Episode 208 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 16 - Epicurus Stands For The Truth Rather Than Make-Believe

Date: 01/01/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3617-episode-208-cicero-s-on-ends-book-two-part-16-epicurus-stands-for-the-truth-rath/

Summary

New Year’s Day 2024 episode. Continuing De Finibus Book Two, section 18. Cicero ups the ante in his attack on Epicurean justice: now he gives the example of Marcus Crassus — so wealthy and powerful that he feared no punishment and could pursue his interests regardless of detection. Cassius argues that Cicero is essentially making the case that the Epicureans should get involved in politics and civic life (which Cicero complains they don’t do) — yet Cassius Longinus, the Epicurean, was the one who actually acted to restrain Julius Caesar.

Key exchanges: Cicero challenges Torquatus directly — “you who determine all your actions by pleasure, as you yourselves declare, do in spite of that act as to make it plain that you are guided not by pleasure but by duty.” Cassius supplies the Epicurean reply: it is not duty but pleasure widely and properly understood, including all of the long-term and social consequences, that motivates this behavior.

Two more examples analyzed: the snake that someone is about to sit on without knowing (would an Epicurean warn the person?) and the trading ship captain who knows other grain ships are coming (would he tell the starving port?). Both show how Epicurean analysis of full consequences leads to the virtuous outcome without reference to virtue as a standard. The Boston/Nova Scotia Christmas tree tradition (begun after the SS Mont Blanc explosion of 1917) is cited as a modern example of benevolence yielding pleasure.

Cicero’s closing: “if fair dealing, honesty, and justice have not their source in nature, and if all these things are only valuable for their utility, then no good man can anywhere be found.” Year-end reflections include DeWitt on Epicureanism’s “two fronts” (repellent and attractive), Dante’s Inferno on Epicureans in the circle of heresy, Lucian’s Alexander the Oracle-Monger as showing that Epicureans were the only people actually standing up to a powerful charlatan, and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden: “any truth is better than make-believe.”

Transcript

Cassius:

Welcome to Episode 208 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most 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 and we’re starting approximately around section 18, which is page 54 of the Reid edition. But before we jump back into the details, let’s talk about generally where we are in the discussion.

Cicero has chosen the topic of justice and injustice in general as a way of hammering Torquatus with the idea that Epicurus’s morality is inferior to the Platonic or the Stoic type of morality that’s based on virtue. Cicero has generally been attacking Torquatus’s position saying that punishment is not a sufficient basis for motivating people to do right, that they need to ground their actions on ideas of virtue — if not ideas of punishment by a supernatural God, at least an idea that there is an absolute morality, absolute virtue, that is independent of pleasure. That you don’t do it for the sake of pleasure but because it is perhaps beautiful, or just because it’s the right thing to do.

The examples that Cicero gave last week were of people who did bad things and were concerned about being discovered. And Cicero was arguing that this concern about being discovered is not a sufficient means of restraining people from doing bad things. The examples that he gave of an executor of an estate who failed to transfer it to the daughter of the dead person as he had promised, or the example of Quintus Pompeius who disowned a treaty with another country — those people were willing to do what they did despite the fear of punishment.

Today Cicero is going to up the ante by saying that not only does the fear of punishment not restrain people, but there are people who don’t even fear punishment in the sense that they know that they are basically all-powerful. He gives the example of Marcus Crassus, who if I remember correctly my Roman history was reputed to be the richest person in the Roman world, and in addition to being rich he was a famous general. The example for purposes of our discussion is that Marcus Crassus was so rich and so powerful that he felt no obligation whatsoever to restrain his conduct based on whether it might be discovered, because he had the power to pursue his interests regardless of whether he were discovered or not.

And it’s important to remember: Epicurean philosophy is based on an understanding of the universe in which there is no supernatural God that’s enforcing an absolute morality, and in which there are no ideal forms in a Platonic sense in some other dimension that serve as an absolute guide to conduct. The important issue is not where we want to end up, because most people do agree that certain things are better than others, certain things are more desirable than others. The question is not so much the ultimate destination of a society that we would like to live in. The question is really more the foundation for getting there — and whether you can get to a desired destination based on a fantasy of noble lies, as Plato might say, or whether we can get to our destination based on what we think is true about reality. And that’s what Epicurus is doing in basing his morality on pleasure and pain, the faculties given by nature that we do know that we have and can feel for ourselves, as opposed to a fantasy of noble lies that’s not true.

Joshua:

What I would say, Cassius, in response to what I’m reading here in Cicero is: he’s previously made the argument that the Epicurean approach to staying out of politics — to the extent that that’s what Epicurus even said — is troubling. He seems to want the Epicureans to engage in politics, as if it would be better for their hometown, better for the republic, if they did. And now we find him in this book assigning every bad thing that any politician or political figure or general has ever done and laying it all at the feet of Epicurus.

Obviously what Cicero wants is for the Epicureans to engage in politics and put aside the pursuit of pleasure and take up the pursuit of virtue. But I would just reiterate: Epicurus doesn’t have the power to bring justice to all of these individual figures. And for Cicero to say that, well, Crassus was all-powerful and functionally infinitely wealthy, and so when he went wrong he went very wrong and it was very difficult to stop him — well, what do you want Epicurus to do in this situation? What do you want the Epicureans to do about this other than throw off the pursuit of pleasure?

I’m sure that Cicero, if he heard that story, would say, well, that’s got nothing to do with me. And my response to the story about the guy who kept for himself the inheritance that was supposed to go to the daughter, the story of Crassus that he’s going into here — this has nothing to do with Epicurus at all.

