Episode 201 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 09
Date: 11/15/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3488-episode-201-cicero-s-on-ends-book-two-part-09/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 201 continues Cicero’s On Ends Book Two, beginning with Section 9. Topics include: Cicero’s criticism of Epicurus’s three-category division of desires (natural and necessary, natural and unnecessary, neither natural nor necessary) as a logical muddle; Aulus Gellius’s second-century response (from Attic Nights) to Plutarch’s petty criticism of Epicurus’s syllogism style, showing that even in antiquity thoughtful readers saw through this kind of attack; Cicero’s claim that Epicurus justifies depravity; Joshua’s discovery that Torquatus’s description of the ideal life in On Ends Book One, read in reverse, directly answers Cicero’s challenge in Book Two — “to be without pleasure is the intensest pain”; and Section 10, where Cicero quotes Epicurus saying he cannot conceive of good separated from the pleasures of taste, sex, hearing, and vision, which leads to a digression on Cicero’s own defense speech Pro Plancio showing his hypocrisy on the subject of sexual morality. The episode also covers the Letter to Menoikeus section 128 (“when we do not feel pain, we no longer need pleasure”) and how to reconcile it with the broader Epicurean position.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 201 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 text and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics.
Last week we had our 200th anniversary retrospective discussion of future plans episode — I think it was a very good episode, and we’ll probably suggest people in the future come back to Episode 200 to get an orientation to the podcast when they first start listening to it. When we broke off on Episode 200, we were in the middle of Cicero’s On Ends Book Two, and we are going to begin today around Section 9. If you’re following in the Reed edition, it’s around page 41.
We are in the beginning of a very long argument by Cicero against Epicurus, and Torquatus does not get much opportunity to reply as we go through these sections. In reviewing for today, the arguments that Cicero is bringing up are complicated — they’re difficult to read to some extent without keeping the big picture of what he’s doing in mind. As we go through these next several episodes, we’re going to bring our best abilities to the task of making this interesting. And I do think it is. There’s a lot of material buried in here, because Cicero — even as he’s attacking Epicurus — is constantly quoting Epicurus. And so you get an additional perspective on some very familiar doctrines and sections of letters of Epicurus that Cicero is quoting and interpreting in negative ways. This is going to give us a lot of good experience in different ways to interpret Epicurus — how to do so sympathetically as opposed to negatively, as Cicero is doing.
We’re starting off today in Section 9. What we’ve found for the last several weeks is that a lot of Cicero’s argument is a sort of vocabulary criticism — that Epicurus is using the word “pleasure” more broadly than he should be, and that normal people do not use the word “pleasure” to describe anything but stimulating and active experiences in life. Whereas Epicurus is using the word much more broadly to include not only those stimulating active experiences of pleasure, but also more normal experiences of daily life, which aren’t stimulating but which we would still consider to be pleasurable for a variety of reasons. So Cicero is taking the position: you’re talking about two separate things, Epicurus. You should not refer to two separate things with only one word.
And I don’t know about our listeners, but those kind of arguments have never impressed me very much. And I don’t know that they’re going to sway the opinions of most readers here that we should throw Epicurus out because he’s using the word in a somewhat different way. Once you understand the way that Epicurus is using the word and see his reasoning for it, most of those problems go away. In the words that DeWitt uses, these kind of arguments are captious and harping on details that don’t need to be harped on — phrasing choices that are in fact discretionary and not, of course, handed down by God or in some way absolutely wrong. Epicurus has his reasons for it and they make a lot of sense. And as DeWitt says, people would be better off if they thought that way and applied that perspective to their own lives.
Today, in the beginning of Section 9, Cicero comes to the famous words of Epicurus about dividing the desires down into natural, necessary, unnatural, unnecessary. He quotes Epicurus saying that there are three kinds of passions: one natural and necessary, another natural but not necessary, and a third neither natural nor necessary. And Cicero says: “In the first place, this subdivision lacks neatness. He has made what were really two classes into three. This is not to subdivide, but to rend asunder.”
So previously, Cicero is criticizing Epicurus for considering two things within one word, and now he’s saying that this subdivision takes two and makes them three.
Joshua: Yeah, Cassius, this is Cicero at his most nitpicky and most insufferable, isn’t it? When he’s like, well, you’re confusing a species with a genus, right? That what Epicurus should have done was say that desires are either natural or necessary — so you have two genuses — and then of the natural kind, some are necessary and some are unnecessary, and that’s your species level. Cicero is pretending that this is far more important than it really is. We’re going to be dealing with a lot of this sort of meaningless, mindless word-gaming.
