Episode 175 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 28 - Chapter 12 - The New Hedonism 04
Date: 05/25/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3077-episode-175-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-27-chapter-12-the-new-hedonism-04/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 175 is hosted by Cassius and Don (substituting for Joshua, who is absent), continuing Chapter 12 with the subsections “Pleasure Not Increased by Immortality” and “Unity of Pleasure.” Cassius opens by reading Principal Doctrines 18, 19, and 20 in sequence: PD 18 states that once the pain of want is removed, the pleasure of the flesh is not increased but only varied; PD 19 states that infinite time contains no greater pleasure than limited time, if one measures by reason the limits of pleasure; PD 20 states that the flesh perceives the limits of pleasure as unlimited and requiring infinite time, but the mind — having grasped the ultimate good of the flesh and its limits — renders the whole life complete with no further need for infinite time, and moreover, the mind does not shun pleasure and does not feel it has fallen short of the best life when death approaches. Don notes that another translation (Saint-André) renders PD 19’s key term as “the same amount of joy” rather than “no greater pleasure,” and that the concept being clarified is that nature’s ceiling for pleasure is the same whether experienced across a finite or infinite life. Don introduces what becomes one of the episode’s central metaphors: the jar — the full jar is the same size and the same full whether you measure it now, in ten years, or across an infinite span of time. Don reads the Letter to Menoikeus at section 126 in Diogenes Laertius: “Choose not the longest time but that in which one enjoys the fruits of the greatest pleasure,” and points out that the Greek word used there is karpizesthai — to harvest or pluck — the same root as the Latin carpo in carpe diem. Cassius and Don explore the aspects of pleasure beyond duration: intensity, variety, different pleasures for different organs and faculties, the different qualities of memories versus immediate sensation. DeWitt’s “alpinist” analogy is introduced: the pleasure of being at the mountain peak is not increased by remaining there indefinitely, and the accomplished climber also carries the pleasure of memory afterward. Cassius notes Hegesias the Cyrenaic (“the death-persuader”) as the extreme contrary position — arguing death was preferable to life — which Epicurus directly opposed; Principal Doctrine 20’s closing phrase (“the mind does not approach its end as though it fell short of the best life”) is read as a direct refutation. Don raises the argument that immortality would also mean watching everyone you love die repeatedly, and Cassius connects this to Cicero’s observation that if Pompey had died when ill he would have been spared all the disasters that befell him. The episode also addresses the “fullness of pleasure” argument: DeWitt cites Ecclesiastes’ “nothing new under the sun” and notes Lucretius says the same — no new pleasure can be devised — and once the jar is full, continuing to pour is overflow, not addition. Cassius warns against reading this as a call to asceticism: Epicurus is not telling you to reduce the jar — nature provides your body and mind as the jar at its given size, and you’re not going to chip off the top to make a smaller jar just so it fills more easily. Don reinforces this by arguing that the famous bread-and-water passage in Epicurus was simply a reference to a normal midday meal in ancient Greece, and what Epicurus was actually calling for was attention and gratitude toward everyday pleasures — not minimalism but awareness. DeWitt introduces Seneca’s point that human life should be measured by achievement rather than length, and Ben Jonson’s poem: “It is not growing like a tree in bulk doth make man better be… In short measure life may perfect be.” DeWitt’s core formulation on this topic is read from the Letter to Menoikeus: “The true understanding of the fact that death is nothing to us renders enjoyable the mortality of existence — not by adding infinite time, but by taking away the yearning for immortality.” Don adds a tangent about a Bart Ehrman podcast episode discussing the controversy over including the Book of Revelation in the New Testament canon, partly because it described the afterlife as including physical banquets — showing that even Christians in the second and third centuries could not agree on whether physical pleasures would be part of the afterlife. The episode then introduces the subsection “Unity of Pleasure.” DeWitt argues that Aristippus and Plato recognized only peaks of pleasure separated by neutral intervals, which logically made it impossible for the wise man to be happy at all times — a conclusion repugnant to Epicurus. To refute this, Epicurus had to vindicate freedom from fear and pain as itself a positive pleasure, which is the doctrine of the unity of pleasure. Don notes the Cyrenaic position is that the neutral, calm state is essentially equivalent to death, whereas Epicurus expanded the definition to include it. Don uses Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s “circumplex” model — plotting pleasant/unpleasant on one axis and high/low arousal on the other — to illustrate the point: the Cyrenaics recognized only the upper-right quadrant (high arousal, pleasant), while Epicurus included everything on the pleasant side of the axis, from excited and elated to calm, serene, and relaxed. Usener 68 is cited: “The stable condition of well-being in the flesh and the confident hope of its continuance means the most exquisite and infallible of joys for those who are capable of figuring the problem out.” Don notes that the key Greek phrase (sarkos eustatheias katastēma, stable condition of the flesh) was the Epicurean definition that Aulus Gellius and Plutarch preserved, and that this was precisely what was excluded from the Cyrenaic definition of pleasure. DeWitt concludes that this understanding must be confirmed through habituation — as Epicurus himself says at the end of the Letter to Menoikeus: “Practice these things day and night with a like-minded friend and by yourself.” Cassius closes with Cicero’s sneering remark that Epicurus “rounds up people from all the crossroads” who are not highly educated, and notes that DeWitt’s response is that Cicero has it backwards — Epicurus was praised precisely for presenting truths so clearly that they could be grasped without elaborate philosophical training. Martin has nothing to add. Callistheni says the episode stimulated some ideas she’ll post to the forum thread. Don endorses the forum threads as a valuable place for extended discussion. Cassius closes by noting that the question of immortality and why we don’t need it is not one most people think about daily, but it is part of the core Epicurean curriculum, because it provides the context — the overarching frame — within which all individual pleasure-and-pain calculations are made.