And again I can reiterate: Cicero is really pushing this claim that Epicurus made that the prick of conscience or the fear of punishment would deter wrongdoing. But he’s leaving out all of the rest of Epicurus on justice. And I really do think at some point, maybe at the end of this text, we’re going to have to go through those Principal Doctrines on justice and give a better appraisal of what Epicurean justice really means.

Cassius:

Yeah, Joshua, I agree with you. Cicero’s whole argument here has to be seen as a sort of misdirection in the way that you’ve just said it. He’s trying to hold Epicurean philosophy responsible for people who are doing bad things and saying that well, they’re acting in their own interests and so therefore they’re following Epicurean philosophy. Well, Epicurus didn’t say to just think about your immediate interest. Epicurus said to think about all of the results of your actions, and in every one of these cases we can argue that if they had thought about all of the implications of what they were doing, they would not have acted in the way that they did.

Number one of your points: it’s unfair for Cicero to be blaming the actions of bad people on Epicurean philosophy. And again there’s a subtext to all of this. Torquatus and Cicero are generally in agreement about when people are doing the right thing versus when they’re doing the wrong thing. There’s no difference in that end result. It would be better if in fact the executor had turned over the estate to the daughter as he was supposed to do. Both Torquatus and Cicero would likely have agreed that it would be better if Quintus Pompeius had not disowned the treaty that had been reached. In every one of these examples, Torquatus and Cicero agree on the better result.

What is in dispute is the rationale and the motivation that gets people to that right result. Cicero is arguing that we should look to some abstraction known as virtue as the motivating factor and Torquatus is arguing that we don’t look to virtue, we look to the results, which means the results in terms of pleasure and pain. Cicero is laying out these high-sounding results and implying that only his philosophy will get you there. Torquatus is saying: no, Cicero, your philosophy is based on things that don’t exist. I can get us to the right result based on things that do exist, through nature, through the feelings of pleasure and pain.

And I think we can deduce from this something important about Epicurean philosophy. If you’re expecting a society to function because bad people will be punished for their actions, then that means that Epicurus and Epicureans would be involved in the operation of that society. And indeed, in the great conflict going on as this book is being written — Cicero and Cassius and Julius Caesar — it is the Epicurean Cassius who gets involved with Brutus and takes the action that Cicero wants to see to restrain Julius Caesar from becoming a king.

Cassius:

Around line 58 on page 54, Cicero starts this way: “If a friend of yours on his deathbed asks you to hand over his property to his daughter, and does not record the fact anywhere, as Fadius did, nor mention it to anyone, what will you do? You personally, Torquatus, would hand it over, possibly Epicurus himself would. So as you assuredly would have acted in the same way, I put the question to you whether you do not see how the power of nature is exalted by the fact that you who determine all your actions by your own convenience and your own pleasure, as you yourselves declare, do in spite of that act as to make it plain that you are guided not by pleasure but by duty and that natural uprightness has more influence with you than your perverted philosophy.”

That is a very direct challenge. And it would be thrown back in Cicero’s face by Torquatus in this way: “In being guided by pleasure, and in doing the things that I see to be right, Cicero — it’s not duty that calls me to do it. It is pleasure widely and properly understood as all of the consequences of my actions. Pleasure not only of the stimulations of the moment, but also mental and bodily pleasures that ripple through the remainder of my life. It is a global assessment of my life that leads me to make this decision to do these things that we both agree are the right things to do.”

And so when you say it’s duty, Cicero, you’re just absolutely wrong. It’s not duty. You’re misrepresenting my position. I’ve never said I would look to some abstraction of duty to a God or duty to some absolute right and wrong. I am looking to the full consequences of pleasure and pain in my life as the way I make my decisions. So you can say I’m acting according to duty as many times as you want to. You’ve been doing it paragraph after paragraph. You’re never going to get me to admit that it is duty or virtue that is the motivation for what I’m doing and what my ancestors did. I’m going to always insist that it is the feelings of pleasure and pain given by nature that ultimately were the basis for these decisions.

Joshua:

Yeah, Cassius. On that point, let me read this from DeWitt’s book Epicurus and His Philosophy. He says: “Epicureanism presented two fronts to the world, the one as repellent as the other was attractive. Its discouragement of the political career was repellent to the ambitious, its denial of divine providence to pious orthodoxy, and its hedonism to timorous respectability. Its candor, charity, courtesy, and friendliness were attractive to multitudes of the honest and unambitious folk. The influence of Epicureanism, though anonymous, has been persistent in literature, ethics, and politics. In literature and ethics it has survived by amalgamation with Stoicism, chiefly through Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. In politics, it fathered the doctrine that the least government is the best government, which was espoused by John Locke and popularized in North America by Thomas Jefferson. All these aspects of influence have been overlooked because of the usual anonymity. It was the fate of Epicurus to be named if condemned, unnamed if approved.”

And Cicero, here in this book, has already started us on that project. He’s already started on the project of saying: you say that you’re acting in the name of pleasure, but it is really virtue that drives you. It is really your understanding of your duty to the Roman people that drives you. And so he’s effectively here taking Torquatus’s Epicureanism and driving it deeper into anonymity so that virtue and duty can claim the palm in all of Torquatus’s actions and that pleasure will have nothing to do with it.

Cassius:

Yes, that’s right. And going back to the example of the person who is about to sit on the snake — and whether you warn him or not — Cicero is claiming that the Epicurean would not tell the person about the snake. And so there would be no reason whatsoever for an Epicurean to tell someone who’s not his friend that he’s about to sit down on a deadly snake.

Well, again, the same response. There’s more at stake than the gain to be gotten from this one incident in the short term. If you did tell the person that they’re about to sit down on the snake, they would be appreciative of your having done so. If that then added to your reputation for honesty and benevolence towards other people, then there are all sorts of other ramifications that you would benefit from in having revealed the existence of the snake.