Now, I found a source. His name is Aulus Gellius — he was a second-century Roman grammarian, and he’s responding in a text called Attic Nights. He’s responding to Plutarch, and specifically to Plutarch’s criticisms of Epicurus. I’m going to read a few paragraphs. I think it gives us a good insight into the fact that even in the ancient world, there were people who were looking at some of these criticisms and going, “You’re just crazy. This is insane that you’re harping on things that are not only so secondary and minute in importance that it’s ridiculous to be spending so much time on them, but to assume that Epicurus didn’t know that ‘natural and necessary’ was a subset of ‘natural,’ and that ‘natural and unnecessary’ was a subset of ‘natural’ as well.” So anyway, this is Aulus Gellius writing in the second century:
“Plutarch, in the second book of his essay on Homer, asserts that Epicurus made use of an incomplete, perverted, and faulty syllogism, and he quotes Epicurus’s own words: ‘Death is nothing to us, for what is dissolved is without perception, and what is without perception is nothing to us.’ Now, Epicurus, says Plutarch, omitted what he ought to have stated as his major premise, that death is a dissolution of body and soul. And then, to prove something else, he goes on to use the very premise that he had omitted as if it had been stated and conceded. But this syllogism, says Plutarch, cannot advance unless that premise be first presented.”
And then Aulus Gellius responds: “What Plutarch wrote as to the form and sequence of a syllogism is true enough — for if you wish to argue and reason according to the teaching of the schools, you ought to say: ‘Death is the dissolution of soul and body; what is dissolved is without perception; and what is without perception is nothing to us.’ But we cannot suppose that Epicurus, being the man he was, omitted that part of the syllogism through ignorance, or that it was his intention to state a syllogism complete in all its members and limitations, as is done in the schools of the logician. Since the separation of body and soul by death is self-evident, he, of course, did not think it necessary to call attention to what was perfectly obvious to everyone. For the same reason, too, he put the conclusion of the syllogism not at the end, but at the beginning. Who does not see that this also was not due to inadvertence?”
These people — Plutarch and Cicero — want to make Epicurus seem like the country bumpkin from the provinces who has come to Athens and is talking about philosophy with a total ignorance of the Greek language and of logic, and who has no business engaged on the turf of Plato and Aristotle. And it’s absurd.
But the important part is coming up here in the next paragraph, where Aulus Gellius says: “In the same book, Plutarch also finds fault a second time with Epicurus for using an inappropriate word and giving it an incorrect meaning. Now, Epicurus wrote as follows: ‘The utmost height of pleasure is the removal of everything that pains.’ Plutarch declares that he ought not to have said ‘of everything that pains,’ but ‘of everything that is painful,’ for it is the removal of pain, he explains, that should be indicated, not of that which causes pain. In bringing this charge against Epicurus, Plutarch is word-chasing with excessive minuteness and almost with frigidity — for far from hunting up such verbal meticulousness and such refinements of diction, Epicurus hunts them down.” And the footnote by the translator there implies that Epicurus deliberately eliminates them.
This furor over syllogisms and correct forms of diction — right? — people know what we’re talking about. We don’t need to go on and on about this stuff, as Cicero is doing here. People are not confused, as Cicero is pretending to be confused for five pages about Epicurus including lack of pain as a kind of pleasure. People get this. We don’t have to continually bang the drum about Epicurus’s ignorance on this question. But that’s exactly what Cicero is going to do, and it’s exactly what Plutarch does after Cicero. So I thought that Aulus Gellius — a second-century Roman grammarian — is able very quickly there to get to the point, and I think it’s an excellent point: this verbal sparring over meaningless distinctions and categories and subdivisions is not productive.
Cassius: Yeah, that’s extremely helpful, Joshua. And that’s what we’re in the middle of now. We’re going to flip back and forth between these grammarian criticisms and more substantive arguments. That’s what Cicero starts out with, and in fact the specific example you’ve raised there about “death is nothing to us” — I believe we are going to come to that later in this section of Book Two.
Where we are now is probably the second example of it. He started out with the issue with the word “pleasure.” Now he’s talking about the issues with the natural and necessary division. And in the middle of all those grammarian criticisms, he’s going to throw in a lot of “you’re despicable to even take these positions.” He goes back and forth between his different types of arguments.
