Episode 207 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 15 - Does Epicurean Philosophy Lead to Injustice?
Date: 12/25/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3599-episode-207-cicero-s-on-ends-book-two-part-15-does-epicurean-philosophy-lead-to/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Christmas Eve 2023 episode. Continuing De Finibus Book Two, sections 16–17. Cicero moves from arguing the grandeur of virtue to producing historical examples of Roman corruption, claiming these exemplify what Epicurean philosophy necessarily leads to: men who, having no fear of the gods and no belief in absolute morality, will pursue their interests by any means they can get away with. The two main examples are Lucius Tubulus (a Roman judge so openly corrupt he simply fled into exile rather than defend himself) and Publius Sextilius Rufus (an executor who kept an inheritance rather than pass it to the intended female heir, citing the Voconian law). Cicero also argues that Epicureans, who are trained to endure pain, are specifically immune to the deterrent of punishment.
Discussion covers: the Epicurean social-contract theory of justice (which Cicero ignores entirely, per Mary Porter Packer’s dissertation); Fragment 20 from Diogenes of Oenoanda on why wrongdoers are not in fact restrained by fear of the gods; Thomas More’s Utopia on Epicurean-style justice (but More ultimately bars atheism because without it “promises, covenants, and oaths can have no hold upon an atheist” — echoing John Locke); Richard III’s speech on clothing villainy with virtue; the Albigensian Crusade’s “Kill them all, God will sort them out”; Cosimo Raimondi’s 1429 defense of Epicurus (A Letter to Ambrogio Tignosi) arguing that virtue is essential to Epicurean philosophy precisely because it guides and constrains the pursuit of pleasure; and Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens on Epicurus accepting that his followers may pervert his philosophy but continuing nonetheless. The episode concludes with Christmas wishes.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 207 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.
We are in Book Two of Cicero’s On Ends, where Cicero has taken the platform from Torquatus and is now launching off into a full attack on Epicurean philosophy. For the last two weeks or so we’ve been discussing the nature of morality. At the beginning of section 16, Cicero had pointed out to Torquatus that Epicurus embraced virtue, and then after attempting to pin Torquatus to this position — well, you too, Torquatus, are accepting the grandeur of virtue — Cicero is now going to switch over and allege: having acknowledged the grandeur of virtue, don’t you see the decadence of putting pleasure in the heart of ethics as opposed to virtue?
And so now Cicero is going to turn to talking about a number of famous Roman examples of lack of morality from his point of view. Today we’re going to be going through the first of these — someone named Lucius Tubulus — but there are others as well.
The first example that Cicero gives is Lucius Tubulus. “He, having presided as praetor over the court for trying murderers, took bribes with such openness that in the following year Publius Scaevola, the tribune of the commons, carried a bill in the popular assembly directing an inquiry to be made into the matter. Under this bill, the Senate voted that the inquiry should be conducted by Gnaeus Caepio, the consul. Tubulus went into exile at once and did not venture to defend himself. The facts were indeed evident.”
The only thing that’s probably important about that little story there is that Lucius Tubulus was such an openly corrupt person — such an open grifter — that when he was replaced in office it was obvious to the people who came behind him that he had been stealing from the public. And Tubulus was so aware of the openness of what he had been doing that he just simply went into exile and didn’t even try to defend himself.
And by bringing up that example, Cicero is setting the stage here to get us back into the Epicurean position about the man who can hope reasonably to escape punishment for his wrongdoing. Because Epicurus’s position is that it’s the punishment you can expect to receive for wrongdoing that is the ultimate reason why you don’t do it — the punishment both external from other people who are injured by your actions, as well as the punishment that you inflict on yourself in terms of a bad conscience and fear of being punished at some point.
So, as we know, Epicurus focuses on the pain and punishment part of the reason not to do things that are considered to be unjust or iniquitous.
Now the more difficult question that Cicero is going to turn to next is, as Cicero says here at the beginning of section 17: “We are inquiring then not merely about an unprincipled man, but about one who is both crafty and unprincipled.”
Joshua:
Yeah, it’s a great problem here in Cicero — this issue as to Epicurus’s opinion on these matters — in part because of what I quoted from Mary Porter Packer’s article last week, Cassius, when she said that in this whole text here in Book Two, Cicero never engages with Epicurus’s central claim about justice. Cicero never gives Epicurus’s opinion on this or allows Torquatus to do so. And the opinion is this: that justice arises naturally between people when they make covenants for mutual advantage, neither to harm nor to be harmed. And so the point there from Epicurus’s point of view is that the authority of people living and working together to come together to make laws is justified under Epicurean philosophy. That’s the nature of justice under Epicurean philosophy.
Now Cicero seems to be making a separate point, which is that Epicurean morality — which is a separate thing — allows Lucius Tubulus to get away with this, that as long as you won’t be caught, then you’re fine, then you will escape punishment. There’s no punishment after death, so there’s nothing to worry about.
But the question for the rest of us, when it comes to the Lucius Tubuluses of the world, is not what his philosophy should tell him to do as to the nature of morality. It’s how should we respond to that given our understanding of justice. And it’s totally absent in this entire book. Cicero does not include Epicurus’s understanding of justice as covenants based on mutual advantage — neither to harm nor to be harmed — and stealing from the public treasury would certainly be included in that.
Cassius:
Before the recording, Joshua, we were talking about Thomas More’s Utopia — in part because in that book he gives a sort of imaginary fictional world that he uses as a thought experiment to work out some of the conclusions of Epicurean philosophy. Thomas More was very Catholic and would not necessarily want these laws to be enacted in Europe, but Europe was having problems. The Catholic Church no longer had the iron grasp on European affairs that it had once enjoyed. Protestantism was the new kid on the block.
Now we know that Thomas More was friends with Erasmus, and they both shared a love particularly for the literature of Lucian of Samosata — the satires of Lucian — and one of those satires has to do with Epicurean philosophy and how it responds to a religious, amoral charlatan.
So this is what Thomas More writes in his book Utopia. He says: “As to moral philosophy, they, the Utopians, have the same disputes among them as we have here. They examine what are properly good both for the body and the mind and whether any outward thing can be called truly good or if that term belong only to the endowments of the soul. They inquire likewise into the nature of virtue and pleasure, but their chief dispute is concerning the happiness of a man. They seem indeed more inclinable to that opinion that places, if not the whole, yet the chief part of a man’s happiness in pleasure. And what may seem more strange, they make use of arguments even from religion, notwithstanding its severity and roughness, in support of that opinion so indulgent to pleasure.”
He says: “And from thence they infer that if a man ought to advance the welfare and comfort of the rest of mankind, there being no virtue more proper and peculiar to our nature than to ease the miseries of others, to free from trouble and anxiety, in furnishing them with the comforts of life, in which pleasure consists, nature much more vigorously leads them to do all this for himself.”
And then: “A life of pleasure is either a real evil — and in that case we ought not to assist others in their pursuit of it, but on the contrary, to keep them from it all we can, as from that which is most hurtful and deadly. Or if it is a good thing, so that we not only may, but ought to help others to it, why then, ought not a man to begin with himself?”
He continues: “Thus, as they define virtue to be living according to nature, so they imagine that nature prompts all people on to seek after pleasure as the end of all they do. They think it is an evidence of true wisdom for a man to pursue his own advantage as far as the laws allow it. They account it piety to prefer the public good to one’s private concerns, but they think it unjust for a man to seek for pleasure by snatching another man’s pleasure away from him.”
