Episode 176 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 29 - Chapter 12 - The New Hedonism 05
Date: 06/01/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3090-episode-176-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-28-chapter-12-the-new-hedonism-05/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 176 returns to the full podcast team — Don, Joshua, Martin, and Callistheni — for the fifth session on Chapter 12, “The New Hedonism.” The episode covers two subsections: “The Root of All Good” (DeWitt p.236) and “Pleasure Can Be Continuous” (p.240), continuing to the end of that subsection. Cassius opens “The Root of All Good” by contrasting Epicurus’s view with Aristotle’s ascending series of pleasures ranked by organ, where intellectual contemplation is the supreme pleasure — citing Aristotle’s statement that “the sense of sight is superior in purity to the sense of touch, and the senses of hearing and smelling to the sense of taste; in a quite similar way, their respective pleasures also differ.” Against this, DeWitt cites the famous statement from Metrodorus (confirmed as Epicurus’s own view in Usener 409): “The pleasure of the stomach is the beginning and the root of all good, and the things of wisdom and the refinements of life have their standard of reference in this.” Don responds by distinguishing between the availability of different pleasures and their absolute ranking: Epicurus held that mental pleasures are more reliably at hand in any external circumstance, but he did not declare them to be intrinsically better — the Platonic hierarchy is an absolute ranking rejected by Epicurus. Don provides historical background on Mytilene: the capital of Lesbos, site of the first Platonic school established by Aristotle, and the first city where Epicurus attempted to teach philosophy — his only close associate there being Hermarchus. This is where Epicurus encountered the Platonic school, whose members “proclaimed a state of riot and dispatched messengers in hot haste for Xenocrates” in response to his teachings. Cassius invokes DeWitt’s favorite phrase about the Platonic alternative — “pure reason contemplating absolute truth” — and argues it is wrong on every count. The episode then addresses the developmental or “genetic” approach: Epicurus looked not only at infants but recognized that humans grow through stages, and the phenomenon of life must be viewed through infancy, childhood, adolescence, maturity, and old age. Cassius notes that Epicurus used two terms — the arche (beginning, root, related to “archaeology”) and the telos — to describe pleasure: pleasure is the arche because it is first in order of time and succession, and the beginning of every choice and avoidance; it is also the telos because it is the criterion of intelligent choice. Cassius notes a connection to the Book of Revelation’s “I am the Alpha and the Omega” (Revelation 1:8), and Don observes that the usage goes back to Isaiah in the Old Testament, meaning “I am the beginning and end of time and can take you out.” The difference: Epicurus uses arche and telos not as cosmic claims but as functional descriptions — pleasure is what all choices point toward, not a transcendent self-existent entity. Joshua then delivers the Dante reference Cassius was baiting him for: the sixth circle of Hell is for heretics (the Epicureans’ address), while Aristotle, Plato, and others are in Limbo — “loitering at the entrance to Hell,” neither in heaven nor in Hell, simply existing there forever. Cassius moves to “Pleasure Can Be Continuous.” DeWitt states that no philosophy offering only intermittent intervals of pleasure would have broad appeal for those seeking the happy life, and that prior philosophers were “merely analytical and academic” — like people who study anatomy without contemplating the practice of medicine. Cassius reads the famous quote: “Vain is the word of that philosopher by which no malady of mankind is healed.” The discussion then centers on Cicero’s objection from De Finibus: Cicero argues there are three states (pleasure, pain, and a large neutral zone of people feeling neither), and that Epicurus is calling two different things by the same name by calling the neutral state “pleasure.” Cicero reads Torquatus as saying: “all who are without pain are in pleasure, and therefore he who not thirsty himself mixes mead for another and he who being thirsty drinks the mead are in just the same state of pleasure” — and Cicero ridicules the claim that a host pouring wine and a thirsty guest drinking it are experiencing the same pleasure. Torquatus responds: “I expected this to happen — logical quibbles.” Don returns to Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s circumplex model to argue that there is no moment in human life where one is not experiencing some affect on the pleasant/unpleasant axis — Epicurus’s innovation was applying the term “pleasure” to everything on the pleasant side of that axis, from high-arousal excitement to low-arousal calm and serenity. Principal Doctrine 3’s second sentence is read: “wherever pleasure is present as long as it is there there is neither pain of body nor of mind nor both at once” — Epicurus denies that pain and pleasure can mix into a third neutral state. Joshua notes that Lucretius himself acknowledged the difficulty of finding Latin words for these Greek concepts: Graeorum obscura reperta — “the dark discoveries of the Greeks.” DeWitt reads this as evidence that Epicurus was correct to extend the name of pleasure even against linguistic convention: “the fact that the name of pleasure was not customarily applied to the normal or static state did not alter the fact that the name ought to be applied to it.” A late critic (Paul Elmer Moore’s Hellenistic Philosophies, 1923) is cited as objecting: “what in a word is to be said of a philosophy that begins by regarding pleasure as the only positive good and ends by emptying pleasure of all positive content?” — which DeWitt dismisses since it ignores that Epicurus recognized kinetic as well as katastematic pleasures. Epicurus’s dying letter is read: “On this blissful day of my life which is likewise my last, I write these words to you. The pains of my strangury and dysentery do not abate the excess of their characteristic severity and continue to keep me company, but over against all these I set the joy in my soul at the recollection of the disquisitions composed by you and the rest.” DeWitt’s interpretation: the dying Epicurus exemplifies the subtraction of pain from pleasure leaving a net balance of pleasure which is happiness; the word “happy” here is beatus (blessed/happy in the full sense), not suavis (merely pleasant). This also explains the bull of Phalaris: Cicero sneers that a Stoic wise man being roasted alive should still say “how pleasant it is,” but Epicurus’s point is that the happy man can have a net balance of beatus even while experiencing acute physical pain. Cassius distinguishes kinetic and katastematic pleasures: kinetic pleasures come from external circumstances (always uncertain), while katastematic pleasures — memories, anticipations, the stable condition of well-being — are accessible from within at all times. Neither is ranked above the other; the distinction is about confidence of access, not quality. Don notes: a healthy Epicurean now enjoying a quiet evening at home, and now having a rollicking time at one of the monthly banquets — both are fully included. Callistheni raises a dissent: she can’t fully agree with “no pleasure is better than another” — she wonders if relying mainly on the pleasure of eating, for instance, is shortchanging herself on pleasures that might be richer or last longer. Don responds using the bread-and-water analogy: eating when genuinely hungry, with full attention, provides intense pleasure; whereas mindless eating provides less. Joshua adds the memorable formulation: “I don’t remember the Twix bar I ate when I was 13, but I remember the time I spent with my friends.” The group reaches a nuanced conclusion: there is no absolute hierarchy of pleasures, but pleasures can be ranked by duration, intensity, and memorability — all within the context of feeling, not imposed from an external standard. Cassius closes: Epicurus is not denigrating “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” — all pleasures are pleasurable. But he is widening the observation to include all non-painful states as pleasurable, which is what allows pleasure to be described as continuous. Next week: “Continuous Pain Impossible.”