I think we’ve probably covered the natural and necessary part adequately. He does the same thing in regard to talking about limiting passion as well. He says that to his mind this is exactly what’s not very satisfactory with the philosopher who talks about limiting the passions — “can a passion be limited?” Cicero says it’s rather a thing to abolish and drag out by the roots. You don’t want to limit passion — you want to eradicate it, according to Cicero. And so he’s, again, criticizing the use of a perspective by Epicurus that everybody knows what you’re talking about: that you don’t want to just drag out by the roots all desire from your life. You want to prudently choose and pursue your desires. Everybody understands that. And to talk about “limiting passions” is not a nonsensical way of talking about the subject.
I think we mentioned this actually two weeks ago. So this is the section where Cicero says: “What sort of philosophy is this, which does not lead to the extinction of depravity, but is satisfied with moderation in sin?” That’s the argument that Frances Wright uses in her confrontation between Epicurus and Zeno. Frances Wright singled this out as a particularly important thing for people to understand. And she has Epicurus say that if this were true, this would destroy the philosophy. But it’s not true from the Epicurean perspective that you’re being satisfied with moderation in sin. This is the point that Martin raised at the end of Episode 200 — that just because you can’t be perfectly in a state of pleasure does not mean that you can’t experience a dominance of pleasure over pain in your life. You’re not happy about the fact that some pain is involved, but you’re willing to choose pain in certain situations so as to get a greater pleasure later on. These are ways of explaining things that are not rocket science and not difficult to understand. And yet Cicero’s approaching all this as if Epicurus is saying we should be satisfied with moderation in sin.
Joshua: Right. Now, another source I was looking at last night was the Categories of Aristotle, in which he’s breaking down things that can be said to be subjects, and things that are predicable of subjects. He’s got ten sorts of categories of what is predicable of the subject — things like location, duration, possessing something else, being possessed by something else, and on and on about it. And I think Cicero has certainly read this text. And so it’s amazing to me that Cicero continues to fail to understand that there is a difference between things that are productive of pleasure and pleasure itself. Aristotle is so clear on this point: pleasure would be the subject, and things which are predicable of pleasure are things that are productive of pleasure — that would be the predicate in that sentence. And so it’s not that Cicero doesn’t understand this, but he finds great utility in prying and picking at this apparently loose end. But there is no loose end. There is a difference between the feeling of pleasure and things that stimulate pleasure — the feeling of pleasure, or things that are productive of the feeling of pleasure, like absence of pain. But as I said, it’s absolutely infuriating that Cicero goes on and on and on about this. It’s actually a very simple thing to understand.
Cassius: Joshua, that reminds me of one phrase that stuck with me for years from DeWitt. There’s an essay that came out in the early 1900s — I think the name of the writer was Mary Porter Packer or something like that. She wrote an article called “Cicero’s Presentation of Epicurean Ethics,” and she goes through Book One and Book Two and talks about where Cicero is accurate and not accurate and so forth. And DeWitt’s comment was that it was generally a good essay to read, but his main disagreement with her was that she acquitted Cicero of the charge of intentionally misrepresenting Epicurus. And DeWitt’s phrase was to the effect that the only reason Cicero was able to misrepresent Epicurus with such effect is that he understood Epicurus so well. That leads you to the conclusion that he was doing so while he was misrepresenting. I don’t think Cicero just fails to understand the argument. He understands what Epicurus is saying and he disagrees with the result. And what he’s doing in expressing his disagreement is using a rather muddy set of argumentative techniques.
I made a comment about this earlier that to some extent, it’s interesting to me how friendly this discussion between Cicero and Torquatus is. Because Cicero never attacks Torquatus’s character — he’s always praising Torquatus and Torquatus’s ancestors. And he’s using that as his real argument: “You’re such a good person, Torquatus. You can’t really believe these things that Epicurus is saying.” But the point is that Torquatus does believe it. And Cicero understands it but disagrees with it. And he’s probably using an argumentative technique where he’s trying to cozy up to Torquatus and to the Epicureans. In fact, there’s another comment we’ll get to later on where Cicero goes on again about how vast numbers of people were following Epicurus. So Cicero was realizing that a lot of people thought these were good arguments. He couldn’t just say, “You’re an idiot, Torquatus, you’re stupid.” He’s saying in a kind and oozing way, as a lawyer would, that you just need to read this and understand that Epicurus is not stating these things clearly, and he’s leading you down a false path that you yourself, who are such a good person, would never follow if you really understood what Epicurus was saying.
