Episode 194 - Cicero's On Ends - Book One - Part 04
Date: 10/02/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3361-episode-194-the-epicurean-arguments-in-cicero-s-on-ends-book-one-part-04/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”The group opens Book One Part Four with Cassius extending the elephant analogy introduced in earlier episodes — different parts of the elephant representing different aspects of pleasure — to emphasize that Epicurus offers a sweeping, comprehensive framework for pleasure rather than a narrow fixation on physical stimulation. Cassius discusses the accessibility of mental pleasures (drawing on Lucretius Book Two’s heights-of-philosophy passage), Usener 423’s account of pleasure arising from escape from evil, and the airplane near-miss as an example of the most intense pleasure possible. The group then reads and discusses Section 19 — Torquatus’s portrait of the wise man who lives in continuous pleasure — alongside Epicurus’s Letter to Idomeneus (written on his deathbed) and Norman DeWitt’s point that the bare escape from dire calamity is among the most intense pleasures available.
Joshua introduces the observation that the phrase “meaning of life” did not enter English literature until 1834, coined by Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Resartus as a direct response to utilitarianism and Epicureanism. Carlyle’s prescription — “love not pleasure, love God” — echoes Cicero’s arguments in Book Two by two millennia. Joshua also notes that Marsilio Ficino, after Poggio Bracciolini’s rediscovery of Lucretius, began writing a favorable commentary on the poem, then burned it and spent the rest of his life incorporating Neoplatonism into Christianity. Cassius counters with the “Billy Don’t Be a Hero” (Paper Lace) analogy as the low-culture equivalent of the same warning against living for virtue rather than pleasure.
The group reads Section 21 — Torquatus’s closing statement in Book One — and briefly previews Book Two (Cicero’s sustained attack on Epicurean philosophy). An extended discussion follows on what Epicurus actually means by “pleasure”: is the claim that life without pain is pleasurable a word game? Cassius argues, drawing on DeWitt’s analysis, that extending the name of pleasure to the normal state of being was Epicurus’s major innovation in the new hedonism, and that accepting this framework — the glass half full perspective — equips the Epicurean to answer Cicero and all similar objections. Callistheni closes with a reflection on meaning as human connection, illustrated by the difference between attending a rock concert alone versus with a friend when the car breaks down on the way home. Joshua closes with DeWitt’s passage from “The New Hedonism” on nature as non-purposive but producing purposive man, with pleasure as that telos. Cassius ends with DeWitt page 240 on why extending the name of pleasure to the normal state of being, though attacked as circular by Cicero, is justified by reason and makes human beings happier.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 194 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.
This week, we’re continuing our discussion of Cicero’s On Ends. We’re closing in on the end of Book One, still in the section where Torquatus is finishing his major presentation. Cicero has given his initial objections. Torquatus is now responding. And then next week and for several weeks after that — maybe even many weeks after that — we’re going to be going through Book Two, which is Cicero’s broadside attack on everything that Epicurus stands for and everything that Torquatus says here. So what we’re doing in preparation for that is we’re setting the stage and getting our minds prepared to deal with Cicero’s objections, which are going to predominantly be this issue of how disreputable pleasure is as a goal, and how absolutely depraved it is to say that pleasure is the best thing you can search for in life.
Now, I used an analogy about how Frances Wright’s Chapter 16 gave us the elephant in the room — in which it’s essential to take a position on whether there’s a supernatural God, whether there are absolute values in morality, and how the universe operates — and that really is an elephant in the room before you even start talking about pleasure. And it occurred to me to extend that analogy briefly. We’ve been talking a lot on the forum lately about the nature of pleasure, and we’ve been talking about issues that arise in the discussion such as kinetic and catastematic, and all different ways you can compare mental pleasure and physical pleasure and talk about whether one is always better than the other — how do you evaluate those? And it occurred to me that the elephant analogy is often used as well in the sense of the blind men who are feeling different parts of the elephant and trying to describe what the elephant is like. One feels the trunk, one feels the legs, one feels the tail, and they all come up with very different impressions from the limited aspects they’re touching — all of which are true to the extent that they have information about the parts they’re touching. But the big picture of what the elephant in full looks like is in the end the more important aspect of it, and you have to combine these different observations and perhaps step back, if you do have sight, and see the full picture of what an elephant is.
