Episode 177 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 29 - Chapter 12 - The New Hedonism 06
Date: 06/08/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3098-episode-177-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-29-chapter-12-the-new-hedonism-06/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 177 concludes DeWitt’s Chapter 12, “The New Hedonism,” with Cassius and Joshua working through the final two sections — “Continuous Pain Is Impossible” and “The Relation of Pleasure to Virtue” — while Martin and Callistheni offer no closing remarks. The discussion opens with Principal Doctrine 4 and DeWitt’s admission that it is an “unfortunate doctrine” that “rightly incurred the sharpest ridicule,” since it appears to claim that intense pain is always brief and chronic suffering always allows a net excess of pleasure. Joshua frames the doctrine as a claim about acute versus chronic pain, and raises multiple sclerosis as the kind of counterexample critics have in mind. Cassius argues that Epicurus would refuse to accept DeWitt’s framing of being “forced by necessity of thought” into this position, since if certain forms of pleasure — kinetic or katastematic — are always available, the logical consequence is that total continuous pain is impossible. Cassius also raises Torquatus’s point that if unrelenting pain truly offers no reprieve, the Epicurean framework permits a person to end life on their own terms rather than endure it. The hedonic calculus enters as DeWitt frames it as a “calculus of advantage” — the net sum of pleasures minus pains — supported by the Letter to Menoikeus’s instruction to measure pleasures and pains against each other. Cassius and Joshua then turn to a digression on the relationship between mind and body in Epicurean philosophy, emphasizing that mental correction of false beliefs is not the same as medieval flesh-denial or Stoic indifference, and that some forms of suffering require doctors rather than philosophy. The second half of the episode covers Cicero’s extended controversy with Epicurus, with Cassius paraphrasing DeWitt’s account of how Cicero won with the closing argument — “a resounding verdict for virtue and at the same time hypocrisy” — and how Stoicism furnished the Roman Empire with “specious labels” acceptable to hypocrites. A digression on “National Day of Reason” versus Cassius’s preferred “Day of Observation” reinforces Don’s running point that we are feeling beings who on occasion think, not thinking beings who feel. The Cleanthes rhetorical technique — picturing virtue as a handmaiden to pleasure and using the emotional disgust of the image to win the argument — is examined, and Cassius cites Cicero’s three-states objection (pleasure, pain, and a neutral third state) along with Torquatus’s refusal to back down: “all who are without pain are in pleasure.” The final section on pleasure and virtue covers DeWitt’s two fallacies Epicurus would have detected in Platonic reasoning: first, the invalid analogy between geometry and temperance (they are not “true similars”), illustrated by the Lincoln film’s use of Euclid to argue against slavery; second, the assumption that pleasure is a detachable independent entity that can be added to or removed from virtuous activity, which Epicurus denies by pointing to Lucretius’s principle that heat cannot be separated from fire, sweetness from honey. Cassius reads Epicurus’s line “I spit upon the beautiful and those who unreasonably adore it when it gives no pleasure,” connects it to Epicurean nominalism about virtue, and presents Marcus Brutus’s dying words after Philippi — “O unhappy virtue, so you were just a word after all” — as the emotional crystallization of the Epicurean critique. Joshua supplies the context of Horace’s Epistles 1.6, and Cassius draws on Diogenes of Oenoanda’s inscription and the text “It is to continuous pleasures that I invite you, not to virtues that are empty and vain and offer but harassing hopes of reward,” parsing “empty” as repudiation of Platonic absolute forms, “vain” as rejection of the separability of pleasure, and “harassing hopes” as the Platonic afterlife. The episode closes with Cassius citing Thomas More’s Utopia on how Epicurean-style atheism was treated as grounds for expulsion from polite society, reading Vatican Saying 27 on the simultaneity of philosophical learning and pleasure, tracing how Stoicism survived partly by incorporating Epicurean content under different labels — “a kindlier creed survived under Stoic labels” — and announcing that next week the group turns to Chapter 13, “True Piety,” and the nature of the Epicurean gods.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 177 of Lucretius Today. We’re continuing in Chapter 12, “The New Hedonism,” of the DeWitt book. Hopefully we’re going to finish it today and conclude on some really important material that has been percolating through the whole chapter. I think after the last several very good sessions we’ve had discussing these issues, we’ll be in a position to bring them together with better clarity than maybe we’ve ever been able to do in the past, having gone through these details that DeWitt has brought to our attention. We ended the discussion last week on the accusation by Theophrastus that, quote, “the happy life cannot mount the scaffold or the wheel.” Joshua had some good thoughts on that last week. And in the interim since last week, I have found the time to reread the second book of Cicero’s De Finibus, and I’ve also had a chance to review the final chapter of Tusculan Disputations in which some of these issues are discussed. Hopefully in the future we can come back to looking at those as well — there’s some really interesting material about Epicurean philosophy that we don’t talk about very much. And when you look at those other sources, it’s easier to see where DeWitt is pulling his commentary from. DeWitt himself is serving as our bridge to Cicero’s summary of the conflict between these philosophies. And every time I look back at Cicero’s own summaries, there’s a lot of really interesting material in which presumably Cicero at that point in Western civilization had access to all of this Greek and earlier Roman material, and he’s systematizing it for us, and now to some extent DeWitt has brought some of that together for us in his book that we’ve been going through. The topic today, the subheading is “Continuous Pain Is Impossible,” which I think again reflects that the new hedonism that is the name of the chapter is a reflection that Epicurus had revamped and revolutionized hedonism in his own presentation of it. To a significant extent, the part of the revolution was the finding of the ability to claim that continuous pleasure is possible. When you read Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and Book Two of De Finibus, you see how important it was to these guys to be arguing about the issue of whether the happy life is really possible, whether the wise man can claim to always be happy, or whether there are peaks and valleys in pleasure — but there’s also the closely related question of whether the wise man is always happy. If you’re Stoic or you’re coming from a Platonic point of view, the question becomes something like: what is the relationship of virtue to pleasure? What is the relationship of virtue to the good? Is virtue going to lead to happiness? Is virtue sufficient for happiness — which is the title supplied to the last chapter of Tusculan Disputations? So last week the assertion was continuous pleasure is possible. Today the flip side of that question is whether continuous pain is the problem. And so DeWitt’s title is “Continuous Pain Is Impossible.” DeWitt starts out by saying: having laid down the two principles that pleasure and pain are true opposites and that continuous pleasure is a possibility, Epicurus was forced by a necessity of thought into positing that continuous pain is impossible. And then we go into Principal Doctrine 4, quote: “Pain does not prevail continuously in the flesh, but the peak of it is present for the briefest interval and the pain that barely exceeds the pleasures in the flesh is not with us many days, while protracted illnesses have an excess of pleasure over pain in the flesh.” DeWitt then says that this kind of formulation is unfortunately among the more unfortunate doctrines of Epicurus and rightly incurred the sharpest ridicule. He says it reveals more faith and doctrine and more determination to live by it and to maintain control of experience than is consistent with medical knowledge. He seems to have been reasoning from his own malady — stone in the kidney, which is accompanied by spasms of extreme agony separated by long intervals of immunity. So let’s go ahead and talk about first of all the wording of Principal Doctrine 4 and what we think about that.