But of course Thomas More is never going to go as far as Epicurus is willing to go. He says: “To cap it all off, Utopus, the king of Utopia, made a solemn and severe law against such as should so far degenerate from the dignity of human nature as to think that our souls died with our body or that the world was governed by chance without a wise overruling providence. For they all believed that there was a state of rewards and punishments to the good and bad after this life. And they now look on those that think otherwise as scarce fit to be counted men, since they degrade so noble a being as the soul and reckon it no better than a beast. Thus they are far from looking on such men as fit for human society, since a man of such principles must needs, as often as he dares, despise all their laws and customs.”
Joshua:
So we started out pretty good there in this book Utopia, but in the end Thomas More is very clear on his opinion, and it’s an opinion that echoes that of John Locke. John Locke in his Letter Concerning Toleration wrote: “I may grow rich by an art that I take not delight in, I may be cured by a remedy that I have no faith in, but I cannot be saved by a religion I distrust or by a worship that I abhor.” That sounds quite good, but then he himself goes on to say: “Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a god, for promises, covenants, and oaths can have no hold upon an atheist.”
That seems to be Cicero’s main problem here. The Epicureans are heedless pursuers of pleasure, they have no fear of the gods, and they have no fear of death to dissuade them from any crime they might commit. And so the question is, how do we answer that question? And that’s the focus of today — what we’re going to be doing this week is trying to find an answer to that question.
Cassius:
Yes, I think that’s a great summary of the problem. And so we see how the problem continues — the concern continues forever, it seems like. Cicero 2,000 years ago, these people you’ve just been quoting are much more recent, but we see the same argument out there today, implicitly, in common culture: that if you’re pursuing pleasure, if you’re just pursuing your own happiness, what is to restrain such a person from deciding that his happiness is to be a monster and to kill everyone else?
To bring this back to section 16 — one of the answers that Epicurus gives, as you were saying, is that justice is a natural development of humanity. You’re going to come to terms with other people. You’re going to form implicit or explicit contracts with other people not to be harmed in exchange for not harming them. You have the emergence of what amounts to a moral code of conduct through the natural interactions of people working together and seeing that if they don’t come to terms with each other, they’re left with nothing but force.
And so where Cicero perceives a weak point in Epicurean philosophy is that he cannot imagine Epicureans acting morally without reference to a god or to virtue.
So to drop back for just a minute to something Cicero said in section 16, Cicero looks at Torquatus and says: “Torquatus, indeed the arguments you alleged were insignificant and weak — I mean that unprincipled men are tortured by their own consciousness within them and by fear of punishment which they either suffer or live in dread of suffering at some time.” So Cicero is referring back to what Torquatus has said, that Epicurus holds that men are generally going to act properly because they fear punishment. And Cicero says: “That’s a weak and insignificant argument, Torquatus, because don’t you know that people don’t all act that way. You shouldn’t consider your bad man to be a coward or a weakling torturing himself about what he’s done. What you don’t understand, Torquatus, is that there are people out there who are craftily judging everything by their interests — people who are keen, shrewd, and hardened, so that they readily devise means for cheating without detection, without witnesses, and without any accomplices.”
It would occur to my mind that back in Book One, Torquatus had used the phrase that there are certain men who are so depraved that they are proper to be restrained rather than reformed. Epicurus knew that, just as it says in the Principal Doctrines, that not everyone is going to form those agreements with each other.
How do we deal with the fact that some people may get away with their crimes? What’s the possible answer to: “Okay, Torquatus, your philosophy is so unsound, you’re not providing a way to punish people who do bad things — therefore people who do bad things in your philosophy just may prosper. How terrible is that, Torquatus? How can you live with that?”
So we have to think about what answers Torquatus and the Epicureans would give. And one of the answers I think they would give is: while that may be true, Cicero — sometimes bad people do prosper — does that mean we should just give up all rationality and connection with nature and just develop a fantasy, a noble lie like Plato? Are we going to give up our hold on honesty and clarity and reality about the way the universe operates just because there are some bad results that happen? There’s a saying in the law that hard cases make bad law. Are you going to look at the bad person out there who happens to escape punishment and say, well, because he escaped punishment I’m going to jettison everything I know about nature and the world and reality, and I’m going to harness myself to some fictional God who’s going to tell everybody what to do? Is that the right answer, Cicero? I think Torquatus would say: no, that’s not the right answer.
Joshua:
We have another example of that in the Epicurean text that’s very interestingly written — from Diogenes of Oenoanda and the wall that he erected. One of the fragments that talks about this issue of justice is Fragment 20, translated by Martin Ferguson Smith:
“So it’s obvious that wrongdoers, given that they do not fear the penalties imposed by the laws, are not afraid of the gods. This has to be conceded, for if they were afraid, they would not do wrong. As for all the others, it is my opinion that the wise are not righteous on account of the gods, but on account of thinking correctly, and the opinions they hold regarding certain things, especially pain and death. For indeed invariably and without exception, human beings do wrong either on account of fear or on account of pleasure. And that ordinary people on the other hand are righteous insofar as they are righteous on account of the laws and the penalties imposed by the laws hanging over them.”
And then he goes on to say that a clear indication of the complete inability of the gods to prevent wrongdoing is provided by examples of nations that are very superstitious and religious but are also vile.
He continues: “On account of what kind of gods then will human beings be righteous? For they’re not righteous on account of the real gods or on account of Plato’s or Socrates’ judges in Hades. We are left with this conclusion: why should not those who disregard the laws scorn fables much more? So with regard to righteousness, neither does our Epicurean doctrine do harm, nor does the opposite doctrine help. Not only does it not help, but on the other hand, it does harm — for the one removes disturbances while the other adds them.”
Basically it’s the same argument whether you’re talking about gods or whether you’re talking about some kind of an absolute morality. Cicero is arguing that the view of absolute morality is the thing that restrains people, and the Epicureans are saying: no it doesn’t. You see people who are not being restrained now. Let’s not try to deal with them by erecting a false fantasy of a god who’s going to punish them in hell. Let’s deal with them here and now in reality. And the only way that you can deal with people who are doing bad things is to make sure that they are punished or restrained and therefore cannot continue to do those bad things.
Cassius:
Yeah, Cassius. There are several classes of people and ideas that we can talk about here. Shakespeare in Richard III gives us an example of a person who mines the resources of religion and virtue in order to cloak his evil deeds. He says — this is Richard III speaking: “And thus I clothe my naked villainy with odd old ends stolen out of holy writ, and seem a saint when most I play the devil.”
Richard III had been killing all his brothers and nephews and basically cutting down everyone that stood between him and the throne, but of course he was doing this using subterfuge as his method, just in order to become king.
But there’s an example that still gets used, presumably ironically. There’s this phrase from medieval Latin: Caedite eos. Novit enim dominus qui sunt eius. According to Wikipedia, this is a phrase reportedly spoken by the commander of the Albigensian Crusade prior to the massacre at Béziers on 22 July 1209. Direct translation of the medieval Latin phrase is: “Kill them. The Lord knows those that are his own.” Papal legate and Cistercian abbot Arnaud Amalric was the commander of the crusade in its initial phase. “Kill them all, let God sort them out” is the phrase that this has given rise to.
