Episode 193 - Cicero's On Ends - Book One - Part 03
Date: 09/30/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3341-episode-193-cicero-s-on-ends-book-one-part-03/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 193 resumes Book One of Cicero’s On Ends, picking up with Torquatus’s response to Cicero’s criticisms. The episode opens by connecting the previous episode’s reading of Frances Wright’s Chapter 16 to the present discussion: the real elephant in the room behind all arguments about pleasure and virtue is the issue of religion — you can only pursue pleasure freely once you have decided there is no supernatural god who will punish you for doing so.
Torquatus’s section 13 is covered — the argument that those who find the good in virtue alone are dazzled by the glory of a name, and that virtue is valuable not as an end in itself but only insofar as it produces results, just as medicine and navigation are valuable only for what they produce. The four classical virtues (wisdom, temperance, courage, justice) are all treated by Torquatus as instrumental to pleasure. Epicureans, the argument goes, actually establish virtue on stronger ground than Stoics, because they can explain why virtue is worth pursuing: it produces a happier life.
The episode then covers section 17: the relationship between mental and bodily pleasures. Torquatus acknowledges that mental pleasures spring from bodily pleasures (we are bodily creatures), but argues that mental pleasures and pains can greatly exceed bodily ones in their influence on the happiness or wretchedness of life, especially when they involve fear of unlimited future evils or memory of past pleasures. John Stuart Mill’s defense of Epicurus from Utilitarianism (1861) is quoted at length, including his claim that all Epicurean theories assign higher value to pleasures of the intellect and moral sentiments than to mere sensation, and his famous line “better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” The group discusses whether intellectual pleasures being “higher” is authentic Epicureanism, with Joshua arguing that the intellectual work is necessary to remove fear and delusion but does not mean intellectual pleasures are always keener, and Callistheni describing “flow” states that unite mental and physical experience.
The two-feelings doctrine is revisited via Torquatus’s statement that when pleasure is removed, grief does not instantly ensue — the absence of a particular stimulus does not mean pain takes its place; the background state of not-pain is pleasure. The episode ends with Torquatus’s eloquent section 18 summary of the Epicurean wise man’s continuous happiness, and a discussion of Charles Darwin’s response to Mill (from The Descent of Man) — Darwin’s point that moral feelings and sociability are instinctive in lower animals refutes Mill’s claim that these capacities are culturally acquired, and supports Epicurus’s grounding of pleasure in the observation of nature.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 193 of 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 walk you through the Epicurean texts and we 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.
Last week in Episode 192 we read from Chapter 16 of Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens, and that chapter has an important relationship to what we are going to talk about today as we resume Book One of On Ends. Cicero has already stated briefly his objections to Epicurus and Torquatus is now going to focus on the issue of pleasure. Torquatus says that this is where the real dispute lies. While that may be true from a practical perspective, Frances Wright’s Chapter 16 reminded us that the real elephant in the room is the issue of religion — and that most of our problems really arise from false views about the gods and false views about whether humans have immortal souls. So it is important to remember that you get to the question of how to pursue pleasure only if you first decide that there is no supernatural god who will send you to hell if you do so.
Torquatus tells us that Epicurus says to look to nature for our standard of conduct, and he says that nature gives us only pleasure and pain as guides. As proof of this, Epicurus says that we do not need complicated logical argument. We can simply look around and see what nature has done with every other type of living being, and see that while these living beings are young and before they are corrupted by outside influences, they naturally pursue pleasure and avoid pain as best they can.
We are now at the point in Chapter One where Torquatus is going to address those who argue that the best life is one of virtue. In Section 13, Torquatus says that those who find the good in virtue and virtue alone are dazzled by the glory of a name, and that they fail to perceive what it is that nature really tells us to do. Torquatus says that these people would be emancipated from the grossest error if they would just listen to what Epicurus and nature are saying about pleasure and pain: “For unless your grand and beautiful virtues were productive of pleasure, who would suppose them to be either meritorious or desirable?” Torquatus first goes through the four classical virtues — wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice — and makes basically the same point as to all four. Just as we value the art of medicine because it brings healing, and just as we value the art of navigation because it shows us how to sail ships, we value virtue not as an end in itself but according to whether it is productive of useful results. Virtue needs to be productive of something else in order to be worth doing.