Joshua: Yeah, I think, Cassius, you could take Principal Doctrine 4 and sum it up pretty easily by saying that pain can be intense, but when it is intense it is acute or short-lasting, and it can be chronic or long-lasting, but when it’s chronic or long-lasting it’s not so intense that you can’t still experience more pleasure than pain. Whether that’s true or not — and DeWitt is very critical of the idea that it could be true — is maybe a more interesting question.
Cassius: Yes.
Joshua: Right now I don’t know enough about medicine really at all to be able to give a good summary of what the response to that would be, but I know there are diseases like, for example, multiple sclerosis, which is an autoimmune disease — your immune system starts attacking the myelin tissue which sort of surrounds and insulates the nerves, and as that tissue breaks down your nerves are exposed all the time and you can imagine what that pain would feel like. It never grows back; it’s a lifelong sentence. It’s probably stuff like that that people have in mind when they’re saying that this is ridiculous — which is what DeWitt says here — that of course intense pain can last for a long time. So I think what we should focus on is this question of: because DeWitt makes the secondary claim that Epicurus was forced by necessity of thought into positing that continuous pain is impossible — do we think that’s true?
Cassius: I don’t know. Right. What is the way — continuing on that potential criticism of Principal Doctrine 4 — what’s the way that it is normally summarized, and what’s the way you remember, Joshua, the fourth leg of the tetrapharmacon? What’s the short version of this?
Joshua: Right. The tetrapharmacon is “do not fear” — as Don has been saying, it’s sometimes stated as a commandment, but Don and Emily are also saying it’s not. Something about the gods are not to be feared, death is not to be feared, what’s good is easy to get, and then what’s difficult is easy to endure.
Cassius: Yes — something about easy to endure, and that becomes the thrust of the problem. When each one of us can think about whatever is bothering us at a particular moment and think to ourselves, “this is not easy to endure, and this is terrible” — and therefore if Epicurus thinks that what I’m going through right now is easy to endure, he’s full of it, and I don’t know why I should spend any more time reading Epicurus or anybody who takes such a ridiculous position. That is a very powerful criticism and something that I think, if we’re going to be advocates — or if we think we do agree with Epicurus and think he had good reasons for saying what he said — it’s something we need to be able to explain with equal strength as the person who’s going through the torture of whatever he’s going through and thinks that this is not easy to endure. I was trying to think of what to respond to that, but I’m not sure I have anything.
Cassius: Joshua, you said a moment ago that DeWitt had said that Epicurus was “forced by necessity of thought” into this position, and I don’t know that I agree that “forced by necessity of thought” is really the right way to frame it, because that would imply that maybe Epicurus did not want to say this — that he somehow had backed himself into a corner, felt that he had to say it and just went ahead and plowed through anyway even though he didn’t really want to say it. And if we’re trying to understand Epicurus and advocate for his position, I don’t think Epicurus would admit that he was forced into doing anything. He would say that the logic of the situation produces this result, and that when you think about the meaning of it, there are ways to understand it that are positive and that don’t cause you any problem in understanding it.
Joshua: Yeah, I know. I think I agree with that.