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 texts 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 175 of the Lucretius Today podcast. We have with us this morning Don, who is taking the place of Joshua, who’s out today. We’re going to go forward in Chapter 12, “The New Hedonism,” with the subsection “Pleasure Not Increased by Immortality,” starting on page 229 of the DeWitt book. Before we get started — last week we were going through the opening sections of this chapter, and we’re now going to focus this week on several Principal Doctrines that are key to this issue of time and immortality.
Principal Doctrine 18: “The pleasure in the flesh is not increased when once the pain due to want is removed, but is only varied, and the limit as regards pleasure in the mind is begotten by reasoned understanding of these very pleasures and of the emotions akin to them which used to cause the greatest fear to the mind.”
Principal Doctrine 19: “Infinite time contains no greater pleasure than limited time, if one measures by reason the limits of pleasure.”
And Principal Doctrine 20: “The flesh perceives the limits of pleasure as unlimited, and unlimited time is required to supply it; but the mind, having attained a reasoned understanding of the ultimate good of the flesh and its limits, and having dissipated the fears concerning the time to come, supplies us with the complete life, and we have no further need of infinite time; but neither does the mind shun pleasure, nor when circumstances begin to bring about the departure from life does it approach its end as though it fell short in any way of the best life.”
So what we’re going to be discussing today in follow-up to the earlier sections is a perhaps more challenging issue: the relationship between pleasure and time, and whether in fact we need an unlimited time, whether we’re missing anything in life because we’re not immortal like the gods are. That’s a big motivation for a lot of people in life. They don’t want to miss out on things. They don’t want to feel like they have been short-changed by life and are leaving things on the table, so to speak, when they die. They’re concerned that what’s going to happen after they’re gone are things they would really wish to be around to see, and that by dying at any point they’ve been cheated out of what life can give them.
Given that motivation and concern — which drives people to religion to some degree, and the desire for immortality — DeWitt’s point in this subsection seems to be that Epicurus wanted to provide a reasoned explanation of why you should not have that concern, why you should not let it bother you, why you should not get obsessed over the fact that you’re not immortal and continuously worry about not only being punished or rewarded after death, but just the fact that you’re missing out on things. And so we have a subtle, complicated, but important relationship between how you’re measuring pleasure. Do you measure pleasure solely in terms of time?
Don: Yeah, exactly. I find it interesting that in Principal Doctrine 19, some other translations and the original Greek actually use the word “equal” instead of “a greater amount.” I think that word “greater” has a different connotation, a different feel to it, whatever it’s used in the translation. For instance, the Saint-André translation says: “Infinite time and finite time contain the same amount of joy” — he translates the word as “joy” — “if its limits are measured out through reasoning.” So I think the thing that’s being concentrated on there is the limits of pleasure, and he’s trying to say that those limits are the same whether you look at them in a finite time or infinite time. And I think it all comes back to this whole idea of being completely filled with pleasure, completely satisfied, and then varying your pleasures. The other Principal Doctrines start talking about the variety of pleasures that you can have. But if you’re satisfied with your life, if you’re in good working order — and I think the metaphor you’ve used in the past is like the jar is full — that jar is going to be full whether you measure it now, whether you measure it ten years from now, whether you measure it if you did live an infinite amount of time. That jar is going to be the same size, filled with the same sort of limit of pleasure, no matter whether it’s now or then.
Cassius: Yes, in that context, DeWitt makes the point that this statement — that infinite time and finite time have equal pleasure — is both paradoxical and subtle. It’s shocking to Christian feeling, and was hardly less so to the pagan of antiquity. To the multitude, as Lucretius observed, it was a gloomy and repulsive thought. To Platonists with their stately, elaborate, and mystical eschatology, it must have seemed like nihilism. So we tend to spend a lot of time talking about everyday decisions — how to choose successfully so that our pleasures don’t lead to more pain than the pleasures are worth. But there are also these deeper issues regarding, again: is pleasure really the thing you should be pursuing? Because we do know that we are mortal, we are going to die. And we have to keep in context whether we should be doing something else, whether we are in fact being cheated by the fact that we die and therefore need to be doing something to adjust for that.
So where DeWitt takes us here — and I think what Epicurus is spending significant time on — is analogies and metaphors. To explain this, he talks about how we have to have an understanding of these issues in order to really grasp them. The flesh doesn’t believe this. The flesh just knows the momentary pleasures of today and right now. But the mind has the ability to understand these things, and so therefore what we do is we work with the mind to explain why the guidance of the flesh here needs to be understood by the mind. And there are particularly good analogies, I think, in the Letter to Menoikeus. Don, do you have the part where he talks about the banqueter and the type of food and the length of time?
