Episode 204 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 12 - More On The "Jurisdiction" Question

Date: 12/09/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3562-episode-204-cicero-s-on-ends-book-two-part-12-more-on-the-jurisdiction-question/

Summary

Continuing De Finibus Book Two, sections 13–14. The episode opens with an important clarification carried over from last week: Cicero framed the jurisdiction question as being about the senses, but Epicurus’s canon has three legs — sensations, feelings of pleasure and pain, and the prolepseis (anticipations) — and Cicero’s argument would need to deal with all three. DeWitt’s chapter on “Sensations, Anticipations, and Feelings” is quoted, including his warning against reducing Epicurus to a simple empiricist.

Key threads: Torquatus’s three-way division in Book One section 9 on how to prove that pleasure is desirable (Epicurus himself just pointed; some Epicureans added rational arguments; Torquatus’s own position required elaborate reasoning); Jackson Barwis’s claim that words can never bridge the gap to feeling; Hume’s is-ought problem and the “rational ought” solution (“if you want to live the blessed life, pursue pleasure”).

In section 13, Cicero says “neither the shape of the human body nor reason gives any indication that man came into existence for the sole purpose of enjoying pleasure.” Cassius’s reply: we didn’t come into existence for any purpose — this is the Epicurean answer, shared with Lucretius and Darwin. The Douglas Adams puddle analogy (shared by forum user Tao Fi) is cited. In section 14 Cicero frames the final contest explicitly: this is no longer a comparative survey of philosophical schools, it is virtue versus pleasure, and “unless we refute the Epicureans we must turn our backs upon all virtue, all honor, all true merit.” Chrysippus is quoted as saying the entire decision about the supreme good is involved in this one opposition. Cassius also mentions his new “pie chart of pleasure” video as a way of visualizing the Epicurean conception that all experience falls into either pleasure or pain with no third option.

Transcript

Cassius:

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 our discussion of Book Two of Cicero’s On Ends. We’re continuing to use the Reid edition and we’re on page 47 of that edition, which is designated as Section 13. Last week our discussion was focused on Cicero’s question: what has jurisdiction? What has the right, what has the ability, what has the authority to pronounce on what is the supreme good of life?

We started out with Cicero arguing that Epicurus was wrong to place this authority in the senses. And to expand on that before we go further — it’s not entirely clear that the senses are the only thing that Epicurus was using to reach his determination that pleasure is the good. Because of course the Epicurean canon is composed of three sections, of which the five senses are only one of the three. The other two legs of the Epicurean canon are the prolepseis, or the anticipations, and then a separate feeling of pleasure and pain.

So in thinking about our discussion from last week, I wanted to bring this up to start: when you question where Epicurus gets his deduction, he’s certainly looking at the young of all species and observing these things. But whether that visual look is all that is involved is a separate question, because the other two legs of the canon work together with the five senses.

We talked a lot last week about DeWitt’s chapter 7 on the canon, reason, and nature. However, we did not really go back into chapter 8, which is entitled “Sensations, Anticipations, and Feelings.” Let me read the first paragraph of that chapter. DeWitt says: “The criteria are three, but the prevailing custom is to reduce them to one by merging the anticipations and the feelings with the sensations. This error arises from classifying Epicurus as an empiricist, ascribing to him belief in the infallibility of sensation, and then employing this false assumption as a major premise. The three criteria are neither three aspects of a single capacity, nor yet three discrete capacities which function separately from one another. To Epicurus, body and soul are corporeal. They are also coterminous. Consequently, all reactions of the individual to his environment are total or psychosomatic. Thus, in the case of every reaction, nature is always alert to register approval or disapproval by the signals of pleasure and pain. This is the function of the feelings and the meaning of the canon.”

Cicero does not make that detailed observation here about how Epicurus is arriving at his conclusion that pleasure is the ultimate good. It would seem likely that Epicurus is also consulting the prolepseis, but also something that Epicurus has distinguished as a separate independent faculty — this feeling of pleasure and pain which nature has given to us. In fact, when you think back, Torquatus has said “you look at the young of all species,” and then right after that Torquatus makes the observation: “What faculties does nature give to us by which to determine what to choose and avoid, other than pleasure and pain?” So that in itself could be a separate reference to talking about the feeling of pleasure and pain rather than just the sensations.

But I don’t want to go on to another section without seeing if anybody has any comment on that.

Joshua:

Yes, Cassius. It’s certainly true that Epicurus has a canon made of three parts — the senses, the feelings, and the prolepseis or anticipations. So to say that it is the senses alone that determine our knowledge of the good would be wrong. The interplay of those three faculties is what we use to determine almost everything that we can know. And while the senses are often given pride of place, any conversation about pleasure or pain has to come back to the feelings, because the feelings are the experience of pleasure and pain as it registers in our consciousness or in our body. So without all three, it kind of doesn’t work.

One of the problems — we talk about Frances Wright’s book A Few Days in Athens frequently — and my major criticism of that book is that she tends to make Epicurus out to be an empiricist, relying solely on sense perception as the grounds of epistemology. And it’s just not true to the ancient texts.

Cassius:

Yeah. Cicero finds it very easy to dismiss Epicurus’s argument because he shifts over to start talking about reason and the different things that reason does. In fact, one more sentence I’ll quote from what Cicero says in approximately line 37: “On what do the senses decide? On sweet and bitter, smooth and rough, nearness and distance, rest and motion, the rectangular form and the circular.” So Cicero is trying to limit Epicurus’s judge to the five senses, saying that the five senses will give us information about whether something is bitter or sweet or smooth or rough — these very concrete attributes. But implicit in Cicero’s argument is that the senses don’t have the reasoning ability or anything further than just registering a direct reaction to something like smooth or rough. And if you were to stop there and looking at Epicurus’s theory about how you derive the ultimate good, you would not be doing justice to Epicurus.

Joshua:

There is a passage in Book One of On Ends in the Torquatus section where he kind of deals with this question directly. Torquatus says in Book One, section 9, I think it is: “He [Epicurus] sets out to prove as follows: every animal, as soon as it is born, seeks for pleasure and delights in it as the chief good while it recoils from pain as the chief evil, and so far as possible avoids it. Thus it does as long as it remains unperverted at the prompting of nature’s own unbiased and honest verdict. Hence Epicurus refuses to admit any necessity for argument or discussion to prove that pleasure is desirable and pain to be avoided. These facts he thinks are perceived by the senses, as that fire is hot, snow white, honey sweet — none of which things need to be proved by elaborate argument; it is enough merely to draw attention to them. For there is a difference he holds between formal syllogistic proof of a thing and a mere notice or reminder. The former is the method for discovering abstruse and recondite truths; the latter for indicating facts that are obvious and evident. Strip mankind of sensation and nothing remains.”

And then he goes on to point out that there has been a later development in Epicureanism regarding the canon. He says some Epicureans would add rational arguments to prove that pleasure is desirable. And then Torquatus himself says that observing that a great many philosophers advance a vast array of reasons to prove why pleasure should not be counted as a good, he considers that Epicureans had better not be too confident of their case and that they require elaborate and reasoned argument and abstruse theoretical discussion.