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 176. We’re continuing to discuss Chapter 12, “The New Hedonism,” and we are beginning today on page 236 with a subsection entitled “The Root of All Good.” I’m happy to say we have our full podcast team here today — Don and Joshua and Martin and Callistheni are with us. As we continue to address this issue of the true nature of pleasure, last week we spent most of our time talking about the unity of pleasure and how the different pleasures are all unified in the one sense that they are recognized by our feeling of pleasure as being pleasurable. We spend a lot of time discussing whether some pleasures are better than others, which pleasure to take and so forth, but sort of like Plato looking for the ultimate unity of something, we’re looking for what it is that unifies our experiences of pleasure — and it is simply that nature tells us that whatever it is that we’re experiencing is pleasurable. There’s no way to go behind that.
So with this section today, “The Root of All Good,” DeWitt begins the discussion by talking about the fact that this doctrine of the unity of pleasure had led to a conflict with Platonism as early as when Epicurus was in Mytilene. And what DeWitt says is that the other philosophers, including Aristotle, had postulated an ascending series of pleasures depending on the organ affected, which culminated in the view that supreme enjoyment consisted in intellectual contemplation. And that Aristotle, who had founded the Platonic school in Mytilene, was very explicit on the point, quote: “The sense of sight is superior in purity to the sense of touch, and the senses of hearing and smelling to the sense of taste. In a quite similar way, their respective pleasures also differ — both the pleasures of the intellect from those of the senses, and the pleasures in each of these two classes from one another.”
And so what DeWitt says is that if you’re taking the position that all pleasures are basically unified and that all senses are basically similar, then that’s going to run up against the categorization that Aristotle had been projecting.
Joshua: Aristotle certainly likes his categories.
Cassius: Yes, he does like his categories. And then DeWitt moves over to state that Metrodorus had written, quote: “The pleasure of the stomach is the beginning and the root of all good, and the things of wisdom and the refinements of life have their standard of reference in this.” So what we basically seem to be talking about here is the perspective of whether some pleasures are intrinsically better and more to be pursued than others are, and if there’s some kind of an absolute hierarchy of pleasure in which intellectual activity is the highest pleasure towards which everything else aims — rather than just saying, as apparently Epicurus does, that pleasure is the ultimate good and the ultimate goal. Is it possible through some kind of absolute ranking to conclude that intellectual activity is the ultimate pleasure, and therefore we can rank pleasures not just through our own personal feelings of pleasure but through some kind of an absolute philosophical or religious or rational ranking?
Don: I thought it was interesting. I looked up Usener 409, which is the footnote that DeWitt gives for the one about the stomach. The very first citation is that Epicurus said this, and the quote that Athenaeus gives is: “The principle and the root of all good is the pleasure of the stomach, even wisdom and culture must be referred to this.” So it looks like it was said by Epicurus and probably quoted by Metrodorus too. So the whole idea is that that’s where you start.
Okay, I think we now have a good grip on the subject that DeWitt is talking about here. And using the subheading “root of all good” — in order to understand it more deeply, we have to contrast it to what these other people were saying. Now we do know that Epicurus took the position that the pleasures of the mind can be more intense than the pleasures of the body. That’s included in the Torquatus material and maybe some other places as well. But that’s not what these other people are saying, apparently. They’re saying that not just “can be,” but they are more important — that they are somehow ranked higher on an absolute scale. They were taking the position that mental pleasure, the pursuit of wisdom, is the ultimate thing, the ultimate pleasure, the best kind of pleasure.
Does Epicurus take a position that there is a best kind of pleasure? I don’t think he takes the position that there is a best kind of pleasure in the sense that we think this one is better than that one. From what I’ve read and what I’ve posted on the forum previously, he and several other of the founders — Metrodorus and the others — put forward the idea that we could be more confident, or that we had at our disposal mental pleasures more readily than what would be termed the kinetic pleasures. The things that come from outside of us — we have at our disposal at all times the ability to use our mind to have pleasurable feelings about memories or anticipations or just the calm state of being. Those were always readily at hand no matter what our external circumstances were. But that didn’t necessarily mean they were better — it just meant that we could be more confident that we would have them at our disposal. He did not say that they were necessarily better than taking joy in eating food or singing or dancing or going to festivals. So it was the external circumstances you’re never quite sure whether you’re going to have those at hand, but you are able to have those other pleasures that arise from inside of you more readily. That’s at least my take. Discuss.
Cassius: Yeah, let’s stay with this for a few minutes because this is a really important point. We choose and avoid among particular pleasures all the time, but that doesn’t mean that we are thinking that one of these pleasures is somehow absolutely better than another one.
Don: Yeah, that word “absolute” — that’s a very good word to include in the discussion: that there’s an absolute value.
Cassius: And let’s get Joshua and others to comment on this as well, but DeWitt hammers this point here. Right after he quotes what we’ve just been discussing about the pleasure of the stomach being the beginning and the root of all good, DeWitt says: “These words exhibit a shocking rawness and were employed as evidence for condemning Epicureans as out-and-out sensualists. Part of their import, though, is the unity of pleasure. Pleasure is pleasure wherever found, and the nature of it does not depend upon the organ affected. The mind is an organ of the body no less than the eyes or the ears, nor does the pleasure of the mathematician in the last analysis differ from that of babes and sucklings. But that is the point.”
So Joshua, Martin, Callistheni — what do you guys think? Is one pleasure better than another?
Joshua: No. And in fact, you can almost point this out by saying the opposite: no pleasure is worse than any other pleasure. Epicurus says elsewhere that no pleasure is a bad thing in itself, right? You have to start asking questions about what gives you pleasure, what causes pleasure, where you feel the pleasure, but pleasure is pleasure. It’s always more or less the same, it’s always good, and there are no real gradations, I don’t think.
Now, we’ve been talking a lot about Metrodorus and what he had to say. Of course, in Mytilene — I can give a little bit of historical background here, because I did that recent video on this. Mytilene is the first place — it’s the capital city on the island of Lesbos. Aristotle had been there to establish the Platonic school. This is the first place that Epicurus goes to actually teach philosophy. He had been born on Samos. He had trained in Athens in the military. When he returned from Athens, he rejoined his family in Colophon, because Samos had changed hands in a war, and it was in Colophon that he started to study philosophy under Nausiphanes. But his first attempt to teach philosophy was in Mytilene. So he hadn’t met Metrodorus at this point. The only person who would later go on to be a major figure in the school who was probably with him at this point was Hermarchus, who was born in Mytilene — so that’s where Epicurus met him. So Epicurus is very much almost on his own at this point. And I find this phrasing funny here, where DeWitt says the Platonists of Mytilene “proclaimed a state of riot and dispatched messengers in hot haste for Xenocrates.” So this is the condition of where they’re at, and this is where the problem is.