Cassius: And so again, if we’re looking at this — and Martin and I were talking about some of these issues before we started the discussion today — about how, if you do go back and look at these issues from a logical formula point of view: if you start from the position that there’s nothing but pleasure and pain, those are the only two; and if you also take the position that while you can have pleasures and pains in maybe different parts of your experience at the same time, as Principal Doctrine 3 says, whenever pleasure is present as long as it’s there there’s neither pain of body nor of mind — you therefore take the position that they’re like oil and water, you can put them together in the same container but they don’t really mix. And then you’ve taken the position that it is possible to always have access to pleasure. We were talking about that on the forum this morning — Don’s comments about kinetic and katastematic and however you interpret all that, it seems clear that Epicurus is saying that there are some types of pleasure that are always available to you. If you take the position that there are some types of pleasure that are always available to you, the logical deduction from that would be that continuous total pain is impossible, if there are indeed some types of pleasure that are always available to you. So if I were trying to defend both DeWitt and Epicurus, maybe that’s what DeWitt is referring to by being “forced into that position.” But I think Epicurus would say that he’s not being forced into anything — this is the reality of the situation. Life is pleasurable for the reasons we’ve been discussing, and he’s not going to back down on that. And so therefore if life is pleasurable, while I am alive, continuous pain is impossible. And of course it’s certainly impossible after I’m dead because I’m not there anymore. So you can logically follow this chain of reasoning and conclude that continuous pain is impossible. Bailey’s translation: “Pain does not last continuously in the flesh, but the acutest pain is there for a very short time, and even that which just exceeds the pleasure in the flesh does not continue for many days at once, but chronic illnesses permit a predominance of pleasure over pain in the flesh.” I think Torquatus, when he talks about it in his presentation, says something to the effect as well that if you do run into a situation where your intense pain is continuing on for so long and with no respite in view, then there are measures you can take to bring that to an end yourself if you have to — which I think he then illustrates by talking about the example of how you would at times choose to die for a friend. That would be an example where you might choose to go to death yourself if you’re in a situation where you could save a friend and you knew that if you didn’t, your life after that would be so miserable — almost like the multiple sclerosis example you mentioned — that you would not want to continue to live. So I think that’s where he’s going, and Epicurus would not admit that he’s being forced into something he doesn’t want to believe. He would say: “Darn right, continuous pain is impossible, and I stand by it and always will.”
Cassius: And where DeWitt carries that is to talk about what many people will talk about as hedonic calculus — the calculus of pleasure. What we’re talking about here is sort of an addition and subtraction, a sum issue. In protracted suffering, the principle of the subtraction of pain from pleasure holds good, and DeWitt says it’s more of a calculus of advantage, and it is a calculus of pleasure or pain because it’s an overall sum issue. DeWitt supports that by citing the text that says, quote: “The right way to judge all of these pleasures and pains is by measuring them against each other and by scrutiny of the advantages and disadvantages.” I think that’s the Letter to Menoikeus. And since it is possible to continue — since happiness is possible — it follows that the process is one of subtraction: pain subtracted from pleasure.
Joshua: What’s just occurring to me now is that as we read through this, I’m seeing stuff like “continuous pain in the flesh is impossible” and so forth. Are we meant to assume that mental pains, anxieties, anguishes — I have to assume that we are — that those fall under the same category and are included in this discussion? Does it even make sense to the ancient Epicureans to talk about it in those terms? They would say, of course, that everything was reducible to the body eventually.
Cassius: Yeah. And of course we know that Epicurus held that pleasures and pains of the mind at least can be, not maybe always, but can be more intense than those of the body. And we also know, like you said, that Epicurus is really, to some extent — he’s not entirely different from those who say that the mental issues that you have, the mental pleasures and pains, you do have some greater degree of control over than those of the body. You can offset the pleasures of the past in your memory of them against the pain that you’re feeling from your kidney stones in the moment. And you can to some extent control those issues that you’re thinking about. Isn’t that what the whole philosophy is about? That the flesh thinks that you need an unlimited amount of time to live, and the flesh thinks that boy, that’s a very impressive volcano — maybe the gods did that — but the mind is able through philosophy to correct those misunderstandings and leads you back into a consistency with nature that allows you to live happily. So I would say: it’s good to point out that Epicurus says pain doesn’t last continuously in the flesh, because you don’t really have as much control over what’s going on in your body as you do in your mind. That’s part of it, maybe.
Joshua: I see what you’re saying there. Of course, anytime we start talking about whether the mind is a fortress to insulate yourself from the flesh, we have to make a series of disclaimers — and I don’t know if I need to go into them now — but this is not the idea you see in medieval Christianity where the flesh is something to be beaten down and subdued in order for the mind to be open to the gift of salvation. It’s nothing like that, nor is it the indifference you see in Stoicism.
Joshua: Right, and also it’s not alleging that you can cure your toothache by thinking happy thoughts. I think there are many textual references where the mind can be sick as well, and if you’ve got a physical problem that’s causing your mind to be somehow diseased, that’s something we run into pretty frequently to make the comment that some people are, in fact, clinically depressed or have chemical or other issues that cause them to be unhappy, and you can’t treat those by philosophy. You need to have a doctor and medical assistance. So Epicurus is not just saying that the mind has the ability to totally control everything. Mind is part of the body, part of your human existence, and they work together.
Cassius: And going forward, DeWitt points out that this phrase, “continuous pleasures,” is a significant phrase to Epicurus, and there’s the text that starts out, quote: “It is to continuous pleasures that I summon you.” And here I’ll make a tangent and say: DeWitt says that this feasibility of achieving continuity was part of the protracted controversy over the rival claims of virtue and pleasure, which raged for 200 years and is rehearsed for us in the last book of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations. And I think if I’m in a kind of confrontational mood this morning, it’s because I just finished reading the last book of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, and I see what he’s talking about there. At some point in the future we’re going to have to find a way to go back over that last book, which is on the question of whether virtue is sufficient for happiness, and also the things that he says in Book Two of De Finibus. These sections of Cicero where he’s attacking Epicurean philosophy contain some really interesting commentary about Epicurus that we can, I think, get a lot out of. DeWitt says that as often in the courts of law, the old advocate Cicero was slated to make the final address — he got the closing argument — and he won. Quote: “Cicero won a resounding verdict for virtue and at the same time hypocrisy. The empire being founded upon political hypocrisy required specious labels, which Stoicism was prepared to furnish. Even virtue and duty were unimpeachable catchwords, acceptable to hypocrites even more than to saints.” I like that line because he’s attacking both the Judeo-Christian framework and the hypocrisy of the Stoic claim that virtue is all that matters in the world.
Joshua: That is phenomenal.
