Episode 206 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 14 - More On The Nature of Morality
Date: 12/22/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3591-episode-206-cicero-s-on-ends-book-two-part-14-more-on-the-nature-of-morality/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Continuing De Finibus Book Two, sections 15–16. A holiday episode (Christmas 2023). Cicero argues that Epicurus is “compelled by the irresistible force of instinct” to concede that it is impossible to live pleasantly without also living morally — and then claims Epicurus bases his understanding of morality on “the babble of the crowd.” Joshua argues this is one of the farthest Cicero has gone off the mark in misrepresenting Epicurus, who consistently criticizes the multitude’s opinions rather than deferring to them.
Key discussion: the manuscript difficulties around rumore (rumor of the crowd) which could be minore (a smaller gathering, i.e., friends) or timore (fear of the crowd); Principal Doctrine 5 and the multiple translations of phronimos, kalos, and dikaios; DeWitt on Epicurus as a moral reformer fighting against skepticism and physical determinism; Cicero’s section 16 appealing to the grandeur of the words “wisdom, courage, justice, temperance” — the violin salesman technique; the moralistic fallacy (concluding that something cannot be true because it ought not to be); Mary Porter Packer’s 1920s dissertation noting that Cicero omits the Epicurean social contract as the basis of justice; and Dr. Marcelo Boeri and Xavier Ayás’s Theory and Practice in Epicurean Political Philosophy and their article “Cicero’s Clamorous Silences.” Wagner’s Tannhäuser is cited as an analogy for the virtue-versus-pleasure debate.
Transcript
Section titled “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 Book Two of Cicero’s On Ends, which of course contains Cicero’s attacks on Epicurean philosophy. We’re using the Reid edition and for those following along we’re on page 51 of that edition. Last week we closed the episode talking about how Cicero was emphasizing that this disagreement about the nature of morality between Epicurus and Cicero himself and the philosophers that Cicero follows is so critically important to everything in terms of setting up a supreme good and the entire way you approach life. This week we’re going to talk a little further about how Cicero is criticizing Epicurus’s position as to the view of the crowd about morality.
The part we’re going to begin with today reads like this. “Hence Epicurus is compelled by the irresistible force of instinct to say in another passage, which you also have said just now, that it’s impossible to live pleasantly without also living morally.”
Now, the Rackham edition makes the point in a separate footnote that in Latin, the word that’s used is often translated as “honorably.” But Rackham says that there’s a dual meaning of this word in Latin and that we should understand it to mean “morally” as much as “honorably.” And so, whenever you hear Epicurus talking about honorably, Rackham is saying that we should be overlaying that with an understanding that we’re talking not just about honor in the sense of glory or your personal honor and reputation, but in a wider sense of morality in general.
Cicero continues: “What does he mean by morally now? The same as pleasantly? If so, does it amount to saying that it’s impossible to live morally unless you live morally, or unless you make public opinion your standard? He means then that he cannot live pleasantly without the approval of public opinion. But what can be baser than to make the conduct of the wise man depend upon the gossip of the foolish? What therefore does he understand by moral in this passage? Clearly nothing but that which can be rightly praised for its own sake. For if it be praised as being a means to pleasure, what is there creditable about that? You can get pleasure at the provision dealers. No. Epicurus who esteems moral worth so highly as to say that it is impossible to live pleasantly without it is not the man to identify moral with popular and maintain that it is impossible to live pleasantly without popular esteem. He can’t understand moral to mean anything else than that which is right — that which is in and for itself, independently, intrinsically, and of its own nature praiseworthy.”
So this harks back to where Cicero has said previously that he’s going to disprove the entire structure of Epicurean philosophy by pointing out something that is desirable in and of itself but has nothing to do with pleasure. We’ve churned a lot of words here over the last section to arrive back at that same place.
Joshua:
Yes, Cassius. I guess what I would say about this whole section 15 here is that it’s somewhat complicated in part because of the way that Cicero chooses to translate certain words. So what comes into question here is Principal Doctrine 5, which depending on the translation you use — I’m looking at the Peter Saint-André version — he translates it: “It is not possible to live joyously without also living wisely and beautifully and rightly, nor to live wisely, beautifully, and rightly without living joyously.” And for each of those words there are alternate translations — instead of “wisely” you could say “prudently” (that’s phronimos, practical wisdom); the word for “honorably” is kalos in Greek which could mean something like “beautifully” (which is one of the words that Peter Saint-André uses here — “beautifully and rightly”); and then the other word is “justly” or “rightly,” which has its own set of alternative translations.
The point is that that part alone is a little bit difficult. Cicero is constantly making choices about how he translates Epicurus. Some of the choices are questionable. But the broader problem in this section is that there are a set of unclear claims that Cicero makes — claims that it is difficult to find justification for in the surviving texts of Epicurus himself.
Cicero is looking for an understanding of morality that is desirable in and of itself. But of course Epicurus isn’t ever going to say that morality is desirable in and of itself. Morality, like everything else in Epicurean philosophy, is desirable or not based on the pleasure that it brings, moderated by the criterion that Epicurus always used when you’re pursuing pleasure: is it going to bring more pain down the line, for example?
So we have to consider Epicurus’s understanding of morality in light of all of that. But part of the issue is that Cicero attributes to Epicurus an understanding of morality that comes from the “babble of the crowd.” And the real difficulty there is that I’m not sure where he’s getting that.
We’ve been talking about this just before we were recording — there’s a thread for this episode on the forum. Epicurus frequently talks about the wrong opinions of the multitude, right? The multitude has wrong opinions about the nature of the gods. The multitude has an unfounded fear of death based on wrong opinions. The multitude is unwise in its pursuit of fame and riches — pursuit of fame and riches makes you a slave to the multitude. So far from founding his understanding of justice or morality on the speech of the multitude, Epicurus is very critical of what the multitude is saying. He says himself: “When I study nature, I would rather speak in oracles that are understood by none and tell the truth than to confirm popular opinion in the kind of speech that is understood by the multitude.”