So today we are going to start with that question of how to look at virtue, and then we are going to turn back to the question of how to look at pleasure. And there we are going to find that Epicurus has not only advocated a new approach to virtue — in which whether an action is virtuous is tested by whether that action brings pleasure — but he has also advocated a new approach to pleasure itself, in which we include under the name of pleasure all mental and physical experiences which are not felt to be painful.
Joshua:
There was a scholar, Cassius, named Stephen Prothero — I assume he is still alive — who wrote a book called God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World. The central claim of his book is against the idea that there is a monomyth, or that all paths lead to the same peak of the mountain, and that the differences between different religions are not only quite broad but also quite deep, that these different faith systems are making competing claims, and that it actually really does depend on which one you choose if it happens to be correct. Now, the opinion of Epicurus is that all eight of these religions are wrong. Prothero breaks each down into sections — the way of salvation, the way of enlightenment, and so forth. And it occurs to me that the competing philosophies of the Greeks can be put into the same sort of rubric. One of the major ones, of course, is the way of virtue. And that is the central problem here — because for the Epicureans, virtue is subservient to pleasure, and not the other way around.
Cassius:
Right. Again, the context here is that Cicero has already stated his preliminary objections to Epicurus and one of those objections is that Epicurean philosophy is totally unworthy of a human being — the most degrading type of approach that you can possibly have to life. And the implication of that argument is that there is something bigger and grander and more virtuous that people are able to do, and as part of our nature we should aspire to it. As Torquatus says in the section, there is this idea that virtue is a glorious thing that we should all aspire to, and you can understand why that is a compelling argument. Everybody generally wants to be spending their time the best way they can, and they want to think that what they are doing is worthy of their time and worthy of all the trouble you have to go through in life. So Cicero has criticized Epicurus by saying that Epicurean philosophy does not value virtue. The real context here is that Torquatus is launching into this argument to say: that is false, Cicero — we do value virtue, but we do not value it in and of itself. We value it for the rewards it brings in terms of a more pleasant life.
And Torquatus goes on to say that as Epicureans we establish virtue on a much stronger ground than the Stoics or anybody else who is just saying you should pursue virtue for itself. The real foundation for wanting and needing and desiring to be virtuous is for the reward it brings in terms of a happier life. And once you identify that as the compelling reason to be virtuous, you can reconcile the terminology and say, yes, we believe in virtue just like the Stoics, the Platonists, or the Aristotelians do — it is just that we know that ultimately it is the reward that virtue brings that is important. Epicureans are not un-virtuous or immoral. They have properly identified that nature’s goal is to live happily and that virtue is the tool for achieving that. Virtue is a tool for the production of a happy life — not something Epicurus looks down upon. It is just that he does not worship hammers. He uses hammers to build buildings. He does not worship screwdrivers. He does not worship violins. He does not worship any particular tool for themselves, but only for the pleasure they bring.
Joshua:
Right. So it is crucially important whether you have the horse before the cart or the cart before the horse.
Cassius:
Yes. Your answer to that question has real meaning. And Torquatus says that the life of men is most troubled by ignorance about the goodness and badness of things, and on account of this blindness men are often robbed of the intensest pleasures and also are racked by the severest mental pains. So he says we must summon to our aid wisdom, that she may remove from us all alarms and passions and, stripping us of our heedless confidence in all false imaginations, may show herself to be our surest guide to pleasure. Pleasure is the dux vitae, the guide of life, as Lucretius said, but you need wisdom to know how to pursue it well. Pleasure is the goal — what we are striving towards — but these virtues have a role to play in getting us there.
Now, we will put a link in the show notes to our previous episodes where we went through these sections in great detail. I am going to suggest that we skip down to Section 17, which is after the discussion of each of these four virtues. The last one being discussed is justice, and of course every one of them — courage, temperance, and so forth — is extremely interesting, but in the interest of time and because we have already gone through these, let us move down to 17.
Here is the summation: “But if the praises passed even on the virtues themselves — over which the eloquence of all other philosophers runs riot — can find no vent unless it be referred to pleasure, and pleasure is the only thing which invites us to the pursuit of itself and attracts us by reason of its own nature, then there can be no doubt that of all things good, it — pleasure — is the supreme and ultimate good, and that a life of happiness means nothing else but a life attended by pleasure.”