Joshua: Yeah, Cassius, I was reading one of Cicero’s defense orations, Pro Plancio, in which he’s working as a defense attorney for a man named Gnaeus Plancius. And it’s exactly like that — this sort of unctuous treatment, where the defendant is a man of integrity and honor but the plaintiff is a man of distinction and family record and humility and so forth. It goes on and on about that.
And I’ve experienced this myself, by people who will say things like: “Oh, you’re far too smart to believe that everything around us happened by chance, right? You have to understand that this was God who did this. And I know if you just thought about it for a little bit, you’re smart enough that you’d figure this out.” It’s absolutely infuriating to be on the receiving end of this treatment.
Cassius: Now, he continues on this kind of analysis, talking now about the word “passion.” He’s talking about Epicurus’s type of pleasure or depravity, and he reads: “Let him call these feelings the cravings of nature. Let him keep the term ‘passion’ for another use, so that when he comes to speak of miserliness, self-indulgence, and the greatest sins, he may arraign the term, so to speak, on a capital charge. But he states these doctrines with greater freedom, not unfrequently. Only due to the fact that he seems often to embrace ardently the pleasure which all nations denote by the term, the active and stimulating pleasures. He sometimes is involved in great straits, so much so that there is nothing so disreputable that he does not seem likely to do it for the sake of pleasure, if only he is secure from the cognizance of his fellow men. Then, blushing, for the force of nature is very great, he makes his escape in this way, by denying that any addition can be made to the pleasure felt by one who is free from pain.”
This is going to take us back into the complicated and extremely important issue of freedom from pain. Cicero says: “But this condition of freedom from pain is not called pleasure. ‘I’m not anxious about terms,’ says Epicurus. But how if the thing signified is entirely different?” And he seems to be quoting Epicurus here as a figurative response, having Epicurus say: “I shall find many persons — or rather persons without number — who are not so pedantic or troublesome as you are, and such that I may easily win them over to any doctrine I choose.” Cicero continues: “Why then do we have to do this?” And he has Epicurus figuratively say: “Because pain has for its opposite not pleasure, but the removal of pain.”
Okay, so what we need to talk about is, going back to this issue of freedom from pain — Cicero is accusing Epicurus of denying that there’s any addition that can be made to the pleasure felt by one who is free from pain. But he says Epicurus doesn’t consider this freedom from pain to be pleasure. Now, I think we have to unwind that by going back to what we talked about last week — that Epicurus does consider the condition of freedom from pain to be pleasure. And you end up with this argument being another example of Cicero refusing to accept Epicurus’s terms and making it seem contradictory.
Let me go back to this depravity issue for just a moment. Cicero is making the claim — he almost outright calls Epicurus a pervert here. He makes the claim that because adulterers experience pleasure, Epicurus is morally justifying adultery. And because profligates and sybarites experience pleasure, Epicurus is morally justifying profligacy. And that the desire that causes us to pursue pleasure needs to be ripped out by the roots because it is associated with things like adultery and profligacy. But Cicero would never say that the public road system in ancient Rome was bad and needed to be ripped up from the roadbeds because robbers and highwaymen and unsavory types also use roads. You wouldn’t make that argument. You wouldn’t say that we can’t have aqueducts because that’s going to give water to people who are going to murder or rape. It’s the same kind of thing. Pleasure needs to be judged on its own terms. You cannot drag in all of these other issues related to depravity as a way to judge pleasure. And when you put it in other terms, it’s obvious that it’s not fair.
Joshua: And I can just quote it again. He says — this is at the bottom of page 42 — “Why then do we hesitate to say, if absence of pain be the highest pleasure, that to be without pleasure is the intensest pain?”
Well, when I read that, what I immediately thought of was a passage from Book One, Section 12 of On Ends — this is Torquatus giving us the exemplar of the life of pleasure. He says: “Let us imagine a man living in the continuous enjoyment of numerous and vivid pleasures alike of body and of mind.” Now, the difference between what Torquatus is saying in Book One and what Cicero is demanding of Epicurus in Book Two is that what Torquatus says in Book One is a much more complete definition of pleasure, a much more complete understanding of the word. It includes not fearing the problems associated with death. It includes not fearing supernatural gods. It includes the memory of past pleasures and the anticipation of future pleasures.