Don: I do. That’s in, for lack of a better word, section 126 in Diogenes Laertius, and it says: “So then the wise one neither begs nor craves for living, nor fears not living, neither to set oneself against living, nor to imagine that it is evil to not live. Just as the most food is not chosen but that which brings the greatest pleasure, choose as well not the longest time but that in which one enjoys the fruits of the greatest pleasure.” So that’s basically a point that when you select your food, you’re not necessarily just going to stuff your mouth with everything that’s available to you. You’re going to select those that you find the most pleasing, and the same analogy would go for time or your life itself. You’re not looking to live the longest life — you’re looking to live the most pleasant life.
Cassius: Exactly.
Don: And I find it interesting there — in that line in the Greek — the word that’s used for “enjoy the fruits of pleasure” is actually karpizesthai, which is related to that Latin word carpo in carpe diem. So you pluck or harvest the day. It’s echoed there in that Letter to Menoikeus, that line that would come later in Latin. So I think that’s an interesting little linguistic detail there.
Cassius: And we were talking before we started recording today about some of the aspects of time and how you have to fit that into what we’re discussing here. Because for example in Principal Doctrine 19, where it says “infinite time contains no greater pleasure than limited time” — that would imply, not putting too much weight on the English translation we’re looking at here, but pleasure apparently in Epicurus’s viewpoint has more aspects to it than just how long it lasts. So it causes you to think about the question: what are the aspects of pleasure besides length of time?
Don: Oh, that’s a good question. What are your thoughts, Cassius?
Cassius: Well, I always come back to the word “intensity.” I know there’s another word that Godfrey in our discussions uses sometimes — or maybe it’s you, Don. The point being that whether you call it intensity or just some other quality, the experience of pleasure is not solely measured in terms of how long it lasts. We certainly find some pleasures to be more pleasing to us than others and we distinguish between them not simply in terms of how long they last. They affect different parts of the body, which is another subject that DeWitt is going to be bringing up later on here. Every organ of the body has its own pleasures, and the mind itself — the different ways you can engage your mind — have different qualities of pleasure that come from them. Looking at a painting is a different pleasure than listening to music. And of course you can say that’s the ear versus the eye, but even if you’re thinking in terms of just your memories of them — your memories of things which are not necessarily coming through your senses at the moment — have different amounts of pleasure that you associate with them, which is again not a factor of the amount of time but is a factor of the amount that you find them pleasing.
Don: I think one of the things too is that I sort of come around to the idea that the whole idea of pleasure is a pleasurable feeling — you know when you’re feeling pleasure — but there may be an infinite number of ways that that feeling can be evoked in you, which is why we have so many different words that sort of mean the same thing: that positive feeling. So I think that pleasure can be considered a concept if you will, but there are an infinite number of things that will provide that feeling in your body.
Cassius: Yes. Yes, I agree. And I think that Epicurus was getting at that too — that’s why his spectrum for his definition of pleasure ranged over such a wide area, whereas other philosophical schools were more narrowly focused. They were like, no, no, no, pleasure is just this, it’s not this and this and this. Whereas Epicurus was like, no, they all provide a pleasurable feeling, and so we’re going to include all of those in our definition.
Now, you just used the word “definition,” and I was about to comment on that word myself. It seems to me that Epicurus’s major technique for explaining things is to point at things and use analogies with things you can observe through your senses, rather than attempting to string together some subtle words that have to be logically parsed in order to mean anything. He’s pointing to analogies like the banqueter who’s full, like the Roman rich person who runs to the country and then runs back again as fast as he can. He’s putting pictures in your mind of things that you can understand. And one of the pictures he puts in your mind — that DeWitt mentions in this subsection — is that of climbing to the top of a mountain peak. DeWitt makes the point that he seems to think of this issue as an alpinist would regard the ascent of a mountain peak. The pleasure is not increased by remaining on the peak. You get there, you wish to experience it, and you do experience it, but you then realize that you’re just not going to stay there for an infinite amount of time. Staying on top of the mountain peak for an infinite period would really do very little if anything to increase the amount of pleasure you get from it.
Don: And would probably actually result in more pain, because you’re going to run out of oxygen and you’re going to freeze to death and all that stuff. And I think another important aspect of that metaphor too is that the alpinist will then also have the memory of having succeeded at the thing to look back on later. So if he takes pleasure in the activity itself, he’ll also take pleasure in the activity of remembering that ascent as well.
Cassius: Right. So we’ve just said: getting to the top of the mountain is great. You’re going to experience the pleasure of being at the top of the mountain, but you’re not necessarily going to want to stay there forever. To me, that always leads me to the question — well, exactly how long do you wish to stay at the top of the mountain? And Epicurus says in Principal Doctrine 20: “Neither does the mind shun pleasure.” And he says also in the Letter to Menoikeus that life is desirable and you’re not going to terminate your life. We’ve been discussing Hegesias, the death-persuader, as a Cyrenaic who really kind of seems to have gone crazy in the period around the same time as Epicurus. You’re not going to decide that death is desirable over life itself unless you’re under some unusual circumstances where your continued life would just bring so much pain that you would not wish to continue to live it. In general, you’re going to prefer to continue to live. You’re just going to know that you don’t have to continue to live for an infinite amount of time in order to experience all that life has to give.