Joshua:
So we come to the part here now where we have to push this even further. It’s obvious that wrongdoers, given that they do not fear the penalties imposed by the law, are not afraid of the gods. We do have to concede that position — but we also should make the case that even people who take sincerely the idea that the gods exist, even people who are driven all their lives by religious feeling and by moral and virtuous thinking, are very easily led astray. And it’s all the worse in their case, because the person generally speaking who commits crimes out of opportunity or vanity or pleasure-seeking is going to be less bad, most times, than the person who commits crimes as a genuine true believer — who thinks that what they’re doing is not only not wrong but the only right and just and moral and virtuous thing to do under the circumstance.
“Kill them all, God will sort out his own.” That is an expression of a feeling of: I am a servant of pure absolute perfect morality because it comes from a pure absolute and perfect God. I am his right arm today, and I am going to make the decision here as to who lives and who dies, because I have the authority granted to me by a figure that is beyond reproach.
Cassius:
Yes. And you mentioned the irony. While Epicureanism will allow people who are so minded to use pleasure as a guise to commit crimes or injustices or immoral acts and get away with them — that’s probably true. But the other side has not only the same problem, that people will use virtue as a guise to cover up their evil, as I quoted from Richard III — but people do praise virtue and morality in earnest and go on to commit the most heinous crimes which it’s possible to imagine.
Yes, exactly. I think we’re really beginning to bring this part into focus here. Even though it gets intricate to go back and forth comparing the two options, we’ve seen the example of it at the beginning of Lucretius: “So great is the power of religion to persuade people to evil deeds.” You could say exactly the same thing about this view of absolute morality that Cicero is advocating. So great is the power of this virtue to persuade people to evil deeds — as in the example you gave of “kill them all, that God sort them out.”
Cicero is not solving the problem by pointing out that people do bad things and so you need something else to stop them. Your something else, Cicero, is non-existent. And when you assert something non-existent and in the end ridiculous as a guideline, you’re undermining any rational guideline that may exist in fact.
Joshua:
Continuing now in section 17 — the example that Cicero gives to drive this point home even further — apparently it was a big problem in the Roman world to make sure that wills and testamentary instructions when you die are carried out. And the Romans apparently had something called the Voconian law. The Voconian law was apparently some kind of a restriction in bequeathing your property to a female heir. And so what the Romans would do to get around this Voconian law would be to leave the property to an executor with instructions to the executor to then transfer the property onto the female heir.
And the example given here is that of Publius Sextilius Rufus, who was made an executor of Quintus Fadius Gallus. Gallus had requested that the whole property passed to the daughter. And the dilemma is this: if you’re a Roman citizen, you’re not going to lie and you’re not going to evade the law. So what do you do when you’ve been asked to be the intermediary to evade the law?
Cicero’s example says that in this case, what the executor did was he kept the estate for himself — because if he had carried out the wishes he would have been in violation of the law. So Cicero says: “Sextilius kept a very large property of which he would never have touched a single penny if he accepted the tenets of those who set morality and uprightness above all gains and advantages. Well, do you suppose that his mind was troubled or disturbed? Nothing less could be true. On the contrary, he was enriched by the property and this made him glad.”
Cassius:
As I read through this, once again I’m struck by the absence in Cicero of any consideration that virtue or justice have a role to play in Epicurean philosophy. Epicurus does not make virtue to be the good or the goal. He does not make virtue out to be the telos, as these other philosophers do. And it’s true that that position is only occupied by pleasure — pleasure is the good, it is the end, the guide. But virtue is, as we sometimes say, a handmaiden to pleasure. It guides us in the pursuit of pleasure. It guides us in the avoidance of pain. All of these things have to be weighed and balanced, but Cicero doesn’t allow Epicurus the level of nuance that would be required to give the full exposition of his position on this subject.
He does him very dirty here on the issue of justice — by leaving out Epicurus’s very reasonable foundation for covenants and laws. Torquatus has made very clear already how highly Epicurus had valued your reputation, your status in the community, the position you hold with your friends.
Here we have 2,000 years of this Roman who has been held up to disrepute for having basically stolen this inheritance. And Cicero is ignoring the fact that Cicero himself is using the disrepute against him. And he’s ignoring that Epicurus has said exactly the same thing — when Torquatus’s ancestors had done the things that they did in wars, they did it because it brought the esteem of the community and the appreciation of the community for having done those things. Well, this man may have been glad that he stole the inheritance and maybe he wasn’t punished by the law, but he would have suffered the same fall in reputation within his community. And once he became known for having done this, there were ramifications in his life before he died that were negative on him for having gone against his word to his friend.
So Cicero just continues to ignore that Epicurus does have this mechanism: when you do bad things, bad things are going to happen to you. They may not be immediate, they may not be as dramatic in terms of punishment as we would like to see them, but they’re still there.
Joshua:
It occurred to me that in the whole first half of this Book Two, Cicero kept chipping away at pleasure. He was constantly trying to cut down the meaning of the word pleasure to only mean the pleasures of the profligate, the pleasures of the Cyrenaics. And it seems to me that in the second half here, his operation when it comes to the Epicurean understanding of justice or morality is kind of similar. He doesn’t allow a fuller exposition of justice in the same way that he didn’t want to hear a fuller exposition of pleasure.
Cassius:
That’s right. He’s ignoring the fact that if these people who he’s citing as examples of bad conduct had in fact applied Epicurus’s philosophy — if they had in fact given thought to the wider ramifications of what they’re doing — in all likelihood they would not have done these things in the first place. As you were saying, Joshua, he’s accusing these people of being Epicureans when they’re not being Epicureans at all, because they’re not looking at all of the ramifications of their conduct.
Cicero takes this a little bit further in an interesting way. In talking about these people who have gained money improperly, he says: “Your school, the Epicureans, must get money in spite of risks because it is productive of many and great pleasures. Thus the men who lay down that everything upright and moral is desirable for its own sake must often face dangers in the interest of seamliness and morality. But your friends who measure everything by the standard of pleasure must face dangers in order to make themselves masters of great pleasures.”
Joshua:
It’s a very interesting argument. Now in Horace in his Epistles, this is Epistle 6 in the first book, he says:
“If your lungs or kidneys were attacked by cruel disease, you’d seek relief from the disease. You wish to live well. Who does not? If virtue alone achieves it, then be resolute, forego pleasure. But if you consider virtue is only words and a forest is only firewood, then beware lest your rivals first to dock, lest you lose Sibira’s or Bithynia’s trade. A wife and dowry, loyalty and friends, birth and beauty too, are the gifts of her Highness Cash. It shouldn’t be surprising when we read this to see how far this deviates from what Epicurus had to say about the pursuit of wealth and fame, which he said first of all makes you a slave to the crowds.”
Cassius:
Yeah, it’s interesting. He’s just ignoring time after time after time the things that Epicurus has clearly said that are right in front of him in these core Epicurean texts. And he is distorting by selectively isolating certain aspects of the doctrine and keeping it separate from how it all fits together. Because in the end it all fits together as a result of the actions that the person is pursuing.