Cassius:

So we have three systems here: Epicurus himself just pointing, some Epicureans adding rational arguments, and Torquatus calling for elaborate reasoned argument. I’ve always interpreted this section of Torquatus as a real potential issue within the Epicurean school — that these later Epicureans were deviating from what Epicurus himself had thought, and that this deviation was not an improvement but was a backsliding. Because you don’t have the ability to reason yourself to a conclusion. You cannot feel based on reason.

There’s a section I like to quote from an author by the name of Jackson Barwis. His position was that no matter how much reason and words you put into trying to convince someone of something, if they cannot feel the pleasure of the concept of benevolence, they will never understand the concept of benevolence. If they cannot feel the pain of injustice, they will never really feel and understand the concept of injustice. Simply, in the end, words are never sufficient to bridge this gap to feeling. I’ve always taken the position that that’s the direction Epicurus is going in here — that words and logic will never get you to the position of arriving at this supreme good in the way that he is doing.

Maybe one thing I would say more confidently is that although I may not understand the precise words that Epicurus is using, he seems to be very clearly ejecting propositional logic as his method of determining what the ultimate good is.

Joshua:

Cassius, let me say one more thing before we go on. Something here in the Letter to Menoeceus caught my eye, and it relates to something we discussed at length last week — the problem from David Hume. I just want to relay that there is a kind of logical out if you want to tackle that problem. Epicurus makes it relatively clear here in paragraph 129. He says: “And for this cause we call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life. For we recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us, and from pleasure we begin every act of choice and avoidance, and to pleasure we return again, using the feelings as the standard by which we judge every good.”

So the question now is: do you want to live the blessed life? And if the answer to that is yes, you now have a rational ought for pursuing pleasure. Hume’s is-ought problem is not fatal to that line of argument, because we’re making an argument based on a rational ought rather than an absolute moral ought.

Cassius:

I do think it’s an important question, Joshua. What you’ve just said adds to the discussion, because you have to have some kind of position on these issues or you’re going to be totally paralyzed. Hume’s approach can be paralyzing, and to some extent I think that’s all the refutation of Hume’s approach that you really need. You cannot survive, you cannot live if you are paralyzed. You have to come out of that paralysis at some point. You have to make decisions and you have to decide that your life is worth living. And I think Epicurus is saying: you ultimately decide that your life is worth living on these natural — I would dare say emotional — grounds. You have to feel that your life is worth living, or ultimately if you reduce just to logical reasoning you will slide further and further backward and downward. It’s the feeling of pleasure at that gut level that ultimately justifies everything else.

Cassius:

Okay, let’s jump back into where we left off from last week. And I think we touched on this briefly but this is the good place to get back into it. Cicero says: “Neither the shape of the human body nor reason, preeminent among man’s mental endowments, gives any indication that man came into existence for the sole purpose of enjoying pleasures.”

And then: “Let us rather speak thus: a man has a vast amount of good who has no ill. Let us estimate happiness not by the banishment of evil but by the acquisition of good. And let us not seek this in inactivity — whether of a joyous kind like Aristippus or marked by the absence of pain as with Epicurus — but in action of some sort and reflection.”

So again Cicero is attempting to set action and reflection — thought and action — as what we are meant to be pursuing.

Two things occur to me. First of all, that first sentence he said: “neither the shape of the human body nor reason gives any indication that man came into existence for the sole purpose of enjoying pleasure.” As I said repeatedly last week, I actually agree that there is no reason to believe that we came into existence for the sole purpose of enjoying pleasure. We didn’t come into existence for any purpose. That’s kind of my response to that.

I would question what he says about reason being preeminent among man’s mental endowments. Although there is a place for reason, it’s kind of a secondary faculty. It’s not canonic or directly interfacing with nature, but it is secondary and has many uses.

But I totally agree that we didn’t come into existence for the sole purpose of enjoying pleasure. We didn’t come into existence for the sole purpose of acting virtuously either. We didn’t come into existence for any reason, because there was no reason. We are a result of a functionally endless line of causation that goes back into the forgotten depths of time. There is no mind that flicked the first domino and set this all in motion. To say that we came into existence with a purpose in view is the wrong question to ask.

Joshua:

Very good observations. And I think that is another statement by Cicero which makes the point that you cannot reason yourself to the conclusion that pleasure should be your goal.

Cicero then goes on and says that these same arguments he’s advancing can be used also against Carneades — who was apparently very much into opposing Stoicism because he was uniquely offended by the Stoics’ assertion of confidence in their conclusions about the supreme good. Carneades was willing to talk about pleasure accompanying virtue as part of the supreme good apparently to some extent, because he wanted to do battle with the Stoics — and not necessarily because he himself thought that pleasure was so desirable, since Carneades, being a skeptic, doesn’t take a position on anything. Cicero says that Carneades proposed a version of the supreme good “not so much with the purpose of securing approval as with the intention of combating the Stoics against whom he waged war.”

Cassius:

Let me pick up on a sentence starting on the bottom of page 47 and then going into 48. He says: “Those indeed who join to virtue either pleasure — the thing of all others which virtue holds in least esteem — or the absence of pain — which though it is unassociated with evil still is not the supreme good — make an addition which is not very plausible, yet I do not understand why they should carry out the idea in such a narrow manner.”

As I read this, we kind of get a sense of Cicero’s thought process and where he has gone horribly wrong. One of the biggest ways he’s gone horribly wrong is by assuming — in the face of all the evidence — that we were put here with a purpose in view, by an intelligent being with a design for nature and for human life. I don’t think there’s any good reason to believe that that’s the case. The Epicureans were taking these positions 200 years before Cicero. So it’s not an impossible conclusion to come to. It just takes looking at nature without prejudice as to our own place.

One of the ways this is sometimes put: when you look at the universe and when you look at the place of all of humanity in that universe, we are the tiniest, most insignificant speck on a cosmic scale. And when you say that the universe was built for us in view, the phrase is: the stage is too big for the drama.

We had a forum user, Tao Fi, who posted a very good video from Douglas Adams exactly on that point: that mankind, waking up in the world seeing that there was food for him to eat, shelter, water to drink, animal fur to wrap around his body at night — a man who woke up in that universe and thought “this world fits me very well, apparently it was made with me in view” — is rather like a puddle waking up, looking at the hole that it sits in, and thinking “this fits me so perfectly it must have been made with me in view.” It’s such a faulty premise, based on assumptions that are so wrong about the nature of things, and it underlies all of Cicero’s argument here.

Joshua:

And it underlies all of Cicero’s argument. He says: “reason leaves no place for anything other than virtue and morality to sit on the throne of the highest good, and I’m merely agreeing with reason,” and “I’m just going to assume that reason is right and I’m going to rule all these other philosophers out of court.” That’s the conclusion arrived at by a series of bad assumptions.