I’ve made recently a comment about a Twilight Zone episode with a phrase in it that stuck with me about “living life full measure.” It seems to me to be this similar concept: everybody does wish to live a full measure of life, which is possible because life does have a ceiling of pleasure, a limit to it, and you don’t need to be consumed with this idea that you’re going to be missing out because you’re not able to live an infinite amount of time. The older I get, the more I see that the longer you live, it’s just a sort of a replay over and over of similar things, and while you like that, you’re not really learning anything new or experiencing anything new. What were you about to say, Don?
Don: Well, I think it’s interesting. I was reading something about how people will talk about the idea — oh, you know, they died too young, or that sort of thing — talking specifically about specific Romans whenever they died. It was a tragedy. And they talked about people who were involved with Pompey, and said that if he had died before he was involved with the whole thing with Caesar, he wouldn’t have had to experience all the terrible things that happened to him. So I think a lot of the focus, whenever people talk about living forever, is that — oh, I’m going to miss out on this, I’m going to miss out on that, and all these pleasures. But there’s also all the number of pains that you’re going to experience too, if you were immortal — and if you were the only one who was immortal, then everybody that you knew, you would just watch them die over and over again, and you would see all these other pains that would be involved. I think people tend to accentuate the positive and not think about all those negative things about an immortal life.
Cassius: Yeah, this is where we really miss Joshua, because there are lots of poetic analogies here that I bet he could come up with.
Don: Joshua would have a story for this, yeah.
Cassius: Yeah, in fact, what you just mentioned, Don — I’ve seen at least one movie that sticks in my mind, but I know it’s several, that’s a common theme when somebody becomes immortal: the people that they love, their wives, their husbands, their children — they all just die on them. And you begin to realize that this is not so cool, to be living forever while the people you value are not living forever.
Don: Right, right. There’s just so many different ways to appreciate it.
Cassius: That is the extended treatment that Lucretius gives it at the end of Book 3. I think what you’re talking about with Pompey — I was reading that too. I think that comes from Cicero, from material we’ve posted where Cicero was talking about death and using the example that if Pompey had actually passed away at a particular time when he was sick, he wouldn’t have had to go through all these disasters that happened to him at the end of his life. The one that always comes to my mind there is that the eternity after you die is just a mirror image of the eternity that happened before you were born. You don’t find yourself obsessing over the details of the fall of the Roman Empire — well, of course I do, I obsess all the time about the fall of the Roman Empire and so forth — but most people who are normal don’t have to worry about that. If I had just been born 2,300 years ago, I could have gone to a lecture in the Garden.
Don: Exactly. You drive yourself crazy.
Cassius: Gosh. This is probably totally unrelated, but we’ve answered some questions recently in the forum about Epicurus and feelings of sympathy and compassion with other people and so forth. And I always think about myself that if you just let yourself get focused on all the pain in the world that’s happened already — an infinite amount of time before you were born — you’d have no time to do anything else other than be consumed by that. And you have to come to a practical understanding and a practical way of living that acknowledges that information but just doesn’t let it kill you.
Don: Right. Literally and figuratively.
Cassius: Yeah. So DeWitt moves from introducing the topic by talking about pleasure not being increased by immortality to the related issue of fullness of pleasure. He cites, for example, the analogous statement made in Ecclesiastes about “there’s nothing new under the sun,” and points out that Lucretius says basically the same thing — that all things are always the same, and no new pleasure can be devised. And citing also in that context, given what we’ve already discussed — the natural ceilings of pleasure — it is possible for you in your life to experience the full jar. That’s where we were talking about the full jar earlier. The jar of life that nature has given you is possible to be filled, and you can continue pouring water into it, but it’s basically going to overflow. That variation is nice perhaps, but not necessary from your perspective of having filled the jar, because once you’ve filled it you have in fact filled it.
And I think you have a great point you’ve made in the past about the jar — about how you don’t reduce the size of the jar. If you could riff on that just for a little bit, I think that was great.
Don: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Because a lot of people getting introduced to Epicurus become perhaps even overwhelmed by this issue. The satisfaction that Epicurus is talking about leads them — because of many other influences we have in our culture — to think about asceticism, to think about minimalism, as if those are goals in themselves. As if by simply reducing your experiences to the bare minimum to keep yourself alive, you have somehow achieved the goal of your nature by having filled that small amount of experience with pleasure. And there probably are situations where people have no alternative to something like that. But this gets back into the issue of the subjectivity and objectivity of things. It seems to me that nature provides you a jar so to speak — with your body, with your mind, with the different aspects of being a human being — and you’re not going to necessarily start chopping off your fingers or chopping off your hands. In fact, I think that’s what they — isn’t that in the Bible, about putting out your eye if it offends you? It seems to me that you would never do something like that. The obvious deduction from having these faculties available is using them. And you’re therefore going to want to keep the jar at the level that you’ve been given to play with. You’re not going to start chipping around the edges at the top, just trying to whittle it down so that the jar becomes smaller, so that you can fill up the smaller jar.