Joshua:
Yes, Cassius. And I want to add to that a quote from a letter that was written in the 15th century by Cosimo Raimondi — a letter that I learned about from you. Cosimo Raimondi, who was born in about the year 1400 and died in 1435 or 1436, was a native of Cremona and a pupil of Gasparino Barzizza. He wrote a well-known defense of Epicurus — A Letter to Ambrogio Tignosi, A Defense of Epicurus Against the Stoics, Academics, and Peripatetics — in 1429. And in that letter he writes:
“We see that man’s whole constitution is geared towards the perception of pleasure, that nature carries us towards it, that a great many important things exist for its sake, that all our actions are measured against its standard, so that in the end lives may be free of care — in short that everything is desired purely on account of the pleasure it will give us. In these circumstances, now that Epicurus’s case is conclusively proved by these rigorous and convincing arguments, who could be still so hostile to him as not to assent to his doctrine and admit that the highest felicity will be found in pleasure. But the Peripatetics do deny his doctrine and cannot bear the thought that pleasure is the supreme good, placing it rather in virtue. I should like to ask them, if virtue itself is going to bring in its train sadness, grief, pain, and fear, is it still to be desired? That I think they will not agree to. Since then, virtue is sought for the tranquility it brings to life, in which, under the name of pleasure, Epicurus identifies the supreme good, again I ask the Peripatetics why they are unwilling to place the greatest good in pleasure.
“If perhaps some think that by this, Epicurus meant that we should spend our days wallowing in feasting and drinking, in gambling, games, and the pleasures of sex, such a wastrel Epicurus would hardly deserve our praise. His teaching would indeed be lamentable if he wanted us to be gluttonous, drunken, debauched, boastful, and promiscuous. But that is not what Epicurus in his wisdom said or recommended. In fact, so far was he from wanting us to live without virtue, that virtue is actually essential for living up to his teaching, since it constrains and directs, as it were, all the bodily senses, and does not permit us to make use of them except when needed. Epicurus does not slide into pleasure in the manner of animals without the exercise of judgment, but rather enjoys it with restraint when it is right to do so. His theories therefore should not be neglected, nor should they be treated as condemned. And it is clear that the Peripatetics have not sufficiently understood what it is that they are saying.”
And in that old Academy tradition we include Cicero, who has not sufficiently understood what it is that he is saying here.
Cassius:
That letter is excellent to read and always worth looking at again. It bears directly on the question.
Cicero is asking here: what are you going to do, Epicurus? What are you going to do about corrupt officials? What are you going to do about kings who behave barbarically? And it’s like — what do you want him to do, Cicero? Do you want him to mete out punishment like a god? All we can do in these situations is erect laws based on covenants — neither to harm nor to be harmed — and build our lives and our societies in such a way as to detect these crimes when they are committed and punish them when the perpetrators are caught. That’s it. That’s all we can do.
It’s not possible to build a system of ethical or moral philosophy in which nobody ever again commits any crimes. It would be ludicrous to imagine that we could possibly achieve that. And so Epicurus isn’t going to fall back on this imaginary understanding of absolute morality. He’s not going to fall back on the idea that there is an all-powerful God intervening in the affairs of men to keep things on a moral level. Those are not true. Even if they were good, we wouldn’t pursue them because they’re not true.
Yes, Joshua. In fact, this calls to my mind — it’s very easy to become almost nihilistic, to become discouraged at what we see going on around us. We know what a mess men make of everything, and to go from that observation to think that nothing makes any difference and that we should just abandon ourselves to ideas that have no foundation and to fantasies and to noble lies as if that’s the best we can do — but that’s not the alternative that Epicurus was suggesting. And in the discussion for this week, I was pointing out a section of what Frances Wright had Epicurus say in confronting the Stoics in her A Few Days in Athens:
“Some few generations hence, when the amiable virtues of Epicurus and the sublime excellence of Zeno’s shall no longer live in remembrance or tradition — their fierce and ambitious bigots of some new sect may alike calumniate both, proclaim the one for a libertine and the other for a hypocrite. But I will allow that I, Epicurus, am more open to detraction than Zeno, that while your schools shall be abandoned, mine shall more probably be disgraced. But it will be the same cause that produces the two effects. It will be equally the degeneracy of man that shall cause the discarding of your doctrines and the perversion of mine.
“Why then should the prospect of the future disturb Epicurus more than Zeno? The fault will not lie with me any more than with you, but with the vices of my followers and the ignorance of my judges. I follow my course, guided by what I believe to be wisdom, with the good of man at my heart, adapting my advice to his situation, his disposition, and his capacities. My efforts may be unsuccessful, my intentions may be calumniated, but as I know these to be benevolent, so I shall continue those — unterrified and unruffled by reproaches, unchilled by occasional ingratitude and frequent disappointment.”
And that’s what we see when we look at people who do bad things, who are not punished. We do have frequent disappointment that the world does not bring the perfect result to everyone in every situation, but we’re not going to abandon reality. We’re going to go forward in a benevolent and wise manner with the faculties that nature has given to us, and we’re going to do the best we can under the circumstances. We’re not going to come up with a fantasy. We’re going to do the best that we can with reality.
So I think a lot of this gets wrapped up into that aspect of the question. And I think that Epicurus not only has a very defensible position, but he has a stronger position than does Cicero. And he erects his morality that does lead to a better result on a much stronger foundation than Cicero and Plato and Aristotle and the rest of them ever dreamed of doing.
So, okay — again, it’s Christmas Eve. Thank you again this year for those who have listened to our podcast. We appreciate those who dropped by the forum and talk with us about the things that we discuss here. We invite you to join us there each week and every week to discuss Epicurean philosophy. Thank you for your time this week. We’ll be back soon. See you then.
Martin:
No, sorry. Again, I have no comments.
Cassius:
All right. Thank you, Martin.
Joshua:
Merry Christmas.
Cassius:
Merry Christmas, everyone.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 207 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 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.
We are in Book Two of Cicero’s On Ends, where Cicero has taken the platform from Torquatus and is now launching into a full attack on Epicurean philosophy. For the last two weeks or so we’ve been discussing the nature of morality. At the beginning of section 16, Cicero had pointed out to Torquatus that Epicurus embraced virtue, and then—after attempting to pin Torquatus to this position—Cicero is now going to switch over and allege that having acknowledged the grandeur of virtue, Torquatus should see the decadence of putting pleasure at the heart of ethics as opposed to virtue. And so now Cicero is going to turn to talking about a number of famous Roman examples of immorality from his own point of view.
The first of these is someone named Lucius Tubulus: “He, having presided as praetor over the court for trying murderers, took bribes with such openness that in the following year Publius Scaevola, the Tribune of the Commons, carried a bill in the Popular Assembly directing an inquiry to be made into the matter. Under this bill, the Senate voted that the inquiry should be conducted by Gnaeus Caepio, the Consul. Tubulus went into exile at once and did not venture to defend himself. The facts were indeed evident.” The only thing that’s probably important about that little story is that Lucius Tubulus was such an openly corrupt person—a grifter, people would say today—that when he was replaced in office it was obvious to those who came behind him that he had been stealing from the public, and Tubulus was so aware of how open his crimes had been that he simply went into exile and didn’t even try to defend himself.
By bringing up that example, Cicero is setting the stage to get back to the Epicurean position about the man who can hope reasonably to escape punishment for his wrongdoing—because Epicurus’s Torquatus had said that it’s not a simple question to know what the wise man is going to do when the action being complained of is totally unknown to other people. Of course, in placing pleasure and pain at the center of your moral analysis, it’s the punishment you can expect to receive for wrongdoing—both external punishment from others injured by your actions, and the internal punishment you inflict on yourself through a bad conscience and fear of future punishment—that is the ultimate reason why you don’t do it. So this first example that Cicero gives is someone whose iniquities were known to the people. The more difficult question that Cicero is going to turn to next is, as he says at the beginning of section 17: “We are inquiring then not merely about an unprincipled man but about one who is both crafty and unprincipled.”