One of those bad assumptions is here at the top of page 48: he says that pleasure is “the thing of all others which virtue holds in least esteem.” What do you mean that pleasure is the thing which virtue holds in least esteem? Virtue has no capacity for reason, sensation, or perception of any kind. It’s ludicrous to even talk in these terms.

Cassius:

I particularly like your point — and Frances Wright has Epicurus say something similar in A Few Days in Athens — that it’s imagination unrestrained, going off on its own without the evidence of the senses or the rest of the canonical faculties, that creates this faulty reasoning.

Cicero comes to the end of section 13 by saying that all these other philosophers have been “cast into oblivion” since the time of Chrysippus. And now Cicero continues into section 14 by addressing Torquatus.

Joshua:

He says: “Your school then remains, for the struggle with the Academics is dubious, since they make no assertions, and as if hopeless of sure knowledge, declare themselves to follow whatever appears probable. With Epicurus the contest is the more troublesome on these grounds: that he is a compound of two kinds of pleasure, and that besides himself and his friends, many champions of his system have arisen since his time; and somehow or other the multitude, whose credit is insignificant but whose power is vast, acts on their side. Now, unless we refute this company, we must turn our backs upon all virtue, all honor, all true merit. So setting aside the systems of all the rest, there remains a contest not between me and Torquatus, but between virtue and pleasure — a contest of which Chrysippus, a man both shrewd and careful, does not think lightly. For Chrysippus considers that the entire decision about the supreme good is involved in the opposition between these two things.”

Cassius:

There’s a lot going on here. The first sentence: “Your school then remains, for the struggle with the Academics is dubious, since they make no assertions and as if hopeless of sure knowledge, declare themselves to follow whatever appears probable.”

This was nowhere more apparent to me than when I read Cicero’s other book, On the Nature of the Gods. Velleius was an Epicurean and a Roman senator, and his interlocutor in that case is a high priest named Cotta. And it’s interesting because what Cotta repeatedly says throughout the entire book is: “Well, I take no position. I’m not here to argue my case. I’m just here to argue with you.” A high priest in the Roman state religion, not willing to stake out a claim on the nature of the gods. That’s the Academic approach — merely to go to war with other systems of thought but not really willing to make any positive claims themselves.

And then Cicero rightly says: with Epicurus, the contest is the more troublesome, because Epicurus is a compound of two kinds of pleasure. One of the many citations that gives us a sense of the growth of Epicureanism in the Hellenistic period and later on in the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire is Cicero, who consistently complains that Epicurus is drawing in people from all quarters of society — particularly among the lower classes, the plebeians.

Cassius:

Now we’ve dealt with this extensively, but it occurs to me that I recently put out a video which was a first draft of a pie chart of pleasure as I’m beginning to understand it through an Epicurean lens. I’m quoting back again the part of DeWitt we’ve been talking about so often lately: “The extension of the name of pleasure to this additional condition of health and normal functioning was the major innovation of Epicurus as hedonism.” This “compound of two kinds of pleasure” — my gosh, it is so basic to everything we’ve been discussing for so many years. To recognize that Epicurus embraces both pleasures of active sensory stimulation as well as pleasures that do not involve active sensory stimulation — but can be more available, can be just as valuable, can be more valuable than sensory stimulation.

I did a pie chart video just to try to visualize how all of the experience of life is divided into pleasure and pain, how there is no third option. If there are only two feelings and none of your experiences in life are outside of those two feelings, then when you are not in pain you are in pleasure. And that extension of the term pleasure is very easy to see if you keep your focus on the fact that there are only two feelings.

This compound nature of pleasure is the signature of Epicurus, and it allows him to incorporate all of these other activities of life that are not immediately pleasures of active sensory stimulation. And that’s what Cicero is trying to focus on. “All you want is immediate enjoyment, Epicurus.” That’s simply not true. Epicurus embraces all of it as fully as anybody does, and he places them on a stronger foundation because he doesn’t hold them in suspicion like Cicero and these other people are doing.

Joshua:

Very good. And like I said, I do recommend people go look at that video. Cassius said that was a first draft and probably there will be changes made, but the conversation it has generated in that thread has already been very interesting.

So where Cicero turns next, he lays out the nature of the contest. Basically, if you take an overview of Cicero’s whole argument up until this point, he has been comparing Epicurean philosophy with other philosophers — trying to drill down on how he understands Epicurean philosophy. And what he basically is going to say here in the end of this paragraph is he’s now going to dispense with this comparative approach. He’s not going to be taking to task Hieronymus anymore or Carneades. This is now — he says very clearly here — “a contest not between me and Torquatus, but between virtue and pleasure.” That is the nature of this war.

Cassius:

What you just touched on — that we’ll get into next week — is this question: ultimately Epicurus is taking the position that there is nothing intrinsically valuable in life except pleasure, there’s nothing intrinsically bad in life other than pain. So Cicero thinks: “Well, I’m going to show you something other than pleasure which is valuable on its own.” But this position — that virtue, that reason, are the tools which we use to obtain pleasure and that they are not goals in and of themselves — over and over and over again, this becomes the question in these philosophical debates: are these things desirable on their own, or are they only desirable because of the reward that you get from them, because of the pleasure you get from them?

The position of Cicero: virtue is its own reward. And in fact, you’re being a jerk if you even suggest the possibility of getting a reward for being virtuous. It’s that distinction of perspective on life that we’ll be exploring further next week.

This is a great place to stop because Cicero has set it up in very dramatic terms here. It’s essentially a fight to the death between pleasure and virtue in Cicero’s way of looking at things. And many of the arguments he’s going to be making from here on out are almost emotion-based — attempted to try to get the reader to identify with virtue as the glorious term which should be set up as the goal, versus pleasure as the harlot, obnoxious, disreputable option. And everything in life seems to come down to this contest of virtue and pleasure.

Okay, let’s talk about any closing thoughts for what we’ve discussed today. Martin?

Martin:

I have nothing to add to this. Thank you.

Cassius:

Thank you, Martin. Callistheni?

Callistheni:

Thank you all for covering this. It’s very complex and I appreciate it all. It’s bringing up a lot of new thoughts. So thank you.

Cassius:

All right, Joshua.

Joshua:

Yeah. This has been a somewhat interesting passage we’ve been going through today, and I’m going to take Cassius at his word here — I hope we’re going to get past some of these fiddly little disputes and get into some of the real questions, like: is there absolute morality or is there not? Is there absolute justice or does justice exist by convention? Some of these deeper issues that are relevant to the study of Epicurean philosophy. So we can finally get on to some new material. That’s my hope for next week.

Cassius:

I don’t want to dash your hopes there, Joshua. I think to some extent there may be some improvement. But by setting out for example Chrysippus — the second founder of Stoicism, the ultimate Stoic man, who considers that virtue versus pleasure is the whole deck of cards in deciding what is the supreme good — I think what we’re going to see is Cicero will maybe get less technical. But it’s going to become even more intense in terms of where the ultimate philosophical divide resides. Are you the type of person — according to Cicero — who sees the glamor and the glory of virtue as the purpose of human life? Or are you the type of person who sees pleasure, the sluggishness and inactivity and idleness of pleasure? Which of those two types of people are you? That’s sort of the way Cicero is going to begin to separate things out as we go forward.