So all of these arguments on these virtues condense down to this ultimate point: virtue is worth pursuing, not on its own, but because it brings pleasure and therefore a happy life.
Now, as we go into Section 17, here are some issues that we have not discussed as much recently and that will be very important as we get to Cicero’s objections in Book Two. The first thing Torquatus says in Section 17 is: “I will concisely explain the corollaries of these opinions I have been talking about. People make no mistake about pleasure and pain, the standards of good and evil themselves, but they err in these matters through ignorance of the means by which these results have been brought about.”
And here is one of the first issues that is very controversial: “Now we admit that mental pleasures and pains spring from bodily pleasures and pains.” So Torquatus is admitting that we are bodily creatures, made of material things — there is no spiritual or supernatural aspect to any of these things. But even though mental pleasures depend on the bodily, what he says is this: it does not follow that the pleasures and pains of the mind do not greatly surpass those of the body. “With the body, indeed, we can perceive only what is present to us at the moment, but with the mind we can perceive the past and the future also. For granting that we feel just as great a pain when our body is in pain, still mental pain can be very greatly intensified if we imagine some everlasting and unbounded evil to be menacing us, and we can apply the same argument to pleasure that it is increased by the absence of such fears. By this time, so much at least is plain. The intensest pleasure or the intensest annoyance of the mind exerts more influence on the happiness or wretchedness of life than either feeling when present for an equal space of time in the body.”
Let me read a quote from John Stuart Mill — actually two quotes. This is from his work from 1861 entitled Utilitarianism, and he says: “Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification. I do not indeed consider the Epicureans to have been by any means faultless in drawing out their scheme of consequences from the utilitarian principle — to do this in any sufficient manner, many Stoic as well as Christian elements required to be included. But there is no known Epicurean theory of life which does not assign to the pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments, a much higher value as pleasures than to those of mere sensation.”
And he follows it up with the famous quote: “It is better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool or the pig are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.”
So in both cases — both in Cicero and in John Stuart Mill — it is put in quite stark terms that it could not possibly be more obvious to these people that mental pleasures, as even John Stuart Mill says, are ranked much higher in the hierarchy of pleasures than mere bodily sensation. The difficulty is the genuine question of whether that is authentic Epicureanism.
Joshua:
Right, and just to be clear about what you just read — John Stuart Mill was defending Epicurus and saying that Epicurus valued mental pleasures as much or more than bodily. Did I understand you correctly?
Cassius:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. “Does not assign to the pleasures of the intellect a higher value than to those of mere sensation” — he is fully on board with that. And so Torquatus is including that argument here as an important part of his presentation in response to what Cicero has already said and also in anticipation of what Cicero is going to say further. He is stressing that it is indeed mental pleasure and pain that can be at least as important as the physical. And that is a huge accusation against the Epicureans — that they are nothing more than pigs pursuing immediate bodily sensations. Now at the same time, Torquatus has introduced this by saying that it is true that these are linked together. The mind is not something separate from the body. Mental pleasures and pains, he says, spring from bodily pleasures and pains. So they are linked together just like the body and the soul cannot be divorced from each other. But it is convenient for us, as we talk about different types of pleasures and pains — just like we talk about ice cream versus apple pie — to classify some experiences as mental and some as bodily.
Joshua:
Right. Now, there is a passage in Book Two of Lucretius where he says that it is pleasant to stand on the shore and to behold the shipwreck, not because any person’s misery is pleasurable to us, but because it is pleasant to see which dangers we ourselves are free from. And he says that it is pleasant to stand on a height and look over a battlefield as the armies clash against each other — again, not because we like to see those people suffering, but because it is pleasant to be free from that ourselves. But then he goes on to say that nothing is more blissful than to occupy the heights effectively fortified by the teachings of the wise. The mind divorced from anxiety and fear may enjoy a feeling of contentment. And so the nature of the body evidently is such that it needs few things — namely those which banish pain and in doing so succeed in bestowing pleasures in plenty. “This terrifying darkness that enshrouds the mind must be dispelled not by the sun’s rays and the dazzling darts of day, but by the study of the superficial aspect and underlying principle of nature.”