So Epicurus is not looking to the multitude, so I don’t understand where Cicero is going with this. And this is interesting to me because this section 15 is the farthest off the mark I’ve ever seen Cicero go in his translation and interpretation of Epicurus. Usually he states what Epicurus says — they’re of varying quality, sometimes we have to make minor adjustments — and then Cicero gives his own opinion, which is very often widely divergent. But this is the farthest I’ve seen Cicero go off the mark in interpreting Epicurus himself, and I do not know what to make of it.
Cassius:
Brian on the forum last night posted that there are difficulties in the manuscript for this text — that we don’t know, for example, if the word rumore, “the rumor of the crowd,” should instead be the Latin word timor, “fear of the crowd.” So it’s genuinely confusing, this whole section here, and it’s genuinely difficult to respond to for that reason.
Another of the options that Brian put forth is that the word rumore could instead in the manuscript be minore, meaning “a smaller gathering” — not a vast multitude, but a smaller gathering, say, your friends, for example. And if the meaning of the word is timore rather than rumore, it would actually mean “out of fear of the crowd,” out of fear of the multitude. Now Epicurus did have experiences in his own life that put him in fear of the multitude — for example in Mytilene when he was trying to teach publicly for the first time and the Platonists basically ran him off the island. But for all of these reasons and more, it’s very difficult to get a handle on this section in Cicero’s text.
Joshua:
Cassius, I think Torquatus would second everything that you said there, and Cicero is very wide of the mark in the way he’s describing Epicurus’s opinion here. You’ve cited several references and there’s probably more we can give that Epicurus clearly distances himself from the opinion of the crowd — not only on the gods but obviously the way he defines many other words with the different opinion he takes on pleasure. So there’s absolutely no way to construe Epicurus as being overly slavish to the opinions of the crowd, and yet that’s what Cicero is putting out here as an alternative explanation for what Epicurus may be saying. And it’s just patently false.
One thing before we go on past this passage: Cicero says here that Epicurus “esteems moral worth so highly as to say it’s impossible to live without them.” We have to explain why Epicurus is making that statement — but Cicero is not scoring any points here, because it’s always in the context that it’s impossible to live a happy and pleasant life without them because those are the tools that bring pleasure. Epicurus is never saying they are goals in and of themselves. And that leads us to where Cicero takes us next in section 16.
Cassius:
Let me read how he elaborates on this argument because again Cicero is trying to hit home this point that Epicurus himself has to acknowledge the intrinsic desirability of morality. So Cicero says to Torquatus: “Torquatus, when you stated how Epicurus cries aloud that an agreeable life is not possible unless it be a moral, a wise, and a just life, you yourself seemed to be uttering a vaunt.”
Now that’s an unusual construction there from Reid, so let me read what Rackham says. “This accounts for the glow of pride with which, as I noticed, you informed us of how loudly Epicurus proclaims the impossibility of living pleasantly without living morally, wisely, and justly. Your words derived potency from the grandeur of the things that they denoted. You drew yourself up to your full height and kept stopping and fixing us with your gaze and solemnly asserting that Epicurus does occasionally commend morality and justice. Were those names never mentioned by philosophers, we should have no use for philosophy. How well they sounded on your lips. Too seldom does Epicurus speak to us of wisdom, courage, justice, temperance, yet it is the love that those great names inspire which has lured the ablest of mankind to devote themselves to philosophical studies.”
So again, Cicero’s tour de force argument is the very glory of these words — justice, wisdom, courage, temperance. To hear them uttered almost like the name of God, they just are so awe-inspiring in and of themselves that you don’t need any pleasure, you don’t need any reward. All you have to do is contemplate the sheer awesomeness of these words, and you’ll see my point to Whatis and realize that Epicurus is depraved because he doesn’t see these things.
Joshua:
You know, it’s somewhat difficult, Cassius, because Epicurus doesn’t actually spend a lot of time talking about morality, it seems. His ethics is comprised of pleasure being the good and pain being a source of evil and something to be avoided. He has this elaborate approach to pleasure and pain about choice and avoidance. And he has an elaborate understanding of desire and some of the pitfalls that creep in in our pursuit of pleasure. But in terms of morality, as Cicero would understand it, Epicurus just doesn’t talk about it that much.
Cassius:
Joshua, I would say there that Epicurus is putting the focus where the focus needs to be, which is the foundation of morality and the real reason that you’re doing everything. Once you understand the foundation and understand your goal, then you can properly focus on using the tools to get you to that goal. He realizes that the problem in the world is not that there aren’t plenty of people out there who use these grandiose-sounding words like wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance. It’s that they don’t understand what the goal of life is, and their implementation of those tools of virtue leads to nothing, leads to emptiness, because they don’t understand the right goal.
We talked recently on the forum about the face Epicurus has portrayed in the bust and so forth — about how serious, or even stern to some extent, his face is recorded. And I would relate that to this. There’s a real seriousness that’s needed to get to the bottom of what morality is all about, and you have to focus first on the goal and the foundation before you can properly understand how to use the tools. And this is a very serious issue.
I would agree with Cicero and Chrysippus that everything comes down to this dispute between pleasure and virtue and how you relate the two of them together. And you’ve got to be very serious and rigorous and vigorous about identifying pleasure as the ultimate goal and not letting virtue or the tools get reversed and put the cart before the horse.
Joshua:
Right. Now one of the things that Epicurus is accused of in part by Cicero at the beginning of Book One is ingratitude to his teachers — right? He stole from Democritus and then spurned Democritus. He studied under Nausiphanes and then denied having studied under him. And Cicero makes quite a deal about this.
DeWitt actually develops this question a little bit. I’ll try to read from here. DeWitt says — this is at the bottom of page 65 in Epicurus and His Philosophy: “In the domain of physics, the charge of ingratitude to his teachers is aggravated because the sin is against Democritus. What is there in the physics of Epicurus that is not from Democritus, demands Cicero. And elsewhere he says, what Epicurus changes in what he has taken from Democritus, he seems to spoil. The defection of Epicurus from the teachings of Democritus, however, is almost wholly in the domain of ethics. To him, as a moral reformer, two things ranked foremost as abominations: skepticism and physical determinism. The pupil was advancing beyond the teacher.”
So what you won’t find in Epicurus is what you do find in writers like Marcus Aurelius or Seneca — they do talk quite a lot about morality and virtue. Obviously morality and virtue, that’s like the summum bonum, the telos of the Stoics. Morality in accordance with nature. And Epicurus is taking the field here, but he’s taking a very, very different approach to morality.
