Episode 202 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 10 - The Animality Argument
Date: 11/22/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3505-episode-202-cicero-s-on-ends-book-two-part-10-the-animality-argument/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Continuing through Cicero’s De Finibus Book Two, sections 10–11, focusing on Cicero’s attack on Epicurus’s “animality argument” — the Epicurean claim that observing young animals and infants, before they are corrupted, reveals that pleasure is the natural goal of all living things. Cicero challenges this on two fronts: that animals may not truly pursue pleasure but only self-preservation; and that even if one should look to young animals for guidance, what they show is desire for security rather than stimulated pleasure.
Discussion covers: Manius Curius, the incorruptible Roman hero Cicero invokes as a contrast to Epicurean pleasure-seeking; Cicero’s name-dropping as a method of argument (and why Torquatus critiqued this in Book One); the taxonomy of positions on the summum bonum — Aristippus (active pleasure), Hieronymus (absence of pain), Zeno (virtue alone), Callipho (virtue + pleasure), Diodorus (virtue + absence of pain) — and why Epicurus, by combining active pleasure and absence of pain under the single word voluptas, appears to Cicero to be inconsistent; the ambiguous sentence “Yet this is the source from which must needs flow the whole theory of good and evil” (ironic or sincere?); and whether Cicero’s objection is that one should not look to animals at all, or that one should look to animals but read them differently.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
So, Episode 202 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 in Book Two of On Ends. We’re going to be continuing along with that today, and there are many more pages of this left. So we’ll have a lot of opportunity to continue to get into the mind of Cicero and the ancient Epicureans as well — Cicero knew them personally and was trying to persuade them to fall away from the Epicurean movement of his time.
Last week, we had a particularly complicated opening sentence in section 10, in which Cicero is again setting forth his complaints about the way Epicurus is defining pleasure. He’s saying that Epicurus’s statements about the different types of pleasure — the normal state which Epicurus considers to be pleasure in addition to the active stimulations — result in Cicero saying that “What no one ever called pleasure, he calls so. He rolls two things into one.” And then the active form of pleasure — for thus Cicero describes these “sweet and sugared pleasures, so to call them” — he sometimes so refines it that you think Manius Curius is the speaker, while at other times he so extols them that he declares himself without even an idea of what the good is beyond this. “When we get to this kind of language, we should put it down not by philosophy, but by the censor, for its fault is not a matter of language only, but a matter of morality.”
So that’s where we were last week — with this general condemnation of Epicurus giving his blessing to all forms of pleasure. Cicero is next going to turn his attention to Epicurus’s argument that this is justified by looking at the young of all species, the earliest life of all living creatures.
So before we go into new text for this week, let’s see if anyone has anything else to say from last week about Cicero’s allegation that Epicurus’s combining of these types of pleasure into the single name of pleasure is justified. Whether it is acceptable to talk about pleasure at one time in a way that makes you sound like a Stoic yourself — that’s the reference to Manius Curius — while at other times in a way that makes you sound like you’re talking about what is the equivalent to us of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Can you combine both perspectives under the single name of pleasure?
So, Cassius, I looked up this Manius Curius. Cicero, as you said, is going to mention a lot of names. One of his complaints about the Epicureans before the whole Torquatus monologue takes off was that he never hears on the lips of the Epicureans the stories of illustrious men. And one of those virtuous deeds comes from this Manius Curius, who was described as having been incorruptible and frugal. Allegedly, when the Samnites sent ambassadors with expensive gifts to influence him in their favor, they found him sitting by the hearth roasting turnips. He refused the gifts, saying that he preferred ruling the possessors of gold over possessing it himself. So the image that Cicero wants you to have is of someone incorruptible. And what he’s saying is: when Epicurus refines pleasure into merely absence of pain and frugality and so forth, he’s putting on the airs of someone talking about virtue without actually mentioning her name. Cicero wants it stated clearly that pleasure is not to be pursued, that the passions need to be ripped out by the roots, and that reason and virtue alone are the standard.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, let me comment on something you just said about looking back at the beginning of Book One and the way Cicero is structuring some of his argument by constantly referring to these great men. He’s got a whole litany of examples from great men of Roman history that he constantly brings up. My understanding of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and the way he and other philosophers of that variety approach morality is that ultimately they’re very wishy-washy about what virtue really is. And they end up talking about, well, you determine what’s virtuous by looking at the examples of other great men from our society. It’s sort of a circular argument, because it never establishes where they got their ideas of virtue from. But it is a strong theme of their approach that you should just follow the leader in determining how to live, and not examine it yourself, but look at people who you somehow automatically recognize as being great people whom you should emulate — without ever again examining the foundation of what it is you’re emulating.