So in most every case, it seems that Cicero is narrowing the scope of vision so that it is only the immediate stimulative pleasure or pain you get from an action that is to be considered. When the truth is, it’s all of the ramifications — all the results that are going to come from the action — that have to be considered. And if you look at all of the ramifications, all the results, you can see that pleasure is enhanced by these decisions that, for the moment, may be painful or less pleasurable than they could have been.

My God, how many times, Cicero, do you have to ignore where Epicurus has said in the Letter to Menoeceus that you’re sometimes going to accept pain in order to have greater pleasure or lesser pain down the road? Torquatus has reminded you of it just in the prior book. You’re just choosing to ignore the argument that answers all of these questions.

Joshua:

And you know, before we go past the snake issue, I remember in reading Cicero’s On Duties there’s another example similar to this. A trading ship is about to arrive in a port where there’s been a famine, and the trading ship is loaded with grain. And he’s going to come to the port and his grain is going to be demanded at a very high price and he’s going to profit a lot from these transactions. The dilemma is that the captain of the trading ship also knows that there are other ships loaded with grain coming to the same port a day behind him.

What does the captain of the first trading ship to arrive at the port say to the people at the port? Does he tell them: “As happy as you are to receive my grain, I’ve got better news for you — there are three other ships that are going to be docking tomorrow, and there’s going to be plenty of grain to go around for everybody. So there’s no reason for you to pay an exorbitant price for my grain. I’ll charge you a fair price for my grain, but also you’ll be able to buy more grain in the near future.”

Does the trading captain tell the people at the port that? In Cicero’s On Duties he suggested that the answer is that the captain of the trading ship would tell the people at the port so that they would not pay him an exorbitant price. But in that example, as well as sitting on the snake, you can analyze the result by saying that the captain of the trading ship who arrives first — if he does tell the people at the port that there’s more grain on the way — his reputation for fairness will be enhanced. And in the future he will reap benefits from that probably by being a more desired trading partner in future transactions.

So it’s again the example of looking to all of the ramifications of your actions rather than just looking at the immediate short-term benefit.

Cassius:

Let me give you a modern example of this kind of thing. If you go to the city of Boston around Christmas time, you will find a very excellent Christmas tree. And every year since 1971, this Christmas tree has traveled by truck from Nova Scotia to Massachusetts. It is sent there in thanks for the help that was given by the people of Boston to the people of Nova Scotia after the explosion on December 6th of 1917 of a French cargo ship called the SS Mont Blanc — one of the largest pre-nuclear explosions ever to have happened by man-made means. And so the people of Boston who were close enough to send aid and send people to help established a friendship between these two cities that continues to this day.

And you wouldn’t say that for the inhabitants of Boston there’s no pleasure to be gained from sending aid to Nova Scotia. Of course there’s pleasure to be gained from sending aid to Nova Scotia. Not only are you the hero of the day, but also it establishes connections and links that carry on through time. The ramifications of this event and its aftermath have really marked the relationship between these two cities ever since.

And so to say that there’s no pleasure at all to be gained in that is absolutely wrongheaded. But of course for Cicero, he’s thinking only in terms of pleasures that are caused by sensory stimulation. He can’t wrap his brain around this other kind, this broader sense of the word pleasure, to take into account everything else that surrounds it.

Cassius:

Right. That is the ultimate point. Cicero is trying to say that you cannot be a good person unless you fly under the flag of virtue and claim that virtue and piety are your motivating factors. If you try to cite anything other than virtue as your motivating force, then you’re bound to be a bad person.

So as we wrap up section 18, Cicero has a closing sentence here that I’m going to read from the Rackham edition first. “It is obvious that if fair dealing, honesty, and justice have not their source in nature, and if all these things are only valuable for their utility, then no good man can anywhere be found.”

So Cicero is insisting that if we don’t put fair dealing, honesty, and justice directly in nature — in the sense of nature having an absolute morality built into it — and if we only look to their value in terms of pleasure or utility, then no good man will anywhere be found.

Joshua:

Yeah, yeah. And any clear thinker would just rip this argument up one side and down the other. Cicero wants this to be a binary choice: you can either act out of self-interest or you can act virtuously. You cannot act both virtuously and out of self-interest. This is so clearly false. If you pass a law, for example — let’s say you are a consul of Rome and you pass a law and the law adds something to the betterment of society — well, you live in that society. So not only are you doing something good for the Roman people, but you’re also doing something good for yourself because you’re part of the Roman people.

It’s funny because Cicero just said in the preceding paragraph that Torquatus, you say that you’re acting in the name of pleasure, but really you’re motivated by virtue and a sense of duty. But does Cicero not see how easy it is to flip the table on that and say: Cicero, you say that you are motivated by virtue and duty, but you are actually motivated in all of your actions by pleasure? I realize that at the bottom of this page we’re going to get to Torquatus’s ancestors, which if people remember our discussion of Book One from a year and a half ago or whenever that was, Torquatus made the claim that his illustrious ancestors acted in the name of pleasure and self-interest, even while they were helping the Roman people. And you can make the exact same argument about Cicero.

Cassius:

Yeah, Joshua. That’s the continuing question. Cicero refuses to see Torquatus’s side of things. He insists that Epicurus is depraved — or “perverted” is the word he uses — and he’s never going to come to any kind of agreement with Epicurean reasoning because he insists that you cannot be a good person unless you hold virtue to be the supreme good.

Now we’ve gone through this question again today. We’re going to continue for the next several weeks and through the end of Book Two with basically that same issue. Rather than start on section 19 though, we’re going to come back to that next week since this is our last episode for 2023. A couple of things that we ought to talk about before we close.

First of all I want to thank our panelists: Joshua, Callistheni, Martin, Don — who’s been with us many times this past year and hopefully will come back next year. But as we come to the end of the year it’s a good time to review some of the more foundational issues that we talk about and we can focus on this very question we’re dealing with today.