Part of that approach is to understand that in order to have a discussion on morality, you have to know that moral action is possible in the first place. This is where the issue of determinism comes in. If all of your actions are predetermined, how can you possibly act morally? There’s no choice, there’s no decision, and so there’s no moral quality to the behavior in either case. And the other abomination that DeWitt cites is skepticism. If you deny the existence of knowledge, how can you know whether something is moral or not? How can you know whether your behavior is just or not, wise or not, honorable or not? It makes nonsense of any discussion of morality.
This is the kind — I mentioned this merely as an example — this is the kind of conversation that Epicurus has about morality. He hasn’t given you a list of ten commandments on moral laws that you shall not break. That’s not the way that Epicurus approached this question.
Cassius:
Now Cicero makes an interesting test for philosophy here. He says that if the philosophers did not discourse on morality we should have no need of philosophers. But that’s not the test that Epicurus applied to philosophy. Epicurus said that philosophy is only useful insofar as it ameliorates the health of the soul — that philosophy has the purpose of improving our lives. It does not necessarily have the purpose of improving our behavior. That’s part of the picture but it’s not the main test of philosophy as Cicero wants it to be.
If I recall correctly it may go on like this for much of the rest of the chapter. We’ll go through each of these examples as you’ve just done Joshua and unwind them so that we can see what Cicero is doing. But I believe it’s probably time to again make this comment that Cicero is presenting a sales spiel. He is attempting to carry away the argument with an emotional appeal to these emotions that these words are supposed to evoke — and yet he is suggesting that you should consider the emotions that are evoked as something different from the feelings of pleasure and pain, as if the emotional responses you get to his arguments have nothing to do with pleasure and pain, when they have everything to do with pleasure and pain.
He says “what passion for those phrases — courage, wisdom, justice, and temperance — that men of preeminent ability have devoted themselves to the pursuit of philosophy.” Well, I thought passion, Cicero, was something you don’t like. I thought emotion were things that were a problem for your reason and for your disembodied abstractions deriving from Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics. The passion for these phrases — Cicero is no different than the passion that Epicurus is talking about for everything that he finds agreeable or disagreeable. It is this feeling that ultimately is where everything comes down to, and you’re saying it yourself, Cicero. Why are you not reversing your opinion and going with Epicurus instead? You’re holding these words of virtue, prudence, honor, justice, wisdom out there and clearly dangling the reward of the pleasure that comes from talking about them and from being associated with them — and yet you’re denying that you’re getting this pleasure. You’re denying the basis of the feeling that everyone gets when they do consider these issues that are being discussed.
Joshua:
Let me add a couple more as we go forward here. He says: “Our eyesight, says Plato, is the keenest sense we have, yet it does not enable us to see wisdom. What passionate affection for herself would she inspire in us!”
And then: “Why is justice praised? For whence comes the saying, so hackneyed from of old, ‘a man you play with in the dark’ — meaning somebody you can trust not to cheat you even in the dark. This proverb, though pointed at one thing only, has a very wide application: that in all transactions we should be influenced by the character of our actions and not by the presence of witnesses.”
And then: “Indeed the arguments you alleged were insignificant and very weak — I mean that unprincipled men are tortured by their own consciousness within them, and also by fear of punishment which they either suffer or live in dread of suffering from some time. It’s not proper to imagine your bad man as a coward or weakling torturing himself about anything he has done and frightened at everything, but rather as one who craftily judges of everything by his interests, being keen, shrewd and hardened, so that he readily devises means for cheating without detection, without witnesses, without any accomplice.”
Again, Cicero is appealing to this emotional attachment — to how we instinctively, emotionally recognize that there are certain things we do wish to be identified with, and that we do wish to profit from in terms of the tight people we wish to be associated with: the just, and those people we can trust with our interests even in the dark not to cheat us. Those are things that obviously Epicurus wants as well — obviously anybody wants — because of the results that come from them, not just because there’s some logical abstraction attached to it.
There’s this detachment from reality here, it seems to me, that Cicero is promoting. It’s not Epicurus that refutes it, it’s just the reality of a situation that refutes it.
Cassius:
That’s a very strange way to proceed there, by saying that the beauty of the word is what draws us to the content of virtue and morality, and that that’s what makes it good in and of itself. That borders on something called the moralistic fallacy. The moralistic fallacy occurs when one concludes that something is a particular way because it should or ought to be that way. This is so Cicero. It’s frustrating because when Cicero says that we cannot have been put here for the pursuit of pleasure as our end, he’s falling prey to this — he’s saying that my understanding of morality does not allow pleasure to be the goal, therefore pleasure is not the goal. That is the moralistic fallacy.
And it relates to something I said a few episodes back: just because you want something to be true does not mean that it is true. Just because you want the operations of nature to proceed with morality or justice does not mean that they actually do proceed with morality or justice. Just because you want morality to be absolute and unchanging — the same today and tomorrow and in Athens and in Rome — does not mean that it actually is absolute and unchanging.
And so what we end up with is just a lot of bare assertions from Cicero, just a lot of claims that “well, this is how it is.” And that’s not good enough.
Joshua:
I quoted from Lucretius, I think it was last episode or the one before, on how justice develops as a convention by mutual agreement. Interestingly enough, Mary Porter Packer — in her dissertation on Cicero’s presentation of Epicurean ethics — one of the things that she says has to do with exactly this question. She says: “Cicero seems to be honestly and entirely unaware of the firm basis for justice which Epicurus has provided. He can see nothing beyond the fear of punishment and therefore the fear of detection. And yet he has Torquatus say that the necessary things of life can be won without injustice. He omits the social contract as a basis of justice — the idea that people make agreements with each other neither to harm nor to be harmed. Cicero just ignores that as if he is unacquainted with it. Moreover, Cicero’s failure to explain or attack the Epicurean theory of justice and the social compact is a significant omission in his discussion of Epicurean virtue.”