Joshua: Yeah, it’s a great problem here in Cicero—this issue of Epicurus’s opinion on these matters—in part because of what I quoted from Mary Porter Packer’s article last week, Cassius. She said that in this whole text in Book Two, Cicero never engages with Epicurus’s central claim about justice. Cicero never gives Epicurus’s opinion on this, or allows Torquatus to do so. And the opinion is this: that justice arises naturally between people when they make covenants for mutual advantage, neither to harm nor to be harmed. So the point from Epicurus’s perspective is that I can’t control Lucius Tubulus’s morality or whether he’s going to take bribes. The authority of people living and working together to come together and make laws is justified under Epicurean philosophy. That’s the nature of justice under Epicurean philosophy.
Now Cicero seems to be making a separate point—that Epicurean morality allows Lucius Tubulus to get away with this, that as long as you won’t be caught you’re fine, you’ll escape punishment, and since there’s no punishment after death, there’s nothing to worry about. But the question for the rest of us when it comes to the Lucius Tubuluses of the world is not what his philosophy should tell him about the nature of morality. It’s: how should we respond to that, given our understanding of justice? That’s where the conversation needs to take place, and it’s totally absent in this entire book. Cicero does not include Epicurus’s very reasonable foundation for covenants and laws based on mutual advantage—“neither to harm nor to be harmed”—and stealing from the public treasury would certainly be included in that.
Before the recording, Cassius, as we were talking about Thomas More’s Utopia—in part because in that book he gives a sort of imaginary fictional world in the Americas, in a place called Utopia, that he uses as a thought experiment to work out some of the conclusions of Epicurean philosophy. Thomas More was very Catholic and would not necessarily have wanted these laws enacted in Europe. But Europe was having problems: the Catholic Church no longer had the iron grasp on European affairs it had once enjoyed, Protestantism was the new force in Northern Europe, and the mutual excommunications and heresy trials and wars of religion followed—Thomas More’s world was sort of collapsing around him and he was looking for solutions.
We know that Thomas More was friends with Erasmus and they both shared a love particularly for the literature of Lucian of Samosata, including one of his satires that has to do with Epicurean philosophy and how it responds to a religious and amoral charlatan. So this is what Thomas More writes in Utopia: “As to moral philosophy, they—the Utopians—have the same disputes among them as we have here. They examine what are properly good both for the body and the mind and whether any outward thing can be called truly good or if that term belong only to the endowments of the soul. They inquire likewise into the nature of virtue and pleasure, but their chief dispute is concerning the happiness of a man and wherein it consists, whether in some one thing or in a great many. They seem indeed more inclinable to that opinion that places, if not the whole, yet the chief part of a man’s happiness in pleasure. And what may seem more strange, they make use of arguments even from religion—notwithstanding its severity and roughness—in support of that opinion so indulgent to pleasure, for they never dispute concerning happiness without fetching some arguments from the principles of religion as well as from natural reason, since without the former they reckon that all our inquiries after happiness must be but conjectural and defective.” And then: “From thence they infer that if a man ought to advance the welfare and comfort of the rest of mankind—there being no virtue more proper and peculiar to our nature than to ease the miseries of others, to free from trouble and anxiety, in furnishing them with the comforts of life, in which pleasure consists—nature much more vigorously leads them to do all this for himself. A life of pleasure is either a real evil, and in that case we ought not to assist others in their pursuit of it, but on the contrary to keep them from it all we can—or if it is a good thing, so that we not only may but ought to help others to it, why then ought not a man to begin with himself? Thus, as they define virtue to be living according to nature, so they imagine that nature prompts all people on to seek after pleasure as the end of all they do.”
More continues: “They think it is an evidence of true wisdom for a man to pursue his own advantage as far as the laws allow it. They account it piety to prefer the public good to one’s private concerns, but they think it unjust for a man to seek for pleasure by snatching another man’s pleasure away from him, and on the contrary they think it a sign of a gentle and good soul for a man to dispense with his own advantage for the good of others, and that by this means a good man finds as much pleasure one way as he parts with another.”
But of course Thomas More is never going to go as far as Epicurus is willing to go. He caps it all off by saying that Utopus, the king of Utopia, made a solemn and severe law “against such as should so far degenerate from the dignity of human nature as to think that our souls died with our body or that the world was governed by chance without a wise overruling providence”—because “there is no doubt to be made that a man who is afraid of nothing but the law and apprehends nothing after death will not scruple to break through all the laws of his country either by fraud or force, when by this means he may satisfy his appetites.”
Cassius: Yes, I think that’s a great summary of the problem, and so we see how the concern continues forever, it seems like—Cicero two thousand years ago, and these people you’ve just been quoting are much more recent, but we see the same argument implicitly in common culture: if you’re pursuing pleasure, if you’re just pursuing your own happiness, what is to restrain such a person from deciding that his happiness is to be a monster? And to bring this back to section 16, one of the answers that Epicurus gives is that he focuses justice on pleasure and pain and how it is a natural development of humanity that you’re going to come to terms with other people. You’re going to form implicit or explicit contracts with each other not to be harmed in exchange for not harming others. You have the emergence of what amounts to a moral code of conduct through the natural interactions of people working together and seeing that if they don’t come to terms with each other, they’re left with nothing but force. And Epicurus recognizes that that’s what’s going to happen. In certain circumstances, people who can’t or don’t agree to make these contracts—there is no justice involved, and force is going to resolve the question if it’s resolved at all. But the course that is seen to maximize pleasure and minimize pain—not only for the majority of people but for yourself—is generally to come to terms with other people and live benevolently with them for the mutual benefit of everyone involved.
And so where Cicero perceives a weak point in Epicurean philosophy is that he cannot imagine Epicureans acting morally without reference to a god or to virtue. To drop back for just a minute to something Cicero said in section 16—Cicero looks at Torquatus and says: “Torquatus, indeed the arguments you alleged were insignificant and 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.” So Cicero is referring back to what Torquatus has said—that Epicurus held that men are generally going to act properly because they fear punishment. And Cicero says that’s a weak argument, because don’t you know that people don’t all act that way? Your bad man is not a coward or a weakling torturing himself about what he’s done—he’s “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, and without any accomplices.” So he’s saying to Torquatus: your argument is bogus. Forget about conscience as a restraint on action because lots of people get away with their crimes without ever being punished, without any witnesses. And that’s where we come up with the example of Lucius Tubulus as someone willing to commit his crimes totally out in the open.
It occurs to me—back in Book One, Torquatus had used the phrase that there are certain men who are so depraved that they are proper to be restrained rather than reformed. Epicurus knew that. Just as it says in the Principal Doctrines, not everyone is going to form those agreements with each other. And there are going to be situations where crimes are not easily exposed. So how do we deal with the fact that some people may get away with their crimes? One of the answers I think the Epicureans would give is that while it may be true, Cicero, that sometimes bad people prosper—does that mean we should give up all rationality and connection with nature and develop a fantasy, a noble lie like Plato? Are we going to jettison everything we know about nature and reality just because there are some bad results? There’s a saying in the law that hard cases make bad law. Are you going to look at the bad person who happens to escape punishment and say that, because he escaped punishment, you’re going to harness yourself to some fictional God who’s going to tell everybody what to do? I think Torquatus would say: no, that’s not the right answer.