Cassius: Right. There is an aspect of nature here. We look at cats and dogs and any other kind of animal and have no problem — it seems — in understanding that they are living their best life when they’re doing what those animals do. It seems to me there’s probably an analogy here: that you can look at a human being and see what kind of capacities they have, and you’re not going to look just at logic — like Ayn Rand might do, or a Stoic who says that reasoning is what makes you a man, and therefore you should spend all your time reasoning. You’re going to look at all the different faculties that you’ve been given and determine what would make sense in order to use them. I’m going to go ahead and employ the Chrysippus hand again. I think the best way to understand that is to say that your hand in its present condition — which is apparently what the text says means a hand that’s fully operational, that can grasp and do things that hands do — a hand that’s able to do things that hands do is living its best life, so to speak. Sounds like Joel Osteen or something — “living your best life.” Oh my, we’re going to have to burn some sage after mentioning that name. Or “be all you can be” — the Marine slogan. But I think there probably is some truth in there. That’s what Epicurus is saying: that life itself is to be considered pleasurable.
Don: That’s right. Yeah, I fully agree. I think, just to jump on the soapbox that I usually throw out at times like this — you were talking about minimalism and reducing your desires to the bare possible minimum. The thing I always seem to bring up about that is that people tend to point to the bread-and-water mentions in the Letter to Menoikeus and some other places. And I still maintain, even after doing my translation of the Letter to Menoikeus, that what Epicurus is referring to with bread and water is that that was a regular meal in ancient Greece. You had a loaf of bread and you had some water or wine or whatever — and that was your midday meal. It might have been what you had for breakfast. It was just a regular meal. And I think what he is saying — at least to my perspective — is that you take pleasure in those everyday things. What he’s basically saying in my mind is: you eat bread and water every day, you eat this for your lunch, and you probably just wolf it down and move along. But if you actually take the time to savor what you have, to appreciate what you have, to have gratitude for what you have, that is going to add pleasure to your life that you’re completely missing and completely passing by. So I think it’s not a call to asceticism — it’s a call to making sure that you’re paying attention to those little pleasures that come up every day in your life.
Cassius: Yes, yes. And I would add to that — I’ve been thinking about this and used it recently — about how when you get to the end of your life, when you’re lying in that hospital bed and you can’t even get up again, you’re going to look back and think back at these experiences of a normal daily life. Even eating the bread and water in bad circumstances, you’re going to look back and think, boy, I wish I could do that again — how good it was to enjoy just a normal life, when you’re on the edge of losing it. Which I think emphasizes that so much of this is perspective. When you can look back at the end of your life and realize how good it was for you to live the normal life that you were living, then you should certainly be able to understand that even while you’re living it, if you are taking the proper attitude.
Don: No, I think at some point — yeah, I think so many people, you see people interviewed on TV and things like that, talking about looking back over their lives. It’s like, “Oh, I wish I would have taken more time with my family, or I wish I would have done this.” The time to do that is whenever it’s happening. You should take these lessons from people who for thousands of years have had the same sort of idea — and the current research in positive psychology and all this kind of stuff — and realize that while you’re living it, you need to act, because whenever you get to the end of your life, it’s too late to go back, and you have too many regrets. Enjoy the bread, enjoy the rainbow, enjoy all the other little pleasures that are there, and take advantage of the extravagances whenever they come by. Rather than just worrying about things that you don’t have, focus on appreciating the things that you do have.
Cassius: Exactly. DeWitt continues on with a point that carries us further. He says that we’ve established early on in the discussion of Epicurus that when you die, you no longer feel anything, which amounts to a form of anesthesia so to speak. But DeWitt says that this anesthesia helped reconcile people to the state of being dead, but it fails to compensate for the surrender of immortality. Only the possibility of having enjoyed all pleasures to the full in this life can counterbalance the relinquishment of the hope of enjoying eternal pleasures in the afterlife. So even though Epicurus certainly had not been exposed to Christianity and the focus on all the different things that Christians focus on, the “jail Christianity” view of an afterlife and so forth, they did have a version of that then. And DeWitt says that this is the true understanding of which Epicurus speaks when he says: “The true understanding of the fact that death is nothing to us renders enjoyable the mortality of existence — not by adding infinite time, but by taking away the yearning for immortality.” That’s actually from the Letter to Menoikeus, right?
Don: I believe so, yes.
Cassius: Yes, yes. So he’s actually saying that this understanding relieves you from that concern of worrying about needing to live on and on forever. Right.
Don: And to live your life as if you’re just in training for what’s to come. I mean, I think a lot of people who believe in an afterlife believe that this is just a training ground and I’m proving myself to be worthy of living forever and all this kind of thing. And it saps the joy from the life that you’re actually living. I mean, that’s just a sorry state of affairs, but I think it’s the way a lot of people do it. And I think — as you were reading — one of the things that jumped out at me was whenever DeWitt says “only the possibility of having enjoyed all pleasures to the full in this life.” I think it’s important to say, whenever he says “all pleasures,” I certainly don’t think that it means you have to experience every pleasure, every possible infinite pleasure that’s out there in the world. I think what’s important to understand is he’s talking about those pleasures that you experience, that you have available to you — enjoy them to the full. Whether it’s a loaf of bread when you’re hungry or a cool drink of water when you come in from mowing the lawn or something like that. Those are little pleasures that you need to take into account too. It’s not just the big pleasures that are out there. Every little thing that you’re able to find pleasurable in your life — concentrate on it, be grateful for it, and really experience it to the full.