Cassius: And continuing with something Don said last week and has said repeatedly — which is that we are not thinking beings who feel, we are feeling beings who sometimes think — something that was in the news recently was the kind of thing that always frustrates me for how obtuse people can come across. You’ll have humanist groups or groups of non-believers who want to come together and convince some local government somewhere to proclaim a Day of Reason — a National Day of Reason, observed each year on the first Thursday in May. It occurs to me that it’s the kind of thing that really comes across as just obtuse, as arrogant, and as though someone simply hasn’t really thought about what they’re doing. I was thinking about it the other day, and I said: if I was going to come up with a day like that with a touch of irony, I would call it a Day of Observation — with two meanings, one being the usual sense of an observance, but the other meaning that it’s the observations we make with our senses that are the core component of this, and not just sitting in a dark room and thinking your thoughts. So why does that come up? Because like it says here, it’s a protracted argument over the rival claims of virtue and pleasure, and the Stoics are prepared to furnish to a corrupt Roman Empire a series of buzzwords like reason, virtue, duty — that are meant to be unimpeachable. During the French Revolution, revolutionaries took over Notre Dame and changed it into a Cathedral of Reason. You become as ridiculous as what you’re trying to tear down, I think, if you do some of this stuff. So my advice in the end is: stand by pleasure, because it’s one thing that we know we can rely on.
Cassius: You’re going to have to reel me in, Joshua, if I go too long in responding to what you just said. But I think what you just said is excellent. And we’ve got on the forum in recent days a visitor who I think many of us were very happy to see — Peter St.-André, who has got a series of translations on the internet that many of us have used for years. And some of the topics and interests he’s had include something you just talked about: the protracted argument in the ancient world about the place of reason and virtue — and that continues today, not only in the examples you’ve given and the humanist angle of elevating reason to the central element, but that’s also a component, interestingly enough, of Ayn Rand and the objectivist viewpoint, where she focused so strongly on reason and rationality. And of course this is sort of baked into the cake of the Aristotelian point of view as well, which Peter is also interested in. It’s a fascinating subject that people at some point ought to dive into. But I’ll close out that point by simply saying that it’s the Stoics and the Platonists who expect to intimidate you and back you into a corner by using words that sound so high and mighty and noble that nobody in their right mind — only a depraved, maniacal monster — would ever oppose them. And they think that by putting these words out there they’re going to win the argument on its own. In fact, they do often intimidate people into backing down. Just as Plato intimidated Philebus to abandon his defense of pleasure as the good in that book entitled Philebus. That’s the common technique of the Platonist. In Diogenes Laertius it is recorded that Epicurus accused the Platonists of being flatterers of Dionysus. DeWitt explains that as meaning they’re like people on the stage, standing in the theater acting high and mighty like some character who’s just come down from heaven or Mount Olympus, presenting something in such dramatically flowery and impressive terms that it’s going to intimidate their opponents into backing down from opposing positions. And DeWitt is saying here that this is a technique of both hypocrites and saints alike — the technique of religion and certain types of philosophies that attempt to win the game not by logical argument and observation of reality, but by this intimidation technique. And frankly, reading Book Two of De Finibus, I think you come to the same conclusion: that in the end, what Cicero thinks is his winning argument against Epicurus is not some kind of logic, but in the end he portrays how revolting it would be. He uses this example of Cleanthes of the Stoic school, who apparently liked to whip his crowd into a frenzy by saying: “Just think about this picture here, you who value virtue so much — think about this picture in your mind, and place pleasure in the middle of that picture as the center of attention, but have the virtues be handmaidens to pleasure, sort of at the bottom of the picture serving as servants of pleasure, and think about how revolting it would be to consider that virtue should be in the service of pleasure rather than pleasure in the service of virtue.” And it’s that instinctive, emotional intimidation that Cicero is evoking there that he uses to sum up his criticism against Epicurus. Right now at the top of the forum I’ve got a quote from Book Two of De Finibus where Cicero says, quote: “Who can fail to see that there are in the nature of things these three states: one when we’re in pleasure, another when we are in pain, and the third — the state I’m in now, and I suppose you are too — when we neither feel pain nor pleasure? Don’t you see that between these extremes lies a great crowd of men who feel neither sorrow nor delight?” And he goes on and says: “You’re doing violence to Torquatus and Epicurus because you’re using the word ‘pleasure’ in a way that nobody else uses it.” Torquatus’s response to that is not to back down but to say, quote: “Not at all — I affirm that all who are without pain are in pleasure and that the fullest possible.” And so I’m citing that as an example: when you are backed into a corner by these guys who are using such high-sounding words, you don’t give in. You don’t let them back you down. You stand your ground on positions you’ve previously established through your observation of reality, and you simply don’t back down. And so that takes us to the final section of this chapter, which is entitled “The Relation of Pleasure to Virtue” — because that is where so much of the fighting takes place in this war between Epicurus and the other schools. Just as we’ve been discussing, they hold up virtue as a name which, as Torquatus says in Book One, “those who disagree with Epicurus are beguiled by the glamour of a name.” And this glamour of the name of virtue is what is held up to intimidate people who believe in pleasure as the goal, and to back them down. “You can’t mean what you’re saying,” people like Cicero would say — “you can’t talk about these things in public, even, because you’re ashamed if you think about it to say that pleasure should be the goal of life.” And using these rhetorical techniques they back people down, and rather than win the debate against Epicurus through reason and observation, they win it through emotional intimidation. And what DeWitt does in the first paragraph of this section on page 245 is to link that to Stoicism: “The reason for the subsequent increase of importance in this issue was the growth of Stoicism, which espoused the cause of virtue against pleasure and concentrated an inordinate amount of attention upon this ‘not too profitable controversy.’” And so DeWitt is again kind of dismissing the stark position — he’s really saying that the argument isn’t worth the center stage it gets. But there it is. And he says the importance accorded to the problem at the time of Epicurus is demonstrated by its prominent position in the key doctrines: the fifth doctrine declares that in effect pleasure and virtue are inseparable — linked together like health and pleasure, disease and pain.