Cassius: We talked earlier in this book about how DeWitt has this favored phrasing that he uses to describe some of these Platonists — “pure reason contemplating absolute truth.” And I’ve probably quoted that enough times for it to have sunk in by now. But the idea that the pleasure of pure reason in the mind contemplating absolute truth is not just wrong on the pleasure count — it’s wrong on all counts. It’s wrong on the absolute truth count, it’s wrong on the pure reason count, and it’s wrong that that’s the greatest pleasure. There is no greatest pleasure. I guess you could say in sort of loose language that the greatest pleasure is the pleasure that never ends. But in terms of whether you can rank them one above another, I simply don’t think Epicurus saw it that way.
Joshua: Yeah, that’s great. I think it’s a really good synopsis.
Cassius: Okay. Well, one aspect of this we need to address before we move much further. It seems like for whatever reason Aristotle or Plato had been assigning different pleasures to different parts of the body and then attempting to rank them. One thing that’s pretty clear about where they arrived was that the pleasures of the mind and the pursuit of wisdom was ultimately the best thing to do. I think we need to address before we move further one implication of all pleasures being ultimately the same in the sense of being pleasurable. Why don’t we just spend all day sitting in a cave staring at a candle if we find that to be pleasurable? In fact, what would prevent this doctrine of all pleasure being the same from being interpreted as — well, I get pleasure from trimming my fingernails, and if I can just spend all my time trimming my fingernails, that’s all I have to do in my life, and I’ve got a life full of pleasure and I’ve fulfilled nature’s intent for me. What’s wrong with that picture? Why would that not be the right conclusion?
Don: At some point your belly is going to tell you that you need to fill it, and your pleasure is going to diminish if your belly is empty — so you’re going to have to stop trimming your fingernails at some point to take some pleasure in eating. I think we can go further than that, but yes — you’re looking at the practical implications of the question, which Epicurus always seems to do. He’s not ever just saying, “Well, God told you to do this, and therefore you better do it” or “rationality tells you to do it for some totally abstract reason and therefore you should.” The practicality of what your life is going to be like if you actually pursue a course like that is the right answer, I would think. And if you go off and trim your fingernails by yourself in a cave — if you’re getting pleasure from it — well, let’s say you trip and hurt your ankle, and you don’t have any friends around to help you out. Then that’s going to be a problem. And so there are all these implications of looking only at the solitary pursuit of pleasure. I don’t think that Epicurus would have advocated for that. He seems to always say something like: if you think you’re going to get pleasure from that and it gives you pleasure, you go ahead, you try it out, see how it works for you, and then come back and talk to me about the practical implications of what you’re trying to do.
Cassius: Yeah, I think once again we can draw this question out because it’s not just a question of maybe I should sit in a cave all day because that gives me pleasure. We also have to talk a little about what if the thing that gives you pleasure also causes harm to other people. This is what everybody in the ancient world was terrified of — that these Epicureans, these godless heathens, cannot be trusted to sign and hold themselves to a contract; we can’t put them in high office because we don’t know what they’re going to do; they have no apparent desire to study or pursue or live a life based on virtue. So that’s the question that gets Epicureans called pigs in the ancient world, and it’s a question I don’t think we can very easily escape even today.
Joshua: Good point, yeah. It seems the way that DeWitt pursues this — at the bottom of page 237 — after we’ve made this observation that pleasure is basically one, DeWitt brings up that to some extent this terminology arises from Epicurus’s decision to look at newborn creatures as the starting point of his analysis. One aspect of a newborn is that it yet lacks volition and intelligence, and the greater part of its experience is just raw physical sensation. And that at this level of experience — where the creature is yet “unperverted” and nature reveals herself candidly — it is discerned that pleasure and life are already indissolubly joined. And for this reason Epicurus wrote, quote: “We recognize pleasure as the first good and connate with us.” By “the first good” he means it manifests itself at the beginning as being good, being first in order of time and succession.
Cassius: And I’m reversing the order of his paragraphs here, but the observation that you start out looking at the infant is not necessarily the only thing you do — because DeWitt talks about that there is a sort of a genetic approach in which you realize that humans grow into definite stages, and that you don’t begin life as a rational creature but only by stages arrive at that eminence if ever. And the phenomenon of life must be viewed in a series: infancy, childhood, adolescence, maturity, and old age. Things do change over time. But basically you’re starting out with the knowledge that pleasure at the beginning is the root of where you start.
Joshua: Yeah, and I think that’s all well said. What we know though is that his detractors in the ancient world are also going to say: don’t you want to live a life more fulfilling, more wisely, or more virtuously than you would live when you were a mere squalling infant flung up onto the shores of life? Don’t you want to live for the goals that are practical for an adult and not just for a child? We talked about this a few weeks ago — we’re an animal too, for heaven’s sake. When Walden was published by Henry David Thoreau, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier reviewed the book for some newspaper and said, “I don’t want to walk on all fours like a woodchuck.” I could see that being a similar problem for the critics of Epicureanism.
Cassius: Yeah. And what we’ve raised there is this question of: okay, maybe it’s okay to decide that for an infant pleasure is the goal of life, but as we grow older and we gain more experience and more mental acuity we realize that there are other things in life besides pleasure that are more important. So why does the observation of looking to the infant not just give way to — well, let’s look at the adult man, and let’s look at what adult men do, and derive our conclusions about how to live from just what adult men do?
I’ve always understood that when reading the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle basically does that — he just ends up concluding that what people should do is what the great men of Athens do, and you just look around at what the other people are doing and follow their lead, and you judge what’s right and wrong just by looking at what adult human beings do. Why would that not supersede the original observation that we should look to infants and go from there?
Don: Well, I think one of the things with that is that we come back to the whole summum bonum, telos sort of things — what do all of your actions actually aim towards? And Epicurus answers that question with: pleasure. That no matter whether you’re acting virtuously, whether you’re running for office, whether you’re doing anything, at the root of it all is still the pleasurable feeling that you get.
Cassius: Yeah, as you get older and your brain develops and you think about more things, you’ve got to use your brain in the same way that you use the other aspects of your body, and you’ve got to learn how to use it properly. And through philosophy you have to begin to understand that questions are going to arise to you — questions about life after death, which don’t presumably cause too much trouble for newborn infants. They aren’t really thinking about gods and heaven and hell and right and wrong and all these other issues that come into your mind as you grow older.