I thought that was a very interesting thing. It’s true — Cicero is talking here about the fear of punishment as if that were the only foundation of justice. But Epicurus has like a whole series of Principal Doctrines — probably like six or seven of them, Cassius — in which he’s outlining and limiting and building up his understanding of what justice is. And it’s not just about unprincipled men being tortured by their own consciousness. So when Cicero says it’s not proper to imagine your bad man as a coward or a weakling torturing himself — well, guess what? People are going to violate your understanding of morality, Cicero, in exactly the same way — with crafty judgment, being keen, shrewd, and hardened. So if you’re saying that this is a flaw in Epicurus’s understanding of justice — which you have not properly understood, Cicero — it’s exactly the same problem that’s going to plague your understanding of justice and morality.
Cassius:
Joshua, you’ve said several things there I have to comment on. First of all, referring back to what Mary Porter Packer had said about how Cicero omitted discussion of Epicurus’s views of justice — that is a point that’s drilled home very well also by one of our guests that we’ve interviewed recently, Dr. Marcelo Boeri and his co-author Xavier Ayás, in their book Theory and Practice in Epicurean Political Philosophy. And in fact, there’s an article that goes along with the book that’s out there entitled “Cicero’s Clamorous Silences.” And that’s the theme of that article — that Cicero has omitted reference to the extensive discussion in Epicurean philosophy of how justice works. He’s just skipped over it, even though it’s a central part of Epicurean philosophy. So he’s chosen to manipulate or deceive the reader by leaving out something as critically important as the explanation of justice.
Joshua:
Yeah. Cicero wants us to believe that Epicurus’s understanding of justice is: if you can get away with it, it’s just — anything that you can get away with and not get caught doing, that falls under Epicurus’s understanding of justice. And it’s so far from being true.
Cassius:
Yes. And people interested in pursuing that, I think we have a copy of Mary Porter Packer’s essay on the forum — she was born in 1886, and that was published around the time of DeWitt’s early career, in about the 20s or 30s. So, yes, we have a copy of that on the forum, or else we’ll get one. And then Dr. Boeri’s book out there pursues that as well.
And you know that Cicero had this material in front of him because he’s quoting extensively from core Epicurean material. Even in what we’ve been discussing today, he seems to be talking about the Principal Doctrines, including number five. What about those from 30 to 40, Cicero, that you don’t seem to be spending any time on? You’re just cherry-picking and selectively reading things to make it look as bad as possible for Epicurus.
So Joshua, as we begin to conclude for today — I do think we’re going to find that it’s going to be a repetitive argument over and over. The well that Cicero is going to keep coming back to is to appeal to what Torquatus has already warned us against: that these guys are beguiled by the glamor of the name of virtue. And he’s going to attempt to beguile us with the glamor of all these wonderful things that he’s talking about — as if the feeling that we get from glamor has nothing to do with pleasure or pain.
One of the things I think we’ll be challenged to do — and I have confidence, Joshua, you’re going to be a whole lot better than I am at this — is coming up with other analogies and stories to deal with Cicero’s arguments here, which is what he does not allow Torquatus to be doing. He’s going on and on and on, page after page, without allowing Torquatus any significant response.
Joshua:
Well, it occurs to me: in Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser, there is a song contest between the hero of the story — who has been spending time with Venus and who is taking the side of pleasure in the play — and these conventional exponents of virtue and honor and justice who are the established members of the nobility in the song contest. The context of the contest is that the prince has stated that the winner of the song contest will be allowed to marry a princess. These Stoic-Platonic philosopher singers get up and talk about her beauty as an abstraction, as something that you can’t touch and can’t come close to but you just honor from afar — in ways I personally associate with Platonic love. And the character that Wagner has speaking in the name of pleasure takes the exact opposite approach: that it’s ridiculous to look at beauty as something that you can’t touch or participate in or feel yourself, that it’s worthless to you unless you touch it and feel it and experience it yourself.
So I’ll link to that section of the Wagner opera as an example to at least consider in dealing with Cicero’s arguments, because a lot of it does seem to come back to this question. Cicero is holding up these virtues as glamorous but expecting you to understand that taking pleasure in them is base. And that’s a very important aspect of deciding where you stand on this question.
Cassius:
Okay, so with that rather than go into the first of several stories of illustrious Romans, let’s go ahead and close the episode for today and ask if anyone has comments on what we’ve discussed so far.
Martin, anything today?
Martin:
Again, no comment today, sorry.
Cassius:
No problem, thank you Martin as always. Callistheni, anything today?
Callistheni:
Yes, Cassius. Today’s podcast — it’s coming to me that it’s really homing in on understanding the difference between putting virtue first versus pleasure and utility and what leads to the best life.
Cassius:
I certainly agree, Callistheni. Now when you use the word “utility” there, utility can sometimes be a word that people get turned around on and maybe becomes even a euphemism for some people to avoid saying the word pleasure. But this is what we were talking about earlier in the episode. Epicurus is very focused on going right to the heart of the matter, and use utility words like that that refer to the process of getting to an endpoint are definitely important. But Epicurus is always going to focus on the endpoint itself as pleasure rather than anything else.
Okay, thank you, Callistheni. Joshua.
Joshua:
Well, it occurs to me, Cassius — we do have one more recording session before Christmas, but that episode won’t go out in time, so we should say it now. Merry Christmas to our listeners and to each other.
Cassius:
You’re exactly right, Joshua. As we begin to come to the close of a recording year, this is the time we want to thank our panelists for all the effort that you’ve put into it and also thank our listeners for their participation and giving us feedback and asking questions at the forum. Speaking for myself, I get a lot of pleasure and enjoyment out of working with the podcast. I think it’s a very productive thing for us to be doing, to get the message out in an oral form as opposed to just in writing on the forum. And I want to be sure to join in with Joshua in expressing our hope that all of our listeners will have an enjoyable and happy holiday season with their friends.
It’s the time of year to think about what we did last year, what we’d like to do next year. And so we’ll be discussing that in our upcoming episodes. Let me remind everyone to please drop by the forum whenever you can — let us know if you have any questions or comments on this episode or anything else regarding Epicurus. Again, have a happy holiday season. See you soon. Bye.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to the Lucretius Today podcast. 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 Cicero’s On Ends, which of course contains Cicero’s attacks on Epicurean philosophy. We’re using the Rackham edition, and for those following along we’re on page 51. Last week we closed the episode talking about how Cicero was emphasizing the disagreement about the nature of morality between Epicurus and Cicero himself—which is critically important to everything in terms of setting up a supreme good and the entire way you approach life.