Joshua: I wanted to follow up on your description of Cleanthes whipping up the crowd. Isn’t there — going to my bookshelf now — isn’t there a scene in A Few Days in Athens essentially where Frances Wright takes the opportunity to respond to that position, that indeed virtue is a handmaid to pleasure, and she goes on to give this sort of poetic train of the virtues? I think so. Is that the confrontation between Zeno and Epicurus — the big speeches they give to each other?
Cassius: I’m not sure. I was wondering if it was in that long italic section where she’s speaking directly, but I don’t remember. It could be there, but it’s sort of the subtext of the confrontation between Zeno and Epicurus, because Zeno says: “I don’t care whether you’re right or wrong, Epicurus — I am defending virtue, and I’m going to go down with the Titanic in virtue because it’s so glorious that I’m proud to go down with it no matter what happens.” And Epicurus has a response to that and doesn’t back down. But I think it’s sort of the same argument.
Joshua: Yeah, there’s definitely a passage in there where he’s talking about prudence at the head of the procession and all this stuff, and so forth. Maybe I’ll be able to find the quote later and put it on the forum.
Cassius: Well, while you gather your next thought, let me go on. This last full paragraph on page 245 has I think a very important point that we need to include here: that Plato and Aristotle were taking the position that pleasure must be an independent entity — that’s attachable and detachable — which might or might not be combined with a given activity. Aristotle said that there’s a pleasure proper to the study of geometry, but this pleasure did not always accompany it, as cold experience must have taught him. But the principle that you could add or detach pleasure from other activities is assumed to hold good for the virtues as well. It was believed that if pleasure could be added to justice or temperance, the value of justice or temperance would be enhanced by the addition — and the same would hold true if any good is added to any other, meaning that something is more desirable when it’s combined with another good than when it’s isolated. And here’s a point that’s relevant to Philebus and a lot of other stuff: “Aristotle also quotes Plato as denying on this ground that pleasure can be the good — because the good is not made more desirable by the addition of something to it.” Something I think is related to this whole issue of limits: that if you can keep adding and adding and adding to something, then you haven’t reached your final destination and it can’t be your ultimate objective. That’s where Epicurus wanted to identify what the limit of pleasure really was — resulting in so much discussion we have about the limit of pleasure.
Joshua: Yeah, now all that stuff from Philebus is interesting and worth reading because it definitely bears on this question, because it really was their opinion that the good — the telos, the thing to which your whole life is directed — has to have, in a sense, almost a perfection about it. It has to not be able to get better, because it’s already the best thing there is. There has to be a limit, I guess — that’s how Epicurus puts it. It’s all over his philosophy: talking about limits, Lucretius refers to the deep-set boundary stone — alta termini haerens or something like that in the Latin. So these issues of limits come up again and again, and I think you’re right that it is a response to Plato and to Aristotle on precisely those issues. Because if the good can admit of increase — this is the essential argument of Plato — then it would never, ever, ever be achievable, not in a human life, not with eternity. And if that’s the case, then why pursue it? We don’t normally talk today in terms of limits and so forth, but I think it’s basically the same issue. And we do talk in terms of perfection, and wanting the best and something that’s perfect — meaning it can’t be made any better. The Platonists were claiming for virtue and their gods this attribute of perfection, saying that they are defining it as something that can’t be made any better. And I guess in the end Epicurus to some extent is willing to engage in that argument and say: well okay, yes — if you want to say that you’re after the best, I can show you that pleasure itself is the best, because it is achievable. By pointing out that when you’ve filled your experience with pleasure that’s the best you can be, you do have the ability to identify a reasonable, rational, identifiable limit to pleasure, and you can talk about it in the same terms as good or these other logical terms that they’re using.
Cassius: I really feel like DeWitt is finishing very strongly in this chapter, and the next point he makes is another really good one. DeWitt says: “In this line of reasoning Epicurus, always on the alert to be exact, would have detected two fallacies. In the first place he would have denied it correct to put temperance and geometry in the same class and to apply the same reasoning to both. It would not follow from the fact that the study of geometry might or might not be accompanied by pleasure that the practice of temperance might or might not be accompanied by pleasure. The logical procedure here called into question is reasoning by analogy — a tricky kind of reasoning and valid only among true similars. Geometry and temperance are not true similars. The error will be more unmistakable if modern examples are employed and we think about the study of trigonometry, geology, and chemistry and try to place them in the same class as practicing diligence, veracity, and sobriety.” The discussion of geometry lets you postulate a line with no width — postulating things in existence in order to make geometry work that do not really exist in reality — and therefore they are not true similars. You cannot treat morality in human affairs as something that can be geometrically or mathematically explained. I totally agree, and there’s a great contemporary example of this. If anyone’s ever seen the movie Lincoln with Daniel Day-Lewis playing the title part, he appeals in a few scenes to his early self-education and the books he was reading at the time, one of them being the Elements of Euclid, the father of geometry. He’s sitting in a room with two telegraph technicians in the war room late at night, and he connects Euclid’s postulate that “things equal to the same thing are equal to each other” to the institution of slavery. While that is a worthy goal I certainly would have supported, I don’t think that particular reasoning process would be sufficient to get you there — in part because nobody else at the time was willing to accept the first premise. It’s made for very effective cinema, but as you’ve used the illustration in the past: the map is not the same as the territory. No matter how useful mathematics and geometry might be, they are not able to capture the full reality of the world we live in. When you try to do that, you are inevitably excluding factors that are not part of the equation — you’re failing to account for all the circumstances of real life. By defining your premises, you are choosing to take some things into account but excluding tremendous numbers of others, and that will lead you to error when you attempt to say that your formula is always applicable.