I’m remembering the passage — I think it’s in the Letter to Pythocles, and maybe Lucretius says something similar — that those people who do look at the stars and gain some knowledge of the movements of the planets, that knowledge can actually be harmful to them if they don’t make an effort to understand it and realize that there are natural explanations for it. Just observing the night sky can cause you to think, “Oh my gosh, there must be a God who’s going to tell me what to do and going to punish me in heaven and hell.” Seeing them without gaining an understanding of what’s going on can actually be harmful if you don’t use your brain to get that understanding. So that’s where philosophy comes in — you have to use philosophy to fine-tune your thinking so that you can make sense of everything. And then when you make sense of everything — if you follow philosophy properly — you do conclude that there’s nothing beyond this feeling of pleasure that makes life worthwhile.
Don: Yeah. So the image that just came into my head as you were talking is the idea that you start out as a baby with a very raw feeling of pleasure and pain. You’re trying to assuage your pain, you’re trying to get pleasure. And that’s still why you do things. And then as you get older you start to get this crust over top of the pleasurable feeling, and you start making other excuses. You get older and older, and that crust around the whole idea of pleasure gets bigger. “Well, it’s not actually that I’m going for pleasure” — you know, “I’m being virtuous,” or “I’m being wise.” So you get this sort of crust around the whole kernel of the idea of pleasure. But if you bore down through that, the reason that you’re still doing things is because it gives you a pleasurable feeling, even though you have all of these other rationalizations and other descriptions of why you’re doing things. But at the heart of it — the little pearl of pleasure that’s still at the heart of everything.
Cassius: Yeah, I definitely like that analogy — the pearl of pleasure. There’s no doubt it’s an interesting and persuasive argument to some people to say that “I’m not a cow, I’m not an ant, I’m not some kind of lower animal — I’m actually a human being and I have rationality and a brain that’s better than anybody else’s.” Therefore because of my brain I have this need to be a rational creature above everything else — which is all to some extent well and good, depending on how you use your brain. I keep coming back to that quote: that “we are not thinking beings who feel — we are feeling beings who on occasion think.”
Yes, and so basically what we’ve been talking about comes down to this phrase from Epicurus about how pleasure is at the beginning and the end of the happy life, as DeWitt talks about here. There are multiple meanings here: the beginning — he means one thing that dates first in time and succession. And then in a second sense it’s the beginning of every action, because from this starting point we begin every choice and avoidance. That it’s the fulfillment of a being from the standpoint of the intelligent being — the telos is an objective, and the telos having been identified as pleasure becomes the criterion of intelligent choice, because to this we have recourse as a canon, judging every good by feeling.
Don: Yeah, I like that whole idea of the arche and the telos as the words that Epicurus uses. I think those are very cool. The fact that arche is the root for “archaeology” — the study of beginnings — so it’s literally the beginning of all of our choices and avoidances and that sort of thing. Which doesn’t mean that the act of drinking milk as a baby is the only thing you’re ever going to do. It’s the beginning of all sorts of other things that are unified by the fact that they’re pleasurable.
Cassius: Exactly. I’m about to fall right into one of DeWitt’s traps here, because I’m looking at the Book of Revelation, Chapter 1, Verse 8, where it says “I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” Of course, that was written probably 350 to 400 years after Epicurus. I don’t know if they had the Epicureans in mind when they wrote that, but it’s a very, very different kind of approach to how you live your life. But this idea of saying that pleasure is the beginning and the end — that it’s there at every step of the way — I find the connection interesting. I don’t know if the connection is real, as I think DeWitt probably does, but yeah.
Don: I think that God was calling himself the beginning and the end — I looked it up, and I think it goes way back in Isaiah in the Old Testament, so that was a common theme. And I think the difference is striking too, because my take on God or Jesus calling themselves the Alpha and Omega is: I am the beginning of time and I’m the end of time, and I brought you into this world and I can take you out. Whereas Epicurus is talking about using the arche and the telos — the goal towards which we’re approaching. And it’s not a finite time sort of thing he’s talking about. It’s more that pleasure is that goal towards your journey that you’re always pointing to. And certainly pleasure does not have any transcendental self-existence apart from things that feel pleasure.
Cassius: Well put, yeah. We’ve had this discussion in a number of ways, but it helps at least me to think about what are the options again to fit into this category. If you’re looking for something that’s the Alpha and the Omega, the orientation focus of life, there are not that many alternatives out there: you’ve got a God, a supernatural realm, as that focus; or you’ve got feeling pleasure and pain; or you’ve got presumably this issue of rationality or reason — that phrase that Joshua has mentioned, “pure reason contemplating absolute truth” — a very abstract rationalistic viewpoint. You’ve got a supernatural God orientation towards life, you’ve got nature giving us the feeling of pleasure and pain as an orientation, and you’ve got this abstract rationalism. And just to put a point on it: whenever they use the Alpha and the Omega, those are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. So God is literally going: I am the A and the Z. Everything comes from this root.
Don: Well, it’s one of the things about even whenever you bring up “absolute truth” — I think that’s one of the reasons why Aristotle and Plato and that ilk were, if not welcomed, at least let into the Christian party when the Christians took over. Because they could spin it: “Well, they were actually talking about God, and so we’ll let them in — they just didn’t realize it at the time. So come on in and hang out with us.” And they were happy to construe their philosophy to match the new program, because they liked those guys — and they were going to let them not have to live in the sealed coffins in the, whatever, the third level of hell or whatever it was.
Cassius: Thank you. Yeah, there I was baiting you, Joshua.
Joshua: So that’s a very good point, yeah. The sixth circle of Hell is the circle of heresy, but all the guys you were just talking about are sort of loitering around the entrance to Hell. They don’t have to come to Heaven, because they were before Jesus, but they also don’t have to go to Hell — so they can just stand there literally forever, loitering.
Cassius: I like that. Okay, well, I think that takes us probably to the end of that subsection on “The Root of All Good.” The next subsection is entitled “Pleasure Can Be Continuous,” and I think we discussed a little bit of this last week, but it’s the issue that as DeWitt phrases it here, quote: “No philosophy that offered merely intermittent intervals of pleasure would have possessed any broad or cogent appeal for those in quest of the happy life.” And therefore Epicurus had to be able to articulate a way in which pleasure is constantly available to us. And in fact, DeWitt contrasts Epicurus’s approach to this question to that of prior philosophers, who had in the main been merely analytical and academic and weren’t really interested in issues that were relevant to action. Their zeal was not for promoting the happiness of mankind — and he says this is comparable to men who give themselves to the study of anatomy without contemplating the practice of medicine.
Don: I’ll give DeWitt that one.
Cassius: Yes, that is good. Everybody who’s familiar with Epicurus will know where he’s going with that. The attitude of Epicurus was pragmatic from the beginning. The declaration was that, quote: “Vain is the word of that philosopher by which no malady of mankind is healed.” That’s a well-known and powerful statement. And it goes back to what you’re saying about Epicurus being a very practically-oriented sort of philosopher — that you had to put things into action. It wasn’t just pure reason contemplating absolute truth. Not that you couldn’t perhaps get pleasure from that contemplation, but that wasn’t the best pleasure you could have.