This week we’re going to talk a little bit further about how Cicero is criticizing Epicurus’s position on the view of the crowd about morality. Cicero is attacking Epicurus for seemingly saying that the opinion of the crowd about what is moral should be significant in your assessment of morality. But the bottom line of all of this is the nature of morality question, and the part we’re going to begin with today reads like this: “Hence Epicurus is compelled by the irresistible force of instinct to say in another passage what you also have said just now, that it’s impossible to live pleasantly without also living morally.”
Now, the Rackham edition makes the point in a separate footnote that in Latin the word that’s often translated as “honorably” has a dual meaning, and that we should understand it to mean “morally” as much as “honorably.” So whenever you hear Epicurus talking about honorably, Rackham is saying that we should overlay that with an understanding that we’re talking about not just honor in the sense of glory or your personal reputation, but in a wider sense of morality in general. Rackham continues: “What does he mean by morality? Morally, now the same as pleasantly? If so, does it amount to saying that it’s impossible to live morally unless you live morally, or unless you make public opinion your standard? He means then that he cannot live pleasantly without the approval of public opinion? What can be baser than to make the conduct of the wise man depend upon the gossip of the foolish? What, therefore, does he understand by moral in this passage? Clearly nothing but that which can be rightly praised for its own sake. For if it be praised as being a means to pleasure, what is there creditable about that? You can get pleasure at the provision dealers. No, Epicurus, who esteems moral worth so highly as to say that it’s impossible to live pleasantly without it, is not the man to identify moral with popular and maintain that it’s impossible to live pleasantly without popular esteem, and understand moral to mean anything else than that which is right, that which is in and for itself, independently, intrinsically, and of its own nature, praiseworthy.”
So this harks back to where Cicero has said previously that he’s going to disprove the entire structure of Epicurean philosophy by pointing out something that is desirable in and of itself but has nothing to do with pleasure. So we’ve churned a lot of words here over the last section to arrive back at that same place. Cicero is asserting that these things that are moral are desirable in and of themselves, without pleasure being associated.
Joshua: Yeah, Cassius, I guess what I would say about this whole section 15 here is that it’s somewhat complicated, in part because of the way that Cicero chooses to translate certain words. So what comes into question here, I guess, is Principal Doctrine Five, which, depending on the translation you use—I’m looking at the Peter St. Andre version, and he translates it: “It’s not possible to live joyously without also living wisely and beautifully and rightly. Nor to live wisely, beautifully, and rightly without living joyously.” Each of those words has alternate translations you could use. Instead of wisely, you could say prudently—that’s phronesis, that practical wisdom. The word for honorably is kalos in Greek, which could mean something like “beautifully,” which is one of the words Peter St. Andre uses: “beautifully and rightly.” And Cicero talks quite a lot in this book about how morality—there’s a sense of moral beauty, or the purity and rightness of doing the moral thing. And then the other word is “justly” or “rightly,” which has its own set of alternative translations. The point is that that part alone is a little bit difficult. Cicero is constantly making choices about how he translates Epicurus, and some of those choices are questionable.
But the broader problem in this section is that there are a set of unclear claims that Cicero makes—claims that it is difficult to find justification for in the surviving texts of Epicurus himself. Cicero is looking for an understanding of morality that is desirable in and of itself. Of course, Epicurus isn’t ever going to say that morality is desirable in and of itself. Morality, like everything else in Epicurean philosophy, is desirable or not based on the pleasure that it brings, moderated by the criterion Epicurus always gives when you’re pursuing pleasure—is it going to bring more pain down the line, for example? So we have to consider Epicurus’s understanding of morality in light of all of that.
But part of the issue is that Cicero attributes to Epicurus an understanding of morality that comes from—as it says in the Rackham edition—“the babble of the crowd.” And the real difficulty there is that I’m not sure where he’s getting that. We’ve talked a little about this just before we were recording—there’s a thread for this episode on the forum, and we’ve been discussing it. Epicurus frequently talks about the wrong opinions of the multitude. The multitude has wrong opinions about the nature of the gods. The multitude has an unfounded fear of death based on wrong opinions. The multitude is unwise in its pursuit of fame and riches. Pursuit of fame and riches makes you a slave to the multitude. So far from founding his understanding of justice or morality on the speech of the multitude, he actually is very critical of what the multitude is saying. He says himself: “When I study nature, I would rather speak in oracles that are understood by none and tell the truth, than to confirm popular opinion in the kind of speech that is understood by the multitude.” So Epicurus is not looking to the multitude. I don’t understand where Cicero is going with this, and I don’t understand what his source for saying this is.
And this is interesting to me because this section, section 15, is the farthest wide of the mark I’ve ever seen Cicero go in his translation and interpretation of Epicurus. Usually he quotes what Epicurus says very accurately. Sometimes we have to make minor adjustments. And then Cicero gives his own opinion, and those are very often widely divergent and founded on false premises—like, for example, when he quotes Aristotle as saying that mankind was put here for two things, or that morality is the same today and tomorrow, and in Athens and in Rome, and so forth. But this is the widest I’ve seen Cicero go off the mark in interpreting Epicurus himself, and I do not know what to make of it.
Brian on the forum last night posted that there are difficulties in the manuscript for this text—we don’t know, for example, if the word rumore (the rumor of the crowd) should instead be the Latin word timor, meaning fear of the crowd. So it’s genuinely confusing, this whole section, and genuinely difficult to respond to for that reason. Another of the options that Brian puts forth is that the word rumore in Latin could instead in the manuscript be minore or timore. If it’s minore, then you would read that as “unless perhaps that which is commended by a smaller gathering”—not a vast multitude, but a smaller gathering, say your friends, for example. And if the meaning of the word is timore rather than rumore, it would actually mean “out of fear of the crowd, out of fear of the multitude.” Now, Epicurus did have experiences in his own life that put him in fear of the multitude—for example, in Mytilene, when he was trying to teach publicly for the first time and the Platonists basically ran him off the island. But for all of these reasons and more, it’s very difficult to get a handle on this section in Cicero’s text.