Why is it that people are so resistant to seeing pleasure as the supreme good? Over the past year one of the more important points we’ve been stressing is how it is essential in these conversations to remind people that Epicurus’s definition of the word pleasure is much more broad than sensory stimulation. When you add to sensory stimulation the observation that if you’re not in pain you are experiencing pleasure, then you see that Epicurus’s definition is much wider and includes all these other activities of life that Cicero thinks must be described as virtue and can’t have anything to do with pleasure.

Callistheni:

What’s so important is considering long-term outcomes. If you’re only focused on the present you’re going to make certain kinds of decisions. But if you’re focused on the long-term outcome you’re going to make better decisions. And perhaps if we think of pleasure only as what’s the easiest right now, then that could also be why pleasure gets kind of a bad name, because then bad choices are made.

Cassius:

Yes, Callistheni. Now of course as we discuss long-term versus short-term, it’s not solely a matter of time. As Epicurus has told us in the Letter to Menoeceus, the wise man at the banquet is not going to choose the most food but the best. So it’s not solely a matter of length of time. But the analogy holds true in the sense of: all of the ramifications versus only a few of the ramifications. A few of them that you see right now does not take into account all of the ramifications that you’re going to see either over time or if you just simply take a step back and look at the bigger picture. That’s the analogy. It’s not necessarily just continuing over a number of years. It’s a question of stepping back and looking at a broader picture of everything.

When you talk about the narrower versus the wider view, you’re not just using a time analogy — you’re talking about more of the full consequences, the full context of the situation. You don’t just look at a small slice of the results that will occur from your actions; you look at all of the results. Time is certainly a part of that, but it’s not the only part.

As I consider the arguments that Cicero is putting forward here, I’m thinking of two things. One of those is an epic poem by Dante called the Inferno, in which Virgil is the poet’s guide to the underworld. And in the sixth circle of hell, the circle of heresy, they encounter the Epicureans unconscious, laying in lidless coffins. And they are informed that on the day of judgment the lids of the coffins will close over them and they will wake up forever locked in these dark coffins. And their punishment is fitting because of the crime, and the crime is their denial of life after death.

It occurred to me as I think about this that there is another source that imagines Epicurus in the afterlife. And that source is one I’ve already quoted from today — it is the letter written by Lucian of Samosata to his Epicurean friend Celsus. And here’s what Lucian of Samosata has to say:

“A time came when a number of sensible people began to shake off their intoxication and combine against him, chief among them the numerous Epicureans in the cities. The imposture with all its theatrical accessories began to be seen through. It was now that he, this religious charlatan figure, resorted to a measure of intimidation. He proclaimed that Pontus was overrun with atheists and Christians who presumed to spread the most scandalous reports concerning him. He exhorted Pontus, as it valued the god’s favor, to stone these men. Touching Epicurus, he gave the following response — an inquirer had asked how Epicurus fared in Hades and was told: ‘Of slime is his bed and his fetters of lead.’”

“It was war to the knife between him and Epicurus, and no wonder. What fitter enemy for a charlatan who patronized miracles and hated truth than the thinker who had grasped the nature of things and was in solitary possession of that truth? As for the Platonists, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, they were his good friends; he had no quarrel with them. But the ‘unmitigated Epicurus,’ as he used to call him, could not but be hateful to him, treating all such pretensions as absurd and plural. Alexander consequently loathed Amastris beyond all the cities of Pontus, knowing what a number of Epicurus’s friends and others like-minded it contained. He would not give oracles to Amastris because of the Epicureans that were present there.”

And in the end of this letter Lucian writes: “My object, dear friend, in making this small selection from a great mass of material has been twofold. First I was willing to oblige a friend and comrade who is for me the pattern of wisdom, sincerity, good humor, justice, tranquility, and geniality. But secondly I was still more concerned — a preference which you will be very far from resenting — to strike a blow for Epicurus, that great man whose holiness and divinity of nature were not shams, who alone had and imparted true insight into the good, and who brought deliverance to all that consorted with him.”

So the takeaway from this text: Cicero has been laying all of these charges at the feet of Epicurus, but what we have here is a concrete example of a criminal preying on the Roman Empire, and the only people who were standing up to him were the Epicureans. All of the other schools of philosophy — all of the various classes and conditions, the nobility, the aristocracy, the equestrians, the plebeians — everybody was going to this guy as if he had a semblance of the truth. But what Lucian is getting at here is that it was not this charlatan who had grasped the truth. It was Epicurus who had grasped the truth.

And if I can quote now from Henry David Thoreau, in his conclusion to his book Walden, he says: “No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures we suppose the case and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time. Insane moments we regard only the facts the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.”

That’s kind of my answer to Cicero. Any truth is better than make-believe. You claim, Cicero, that virtue is your guide, that virtue is founded in nature, that nature tells you to pursue virtue. But I tell you, Cicero, that is a lie. And any truth is better than make-believe. You say in one of your other works that you are comforted by the belief that the soul does not die with the body, and that you would not have this belief ripped from you while you were still alive. But the belief that the soul survives after the death of the body is a lie. And any truth is better than make-believe.

It helps to cite an example where it was really only the Epicureans among the ancient pagans who were willing to look at this most cruel and unjust person and to attempt to bring him low. And Cicero’s friends in all of these other schools of philosophy would not raise a finger to do anything about it. It was Epicurus and his followers, and it was because they had grasped some semblance of the most important truth there is.

Joshua:

That’s a great way to summarize the situation, Cassius. In contrast to Cicero saying that it’s impossible to be a good man unless you consider that virtue is the basis of the supreme good — the fact of the matter is that even in Cicero’s own world, his best friend was an Epicurean. Cassius, who he was ultimately relying on against Julius Caesar, was an Epicurean. Torquatus, who he’s talking to, is an Epicurean. And yet his goodness as a person is beyond dispute.