Joshua: Yeah, yeah, that’s very good. So the problem, I guess, is that people have the idea sort of natively that sometimes you feel pleasure, sometimes you don’t. But the idea that you could just on a finite time horizon feel pleasure right up until you die — that seems to be the controversial opinion here. And I guess thinking now about my own life — is that how I experience it? I’m not even sure. I have to think about it some more. But I’m not sure whether the continuity of pleasure — you can feel pleasure because there are so many different kinds of pleasure to feel, that’s I think one sort of thing of it. But we as human mortal beings can’t feel continuous pleasure all the time just from the nature of our bodies and our minds. I would think so. I don’t know — is it more of a goal to feel continuous pleasure, or is it… where is DeWitt going with the whole idea?
Cassius: Well I think you and DeWitt are looking right back to where we’ve been for a while, which is that yes, you can consider pleasure to be continuous because the very act of living without some absolute pain is pleasurable. It looks like that’s where he’s going over on page 240 here, because he says, quote: “The extension of the name of pleasure to the normal state of being was the major innovation of this new hedonism.” And he’s going to take us into a discussion of the illustration that Cicero makes fun of. But I think he’s still on this basic point that because there are many types of pleasures — including memories of past pleasures and thinking about the future and all sorts of different things — that are generally available to you without a lot of pain and that are generally available to most people in most situations, it’s very possible to consider that you do have available to you constantly the ability to focus on pleasures that are available to you, because there are so many types.
Don: Okay, yeah. I think that’s good. Yeah.
Cassius: And so where he takes us from there is that, quote: “It was in the negative form — freedom from pain of body and distress of the mind — that this drew the most persistent and vigorous condemnation from adversaries. The contention was that application of the name of pleasure to this state was unjustified, on the ground that two different things were therefore being denominated by one name.” And Cicero made a great to-do over this argument. But as DeWitt says, it’s really superficial. Cicero really criticizes Epicurus for not being clear about this. He says: “Do you think then that I sufficiently grasped the force of expressions, or am I even at my age to be taught to speak either Greek or Latin? Granting that I do not clearly comprehend what Epicurus means — though I believe I have a clear knowledge of Greek — there may be some fault in him who uses language that is not understood.”
Joshua: Cicero is such a jerk. I’m sorry.
Cassius: He says that makes me laugh. He says it “can be done intentionally, as by Heraclitus,” and then he mentions Plato and Timaeus, who says that the darkness of the subject matter makes the issue difficult. But Epicurus, he says, “I imagine neither lacks the desire to express himself clearly and plainly if he can, nor is he dealing with a dark subject or technical matters like the mathematicians, but he speaks on a doctrine which is perspicuous and easy. If indeed his statement is identical with that of Hieronymus, who pronounces that the supreme good consists in a life apart from all annoyance, why does he prefer to talk about pleasure rather than freedom from pain, as Hieronymus does, who well understands what he’s talking about? And if he thinks he must add to this the pleasure that depends on agitation — for he speaks of this sweet kind of pleasure as consisting in agitation, and the type of pleasure felt by a man free from pain as consisting in steadiness — why does he fight? He cannot bring it about that any man who knows himself — I mean who has thoroughly examined his own constitution — should think that freedom from pain is one and the same thing as pleasure. It is as good as doing violence to the senses, Torquatus, to uproot from our minds these notions of words which are ingrained in us. Why, who can fail to see that there are in the nature of things these three states: one when we are in pleasure, another when we are in pain, and the third the state in which I’m in now, and I suppose you are too, when we are neither in pain nor in pleasure? Thus he was feasting is in pleasure while he on the rack is in pain. But don’t you see that between these two extremes lies a great crowd of men who feel neither delight nor sorrow?”
That’s the question that Cicero poses to Torquatus. So how do we think Torquatus responds to this issue — that “there’s people who are experiencing pleasure and there’s people who are experiencing pain and then there’s a great swath of people in between who are experiencing nothing at all. That’s the way everybody talks. Why don’t you accept that, Torquatus?”
Don: And of course we do not expect Torquatus to back down.
Cassius: Of course we don’t. No we do not. So Torquatus says: “Not at all! And I affirm that all who are without pain are in pleasure, and that the fullest possible. Therefore he who, not thirsty himself, mixes mead for another, and he who, being thirsty, drinks the mead, are in just the same state of pleasure.” Now that’s Torquatus agreeing with Cicero’s characterization. He does agree. But that’s the ridicule that Cicero brings out here — that the host at a party who’s pouring wine for a guest is experiencing the same level of pleasure as his guest who is drinking the wine.
Don: Oh, exactly. Because it’s the whole idea of hospitality, and you’re taking pleasure in your guests having fun. I think the thing where Cicero is too clever by half is where he says, “in just the same state of pleasure.” Well, they’re both feeling pleasure, but it’s pleasure from different sources. So just because they’re from different sources doesn’t mean that it’s not pleasure. I get so frustrated with Cicero — he’s just so proud of his own rhetorical abilities. He is insufferable.
Cassius: And that’s exactly what Torquatus says next, when he says: “I expected this to happen. I’m seeing just what has come about” — meaning logical quibbles. But it’s important for us to discuss, and I think it is a good test case. It’s kind of like Chrysippus’s hand — it’s giving us a question directly from the ancient world that we can use the same way they did to sort of understand what the question is.
Whenever I’m reading Cicero and he talks about the three states, I go back to what we were talking about last week with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett and her colleagues’ research about the circumplex of affect and intensity and that sort of thing.
Don: And I’ve heard either her or one of her colleagues saying that there is no moment of life where you’re not feeling some sort of affect, and the affect is pleasurable or unpleasurable. There’s not a moment in your life where you are not experiencing some sort of point on those two axes of pleasure and pain and intensity. And I go back to saying that that was Epicurus’s big innovation: that he would apply the term “pleasure” to everything that was to the right on the pleasurable side, whether it was calmness, whether it was excitement, or whatever. That there is no middle state — you’re either in a pleasurable affect or an unpleasurable affect, and the intensity is what judges what sort of feeling you’re feeling. So basically I’m saying that Cicero got it wrong when he posited three states — that’s not actually the way the human body works.
Cassius: Yeah, I do see this as such a huge point. Principal Doctrine 3, the second sentence, is translated generally as, quote: “Wherever pleasure is present, as long as it is there, there is neither pain of body nor of mind nor both at once.” And it just seems like Epicurus is really focusing on this point that pleasure and pain are the two choices. There’s no other affect. There are all sorts of types of pleasure, but it’s valid to consider all types of pleasure under a category of pleasure.
Don: Yeah. It’s sort of like there is no Year Zero. There’s either you’re in the BCs or in the ADs — there is no Year Zero. And so that’s like: there is no point where you are specifically directly in the middle between pleasure and pain. You’re always on either one side or the other of that axis. And I come back to the comment that we’ve been talking about: for those who have the ability to understand the issue, for those who are able to figure it out, it does take thought on this issue to realize that it is valid to look at things this way. To look at life in the absence of pain as pleasurable is an understanding that you come to, especially when you begin to realize this eternity of time before birth and the eternity of time after death when you’re going to experience nothing at all.