So there’s a lot more ahead, and we’ll begin to get into it in the middle of section 14 next week. Please drop by the forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about this or anything else related to Epicurean philosophy. Once again, thanks for your time today.

Transcript

Cassius: Welcome to episode 204 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 our discussion of Book Two of Cicero’s On Ends. We’re continuing to use the Rackham edition, and we’re on page 47 of that edition, which is designated as section 13.

Last week our discussion was focused on Cicero’s question: what has jurisdiction? What has the right? What has the ability? What has the authority to pronounce on what is the supreme good of life? We started out with Cicero arguing that Epicurus was wrong to place this authority in the senses. And to expand on that before we go further, it’s not entirely clear that the senses are the only thing that Epicurus was using to reach his determination that pleasure is the good. Because, of course, the Epicurean Canon is composed of three sections, of which the five senses are only one of the three sections. The other two legs of the Epicurean Canon are the prolepsis — or the anticipations — and then a separate feeling of pleasure and pain.

So in thinking about our discussion from last week, I wanted to bring this up to start: that when you question where Epicurus gets his deduction, he’s certainly looking at the young of all species and observing these things. But whether that visual look is all that is involved is a separate question, because the other two legs of the canon work together with the five senses. We talked a lot last week about DeWitt’s chapter 7 on the canon, reason, and nature. However, we did not really go back into chapter 8, which is entitled “Sensations, Anticipations, and Feelings.” Let me read the first paragraph of that chapter. DeWitt says:

“The criteria are three, but the prevailing custom is to reduce them to one by merging the anticipations and the feelings with the sensations. This error arises from classifying Epicurus as an empiricist, ascribing to him belief in the infallibility of sensation, and then employing this false assumption as a major premise. The three criteria are neither three aspects of a single capacity, nor yet three discrete capacities which function separately from one another. To Epicurus, body and soul are coterminous. Consequently, all reactions of the individual to his environment are total or psychosomatic. Thus, in the case of every reaction, nature is only alert to register approval or disapproval by the signals of pleasure and pain. This is the function of the feelings and the meaning of the canon.”

Now, DeWitt goes on much further, and of course, that’s just DeWitt’s opinion. DeWitt’s not the ultimate authority. He’s doing the same thing we’re doing, looking at the text and trying to make sense out of them. But Cicero does not make that detailed observation here about how Epicurus is arriving at his conclusion that pleasure is the ultimate good. It would seem likely that Epicurus is also consulting prolepsis, but also something that Epicurus has distinguished as a separate independent faculty — this feeling of pleasure and pain which nature has given to us. In fact, when you think back, Torquatus has said: “You look at the young of all species.” And then right after that, Torquatus makes the observation: what faculties does nature give to us by which to determine what to choose and avoid other than pleasure and pain? So that in itself could be a separate reference talking about the feeling of pleasure and pain rather than just the sensations.

That’s what we discussed last week. I don’t want to go on to another section, though, without seeing if anybody has any comment on that. Because Cicero had started section 12 with this statement, quote: “Now, as to his statement that pleasure is decided by the senses themselves to be good and pain to be evil, he, Epicurus, allows more authority to the senses than our laws grant to us when we act as judges in private suits.” And what I’m saying in introducing this back in this episode is that I think Cicero should have said that Epicurus places that jurisdiction not just in the five senses, but in the feelings of pleasure and pain and potentially in the prolepsis as well.

Joshua: Yes, Cassius — it’s certainly true that Epicurus has a canon made of three parts: the senses, the feelings, and the prolepsis or anticipations. So to say that it is the senses alone that determine our knowledge of the good, or that it is the senses alone that determine our knowledge of basically anything, would be wrong — because the interplay of those three aspects, those three faculties of human life, is how we determine almost everything that we can know. And while the senses are often given pride of place because we would be totally lost without them, any conversation of pleasure or pain has to come back to the feelings, because the feelings are the experience of pleasure and pain as it registers in our consciousness or in our body. So without all three, it kind of doesn’t work.

And one of the problems — we talk about Frances Wright’s book, A Few Days in Athens, frequently — and basically my major criticism of that book is that she tends to make Epicurus out to be an empiricist, that he’s relying solely on sense perception as the grounds of epistemology, or how we know what we know, and it’s not true to the ancient texts.

Yeah, Cicero finds it very easy to dismiss Epicurus’ argument, it seems like, because he shifts on over to start talking about reason and the different things that reason does. In fact, one more sentence I’ll quote from what Cicero says here — it’s on approximately line 37 — he says: “On what do the senses decide? On sweet and bitter, smooth and rough, nearness and distance, rest and motion, the rectangular form and the circular.” So Cicero is trying to limit Epicurus’ judge to the five senses and saying that well, the five senses will give us information about whether something is bitter or sweet or smooth or rough — these very concrete attributes like this. But implicit in Cicero’s argument is that the senses don’t have the reasoning ability or anything further than just registering a direct reaction to something like smooth or rough.

And if you were to stop there in looking at Epicurus’ theory about how you derive the ultimate good, then you would not, I think, be doing justice to Epicurus. And of course, Cicero’s not interested in doing justice to Epicurus. Cicero’s presenting what he thinks is useful for Cicero to present. But for those of us who are attempting to make the best use of Epicurean philosophy, it’s got to be critical to observe that the feeling of pleasure and pain and prolepsis — whatever those faculties are — they are involved in this process just like the five senses are.

There is a passage in Book One of On Ends in the Torquatus section when he kind of deals with this question directly. Torquatus says, in Book One, section 9, I think it is: “This he, Epicurus, sets out to prove as follows. Every animal, as soon as it is born, seeks for pleasure and delights in it as the chief good, while it recoils from pain as the chief evil, and so far as possible avoids it. Thus it does as long as it remains unperverted at the prompting of nature’s own unbiased and honest verdict. Hence, Epicurus refuses to admit any necessity for argument or discussion to prove that pleasure is desirable and pain to be avoided. These facts, he thinks, are perceived by the senses, as that fire is hot, snow white, honey sweet — none of which things need to be proved by elaborate argument. It is enough merely to draw attention to them, for there is a difference he holds between formal syllogistic proof of a thing and a mere notice or reminder. The former is the method for discovering abstruse and recondite truths, the latter for indicating facts that are obvious and evident. Strip mankind of sensation and nothing remains. It follows that nature herself is the judge of that which is in accordance with or contrary to nature. What does nature perceive, or what does she judge of, beside pleasure and pain, to guide her actions of desire and avoidance?”

