Episode 196 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 06
Date: 10/16/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3417-episode-196-the-epicurean-arguments-in-cicero-s-on-ends-book-two-part-06/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”The group opens with a thorough recap of the textual evidence on pleasure and pain before picking up where last week left off in Section 3. Cassius assembles the key Epicurean citations: Principal Doctrine 3’s two sentences, the Letter to Menoikeus on pleasure as the absence of bodily pain and mental disturbance, Diogenes Laertius Book 10 on two internal sensations, Torquatus in On Ends Book One Section 30 on nature as arbiter, Section 38 on no middle term between pleasure and pain, Section 39 on the Chrysippus hand (quod dolore caret id in voluptate est), Section 56 on not believing grief follows instantly when pleasure is removed, and Section 62 on the wise man’s continuous happiness and finding more reasons for joy than vexation.
Joshua adds a previously unmentioned Lucretius passage from Book Three — describing how one part of a body can be in pain while another is in pleasure simultaneously — which appears to complicate the “discrete sensation is either pleasure or pain” analysis. The group develops a macro/micro framework: at the whole-organism level, pleasure and pain can coexist; at the level of an individual discrete sensation, Epicurus’s Principal Doctrine 3 (“wherever pleasure is present there is neither pain of body nor mind”) holds. The Letter to Idomeneus (deathbed letter) serves as the clearest illustration: Epicurus offsets the pleasure of his mind against the pain of his strangury — not mixing them, but weighing two simultaneous but discrete experiences.
The group then turns to the word “variety” at the end of Section 3 — Torquatus’s statement that once all pain is removed, pleasure “admits of varieties but not of increase.” Cicero presses that this uses the word “variety” in a non-standard way and that he cannot understand how the absence of pain qualifies as pleasure at all. Joshua connects this to Principal Doctrine 18 (the pleasure in the flesh is not increased once the pain due to want is removed, only varied). Callistheni notes that Torquatus is making a common-sense observation that Cicero is taking to an extreme: don’t overeat, because the height of pleasure comes before the pain of excess. Cassius uses the square/rectangle analogy to capture the structure.
Joshua contributes a key passage from Plato’s Philebus on the variety of pleasures — Socrates noting that pleasure has one name but many unlike forms, and Protarchus replying that pleasures are alike insofar as they are pleasures, while their sources may be opposed. This illuminates both Cicero’s source and his method. Cassius reads Cicero’s extended vocabulary lesson distinguishing voluptas (which applies to both body and mind) from laetitia and gaudium (mental joy terms not applied to the body), and interprets Cicero’s real project as driving two simultaneous wedges: body against mind, and stimulative pleasure against the normal pain-free state of existence.
The host-pouring-wine-versus-guest-drinking-wine hypothetical (Cicero’s attempt to reduce Torquatus’s position to absurdity) is analyzed: Cassius argues both parties are in pleasure, that the pleasures differ in kind (pleasure of hospitality vs. pleasure of drinking), but that if neither is in pain both are at the fullest possible pleasure — which is exactly Torquatus’s position. Cicero then attacks Epicurus for ignoring logic as “the sole foundation for discovering the essence of things,” which Joshua dismisses: logic misapplied produces exactly the circular word-games Cicero is playing here.
Callistheni closes by observing that Epicurus’s broad use of “pleasure” is like the Eskimo problem with “snow” — one word for a phenomenon with many distinct forms, and modern readers’ confusion partly stems from having only one word where more precision would help. Joshua closes with the observation — recorded this same day, October 15th — that Aelius Donatus (teacher of Jerome) recorded that Virgil assumed the toga virilis on the same day Lucretius died, October 15th. Cassius ends by noting that the Lucretius citations Joshua has brought throughout this episode demonstrate that Lucretius is not only a text on physics but contains embedded epistemology, canonics, and ethics throughout.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 196 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 this and every one of our podcast episodes as well as many other topics.
This week we continue our discussion in Book Two of Cicero’s On Ends, which is devoted to Cicero’s criticisms of Epicurean philosophy. Last week we were in Section 3 and we’ve begun to some extent Section 4. But as we start this episode today, let’s recap where we are. Certainly what Cicero has introduced in Section 3 is that — ironic as it may be — he thinks Epicurus is ignorant of the nature of pleasure, or else for some reason being ambiguous about what he’s talking about. Cicero says in Section 3 that all pronounce that thing to be pleasure “by the reception of which sense is excited and is pervaded by a certain agreeable feeling.” That is a fairly clear marker for a lot of the discussion, because Cicero is attempting to box in the position that the word pleasure is understood by everyone to be an excitement or stimulation that’s agreeable — and that unless there is an excitement or stimulation that goes along with the agreeableness, you don’t have pleasure.