So it occurs to me that as we’re talking about this and as Torquatus is going through this here, the emphasis to some extent is on how important and big a picture of pleasure really is. If you limit it to physical pleasure, if you limit it to stimulation, if you limit it to mental pleasure, if you limit it to any type of mental pleasure, you’re not going to get a full big-picture understanding of where pleasure fits in the Epicurean analysis. Because from the beginning, when Epicurus was concerned about explaining chaos and understanding the nature of the universe, what you really have to do in order to understand how to live is to decide what standard you’re going to follow. And those who suggest that virtue is the right standard — as we were talking about last week — or those who suggest that God is going to tell you how to live: those are methods of organizing your thoughts that can be coherent and provide many people a lot of analysis to live their lives by. But again, we had a post this week on the forum — someone from Greece, actually — making the point that you need a worldview, a method of organizing your thoughts that includes all sorts of details. He mentioned the pictures people used to use of Epicurus, and not exactly rituals but the continuing pattern of activities of honoring the Twentieth and so forth. You have to have a framework, because you can’t constantly re-evaluate everything going on in your life. Just as Epicurus said, you don’t always need the details of the philosophy, but you do pretty much always need the big picture, the outline.
So to some extent I would suggest that what Torquatus is doing here, in setting up Epicurean philosophy in its broadest terms, is stressing that pleasure serves a very fundamental and very wide purpose within Epicurean philosophy.
In relation to that, before we actually start reading Section 19 — we’re going to see Torquatus start talking about the way the wise man is continually happy. He’s going to place stress on the ability to access mental pleasures and the important role they play. That’s a point that our friend Don from the Forum has been making: that mental pleasures are often the most accessible kind, that often in life you’re in a lot of physical pain and physical disadvantage, but you can usually — if not always — summon up good memories from the past and good thoughts about potentials for the future. Being focused on the present, you can mentally — as Epicurus was doing as he was about to die — focus on the pleasures that came from his teachings, his friends, his memories of what he had done, and offset those against the pain of the kidney problems he was having. That’s something accessible to most everyone in most situations, and it’s an important part of the picture.
I wanted to relate that to the passage we frequently discuss at the beginning of Book Two of Lucretius: “How sweet it is when whirlwinds whirl great ocean / To watch from land the danger of another, / Not that to see some other person suffer / Brings great enjoyment, but the sweetness lies / In watching evils you are free from.” He continues that nothing is more sweet than full possession of those calm heights, well built, well fortified by wise men’s teachings, and to think about men who are wandering lost and suffering all the things that you yourself could be suffering except for your understanding of the way things are. I would think that’s a clear example — not intended to be irreverent or dispassionate toward those who are suffering, but intended to emphasize that you always have accessible the ability to understand that your life is desirable, that you are living, and that unless you’re in some specific pain you have access to and can experience all sorts of other pleasures that make life worth living.
I’d also bring in Usener 423 — from Plutarch — where he says Epicurus makes a similar statement to the effect that the good is a thing that arises out of your very escape from evil, and from your memory and reflection and gratitude that this has happened to you. His words are these: “That which produces a jubilation unsurpassed is the nature of good, if you apply your mind rightly and then stand firm and do not stroll about parading meaninglessly about the good.” And I had one illustration that came to mind about that. You often read about people who are traveling by air and at the last minute they make a change and decide not to get on a particular airplane, and then an hour later they hear that the airplane has crashed and everybody on board is dead. A person who receives that news is not eating anything stimulating, not dancing, not having sex, not listening to music — none of the physical pleasures people accuse Epicurus of fixating on — but I think most people would agree that when you hear news like that you experience such a rush of relief and gladness that you were not on that airplane that you are experiencing an extreme rush of emotion that is good and happy for you. That would be an example of Epicurus using that as the highest possible pleasure. Now, you would not spend your time in airports going on airplanes and changing your mind at the last minute just so you can experience that type of pleasure. It’s one type of pleasure, just like the trunk of the elephant is one part of the elephant. But it serves to prove the point.
So with that, let’s start Section 19, because what Torquatus says there is a good summary of Epicurean philosophy:
“For this is the way in which Epicurus represents the wise man: he is 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 continually 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 in dependence on the future, but awaits it while enjoying the present. And he is also very far removed from those defects of character which I quoted a little while 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.”
Joshua: Cassius, I think that was an excellent summary and explanation of where we are in this text and where we’re going to be going — especially as we get into some of Cicero’s criticisms of Epicureanism in Book Two. The nature of pleasure is absolutely critical to understanding everything about the ethical component of this philosophy, and this is a really important text for getting there.
Now, one of the things you said just now is that mental pleasures have advantages that physical pleasures do not — Don’s example that you can more readily summon mental pleasures than physical ones, that mental pleasures don’t rely on having access to external stimulations. Right now, at the moment when you’re standing in line at the DMV, you can summon mental pleasures by thinking of happy memories, and so the misery of standing in that line is not a fate to which you are doomed at that moment, even though you don’t have cake and wine to alleviate yourself.