Cassius: Absolutely. Because there are some pleasures — chances are it would be pleasurable to go up in a rocket ship, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to do that. So if I pine away and worry about not being able to go up in a rocket ship, it’s going to add pain to my life that is really not helpful. It’s like — yeah, if it ever came up and somebody offered me a ticket, sure, I’d probably do it. But I’m not going to pine away for it and worry about it and see it as a lack in my life.
Don: Yeah, that’s a deep subject. It’s very easy for a lot of us to think about particular aspects of what we’ve been brought up to believe are parts of every life that have to be checked off before you’ve completed your bucket list and so forth.
Cassius: Exactly, as you said — the whole idea of the bucket list. And realize that that’s not really a logical or reasonable approach to what nature really has in mind. Again, we’re looking at nature as the standard in all of this, and nature doesn’t seem to have contemplated a list which includes flying to the moon on a rocket ship or anything like that.
Don: Exactly. I do think it’s interesting where DeWitt talks about enjoying “the eternal pleasures in the afterlife.” This is a little bit of an aside, but I was listening to an episode of Bart Ehrman’s podcast and they were talking about the inclusion of the Book of Revelation in the official canon of the Bible. And evidently there was a big controversy in the second and third centuries AD — some people did not want to include the Book of Revelation because it talked about the afterlife as, you know, everybody being thrown into the lake of fire and then the new Jerusalem comes and it’s a golden city and there are banquets available and all this kind of thing. And there was a contingent of people who did not want to include the book in the canon because it talked about the afterlife as like an endless banquet and all these physical pleasures and things like that. They didn’t think that was right — that it should be put in there, because it shows that this kind of pleasure is good if you’re experiencing it in the afterlife, but we can’t have people thinking that now. And so that was one of the reasons they said it was not worthy of being included in the canon. I guess the reason it ended up included is because it helped people who wanted to have a Trinitarian view of God — it mentions that both Jesus and God refer to themselves as the Alpha and the Omega. So it was like, oh, that helps our case, so we’re going to stick that in the canon anyway, even though it talks about all these banquets and everything in the afterlife. So I thought that was a really interesting view — that even the Christians can’t really agree on what the afterlife is going to include.
Cassius: Yeah, to me, that’s a subset of this whole issue — that the flesh has its pleasures and desires of the moment, but it doesn’t have an understanding of exactly what it is that it really could and should pursue, and that the mind can help it understand that an unlimited time is not necessary to pursue those things.
Don: Exactly. And I think it’s important, too, just to hammer home the point that when we keep talking about the flesh and the mind, those two things are co-mingled and co-existent in the person. So it’s not that the body is opposed to the mind or the mind is opposed to the body. It’s just that there are different things going on. One of the interesting things from Principal Doctrine 20 is that the word usually translated as “flesh” or whatever is sarx — that’s the actual Greek word. And one of the connotations is that it’s basically the material body. But it’s also listed in the LSJ as referring to the seed of animalistic and immoral desires and thoughts such as lust. So it was pulled into Christianity with those connotations — that the body is the seed of those animalistic, immoral desires. And I can see a foreshadowing of that in what they’re talking about here: that the material body has certain needs and wants, but we are able to understand that some things are necessary, while some things the body wants in unlimited quantities — like the whole idea of eating too much at a banquet or something like that. Your body might go, “hey, this is great, keep it coming,” but you have to understand that there’s a limit to the amount that’s actually going to satisfy you and keep you satisfied, as opposed to providing more pain in the future.
Cassius: You know, I think we’ve already begun to discuss some of the issues of the different types of pleasure that DeWitt is going to cover in the next section called “Unity of Pleasure.” But before we get to that — and in the absence of Joshua, again, to help us with our poetic analogies — at the bottom of page 231, DeWitt talks about Seneca saying that human life should be measured by its achievement rather than by its length. DeWitt says that in the course of this reflection, Seneca compares the long and merely vegetative life to that of a tree. And this detail survives for us in the poem of Ben Jonson, which begins: “It is not growing like a tree in bulk doth make man better be.” And then in the last lines of the poem he says: “In small proportions we just beauty see, and in short measure life may perfect be.”
Now, I don’t know which ones of those I would focus on, but I do think it’s pretty clear that it’s not growing like a tree in bulk that makes us better. We don’t judge the best man by how much he weighs.
Don: In fact, maybe the opposite. Yeah, I’ve actually seen photographs of what they were called like “fat men’s clubs” or something, where literally the bigger you were, the more prominent you were, the more you showed how rich you were and all that. So actually that’s not out of the realm of possibility. We could probably go on for hours with those analogies.