Now Torquatus’s response to this is very firm and forceful. I’m not sure we would say that in every case what Torquatus is saying is completely clear, but I think what we can do is review a couple of his statements as we get started today, along with a couple of other positions from Epicurean philosophy, to put this in context.
We covered last week the second sentence of Principal Doctrine 3: “Wherever pleasure is present, as long as it is there, there is neither pain of body nor of mind nor of both at once.”
In the Letter to Menoikeus, Epicurus says: “By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.”
Diogenes Laertius in Book 10, Section 34 says: “The internal sensations they say are two, pleasure and pain, which occur to every living creature; and the one is akin to nature and the other alien.”
Now what Torquatus himself has said previously here, in Book 1 of On Ends, Section 30: “Moreover, saying that if you deprive a man of his senses there is nothing left to him, it is inevitable that nature herself should be the arbiter of what is in accord with or as opposed to nature. Now what facts does she grasp or with what facts is her decision to seek or avoid any particular thing concerned, unless the facts of pleasure and pain?”
Then in Section 38: “Therefore Epicurus refused to allow that there is any middle term between pain and pleasure. What was thought by some to be a middle term, the absence of pain, was not only itself pleasure but the highest pleasure possible.”
And then in Section 39, in the context of the Chrysippus hand analogy: “For it would not wish for it for this reason, inasmuch as whatever is free from pain is in pleasure.”
In Section 56 of On Ends Book 1: “We refuse to believe that when pleasure is removed, grief instantly ensues, excepting when perchance pain has taken 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 Section 62, where Torquatus is talking about how the wise man is continually happy: “For this is the way in which Epicurus represents the wise man as continually happy… there is, in truth, no moment at which he does not experience more pleasures than pains… and pains, if any befall him, have never power enough to prevent the wise man from finding more reasons for joy than for vexation.”
And one more for emphasis — a page or so down from where we are, in Section 5, Cicero is going to get exasperated with this whole argument and say this: “Torquatus, your definitions are doing violence to one’s senses. It is wrestling out of our minds the understanding of words with which we are imbued. For who can avoid seeing that these three states exist in the nature of things? First, the state of being in pleasure. Secondly, that of being in pain. And then thirdly, that of being in such a condition as we are in this moment — neither in pleasure nor in pain.” And Torquatus’s response is: “No indeed. I say that all men who are free from pain are in pleasure — and in the greatest pleasure, too.”
So we’ve got a series of statements about this relationship between pleasure and the absence of pain, and we find ourselves in Section 3 with Cicero attempting to cross-examine Torquatus about it — and then bringing up Hieronymus of Rhodes, which we discussed last week. Clear as day, or clear as mud?
Joshua: Well, Cassius, part of what makes this difficult is that we have, as you’ve just read from the Letter to Menoikeus and from Cicero, and we have what Epicurus says in his will — a series of claims about the relationship between pleasure and pain that don’t all necessarily agree with each other superficially. That’s not to say that there isn’t a reading of all this material where you can find a way to make them mesh together, but superficially they appear to disagree, and I think that’s part of the problem.
I can add to the problem by quoting Lucretius. This is his section in Book Three where he’s describing the mind as part of the body — that the two are interconnected, in fact just two parts of the same thing. He says: “For often our body is ill — we see that clearly — yet we feel pleasure in some other part hidden within. Often the reverse takes place as well, when by contrast a man whose mind is sad feels pleasure in his whole body. In the same way, if a man’s foot pains him, perhaps at the same time his head may feel no pain at all. Moreover, when our limbs surrender to soft sleep and our body, relaxed and heavy, lies there without sense, at that very time there is something else inside us still, which is, in various ways, stirred up and which receives within itself all motions of joy and vain cares of heart.”
Cassius: Joshua, that is a great catch in addition to what we’re discussing here. What you’ve just read is an explicit itemization of situations where one part of the organism is in pleasure while another part of the organism is in pain. Do I understand that correctly?
Joshua: Yeah, exactly. So you could almost make a T-chart, Cassius, and you could put the Letter to Idomeneus on one side with this Lucretius text, and then you could put the Letter to Menoikeus on the other side of the T-chart — and it would appear that you have two different things being said. Here and in his will, Epicurus says pleasure and pain can exist at the same time. In the will he goes further and says that it’s possible to set above all of the horrible pain he’s experiencing the pleasure of remembrance of the time he spent with his friends. But elsewhere it seems to say that you’re either experiencing pleasure or pain.