Cassius: And then the second fallacy — as DeWitt says in the next paragraph — goes like this. He says: “The second fallacy in the reasoning of Plato and Aristotle was expressly urged. The error according to Epicurus lay in the assumption that pleasure was an independent entity capable of being combined with the practice of virtue or detached from it.” Whether it’s virtue or reason or god or any of those things, Epicurus’s reasoning on the point was similar to his reasoning about pleasure and living life as the greatest good: it is a pleasure to be alive even if maimed or in pain. So he’s bringing up once again his assertion that for the Epicureans life itself was the greatest good. The idea that pleasure is some thing that you can attach to other things to make them more pleasurable — it’s an experience that you feel yourself. You just feel it. You don’t plug it into stuff to make other stuff better. That seems to be the argument.
Joshua: I think you’re saying it correctly, and this is very important. Frances Wright talks about it — she criticizes Theophrastus and Aristotle for saying that orange is something that can be attached or detached from particular oranges. DeWitt’s making a really interesting point here: that Principal Doctrine 5 about the unity of virtue and pleasure is really dealing with this issue of whether pleasure is something that you can attach or detach from other things and has an existence separate from life itself. Many of us are coming around to the position that it is essential and clear Epicurean philosophy that life in the absence of pain is pleasure.
Cassius: He says pleasure is virtually an attribute of life, and the principle enunciated by Lucretius holds good: that an essential attribute of a thing is incapable of being removed without destroying the thing itself. Heat cannot be separated from fire, sweetness from honey, nor whiteness from snow. And DeWitt says pleasure and virtue are similarly inseparable. The bottom line is that Principal Doctrine 5 — about the unity of pleasure and virtue — has this quality of combativeness to it: we are not going to agree that virtue and pleasure are separable and can be evaluated differently. We’re going to take the position that they are inseparable, and you can’t live well without being virtuous, and you can’t be truly virtuous without also living well.
Joshua: And I love how DeWitt points out here with that passage from Lucretius that there’s an analogy to be made to the physics — the atoms also have their attributes that can’t be stripped from them without destroying them, and the same is true of things like pleasure, the same is true of life. I find that very compelling. It’s interesting to me because in any other school of philosophy from the ancient world there’s a hard time incorporating the physics into it, given how much we’ve learned. But with Epicurean philosophy in particular, we don’t have that problem. The physics integrates rather well.
Cassius: Yes, it integrates very well. And DeWitt moves on and I’m thinking to myself “from strength to strength.” The direction he takes it after this observation takes us back to a continuing issue we have today. You’ll have people who say: well, let’s look at Principal Doctrine 5 — Epicurus says virtue is inseparable from the pleasant life, so that means Epicurus is really all about virtue. He’s really just like the Stoics. Let’s all sit around the campfire and sing songs together because we all agree on the same things. That’s the position you’ll see people take. And DeWitt addresses that: “At first glance this reciprocation of pleasure and virtues may seem to result in placing pleasure and virtue upon a parity of importance, but this inference is readily shown to be illusory. Virtue, unlike pleasure, is not ‘the first good,’ nor ‘the beginning and end of the happy life.’ Even if nature approves of virtue, she first bestows approval upon pleasure because she links it with life from the moment of birth in advance of volition and intelligence. Pleasure possesses a long precedence over virtue in the growth of the human being. The newborn infant can feel pleasure but cannot practice virtue. By benefit of this priority, pleasure becomes a criterion, and when at length the choice to act virtuously or otherwise must be made, this choice must be decided by the criterion that has the priority. Thus virtue is chosen for the sake of pleasure and not the contrary.” And when he refers to the “genetic approach,” I think he’s talking about just the observation of the way that life really works and how it develops from beginnings over time to greater perfection. So again I think that’s a very good paragraph. It’s almost as if DeWitt is pulling Cicero back out of his grave again to have one last go at him.
Joshua: Yes. I think that’s a very good passage. I do have a dual feeling of appreciation that Cicero wrote the things he did — because we can now have them to talk about — versus questioning Cicero for taking the positions that he did. But you can begin to see, I think, the intensity of feeling that these guys have when they start talking about it in this way. It’s not just an austere logical debate for these guys. When you really drill into the issues of why they’re having this debate, it’s an almost emotional issue between these two warring camps.
Cassius: And again DeWitt just goes further and further. In the next section he says: “In the heat of controversy Epicurus did not shrink from employing strong language. ‘I spit upon the beautiful and those who unreasonably adore it when it gives no pleasure.’” And when he says “unreasonably,” this is more than derision — it’s a fundamental doctrine. Because the only really full and eternal existences are atoms and void, it follows that no abstractions really exist. DeWitt says Epicurus is asserting that justice is nothing by itself — form cannot exist apart from substance, quality cannot exist apart from a thing, virtue cannot exist apart from action. This results in a sort of nominalism in which virtue becomes an empty name corresponding to no reality at all. And he quotes Horace as making the point: “You think virtue is mere locution and a stately grove is just sticks” — which Horace attributed to Epicurean doctrine at that moment. And this was even more memorable to me: the same allegation applied to the saying that passes as the last words of Marcus Brutus after the battle of Philippi, when both Brutus and Cassius had been beaten by Augustus and Antony and they were in the throes of committing suicide because they thought the battle had been lost. The last words attributed to Brutus are: “O unhappy virtue — so you were just a word after all, and I was practicing you as something real.” Which to me is a very good emotional way of expressing the fact that these people who say they’re living for virtue — from an Epicurean perspective — in the end are living for something that is not real. They’ve made up a goal of life for themselves, clothed in the garments of royalty and called it virtue, called it nobility, called it meaningfulness — and in the end it’s just a shell, something that’s not real.