We frequently overlook the foundations, and we think about: “Well, Epicurus talks about being happy. I want to live happily, so therefore I’m going to just listen to what Epicurus has to say about the subject of happiness because I’ve chosen that as my goal in life.” But Epicurus is not suggesting that you start that way. As Epicurus himself did when he was a young person and challenged his teachers as to where chaos and the universe comes from — it is super important to focus on the issue of what is true versus what is false, and use the truth as the basis for your life. Because you do only get one life to live. You have to live it as productively as you can. And you don’t know what is the most productive way to live unless you first pursue the truth about the nature of the universe. That’s what Epicurus continuously calls us to do. And that’s what we’ll get back to in 2024.

Cassius:

As we come back next year in our next episode, we invite everyone as we always do to drop by the forum, let us know your thoughts about the podcast and the forum in general. Thank you for your time this week. We’ll be back soon. Happy New Year to all.

Transcript

Cassius: Welcome to Episode 208 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most 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.

This week we’re continuing in Book Two of Cicero’s On Ends and we’re starting approximately around section 18, which is page 54 of the Rackham edition. But before we jump back into the details, let’s talk about generally where we are in the discussion. Cicero has chosen the topic of justice and injustice in general as a way of hammering Torquatus with the idea that Epicurus’s morality is inferior to the Platonic or Stoic type of morality based on virtue. Cicero has been attacking Torquatus’s position by saying that punishment is not a sufficient basis for motivating people to do right—that they need to ground their actions on ideas of virtue, if not ideas of punishment by a supernatural God, at least on the idea that there is an absolute morality, an absolute virtue independent of pleasure that you pursue not for the sake of pleasure but because it is beautiful or simply the right thing to do. The examples that Cicero gave last week were of people who did bad things and were concerned about being discovered, and Cicero was arguing that this concern about being discovered is not a sufficient means of restraining people from doing bad things. The examples he gave—of an executor who failed to transfer property to the daughter of the deceased as promised, or of Quintus Pompeius who disowned a treaty Rome had made with another country—were people willing to do what they did despite the fear of punishment.

Today Cicero is going to up the ante by saying that not only does the fear of punishment not restrain people, but there are people who don’t even fear punishment at all because they know that they are basically all-powerful. He gives the example of Marcus Crassus—reputed to be the richest person in the Roman world and also a famous general—who was so rich and so powerful that he felt no obligation whatsoever to restrain his conduct based on it being discovered, because he had the power to pursue his interest regardless of whether he were discovered or not.

Now before we go further into Cicero’s examples, another aspect of the general situation is this. We had a post on the forum just recently about the idea that Stoic or Platonic morality is just better than Epicurean morality—that you can list all these things that Platonic morality offers in terms of being beneficent or friendly to everyone in humanity as opposed to just those who are your personal friends. And it’s important to remember that Epicurean philosophy is based on an understanding of the universe in which there is no supernatural God enforcing an absolute morality and there are no Platonic ideal forms in some other dimension serving as an absolute guide to conduct. So the important issue is not where we want to end up, because most people do agree that certain things are better than others. The question is really about the foundation for getting there—whether you can get to a desired destination based on a fantasy or noble lies, as Plato might say, or whether you can get there based on what we think is true about reality. That’s what Epicurus is doing in basing his morality on pleasure and pain, the faculties given by nature that we know we have and can feel for ourselves, as opposed to a fantasy that’s not true.

Joshua: What I would say, Cassius, in response to what I’m reading here in Cicero is that he’s previously made the argument that the Epicurean approach to staying out of politics is troubling—as if it would be better for the republic if Epicureans engaged in partisan politics. And now we find him in this book assigning every bad thing that any politician or general has ever done and laying it all at the feet of Epicurus. Obviously what Cicero wants is for the Epicureans to engage in politics and put aside the pursuit of pleasure and take up the pursuit of virtue. What I would just reiterate is that Epicurus doesn’t have the power to bring justice to all of these individual figures. For Cicero to say that Crassus was all-powerful and functionally infinitely wealthy and so when he went wrong he went very wrong and it was difficult to stop him—well, what do you want Epicurus to do in this situation? What do you want the Epicureans to do other than throw off the pursuit of pleasure because in one or more cases the pursuit of pleasure has led people down the wrong path?

And again I make the other point: it’s equally true that the pursuit of virtue, or at least the cloak of virtue, has covered a lot of very wrong actions on behalf of very powerful people. I would in that case point to the letter written by Lucian of Samosata to his Epicurean friend Celsus, On Alexander the Oracle Monger—a religious figure, a prophet of the god Glycon. Lucian says in that text that this was no common robber, that the scene of his depredations was in effect the whole Roman Empire, that even the emperor himself—Marcus Aurelius—had consulted this alleged oracle on the eve of a great battle. And the oracle had promised a great victory, and when their victory did not happen, he said, “Well, I promised a great victory, I didn’t say which side it would come to.” He wraps himself in this cloak of a divine figure conveying the word of a god to the multitude—but he was a shameless charlatan. I’m sure that Cicero, if he heard that story, would say, “Well, that’s got nothing to do with me.” And my response to the story about the man who kept for himself the inheritance that was supposed to go to the daughter, or to the story of Crassus—this has nothing to do with me and nothing to do with Epicurus at all. And again: Cicero is really pushing this claim that Epicurus relied on the prick of conscience or the fear of punishment to deter wrongdoing, but he’s leaving out all of the rest of Epicurus on justice. At some point we’re going to have to go through those Principal Doctrines on justice and give a better appraisal of what Epicurean justice really means, because Cicero is doing an absolutely terrible job of it.

Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, I agree with you. Cicero’s whole argument here has to be seen as a sort of misdirection. He’s trying to hold Epicurean philosophy responsible for people who are doing bad things and saying that, well, they’re acting in their own interests and so therefore they’re following Epicurean philosophy. Well, Epicurus didn’t say to just think about your immediate interest. Epicurus said to think about all of the results of your actions, and in every one of these cases we can argue that if they had thought about all of the implications of what they were doing, they would not have acted the way they did.

Another aspect of this is important: Torquatus and Cicero are generally in agreement about when people are doing the right thing versus the wrong thing. There’s no difference in that end result. Both would likely have agreed that it would have been better if the executor had turned over the estate to the daughter as he was supposed to do. In every one of these examples, Torquatus and Cicero agree on the better result. What is in dispute is the rationale and the motivation that gets people to that right result. Cicero argues that we should look to some abstraction known as virtue as the motivating factor; Torquatus argues that we look to the results in terms of pleasure and pain. So Cicero is laying out these high-sounding results and implying that only his philosophy will get you there. Torquatus is saying: no, Cicero, your philosophy is based on things that don’t exist. I can get us to the right result based on things that do exist—through nature, through the feelings of pleasure and pain.

Around section 18, page 54, Cicero says: “If a friend of yours on his deathbed asks you to hand over his property to his daughter, and does not record the fact anywhere, as in the Fadius case, nor mention it to anyone, what will you do? You personally, Torquatus, would hand it over. Possibly Epicurus himself would. So as you assuredly would have acted in the same way, I put the question to you: whether you do not see how the power of nature is exalted by the fact that you, who determine all your actions by your own convenience and your own pleasure, as you yourselves declare, do in spite of that so act as to make it plain that you are guided not by pleasure but by duty, and that natural uprightness has more influence with you than your perverted philosophy. If, says Carneades, you know that a snake is concealed somewhere, and that someone by whose death you will gain is intending to sit down on it unawares, you will do a rascally action if you do not warn him not to sit down—but still you would not be punished, for who could prove that you knew?”

So that’s the challenge that Cicero makes to Torquatus here. He’s saying: you say that you act in all things in the pursuit of pleasure as your goal, but I judge from your actions, Torquatus, that it is virtue that guides you and not pleasure. That’s the challenge he makes not just to Torquatus but to the Epicureans in general—that all of this talk about pleasure and convenience and self-interest is a smokescreen to conceal a commitment to virtue that was really there the whole time.

I’d really like to highlight that at the very bottom of page 54 you can dissect Cicero’s argument by focusing in on this line where Cicero says, talking to Torquatus: “You, who determine all your actions by your own convenience and your own pleasure, as you yourselves declare, do in spite of that act as to make it plain that you are guided not by pleasure but by duty.” Well, you can’t let that sentence go unanswered. That is a very direct challenge and it would be thrown back in Cicero’s face by Torquatus in this way: “And being guided by pleasure in doing the things that I see to be right, Cicero—it’s not duty that calls me to do it. It is pleasure, widely and properly understood as all of the consequences of my actions. Pleasure not only of the stimulations of the moment but also mental and bodily pleasures that ripple through the remainder of my life. It is a global assessment of my life that leads me to make these decisions—to do these things that we both agree are the right things to do. And so when you say it’s duty, Cicero, you’re absolutely misrepresenting my position. I’ve never looked to some abstraction of duty to a God or duty to some absolute right and wrong. I am looking to the full consequences of pleasure and pain in my life as the way I make my decisions. So you can say that I’m acting according to duty as many times as you want to. You’ve already taken my ancestors in vain. You’re going to switch back and start talking about my ancestors again in just a few minutes. But I’m never going to admit to you that it is duty or virtue that is the motivation for what I’m doing and what my ancestors did. I’m going to always insist that it is the feelings of pleasure and pain given by nature that ultimately were the basis for these decisions. And I am totally ready to defend my conclusions and my actions to the end of time. I’m not going to give in to your illusions that they’re less than noble just because I’m not bowing down to your God or your Platonic virtues. I’m looking to the reality of pleasure and pain as the basis for my decisions. And you can call my philosophy perverted as many times as you’d like—we prefer to go with a true philosophy rather than your made-up fictional one.”

Joshua: Yeah, Cassius, on that point, let me read this from DeWitt’s book, Epicurus and His Philosophy. He says: “Epicureanism presented two fronts to the world. The one as repellent as the other was attractive. Its discouragement of the political career was repellent to the ambitious, its denial of divine providence to pious orthodoxy, and its hedonism to timorous respectability. Its candor, charity, courtesy, and friendliness were attractive to multitudes of the honest and unambitious folk. The influence of Epicureanism, though anonymous, has been persistent in literature, ethics, and politics. In literature and ethics it survived by amalgamation with Stoicism, chiefly through Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. In politics, it fathered the doctrine that the least government is the best government, which was espoused by John Locke and popularized in North America by Thomas Jefferson. All these aspects of influence have been overlooked because of the usual anonymity. It was the fate of Epicurus to be named if condemned, unnamed if approved.”

And Cicero, here in this book, has already started that project. He’s already started saying: you say that you’re acting in the name of pleasure, but it is really virtue that drives you—it is really your understanding of your duty to the Roman people that drives you. And so he’s effectively taking Torquatus’s Epicureanism and driving it deeper into anonymity, so that virtue and duty can claim the palm in all of Torquatus’s actions and pleasure will have nothing to do with it. And Torquatus himself, of course, has no patience for this.