Now I think part of the explanation you’ve been developing, Cassius — that there’s a macro level where you consider the organism as a whole, where it’s possible to experience both — but when you get down to a small enough unit, that unit however you describe it is either pleasure or pain. What we’re really talking about is that an individual sensation or feeling is either pleasure or pain, but at the whole-organism level one part can be experiencing pain and another experiencing pleasure.
Again, parsing individual words in these texts is dangerous, but in Principal Doctrine 3 the standard translation — Bailey, I think — has “wherever pleasure is present, as long as it is there, there is neither pain of body nor of mind nor of both at once.” If you emphasize the word “wherever,” you could be drilling down to a particular part of the body or mind — the particular feeling we’re talking about now. I haven’t been able to construct in my own mind a way the Letter to Idomeneus makes sense when he’s offsetting the kidney pain with the pleasures of his mind, other than that that’s exactly what he’s doing: he’s isolating a sensation or feeling in one part of his experience and comparing it — offsetting it — against a pain in another part.
Cassius: It probably helps for us to talk about the Hieronymus of Rhodes situation again, because that appears to be another illustration of this definitional issue. Hieronymus of Rhodes was placing his supreme value in freedom from pain — totally divorcing the concept of absence of pain from pleasure and saying that pleasure is not important. Hieronymus of Rhodes was taking Cicero’s position that whatever absence of pain means, it’s not the same thing as pleasure. And yet this is the point that Torquatus is being as obstinate as he can be on.
An illustration of the limitation here: ice cream is a pleasure and sex is a pleasure, but no one would say that ice cream and sex are the same as each other. The word pleasure is a term that describes many different individual types of pleasure. And if indeed they’re equating pleasure and absence of pain, you’d have to say the same thing about absence of pain — if absence of pain is pleasure, then “absence of pain” doesn’t describe the particular sensation you’re feeling. It’s just telling you simply that you’re labeling it with this term in which pleasure and absence of pain are interchangeable from the Epicurean perspective.
Joshua: Yeah, that’s one of the more difficult things to get your head around — and I’m still not sure I have it fully. I can get to a point where I can see: when you remove all pain from all levels of your mind and body and every aspect of your experience as a human being, it’s very clear to me how that is a state of pleasure. But to see pleasure and absence of pain as interchangeable on all levels — I find that a little more difficult to grasp. I have a glass of soda next to me that I’m periodically sipping from, and I wouldn’t say that when I drink from it I’m enjoying the absence of pain. I can see that when we say at a small enough level it’s either pleasure or pain — and if it’s pleasure, it is by definition not pain — therefore when I do sip from my soda and experience that pleasure, I’m also experiencing not-pain in that feeling. But it’s a little unintuitive to put it that way, isn’t it?
And you can certainly see why Cicero would choose to harp on this. He’s given credit for being a very smart guy and a very good lawyer — and I’m not sure how much intelligence you need to realize that this argument is going to allow you to score some points, because people don’t normally talk that way. They don’t use absence of pain and pleasure as interchangeable words.
Callistheni: It just strikes me that perhaps what Cicero is doing is trying to nail something down in a black-and-white way — either/or, no shades of gray allowed. It’s almost like if there’s a war going on and there’s side A and side B, which side are you going to support? You can’t support both. But maybe if you really dig down and see that both sides have reasons for what they’re doing, Cicero is forcing something into a box here. And perhaps Epicureanism really has many more shades of gray — for example, when Joshua read from Lucretius that long list of different types of pleasures simultaneously. So perhaps even by the time of Cicero a certain amount of time had gone by since Epicurus, and the philosophy itself could have been changing, and there could have been some Epicureans who were adopting some kind of black-and-white way of thinking about pleasure that maybe Epicurus didn’t even intend. But of course this is all just ideas — you can’t really know for sure.
Cassius: Yeah, Callistheni — and I would say also that gets back to this question of how much we trust Cicero’s description of something here. Because the way you started your comment, you’re saying that Cicero is forcing a black-and-white choice between something that may not be black and white. If you take Cicero at his word, it’s not necessarily Cicero who’s doing that — it’s Torquatus channeling Epicurus and the Epicurean position. It seems to be the Epicureans who are doing this black-and-white either/or analysis. Now again, we can always question whether Cicero is relaying what the Epicureans of his day were saying accurately, or whether the Epicureans of his day were saying something different than what Epicurus had said — so we definitely have to eventually take a position on those questions you’ve raised.