And so it’s interesting to consider how effective that technique is. It’s certainly common and something that can be persuasive when you flood the zone with example after example of people you have this impression should be emulated. It’s certainly something that needs to be met by the argument that you should examine the basis by which they reached their decisions before you conclude that you should emulate them.
Joshua:
Yeah, it is very important. And it’s very typical of the work of his school. In fact, Plutarch in the early second century would go on to write one of the most important books of its kind on this — called the Parallel Lives or Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans — in which there are 23 pairs of biographies. He takes one notable Greek and one notable Roman: Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, Demosthenes and Cicero, and so forth. And the purpose of this was to instruct people in virtue essentially by looking at the way that these famous figures — names that everyone knows — lived. But it’s not a good idea just to play follow the leader and do exactly what other people are doing without examining the reasons why they did what they did themselves.
In fact, continuing that for a moment more — that’s what Torquatus did in regard to his own ancestors. When Cicero brought them up and said “you should be following your ancestors,” Torquatus responded by explaining that he could reconcile his philosophy and hoped that his ancestors had a similar reasoning — because if they hadn’t had some similar reasoning for the actions that they did, then he would have been horrified. They have to have a reason. Everybody has a reason. And the reason is not to follow the leader and become a lemming into what other people are doing.
We could probably use the example of Lucretius here, who did cite the story of one illustrious man in particular, Agamemnon, as being a reason why we should be critical of the claims made by supernatural religion. He says that religion is so potent in persuading to evil deeds that Agamemnon was driven to sacrifice his own child. So that’s exactly the kind of thing we’re talking about here. But the difference is that Lucretius is using this story to cut to the root of a problematic idea, not merely to say “here is what you should do” or “here is what you should avoid.”
Cassius:
All right, let’s move on in section 10. As I’m reading it now, it looks like there’s a sort of choppy transition here because Cicero moves from a cut against Epicurus — saying that he’s just anxious to get pupils so that those who want to be profligates can become philosophers — and then after that sentence, he turns without transition to apparently quoting Epicurus, or at least paraphrasing what Torquatus has already said. Because the topic he brings up is: “The beginning of the supreme good, I believe, is looked for in the earliest life of living creatures.” And when he says “I believe,” I have to think that’s a reference to Torquatus and Epicurus, because Cicero, I don’t believe, takes that position.
He continues: “As soon as the creature is born, it rejoices in pleasure and yearns for it as being good and rejects pain as evil. He says, however, that creatures which are as yet uncorrupted give the best judgment about things evil and things good. You yourself have placed the matter in this light, and the phrase belongs to your school. How many faults there are here? By what kind of pleasure shall a whining babe determine the supreme good and evil? By the steady pleasure or the active? If by the steady kind, of course the aim of nature is that her safety should be secured — and this we grant. If by the active — which after all is what you say — then no form of pleasure will be disreputable so that it should be neglected. While at the same time, the creature you imagine as newly born does not start from the supreme form of pleasure, which has been defined by you as consisting in absence of pain. Yet Epicurus did not look to babes or even to animals, though he thinks them the mirrors of nature, for any proof to show that they, under the guidance of nature, desire this kind of pleasure which consists in absence of pain.”
Joshua:
Okay. So Cicero has turned to criticizing Epicurus’s primary proof that pleasure is desirable — the example that Torquatus told us Epicurus looks to, namely the young of all beings before they are corrupted. And Cicero is arguing that that’s not true. “We the Platonists believe that yes, the aim of nature is to preserve herself, and we agree with you on that. But nature doesn’t tell the young of all beings to go running around chasing sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”
You know, I was very confused when I first read this because I think Cicero is fundamentally confused about something. He’s going to go on here in a little bit to say that no, what newborn babes and animals actually pursue is their own security — not pleasure, and certainly not absence of pain. But I think this is just confusion, because just to pursue security is to anticipate pain and avoid it where possible. Is that not true?