We have an example of this in the Epicurean texts—very interestingly written by Diogenes of Oinoanda on the wall that he erected. Fragment 20, translated by Martin Ferguson Smith, reads: “So it is obvious that wrongdoers, given that they do not fear the penalties imposed by the laws, are not afraid of the gods. This has to be conceded, for if they were afraid, they would not do wrong. As for all the others, it is my opinion that the wise are not righteous on account of the gods, but on account of thinking correctly, and the opinions they hold regarding certain things—especially pain and death. For indeed invariably and without exception, human beings do wrong either on account of fear or on account of pleasure, and ordinary people on the other hand are righteous insofar as they are righteous on account of the laws and the penalties imposed by the laws hanging over them.” And then he goes on to say that a clear indication of the complete inability of the gods to prevent wrongdoing is provided by examples of nations who are very superstitious and religious but are also vile. And he continues: “On account of what kind of gods then will human beings be righteous? For they are not righteous on account of the real gods or on account of Plato’s or Socrates’ judges in Hades. We are left with this conclusion: why should not those who disregard the laws scorn fables much more?” In other words, if people are already disregarding the real impediments to bad conduct—obvious punishment from the police or the military—won’t they disregard the fables of punishment hereafter even more? “And so, with regard to righteousness, our doctrine—Epicurean philosophy—neither does our doctrine do harm, nor does the opposite doctrine help. Not only does it not help, but on the other hand it does harm—for the one removes disturbances while the other adds them.”
Joshua: Yeah, Cassius, there are several classes of people and ideas that we can talk about here. Shakespeare, in Richard III, gives us an example of a person who mines the resources of religion and virtue in order to cloak his evil deeds. Richard III says: “And thus I clothe my naked villainy with odd old ends stolen out of holy writ, and seem a saint when most I play the devil.” Richard III had been killing off his brothers and nephews and cutting down everyone that stood between him and the throne—but using subterfuge as his method.
There’s also a phrase I still see used ironically, from medieval Latin: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius—“Kill them. The Lord knows those that are his own.” According to Wikipedia, this is a phrase reportedly spoken by Papal Legate and Cistercian Abbot Arnaut Almarich, military commander of the Albigensian Crusade, prior to the massacre at Béziers on 22 July 1209. “Kill them all, let God sort them out” is the phrase it has given rise to. And there are Old and New Testament passages cited to justify precisely that position.
We do have to concede that position Diogenes makes—that wrongdoers are not afraid of the gods, since if they were afraid they would not do wrong. But we should also make the case that even people who sincerely believe in the gods, even people driven all their lives by religious feeling and moral and virtuous thinking, are very easily led astray. And it’s all the worse in their case, because the person who commits crimes out of opportunity or vanity or pleasure-seeking is generally going to be less bad than the person who commits crimes as a true believer—one who thinks that what he’s doing is not only not wrong but is the only right and just and moral and virtuous thing to do under the circumstances. “Kill them all, let God sort them out”—that is an expression of the feeling: I am a servant of pure absolute perfect morality because it comes from a pure absolute and perfect God, and I am his right arm today making the decision about who lives and who dies. How could you possibly gainsay such a person except by saying that your authority does not exist in that way, you’re wrong to think this is moral or virtuous or just. Epicureanism may allow people who are so minded to use it as a guise to commit crimes. That’s probably true. But the other side has not only the same problem—that people will use virtue as a guise to cover up their evil, as I quoted from Richard III—people also do praise virtue and morality in earnest and go on to commit the most heinous crimes imaginable.
Cassius: Yes, exactly. I think we’re really beginning to bring this part into focus here. Even though it gets intricate to go back and forth comparing the two options, we’ve seen the example of it at the beginning of Lucretius—this is basically the same thing as saying: so great is the power of religion to persuade people to evil deeds. You could say exactly the same thing about this view of absolute morality that Cicero is advocating. In the example you gave of “kill them all, let God sort them out”—it’s that kind of total absolute abandonment of discretion and intelligent evaluation of the justice of a situation that you can arrive at whether you’re talking about a god telling you to sacrifice your daughter like Iphigenia or some kind of military action like the one you cited.
Cicero is not solving the problem by pointing out that people do bad things and that you need something else to stop them. The something else you’re trying to add, Cicero, is non-existent. And when you assert something non-existent and in the end ridiculous as a guideline, you’re undermining any rational guideline that may exist in fact. That seems to me to be what Diogenes of Oinoanda is saying when he says that the opposite doctrine not only does not help but does harm. What about the harm of undermining honesty and clear thinking and reality by asserting that this absolute morality or this law from heaven exists—when it clearly does not, when there is no way to prove that it exists and there’s no evidence for it? You are not just creating a harmless fairy tale. You are absolutely undermining any confidence that the people you’re dealing with should have in your honesty and justice.
Now, continuing on in section 17, the example that Cicero gives to drive this point home further concerns what the Romans called the Voconian law—apparently some kind of restriction on bequeathing property to a female heir. And so what the Romans would do to get around the Voconian law would be to leave the property to an executor with instructions to transfer it to the female heir. The example given here is that of Publius Sextilius Rufus, who was made executor of Quintus Fadius Gallus. Gallus had requested that the whole property pass to his daughter. The dilemma is this: if you’re a Roman citizen, you’re not going to lie and you’re not going to evade the law. So what do you do when you’ve been asked to be the intermediary to evade the law? What Cicero says here is that Sextilius simply kept the estate for himself, because if he had carried out the wishes of the testator he would have been in violation of the law. Cicero says: “Sextilius kept a very large property of which he would never have touched a single penny if he accepted the tenets of those who set morality and uprightness above all gains and advantages. Well, do you suppose that his mind was troubled or disturbed? Nothing less could be true. On the contrary, he was enriched by the property and this made him glad. He placed a high value on money gained, not merely without breach of the laws, but actually by observance of the laws.” Here’s another example of a dilemma where Cicero says you should choose morality and virtue over your own advantage.
Joshua: As I read through this, Cassius, once again I’m struck by the absence in Cicero of any consideration that virtue or justice have a role to play in Epicurean philosophy. Epicurus does not make virtue to be the goal—he does not make virtue the telos, as these other philosophers do. And it’s true that that position is only occupied by pleasure. Pleasure is the good, the end, the guide. But virtue is a handmaiden to pleasure. It guides us in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, just like reason—which is not the canon itself but is nevertheless an indispensable mental faculty—guides us in the pursuit of pleasure. All of these things have to be weighed and balanced, but Cicero doesn’t allow Epicurus the level of nuance that would be required to give the full exposition of his position on this subject. He does him very dirty on the issue of justice by leaving out Epicurus’s very reasonable foundation for covenants and laws.
Torquatus has made very clear already how highly Epicurus valued your reputation, your status in the community, the position you hold with your friends. Here we now have this Roman—Sextilius—held up to disrepute for having basically stolen this inheritance. And Cicero is ignoring the fact that he himself is using that disrepute against him. He’s also ignoring that Epicurus said exactly the same thing: when Torquatus’s ancestors had done the things they did in wars, they did it because it brought the esteem and appreciation of the community. Well, this man may have been glad that he stole the inheritance and maybe he wasn’t punished by the law, but he would have suffered the same fall in reputation within his community that we’re talking about here. And once he became known for having done this, there were ramifications in his life before he died that were negative for having gone against his word to his friend. So Cicero just continues to ignore that Epicurus does have this mechanism: when you do bad things, bad things are going to happen to you. They may not be immediate, they may not be as dramatic as we would like to see them, but they’re still there. And even when the punishment doesn’t come with as much force as we’d like, we’re not resorting to a made-up fantasy as an excuse.