Cassius: Good things come in small packages — and different things that disassociate the quality of the experience from the physical size of it. And I do like that last line, that “in short measure life may perfect be.” That’s the kind of thing we’ve been driving at: take advantage of those little pleasures that come out during your regular day, and just take time to savor them whenever they’re available. And it includes something to the effect that “he liveth long who liveth well.” And basically that kind of argument is extended at length in Lucretius’s treatment of death. I remember it in the context of thinking about the fact that Epicurus — as great a man as he was — or Scipio or all the different great men of Rome — they were all dead. And so if those great men have had to go through death, then surely we can as well, without regret.
Okay, so that takes us into a discussion of the “Unity of Pleasure,” which we’ll probably spend a few minutes with before we conclude today. Let’s introduce the topic at least of the unity of pleasure, which DeWitt covers on page 232. And the main point that DeWitt is going to discuss here is that this takes us back to the issue of life without pain being pleasure itself. This created a lot of controversy then and it does now. Why do you call living without pain “pleasure”? Don’t most people consider pleasure to be things that are stimulating, that are ups and downs and peaks and valleys and things that are temporary, as opposed to just health of mind and health of body itself? And that Cicero and many others attacked Epicurus because he was saying you’re calling two different things by a single name. DeWitt is going in the direction of saying that there was a reason that Epicurus was doing that. And for example on page 232, he says he discerned that according to Aristippus and Plato, no such thing as continuous pleasure is possible. They recognized only peaks of pleasure separated by intervals either devoid of pleasure, or neutral, or mixed. And from this it followed — from their perspective, with inevitable logic — that the wise man could not be happy at all times, a conclusion that was repugnant to Epicurus and that Epicurus wanted to repudiate. And this repudiation could be made good only by vindicating for freedom from fear and pain the status of a positive pleasure. And then, quote: “This in turn results in the doctrine of the unity of all pleasure.”
Now, whether Epicurus had a doctrine of the “unity of pleasure” or that’s just what DeWitt is calling it may be a different question. But it probably is a very important point.
Don: And I think it goes back to the whole differences of opinion with the Cyrenaics. It seems like they were very, very interested in those peaks and those positive pleasures and that sort of thing, because they maintained that the calm or neutral state was the same as death or something like that. Whereas DeWitt is terming it the “unity of pleasure” — that Epicurus was the one who said, no, those positive pleasures are pleasure, the calm, the well-functioning of the body is pleasure, the removal of pain is pleasure. He expanded that definition, and everybody else said he was splitting hairs and including too much. But I think he had it exactly right.
Cassius: Yeah, DeWitt cites, quote: “The stable condition of well-being in the flesh and the confident hope of its continuance means the most exquisite and infallible of joys for those who are capable of figuring the problem out.” That is Usener 68, and it looks like from Plutarch. And then there’s also an Aulus Gellius source. The one from Plutarch is from Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible. So DeWitt points out that this is sort of a conclusion of the Plutarch excerpt which says that the escape from some terrible danger or distress is one of the greatest pleasures. And then the observation that Don has made numbers of times that recovery from illness is pleasurable, obviously just eating from hunger is pleasurable — and so forth — if the recovery to the natural state is itself a pleasure, why isn’t the natural state itself pleasurable as well?
Don: Yeah, interesting enough, Usener 68 has — the Aulus Gellius one is shorter, but it has Epicurus defining pleasure as sarkos eustatheias katastēma — “a well-balanced condition of the body.” And the one from Plutarch also talks about that Epicurus included painlessness and stable condition of the flesh as pleasurable. So that was their big thing — they said this kind of painlessness, or stable condition of the flesh — what I would say is homeostasis, or the stable and settled condition of the flesh — they didn’t consider those as being part of their definition of pleasure. And Epicurus was like, nope, it’s all one and the same thing.
Cassius: Yeah, and DeWitt emphasizes the associated point that you do have to think about this in order to have it make sense to you. You should never have been off on this idea that life is suffering and that you should want to terminate your life, or wish you’d never been born. You should never have gotten to that point in the first place. That’s probably a pollution and a corruption and a perversion from false religions and false philosophies and so forth. But it’s important to get to this understanding, and you simply can’t rely on the flesh — your body — to tell you this. Your mind has a purpose, basically, is the point being emphasized here. And you’ve got to be capable of figuring this out to some extent. There’s a passage in Diogenes Laertius that really not everybody’s capable of being wise. And unfortunately there are some people who have clinical mental issues that do pose obstacles that only medical doctors, if anybody, can really help. But the normal way of life is that you use both your body and your mind, and you think about these things. This is the call throughout Lucretius about you’re not just rimming the cup with honey just to take medicine at the moment. You engage your whole life in a systematic study and observation of nature to see how things are going on and think about things — not just react to them.
Don: Exactly. And I think you had mentioned Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett earlier. I think maybe the word you were thinking of was “circumplex” — with the different arousal and affect and things like that. But I’m looking at the diagram that she calls the circumplex, which is: pleasant and unpleasant feelings are on one axis, and then arousal levels on the vertical axis. And I’ll try to post this on the forum so people can see what I’m looking at. So everything to the right on the pleasant axis — I would say that Epicurus included all of it as pleasure. She uses words on this particular one: everything from being surprised and alert and excited, elated, happy — and then whenever we go down to the lower arousal ones, these are still pleasure — contented, serene, relaxed, calm, that sort of thing. So all those things that Epicurus would include as pleasure, whereas it seems that the Cyrenaics were only interested in the things that were, in her words, high-arousal and pleasant on that axis. So they only recognized the things in the upper-right quadrant as what they would consider pleasure, whereas Epicurus included those things like being calm and being relaxed and the well-functioning of the body.