Cassius:
Sure it is. I think the issue in contention is the “both” aspect of everything here. Yes, we do pursue security. Yes, we do pursue having fun. And what Epicurus is doing is combining both of those under the single term of pleasure. And Cicero can disagree with that combination if he wants to. But it is true that we do both things and it’s not inconsistent that we are pursuing both.
Boy, that may take us back into that continuing question about whether somehow security in itself, stability in itself, is the ultimate goal — and we do all these other things just to pursue security — or whether we include every activity of life, not only the stimulations but also the normal condition, both under the umbrella term of pleasure. That’s still what we’re arguing about here. And Cicero has just found another way of striking at Epicurus’s definition.
Joshua:
Yeah. But what I would say to Cicero here is that the animal or the newborn child does pursue the stimulation of pleasure as well as absence of pain, because by pursuing its own security, it is by definition trying to avoid pain. So it is both kinds of pleasure. That’s what I would say in response to Cicero.
Cassius:
Yes. And this argument goes on for a while here. It’s almost like we should read the whole argument and then come back. But unless we sort of break it down it’s just going to be too much at one time.
So having said what we just said, let’s let Cicero continue. He says: “Yet Epicurus did not look to babes or even to animals, though he thinks them the mirrors of nature, for any proof to show that they, under the guidance of nature, desire this kind of pleasure which consists in absence of pain. Indeed, this pleasure — absence of pain — cannot stimulate our impulses, nor has this condition of freedom from pain any force whereby it may strike upon the mind. So Hieronymus ends in the same manner. But that condition which charms the sense by the presence of pleasure does strike upon the mind. So it is this condition which Epicurus always employs to prove that pleasure is naturally an object of desire, because it is the pleasure which consists in the activity that attracts to itself babes and animals alike, and not the other pleasure of the steady kind, which comprises only the absence of pain. How then is it consistent to say that nature starts from one kind of pleasure, and then to lay down another kind as constituting the supreme good?”
Joshua:
Okay. Well, the first thing to say is that both kinds of pleasure are pleasure and are the supreme good, right? The absence of pain — as the third Principal Doctrine says — is the limit of the quantity of pleasure. But pleasure, full stop, is the supreme good. If you want a full description of the life of pleasure, you have to go back to what Torquatus says in Book One, where he says: imagine a person living in the numerous and constant enjoyment of pleasures of both body and of mind, the anticipation of future pleasures, the remembrance of past pleasures, no fear of death, no fear of the gods. That would be a much more complete understanding of the word pleasure.
But of course, animals don’t approach it that way. What they are endowed with by nature and by their evolutionary heritage is instinct and also various biological processes that I’m not sure Cicero would have fully understood. When I think of things like the adrenaline response, for example — which is probably what he’s talking about when he’s talking about security, an animal running for its life from another animal — how inept would we have been endowed by evolution to engage in a hostile environment if we were incapable of anticipating pain, if we were incapable of anticipating predation? And so I keep going back to this because I think Cicero is just fundamentally confused on this point.
Cassius:
Yeah. Animals do not spend their time obsessing about the definition of the word pleasure and whether it’s right for them to both run from predators and sleep and have sex and do the different things that animals do. They don’t obsess about trying to decide whether one of those activities is the justification for the other. They don’t obsess about trying to fit everything within a word definition. They just do what comes naturally to them through nature. And they don’t question the desirability of what comes naturally to them through nature. They don’t apply to it some standard outside themselves. They don’t look to some god, they don’t look to some set of tablets handed down from a mountain supposedly telling them what to do. They’re just doing what comes naturally to them and they don’t question that.
I think it’s important that Cicero has again referenced Hieronymus here. He says “Hieronymus ends in the same way” about the way he’s defining absence of pain. Cicero has previously praised Hieronymus because apparently Hieronymus’s position was to say that absence of pain is the ultimate goal of life — but he divorced totally absence of pain from pleasure, and he therefore deprecated pleasure in the active sense. So he took sort of the opposite position from what the Cyrenaics had been doing, who had accepted only these stimulating pleasures as the goal.
So if you go either direction — if you split them apart — you’re going to run into these criticisms of inconsistency from Cicero. And to some extent the criticisms are probably valid if you do split them apart. You’ve got to have both of them supporting and coexisting and working with the other to form the complete life. Otherwise, “the house divided against itself will be destroyed.” You’ve got to consider both of them pleasure in order for your system to make sense and avoid this internal contradiction.