And so when Cicero says at the bottom of page 42, “Why then do we hesitate to say, if absence of pain be the highest pleasure, that to be without pleasure is the intensest pain?” — well, Torquatus doesn’t really hesitate to say that, because his next paragraph in Book One is this: “Suppose, on the other hand, a person crushed beneath the heaviest load of mental and bodily anguish to which humanity is liable. Grant him no hope of ultimate relief in view — so give him no pleasure, either present or in prospect. Can one describe or imagine a more pitiable state? If then a life full of pain is the thing most to be avoided, it follows that to live in pain is the highest evil, and this position implies that a life of pleasure is the ultimate good. In fact, the mind possesses nothing in itself upon which it can rest as final. Every fear, every sorrow can be traced back to pain. There is no other thing besides pain which is of its own nature capable of causing either anxiety or distress.”
So if you go through what Torquatus says — a man living in the continuous enjoyment of numerous and vivid pleasures of body and mind, and on and on — and you were to just reverse every claim there and say that he’s living in the continuous suffering of numerous and vivid pains of body and mind — I don’t think that’s far off from being a good answer to what Cicero is demanding here in Book Two. That to be completely, comprehensively, and entirely without pleasure is to be in a state of horrible pain.
Cassius: Joshua, that’s why we pay you so much to be on this podcast with us. That’s a brilliant exposition. I did not think of that, but I think that’s an excellent answer to this. This goes back to DeWitt’s comments. Cicero is misrepresenting things and misrepresenting to some extent what he’s reported himself in Book One from Torquatus. Because I think you’re right — that passage you just quoted does amount to saying exactly that. That to be without pleasure, without hope of pleasure, without any ability to change that condition, is the worst condition you can be in — which would be, in these words, “the intensest pain.” Cicero knows that these logical deductions are there, and yet he refuses to draw them himself, and he acts as if nobody in their right mind could draw them.
And it all comes back to this idea that pleasure is not limited to sex, drugs, and rock and roll — it’s not limited to these stimulating activities that everybody understands to be pleasure. But everybody also understands that good feelings about other people, benevolence, reading literature, listening to poetry, looking at art, just reflecting on good feelings about your friends and family and the experiences of your past — you don’t have to be constantly in a state of stimulated action in order to experience pleasure. And everybody does know that. But in the hands of a good lawyer like Cicero, you can tend to forget things like that and say, “Oh yeah, Cicero, you’re right, this man’s not being stimulated by listening to this discussion.”
And that’s where this third state comes in. It’s easier to argue not that they’re in pain when they’re not in pleasure, but that someone who’s not being stimulated is just simply in a neutral state. And that’s the importance of this neutral state issue — when you understand that when you’re not in pain you are lucky to be alive and you’re experiencing pleasure, then you don’t run into that logical hurdle that Cicero is trying to throw up. And it becomes apparent what Epicurus is trying to do.
Cicero is trying to say that Epicurus’s position is that the opposite of pain is not pleasure but absence of pain. And Epicurus could use those words, but when you understand the absence of pain to be pleasure, there’s no contradiction — because you’re saying the same thing. In fact, that’s the difference between the Rackham and Reid translations. Reid’s words are exactly this: “because pain has for its opposite not pleasure, but the removal of pain.” Now, Rackham translates that as: “because the opposite of pain is not pleasure, but absence of pain.” I think either way you translate it, you come up to the same result. Epicurus said in the Letter to Menoikeus, “by pleasure, we mean the absence of pain.” I think it’s very reasonable to reverse that and say, by absence of pain, we mean pleasure. Epicurus is using these concepts interchangeably. And in this last sentence, what Cicero is doing is, again, refusing to accept the interchangeability of “removal of pain” as “pleasure.”
So I think the probable best way to interpret all this is that if Torquatus were allowed to answer here, he would be going back to the same point — that Epicurus said that absence of pain is pleasure. If you say absence of pain is pleasure, that means pleasure is absence of pain, and you can use those terms interchangeably. And so we don’t hesitate to say that if absence of pain is the highest pleasure, then to be without pleasure is the intensest pain. We would say that. Just like 100% pleasure — pure pleasure — is the height of pleasure. If you don’t have any pleasure, that means you’ve got 100% pain. And I don’t think there’s any problem with saying 100% pain is the highest pain.
Joshua: That’s a very good point. It’s interesting to think it through. It’s this tension that we constantly run into: if 100% pleasure is the most intense pleasure — okay, that makes sense, logically you can’t get any more pleasurable than 100% pleasure. But because we haven’t stated what exactly you’re doing in that type of pleasure, it’s natural to ask, “Are you saying that I can be 100% pleasure by cutting my fingernails, or I can be 100% pleasure by having sex, drugs, and rock and roll?” You’ve got to keep those questions in perspective — “100% pleasure” isn’t telling you exactly what you’re doing. It’s just telling you that you’ve got 100% pleasure, and it’s not going to get any more than 100%. I think the same analysis would apply to 100% pain.