Cassius: Yes, yes, that’s what I was thinking about earlier when I was using the word “intensity.” There are also different ways to describe that. Exactly.
And DeWitt says that this kind of reasoning has to be confirmed by habituation. The same rule applies here as in the case of “death is nothing to us.” It’s not enough to master the reason for so believing — it’s also necessary to habituate oneself to so believe. And that this is a pragmatic approach to life. Which is exactly what he says at the end of the Letter to Menoikeus: “Practice these things day and night with a like-minded friend and by yourself.”
Don: Yes. And I wish that Joshua were here for this part, because Joshua talks about this one regularly.
Cassius: You’re going to start to hurt my feelings, man.
Don: Well, variation is good, but we want the full jar. The full jar would be our full team of podcasters attacking each one of these issues. We’ll do the best we can in the meantime.
Cassius: DeWitt next uses the example from Cicero, where Cicero wrote, quote: “You Epicureans round up people from all the crossroads. Decent men, I allow, but certainly of no great education. Do such as they then comprehend what Epicurus means? Wow, I, Cicero, do not.” I love that line. Cicero was completely full of himself, wasn’t he? It’s interesting that Cicero chose to sneer at Epicurus as opposed to the common people of the ancient world for whom the polished style held nothing attractive — who were attracted to Epicurean pragmatism and gladness, according to DeWitt here. Because I think it goes back to Epicurus saying things like: pleasure is obviously good the same way that fire is hot and ice is cold — pointing at things, like you mentioned earlier in the podcast about how he would use illustrations and practical metaphors to show people what he was talking about. Cicero is just too clever for his own good, basically.
Don: You know, related to that — and thinking back to Lucretius, I was looking at some of that this morning trying to prepare for this. It occurs to me to make the observation that Lucretius starts out his poem by talking about Venus and uses the example of how pleasure drives all these different animals, all these different living creatures to follow pleasure, to perpetuate their kind. Lucretius then just sort of abruptly stops that discussion of pleasure and moves on to talking about Epicurus and atoms and void and so forth. Perhaps that’s an application of what Epicurus is saying there. You point out that pleasure is what drives everything, and then you move on and deal with other issues. You don’t just incessantly churn logical arguments over and over and over again about pleasure versus other things. You point to what’s really going on in the world and that’s all the proof that you really need. To paraphrase: you don’t walk around rattling about the nature of pleasure.
Cassius: Yes, yes, and so that opening which causes so many questions about why he’s talking about gods and so forth might just be another application of that point.
Don: Yeah, that’s a good idea, yeah.
Cassius: Okay, well, we’ve been going the length of a full episode. We really appreciated your being here, Don, and hope you can join us again soon, if not next week.
Don: This was fun, yeah, thank you for having me.
Cassius: Let’s go ahead and see if anybody has any closing thoughts for today. Martin, any thoughts?
Martin: Sorry, again, I have nothing to add. We’re pretty much at it, okay.
Cassius: Well, very good. We appreciate your being here to keep us honest. And I know we’re not really hitting any physics issues right now where you’re at your strongest, but we appreciate your being here as always. Callistheni.
Callistheni: This was a very interesting episode and stimulated some ideas. I feel like it probably makes more sense to just put it on the thread on the forum.
Cassius: Okay, that’ll be great. Appreciate that. Don.
Don: Yeah, just to carry on with what Callistheni was saying — I really do think it is such a nice thing to have those threads for each episode that we can add notes and add extra thoughts and engage other people in the conversation. Certainly what we say here isn’t the be-all and end-all of everything, but hopefully it sparks some ideas, and some other people on the forum — and we have some great contributors to the forum — so I’m looking forward to hearing some people’s thoughts on that.
Cassius: Right. This issue that we’ve been discussing today is presented in a little bit different way than we normally attach to things. The question of immortality — and why we don’t need immortality — is not something that we are thinking about every day. But there are a lot of people out there who do think in these terms, and showing that there is an alternative to worrying about immortality and life after death is a very important thing for some people. And again, it’s probably part of a core curriculum of every Epicurean educational path that this issue would be discussed. Because that’s the purpose of a lot of these studies — so that you can reason out these questions. And next time you push yourself away from the table because you’re concerned that you’re eating too much pie or too much cake and so forth, these are the issues that go into your mind when you’re constantly having to make calculations — as we all do — about which pleasures to choose, which ones to avoid, and so forth. There’s a context that really controls the individual decisions. If you just try to deal with every individual decision without these contexts, you’re pretty much guaranteed not to be as successful as if you can keep in mind the overall reason that you’re doing these things in the first place.
Don: Yeah. “What will happen if this desire is fulfilled, and what will happen if it is not?” That’s the criterion.
Cassius: That’s right. Okay, well, I think we’ve had a very good episode today. Thanks everybody. Please come by the forum if you’re a listener and let us know your thoughts, suggestions, and questions. We’ll be back next week and see you then.