But you can find this position not only here in Torquatus and Cicero — you can find it in Epicurus himself in the Letter to Menoikeus, in Diogenes Laertius, and as Joshua raised a few minutes ago, potentially in Lucretius as well. So that’s the question people need to wrestle with, and hopefully as we go through more of Cicero’s arguments we’ll get additional evidence that will help us with that.
Joshua: There’s another point in Lucretius that’s probably worth mentioning — that the things which are pleasurable to one organism are not necessarily pleasurable to another. He expresses that by saying: you may notice that bearded goats often grow fat on hemlock, which is bitter poison to human beings. This is kind of turned into the phrase “one man’s meat is another man’s poison.” I think we all know the example of eating too much ice cream turning painful at some point. The same thing can produce both pleasure and pain depending on context and what you’re doing with it.
Cassius: Okay. Well let’s go ahead and focus on some text we didn’t talk about last week. Right at the end of Section 3 there is a discussion of the word “variety” which we probably ought not to pass over, because Cicero asks again: “Why do you describe two things so different by the same name?” Torquatus’s answer: “Don’t you recollect what I said a little while since — that when once all pain has been removed, pleasure admits of varieties but not of increase.” Cicero says: “I do remember, but though your statement is good Latin, it is far from clear. For variety is a Latin word and in its strict sense applies to differences of color, but metaphorically it refers to many differences. We speak of a varied poem, varied speech, varied manners, varied fortune. Pleasure too is usually called varied when it is derived from many unlike objects which produce pleasures that are unlike. If you intended this by the term variety, I understand it, as indeed I do understand the word when you’re not the speaker. But I am far from clear what the variety is of which you speak when you say that we experience the highest pleasure as often as we are without pain. When however we are eating things that rouse a pleasurable agitation in our senses, then the pleasure consists in agitation which produces a variety in our pleasures; but that the pleasure felt in absence of pain is not thereby increased — why should you call that feeling pleasure, I cannot understand.”
Does this discussion of variety add anything?
Joshua: Well, it’s essential to understanding what flows from Principal Doctrine 3 — that the limit of the quantity of pleasure is the removal of all pain. Every pleasure you experience while in that state has to be a variety rather than an increase.
Cassius: Yes, Joshua, and that’s Principal Doctrine 18 as well: “The pleasure in the flesh is not increased once the pain due to want is removed, but is only varied; and the limit as regards pleasure in the mind is begotten by a reasoned understanding of these very pleasures and of the emotions akin to them which used to cause the greatest fear to the mind.”
You know, this actually brings up some interesting questions about the meaning of Principal Doctrine 18. Maybe this also fits into our discussion of pleasure equaling absence of pain — in the sense that the height of pleasure at 100% has not erased the variation of pleasures that have led up to that 100%. Indeed, you’ve had varied pleasures adding up to this level. And after you get to 100% and you continue to live, you could change the components within the 100% mix — that would be an increase in variety, but that variety increase does not take you past 100%.
Maybe part of this variety discussion is the variety between pleasures that are stimulative and pleasures that are the normal accompaniment of a healthy, pain-free experience.
And so then Torquatus continues: “Can anything be sweeter than to feel no pain?” Cicero says: “No; be it granted that there is nothing better — for I am not yet investigating that question. Does it not therefore follow that painlessness, so to call it, is identical with pleasure?” And Torquatus’s answer: “It is quite identical, and is the greatest possible, and no pleasure can be greater.”
Callistheni: It’s almost like he’s taking something that, if you really think about it, is true — but he’s twisting it around and making it an absolute. It’s going one step further than what I would have ever thought. We’ve already said that being without pain is a type of pleasure — that’s one thing — but then seeing that that’s the height of pleasure is another thing. You could almost see it, though — from a stimulative point of view, if you go to an all-you-can-eat buffet, at a certain point you’re going to get full, but if you keep eating you’re going to cause yourself pain. So it’s kind of a mundane common-sense thing: don’t give yourself too much pain by overeating because the height of pleasure is before the pain of overeating kicks in. So it’s kind of like a common-sense observation, but Cicero is taking it to some kind of extreme.