Joshua:
Cassius, our next section is section 11 here. And there’s a very good sentence on page 45, sort of in the middle of this section, where Cicero gives us sort of the overview of the nature of his problem. He says:
“There are thus three theories of ultimate good which have nothing to do with morality. One, that of Aristippus, who was interested in the stimulation kind of pleasure rather than the absence of pain kind of pleasure. The second, that of Hieronymus, who was interested in absence of pain but not in the stimulation of pleasure. And the third is that of Carneades.”
And Carneades apparently defended the combined view that the goal is virtue together with pleasure. His aim seems to have been to challenge the Stoics by showing that the considerations captured by the framework do not all point to the Stoic view. By defending the view that the goal is the actual enjoyment of natural advantages, Carneades probably intended to suggest that the considerations which support taking natural advantages as the object of our first natural impulse — as the Stoics did — also count in favor of taking them to be goods and therefore components of the end. So virtue and pleasure are both components of the telos for Carneades.
He goes on to mention several other figures: Palemo, Callipho, Diodorus. And then he adds in Zeno at the end — one view in which morality stands alone, of which Zeno is the author.
So that’s kind of the broad overview. And his problem, I think, partially with Epicurus, is that he’s trying to have one foot in both worlds — one foot in the world of the stimulation-type pleasure of Aristippus, and another foot in the world of Hieronymus, who advocated absence of pain but did not care about sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua. The name-dropping gets very confusing and hard for people who are not really into the reading of philosophy to follow. Let’s try to summarize these three. Is it a matter of virtue and pleasure and absence of pain being the three terms that people are combining in different ways?
Joshua:
Right. So one is active pleasure without any regard for absence of pain. Another one is absence of pain without any regard for active pleasure. And another one is virtue and pleasure combined as the goal. And then he has Zeno, which is virtue alone. So what are the possible options? Virtue, pleasure, and absence of pain?
Cassius:
Right. The three pure alternatives purely stated would be: pleasure, virtue, and absence of pain. And it’s possible to combine the three in certain ways, because given the examples we’re talking about — Callipho, for example, is joining virtue and pleasure; Diodorus is apparently joining virtue and freedom from pain; Aristippus, the Cyrenaics, proposed pleasure by itself; the Stoics say virtue by itself. Cicero is apparently willing to consider some combinations of virtue with other things. But he’s saying that Epicurus is advocating purely for the term pleasure. And under pleasure there would be another breakdown between active and at rest — if you’re Epicurus. But if you’re Cicero, he will not allow that.
Joshua:
Right. And what’s the upshot here? The upshot is he’s not writing against Hieronymus or Carneades or Aristippus or Zeno in Book Two. This is a book against the Epicureans. He’s taking Epicurus’s position and comparing it with a group of other philosophers. And basically the assertion — which he’s made elsewhere — is actually in section 10: he said this is not a matter for the philosophers. This is a matter for the censors. That Epicurus has no business parading in Athens on the turf of Plato and Aristotle and Socrates if he’s teaching libertinism and the grossest violations of morality in the pursuit of pleasure. This is what Cicero has been on and on about this whole time.
Cassius:
Right. And why don’t we take what I think is the concluding argument of this section as an explanation of what we’ve been talking about. Because what Cicero says next is: that while the other philosophers have been consistent with themselves, absolutely good in agreeing with their first principles, “yet Epicurus, after speaking of pleasure as the primary attraction, was bound to hold the same form of ultimate good with Aristippus if he meant the same kind of pleasure. While if he meant by pleasure what Hieronymus held, he would have followed the same course as Hieronymus, that of laying down that form of pleasure to be the primary attraction.”
So he’s criticizing Epicurus for this: if you want to be pursuing pleasure as the ultimate good, then you stay with Aristippus because that’s being consistent. If you want to be saying freedom from pain is the ultimate good, then you stay with Hieronymus because you’re being consistent. What you don’t do is take two separate terms that mean different things and jam them both into a single term and say that’s your ultimate good — you’re not being consistent.
Joshua:
Yeah. Epicurus is here, in Cicero’s view, trying to have his cake and eat it too. That’s Cicero’s main objection here to the whole pleasure ethics of Epicurus.