I wanted to quote something you referenced, if I can find it — the Letter to Idomeneus, which is part of Epicurus’s last will and testament. He says: “On this blissful day, which is also the last of my life, I write this to you. My continual sufferings from strangury and dysentery are so great that nothing could increase them; but I set above them all the gladness of mind at the memory of our past conversations.” And he goes on to say: “But I would have you, as becomes your lifelong attitude to me and to philosophy, watch over the children of Metrodorus.” So even in this intense pain of kidney stones — or whatever it is — he still is able to summon pleasures that make that day fully worth living, and indeed in that last sentence is able to take other people into consideration while doing so.
And as to something else you said — the canceled airline ticket, which leads to the great pleasure of having missed the tragedy of the plane crash — that was something that Norman DeWitt latched on to as part of his analysis of what he called the summum bonum fallacy, and we talked about that at length in the last series. Basically, he says the same thing you said — that the bare escape of some dire calamity is almost the most intense kind of pleasure you can experience. And while there are adrenaline junkies who go out and pursue that by jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, for most of us it’s not something we’re going to experience very often. But it does serve to prove a point: that the need for some physical stimulation is not sufficient to explain every kind of pleasure that there is out there.
You used the metaphor of the elephant to explain that. So that’s where we are, and Cicero will go on to say later that Epicurus doesn’t understand pleasure — either he doesn’t understand pleasure, or everyone else, the whole world over, does not understand pleasure. So we’ll be talking about pleasure and its manifold properties and all of the forms in which it takes.
You know, I found something interesting. One of the things we frequently hear about in modern life that actually is not as old a question as people might think is this phrase “meaning of life.” We talk about the summum bonum, the telos, the end or the goal or the guide or the good. It struck me as fascinating that the phrase “meaning of life” first entered the record of English literature in something like 1834, in a book by Thomas Carlyle — who was a contemporary and critic of John Stuart Mill — which is given a Latin name: Sartor Resartus, meaning “the tailor retailored.” And it’s fascinating because what he’s actually responding to in this text — it’s a somewhat difficult text because it has a multi-layered narrative structure, almost like a satire — is utilitarianism, and beyond utilitarianism the pleasure principle itself, and ultimately Epicureanism. So he says: “Our life is compass’d round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of life itself no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force.” And then several paragraphs down: “Love not Pleasure; love God! This is the Everlasting Yea” — that’s his equivalent of a will to power, almost an analog to Nietzsche. He then goes on to quote Zeno: “And again, small is it that thou canst trample the Earth with its injuries under thy feet, as old Greek Zeno trained thee; thou canst love the Earth while it injures thee, and even because it injures thee; for this a greater than Zeno was needed” — and he too, meaning Jesus of Nazareth, was sent.
So the claim being made by Thomas Carlyle is that this specter of resurgent Epicureanism — he said that the wilderness that nineteenth-century men find themselves in is the wilderness of atheism — that that’s the problem. We need to find our way back to God. And to that end he’s taking Epicureanism to task by the expedient of an argument that has become very common: that if you pursue mere base pleasure, Carlyle said utilitarianism and Epicureanism were philosophies fit for swine — that if you pursue pleasure as the gold, then you are living a meaningless life. Where do you get the meaning in your life if you don’t have God? That has become a very common question in Christian apologetics. But it strikes me that that question does not predate 1834, really, in the terms that he puts it in here.
Cassius: I agree with you, Joshua, and I think that’s exactly what we’re talking about. This “meaningfulness” issue is another way of making the same argument that Cicero is going to be arguing in Book Two — that he’s already started arguing — and that Thomas Carlyle is arguing here: that there’s this meaningfulness about your activities in your life that you have to strive for, that it’s not pleasure and it’s not anything you’re going to get enjoyment out of in life. There’s something above and beyond that which just puts enjoyment to shame.