Cassius: Yeah, you’re kind of experiencing something, Callistheni, that is close to what I’m experiencing — which is that I tried to use the analogy recently of the square/rectangle issue: all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. I can’t find a way to put that exactly right here, but that’s kind of how I feel about this issue of pleasure and absence of pain. It’s not necessarily untrue to say that at the smallest level of a feeling, if you’re experiencing pleasure you are not experiencing pain in that feeling — you can be experiencing pain elsewhere, but that particular feeling is just one or the other. But it almost introduces confusion on the subject.
By the way, Callistheni, I can quote Plato here from the Philebus on this issue of variety, just in case you wanted to include it.
Cassius: Yes, go ahead.
Joshua: Socrates says: “The awe which I always feel, Protarchus, about the names of the gods is more than human — it exceeds all other fears. And now I would not sin against Aphrodite by naming her amiss; let her be called what she pleases. Pleasure I know to be manifold, and with her, as I was just now saying, we must begin and consider what her nature is. She has one name, and therefore you would imagine that she is one; and yet surely she takes the most varied and even unlike forms. For do we not say that the intemperate has pleasure, and that the temperate has pleasure in his very temperance — that the fool is pleased when he is full of foolish fancies and hopes, and that the wise man has pleasure in his wisdom? And how foolish would anyone be who affirmed that all these opposite pleasures are severally alike?”
And then Protarchus says: “Why, Socrates? They are opposed insofar as they spring from opposite sources, but they are not in themselves opposite — for must not pleasure be of all things most absolutely like pleasure, that is, like itself?”
Cassius: Joshua, I think you get multiple gold stars today for the text you’re interjecting, because that’s one that wasn’t in front of me either, just like the Lucretius one. And I think that’s exactly on point: pleasure has one name but refers to many different experiences that we find to be pleasurable, and we have to keep both of those concepts in mind as we’re discussing it. The pleasure of sex is not at all the pleasure of ice cream, and yet we describe both as pleasurable — and we’re not speaking artificially or negligently or ambiguously by doing that, because we are identifying a common aspect to both very different activities: they produce in us a feeling of pleasure. So you’ve got to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time — you’ve got to be able to talk about pleasure in a generic perspective versus talking about individual pleasures, which can differ dramatically from each other. Both perspectives are true.
To go back to the David Sedley issue of how Epicurus rejects radical atomic reductionism: everything may be made up of atoms and void, but that doesn’t mean that the level we exist on in our world does not also have a truth of its own. It is true to us — just as at the same time we recognize that these bodies are made up of atoms and void. We can talk about pleasure while recognizing that individual pleasures are distinct from each other.
My best guess about what Cicero is doing here is that a greater explanation of Torquatus’s position is possible, and yet he doesn’t put those words in. He doesn’t attempt to go any further. He just takes the position that pleasure and absence of pain are going to be treated as identical without letting Torquatus explain in what respect they’re identical. That’s not the way we normally speak — we don’t normally talk in Venn diagrams or algebraic terms — but when we think about it in those terms, we can reverse the sides of the equation and come up with the presence of something being equal to the absence of another. Of course, that doesn’t mean that every experience of pleasure is the same or that every experience of absence of pain is the same. But it means that we can, if we choose to, equate those terms. And I personally would lean to the side that when Torquatus is speaking, Cicero as a lawyer — as someone who wanted to be understood as credible — is more likely to be coloring the response by giving his own assessment of how terrible this position is, while simply not letting Torquatus give the full explanation. All he lets him do is repeat this formula over and over: “It is quite identical and is the greatest possible and no pleasure can be greater.”
So Cicero then turns and says: “Why then, when you have so defined your supreme good as to make it consist entirely of absence of pain, do you shrink from embracing, maintaining, and championing this exclusively?” In other words: why aren’t you Hieronymus of Rhodes? If absence of pain is your goal, be Hieronymus of Rhodes and say you want nothing to do with pleasure. “Why do you want to introduce pleasure into the assembly of the virtues like some harlot into the company of matrons? The name of pleasure is odious, disreputable, open to suspicion. And you’re in the habit of telling us this very often that we don’t understand what kind of pleasure Epicurus means. Now whenever I’ve been told this, and I have not been told it infrequently, I have the habit of getting now and then a little angry, though I usually bear myself with tolerable calmness in discussion. Do I not understand what ἡδονή means in Greek and voluptas in Latin? Which, pray, of the two languages is it that I do not know?”