And then he goes on to point out that there has been a later development in Epicureanism regarding the canon. He says: “Some members of our school, however, would refine upon this doctrine. These say that it is not enough for the judgment of good and evil to rest with senses. The fact that pleasure is in and for itself desirable, and pain in and for itself to be avoided, can also be grasped by the intellect and the reason. Accordingly, they — those other Epicureans — declare that the perception that the one is to be sought after and the other avoided is a notion naturally implanted in our minds.” And then he cites a second school within Epicureanism. He says: “Others again, with whom I, Torquatus, agree, observing that a great many philosophers do advance a vast array of reasons to prove why pleasure should not be counted as a good nor pain as an evil, consider that we had better not be too confident of our case. In their view, it requires elaborate and reasoned argument and abstruse theoretical discussion of the nature of pleasure and pain.”

Cassius: So we have three systems here, right? Torquatus almost says himself: “Strip mankind of sensation and nothing remains.” This is challenging, because what remains would be the feelings and, I guess, you could say the prolepsis. The trouble is determining how these three legs of the canon interact. Do the feelings and the prolepsis rely on the sensations? The second point here is: should we include reason and the intellect as being kind of proto-canonic or semi-canonic, as the second school of Epicureans wants to hold? Or should we say that none of this is self-evident and we have to support it by elaborate reasoned argument and abstruse theoretical discussion — which is what Torquatus seems to hold? So which of these is true to Epicurus, I guess, if any? That’s a challenge here in Book One, again, where this stuff is being channeled by Cicero, and it’s possible that he’s just not reading Epicurus charitably enough to find out what Epicurus is saying himself.

Yes — it sounds like in the opening section there that you were reading, he’s stating that Epicurus himself took the position that this logical argument is not necessary or perhaps even appropriate. And I think Joshua, that’s the point you made last week — that it seems like Epicurus is to some extent anticipating all these other later developments of the is-ought question and so forth, by simply planting his flag in the position that logic is never going to get us to this conclusion about where we want to be, about whether there is a place we want to be or not.

So I’ve always interpreted this section of Torquatus as a real potential issue within the Epicurean school, that these later Epicureans were deviating from what Epicurus himself had thought, and that this deviation was not an improvement but was a backsliding — again based on the same issue you brought up last week: that you don’t have the ability to reason yourself to a conclusion you cannot feel based on reason alone.

There’s a section I like to quote from an author by the name of Jackson Barwis. His position was that no matter how much reason and words you put into trying to convince someone of something — I think the example he uses is: if they cannot feel the pleasure of the concept of benevolence, they will never understand the concept of benevolence; if they cannot feel the pain of injustice, they will never really feel the concept and understand the concept of injustice — that simply, in the end, words are never sufficient to bridge this gap to feeling, to allow you to truly understand what is being discussed.

I’ve always taken the position that that’s the direction Epicurus is going in here — that words and logos will never get you to the position that you can ultimately come up with this supreme good in the way that he is doing. So there’s a lot of very interesting questions involved here, and we don’t have the text left to us to be as sure as we would like to be about what he even means by words like prolepsis and then the feelings of pain and pleasure. But maybe one thing I would say more confidently is that, although I may not understand the precise words that Epicurus is using here, he seems to be very clearly ejecting propositional logic as his method of determining what the ultimate good is.

Now, Torquatus and these later Epicureans appear to have been — perhaps under the influence of Stoic and other argumentation in the subsequent 200 years — to have decided that they were not going to abandon the field of logic and that they were going to also fight on that battlefield as well. But even in Torquatus’ own words here, he’s saying that Epicurus had not taken that position. Epicurus was not going to construct his ultimate good through syllogisms. He was going to construct his ultimate good through his own canon of truth, which was the five senses, the feelings of pleasure and pain, and the anticipations, which he did not equate with propositional logic — although he did consider reason to be playing a part in the process that’s involved.

All very complicated, but important to understand so that you can see how Epicurus’ position differs from what Cicero is advocating here. All the things that, especially you, Joshua, were saying last week are critical to remember. Epicurus is pointing a way out of this maze of varying opinions that everyone has by saying: in the end, if you’re going to live, you have to use the faculties that nature has given to you and apply them. As Lucretius says in Book Four, if you abandon confidence in the senses, you won’t even know whether to avoid stepping out of the way of a cart coming down the road. You won’t even be able to live if you don’t make practical decisions based on the faculties that nature has given to you.

Joshua: Yeah, and if we go to the Letter to Menoikeus, there is some discussion of these faculties. He says, for example, in paragraph 124 of the letter: “For the statement of many about the gods are not conceptions derived from sensation but false suppositions, according to which the greater misfortunes befall the wicked and the greatest blessings befall the good by the gift of the gods. For men, being accustomed always to their own virtues, welcome those like themselves, but regard all that is not of their nature as alien.”

So we have a little bit there about virtue as well — that people are drawn to false ideas about the gods because they have false ideas about virtues, and because they are not relying — you cannot rely, really, for information about the gods from the sensations. That has to come from the prolepsis. So we see there a limitation on sensation, but also a limitation on using virtue as your guide. If you use virtue as your guide, you’re going to reach the wrong conclusion — precisely the wrong conclusion that people do reach about the nature of the gods.

And then in the next paragraph, Epicurus in the Letter to Menoikeus says: “Become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us, for all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation.”

Now, you might think Epicurus there is saying that sensation is the standard by which we judge pleasure and pain. But if you go to paragraph 129, he says this: “And for this cause we call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life, for we recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us, and from pleasure we begin every act of choice and avoidance, and to pleasure we return again, using the feelings as the standard by which we judge every good.”

Cassius: One of the problems we consistently run into is that people go to Epicurus and sort of cherry-pick things, but we have to consider every claim made in any given text with the whole body of surviving literature in order to determine which ones are more likely to be genuine and which ones are more likely to be later additions — but also to determine whether your interpretation of a given passage really stands up to what we know about the whole philosophy generally. And that’s a difficult sort of lifelong project that we have to undertake. I know our recent discussion on how absence of pain fits into pleasure has been developing just here as we’ve been reading Cicero. And so it’s something — every time you come across some new fact or new text or new reading of an existing text, you have to compare it against every other claim within the context of Epicurean philosophy in order to understand which interpretation is more likely to be correct.

And Joshua, from all that opening we’ve had this morning, I’ll try to bring us back to where we are today by focusing on — I think the conclusion we come back to over and over is that, in fact, Epicurus is looking to nature as the standard. He is not thinking that there is a supernatural force, a supernatural standard, a non-natural standard. As you used the illustration last week, the bar of a certain length in Trafalgar Square — nature is not an intelligent judge which has set a purpose for our lives, but we are able by looking to nature to see what we are ourselves and how we can best operate. And it’s by no means easy, but it’s something that has to be done if you’re going to have a consistent approach to living happily.