Cicero in Book Two is going to use the example of a painting — one of these philosophers had come up with an image of pleasure in the form of some beautiful woman surrounded by the virtues at her feet — and these virtues, which all of us think of as so glorious, imagine the idea that those virtues would be the slaves of pleasure, that pleasure is really calling the tune. There’s just nothing so revolting, nothing that so traumatizes the noble soul, as to imagine something like that. I think that’s exactly what Thomas Carlyle and all these others are saying, whether they put it in religious terms or — and I think Nietzsche kind of went in this direction as well — these humanist terms. Humanism, if you don’t watch what you’re talking about, becomes this same kind of virtue ethics pseudo-religion. You may not attribute it to God, but if you attribute these other attributes — courage, wisdom, temperance, justice — as things that become ends in themselves, you end up with this same type of hypocritical exaggeration of the role. As DeWitt would say, you place the cart before the horse, you get things out of order, and thereby nothing works. The horse has to come before the cart, and the person driving the cart has to tell the horse what direction to go, for everything to work as it should. And placing virtue or meaningfulness or compassion — or any of these ideas that do often bring pleasure to us and are worth pursuing because of the pleasure they bring — if you act as if they are ends in themselves, then you’ve totally got everything reversed and you end up like Diogenes of Oinoanda, having to shout to all Greeks and non-Greeks that pleasure is the end of life and not virtue, and that those who place virtue ahead of it are basically standing on their head and have things totally turned around.
So I do think that’s a good example of what we’re talking about here, and it’s a good reminder because Cicero is going to beat us almost to death in Book Two about this.
Joshua: Yeah, another thing about Thomas Carlyle just while we’re on the subject: he did have a flirtation with Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism in his youth, and then seeing where it was leading him he abandoned that and devoted quite a lot of the rest of his life to opposing it.
There was also a figure of the Italian Renaissance called Marsilio Ficino. After the rediscovery of Lucretius by Poggio Bracciolini, Marsilio Ficino started to write a commentary — a favorable commentary — on the poem, and then came to his senses and burned it, and he devoted the rest of his life to incorporating Neoplatonism into Christianity. People are terrified of where this stuff will lead them. And one thing that’s interesting about that is they come up with terms like “meaning of life” or “virtue” and then define them in such a way as to be favorable to their side of the argument.
Cassius: Joshua, those are excellent highbrow analogies you brought. Let me make a low-culture analogy, because for some reason — given my age — what came to my mind was a song from the 70s. It’s so trite and sugary sweet, but I’m going to post a link to the forum because I found a version of the video. The song was extremely popular in England and the United States, and the line that stuck with me then and sticks with me now was: “Billy, don’t be a hero — don’t be a fool with your life.” And the reason I quote that is: I think that’s exactly the issue here. If you are following virtue, or some type of supernatural religion that does not exist, you are being a fool with your life. There are times when you’re going to be pursuing pleasure, times when you’re going to be doing things we call courageous, times when you’re going to lay down your life for a friend — but you’ve got to do it for good reason and under the right circumstances, and not just because you’re under this peer pressure or cultural manipulation from people who say that virtue is noble, meaningfulness is noble, and you must do what is noble and worthy and good. Those things have no meaning in Epicurean philosophy unless they bring pleasure. So we’re hitting this from many different directions — and I apologize for polluting Thomas Carlyle with, I believe, a band called Paper Lace. At any rate: don’t be a fool with your life. Make sure you’re living based on sound reasoning and sound understanding of nature, and not on things that do not exist.
Okay. Now I’ll follow up on your lead that we need to move on. Torquatus then turns to a very good section on what we call epistemology or canonics — he talks about the problems Epicurus has had with the logic of the opposing schools. There is one thing I want to mention here: we’ve been talking lately as well about the role of studying the texts in making sure we understand Epicurean philosophy. One part of it is studying the texts every day, somewhat like what the rabbis of the world do. I think it would be interesting to sit back and think about how Epicurus himself is studying nature. Epicurus doesn’t spend a lot of time telling us to go study what Plato said about this or Aristotle said about that. What he’s doing is stressing that you yourself can observe nature and come to these conclusions yourself. So in this section talking about epistemology and how to gain confidence in your conclusions, that’s an interesting thing to think about — because what we’re really studying and looking for is not just to be able to repeat what somebody else has said, or to say that Epicurus said it so it must be right; we’re trying to understand the reasoning that Epicurus used himself to come to those conclusions, so that we can be confident in those same conclusions.
That carries us through the end of Section 19. Section 20 that follows is another long discussion of friendship — one of the main tools of life. We’ve talked about friendship and its benefits and its necessities so often that I’m probably going to suggest we move on down to Section 21, where we’re going to begin to close the chapter. Does anybody want to say anything about this? Maybe we can just quote the last line of Section 20 where he says, from all these different views, we may conclude that not only are the principles of friendship left unconstrained if the supreme good be made to reside in pleasure, but that without this view it is entirely impossible to discover a basis for friendship — that friendship, like just about everything else in life, has its basis in pleasure. This is the point of this whole section: Epicurus and Torquatus are confident of their conclusions, confident that they are right about the nature of friendship, and that friendship like everything else brings pleasure and fits into that pleasure framework of analysis.
Since this is the last thing Torquatus says before turning the floor back over to Cicero, Joshua, could you read what he says in Section 21, and we’ll end our discussion of Book One on that?