Cassius: I would even be careful — yeah, I think a better way to put it is: you do not exist before you’re born, you do not exist after you die. But while you’re existing, you’re feeling things.
Don: Exactly, exactly, yes.
Joshua: What’s interesting to me — and I’m kind of late to the party on this one, because I’ve been looking it up — but, Cassius, you’re talking about Cicero and how he’s complaining about how Epicurus is using words in non-standard ways. And what I found interesting, I was looking for the Latin in Lucretius: Lucretius kind of agrees with him in a way, that it’s somewhat difficult to get a hold of these issues. And so this is why we keep talking about them week after week every day on the forum, because they’re not easy. So the Latin is Graeorum obscura reperta — “the dark discoveries of the Greeks.” So that’s Lucretius struggling in his poetic way to come up with Latin words to give names to what the Greeks were up to.
Cassius: I’ve got to give it to Lucretius — that’s a pretty good line there. And DeWitt says it this way, quote: “The fact that the name of pleasure was not customarily applied to the normal or static state did not alter the fact that the name ought to be applied to it, nor that reason justified the application, nor that human beings would be happier for so reasoning and believing.” And so that’s what he’s saying: Epicurus was reasoning through this point, that it is important and useful and beneficial to understand that the normal state of being when you’re not in pain is a state of pleasure.
And this is where DeWitt next says: “But even in the present day the same objection is raised. For instance, a modern Platonist ill-informed of the true intent of Epicurus has this to say: ‘What in a word is to be said of a philosophy that begins by regarding pleasure as the only positive good and ends by emptying pleasure of all positive content?’” And DeWitt answers that by saying this ignores the fact that this is but one of the definitions of pleasure offered by Epicurus, and that he recognized kinetic as well as static pleasures and so forth. That statement of the criticism — from Paul Elmer Moore’s Hellenistic Philosophies from 1923 — is one that I think we see over and over in responses to Epicurus.
Don: Yeah, and I’ll post a link to the forum to the Hellenistic Philosophies reference so people can get the context of that.
Cassius: Yeah, that’s this contradiction that people think they see, and they end up in many cases dropping away from Epicurus or just rejecting his viewpoints when they can’t come to a reconciliation of this. But I do think it is reconcilable. Understanding what Epicurus is doing here is essential to appreciating the whole merit of the philosophy.
Joshua: Yeah, I definitely agree. I think a lot of the confusion on this issue centers around the way this is typically expressed when people say that “Oh, Epicurus thought that pleasure was the good or the goal of life, but he didn’t mean the pleasures of the body — he meant that pleasure which is absence of pain.” But pleasure doesn’t equal absence of pain. They’re not equivalent in any way. It’s that when you remove the pain, the pleasure has been there the whole time. But it just occurs to me that the way this is often put to people in the English language has sown so much confusion on this issue, and it’s something we are dealing with constantly.
Cassius: Well, let’s carry on with what you just said there, Joshua. I think I heard you say something to the effect that pleasure is not the equivalent of the absence of pain. Let’s continue to drill down on that point. In general, people just want to focus on pleasure as meaning something that is a stimulating, active, external kind of excitement. And they think that if they’re not being excited, they’re not experiencing pleasure. And so if you take a very logical, abstract viewpoint, it is proper to say — and I think he does say in Principal Doctrine 3 — “the limit of quantity of pleasure is the absence of pain,” and he says that when pleasure is present then you have no pain. So he’s continuing to draw this sort of quantitative perspective that there are two feelings and you’re always experiencing one or the other. And from that premise you can say that the presence of one is the absence of the other. From that single perspective. But that doesn’t mean that the pleasure of eating cake is the reverse of the pain of an ingrown toenail. That’s a weird way to say it, but I think the issue is that there are many types of pleasures and many types of pains. And in order to understand what Epicurus is saying here, we have to get on this level — this high-level analysis that there’s all sorts of pleasures, all sorts of pains, we know that. But in the end, when you accumulate all pleasures into the word “pleasure” and accumulate all pains into the word “pain,” you can say we’re experiencing one or the other, and there’s no other. That’s the ground level. Right?
Don: Right, yeah. I completely agree with that. What I would reinforce — and you quoted what you said there with “the limit of the quantity or the magnitude of pleasures, the removal of all pain” — is that Epicurus every time he talks about this is very, very precise in the way he puts it. And I think that people who report what he said today are not precise.
Cassius: Yeah. Agreed. It’s an easy thing to take out of context too, because if you don’t provide the context you’re like, “Well, you know, that doesn’t make any sense.” And you can complain about it and mischaracterize it and stereotype it. But if you think through it — it does make sense. It’s the whole seesaw sort of thing.
Continuing on, on page 241 — what we were just talking about in terms of Principal Doctrine 3 — DeWitt says that this doctrine of continuous happiness is present in the Principal Doctrines. When you realize that Principal Doctrine 3 is talking about this issue, he says, quote: “Its presence is easily overlooked because the context of the controversy has become blurred with the lapse of time, but the emphasis derived from prominence of position must have been at one time arresting. The first part already quoted identifies the basic pleasure as freedom from pain — the only kind that could be continuous — this rules out the neutral state as postulated by Plato. It identifies the neutral state as one of static pleasure. The second part of the doctrine disposes of Plato’s mixed states: ‘And wherever the experience of pleasure is present, so long as it prevails, there is no pain or distress or a combination of them.’ This amounts to denying that pain and pleasure are capable of mixing and resulting in a state that is different from either one.”
Don: Yeah, that sort of goes back to the idea that you can be experiencing pleasure in one part of your body but still be experiencing pain in a different part of your body too.
Joshua: Yep. This is the salad bowl, not the melting pot version.
Cassius: Yes, yes. Joshua, were you about to say something?
Joshua: The letter that Epicurus wrote when he was dying goes even further. Epicurus could not have used “pleasure” as an invariable synonym for “happiness.” He died a happy man but in physical agony. His last words, known even beyond his own sect, exhibit the triumph of happiness over pain: “On this blissful day of my life, which is likewise my last, I write these words to you. The pains of my strangury and dysentery do not abate the excess of their characteristic severity and continue to keep me company. But over against all these I set the joy in my soul at the recollection of the disquisitions composed by you and the rest.” And DeWitt says he is here exemplifying the subtraction of pain from pleasure, leaving a balance of pleasure which is happiness.
Cassius: Yeah. That’s where we are in terms of this whole issue of continuous pleasure being really what we’re talking about — which is happiness. Even the happy man is going to be experiencing pains at certain times. You’re regularly choosing pain in order to obtain a greater pleasure or avoid worse pains. So the issue of this balance here is not that the two mix together, but it’s that the man who appreciates his full experience is going to be considering himself to be happy even though he may be temporarily experiencing certain pains.