Joshua: Very powerful stuff. I’m familiar with that line from Horace where he says “you think virtue merely words, a sacred grove merely firewood” — and I’ve actually written about that on the forum, I think I wrote a poem about it. Do you remember the context in which Horace is saying that? Because “you” implies that’s not his view, but I think that is Epicurus’s view. Do you know why Horace was saying that?
Cassius: I think the context is that he’s basically giving advice to someone, and the approach is: whatever you believe to be true, follow that. So he’ll start out with: “if you think virtue is X, then you should do Y; if you think pleasure is the good, then you should do this instead.” That kind of approach.
Joshua: I have that passage from Horace. It’s Epistles Book One, the sixth epistle in that book, and he says: “If your lungs or kidneys were attacked by cruel disease, you’d seek relief from the disease. You wish to live well — who doesn’t? If it’s virtue alone that achieves it, then be resolute, forgo pleasure. But if you consider virtue only words, a forest only wood, then beware lest your rivals burst to dock” — he’s actually making the point that making money is what you should be spending your time on instead. We’ll go through that and put some links in the forum and discuss what Horace is saying, because I bet we’ll be able to find the context and pull some meaning out of it.
Cassius: And it’s easy to mix it all together and say it inarticulately, and I have a habit of doing that. Virtue is important to Epicurus and virtue is important to the happy life — because we have a correct understanding of the nature of virtue. The problem with virtue is those who do not have a correct understanding of it and think it exists on its own, and think it’s established by God or by Plato’s forms as being some kind of ultimate goal of life. That type, that definition of virtue is wrong and has to be gotten rid of — that’s what Epicurus is saying. Just like he’s talking about the gods: the correct understanding of the nature of the gods is important, but the definition assigned to the gods by most people is wrong. We need to redefine our use of the word and have only correct notions of the gods. Same thing with pleasure: pleasure is not just stimulation — it’s not just, in Don’s words, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It’s not just the stimulating pleasures; it’s also the pleasures that occur in our minds when we’re at rest, and those things that are naturally attached to life. So again we are working towards a correct understanding of the word pleasure, just like a correct understanding of the word gods — and here again with virtue we’re working towards a correct understanding of the word virtue that has its correct implications and therefore leads us to use it correctly and jettison these interpretations of virtue that lead us totally astray, which are advocated by the Stoics and by Plato. DeWitt includes another text in support of this from Epicurus that says, quote: “As for me, it is to continuous pleasures that I invite you, and not to virtues that are empty and vain and offer but harassing hopes of reward.” That pretty clearly expresses it. He’s calling us to continuous pleasure through a proper understanding of virtue — but not to a type of virtue that is empty and vain and offers nothing but essentially empty hopes of reward. The word “empty,” DeWitt says, implies repudiation of the theory of ideas which assume the existence of such things as absolute virtue. The word “vain” implies rejection of Plato’s opinion that pleasure was separable from virtue. And “the harassing hopes of reward” refers to the Platonic belief in immortality and the hope of happiness in the afterlife, which Epicurus rejected.
Joshua: That’s very good. It’s probably worth considering why the word “harassing” was used, and I think probably the answer is that the Platonic belief in immortality and the hope of happiness in the afterlife was just that — it was a hope, and something you fundamentally couldn’t rely on. You’re building your whole life around this idea and you have no way really of knowing whether it is true. And that’s got to be a huge problem. You have no way of knowing that it’s true, and in fact if you really pay attention to what nature’s doing in every other aspect of life you have a lot of reason for thinking it’s not true. Epicurus isn’t rejecting immortality because he’s got some grudge against it — he’s rejecting it because he doesn’t think it exists for humanity. He doesn’t reject immortality as to the gods. The Epicurean gods have no fear of dying and appear to be deathless. So Epicurus is not concerned that there’s anything wrong with deathlessness. He’s just saying it’s not possible for human beings who are combinations of atoms and void and don’t have the ability to replenish our existence like the gods do. He’s saying that we don’t have that ability and it’s not going to happen, so don’t spend your time now while you’re alive thinking that it’s going to happen in the future.
Cassius: That’s right. He didn’t deny the afterlife for that reason either. I’m looking here at Utopia by Thomas More, and this is going to get important because of where we’re going next week. This is the passage where he says: “The king of Utopia therefore left men holy to their liberty that they might be free to believe as they should see cause, only he made a solemn and severe law against such as should so far degenerate from the dignity of human nature as to think that our souls died with our bodies or that the world was governed by chance without a wise overruling providence. And they, the Utopians, look on those that think otherwise as scarce fit to be counted men, since they degrade so noble a being as the soul and reckon it no better than a beast. Thus they are far from looking on such men as fit for human society or to be citizens of a well-ordered commonwealth, since a man of such principles must needs, as often as he dares do it, despise the laws and customs of his country, for there is no doubt to be made that a man who is afraid of nothing but the law and apprehends nothing after death will not scruple to break through all the laws of his country either by fraud or by force when by this means he may satisfy his appetites.” That might seem off topic, but it seemed appropriate given our discussion of this issue of the afterlife.
Joshua: I have to violently disagree — it’s completely, totally on topic. It’s extremely important. It’s one of these things that helps you understand what’s at stake in these issues. These people are saying that if you don’t believe that there’s a life after death, you should be written out of polite society, you should be ejected, you’re not worth being a part of the community because we can’t trust you to have any kind of morality at all — you’re worse than a monster, you have no guidance system whatsoever. And it’s a total, very strong position that we need to understand as part of the scope of what’s going on with Epicurean philosophy. It’s not just a small observation to say that Epicurus says there’s no life after death and then move on and talk about something else. Epicurus says there’s no life after death, and that has profoundly important implications for not only the way we think but the way other people think about Epicureans and anybody else who doesn’t believe in life after death. It’s really interesting that that’s not talked about that much right now anymore. We have all sorts of incredibly intense debates about politics and all sorts of other issues, but not that many people out there advocating on a day-to-day basis that there’s no life after death — but it has tremendous implications and it’s something important as a part of this study.