Joshua: Certainly:
“Wherefore, if the doctrines I have stated are more dazzling and luminous than the sun itself; if they are draughts drawn from nature’s spring; if our whole argument establishes its credit entirely by an appeal to our senses, that is to say to witnesses who are untainted and unblemished; if speechless babes and even mute beasts almost cry out that with nature for our governor and guide there is no good fortune but pleasure and no adverse fortune but pain; and their verdict upon these matters is neither perverted nor tainted: are we not bound to entertain the greatest gratitude for the man who, lending his ear to this voice of nature, as I may call it, grasped it in so strong and serious a spirit that he guided all thoroughly sober-minded men into the track of a peaceful, quiet, restful, happy life? And though you think him ill-educated, the reason is that he held no education of any worth but such as promoted the ordered life of happiness. Was he the man to spend his time in conning poets, as I and Triarius do on your advice, when they afford no substantial benefit and all the enjoyment they give is childish in kind? Or was he the man to waste himself like Plato upon music, geometry, mathematics, and astronomy — which not only start from false assumptions and so cannot be true, but if they were true would not aid us one whit towards living a more agreeable, that is a better, life? Was he, I ask, the man to pursue those arts and thrust behind him the art of living — an art of such moment, so laborious too, and correspondingly rich in fruit? Epicurus, then, is not uneducated; but those persons are uninstructed who think that subjects which it is disgraceful for a boy not to have learned are to be learned through life into old age.”
And then Torquatus goes on to say: “I have expounded my own tenets with just this purpose, that I might make acquaintance with your opinion, as this is an opportunity for doing so to my satisfaction which has never been offered me till now.”
And boy — are we going to become acquainted with Cicero.
Cassius: That is the end of Book One. At the beginning of Book Two — which will start next week — Cicero goes into this long discussion about whether it’s better to have a back-and-forth question-and-answer session or to speak in narrative form as Torquatus has just done. It takes him almost three pages of Book Two before he gets back into the real topic of what pleasure is.
He makes another claim here: Cicero in Book Two says that Socrates is entitled to be called the father of philosophy, which is interesting because philosophy in Greece predates Socrates by several hundred years. Some of the earliest so-called pre-Socratic philosophers — Thales, Anaxagoras, Anaximander, Pythagoras — were interested in questions much more in line with those of Democritus or Epicurus. They wanted to understand nature, how nature operates on its own terms, what the primordial foundational element of everything we see and of course everything that we are truly is. This represents one of the first attempts to explain nature in natural terms — to explain nature as the result of a long chain of antecedent causes rather than simply the result of creation by a god. And even though some of their ideas kind of make us smile today, they represent a really revolutionary approach to understanding the world we live in. For Cicero to just glide past all of those earlier thinkers and nominate Socrates as the father of philosophy is to rule that whole line of inquiry out of court — which of course is very beneficial to Cicero’s argument, because Epicurus is taking up that thread as a very foundational aspect of his own philosophy.
Joshua: Yeah, Cicero is being very selective in the way he makes these arguments. What Cicero does to launch his argument is this: he says the first thing important to do is to identify the point at issue. He says Epicurus gave his sanction — but the next step he did not see — for he pronounces against any definition of a subject being given, though without such it’s impossible to secure an understanding concerning the nature of the point. Cicero says: our inquiry touches the ultimate good. Can we learn what its nature is without agreeing among ourselves, when we use the phrase “ultimate good,” what we mean by “ultimate” and what we mean by “good” itself? So he’s making the point that if you’re going to talk about an ultimate good, define what “ultimate” means and define what “good” means.
Cassius: Okay, what we’re going to find as Cicero goes forward is that he’s going to focus his attack on saying that Epicurus did not define what he meant by pleasure. Now, having finished listening to and going through what Torquatus says, and having done all of the reading that everybody here on the podcast has done in the past, let’s talk about how Epicurus would respond to that criticism. What do we think Epicurus held pleasure — the word pleasure — to really mean? What summary of that question are we going to be comfortable keeping in our minds to use to respond as Cicero gives his arguments?
Cicero says: pleasure in the minds of everyone else means stimulation from the outside to some kind of agreeableness. Is that stimulation of the senses Epicurus’s definition of pleasure? And if it’s not, what is Epicurus telling us that pleasure is?