Cicero is taking all of the horrible things that these well-known Greek and Roman scoundrels have done over the years and laying them all at the feet of Epicurus, saying this is your work—you have created a philosophy that licenses every single one of these crimes. That couldn’t, in my view, be more ludicrous or more meretricious. It’s absolutely foolish and ridiculous that Cicero is doing this.
Cassius: You know, it occurred to me that in the whole first half of Book Two, Cicero kept chipping away at pleasure. He didn’t want pleasure to mean the absence of pain. He didn’t want pleasure to mean mental pleasure. He didn’t want pleasure to mean the remembrance of past pleasures or the anticipation of future pleasure. Pleasure was only stimulation—he was constantly throughout the first half of the book trying to cut down the meaning of the word pleasure to mean only the pleasures of the profligate or the pleasures of the Cyrenaics. And it seems to me that in the second half here, his operation when it comes to Epicurean understanding of justice or morality is kind of similar. He doesn’t allow a fuller exposition of justice in the same way he didn’t want to hear a fuller exposition of pleasure.
Joshua: That’s right. He’s ignoring the fact that if these people he’s citing as examples of bad conduct had in fact applied Epicurus’s philosophy—if they had given thought to the wider ramifications of what they’re doing—in all likelihood they would not have done these things in the first place. As you were saying, Cassius, he’s accusing these people of being Epicureans when they’re not being Epicureans at all, because they’re not looking at all of the ramifications of their conduct.
Cassius: Cicero takes this a little bit further in an interesting way we ought not to skip over. In talking about people who have gained money improperly—Tubulus from stealing from the country, and the executor who stole from the proper heir—he now wants to lump Epicureans as being particularly susceptible to going after money. In referring to Sextilius, he says: “That person placed a high value on money gained not merely without breach of the laws, but actually by observance of the laws. And money, your school—the Epicureans—must get in spite of risks because it is productive of many and great pleasures. Thus, just as men who lay down that everything upright and moral is desirable for its own sake must often face dangers in the interest of seemliness and morality, so your friends who measure everything by the standard of pleasure must face dangers in order to make themselves masters of great pleasures. If great wealth or great property is at stake, seeing that money purchases very many pleasures, Epicurus must, if he desires to carry out his own view of the ultimate good, act in the same manner as Scipio, who saw great fame in store for him if he succeeded in drawing Hannibal back into Africa. Therefore, how great was the danger that he faced? In this entire enterprise of his, he was guided by morality and not by pleasure. But your wise man, when urged on by some great gain, will do battle for money’s sake if occasion requires. Perhaps it may have been possible for crime to remain concealed. He’ll be delighted. If caught, he’ll make light of all punishments, since he’ll be trained to think lightly of death and banishment and even pain itself. You and your friends represent pain as intolerable when you set punishment before the eyes of unprincipled men. But as endurable when you make out that the wise man has always a preponderance of good.”
It’s an interesting play on the Principal Doctrines on pain—because Cicero is citing the doctrine that an Epicurean is going to be strong against pain, knowing that pain is short if strong and endurable if long. And he’s saying: Epicurus, you’re training your people to withstand punishment. You’re telling me that the pain of punishment is what keeps bad people from doing bad things. But you’re training your people that pain is tolerable, that it’s avoidable and endurable. You’re taking away the very restriction that prevents Epicureans from being total money-grubbers. So he has two accusations: Epicureans are particularly disposed toward the pursuit of money at all costs, and they’re not even concerned about punishment for getting caught, because they know that pain is endurable if long and short if harsh.
Joshua: Yeah, it’s a very interesting argument. Now, in Horace’s Epistles—this is Epistle Six in his first book—he says: “If your lungs or kidneys were attacked by cruel disease, you’d seek relief from the disease. You wish to live well. Who does not? If virtue alone achieves it, then be resolute, forego pleasure. But if you consider virtue is only words and a sacred grove is only firewood, then beware lest your rivals—first to dock—lest you lose the trade of Sibara or Bithynia, having cleared a thousand, add another, then add a third pile rounded off with a fourth. Surely wife and dowry, loyalty and friends, birth and beauty too, are the gifts of her Highness Cash, while Venus and Charm grace the well-moneyed classes. Don’t be like Cappadocia’s king, rich in slaves, short of cash. They say Lucullus was asked if he could lend the theater a hundred Greek cloaks. ‘Who could find all those?’ he answered. ‘But I’ll see and send what I’ve got.’ Later a note: ‘It seems I have at home five thousand. Take any of them, take the lot.’ It’s a poor house where there isn’t much to spare. Much that evades the master benefits his slaves. If wealth alone will make you happy and keep you so, be first to strive for it again and last to leave off.”
It shouldn’t be surprising when we read this to see how far it deviates from what Epicurus had to say about the pursuit of wealth and fame—which he said first of all makes you a slave to the crowds. But that bit about the sacred grove I think is a reference to a grove sacred to some god, where Horace imagines someone coming by with a hundred men with axes and just chopping it all down for money. And the reference to virtue being only words—that might be a reference to the last words of Brutus, which Cassius occasionally quotes: “O virtue, I thought you were something real, but it turned out you were only words after all.” It seems likely to me that Horace has his tongue firmly in cheek here, and if it is the Epicureans he has in mind, certainly Epicurus’s advice was not to pile cash upon cash without any view to either the pain you cause yourself or the harm you cause to others.
Cassius: It’s true that money brings pleasure, but you moderate that against all of the auxiliary details you could find in all of his ethical philosophy.
Joshua: Yes, absolutely. He’s just ignoring time after time after time the things that Epicurus has clearly said that are right in front of him in these core Epicurean texts. He is distorting by selectively isolating certain aspects of the doctrine and keeping it separate from how it all fits together, because in the end it all fits together as a result of the full picture of what the person is pursuing.
Cassius: The examples we’ve been talking about today, and that will continue as we move forward next week into the end of section 17 and into section 18, can all be brought into focus by this question of what is the reality of the situation. The reality is that everyone as an individual can look at the actions of other people and see them doing things that they consider bad or harmful. And how are you going to analyze this? Are you going to say there is an absolute morality and that your version of right and wrong applies to everyone? Are you going to look for some mechanism to erect your own code of values as absolute—through reason, or through God telling you so? Or are you going to look at the reality of the world from an Epicurean perspective—that there is no supernatural God, there is no overriding absolute code of right and wrong, and all that nature has given you or anybody else is pleasure and pain—and then work with the reality of pleasure and pain to come up with a culture, with a set of laws, a set of social norms, that do lead to generally the best result? Which of those two paths are you going to choose?
As we’re recording this, it’s perhaps appropriate that we’re recording on Christmas Eve 2023. The central story of much of the world in trying to resolve some of these questions is to look for a supernatural answer to the problems of life. That’s certainly one course that many people choose to follow. Epicurus suggested that it’s not only not helpful to do that, but it’s actually harmful to your successful living to erect these stories that are not based on truth and reality. But if you do in fact choose to look at the reality of nature and see how nature gives us pleasure and pain, you can—if you intelligently approach life and nature—erect a system that will allow a generally better result than if you erect a system based on falsehoods.