So if you were inclined to support this opinion, you would look right here in Book Two of Lucretius as evidence for your claim. But it seems to me that some of these commentators are getting things somewhat wrong. And I say that because there are two different things going on here. You can read this at the most superficial level and say that intellectual pleasures, pleasures of the mind, pleasures of the memory of doing the right thing and moral sentiment — as John Stuart Mill said — these are higher, more elevated, higher up in the hierarchy in every way than those mere bodily sensations. You can kind of see where they get this idea. But there is another way to read it: the intellectual aspect of the human being is where we have to do the hard work of removing fear and delusion and false beliefs — beliefs about what happens when you die, beliefs about the gods. That is an intellectual process that has to be undertaken in order for you to make real headway in Epicurean philosophy. But it does not necessarily mean that the keenest pleasures you can ever have are intellectual. It is just that the groundwork for the philosophy is intellectual. Would you say that is a fair interpretation, Cassius?
Cassius:
I certainly agree with the emphasis on the foundation being necessary to lay before you can make intelligent decisions about the rest of it. You know, reading Greek — that is the famous example usually associated with John Stuart Mill, that reading Greek is a far more intense pleasure than simply drinking wine or having sex or doing any of the other things we do with our bodies. Part of the problem for me is that so many of these intellectual pleasures are also rooted in bodily experience and bodily pleasures. We think of dying for a friend as being an intensely painful experience — and presumably it is, depending on how you die. But there is also an adrenaline rush associated with that which a lot of people would interpret as pleasurable. So there is not a fine line that you can cut through these things and divide them. I think that when Epicurus is on his deathbed writing his letter to Idomeneus and saying that it is the memory of past pleasures that sustains him in that moment — I do not think that is a purely intellectual exercise. The body is affected by the experience that we have in the mind. Just like when you walk out of a movie theater, you have this sense of catharsis, but it is not just in your mind or in your intellect. Your body feels that too.
Joshua, this reminds me of what you were talking about two weeks ago in terms of how it is really off-putting and a really bad idea to try to substitute your judgment for what somebody else is actually experiencing. And if John Stuart Mill wants to tell me that reading Greek is the greatest pleasure in life, if that is the way he sees it, I am not going to dispute his feelings. But I guarantee you it is not my greatest pleasure in life to read Greek, and it never will be. I think that is where you have to keep the whole atomic physics aspect of Epicurean philosophy in mind — looking to some absolute standard of single rankings of experiences in life is just nonsense given the unintended and lack of supernatural design. It just does not make sense that everybody should reach the same conclusion about how to spend their lives. And even if you want to generalize and just say mental versus physical, that changes from moment to moment based on the situation you are in.
Go ahead, Callistheni.
Callistheni:
As far as mental pleasures, there is the experience of flow when you are doing certain activities. Maybe when you are playing an instrument you can really get into the flow of it, or when you are dancing you can just really get into the flow. And those actually are a combination of physical and mental. Also just a sense of timelessness. And when people are together with good friends in some kind of activity they are sharing — that could be both mental and physical, once again bringing about a sense of timelessness and a sense of bliss, when you are both fully alive in your mind and your body, fully present. And in that sense, that would be living as blissfully as the gods.
Joshua:
Right. And you know, these are excellent pleasures, and they are worth pursuing. The difficulty for me is that it is the act of a snob to say what John Stuart Mill says here — that it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied, and the only reason the fool would have a different opinion is because the fool only knows his own side of the question. If only he had had the intelligence or the education or the wisdom of a Socrates, he would know what a miserable life he was leading. And I find that deeply off-putting.
So I think that the essential work of overcoming your fear of death, of overcoming your fear of punishment, or even of your hope of reward beyond the grave — that this has to be done, and it has to be done by the intelligence, because the body cannot really do this. But to say that because of that, the intellectual pleasure is purer or higher or more stimulating — I find a lot of problems with that approach.
Cassius:
You know, it might be interesting to note that the way Torquatus states this here, he has a little bit of a caveat at the end. The sentence we have been stressing is: “By this time so much at least is plain that the intensest pleasure or the intensest annoyance felt in the mind exerts more influence on the happiness or wretchedness of life than either feeling when present for an equal space of time in the body.” That last phrase — “present for an equal space of time in the body” — is a caveat that begins to address some of what you are raising, Joshua. He is not saying that mental pleasure or pain is necessarily always more important than physical, but limiting it to when both are present for an equal space of time.