Cassius:
Right. Before we go further into section 12, I think we skipped over at the beginning of section 11 a little more continuation of Cicero’s argument against looking to young of all species. Rather than omit that, let’s go back to it for just a moment because Cicero says:
“I believe animals have no power of judging, since though they be uncorrupted, yet they may be corrupt — just as one stick is bent and twisted intentionally while another grows in that way. So the nature of beasts is not indeed corrupted by bad training, but it’s corrupt in its own constitution. Nor does nature impel the babe to desire pleasure, but merely to love itself and desire himself to remain sound and secure.”
And then he continues: “Whether pleasure is one of the primary natural endowments or not is a great problem. But to suppose that the primary natural endowments comprise nothing but pleasure — putting aside our limbs, our senses, our intellectual activity, soundness of body, health — is in my opinion the extreme of ignorance.”
Joshua:
Okay, I don’t want to skip that because it sounds like what we’re submitting here is that the “extreme of ignorance” is Cicero alleging that Epicurus does not include the limbs, the senses, intellectual activity, soundness of body, health, and so forth in the definition of pleasure — because that’s exactly what he’s doing in combining both into the word pleasure. He’s including intellectual activity, he’s including soundness of body and health in his ultimate good of pleasure.
What I think Cicero is saying here is that Epicurus is claiming that pleasure — the choice for pleasure in the avoidance of pain — is the primary natural endowment of animals, of newborn children. And Cicero is saying: you Epicurus, you’re saying that pleasure is the primary natural endowment, but what about everything else that goes into the makeup of a living thing? Our limbs, our senses, our intellectual activity, soundness of body, health — do these not factor into your consideration of the life of lower forms of animals or of newborn children?
Yes, of course they factor into the life of animals — and that’s why Epicurus incorporates them into his definition of pleasure. What Cicero is saying here is that he’s not even sure whether pleasure should even be considered as a primary natural endowment of animals. He’s saying that this is a great problem. But it was obvious to Lucretius that pleasure and pain were primary natural endowments of animals — because when he pointed to the mother cow searching for its lost calf, there was the remembrance of pleasure and there was also the feeling of grief and great pain.
Cassius:
I was very confused when I read this because I think Cicero is fundamentally confused about something. The whole section about “animals may be corrupt” — what an excellent Calvinist Cicero would have made. Does “corrupt” mean shamelessly pursuing pleasure, as he thinks “corrupt” means? I’m looking at this whole section as Cicero saying that you should not be looking to young animals in the first place because animals are corrupt. And so in the end Cicero is saying that whether pleasure is a primary attribute of nature is a problem, but certainly it’s not the only attribute of nature, because these other things are included as well.
Joshua:
The way I’m reading this paragraph is that Cicero — following Aristotle here — says you have to look to animals, you have to look to people for your understanding of the nature of good and evil. But then at the bottom, he doesn’t even know whether pleasure is a primary natural endowment. And so his criticism of Epicurus, in my reading, is not that he’s looking to the animals for his guide to what is good — it’s that he’s imputing to the animals something that Cicero thinks might even be foreign to their nature: namely, pleasure. “No more does nature impel the babe or the animal to desire pleasure.” And that’s what Epicurus’s pleasure ethics rests on.
Cassius:
Yeah I agree with you there, Joshua, that Cicero is making an argument here that strikes at the foundation of Epicurus’s whole argument that we’re supposed to look to animals. And I’m questioning whether Cicero is saying “Epicurus, you’re wrong to look at young animals as the basis of your virtue” — or whether Cicero is saying “Epicurus, you’re looking at the young of all animals wrong. I agree we should look at the young of all animals, but when you look at them you see them doing something other than pursuing pleasure.”
He could be saying “Epicurus you’re looking at young animals wrong” or he could be saying “Epicurus you’re wrong to be looking at young animals.” I’m not entirely clear which of the two of those he’s doing.
Joshua:
Cassius, let me say something here. It occurs to me that when he says “yet this is the source from which must needs flow the whole theory of good and evil” — is he sarcastic in that sentence, or is he saying it factually?