Cassius: Yes, that’s right. And going back to the example of the person who is about to sit on the snake—and whether you warn him or not—Cicero’s claiming that the Epicurean would not tell the person about the snake and would have no reason to, because the only consideration is that he wouldn’t be punished. Well, again, the same response: there’s more at stake than the immediate gain from this one incident. If you did tell the person that they’re about to sit down on the snake, they would be appreciative of your having done so. If that added to your reputation for honesty and benevolence, then there are all sorts of other ramifications that you would benefit from in having revealed the existence of the snake. In most every case, Cicero is narrowing the scope of vision so that only the immediate stimulative pleasure or pain from an action is considered. When the truth is, it’s all of the ramifications, all the results that are going to come from the action, that have to be considered. And if you look at all of the ramifications, you can see that pleasure is enhanced by these decisions that, for the moment, may be painful or less pleasurable than they could have been. How many times, Cicero, do you have to ignore where Epicurus has said in his Letter to Menoikeus that you’re sometimes going to accept pain in order to have greater pleasure or lesser pain down the road? Torquatus has reminded you of it just in the prior book. You’re just choosing to ignore the argument that answers all of these questions.

And before we go past the snake issue—I remember in reading Cicero’s On Duties, there’s another example similar to this. A trading ship is about to arrive in a port where there’s been a famine, and the trading ship is loaded with grain. The captain is about to arrive and his grain is going to be demanded at a very high price, and he’s going to profit a lot. But the captain also knows that there are other ships loaded with grain coming to the same port a day behind him. What does he say to the people at the port? Does he tell them: “As happy as you are to receive my grain, there are three other ships going to be docking tomorrow and there’s going to be plenty of grain to go around for everybody, so there’s no reason for you to pay an exorbitant price”? In Cicero’s On Duties, he suggests the answer is that the captain would tell the people at the port so that they would not pay him an exorbitant price. But you can analyze the result by saying that the captain who arrives first—if he does tell the people that there’s more grain on the way—his reputation for fairness will be enhanced, and in the future he will reap benefits from being a more desired trading partner in future transactions. So it’s again the example of looking to all of the ramifications of your actions rather than just the immediate short-term benefit.

Joshua: Let me give you a modern example of this kind of thing, Cassius. If you go to the city of Boston around Christmas time, you will find a very excellent Christmas tree. Every year since 1971, this Christmas tree has traveled by truck from Nova Scotia to Massachusetts. It is sent there in thanks for the help that was given by the people of Boston to the people of Nova Scotia after the explosion on December 6th, 1917, of a French cargo ship called the SS Mont Blanc—one of the largest pre-nuclear explosions ever to have happened by man-made means. And so the people of Boston, who were close enough to send aid and send people to help, established a friendship between these two cities that continues to this day. You wouldn’t say that for the inhabitants of Boston there’s no pleasure to be gained from sending aid to Nova Scotia. Of course there’s pleasure to be gained. Not only are you kind of the hero of the day, but also it establishes connections and links that carry on through time. The ramifications of this event and its aftermath have really marked the relationship between these two cities ever since. And so to say that there’s no pleasure at all to be gained in that is absolutely wrongheaded. But of course, for Cicero, he’s thinking only in terms of pleasures caused by sensory stimulation. He can’t wrap his brain around this broader sense of the word pleasure, taking into account everything else that surrounds it. He wouldn’t look at this as an example of acting in the desire for pleasure—he would look at it as duty and virtue and give the palm to those in the contest.

Cassius: Right. That is the ultimate point. Cicero is trying to say that you cannot be a good person unless you fly under the flag of virtue and claim that virtue and piety are your motivating factors. If you try to cite anything other than virtue as your motivating force, then you’re bound to be a bad person. That’s just obviously not true. People can act decently for all kinds of reasons, a lot of which have to do with personal pleasure and most of which bring personal pleasure in their train.

So as we wrap up section 18, Cicero has a closing sentence that pretty well summarizes what we’ve been discussing. From the Rackham edition: “It is obvious that if fair dealing, honesty, and justice have not their source in nature, and if all these things are only valuable for their utility, then no good man can anywhere be found.” So Cicero is insisting that if we don’t put fair dealing, honesty, and justice directly in nature—if we only look to their value in terms of pleasure or utility—then no good man will anywhere be found. He’s insisting that fair dealing, honesty, and justice are abstract concepts that exist for their own sake, and that if utility is your only test of whether you’re going to do something or not, then you’re never going to be fair dealing, honest, or just.

Joshua: Yeah, and any clear thinker would just rip this argument up one side and down the other. Cicero wants this to be a binary choice: you can either act out of self-interest or you can act virtuously. You cannot act both virtuously and out of self-interest. This is so clearly false. If you pass a law as consul of Rome and the law adds something to the betterment of society—well, you live in that society. So not only are you doing something good for the Roman people, but you’re also doing something good for yourself because you’re part of the Roman people. Cicero’s rigid approach to all of this does not allow for any of the nuance required to really understand this.

And it’s funny, because Cicero just said in the preceding paragraph that Torquatus, you say that you’re acting in the name of pleasure, but really you’re motivated by virtue and a sense of duty—that perhaps even Epicurus himself, though he is a hedonist philosopher who claims he is motivated by the pursuit of pleasure, perhaps Epicurus is actually motivated by a desire for virtue and a sense of duty. But does Cicero not see how easy it is to flip the table on that and say: Cicero, you say that you are motivated by virtue and duty, but you are actually motivated in all of your actions by pleasure?