Yeah, that’s Aristotle’s difference between the subject and the predicate, right? That pleasure as a feeling, pain as a feeling — those are the subjects. But the predicate of all of the surrounding detail is and can be different in different circumstances, but that doesn’t change what the feeling is. We all know that we can be eating bread and water or we could be eating the best food at a great banquet — we’re receiving pleasure from both. The type of pleasure is different, but they’re both legitimately called pleasure.
Cassius: So now we get to Section 10 here, and Cicero starts off with character assassination. He says: “Now, not to see that the greatest proof we have with regard to that form of pleasure — apart from which he declares himself wholly unable to understand the nature of good — is that he pursues this pleasure into detail. Thus, that which we enjoy through the palate, through the ears.” And then he adds the rest — and Cicero, clutching his pearls, says: “things not to be named without an apologetic preface.”
By the way, this sentence is very difficult and intricate grammatically. Very well, says Cicero: “this stern and serious philosopher does not see that the only good within his knowledge is a thing not even to be desired, because on the authority of the same thinker, whenever we are without pain, we do not crave that form of pleasure.”
He’s talking about sex here, basically. This is from a text by Epicurus which we don’t have. It’s called On the End Goal, or On Ends — the same title as Cicero’s book. Epicurus says: “For I at least do not even know what I should conceive the good to be, if I eliminate the pleasures of taste and eliminate the pleasures of sex and eliminate the pleasures of listening and eliminate the pleasant motions caused in our vision by a visible or beautiful form.”
And the simple answer here to Cicero’s problem is that while absence of pain is a kind of pleasure, it is once again for the hundredth time not the fullest possible exposition of pleasure. Yes, pleasure includes the pleasure we get from food. It includes the pleasure we get from sex. It includes the pleasure we get from listening to music or going to the theater. It includes the pleasure we get from watching people dance or from beautiful visible forms. And it’s only because Cicero is, as Norman DeWitt says, making a big to-do about this, that he is unwilling to understand this simple fact.
Joshua: Now, I had to go and look up this story. I’d heard it before but I’d never actually read the text. And I should preface this by saying, bear in mind that in this oration I’m reading from Cicero — Pro Plancio — he is a defense attorney, and there are requirements to that job that should not be overlooked. But if you’re going to say to Epicurus that the pleasures he’s describing — the pleasures of sex — are things that you can’t even mention in company without an apologetic preface, I have to quote this from Pro Plancio. Cicero says to the plaintiff’s attorney: “Would you dim with your silly insinuations the luster of that untarnished life? Darkly insinuate acts of immorality, charges which cannot even be suspected, far less substantiated against him? Not content with inventing charges, you invent names for your charges and call him a bigamist. You say that he took with him to the province a companion to be the instrument of his base passions. This statement is not a charge, but a reckless and libelous falsehood. You say that he raped a ballet girl. We hear that this crime was once committed at Atina by a band of youths who took advantage of an old privilege allowed at the scenic games, especially in country towns. What a tribute to the propriety of my client’s youthful days — he is reproached with an act which he was permitted by privilege to commit.”
So this is, again, he’s a defense attorney — but he’s defending here an act that would, in modern terms, constitute a serious crime. And I only bring it up because of what Cicero is accusing Epicurus of doing here. He says in Section 9 that Epicurus would do anything for pleasure if only he had assurance that he wouldn’t be caught by his fellow men. They’re going to make that accusation. I think it’s only fair to include what other things Cicero has said on this subject. He’s pretending here to clutch his pearls at the mention of sex, as if to make Epicurus out to be a pervert on the subject — but this is absolutely baseless, and it is beneath the dignity of someone arguing this case.