Joshua:
Right. You know, one of the other issues here that does not often get brought up is: if the argument for pleasure as the good comes to us from observation of infants and of lower orders of animals, does not that kind of throw a wrench in the idea that intellectual pleasures are higher? Actually, here is something interesting. I read on one of these science or technology websites just this morning a report on the results of a study in which they had taken a newborn infant and put it on what they called a mobile — the baby is strapped to a flat surface and there are lines that go to cuffs around the baby’s feet. As the baby moves, if it moves the right foot the mobile goes backwards, if it moves the left foot the mobile goes forwards. The point was to find the moment at which the baby discovers that it has agency in moving the thing. At the beginning the movement is purely random — babies just kick, it is part of strengthening their limbs. But gradually this infant realized that by moving its foot it was causing the thing to move, and then it would go through periods where it would move and then stop, and the machine would stop. So it is clear that the baby was developing some kind of awareness that its body was causing these changes in its environment. I found that very interesting.
Cassius:
Well, I think it does reinforce how the physical and the mental work together. Certainly the Epicureans do not seem to be advocating that the mental is itself operating in isolation from the physical. And presumably sometimes, in the standard calculation, you accept pain in order to experience a greater pleasure or avoid worse pain in the future — you will have the same kind of interplay between physical and mental experiences. Sometimes you are going to trade mental pain for physical pleasure, and sometimes physical pain for mental pleasure. They are totally connected.
And maybe that is a bridge to the next point he is making in the remainder of Section 17, which I think is significantly different. It gets back to the bigger picture. We have established that we are not just talking about physical pleasure and pain but also about mental pleasure and pain. The next point Torquatus makes is: “We refuse to believe, however, that when pleasure is removed grief instantly ensues, except when perchance pain takes the place of pleasure. But we think, on the contrary, that we experience joy on the passing away of pains even though none of that kind of pleasure which stirs the senses has taken their place. And from this it may be understood how great a pleasure it is to be without pain.”
That is maybe awkwardly worded, but I think it is taking us back to the central point that there is only pleasure and only pain. If you are not experiencing pain, you are experiencing pleasure. What he is emphasizing is that unless you are experiencing some affirmative pain of the body or the mind — say, when you finish eating the apple pie or finish drinking the milkshake — just because you have finished that particular stimulating pleasure does not mean that pain takes its place. Only if you somehow specifically are exposed to a particular pain will pain take the place of that pleasure which is left. Because there are so many pleasures in life — the pleasure of existing without pain — every time you withdraw a particular stimulus of pleasure does not mean that pain is going to take its place. These other pleasures of life will take the place of that pleasure, unless there is some specific pain that is bothering you.
Joshua:
Right. Well, I am glad you made that commentary, Cassius, because I thought your analysis was excellent. The surface reading of this is that there are three states — almost is what it invites you to conclude. But I think you pointed out that no, what he is actually talking about is essentially the difference between the kinetic and the catastematic — words we do not use very often on the podcast — and that when you remove these active stimuli that provoke a response of pleasure, there still is pleasure: the pleasure of living without pain. It is very good to clarify what he says there, because it is very awkwardly worded.
Cassius:
Yeah, and I know how reluctant I am to talk about kinetic and catastematic, but I bet it would be interesting to look at the Latin here and see if there are any differences in the Latin word for pleasure, because this is the issue Cicero is going to jump all over — that the word pleasure is a sweeping word that includes all sorts of types of experiences: the roller coaster, the sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but also just the pleasure of being alive without pain, the pleasure of knowing you are not six feet underground, the pleasure of all the different memories and appreciations of the things you have in your life. Those are very different types of pleasures, but they still fall into this category of pleasure itself. Cicero and the anti-Epicureans are just trying to hammer the point that pleasure means nothing other than these affirmative stimulations, and they are trying to argue that when you withdraw them, you are in pain or in nothingness. The Epicurean position stands or falls on this issue: if you are not experiencing pain, life in the absence of pain is pleasurable — no matter what you are doing, as long as you are not in pain and you are alive, you are experiencing pleasure.