Joshua: I would try to put it in the simplest possible terms, which would be to say that pleasure is not something that happens to us, it’s something that happens within us. It’s this feeling of feeling good, of feeling satisfied. I probably wouldn’t go much further than that. To feel satisfied or to feel good in the mind or in the body is to feel pleasure. And it’s possible that this is something subjective, because the way that I feel pleasure is probably different from the way other people feel pleasure. We know from modern psychology that different people experience different levels of affect. Are there any limitations on the word “pleasure” in terms of your feelings and experiences in life? Which ones of those feelings and experiences are pleasurable? Well, the ones that make you feel good, right?
How about this: is it playing a word game to answer that question by saying those experiences that are not painful? Well, you asked what Epicurus’s response would be, and his response would be that this whole tangent is a word game. Or is this answer — that pleasure is the absence of pain, that pleasure is every experience of life which is not painful — is that a word game or is it an attitude?
Well, what I’m about to say is a word game — because then how do you define pain? Do you define pain as the absence of pleasure? In which case, by the way, your definitions have become circular, don’t they? You define one by the other.
Cassius: And thinking about this aspect of it earlier this morning, I was thinking to myself about the old example of looking at a glass filled with water up to the 50% level. Is that glass half full or is that glass half empty? There is a truth that is understandable from either perspective. But this is something that I quoted this past week — Norman DeWitt phrased it as something that is not wrong to call: that the glass is half full. And would it not be better in life if you take the position that every experience in your life, mental or bodily, which is not painful to you, is pleasurable? You can justify that by saying: you’re lucky to be alive. You are dead for an eternity in the past. You’ll be dead for an eternity after you’re gone. Every moment should be treasure. Just as Torquatus was saying earlier today — the wise man is going to summon from his experience the memories of the past, consider the possibility of pleasures in the future, savor the present moment, and have all three time periods from which to draw these pleasures arising from these things. If you take this attitude that Epicurus is apparently suggesting, the wise man can live in continuous pleasure, and there is not a moment in his life when the pleasures he is able to summon do not outweigh the pains confronting him at any particular moment.
Even though you could criticize this perspective as a word game, I’m thinking that this is a lot of what Epicurus is talking about — that you benefit from and provide yourself this framework of understanding of pleasure by thinking that being alive, no matter what you’re doing, is pleasurable unless you’re experiencing some particular pain at a particular moment. That’s what Torquatus was saying earlier too: we don’t agree that just because you remove a particular pleasure, pain is necessarily going to take its place. The default state — or, as DeWitt put it, the attachment of the word “pleasure” to the normal state of being — was the major innovation that Epicurus was suggesting about hedonism here, that our normal way of life, our normal experience — the hand of Chrysippus, the host who’s serving wine to his guest — and Torquatus’s response when Cicero says, “Don’t you agree, Torquatus, that there are a lot of people who are neither experiencing pleasure nor pain?” is: “No, I don’t agree with that at all, because if they’re not experiencing pain, they’re experiencing pleasure, and if they’re not experiencing any pain, they’re experiencing the greatest pleasure that they can possibly experience.”
This is to me an attitude or perspective on life which you can quibble with and say is just a word game. But the people who are quibbling with that are the ones insisting that pleasure means only physical stimulation or mental stimulation from the outside. They are refusing to accept Epicurus’s definition that life itself, unless you’re in pain, is pleasurable. And it’s legitimate to make that argument against Epicurus if you like. But again: I think that the foundation of that argument would be that you’re taking the position that life itself is not pleasurable. And if you think the problem through, you realize that the question is not your place for the moment, but really where you fit within eternity. And if you think about what a privilege it is to be alive and not in pain, you can summon through your thought processes this perspective that allows you to achieve a life of continuous pleasure, in which your pleasures of mind and body and all the things you’re experiencing are seen and understood and appreciated to outweigh whatever pains might be in your way — with the exception that at the end of your life, sometimes pains are going to get so intense and so without remedy that you want to end your life, and at that point you have the option of escaping pain that way. But that’s not the norm; that’s an extreme situation.
And in the end, while it may sound like a game of words, it’s probably — from my point of view at this point — the best explanation of where Epicurus is going here. But that would be one way of looking at the question.
Regardless of whether you accept that or not, you’re going to be hit in Book Two with extremely powerful arguments that it is only the life of meaningfulness and nobility and virtue that’s worth living. And you’re going to have to have a powerful argument in response to that, because all of us are subject to the peer pressure of knowing that if we deviate from it, we risk being ostracized, losing our jobs, or our lives even, under the right circumstances. So you have to have a powerful argument if you’re going to withstand what Cicero is about to say.
I had something regarding the meaning of life — that that’s going to take you in the direction of seeking virtue. Virtue is noble, meaning is noble, and that’s just going to end up being the opposite of the pursuit of pleasure.