Cassius: Joshua, I want to second everything you’ve said there. Cicero is very wide of the mark in the way he’s describing Epicurus’s opinion here. You’ve cited several references, and there are probably more we could give, that Epicurus clearly distances himself from the opinion of the crowd—not only on the gods, but in the way he defines many other concepts, with the very different opinion he takes on pleasure. So there’s absolutely no way to construe Epicurus as being overly slavish to the opinions of the crowd, and yet that’s what Cicero is putting out here as an alternative explanation for what Epicurus may be saying. It’s just patently false.
One thing before we go on past this passage: where Cicero says that Epicurus esteems moral worth so highly as to say it’s impossible to live pleasantly without it—what we have to explain is why Epicurus is making that statement. Cicero is not scoring any points by saying that Epicurus values these things so highly as to say it’s impossible to live without them. It’s always in the context that it’s impossible to live a happy life, a pleasant life without them, because those are the tools that bring pleasure. Epicurus is never saying that they are goals in and of themselves.
And that leads us to where Cicero takes us next in section 16. Let me read how he elaborates on this argument, because again Cicero is trying to hit home the point that Epicurus himself acknowledged the intrinsic desirability of morality. So Cicero says to Torquatus: “Torquatus, when you stated how Epicurus cries aloud that an agreeable life is not possible unless it be a moral, a wise, and a just life, you yourself seem to be uttering a vaunt.” Now, the Rackham edition renders it this way: “This Torquatus accounts for the glow of pride with which, as I noticed, you informed us of how loudly Epicurus proclaims the impossibility of living pleasantly without living morally, wisely, and justly. Your words derive potency from the grandeur of the things that they denoted. You drew yourself up to your full height and kept stopping and fixing us with your gaze, and solemnly asserting that Epicurus does occasionally commend morality and justice. Were those names never mentioned by philosophers, we should have no use for philosophy. How well they sounded on your lips. Too seldom does Epicurus speak to us of wisdom, courage, justice, temperance. Yet it is the love that those great names inspire which has lured the ablest of mankind to devote themselves to philosophical studies.” So again, Cicero’s tour de force argument is the very glory of these words—justice, wisdom, courage, temperance. To hear them uttered almost like the name of God, they are so awe-inspiring in and of themselves that you don’t need any pleasure, you don’t need any reward. All you have to do is contemplate the sheer awesomeness of these words, and you’ll see Cicero’s point.
Joshua: It’s somewhat difficult, Cassius, because Epicurus doesn’t actually spend a lot of time talking about morality, it seems. His ethics is comprised of pleasure being the good and pain being a source of evil and something to be avoided. He has this elaborate approach to pleasure and pain about choice and avoidance, and he has an elaborate understanding of desire and some of the pitfalls that creep into our pursuit of pleasure—some of the ways that desire leads people astray. But in terms of morality, as Cicero would understand it, Epicurus just doesn’t talk about it.
Cassius: I would say there that Epicurus is putting the focus where the focus needs to be, which is the foundation of morality and the real reason that you’re doing everything. Once you understand the foundation and understand your goal, then you can properly focus on using the tools to get you to that goal. He realizes that the problem in the world is not that there aren’t plenty of people out there who use these grandiose-sounding words like wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance—it’s that they don’t understand what the goal of life is, and their implementation of those tools, those virtues, leads to nothing, leads to emptiness, because they don’t understand the right goal. We talked recently on the forum about the face Epicurus is portrayed in the bust, about how serious—or even stern, to some extent—his face is recorded. And I would relate that to this. There’s a real seriousness that’s needed to get to the bottom of what morality is all about. And you have to focus first on the goal and the foundation before you can properly understand how to use the tools. This is a very serious issue. I would agree with Cicero and Chrysippus on this—that everything comes down to this dispute between pleasure and virtue, and how you relate the two of them together. And you’ve got to be very serious and rigorous and vigorous about identifying pleasure as the ultimate goal, and not letting virtue or the tools get reversed and put the cart before the horse.
Joshua: Right. Now, one of the things that Epicurus is accused of—in part by Cicero at the beginning of Book One—is ingratitude to his teachers. He stole from Democritus and then spurned Democritus. He studied under Nausiphanes and then denied having studied under Nausiphanes. And Cicero makes a great deal of this. DeWitt actually develops this question a little bit. I’ll try to read from here, as it may be useful—in part because this is one of the paragraphs in DeWitt’s book where he mentions that part of Epicurus’s project was as a moral reformer, putting our understanding of morality on a different ground. DeWitt says, at the bottom of page 65 in Epicurus and His Philosophy: “In the domain of physics, the charge of ingratitude to his teachers is aggravated because the sin is against Democritus. ‘What is there in the physics of Epicurus that is not from Democritus?’ demands Cicero. And elsewhere he says what Epicurus changes in what taken from Democritus seems to spoil. Incidentally, every offense that was charged to Epicurus seemed more heinous than those of others. The defection of Epicurus from the teachings of Democritus, however, is almost wholly in the domain of ethics. To him, as a moral reformer, two things ranked foremost as abominations: skepticism and physical determinism. To such moral indignation, Nausiphanes seems to have been immune. This need not mean that he became alert to the evil of skepticism in general. To Epicurus, he seemed insensate. The pupil was advancing beyond the teacher.”
So what you won’t find in Epicurus is what you do find in writers like Marcus Aurelius or Seneca, for example, where they do talk quite a lot about morality and virtue. Obviously morality and virtue—that’s the summum bonum, the telos of the Stoics: morality in accordance with nature. So what you see in Epicurus is taking the field here, but he’s taking a very, very different approach to morality. And part of that approach is to understand that in order to have a discussion on morality, you have to know that moral action is possible in the first place. This is where the issue of determinism comes in. If all of your actions are predetermined, how can you possibly act morally? There’s no choice. There’s no decision. And so there’s no moral quality to the behavior in either direction. So what you see in Epicurus is establishing that morality is possible. And the other abomination that DeWitt cites is skepticism. If you deny the existence of knowledge, how can you know whether something is moral or not? How can you know whether your behavior is just, wise, or honorable? It makes nonsense of any discussion of morality.