Cassius: Yeah, these character assassination accusations are a major theme of everything that Cicero is doing here. Before we move on, however, to the next example of character assassination, let me point out this — that the part he ends this section on that Joshua, you read earlier, about “very well, this stern and serious philosopher does not see that the only good within his knowledge is a thing not even to be desired, because on the authority of the same thinker, whenever we are without pain, we do not crave that form of pleasure” — I think that is probably a direct reference to what we have in Section 128 of the Letter to Menoikeus. Let me quote that:
“The right understanding of these facts enables us to refer all choice and avoidance to the health of the body and the soul’s freedom from disturbance, since this is the aim of the life of blessedness, for it is to obtain this end that we always act, namely to avoid pain and fear. And when this is once secured for us, all the tempest of the soul is dispersed, since the living creature has not to wander as though in search of something that’s missing, and to look for some other thing by which he can fulfill the good of the soul and the good of the body. For it is then that we have need of pleasure, when we feel pain owing to the absence of pleasure. When we do not feel pain, we no longer need pleasure.”
And that’s a line that people talk about a lot in discussing Epicurus in general. And I think that’s what Cicero was saying here when he says “on the authority of the same thinker, whenever we are without pain, we do not crave that form of pleasure.” As Cicero says: “How irreconcilable these statements are.” So we should reconcile them.
What is this about the allegation that when we do not feel pain, we no longer need pleasure?
Joshua: Well, I think it’s obvious, Cassius, that to say that when we no longer have the craving for pleasure, we don’t need that pleasure — when you no longer have the craving of thirst, you no longer experience thirst, right? One thing we should say about what Torquatus says, about what Epicurus says about the ideal life, is that no one said this is going to be easy or it’s going to come naturally to you. The study of philosophy for Epicurus is easy and brings pleasure with it. But this life that Epicurus compares to the life of the gods is not something that you’re going to experience every moment of your life. We are plagued by cravings, and sometimes the best thing to do is to satisfy those cravings. So I think just by definition, to be without pain in the most perfect sense of that — is to also be without the craving for food, the craving for water, the craving for sex. Just by definition.
I think I will go further too, though. I don’t want to put too much emphasis on a particular translation and a particular word, but at least in the translation from Bailey that I read, Bailey translates Epicurus as saying “when we do not feel pain, we no longer need pleasure.” I think you can also look at that from the point of view of: when we don’t feel pain, that means we are at 100% pleasure, and we don’t need anything more than 100% because we frankly can’t have anything more than 100%. You can look at it from that direction as well.
Cassius: But in Cicero’s wording of it, Reed says that “when we are without pain, we do not crave that form of pleasure.” Rackham says “we feel no need of this sort of pleasure so long as we are free from pain.” Could be that what Cicero is doing here is, again, the same distinction of what pleasure means — Cicero is trying to say that when you’re free from pain, that means you don’t need sex, you don’t need rock and roll, you don’t need food. The point is you don’t need any kind of pleasure anymore when you’ve had 100%. When you’re at freedom from pain, you by definition don’t have any cravings for additional pleasure, because you’re full at that point. It’s not necessarily tied to the type of pleasure. When Epicurus says “when you’re free from pain, you no longer need pleasure,” he’s meaning: when you’re free from pain, you’ve got 100% complete pleasure — so you don’t need any more, when you’re at 100% and when you’re complete. And of course, Cicero doesn’t explain it from that perspective, and he doesn’t let Torquatus come back in and say that either.
Joshua: Yeah, it’s important to understand that the Epicurean texts are very clear that once you’ve reached the limit of the quantity of pleasure — as he describes in the third Principal Doctrine — what you’re dealing with after that point is variation in pleasure. And while there’s nothing at all wrong with pursuing those variations in pleasure, you are at maximum. I mean, that is Epicurus on Pleasure 101.
Cassius: I’m afraid this is a source of great concern for a lot of people, and I think it leads to major problems. If you take the position that absence of pain means something other than pleasure, then you really do look at this last sentence in Section 128 and say: “Hey, this doesn’t make sense at all, because it says when we don’t feel pain, we no longer need pleasure — well, frankly, I thought we need pleasure all the time. What can you possibly be talking about?” If you think absence of pain is some other condition other than pleasure, then this really does cause lots of concern because it doesn’t clearly explain what he means.
But just as Aulus Gellius — whom Joshua was quoting earlier — was taking the position that Epicurus is not so stupid that he has to continuously point out the same thing over and over that is obvious to people — that’s what Epicurus is doing here. He said over and over and over again that pleasure is the end of life. He said that pleasure includes all of these things that everybody understands to be pleasure and the normal activities of life. He doesn’t every time he uses the word “pleasure” have to go back into that same explanation again. Especially when you’re writing a condensation type of letter where you’re trying to explain your philosophy in a short work, you just are not going to be able to use the same definition over and over again.