Joshua: It just came to me that there is a kind of meaning in life in Epicureanism. If you look to the very end of the Letter to Menoikeus where he says to study and practice these things with others of like mind — and also that the pleasure of study of philosophy comes at the same time, not afterward, as other pleasures. There’s meaning right there and pleasure all at the same time. What is meaning separated from pleasure? Well, that simply boils down to purpose. Does your life matter to anybody else but your own self? We evolved as part of family systems and community systems, in tribes and in families, and so “meaning” really is something that, if you look at it closer, is just a basic need to matter to other human beings, because we evolved in this interdependent way. People didn’t live in isolation. And so you only have this search for meaning when civilization is getting so complicated, so starting to sever us from our original way of living, that civilization creates this missing piece, and then we label it as “we’re searching for meaning.” But I think we know from Epicureanism that friendship is important, being part of the Epicurean community is important. There is some aspect of meaning — but then you have to really say, perhaps we would label it slightly differently within Epicureanism.
Cassius: Joshua, is meaning an end in itself, or is meaning desirable because it brings pleasure? See, this is my problem: to talk about a term like “meaning of life” is to stack the deck in your favor in the argument, and this is how it’s played. It’s like when a pharmaceutical company needs to sell a particular drug — you have to sell the illness before you can sell the drug. You have to convince people that something is significantly worse than it really is before you can convince them to buy your cure or treatment. And it’s like that with the term “meaning of life” — people who use this phrase want to convince you that there is a hole in your life.
And I don’t think that it’s true that there is a hole in your life. It strikes me that it wasn’t until really after the French Revolution that this phrase comes into circulation with Thomas Carlyle, and it’s because of what he says very near that same paragraph in that book: he is living in a wilderness of atheism. That’s his problem. It’s not that he’s isolated or doesn’t have friends; it’s that he lives in a society that has lost its faith. And so how do you convince people who have lost their faith of the need to restore themselves to that faith? Part of how he does that is by saying what generations of Christian apologists have said afterwards and are still saying today: if you’re an atheist, your life can have no meaning. Whereas my answer to that is: I think that my life is just as rich and fulfilling as anyone else’s without having to look for that God-shaped hole — because it doesn’t exist.
Callistheni: I see what you’re saying, that it is coming out of the Christian mind. There still is something going on there, because I think even if you didn’t have Christianity you would have some kind of ancestor reverence ritual. It’s very much part of certain cultures that they have a whole ritual of honoring ancestors. In fact, in some sense the Epicureans really did that.
Cassius: Callistheni, I’m glad you brought this subject up, and I think that what Joshua has said in regard to Christianity — you’ve just made the point that maybe this is not limited to Christianity, and I think you’re exactly right. This is a huge issue. Cicero is making the same argument fifty years before Jesus was born. This is not limited to Christianity.
The example that Joshua gave is one that is compelling to us today. But there’s something more going on here about this tendency to wish to be — as Torquatus says earlier — dazzled by the glory of the name of virtue. There’s something in these concepts — virtue, courage, wisdom, temperance, justice, meaningfulness — that strikes some kind of accord within people that they don’t understand. They don’t know whether this comes from God, they don’t know what the source of this is. They haven’t, as Frances Wright said, examined the foundation of what it is they’re talking about. And they dredge up these words like “meaningfulness” and “nobility” and “worth,” and it strikes some kind of intimidating response in people’s minds that makes them think: “Well, he has to be right. It can’t be that life is all about ice cream and cookies and cake and pleasure — there’s got to be something more than that.” And that’s what we’re going to be dealing with in Book Two: extremely persuasive arguments by Cicero. He’s going to bring up things about the nobility of mankind and our abilities to do things beyond the animals, that will intimidate the person who really doesn’t think through these issues and will cause them to fall away from Epicurean philosophy. He’ll cause them to say: “Well, pleasure can’t be the end — I agree with Cicero.” And that’s why this issue of what pleasure is is so critical.
It’s interesting that Epicurus does not provide in the Principal Doctrines a detailed explanation of it. Torquatus says that Epicurus says no detailed explanation is necessary. But if you limit the definition of pleasure — if you limit your understanding of pleasure to physical stimulation — then you cannot defend pleasure as the ultimate goal of life, because everybody instinctively knows that there’s something more than just sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The question is: what is there beyond that? And Epicurus, I’m suggesting, is answering that what comes beyond sex, drugs, and rock and roll is the realization, through a correct philosophy, that your life is pleasurable — is desirable in everything you’re doing, unless you’re suffering from pain — and that you should treasure the existence of everyday moments. As Don might say, the mental pleasures that come from stable, confident assertions that you’ve reached the right conclusions about death and God. But every other part of the elephant is just as much a part of the elephant as the trunk or the feet or the tail that we can touch when we’re only feeling a part of it. And Epicurus is providing a sweeping, global understanding and framework to place all this in — that once you accept the sweeping definition of pleasure as anything that’s not painful, you’re equipped to argue against Cicero and the Church and all these people who want to intimidate you with nobility and worth. You’re equipped to explain that Cicero — and the Church — are wrong: pleasure is not just sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Pleasure is the true thing that nature has given us to organize our lives, and we’re looking to nature and reality and the truth of things, and not to these dreamed-up suggestions that don’t have a basis in reality.