I changed on the forum this morning the opening quote on the first page to emphasize this point. It comes from Cicero’s response to Torquatus at the beginning of Book Two, but it is very relevant to what we are discussing. Cicero has alleged that Epicurus does not know what he is talking about when he talks about pleasure the way he does. And so in response to that, Torquatus says: “Come, that is a good joke — that the author of the doctrine that pleasure is the end of things desirable and the final and ultimate good does not actually know what manner of thing pleasure itself is.” And Cicero says in response: “Either Epicurus does not know what pleasure is, or the rest of mankind — all the world over — does not.” The point being that Cicero is trying to limit pleasure and saying that everybody thinks of pleasure as only the stimulating things, and that Epicurus’s definition of pleasure is wrong and should not be accepted.
Every time I read this material I have a greater appreciation of how clear it is that this really is the heart of the question Cicero is identifying: do you take Epicurus’s position that life in the absence of pain is pleasure, or do you take the position that pleasure is only sex, drugs, and rock and roll? If Cicero is right and pleasure means only that, then pleasure cannot be understood to be the ultimate good of life. But if you take a wider view — that pleasure is everything mental and physical that is desirable in life, that we find desirable naturally through our feeling of pleasure — then it makes perfect sense what Epicurus is saying. There is no mystery, no darkness, no esoteric thing that nobody can understand. But that is what Cicero is trying to say here: that Epicurus makes no sense, that it is totally beyond human comprehension to accept that Epicurus is correct.
Joshua:
Right. And Torquatus takes up the summation of everything we have been talking about with great eloquence here in the beginning of Section 18. He says:
“What a noble and open and plain and straight avenue to a happy life! It being certain that nothing can be better for man than to be relieved of all pain and annoyance and to have full enjoyment of the greatest pleasures both of mind and of body. Do you not see how nothing is neglected which assists our life most easily to attain that which is its aim, the supreme good? Epicurus — the man whom you charge with being an extravagant devotee of pleasures — cries aloud that no one can live agreeably unless he lives a wise, moral, and righteous life, and that no one can live a wise, moral, and righteous life without living agreeably. It is not possible for a community to be happy when there is rebellion, nor for a house when its masters are at strife — much less can a mind at discord and at strife with itself taste any portion of pleasure undefiled and unimpeded.”
Cassius:
There is an echo of Abraham Lincoln in there, is there not — “a house divided against itself cannot stand”? I wonder if he had this passage in mind. And continuing on, this part gets back to this other point we are discussing about mental versus physical:
“If a mind is always beset by desires and designs which are recalcitrant and irreconcilable, it can never see a moment’s rest or a moment’s peace. But if agreeableness of life is thwarted by the more serious bodily diseases, how much more must it inevitably be thwarted by the diseases of the mind? Now the diseases of the mind are the measureless and false passions for riches, fame, power, and even for the lustful pleasures. To these are added griefs, troubles, sorrows, which devour the mind and wear it away with anxiety, because men do not comprehend that no pain should be felt in the mind which is unconnected with an immediate or impending bodily pain. He says there is also death, which always hangs over them like the stone over Tantalus, and again superstition, which prevents those who are tinged by it from ever being able to rest.
“Neither can any fool be happy, nor any wise man fail to be happy. And we advocate these views far better and with much greater truth than do the Stoics, since they declare that nothing good exists except that vague phantom which they call morality — a title imposing rather than real — and that virtue, being founded on this morality, demands no pleasure and is satisfied with her own resources for the attainment of happiness.”
And here is the concluding section, which is powerfully written. This is also another very good summary of what the Epicureans are suggesting as the best way of life:
“This is the way in which Epicurus represents the wise man as continually happy. He keeps his passions within bounds. About death he is indifferent. He holds true views concerning the eternal gods, apart from all dread. He has no hesitation in crossing the boundary of life if that be the better course. Furnished with these advantages, he is continuously in a state of pleasure, and there is in truth no moment at which he does not experience more pleasures than pains. For he remembers the past with thankfulness, and the present is so much his own that he is aware of its importance and its agreeableness. Nor is he dependent on the future, but waits it while enjoying the present. He is also very far removed from those defects of character which I quoted a little time ago. And when he compares the fool’s life with his own, he feels great pleasure. And pains, if any befall him, have never power enough to prevent the wise man from finding more reasons for joy than for vexation. It was indeed excellently said by Epicurus that fortune only in a small degree crosses the wise man’s path, and that his greatest and most important undertakings are executed in accordance with his own design and his own principles. And no greater pleasure can be reaped from a life which is without end in time than is reaped from this which we know to have its allotted end.”
Boy, that is kind of a summary of a lot of the material under the Letter to Menoikeus and the Principal Doctrines — very well stated.