Cassius:
That’s a very good point. He might be saying that ironically, and then the problematic part is that Palemo and Aristotle before him believed the primary endowments to be as he states them. Maybe his attack on Epicurus here is multi-layered. He’s saying: you shouldn’t look to the animals for your understanding of good and evil. If we take that “yet” sentence to be said sarcastically — we shouldn’t take them as the standard — but even if we did take the lives of animals and newborn children as the standard, it still wouldn’t say what you Epicurus are trying to make it say.
Joshua:
Yeah, that’s where I think we’re together. Because my understanding of the Stoics ends up that they tried to say that we are following nature. And so if the Stoics were arguing that we are following nature, then the Stoics are going to say: well, we’re following the nature including the young of all species. And what we’re saying about the young of all species is right, and what you’re saying about the young of all species, Epicurus, is wrong. So there’s several things going on here potentially anyway. And it’s all depending on whether that “yet” sentence is ironically sarcastically stated, or whether it’s a flat statement of fact.
I think we were totally going fine discussing the three breakdowns even though we’re not going to go into tremendous detail about all these names that Cicero drops. We properly see that you can have virtue or you can have pleasure or you can have absence of pain as your definition of the ultimate goal. And Cicero is criticizing Epicurus for singling out the word pleasure as the only description of his ultimate goal. But as far as what Cicero is saying about looking to the animals — we’re going to have to assign that as extracurricular reading material and come back to discuss whether Cicero is saying “it’s okay to look to young animals but get it right and see that they pursue self-preservation instead of pleasure” — or whether he’s saying “don’t look at the young of all animals because they’re corrupted” — or even “don’t look at the young of all animals, but even if you did you would be wrong.”
Cassius:
Yeah. I have a feeling that one — “don’t look at them, but even if you did you would be wrong” — is probably the most accurate. Okay, so we’re going to come to an end for today’s episode. Cicero is going to continue on in this section and this time he’s going to cite an example from Roman jurisprudence and the way Roman judges and courts talked about jurisdiction, and he’s going to wrap that into the discussion of whether we should be looking to the young of all species for an answer to these questions. But we will defer the extension of that into next week.
In the meantime, we’ll see if anyone has closing thoughts for today. Martin, anything for today?
Martin:
Nothing for me today.
Cassius:
Okay. Callistheni?
Callistheni:
I think the most interesting part that came up for me today was creating these different categories and kind of pointing out that there were various philosophers at the time that held various opinions regarding virtue, pleasure, and absence of pain — all the names that Joshua was kind of bringing up — which reminded me how all of this is embedded in the ancient philosophy of the time. And so as we’re studying Cicero, this is kind of making it more evident about how the different philosophies were interacting with each other.
Cassius:
Yeah. This is a lot of depth and detail here that you can’t get from just reading the Letter to Menoeceus and stopping.
Joshua:
Yeah, the arguments are very intricate and very difficult to parse, and we’re trying to do it in real time. But I am quite excited actually, because what we’ve got coming up in section 13 is some very, very good stuff. But I have about nine tabs open so I’m very ready to argue when we get back to it next week. This section was quite difficult, but it’s such an important central claim of Epicurus that he’s criticizing that it will bear further discussion on the podcast and on the forum as to whether we should look to the young of all beasts for our understanding of the nature of the good.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua. That’s exactly the point. A good place to end the episode today. We constantly refer to Epicurus’s argument that the foundation of the view that pleasure is the good comes from observing nature and observing the young of all species before they have been corrupted. But Cicero is not accepting that argument — in fact he’s fairly emphatically challenging it. He’s saying it’s “a great problem” how to evaluate the role of pleasure as a primary endowment of nature, and whether we should follow that as an example. And yet that is what Epicurus is laying out as the foundation of his philosophy.
Where you end up coming down on that argument might well be the number one question about whether you accept Epicurus’s philosophy as valid. If you don’t accept that you should look to the young of all animals — if you say “why would you look to a baby who doesn’t have good judgment, why don’t you want to look to people who are mature, to the great men of Athens and Rome who have come before us?” — that’s Cicero’s position. So we’ll come back and examine those questions further next week.
In the meantime, please visit us on the forum and let us know what you think — in particular on page 44 of the Reid edition, section 11 in Book Two of Cicero’s On Ends. We look forward to your comments on that and to talking further about these things next week. Until then, bye.
Joshua:
Bye.
Martin:
Bye.