I think we mentioned recently as well, Lucretius uses the phrase several times in his poem that it’s not the light of day that is going to answer these questions for you. Different translators use different words, but “scheme of systematic contemplation,” I think, is what Humphries uses. And others will just talk about the fact that it’s not simply looking at something that is going to give you the answer. You do have to have some kind of a process of understanding that goes along with seeing. You cannot simply look — you have to actually see, in the sense of taking in what you’re seeing to make sense of it. And Epicurus is not simply saying that, oh, you can just look and it’s self-evident without anything else going on. He’s got — just as with the nature of atoms explaining how the universe is made — he has a theory of how consciousness operates that is more than just the immediate physical operation of the eyes or the ears or the tongue.

Let me say one more thing before we go on. Because something here in the Letter to Menoikeus caught my eye, and it relates to something we discussed at length last week: the is-ought problem from David Hume. And I just want to relay that there is a kind of logical out if you want to tackle that problem. And Epicurus makes it relatively clear here in paragraph 129. He says: “And for this cause we call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life.”

Now, in the is-ought problem, David Hume identifies — I think correctly — that you cannot get from a description of how things are to an assertion of how things ought to be. I was on the Wikipedia page; there are loads of criticisms of this, and you can go read all of that if you want to. But one of the ways we can get around this problem is by pointing to these rational oughts. And Epicurus gives it to us right here. He says: “Pleasure is the beginning and the end of the blessed life.” So the question now is: do you want to live the blessed life? And if the answer to that is yes, you now have a rational ought for pursuing pleasure.

I don’t know if I’m making this more clear or less clear, and maybe I shouldn’t have even gone into it at all. But I think it’s worth saying, probably, that that is — and I think can and should be — enough to say: well, pleasure is what we should pursue if we want to be happier, if we want to live the blessed life. And the is-ought problem is not fatal to that line of argument, because we’re making an argument based on a rational ought rather than an absolute moral ought. I have a longer post on the thread for last week’s episode, and anyone who’s curious can go read that.

Cassius: I do think it’s an important question, Joshua, and I’m glad you’ve gone into it. Last week and what you’ve just said, I think, does add to the discussion, because you have to have some kind of an understanding or position on these issues or you’re going to be just totally paralyzed. Hume’s approach can be paralyzing. And to some extent I think that’s all the refutation of Hume’s approach that you really need. You cannot survive, you cannot live if you are paralyzed. You have to come out of that paralysis at some point. You have to make decisions. You have to decide to get out of bed in the morning. And you have to ultimately decide that your life is worth living.

And I think Epicurus is saying you ultimately decide that your life is worth living on these natural — I would dare say, maybe emotional — grounds. You have to feel that your life is worth living. Or ultimately, if you’re reduced just to logical reasoning, you will slide further and further backward and downward, because it’s the feeling of pleasure at that gut level that ultimately justifies everything else — is what I’m interpreting Epicurus to be saying.

Joshua: Yeah, and we can put this in sort of negative terms by saying that if you disagree with Epicurus, if you don’t want to live a blessed life and you want to live a life of abject misery, then you ought to pursue pain. So to put it in these terms, I think, is helpful. And Torquatus in Book One of On Ends, as we’ve been quoting recently, does a very good job of explaining the difference between the life oriented towards the pursuit of pleasure and the life oriented towards the experience of pain. And it should be clear from reading that passage which of these positions is preferable.

Cassius: Okay, let’s jump back into where we left off from last week. And I think we touched on this briefly, but this is a good place to get back into it. Cicero says: “Neither the shape of the human body nor reason, preeminent among man’s mental endowments, gives any indication that man came into existence for the sole purpose of enjoying pleasures.” And then he says: “Nor must we listen to Hieronymus, whose supreme good is the same as that which you sometimes or often insist — absence of pain — because if pain isn’t evil, it does not follow that to be free from that evil suffices to produce the life of happiness.”

So what we’re doing in all of these discussions is we’re battling these ideas that Cicero and these other philosophers have — that pleasure is not a central aspect of life. Cicero wants to add something in addition to this. He says: “Let any one of us rather speak thus: he has a vast amount of good who has no ill. Let us estimate happiness not by the banishment of evil but by the acquisition of good. And let us not seek this in inactivity — whether of a joyous kind like Aristippus or marked by the absence of pain as with Epicurus — but in action of some sort and reflection.” So again Cicero is attempting to set action and reflection as what we are meant to be pursuing.

Joshua: Two things occur to me. First of all, that first sentence you read — he says: “Neither the shape of the human body nor reason, preeminent among man’s mental endowments, gives any indication that man came into existence for the sole purpose of enjoying pleasure.” As I said repeatedly last week, I actually agree that there is no reason to believe that we came into existence for the sole purpose of enjoying pleasure. We didn’t come into existence for any purpose. That’s kind of my response to that.

I would question what he says about reason being preeminent among man’s mental endowments. Although there is a place for reason, it’s kind of a secondary faculty — it’s not canonic or directly interfacing with nature, but it is secondary and has many uses. But I totally agree that we didn’t come into existence for the sole purpose of enjoying pleasure. We didn’t come into existence for the sole purpose of acting virtuously either. We didn’t come into existence for any reason, because there was no reason. We are a result of a functionally endless line of causation that goes back into the forgotten depths of time. There is no mind — it doesn’t matter how far back you go — there’s no mind that flicked the first domino and set this all in motion. So to say that we came into existence with a purpose in view is the wrong question to ask. It’s the wrong way to look at this.

Cassius: Very good observations. And I think that is another statement by Cicero which makes this point: that you cannot reason yourself to the conclusion that pleasure should be your goal. And that’s where Torquatus is indicating that those later Epicureans may have come to accept some of that, but I don’t think that Epicurus would have done that. I don’t think you can reason yourself to the conclusion that pleasure is the supreme good.

Cicero then goes on and says that these same arguments that he’s advancing can be used also against Carneades. And we’re not going to go too much on a tangent off into Carneades, but we probably better make a couple of comments about what Cicero’s about to say here. Carneades apparently was one of these skeptical philosophers who came in the years between Epicurus and where Cicero was. And Carneades was very much into opposing Stoicism because he was apparently uniquely offended by the Stoics’ assertion of confidence in their conclusions about the supreme good. So Carneades was willing to talk about pleasure accompanying virtue as part of the supreme good, apparently to some extent because he was wanting to do battle with the Stoics — and not necessarily because he himself, Carneades, thought that pleasure was so desirable, because Carneades, being a skeptic, doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t have a position on anything himself other than perhaps that there’s nothing you can take a position on.

Carneades is an interesting figure who apparently didn’t leave any writings himself, but who was apparently also very influential during that time period — going through these other philosophers and attacking both the Stoics, eventually the Epicureans, and modifying what Plato and Aristotle had done previously. A very interesting figure. Cicero says that Carneades proposed a version of the supreme good not so much with the purpose of securing approval as with the intention of combating the Stoics against whom he waged war.

Joshua: Cassius, let me pick up on a sentence starting on the bottom of page 47 and then going into page 48. He says: “Those indeed who join to virtue either pleasure — the thing of all others which virtue holds in least esteem — or the absence of pain, which, though it is unassociated with evil, still is not the supreme good, make an addition which is not very plausible. Yet I do not understand why they should carry out the idea in such a narrow manner.”