We’re still wrestling with this from a perspective that all of us here understand. All of us are expressing that this is not the way we normally speak. We don’t normally talk about absence of pain as being the same thing as pleasure. We normally talk about pleasure as stimulation or excitement of some kind. And yet you Epicureans seem to know this — and therefore you’ve chosen to become Epicureans. And so Cicero’s no longer just saying you’re using two words that are different to describe the same thing. Now he’s going to go back into the ad hominem attack against Epicurus: “This is a point argued by your school — that a man who is to become a philosopher has no need to be acquainted with literature. And just as our ancestors brought Cincinnatus from his plow to make him a dictator, so you gather from every village men who are worthy but not very well educated.”
I think we can probably take Cicero up on that one argument. If you say that absence of pain is the limit of the quantity of pleasure as Epicurus puts it, then why are you bothering with pleasure as a stimulation? Why aren’t you Hieronymus of Rhodes? I think Epicurus would answer: because my knowledge, my understanding of what the goal is for humans comes from my observation of nature. And when you watch animals or newborn humans, what they are pursuing is pleasure — and not just absence of pain. They’re also pursuing positive pleasures that enrich life. They continue to exist in the time periods between stimulating events, and as long as they’re not in pain during those time periods, that also is something desirable for them through nature.
And we probably shouldn’t pass over this quip about not needing literature either — because I don’t think that’s a valid commentary. Epicurus is obviously very well educated. Lucretius is well educated. All of the Epicureans we know about have a great deal of knowledge of the literature and background and science of the world they were living in. What they don’t have is an obsession with pursuing literature for the sake of literature. What they understand is that you pursue knowledge for the sake of the pleasures it brings — and not for the sake of the knowledge itself.
Joshua: Right — because wisdom and knowledge are means to an end. If your pursuit is of a comprehensively pleasurable and pain-free life, you need wisdom and knowledge to know that death is nothing to us, that the gods are not going to strike you dead at any moment, that you don’t have to fear them — because fear is a kind of pain. So this stuff is all critically important, but it’s not given primary importance in itself. And I think that’s part of what riles Cicero.
You know, Cassius, since I have the Philebus thing in front of me — it couldn’t be more obvious that this is one of Cicero’s main sources in writing this. Because after that quote I mentioned about variety and pleasures, the very next thing Socrates says is: “Yes, my good friend, just as color is like color insofar as colors are colors, there is no difference between them — and yet we all know that black is not only unlike, but even absolutely opposed to white. Or again, as figure is like figure, for all figures are comprehended under one class, and yet particular figures may be absolutely opposed to one another, and there is an infinite diversity of them. And we might find similar examples in many other things — and I suspect that we shall find a similar opposition among pleasures.”
Cassius: That’s why we have teamwork on the podcast and on the forum. I would never have come up with that either, but it seems clear that he’s following the same pattern of analysis that Plato has done in his attack on pleasure in the Philebus.
Okay. So as Cicero continues on, he goes back to another vocabulary section. To let you know that he understands, he says: “I first declare that by voluptas I mean what he means by ἡδονή. Now though we often search for a Latin word equivalent to a Greek word and conveying the same sense, in this case there’s no need to search. No word can possibly be discovered which more exactly represents in Latin the sense of a Greek word than voluptas. All men everywhere who know Latin denote by this word two things: delight existing in the mind, and a sweet agreeable agitation in the body. But there is this distinction: that voluptas is applied also to the mind, while laetitia and gaudium are not used in connection with the body. But according to the usage of all who speak Latin, pleasure consists in feeling — that is, a kind of agreeableness which agitates some one of the senses.”
I’m prepared to defend the use of voluptas in part because Lucretius uses it in the very first line of his poem when he describes Venus as the delight of gods and men. So what I see Cicero doing here is trying to drive two wedges. One wedge between the body and the mind — a pleasure like voluptas, which has its impact in both body and mind, is in some ways for Cicero tainted. He wants to use words like laetitia and gaudium for mental joy and the joy of wisdom, because for him the body is gross. He wants to talk about pleasure in a way that makes pleasure chaste. And to do that, you have to do what Christians do today — you have to look to the mind as something beyond and better than the body. But for the Epicureans, this just isn’t true. The mind and the body, if they can’t be described as one, are at least so thoroughly entangled that you can’t separate them.