Don: Exactly. And I always come back to having problems with the word “happiness” because it denotes something different, I think, for English speakers than it did for the Greeks. What I do in my head usually is I try to substitute the word “well-being” for “happiness” there. You can have a sense of well-being even if you are in pain — that you’re living well, that you have that sort of satisfaction with your life, that sort of thing — even though you’re in pain. And I think that having Epicurus talk about that he was experiencing the kidney stones and all that sort of thing, and he was in severe pain, but he could still remember back that he had a sense of well-being — that his life was well-lived, that he had friends, that he could look back on these memories. And he was still feeling all the pain that he was feeling, but he could still have that sense of satisfaction with his life that he could sort of bask in, even in the midst of all that.
Cassius: Yeah, and Don, you mentioned a few minutes ago this is the section where DeWitt starts talking about kinetic versus katastematic pleasures. And this is the right context to probably bring all this up: those words — kinetic meaning motion, basically, and katastematic being stable or more related to rest — are types of pleasures. And “pleasure” is the global term that includes both of them. It’s not that there’s a katastematic pleasure which is the highest type of pleasure that we should all be working for, that somehow there’s a pyramid of pleasures and the apex is some segment labeled “katastematic.” I think the point here is that there are all sorts of types of pleasures — mental, physical — some of which are more longer-lasting than others. There are the reflections of past pleasures as you’re talking about, Don, the stable condition of a feeling of well-being. It is a part of your overall mix of experiences. When your life is going in the right direction, when you consider yourself to be happy, you have this feeling of the stable condition of confidence in where you are and where you’re going. And that is how these words “happiness” and “pleasure” fit together.
Again, the bull of Phalaris is mentioned in this section — how Cicero was being unfair to Epicurus in suggesting that the wise man would be saying “how pleasant it is” while I’m being roasted alive. And this ignores the difference between pleasure and happiness, between suavis and beatus, and bringing up the katastematic and kinetic pleasures.
Don: The way I would phrase it now, since we’re actually using those words, is that we can be more confident in having katastematic pleasures than we can have confidence in having kinetic pleasures, simply because the kinetic pleasures come to us from external circumstances and things from outside of us, whereas the katastematic pleasures come from within us — like memories and anticipations of pleasures and contemplation and that sort of thing. It doesn’t necessarily mean that one is better than the other. It’s just that we have access to one all the time and we don’t necessarily have access to the other one all the time. That’s how I understand it myself. I’m not saying that’s necessarily correct, but that is the way I’ve been able to wrap my brain around it and accept that idea.
Cassius: Yeah, I agree with that. And I think that resolves the problems that a lot of people come up with after reading different commentaries or even the Wikipedia articles on Epicurus. Yes, there is an issue of katastematic and kinetic pleasure in the discussion of Epicurus, but it’s part of the overall discussion about how pleasure is the goal of life. And it by no means is the whole story of Epicurean philosophy.
Don: And people seem to put — whatever the whole thing about the katastematic pleasures being ataraxia and aponia — people just ignore the whole other thing of where the kinetic pleasures are joy and merriment and that sort of thing. He doesn’t put a value judgment on those. He just says this is the way that I’m thinking about them: that one comes from inside and one comes from external circumstances. So he’s including both of them in his definition of pleasure. And people just seem to skate right over that and say “Oh, well, ataraxia was obviously the most important thing to Epicurus all the time.” And I’m like — I’m not getting that. It may be important, you may have access to it all the time, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a better value judgment. No pleasure is an evil in itself.
Cassius: Right, right. We started the chapter with this quote on Epicurus about how he had discussed the issue of pleasure so thoroughly that essentially everyone who came after him was reduced to simply squabbling over what he had to say.
DeWitt says here near the end: “The leading philosophers after Plato seemed to have made this concession. The fact that this extension of the name of pleasure was so long and malevolently contested is merely proof of the jealousy of the rival schools and of the real validity of the arguments. The validity of the main contention — that continuity of happiness must be conceded to be feasible — was not contested. Much that Plato had said about pleasure became obsolete.”
And so DeWitt says that Theophrastus, who was part of the Aristotelian school, was an exception — who in attaching great value to external goods and evils declared that fortune, not wisdom, rules the minds of men, and that “the happy life cannot mount the scaffold to the wheel.” What does that last phrase mean — “cannot mount the scaffold to the wheel”?
Don: I have a proposal, but I don’t know if it means anything. We’re grabbing your jaws. So when you mount the scaffold — in other words you’re being hanged — some people are willing to walk up those stairs and just face it. Whereas “no one goes willingly to the wheel” — the wheel being a torture device.
Joshua: Oh, so it means walking up the steps to the wheel? I think I’m getting it. Okay.
Cassius: Yeah. And it does say in the Tusculan Disputations that a man who is placed on the wheel — that is a kind of torture used among the Greeks — the wheel of Ixion, yeah.
Joshua: Okay. So if we can find anything more about that we can post it to the forum.
Cassius: Yeah, I’ll post the link to the forum to Paul Elmer Moore’s Hellenistic Philosophies citation too, so we get to get the context of that. Okay. And so DeWitt kind of brings it all back to a conclusion by saying in terms of katastematic and kinetic, that both would apply to the pleasure of a healthy Epicurean — “now enjoying a quiet evening at home and now having a rollicking time at one of the monthly banquets.” So we’ve come to the end of this subsection, and probably the end of our podcast for today.
Let’s go ahead and close on this question of how the viewing of pleasure as a wide concept that includes all sorts of types of pleasures allows us to see how we can continuously experience a form of pleasure and on balance consider our lives to be happy, even when we are experiencing certain temporary pains.
So Martin, any thoughts as we begin to close?
Martin: No, I have nothing today.
Cassius: Okay. Let me go to Joshua next.
Joshua: Oh, that’s good, because I don’t have much. We’re going to “pain” next, and one of Epicurus’s most controversial claims, but that will have to wait until next week.
Don: Yes. That’s the next section — “Continuous Pain Impossible.” Yeah, I think this is always an important thing to sort of go over — that wide definition that Epicurus had of pleasure — and to bring out the implications of that, and that one pleasure isn’t necessarily better than another. I do hope that we have a continuing discussion of this on the forum. It’s always good to get other people’s perspectives. But yeah, this was an interesting discussion.
Callistheni: I’m not so sure I can agree with this whole thing about not considering whether some pleasures are better than others. It gives me pause — that whole section which was really early on. I’m going to have to re-listen to that because I could not agree with what was being said there.
Cassius: Well, the issue is what the word “better” means, I guess, is what you’re talking about, right?
