gets us back to that Chrysippus hand argument: the hand doesn’t feel a lack because the foundational baseline state is a state of pleasure. But it’s not the only pleasure.

Joshua: Right. You also have to consider what Epicurus talks about in the Letter to Menoikeus as well, when he talks about how when we are not facing any more pain we have no need of pleasure. Well, all of these have to be understood together.

Cassius: In talking about the quantity that you’ve been discussing there, Joshua, there’s a lot going on here. And it’s not just a type of pleasure that is different from others — it’s a quantitative or magnitude measurement of all the different experiences that you’re feeling at a particular moment. You can only experience so much in your life, or at any particular moment. At any moment we’re feeling different things — in our minds and our bodies, different thoughts going around in our minds. You’re aware of many things at a particular time, but the most you can be aware of at any particular moment — you can think of that as the total of your experience. If you could sit back and itemize them all, at some point you’d have to stop, because you can’t be aware at one moment or over your lifetime of more than a certain number of things. And if you list out that number — however long it is — and make all of those experiences pleasurable and have zero experiences of pain, it would seem like that is the limit of pleasure that he’s referring to.

So you’ve got a series of things to consider there, but this general issue of “limit” is something that is very important to think about. It’s not just a question of saying that there’s a single type of pleasure out there that is better than anything else. The word “limit” implies all sorts of different perspectives that have to be considered. We talk about Cicero’s On Ends as a similar analogy — “end” or “goal,” the relationship between those two words, “limit” versus “goal,” they seem to be used in a very similar manner.

Joshua: What’s that Usener fragment? Because it seems important — where Epicurus says “I know not how to define the good apart from x, y, and z.” That is cited in Diogenes Laertius as well.

Cassius: The translation I have there says, quote: “I know not how to conceive of the good apart from the pleasures of taste, of sex, of sound, and the pleasures of beautiful form.”

Joshua: Right. So in other words, the absence of pain is not a full description of pleasure, nor should it be construed as the only pleasure we should pursue.

Cassius: You know, the word “ceiling” is a good one to flesh out what we’re talking about here. A ceiling is a limit. It’s the highest point you can reach in the room you’re standing in at a particular time — but there’s no implication that living in the rest of the room is somehow something you shouldn’t be doing. If you fill a room with water or anything else, the ceiling is the limit at which it can no longer be filled. And by nature, a human being has a similar limit in his limited lifespan and in the limited amount that he can experience in any one particular moment. So the best life would be one where a person spends every moment of his living time in full pleasure and without any pain. That would be the ceiling of what any living individual could do. In full pleasure of mind and body — this is almost good for a Torquatus quote. It’s similarly stated in the Letter to Menoikeus, but it is stated very clearly in Torquatus. Passage 12: “The truth that pleasure is the supreme good can be most easily apprehended from the following consideration. Let us imagine an individual in the enjoyment of pleasures great, numerous, and constant, both mental and bodily, with no pain to thwart or threaten them. I ask what circumstance can we describe as more excellent than these or more desirable?” I think that’s a great summary of what we’re talking about here when we talk about both mental and bodily, with no pain to thwart it. What circumstance can we describe as more excellent or more desirable? Is that not just a way of saying that the ceiling of goodness is a person experiencing total pleasures of mind and body without any pain?

Joshua: Yeah, I think that’s just about the best summary from the ancient world we’re going to get on that, but it’s very good.

Cassius: You have to presume that what Torquatus is saying here is the distilled summary and latest articulation of Epicurean philosophy after two hundred and some years of development. In the Roman world at the time of Cicero, what Torquatus is saying had been distilled down as the essence of Epicurean philosophy. This is a good place for us to end. There is a limit to pleasure. Pleasure does have a ceiling in human existence, and so there is no logical objection from Plato or Seneca or anybody else that carries force against it, because pleasure does have a ceiling and a limit to it which we can logically assign as the goal of life. So let’s go ahead and bring today to a conclusion. Closing statements. Martin, anything?

Martin: I have nothing today.

Cassius: Okay. Callistheni.

Callistheni: Yes, I really enjoyed today because it really covers the basic ideas about pleasure, and some things which I’ve read and thought about — yet hearing it all in this presentation really solidified it for me. So thank you.

Joshua: Yeah, it occurs to me that we’ve been going now for weeks on this chapter of “The New Hedonism” and really haven’t even gotten into issues like different categories of desires and all that kind of stuff. I still don’t even think we’re halfway through this chapter — which is good, because as I said elsewhere, this is kind of the meat of the whole book. Everything that we’ve covered before this is kind of laying the groundwork for exploring these issues. And this isn’t the only issue like that that needs to be explored. So there’s a lot more to come, even just in this chapter. So don’t by any means think that we’ve covered it all.

Cassius: Yes. Last week we had DeWitt talking about the Gordian Knot, and I think that’s kind of where we are at this point in our discussion. We’re seeing Epicurus cut through many of the contradictions that other philosophers and religions were throwing against pleasure as the coordinating guide of life. We’re seeing Epicurus cut through those logical inconsistencies by pointing to the observations of what the young of all things do, and so forth. These are the essential insights of Epicurus that lead to his conclusions. If you don’t understand these essential insights, then you’re not going to be able to predict with accuracy or apply where he’s going. So these issues deserve the attention we’re giving them, and I hope people will drop by the forum, come talk with us about them during the week, post your comments and questions, and we’ll bring them up as we can in future episodes. Thanks everybody for your time today. We’ll come back next week and see you then.