The other wedge is between stimulation-type pleasure — the word he uses for it is “agitation” — and the absence of pain we’ve been talking about throughout. But Lucretius is quite happy to use voluptas. Don on the forum a couple of weeks ago made a post that it wasn’t at all necessary for Cicero to take voluptas as the Latin translation of ἡδονή, that you could translate it in different ways, and that this colors Cicero’s argument — which is probably true. But even insofar as the word is voluptas, which is again the word Lucretius uses, I see no problem in defending the Epicureans here. Pleasure is not a harlot among the virtues. It doesn’t even make sense to talk in those terms. This is the same Cicero who wrote so disparagingly of Leontium for having the gall as a woman to write philosophical tracts. This is Cicero trying to defend a very rigid stratified social order, and he sees the Epicureans as a threat to that — but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.
Joshua: Right, Joshua, and I think you’re right on both of the categories. There is an implicit pitting of the body against the mind. And it helps us to think in those terms — we’re so indoctrinated into Christian analysis and we have this spirit-versus-flesh orientation that we immediately understand how someone referring to the body is being negative and someone referring to the spirit is being positive. But I would also say it’s really important here to understand the second of the two things you mentioned. The two things really pitting against each other are the pleasures of stimulation versus the pleasures of normal existence — and that’s where people don’t normally talk in those terms.
There is more than a grain of truth to Cicero’s complaint that “he speaks after a fashion of his own and gives no heed to ours.” Epicurus is using the word pleasure to include both stimulative pleasures and the pleasures of normal life, and people don’t normally talk in those terms. So when Cicero complains that there’s an unusual usage going on here, he’s right. The point you’ve also made is there’s nothing wrong with Epicurus’s usage — as DeWitt says, people would be better off if they did think that way, and there’s justification for thinking that way — but most people don’t think that way. And so Cicero’s got this wedge that he’s hammering in here for all that it’s worth.
This issue of Epicurus using non-standard definitions of words has a truth to it that has to be wrestled with. Epicurus is using the term “pleasure” in a wider sense than everyone else does. We’re defending him on the grounds that it’s legitimate to do so. But Cicero’s right: Epicurus’s view of pleasure is different from the view most people have. It’s probably going to be impossible to understand Epicurus if we ourselves continue to understand pleasure as limited to stimulation. Epicurus is clearly going beyond stimulation as a definition of pleasure.
And as DeWitt says: the word pleasure is not normally used to describe the normal state of things. It does not follow that it should not be used. That’s what Cicero is running into here — he only wants “pleasure” to mean this and this and not this other thing as well. But Epicurus is not going to hold there and stop.
Cicero is a good lawyer, and if you’re in front of a jury of 12 normal average everyday people listening to this discussion, I think Cicero is going to win on that point. You’re using this word in a different way than we the jury use it. And so what you’ve got to do is give the explanation as to why you’re doing that — which is what Cicero does not really allow Torquatus to do here. Instead he says: “He speaks after a fashion of his own and gives no heed to ours. If indeed a statement is identical with that of Hieronymus, who pronounces that the supreme good consists in a life apart from all annoyance, why does he prefer to talk about pleasure rather than freedom from pain, as Hieronymus does?”
Cassius: And at that point, Torquatus gets exasperated and says, effectively: “Make an end of questioning if you please — foreseeing just what has come about, I mean logical quibbles.” So Torquatus, instead of giving a longer explanation, just says that Cicero is being ridiculous — now just chopping words.
What do you think the Epicurean response would be to the hypothetical Cicero then raises — that the host who mixes wine for a guest and the guest who drinks it are both in the same state of pleasure? Is that a fair observation, or is there a way to apply both the whole-organism perspective and the individual pleasure perspective to produce a good response?
Joshua: That’s a really good question. Let’s talk for a little bit about the pleasure that the host is experiencing. Are they experiencing what you described, Cassius — a sort of whole-organism kind of pleasure — or are they experiencing the pleasure of hosting, the pleasure of hospitality? I was just at a wedding yesterday, and certainly the people who managed to arrange that event get pleasure out of doing it, even though I would probably hate it. So what kind of pleasure is experienced by the person pouring and mixing the wine?
Cassius: I think you’re going in the right direction, and my answer would be similar to what we’ve already been discussing. The pleasure of sex is different from the pleasure of ice cream. The host who is pouring the wine is enjoying the pleasure of being a host. The guest drinking the wine is experiencing the pleasure of drinking wine. Those are two different types of pleasure — they are not the same, and they are very different. But they are both pleasures. You can apply the name of pleasure to both of them.