I’m reminded of the situation in Emily Austin’s book where she talks about natural but unnecessary desires. She said, “I just can’t write that phrase over and over and over again,” so she came up with “extravagant desires.” It — if I remember correctly — I know Dr. Austin has expressed reservations about that word and whether it completely encapsulates her point. And this may be a similar situation: when you abbreviate, when you condense things down, you have to rely on the intelligence of your reader to remember what you’ve previously said.
Joshua: Yeah, that’s exactly right. If I said, “Cassius, I’m just going to pop into the store to get bread,” you wouldn’t respond to me saying, “Well, your syllogism is incomplete. You haven’t told me that the store has bread. If you want to write a complete syllogism, then you have to include that as one of your premises.” I mean, that is a ridiculous approach to human life. It’s farcical, really — that this is the point that Cicero is going to make here.
And if you came back from the grocery store not only with sliced bread but also with hot dog buns and hamburger buns, I wouldn’t call you a liar and say you totally misrepresented the reason you went to the store because you came back with various forms of bread. But that’s the kind of thing that Cicero is doing here when he’s taking these very, very nitpicking definitions of words and using them in ways that Epicurus is not using them — to make them look bad.
Cassius: I think you’re right to say that Aulus Gellius has absolutely hit the nail on the head with that one. And if you came back from the grocery store not only with bread but with buns as well, I wouldn’t say you totally misrepresented your sentence. But that’s the kind of thing Cicero is doing here. Okay, let’s go ahead and take closing thoughts for the day. Martin, nothing to add today?
Martin: Nothing to add today. Thanks.
Cassius: All right. Thank you, Martin. Callistheni?
Callistheni: During this episode, I’ve been trying to follow these arguments and the rebuttals, and it came to me that perhaps creating some kind of a chart — because I’m sort of visual — if I could almost just see a list of all of this, it would help me. Because there’s so much going on here, there are so many different threads that we’re pulling on and going into. And also the question is, which of these might a modern person bring up? Like, which kinds of questions are still relevant for people who are unclear about the philosophy now?
Cassius: I think the majority of what we’re talking about is exactly the kind of issue that we continue to deal with. And maybe the most obvious one is that we talk about pleasure as the goal and pleasure as a central aspect of Epicurean philosophy, and many people have very different definitions of what that word “pleasure” means. They disagree with using the word “pleasure” as the goal of life. And I don’t think I can think of any more common controversy in discussing Epicurus than that issue. And that is exactly what Cicero is arguing about.
Joshua: I just want to again sort of plug this book by Aulus Gellius, because I think it’s very clear on some of the problems that Cicero and Plutarch — we’ll probably have to go through Plutarch eventually — that Cicero and Plutarch are using in their criticism of Epicurus. And it’s striking to me because again, this is the second century, this is the Roman Empire in the second century, that even in the ancient world people were not immune to seeing clearly through what Cicero is doing here. I find that to be very cheering, actually — that not everybody was taken in by Rome’s great orator. There were people even then who were like: “This guy’s crazy for what he is demanding of Epicurus in just kind of casual speech. It’s ridiculous.” And to me, that one of the values of going through this is — I didn’t even realize how bad it was in the second book. Cassius, you’ve been telling us for weeks now that this was going to be somewhat difficult stuff, but I didn’t realize that Cicero was going to stoop to these levels.
Cassius: Anyway, much more to come. We’re on page 43 here, and I think this goes on to like page 70 or so. So there’s a lot more to cover. And it’s cheering, as you say, to realize that there are ancient authors as well as modern ones who can see through these arguments. But at the same time, it’s of course sobering to realize that Cicero’s position has been the prevailing position for two thousand years now.
Ultimately, though, we can come back and read this material and see through it, and we know there have been people throughout the ages who have done the same thing. And it’s a fascinating and enjoyable thing to do. It’s not sex, drugs, and rock and roll in that sense of the word “pleasure” — but it sure is pleasurable in other ways, to show what Epicurus was talking about when he said you don’t limit the word “pleasure” so narrowly. And of course, what’s the big issue anyway behind all this? He’s attacking the word “pleasure” because he wants to substitute virtue, rationalism, some type of theism, as the real basis of morality instead of pleasure. He’s pulling out every weapon in his arsenal to discredit Epicurus, and it takes fighting back to be able to defend yourself and understand why Cicero’s position is not correct.
Okay, with that we’ll close for this week. We’ll come back next week. In the meantime, join us at the forum and we’ll talk about this and anything else you’d like to talk about regarding Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll see you next week. Bye.