Don: Yeah, I would agree with that. The question is how do you define “better,” and who do you allow to define that word for you. “Better” — is God telling you what’s better? Well then that’s just a statement that your feeling of pleasure tells you to prioritize some pleasures over others, but it doesn’t mean that it’s some kind of an absolute standard of what everybody needs to do.
Callistheni: Okay, but I guess I was hearing something different in that section. I know what you’re saying now, so that’s helpful. But I do have — I mean, I’ve had problems with this in the past as well. I’ve mentioned the knock-down drag-out discussions that we’ve had on the forum in the past with Cassius and me and Elaine, talking about Principal Doctrine 10 and the pleasures of the prodigal and this sort of thing. And so it comes back around to the idea that if you’re feeling pleasure, nobody can argue with you about it. But it’s the consequences of those pleasures — on other people, on your own health, on a well-ordered community — those pleasures may feel good, but they may not be the ones you want to choose because they’re going to have subsequent pains that you maybe didn’t think of, or that are going to impact your continued existence. So that’s sort of where I’ve come down on the idea of whether some pleasures are better than others. As Epicurus said, all pleasures are good — but that doesn’t mean that all pleasures are choice-worthy. That’s sort of where I’ve come down on that.
Cassius: Okay, because you’re contrasting it between pleasures that lead to further pains. But what I’m thinking is: within pleasures that are all pleasurable, there really could be pleasures that are better in the sense of being more pleasurable. So — do you consider that you’re not living the fullest amount of pleasure because you’re not considering what your options are and realizing that you could be choosing slightly differently and actually getting more pleasure?
Callistheni: I think it’s a good discussion to have.
Don: Yeah, I think that’s — not to put you on the spot or anything, but I’m curious if you have any specific examples in mind, because I would be curious to see what your perspective is coming from there.
Callistheni: I guess occasionally thoughts come to me as I’m experiencing something. One of them was: okay, is the pleasure of eating somehow not quite the best pleasure that there could be? Something that lasts longer? And if I’m relying only on the pleasure of eating — because it does give pleasure to eat — and I’m not thoroughly cultivating other pleasures, am I really short-changing myself at some point?
Don: Well, I think that’s a really good example. Because I think that Epicurus, at least in the Letter to Menoikeus and some other places, when he talks about bread and water and that whole section — if you are hungry, sometimes just eating a simple meal is going to give you the height of pleasure. Because you’re tired, you’re sweaty maybe from being outside, maybe you’ve been on a long journey, maybe you’ve been working in your garden, and if you come in and have a cool glass of water and a snack of some bread, that’s going to really taste good and you’re going to have a lot of pleasure from that. Whereas if you are just eating for the sake of eating, or you’re not really hungry, or what they sometimes call today emotional eating — that doesn’t necessarily give you as much pleasure as eating when you actually are hungry, and being able to really concentrate on what it tastes like. So there’d be different experiences of eating even within that activity itself. Did any of that make sense?
Callistheni: Yeah, I think I’ll need to contemplate this more and write it out.
Don: Yeah, and it’s sometimes really hard to just throw things into the discussion. It’s much easier to contemplate them and write them out — which is really one of the benefits of the forum, that it really allows you to do that. We reserve the right to extend and revise our remarks.
Cassius: Yeah, so I will look forward to seeing some posts from that on the forum. And somebody recently made a comment on the forum about how we used to emphasize outlining and so forth. I think that can be useful. But it comes back to this question of what is “good” and is there some absolute meaning of the word “good” that you need to be conforming your actions to. And I think that’s the point — there’s not an absolute meaning of “good” that is different from and higher than the word “pleasure.” All you’ve got is your feeling of pleasure. Within your feeling of pleasure there are many different things you can do that are going to give you different experiences — some of which you’re going to value more than others, and find more intense or more long-lasting or whatever. But you always come back to: there’s nothing in this word “good” that answers the question for you. There’s always the question of pleasure and how you feel about it that allows you to rank something. You don’t solve any questions, you don’t provide any answers, by saying that something is “good” or “not good” or “better” or “not better.” You’ve got to drill down past those words. “Better” would be about whether something lasts longer or is more intense, whether it feels longer and more intense to you in this feeling of pleasure. I would say yes — you’ve got to give context to these words “good” and “better” that these other philosophers are just ignoring. That’s the problem with the word “virtue”: what is your context? Are you in fact being courageous by standing in front of this opposing army, or are you just being a fool? You’ve got to understand the context, and there’s nothing that tells you in the end the context other than the result — this practical, pragmatic looking at what does actually happen based on what you do.
Don: Yeah. That’s where I sort of come back to — I’m sorry for being a broken record on bringing up that circumplex idea, but the whole idea of the high-arousal, low-arousal. Even if it’s a low arousal on the vertical scale, it’s still pleasurable. It’s that idea of calm and satisfaction and serenity. It might be a low energy state, but that doesn’t mean that it’s negative. That in no way connotes that it’s a negative state — it’s still pleasurable and might even be very pleasurable for some people.
Joshua: Well, and especially because more intense pleasures actually only last a short time.
Don: There you go. Yeah, that’s a good point.
Joshua: I would also add to this: there’s duration, intensity, but also how memorable they are — which is going to impact whether you can continue to draw on them throughout your life. I don’t remember the Twix bar I ate when I was 13, but I remember the time I spent with my friends.
Don: Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point. That is a very good point. Yeah. Because even in positive psychology now, they talk so much about how important it is to make memories and to value experiences with friends and out in the world and that sort of thing. The importance of that in your life in the future — whatever, when you get older — to be able to pull on those memories. I think that’s a perfect point to bring up, Joshua.
Cassius: And that’s what we mean by “better,” and that’s what we mean by “good” — at the level of real experience. But that’s where “better” and “good” come from: these real experiences of life, not an abstraction.
Joshua: Yeah, exactly. “Better” and “good” are all about the context in which you’re talking about them. There is no absolute hierarchy.
Cassius: Yes. And I’m not going to stop eating Twix bars, either.
Don: Okay, I think we can slice that back in, because that was the best part of the discussion today.
Cassius: Yeah, this does strike me as really, really key. It’s the same question they were using to attack Epicurus back 2,000 years ago. It’s the cause of so much confusion today. Everybody thinks of pleasure as being ice cream, cake, candy — tongs, dance.
Joshua: Sex, drugs, and rock and roll, baby.
Cassius: Sex, drugs, and rock and roll — that’s exactly correct. But with Epicurus, he’s not denigrating those pleasures because he insists that all pleasures are pleasurable. But he is widening the scope of our observation to see that, especially in the great scheme of things compared to the time before birth and the time after death, our experiences in life when we are not in pain are pleasurable. And we can consider all of these experiences in life to be pleasurable in our analysis of whether pleasure fits the bill for a description of the goal of life or not. So we will continue on next week with this analysis and continuing to put everything in that wider perspective. As Don said, please drop by the forum and let us know your thoughts and comments. And so until next week, we will say goodbye and see you then.