One more quotation from Diogenes of Oinoanda, where he says: “Was it, I ask, for his own sake that God created the world, or for the sake of human beings? For it’s obvious that it was from a wish to benefit either himself or human beings that he embarked on this undertaking. Let us then examine this. It was, they say—the Stoics—from a wish to have a city and fellow citizens, just as if he were in exile from a city, that God created the world and human beings. However, this supposition, a concoction of empty talking, is self-evidently a fable, composed to gain the attention of an audience, not a natural philosopher’s argument searching for the truth and inferring from probabilities things not palpable to sense.” So in Diogenes of Oinoanda’s words, what you want to avoid is “a supposition, a concoction of empty talking”—something “self-evidently a fable and composed to gain the attention of an audience”—rather than a natural philosopher’s pursuit of truth and inference from probabilities brought to us through the senses and faculties that nature has given to us. That’s the difference between Epicurus’s approach and this conventional absolute morality, supernatural religion approach.
We’ll come back next week and turn to the next of Cicero’s tweaks to the question. He started out today by saying: well, what if your evil man is not found out? If he’s not found out, then he can do anything he wants and will never be punished, so your appeal to punishment as a restraint on conduct is ridiculous. Next week it will be: well, what if your bad man is in fact all-powerful? What if he has the power to evade the things we call punishment? And I think the Epicureans would answer it the same way—that bad things do sometimes happen, but we’re not going to abandon the way things are. We’re not going to abandon what nature has given to us. We’re going to stick to that and do the best we can with what nature has provided.
Okay, let’s begin to come to the conclusion today. Martin, do you have any comments on what we discussed today?
Martin: No, sorry. Again, I have no comments.
Cassius: All right. Thank you, Martin. Joshua?
Joshua: Yes, Cassius. I want to pick up with what you were just talking about there. And I want to add a quote from a letter written in the fifteenth century by Cosmo Raimondi—a letter that I learned about from you. Cosmo Raimondi, who was born in about the year 1400 and died in 1435 or 1436, was a native of Cremona and a pupil of Gasparino Barziza. He helped to decipher an important manuscript of Cicero’s rhetorical works and wrote a well-known defense of Epicurus—a letter to Ambrogio Tignosi in defense of Epicurus against the Stoics, Academics, and Peripatetics, in 1429. In that letter he writes: “We see that man’s whole constitution is geared towards the perception of pleasure, that nature carries us towards it, that a great many important things exist for its sake, that all our actions are measured against its standard, so that in the end lives may be free of care—in short, that everything is desired purely on account of the pleasure it will give us. In these circumstances, now that Epicurus’s case is conclusively proved by these rigorous and convincing arguments, who could be still so hostile to him as not to assent to his doctrine and admit that the highest felicity will be found in pleasure. But the Peripatetics do deny his doctrine and cannot bear the thought that pleasure is the supreme good, placing it rather in virtue. I should like to ask them: if virtue itself is going to bring in its train sadness, grief, pain, and fear, is it still to be desired? That I think they will not agree to. Since then virtue is sought for the tranquility it brings to life—in which, under the name of pleasure, Epicurus identifies the supreme good—again I ask the Peripatetics why they are unwilling to place the greatest good in pleasure.”
“If perhaps some think that by this Epicurus meant that we should spend our days wallowing in feasting and drinking, in gambling, games, and the pleasures of sex—such a wastrel Epicurus would hardly deserve our praise. His teaching would indeed be lamentable if he wanted us to be gluttonous, drunken, debauched, boastful, and promiscuous. But that is not what Epicurus in his wisdom said or recommended. In fact, so far was he from wanting us to live without virtue, that virtue is actually essential for living up to his teaching, since it constrains and directs, as it were, all the bodily senses, and does not permit us to make use of them except when needed. Epicurus does not slide into pleasure in the manner of animals without the exercise of judgment and when necessity does not require it, but rather enjoys it with restraint when it is right to do so. His theories therefore should not be neglected, nor should they be treated as condemned. And it is clear that the Peripatetics have not sufficiently understood what it is that they are saying.” And in that tradition we include Cicero—who has not sufficiently understood what it is that he is saying here.
That letter is excellent to read and always worth looking at again, and it bears directly on the question Cicero is asking here: what are you going to do, Epicurus? What are you going to do about corrupt officials? What are you going to do about kings who behave barbarically? And it’s like—what do you want him to do, Cicero? Do you want him to mete out punishment like a god? All we can do in these situations is erect laws based on covenants not to harm nor to be harmed, and build our lives and our societies in such a way as to detect these crimes when they are committed and punish them when the perpetrators are caught. That’s it. That’s all we can do. It’s not possible to build a system of ethical or moral philosophy in which nobody ever commits any crimes. It would be ludicrous to imagine we could possibly achieve that. And so Epicurus isn’t going to fall back on this imaginary understanding of absolute morality or on the idea that there is an all-powerful God intervening in the affairs of men to keep things on a moral level. Those are not true. Even if they were good, we wouldn’t pursue them because they’re not true.
Cassius: Yes, Joshua. In fact, this calls to my mind something we’ve been discussing on the forum in the last couple of days. It’s very easy to become almost nihilistic, to become discouraged at what we see going on around us. We know what a mess men make of everything, and from that observation one might think that nothing makes any difference and that we should just give up—or that we should abandon ourselves to ideas that have no foundation, to fantasies and noble lies, as if that’s the best we can do. But that’s not the alternative that Epicurus was suggesting.
In the discussion for this week, I was pointing out a section of what Frances Wright has Epicurus say in confronting the Stoics in her A Few Days in Athens. Epicurus can’t wave a magic wand over the world and change things that we think are bad. He’s not a supernatural God. He’s not a set of ideal abstractions. And he’s not going to suggest to you that there are, because those things just don’t exist. But does that mean you’re going to give up what you can do to try to make a better place to live, to make a better world for yourself and your friends? You’re not going to just give up and walk away from the challenge. You’re going to take what nature has given you and articulate it in a constructive and persuasive way so that people can live more successfully. Here’s what Frances Wright has Epicurus say: “Some few generations, when the amiable virtues of Epicurus and the sublime excellence of Zeno shall no longer live in remembrance or tradition, their fierce and ambitious bigots of some new sect may alike calumniate both—proclaim the one for a libertine and the other for a hypocrite. But I will allow that I, Epicurus, am more open to detraction than Zeno, that while your schools shall be abandoned, mine shall more probably be disgraced. But it will be the same cause that produces the two effects—it will be equally the degeneracy of man that shall cause the discarding of your doctrines and the perversion of mine. Why then should the prospect of the future disturb Epicurus more than Zeno? The fault will not lie with me any more than with you, but with the vices of my followers and the ignorance of my judges. I follow my course, guided by what I believe to be wisdom, with the good of man at my heart, adapting my advice to his situation, his disposition, and his capacities. My efforts may be unsuccessful, my intentions may be calumniated, but as I know these to be benevolent, so I shall continue—unterrified and unruffled by reproaches, unchilled by occasional ingratitude and frequent disappointment.”
And that’s what we see when we look at people who do bad things and are not punished. We do have frequent disappointment that the world does not bring the perfect result to everyone in every situation, but we’re not going to abandon reality. We’re going to go forward in a benevolent and a wise manner with the faculties that nature has given to us, and we’re going to do the best we can under the circumstances. We’re not going to come up with a fantasy. We’re going to do the best we can with reality. I think Epicurus not only has a very defensible position, but he has a stronger position than does Cicero, and he erects his morality on a much stronger foundation than Cicero and Plato and Aristotle and the rest of them ever dreamed of doing.
So okay—again, it’s Christmas Eve. Thank you again this year for those who have listened to our podcast. We appreciate those who drop by the forum and talk with us about the things we discuss here. We invite you to join us there each week to discuss Epicurean philosophy. Thank you for your time this week. We’ll be back soon. See you then.