This is the kind of morality Epicurus talks about—he hasn’t given you a list of ten commandments, moral laws that you shall not break. That’s not the way Epicurus approached this question. Now, Cicero makes an interesting test for philosophy here. He says that if philosophers did not discourse on morality, we should have no need of philosophers. But that’s not the test that Epicurus applied to philosophy. Epicurus said that philosophy is only useful insofar as it ameliorates the health of the soul. Philosophy has the purpose of improving our lives. It does not necessarily have the purpose of improving our behavior. That’s part of the picture, but it’s not the main test of philosophy, as Cicero wants it to be.
Cassius: If I recall correctly, it may go on like this for much of the rest of the chapter—going through each of these examples, as you’ve just done, Joshua, and unwinding them so that we can see what Cicero is doing. But I believe it’s probably time to again make the comment that Cicero is presenting a sales pitch. He is attempting to carry away the argument with an emotional appeal—to these emotions that these words are supposed to evoke. And yet he is suggesting that you should consider the emotions evoked as something different from the feelings of pleasure and pain, as if the emotional responses you get to his arguments have nothing to do with pleasure and pain, when they have everything to do with pleasure and pain. Cicero notes how well it became Torquatus to take these words on his lips—“for if they were never uttered by philosophers, we should not care to have any philosophy at all.” He’s saying that the reason we like philosophy is for this sense of awe-inspired grandeur that the discussion brings, of these words that are so intrinsically good in themselves. And even the next sentence: “It’s from a passion for those phrases, which are very seldom employed by Epicurus—I mean courage, wisdom, justice, and temperance—that men of preeminent ability have devoted themselves to the pursuit of philosophy.”
Well, I thought passion, Cicero, was something you don’t like. I thought emotions were a problem for your reason and for your disembodied abstractions derived from Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics. The passion for these phrases, Cicero, is no different than the passion that Epicurus is talking about for everything that he finds agreeable—or the reverse, the things that he finds disagreeable. It is this feeling that ultimately is where everything comes from. And you’re saying it yourself, Cicero. Why are you not reversing your opinion and going with Epicurus? You’re holding these words of virtue, prudence, honor, justice, wisdom, all these things out there, and clearly dangling the reward of the pleasure that comes from talking about them and from being associated with them—yet you’re denying that you’re getting this pleasure. You’re denying the basis of the feeling that everyone gets when they consider these issues. In my view, that is taking the totally obstinately stubborn and reverse position from reality.
Let me add a couple more as we go forward. Cicero says: “Our eyesight, says Plato, is the keenest sense we have, yet it does not enable us to see wisdom. What passionate affection for herself would she inspire in us? Why so? Because she is so crafty that she can build the fabric of this pleasure in the most excellent, magnificent manner. Why is justice praised? For whence comes the saying so hackneyed from of old, ‘a man you play with in the dark’—meaning somebody you can trust not to cheat you even in the dark? This proverb, though pointed at one thing only, has this very wide application, that in all transactions we should be influenced by the character of our actions and not by the presence of witnesses. Indeed, the arguments you alleged were insignificant and very weak. I mean that unprincipled men are tortured by their own consciousness within them, and also by fear of punishment, which they either suffer or live in dread of suffering at some time. It’s not proper to imagine your bad man as a coward or a weakling, torturing himself about anything he has done and frightened at everything, but rather as one who craftily judges of everything by his interests, being keen, shrewd, and hardened, so that he readily devises means for cheating without detection, without witnesses, without any accomplice.” Again, Cicero is appealing to this emotional attachment to how we instinctively recognize that there are certain things we wish to be identified with—that we do wish to profit from in terms of the type of people we wish to be associated with: the just, those we can trust with our interests even in the dark, not to cheat us. Those are things that obviously Epicurus wants as well. Obviously anybody wants them, because of the consequences that come from them—not just because there’s some logical abstraction attached to them, as if you acknowledge their goodness but take no personal pleasure from it, no personal reward. If you can somehow appreciate the object of your affection without taking any personal interest in it, there’s a detachment from reality, it seems to me, that Cicero’s promoting. It’s not Epicurus that refutes it, it’s just the reality of the situation that refutes it. These high-minded abstractions that Cicero is pointing to are not worthy of our respect just because they’re there. They’re worthy of our respect because of the benefits that come from associating with them.
Joshua: Yeah, it’s a very strange way to proceed—saying that the beauty of the word is what draws us to the content of virtue and morality, and that that’s what makes it good in and of itself. That borders on something called the moralistic fallacy. The moralistic fallacy occurs when one concludes that something is a particular way because it should or ought to be that way. Alternatively, this fallacy occurs when one concludes that something cannot be a particular way because it should not or ought not to be that way. This is so Cicero—it’s frustrating, almost—because Cicero says that we cannot have been put here for the pursuit of pleasure as our end. He’s falling prey to this fallacy. He’s saying that his understanding of morality does not allow pleasure to be the goal, therefore pleasure is not the goal. That is the moralistic fallacy, and Cicero trips over it every step of the way in his discussion of morality.
And it relates to something I said a few episodes back: just because you want something to be true does not mean that it is true. Just because you want the operation of nature to proceed with morality or justice does not mean that it actually does proceed with morality or justice. Just because you want morality to be absolute and unchanging—the same today and tomorrow, in Athens and in Rome—does not mean that it actually is absolute and unchanging. And so what we end up with is just a lot of bare assertions from Cicero, just a lot of claims that “well, this is how it is.” And that’s not good enough. As we read in Lucretius—I think it was the last episode or the one before—how justice develops as a convention by mutual agreement.
Interestingly enough, Mary Porter Packer, in her overview—she wrote her dissertation on Cicero’s presentation of Epicurean ethics—says something directly relevant to exactly this question: “Cicero seems to be honestly and entirely unaware of the firm basis for justice which Epicurean rule set. He can see nothing beyond the fear of punishment and therefore the fear of detection. And yet he has Torquatus say that the necessary things of life can be won without injustice. He omits the social contract as a basis of justice—the idea that people make agreements with each other, neither to harm nor to be harmed.” Cicero just ignores that as if he is unacquainted with it. She says moreover that Cicero’s failure to explain or attack the Epicurean theory of justice and the social compact is a significant omission in his discussion of Epicurean virtue. I thought that was a very interesting observation, something I might not have otherwise noticed. But it’s true—Cicero is talking about the fear of punishment as if that were the only foundation of justice. But Epicurus has a whole series of Principal Doctrines—probably six or seven of them—in which he’s outlining and building up his understanding of what justice is.