So as we read this, we kind of get a sense of Cicero’s thought process and where he has gone horribly wrong. One of the biggest ways he’s gone horribly wrong is by assuming, in the face of all the evidence, that we were put here with a purpose in view — that we were put here by an intelligent being with a design for nature and with a design for human life. I don’t think there’s any good reason to believe that that’s the case. And it’s not just me sitting here in the 21st century, taking a position that’s easy to take because I live in a world where Charles Darwin and Stephen Jay Gould and so forth have published, and that’s how I can come to these positions. The Epicureans were taking these positions 200 years before Cicero. So it’s not an impossible conclusion to come to. It just takes looking at nature without prejudice as to our own place.

One of the ways this is sometimes put is that when you look at the universe and when you look at the place of all of humanity, all of human history, in that universe — we are the tiniest, most insignificant speck on a cosmic scale. And when you say that the universe was built for us in view, the phrase is “the stage is too big for the drama.” We think about 10,000 years, roughly, of recorded history, and that’s a really long time. And there have been a lot of people, and there have been empires rise and fall, nations that have come out of nothing, built themselves up, and then collapsed. And when you think about it in those terms — that long sweep of human history — it seems really significant and really important. But when you take a cosmic scale, imagine if you were standing on Venus just looking at the Earth the whole time — you wouldn’t notice that anything had changed, really. And that’s just a very close planet to us. You could go not just a different star system but a different galaxy, and take the view of our galaxy, and you wouldn’t even notice that we existed. And that’s just the nearest galaxy. And there are apparently an infinite number of galaxies — at the very least, more galaxies than the grains of sand in the Sahara. So it’s impossible to look at nature, really look at nature without a prejudiced view for your own interest and your own self-importance, and arrive at the conclusion that it was all built with us in view.

And we had a forum user, Tao Phi, who posted a very good video from Douglas Adams exactly on that point — that mankind, waking up in the world, seeing that there was food for him to eat, shelter, water to drink, animal furs to wrap around his body at night, and so forth — that a man who woke up in that universe and thought, “This world fits me very well. Apparently it was made with me in view” — it’s rather like a puddle waking up, looking at the hole that it sits in, and thinking, “This fits me so perfectly, it must have been made with me in view.” It’s such a faulty premise, based on assumptions that are so wrong about the nature of things. And it underlies all of Cicero’s argument here.

As we quoted repeatedly last week, he says: “Reason leaves no place for anything other than virtue and morality to sit on the throne of the highest good. And I’m merely agreeing with reason. I’m just going to assume that reason is right and I’m going to rule all these other philosophers out of court. Anyone who thinks that pleasure can sit on the throne even with morality, I’m ruling them out of court. I’m just assuming that they’re wrong.”

So there have been a series of bad assumptions that lead Cicero to his conclusions. And one of those bad assumptions is here at the top of page 48, when he says — talking about people who join to virtue either pleasure, the thing of all others which virtue holds in least esteem, or the absence of pain, which though it is unassociated with evil still is not the supreme good: “What do you mean that pleasure is the thing of all things which virtue holds in least esteem? Virtue doesn’t hold anything in least esteem. Virtue has no capacity for reason, sensation, perception of any kind.” So it’s ludicrous to even talk in these terms. But it comes from the kind of person who thinks that nature was built with a purpose in view, or that the universe was designed with an object toward which all things were tending. And it’s a completely faulty way to look at things, and it underlies everything that Cicero is saying here.

Joshua, I particularly like how you’ve described how faulty a way it is of looking at things. In A Few Days in Athens, Frances Wright has Epicurus say that it’s sort of the imagination unrestrained — that goes off on its own without the evidence of the senses or the rest of the canonical faculties — that creates this faulty reasoning. And that’s where Cicero goes for the remainder of this section 13. He starts out by saying that joining pleasure with the virtues is a narrow way of looking at things. And then he throws in a series of other people that he references over the next several sentences: Pyrrho, Aristo, Erillus, Chrysippus. And the faulty way of looking at things is to — I think from Epicurus’s point of view — divorce reason from the evidence of the senses and anticipations and the feelings of pleasure and pain.

Cicero criticizes all these other ways of categorizing things, of adding virtue to pleasure. And Erillus says that all importance is assigned to knowledge as a single kind of good. And Pyrrho and Aristo held that health and illness have absolutely no distinction of value between them. And he cites these people who are coming up with relatively ridiculous ideas of the ultimate good — at least ridiculous from the point of view of Epicurus and sort of the common view that all of these things need to be considered, and not just placing reason in the middle or letting reason decide that virtue is somehow — as you were saying a moment ago — an ultimate arbiter, even though virtue doesn’t make judgments about anything.

And Cicero comes to the end of section 13 by saying that all these other philosophers have been cast into oblivion, for since the time of Chrysippus there’s been no discussion about people like Erillus and even Pyrrho and Aristo, who had taken positions that seem extremely implausible.

Cassius: Cicero continues into section 14 by addressing Torquatus. He says: “Your school then remains, for the struggle with the academics is dubious, since they make no assertions and, as if hopeless of sure knowledge, declare themselves to follow whatever appears probable.” That’s almost a reference to himself to some degree. There are different variations in the academy over the years, but they prided themselves in ultimately just saying things have to be probable at best, because there is no certainty of things.

Cicero says: “With Epicurus, the contest is the more troublesome on these grounds — that he, Epicurus, is a compound of two kinds of pleasure, and that besides himself and his friends, many champions of his system have arisen since his time, and somehow or other, the multitude — whose credit is insignificant but whose power is vast — acts on their side. Now, unless we refute this company, we must turn our backs upon all virtue, all honor, all true merit. So setting aside the systems of all the rest, there remains a contest, not between me and Torquatus, but between virtue and pleasure. A contest of which Chrysippus — a man both shrewd and careful — does not think lightly. For Chrysippus considers that the entire decision about the supreme good is involved in the opposition between these two things” — which means pleasure and pain.

Everything comes back to this question: are we ultimately going to go with pleasure and pain, the feelings given to us by nature, or are we going to go with virtue, a construction of the human mind?

Joshua: There’s a lot going on here. So let me take that first sentence. He says: “Your school — Epicureans — then remains, for the struggle with the academics is dubious, since they make no assertions and, as if hopeless of sure knowledge, declared themselves to follow whatever appears probable.” This was nowhere more apparent to me than when I read Cicero’s other book, On the Nature of the Gods — the Velleius section. Velleius was an Epicurean and a Roman senator, and his interlocutor in that case is a high priest named Cotta. And it’s interesting because what Cotta repeatedly says throughout the entire book — like every other paragraph — he has to say, “Well, I take no position. I’m not here to argue my case. I’m not staking out any ground here. I’m just here to argue with you.” A high priest in the Roman state religion, not willing to stake out a claim on the nature of the gods. That’s the peripatetic view to me. That’s the academic approach to these things — merely to go to war with other systems of thought, but not really willing to make any positive claims themselves.