Okay, maybe we should begin to bring today’s episode to a conclusion. Let us go around and see if anybody has comments. Callistheni, any closing comments today?
Callistheni:
Yes — you were just reading a section there which had these words: “the agreeableness of the present” and then “more reasons for joy than vexation.” And I guess that would be the description of the wise man: “For he remembers the past with thankfulness and the present is so much his own that he is aware of its importance and its agreeableness” — and then continuing on, “any pains if any befall him have never power enough to prevent the wise man from finding more reason for joy than for vexation.”
Cassius:
Okay Joshua.
Joshua:
Yeah, so since we were talking about John Stuart Mill earlier and some of his ideas about not just pleasure but wisdom and morality and so forth, I wanted to quote Charles Darwin here from The Descent of Man. He says, “Mr. John Stuart Mill speaks in his celebrated work Utilitarianism of the social feelings as a powerful natural sentiment and as the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality.” And again Mill says, “Like the other acquired capacities above referred to, the moral faculty, if not a part of our nature, is a natural outgrowth from it, capable like them in a certain small degree of springing up spontaneously.” But then Darwin says in opposition to all this, “if, as is my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate but acquired, they are not for that reason less natural.” And then Darwin says, “It is with hesitation that I venture to differ at all from so profound a thinker, but it can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals. And why should they not be so in man?” And then he quotes another 19th-century thinker named Bain: “Mr. Bain and others believe that the moral sense is acquired by each individual during his lifetime on the general theory of evolution. This is at least extremely improbable. The ignoring of all transmitted mental qualities will, it seems to me, be hereafter judged as a most serious blemish in the works of Mr. Mill.”
I bring that up because I kind of think that John Stuart Mill is a bit of a snob when it comes to some of these issues. He says that intellectual pleasures are superior to physical pleasures, that no theory of Epicureanism which is consistent can possibly hold otherwise. And then he goes on to say that social feelings, sociability, and morality do not exist in nature or in lower orders — they exist in man and are developed in the individual during the course of his lifetime. In other words, culture, society, education — this is what produces moral sentiment.
I totally am on board with what Charles Darwin has to say, and I think his side has won out — that lower orders of animals are just as capable of behaving selflessly as we are, and that lower orders of animals are just as capable of sociability as we are. And that is important to me because Epicurus founds his understanding of pleasure not just on infants who have no culture, no education, who have not been civilized, but also on these lower orders of animals. So I think John Stuart Mill gets quite a lot wrong here, and it is actually very nice to see that Charles Darwin takes him to task on that.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, I agree with what you have said, and I think that does put a point on the issues we have been discussing today — that we need to be looking at all these questions in the widest possible context, looking mainly to nature as the source of our ultimate answers, but realizing that there are other suggestions out there that other people are advocating, whether based on piety to the gods or virtue or some kind of ideal behavior. There are competing theories of how you should look at and organize your life, and ultimately what Epicurus is doing is saying: look at nature, look at the rest of the things around you, and do not just let your own mind carry you away into something that has no natural evidence to support it.
Going back to Frances Wright’s commentary — she interestingly focuses on the imagination as a source of this issue. The imagination can be extremely pleasurable, productive to life, and just an absolutely important part of human experience, but it needs to be tempered by judgment and prudence about what you allow it to do and how you allow it to influence your life. There are all sorts of things that you can imagine — such as John Stuart Mill taking the greatest pleasure in Greek and all sorts of mental constructs in life — but you have to understand that you are a part of a natural universe that your mind does not control. You cannot simply climb to the top of a mountain and sit there and expect not to freeze to death or die of starvation. You cannot just take a mental position through the strength of your willpower, as if you are some Stoic who can be aloof from everything going on around you, because the world is not going to let you do that.
So much of all this seems to come back to this definition of pleasure. This is where Cicero has chosen to focus his argument. He thinks there is this opening where he can convince people that looking at pleasure widely, as Epicurus is doing, is ridiculous and unworthy of men, and that this will allow him to defeat Epicurus’s argument. And so that is where we cannot allow pleasure to be restricted to sex, drugs, and rock and roll. We have to take a wider view of it so that we can then understand how to defeat these other arguments based on religion or idealism that have no foundation in nature.
Okay, thanks for your time. We will be back soon. Bye.