And I would go further: Torquatus has been tying being without pain and pleasure together, and going to the next step — when you say you are without pain, you are at the fullest possible pleasure. So if in Cicero’s hypothetical you have stipulated that the host who pours is without pain and the guest who drinks is without pain, then you have said that both are in the fullest possible state of pleasure, because anytime you say somebody has no pain you are saying that they are at the height of pleasure. So there are two ways to analyze this hypothetical: the pleasure of serving wine is different from the pleasure of drinking wine, but they are both pleasures — and if you stipulate that both the host and the guest are without pain, then both are in the same state of pleasure at 100%.
Joshua: Yeah. And Cicero would prefer to move the discussion over to whether continuous speech is the best way to discuss this or whether back-and-forth dialogue is better. He starts talking about Zeno and the Stoics talking about dividing speech into two divisions — the rhetoricians using an extended style and the logicians using a condensed style — and he says that while Epicurus disregards logic, which is “the sole foundation of the skill in discovering the essence of everything and determining its qualities,” he makes a shipwreck of his exposition.
Cassius: And there is absolutely no reason that we should take Cicero at his word here — that logic is the sole foundation of all skill in discovering the essence of every object and in determining its qualities. It’s possible to do with logic what Cicero is doing right here: talking in circles. It’s possible to do what the Pythagoreans were doing with logic — saying that the number of the heavenly spheres matches the number ten because ten is the sum of a point and a line and a surface and a volume. All of this stuff is so far divorced from reality the way they applied it. As Torquatus says here, it’s really just logical quibbles and bickering over the meaning of words. That’s a frivolous approach, and Cicero is excellent at displaying how it works.
It’s probably time for us to begin to come to the end of today’s episode, because the next thing Cicero picks up is what I would say is even more controversial and questionable fact-wise. He’s going to say to Torquatus: you declare pleasure to be the supreme good, and therefore you have to unfold the nature of pleasure. And then Cicero says that what Epicurus should have done is simply combine as his greatest good these pleasures of stimulation and these pleasures of normal life — and not call them both pleasure. It is the word “pleasure” and what it means. And I think DeWitt is absolutely right on this point. Do you have that quote handy, Cassius?
Yes, it is page 240 of the DeWitt book. He says: “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 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 is really 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 humans would be the happier for so reasoning and believing.”
So that’s the issue that we’re struggling with — it’s certainly not easy even for us today to shift our perspective from thinking of pleasure as limited to stimulation. But that seems to be the issue that is before the house. Let’s go ahead and have closing thoughts for today. Callistheni?
Callistheni: One thing that was sticking out in my mind was the idea that it’s pretty obvious that pleasure can refer to many different types of feelings. So I guess there’s a parallel to the idea of snow — that Eskimos have many words for snow, whereas we just have the one word. So there’s a problem if we just have this word “pleasure” for something that has so many different kinds of feelings and feeling-tones. And I think this is all very important for modern Epicureans to get clear about, because it’s obviously one of the main parts of the whole philosophy regarding the role of pleasure in life.
Cassius: Yeah, it might well be true that there’s no more central question in Epicurean philosophy than this: understanding the word pleasure as referring to more than just stimulation, but also to the normal pain-free state of life — and that this expansion of the view of pleasure underlies everything else going on in what Epicurus is talking about. Joshua?
Joshua: I just wanted to say that according to a text by a Roman grammarian — Aelius Donatus, who was also the teacher of Jerome, who translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin — Donatus wrote a short life of Virgil in which he says that Virgil assumed the toga virilis, the toga of manhood, on the same day that the poet Lucretius died, and that that day was October 15th. And we’re recording this actually on October 15th. So it would probably be very fitting to end with a sort of toast to Lucretius, who was said to have died on this day, and to Virgil, who was in many ways his successor as a poet in the Roman world. Happy death day slash birthday to those two. Some people think by the way that Lucretius was born on the same day, or there are conflicting sources.
Cassius: Well, Joshua, I really appreciate your bringing those citations from Lucretius in today, and that’s a good place to end the episode — because a lot of people seem to think Lucretius is of interest only for his physics. But embedded within Lucretius’s approach are both the epistemology, the canonics, and the ethics, and the citations you’ve raised today are good illustrations of how Lucretius, in conveying the philosophy to Memmius — the person he was writing to — was explaining not only physics but also Epicurean ethics and the way to live. If we dig into it and begin to recognize those issues, we can see the same insight that permeates the rest of the Epicurean text.
Okay — I think we’ve had a good discussion today. We’ll be back in a week. In the meantime, please drop by the forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions on this or any of our other episodes. Thanks for your time today. We’ll see you next week.