So when Cicero says: “It’s not proper to imagine your bad man as a coward or a weakling torturing himself about anything he has done and frightened at everything, but rather as one who craftily judges of everything by his interests, being keen, shrewd, and hardened, so that he readily devises means for cheating without detection, without witnesses, without any accomplice”—well, people are going to violate your standard of morality in exactly the same way, Cicero, with crafty judgment, being keen, shrewd, and hardened. So if you’re saying that this is a fatal flaw in Epicurus’s understanding of justice—which you have not properly understood—it’s exactly the same problem with your own understanding of justice and morality.
Cassius: That’s a point worth emphasizing. Referring back to what Mary Porter Packer said about how Cicero omitted discussion of Epicurus’s views of justice—that is a point drilled home very well also by one of our guests we’ve interviewed recently, Dr. Marcello Boeri and his co-author Javier Ayaz, in their book Theory and Practice in Epicurean Political Philosophy. And there’s an article that goes along with that book entitled Cicero’s Clamorous Silences—and that’s the theme: that Cicero has omitted reference to the extensive discussion in Epicurean philosophy of how justice works. He’s just skipped over it, even though it’s a central part of Epicurean philosophy, ending up manipulating or deceiving the reader by leaving out something as critically important as the Epicurean explanation of justice.
Cicero wants us to believe that Epicurus’s understanding of justice is: if you can get away with it, it’s just—anything you can do without getting caught falls under Epicurus’s understanding of justice. And that is so far from the truth. For people interested in pursuing that further, I think we have a copy of Mary Porter Packer’s essay on the forum, or else we’ll get one. She was born in 1886, and her work was published around the time of DeWitt’s early career—so it would have been in about the 1920s or 1930s. And then Dr. Boeri’s book pursues that point as well.
Joshua: So that’s a really important point for seeing through Cicero’s manner of argument here. And you know that he had this material in front of him, because he’s quoting extensively from core Epicurean material. Even what we’ve been discussing today—it seems like he’s talking about the Principal Doctrines, including number five. Well, what about those from thirty to forty, Cicero, that you don’t seem to be spending any time on? You’re reading things to make it look as bad as possible for Epicurus.
Cassius: So yes, Joshua, as we begin to conclude for today and think about next week, I do think we’re going to find there’s a repetitive argument over and over. The well that Cicero is going to keep coming back to is to appeal to what Torquatus has already warned us against—that these guys are beguiled by the glamour of the name of virtue. And he’s going to attempt to beguile us with the glamour of all these wonderful things he’s talking about, and attempt to assert they should be disassociated from the name of pleasure—as if the feeling that we get from glamour has nothing to do with pleasure or pain, as if it’s just some kind of abstraction. And one of the things I think we’ll be challenged to do—and I have confidence that you’ll be a whole lot better at it than I am, Joshua—is coming up with analogies and stories to deal with Cicero’s arguments, which is what he does not allow Torquatus to be doing here. He’s going on and on, page after page, without allowing Torquatus any significant response.
Cicero’s got these stories and methods of impressing you with how glorious his version of the supreme good really is. And I do have one example that’s related to this question of Platonic love. In Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser, there is a song contest between the hero of the story—who has been spending time with Venus and who is taking the side of pleasure—and the conventional exponents of virtue and honor and justice, who are the established members of the nobility in the song contest. The context is that a prince has stated that the winner of the song contest will be allowed to marry a princess, and these Stoic-Platonic philosopher-singers get up and talk about her beauty as an abstraction—as something that you can’t touch and can’t come close to, that you just honor from afar, in ways that I personally associate with Platonic love. And the character that Wagner has speaking in the name of pleasure takes the exact opposite approach: that it’s ridiculous to look at beauty as something you can’t touch or can’t participate in or feel yourself, that it’s worthless to you unless you touch it and feel it and experience it yourself. So I’ll link to that section of the Wagner opera as an example for dealing with Cicero’s arguments, because a lot of it does seem to come back to this question. Cicero’s holding up these virtues as glamorous, but expecting you to understand that taking pleasure in them is base. And that’s a very important aspect of deciding where you stand on this question.
Okay, so with that, rather than go into the first of several stories of illustrious Romans, let’s go ahead and close the episode for today and ask if anyone has comments on what we’ve discussed so far. Martin?
Martin: No, again, no comment today. Sorry.
Cassius: No problem. Thank you, Martin, as always. Callistheni, anything today?
Callistheni: Yes, Cassius. Today’s podcast—it’s coming to me that it’s really homing in on understanding the difference between putting virtue first versus pleasure and utility, and what leads to the best life.
Cassius: I certainly agree, Callistheni. Now, when you use the word “utility” there—utility can sometimes be a word that people get turned around by, and it may even become a euphemism for some people to avoid saying what we’re actually talking about. But that’s what we were discussing earlier in the episode. Epicurus is very focused on going right to the heart of the matter. And “use,” “utility,” words like that which refer to the process of getting to an end point are definitely important—but Epicurus is always going to focus on the end point itself as pleasure rather than anything else. Okay, thank you, Callistheni. Joshua?
Joshua: Well, it occurs to me, Cassius—we do have one more recording, but that episode won’t go out in time. So we should say it now. Merry Christmas to our listeners and to each other.
Cassius: Exactly right, Joshua. As we begin to come to the close of a recording year, this is the time we want to thank our podcast team for all of the effort that you’ve put into it, and also thank our listeners for their participation, for giving us feedback, and for asking questions at the forum. Speaking for myself, I get a lot of pleasure and enjoyment out of working with the podcast. I think it’s a very productive thing for us to be doing—to get the message out in an oral form as opposed to just in writing on the forum. And I want to be sure to join in with Joshua in expressing our hope that all of our listeners will have an enjoyable and happy holiday season with their friends. It’s the time of year to think about what we did last year, what we’d like to do next year. And so we’ll be discussing that in our upcoming episodes. Let me remind everyone to please drop by the forum whenever you can. Let us know if you have any questions or comments on this episode or anything else. Again, have a happy holiday season. See you soon. Bye.