I’m sorry to get wound up again. Martin, do you have closing thoughts for the day?
Martin: Nothing to it.
Cassius: Okay. Callistheni, anything more? We’re going to come back to your point next week and the week after, but anything else for today?
Callistheni: I just wanted to add that I think what I’m trying to get at regarding meaning is not some overarching thing that you’re going to bow down and worship or seek through virtue, but something more down-to-earth — part of what human beings are and part of what happiness means for the soul. I was imagining: let’s say I was going to go to a rock concert to see one of my favorite bands, and I was just going to drive by myself. Now, I could really have a great and pleasurable time. But imagine if on the way home my car broke down and I’m by myself — how it’d be kind of a drudge to try to figure out what to do and how to get myself and my car back home and to a repair garage. But imagine instead that I had gone with a friend to the concert. My pleasure may have been just one notch higher at the concert itself, but more importantly, on the way home, something that would have been kind of annoying suddenly was not so bad — because I’m with a friend, we’re making jokes about it, we’re laughing, we can’t believe what happened, but we’re working together to figure out what to do next, and it ends up actually being a pleasurable experience rather than being a drag. So I’m just saying that part of what we’re calling “meaning” is really about the people that you’re with in life.
Cassius: Callistheni, I’m going to move to Joshua, but I want to say in response to that: what you’re expressing to me is a part of the big picture of pleasure, just like the trunk and the tail and the legs are a part of the big picture of an elephant. The elephant does not exist for his trunk or his tail or his feet, and neither does the human exist for the single experience of friendship and that type of meaning that you’re talking about. It’s part of the big picture. It’s an important part of the big picture. But anybody who suggests that there’s one piece of the elephant that is the elephant — to the exclusion of the rest — is going to end up with a lot of confusion and off on the wrong track. Joshua?
Joshua: Yeah. I’m just going to quote from Norman DeWitt, from his chapter called “The New Hedonism,” starting on page 222. He says: “In passages where the word ‘nature’ does not mean ‘human nature,’ it signifies the blind activity of the universe, the sum of all matter and motion, which is non-purposive and almost equally destructive as creative. Both Epicurus and Lucretius personify Nature, but Epicurus also personifies Prudence — the practical reason — making a teacher of her. This is mere figurative language; there is no fallacy in the thought. Even though Epicurus affected the bald style of Euclid and abjured figures of speech, there was a poetical vein in his own nature to which he yielded at times. Thus, so far as touches teleology, the net situation may be described as follows: there is no purposiveness in Nature, but in the processes of non-purposive creation she has brought into being a purposive creature — man. For him, being capable of reason, a telos is conceivable.” And the next section, following immediately after that, is “The True Nature of Pleasure”: “Pleasure is that telos.”
So you’re addressing what Callistheni has brought up there about meaningfulness and whether there’s really an end or a purpose of life — and emphasizing there that Epicurus held that pleasure is that end.
Cassius: I don’t want to make our closing just a recitation of Norman DeWitt, but let me go to the other citation of Norman DeWitt I included this past week as part of this discussion on the sweeping nature of pleasure. If Joshua had continued a little further and gone to page 240, he would have come to this paragraph: “The extension of the name of pleasure to the normal state of being was the major innovation of the new hedonism. It was in the negative form, freedom from pain of body and distress of mind, that it drew the most persistent and vigorous condemnation from adversaries. The contention was that the application of the name of pleasure to this normal state was unjustified on the ground that two different things were thereby being denominated by one name. Cicero made a great to-do over this argument, but it really is superficial and captious. The fact that the name of pleasure was not customarily applied to the normal or static state did not alter the fact that the name ought to be applied to it, nor that reason justified the application, nor that human beings would be the happier for so reasoning and believing.”
So let’s bring today to a close with the suggestion that human beings would be happier if they took the same approach and attitude toward pleasure that Epicurus is suggesting. All right — I hope everybody who has a chance will drop by the forum and leave us a comment. We’ll be back next week, and until then, thanks for your time today.