Cassius: And then we’re about to end the chapter, and DeWitt talks about how the denial of immortality results in the restriction of pleasure to the brief span of mortal life — the reward of virtue or living cannot be postponed but has to be immediate and concurrent. And this is expressed in Vatican Saying 27: “In the case of other activities, completion is toilsome and the reward comes after it, but in the study of philosophy the pleasure keeps pace with the process of learning and enjoyment does not follow after learning but is simultaneous with it.” That leads to this bigger conclusion: that within Epicurean philosophy there’s no hint of despair or self-abandonment. Epicurus doesn’t advise us to take the cash and run. Epicurus doesn’t ultimately say “eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.” His attitude is restrained, logical, realistic, and even to some extent utilitarian in a version of that word. His studied aim is to determine where pleasure lies, not just to find it and seize it. And another comment that DeWitt adds is that the success Epicurus had in sponsoring pleasure like this had the effect of embittering the battle of the schools and of advancing it to a new phase. Theophrastus in fact devoted study to the classification of goods in terms of wealth, health, and the like. And then over the years the Peripatetics and the Stoics pursued this line of inquiry into great detail, which DeWitt characterizes as a “fetishistic comparison of goods” — and out of that arose the question concerning the identity of a superlative good, or the summum bonum, which it was falsely presumed must be the telos. That kept the Stoics at the opposite extreme, maintaining the austerity that was native to the creed of Stoicism. Inevitably they espoused virtue as the highest good, and so engrossing was this conflict that they forgot or de-emphasized the issue that Epicurus was really talking about, which is the connection between pleasure and life itself. And so DeWitt says this fallacy pervades the writing of Cicero, and that because of this controversy you end up with sort of an amalgamation of views in which Stoicism — sustained by the empire and blessed by the Romans and then merged into Christianity — became the winner in terms of numbers over the years. But Stoicism, with the harshness of it, was mitigated because the views of Epicurus were incorporated to some extent, which you see in people like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius who will adopt many of the issues of Epicurus in terms of how to pursue pleasure and the desirability of pleasure, and yet they just can’t bring themselves to take the final step and realize that it is indeed pleasure and not virtue which is the motivating factor of life. They refuse to get past the glamour of the name of virtue, and therefore their philosophy turns out to be mixed up, muddled, incoherent, and ultimately a step back from what Epicurus was attempting to do. Hold on — I had to finish that with the last line, because I thought it was actually quite interesting where DeWitt says: “A kindlier creed” — meaning Epicureanism — “survived under Stoic labels.” All right. We have reached the end of the chapter on the new hedonism. We’re going to turn next week to the question of piety — “True Piety” is the title of the chapter — and we’re going to go back into the issues of the nature of the Epicurean gods. We spent a lot of time on Chapter 12. It’s one of the most important issues in Epicurean philosophy. I think DeWitt has really finished Chapter 12 on a high note, discussing issues that are of great interest to most of us as we discuss these points. But we’re at the end of the episode for today, so let’s take any closing thoughts. Martin, any final thoughts for today?
Martin: No, I have nothing to contribute. Thanks.
Cassius: Okay. I will blame you, however, for part of my being wound up, because we had a very good discussion about some related issues before we started today that hopefully we can develop over time as well. Callistheni, any closing thoughts?
Callistheni: No, I did not.
Cassius: Okay, thank you, Callistheni. Joshua, your thoughts for today?
Joshua: Well, I was kind of expecting Callistheni to address the usual questions we try to talk about at the end of a chapter, but I’m kind of not even remembering what they were. I guess the question was: where are we and where are we going? And we’ve already talked a little bit about what the next chapter is. But I think it’s important to realize that DeWitt spent the first half of the book really laying the groundwork for the chapters we’re getting into now, and this is really the meat of the philosophy to me. So that’s my best summary of where I think we are and where we’re going. And like we say, the next episode is “True Piety,” so we’re going to get into one of the more interesting areas of Epicurean philosophy, which is the view of the gods.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua. I think the review we’re doing of the DeWitt book — what we’re seeing right now is an example of why this type of book is useful as a complement to or even as a starting point to the philosophy. But no matter where you are in your reading of Epicurus, we tend today to focus on the practical issues involved in being happy, and that is natural and normal and something that we need to do. But it’s fascinating for those who are interested to dig into the controversies that Epicurus was dealing with. DeWitt’s book is doing that for us — he’s introducing us to the major controversies that, like I said earlier in the podcast, Cicero had preserved for us. And it really is important to understand as we attempt to apply the philosophy. We can sometimes get the wrong impression of what Epicurus is really saying if we look strictly at Epicurus as if — in Emily Austin’s words — he’s a life coach. He is not starting in the position of being a life coach. He ends up in that position to some degree because his conclusions end up being very practical and give us guidelines we can apply to our own lives. But if we don’t understand where he started — with his physics, his epistemology, his initial conclusions — and what these other people were arguing, and therefore why he chose to talk about particular things, then we’re missing something. Someone listening to us or reading the forum talk about food or drink or just all sorts of activities that are fun for us might get the impression that the theoretical side is not important. But it is important. And I think the best understanding of both the application and the theory will come from examining both sides of the issue — both the principles and the practice of Epicurean philosophy. And so that’s what we’re trying to do in this series, and we’ll continue to do next week on “True Piety.” In the meantime, feel free to drop by the forum and let us know your thoughts, and we’ll be back in a while. Thank you very much, and we’ll see you there. Bye.