And then Cicero rightly says, I think: “With Epicurus, the contest is the more troublesome on these grounds: that he is a compound of two kinds of pleasure” — which is, of course, the stimulation type pleasure and the absence of pain type pleasure. And that besides himself and his friends, many champions of his system have arisen since his time. And somehow or other, the multitude acts on their side.

One of the many citations that gives us a sense of the growth of Epicureanism in the Hellenistic period and later on in the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire is Cicero, who consistently complains that Epicurus is drawing in people from all quarters of society and particularly among the lower classes, the plebeians. So he says here that Epicureanism is a troublesome opponent, in part because of this compound nature of pleasure as Epicurus viewed it.

Now, we’ve dealt with this extensively. But Cassius, it occurs to me that you recently put out a video, which was your first draft of a pie chart of pleasure as you are beginning to understand it through an Epicurean lens, right?

Cassius: I’ll mention it briefly. I’m quoting back again the part of DeWitt we’ve been talking about so often lately: that “the extension of the name of pleasure to this additional condition of health and normal functioning was the major innovation of Epicurus’ hedonism.” This section that you’ve just quoted from Cicero — “his compound of two kinds of pleasure” — my gosh, it is so basic to everything we’ve been discussing for so many years, to recognize that Epicurus includes both pleasures of active sensory stimulation as well as pleasures that do not involve active sensory stimulation, but can be more available, can be just as valuable, can be more valuable than sensory stimulation — in the sense of appreciation of life without pain. And we won’t go far into that again, but I did a pie chart video just to try to visualize how all of experience is divided into pleasure and pain, how there is no third option, there is no middle ground — despite the fact that Cicero is insisting on it here in Book Two and throughout his arguments with Torquatus. If there’s only pleasure and there’s only pain, then when you are not in pain, you are in pleasure. And that extension of the term pleasure is very easy to see if you keep your focus on the fact that there are only two feelings, and that none of your experiences in life are outside of those two feelings.

So this compound nature of pleasure is the signature of Epicurus, and it allows him to incorporate all of these other activities of life that are not immediately pleasures of active sensory stimulation. And that’s what Cicero is trying to focus on: “All you want is immediate enjoyment, Epicurus. You don’t care about any of the finer things in life such as intellectual achievement and art and literature and the appreciation of your ancestors and all of these other things that are not just sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” You throw out all that as valuable, Epicurus — and that’s simply not true. Epicurus embraces this compound of these types of pleasures as fully as anybody does, and he places them on a stronger foundation because he doesn’t hold them in suspicion like Cicero and these other people are doing.

And that’s where Cicero is going here, as he seems to always go back to the well of finding pleasure to be obnoxious, cheap, narrow — all the different deprecatory words you can think of to place pleasure in a suspicious category that you don’t want anything to do with.

Joshua: Very good. And like I said, I do recommend people go look at that video. You said that was a first draft, and probably there will be changes made, but the conversation that it has generated in that thread has already been very interesting to me.

So where Cicero turns next here, he lays out the nature of the contest. Basically, if you take a synoptic view — an overview of Cicero’s whole argument here up until this point — he has been comparing Epicurean philosophy with other philosophers, trying to drill down on how he understands Epicurean philosophy. And what he basically is going to say here in the end of this paragraph is: he’s now going to dispense with this comparative approach to philosophy. He’s not going to be taking to task Hieronymus anymore, or Carneades. This is now — he says very clearly here — a contest, not between me and Torquatus, but between virtue and pleasure. That is the nature of this war. And it is, I think, going to go on to color the rest of the text here.

And as he said: “Now, unless we refute the Epicureans, we must turn our backs upon all virtue, all honor, and all true merit.” And he goes on here to outline what his approach to that is going to be. He says: “It is, however, my opinion that if I show there is something moral, which is essentially desirable by reason of its inherent qualities and for its own sake, all the doctrines of your school are overthrown. So when I have once briefly, as our time requires, determined the nature of this object — the object of something that is truly moral, desired by our whole being — I will touch upon all your statements, Torquatus, unless perchance my recollection fails me.”

Cassius: He’s setting up the stage for his final conflict between virtue and pleasure, between Cicero and Epicurus here, which will of course be the subject of next week’s podcast. Joshua, what you just touched on — that we’ll get into next week — is this question of: ultimately Epicurus is taking the position that there is nothing intrinsically valuable in life except pleasure, and there’s nothing intrinsically bad in life other than pain. So Cicero thinks, “Well, I’m going to show you something other than pleasure which is valuable on its own.” But this position — that virtue, that reason, are the tools which we use to obtain pleasure, and that they are not goals in and of themselves — over and over and over again, this becomes the question in these philosophical debates. Are these things desirable on their own, or are they only desirable because of the reward that you get from it, because of the pleasure you get from it?

Joshua: This is a great place to stop, because he has set it up in very dramatic terms here. It’s a fight to the death, essentially, between pleasure and virtue in Cicero’s way of looking at things. And many of the arguments he’s going to be making from here on out are almost emotion-based arguments, attempting to get the reader to identify with virtue as the glorious term which should be set up as the goal — versus pleasure as the harlot, obnoxious, disreputable option. And that everything in life, it seems to them, comes down to this contest of virtue and pleasure.

Cassius: Okay, let’s talk about any closing thoughts for what we’ve discussed today. Martin?

Martin: I have nothing to add to this.

Cassius: Thank you, Martin. Callistheni?

Callistheni: Thank you all for covering this. It’s very complex and I appreciate it all. It’s bringing up a lot of new thoughts. So thank you.

Cassius: All right. Joshua?

Joshua: Yeah, this has been a somewhat interesting passage we’ve been going through today. I’m going to take Cicero at his word here. I hope we’re going to get past some of this stuff about, “Well, you say that you pursue pleasure, but then you include absence of pain among pleasure,” and so forth. I hope we can get past some of these fiddly little disputes that he wants to drag on and on and get into some of the real questions — like, is there absolute morality or is there not? Is there absolute justice or does justice exist by convention? Some of these deeper issues that are relevant to the study of Epicurean philosophy, so we can finally get on some new material. That’s my hope for next week.

Cassius: I don’t want to dash your hopes there, Joshua. I think to some extent there may be some improvement here. But by setting out, for example, Chrysippus — the second founder of Stoicism, the ultimate Stoic man who considers that pleasure versus virtue is the whole deck of cards in deciding what is the supreme good — I think what we’re going to see is Cicero is going to maybe get less technical, and that’s going to be a relief, but it’s going to become even more intense, I think, in terms of where the ultimate philosophical divide resides. Are you the type of person, according to Cicero, who sees the glamour and the glory of virtue as the purpose of human life? Or are you the type of person who sees pleasure — the sluggishness and inactivity and idleness of pleasure? Which of those two types of people are you — that’s sort of the way Cicero is going to begin to separate things out as we go forward.

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