I realize that at the bottom of this page we’re going to get to Torquatus’s ancestors—which, if people remember our discussion of Book One from a year and a half ago, Torquatus made the claim that his illustrious ancestors acted in the name of pleasure and self-interest, even while they were helping the Roman people. You can make the exact same argument about Cicero. But Cicero is a very prickly person when it comes to his reputation. He does not want the pursuit of pleasure imputed to him. And the question is: why, Cicero? Do you have so many houses and villas? Why do you have houses in the city and in the country? Why do you have fine statuary and gardens? Why do you have all of this worldly wealth if your only goal is to pursue virtue and duty? Wouldn’t it be easier to pursue virtue and duty if you were less encumbered? Obviously he has these places as places to resort to for pleasure and leisure and recreation. And it’s equally true that he’s pursuing pleasure in his political work, in his work as a lawyer. All of it is done out of essentially self-interest.

Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, that’s the continuing question. Cicero refuses to see Torquatus’s side of things. He insists that Epicurus is depraved—“perverted” is the word he uses—and he’s never going to come to any kind of agreement with Epicurean reasoning because he insists that you cannot be a good person unless you hold virtue to be the supreme good.

Now, we’ve gone through this question again today. We’re going to continue for the next several weeks and through the end of Book Two with basically that same issue. Rather than start on section 19, we’re going to come back to that next week since this is our last episode for 2023. A couple of things we ought to talk about before we close. First of all I want to thank our podcasters—Joshua, Callistheni, Martin, and Don, who has been with us many times this past year and hopefully will come back next year.

But as we come to the end of the year it’s a good time to review some of the more foundational issues that we talk about, and we can focus on this very question we’re dealing with today. Why is it that people are so resistant to seeing pleasure as the supreme good? Over the past year, one of the more important points we’ve been stressing is how essential it is in these conversations to remind people that Epicurus’s definition of the word pleasure is much more broad than sensory stimulation. When you add to sensory stimulation the observation that if you’re not in pain you are experiencing pleasure, then you see that Epicurus’s definition is much wider and includes all these other activities of life that Cicero thinks must be described as virtue and can’t have anything to do with pleasure. That widening of the scope of the definition of the word pleasure enables a persuasive response to be given to these arguments—and of course that’s why Cicero has rejected Epicurus’s definition, because he knows that if it is accepted, his arguments are seen to be invalid.

Callistheni: What’s so important is considering long-term outcomes. If you’re only focused on the present you’re going to make certain kinds of decisions, but if you’re focused on the long-term outcome you’re going to make better decisions. And perhaps if we think of pleasure only as what’s the easiest right now, that also could be why pleasure gets kind of a bad name—because then bad choices are made.

Cassius: Yes, Callistheni. Now, of course, as we discuss long-term versus short-term, it’s not solely a matter of time. As Epicurus has told us in the Letter to Menoikeus, the wise man at the banquet is not going to choose the most food but the best. So it’s not solely a matter of length of time, but the analogy holds true in the sense of all of the ramifications versus only a few of the ramifications—a few of them that you see right now does not take into account all of the ramifications that you’re going to see either over time or if you simply take a step back and look at the bigger picture. When you talk about the narrower versus the wider view, you’re not using only a time analogy—you’re talking about more of the full consequences, the full context of the situation. You don’t just look at a small slice of the results that will occur from your actions; you look at all of the results. Time is certainly a part of that but it’s not the only part. There may be ramifications that occur very quickly that are mental as opposed to physical, or involve some other aspect of intensity. As Principal Doctrine Nine talks about—the ways of looking at pleasure in terms of duration, part of the body, and intensity—you’ve got those three aspects to consider. And of those three, duration as a reference to time is only one. You have to consider all of these things in assessing any action.

Joshua: As I consider the arguments that Cicero is putting forward here, I’m thinking of two things. One of those is an epic poem by Dante called the Inferno, in which Virgil is the poet’s guide to the underworld. In the sixth circle of hell—the circle of heresy—they encounter the Epicureans lying in lidless sarcophagi, and they are informed that on the day of judgment the lids of the coffins will close over them and they will wake up forever locked in these dark coffins. Their punishment is fitting because of the crime, and the crime is their denial of the afterlife, of life beyond the grave.

It occurred to me that there is another source that imagines Epicurus in the afterlife, and that source is one I’ve already quoted from today—the letter written by Lucian of Samosata to his Epicurean friend Celsus, called Alexander the Oracle Monger. Here’s what Lucian has to say: “A time came when a number of sensible people began to shake off their intoxication and combine against him, chief among them the numerous Epicureans in the cities. The imposture with all its theatrical accessories began to be seen through. It was now that he—this religious charlatan—resorted to a measure of intimidation. He proclaimed that Pontus was overrun with atheists and Christians who presumed to spread the most scandalous reports concerning him. He exhorted Pontus, as it valued the god’s favor, to stone these men. Touching Epicurus, he gave the following response: an inquirer had asked how Epicurus fared in Hades, and was told: ‘Of slime is his bed and his fetters of lead.’ Well, it was war to the knife between him and Epicurus—and no wonder. What fitter enemy for a charlatan who patronized miracles and hated truth than the thinker who had grasped the nature of things and was in solitary possession of that truth? As for the Platonists, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, they were his good friends—he had no quarrel with them. But the unmitigated Epicurus, as he used to call him, could not but be hateful to him.” Alexander consequently loathed certain cities of Pontus, knowing what a number of Epicurus’s friends and like-minded people they contained. He would not give oracles to Amastris because of the Epicureans that were present there.

And in the end of this letter, Lucian writes: “My object, dear friend, in making this small selection from a great mass of material has been twofold: first, I was willing to oblige a friend and comrade who is for me the pattern of wisdom, sincerity, good humor, justice, tranquility, and geniality. But secondly—and this is a preference which you will be very far from resenting—I was still more concerned to strike a blow for Epicurus: that great man whose holiness and divinity of nature were not shams, who alone had and imparted true insight into the good, and who brought deliverance to all that consorted with him.”

So the takeaway from this text: Cicero has been laying all of these charges at the feet of Epicurus, but what we have here is a concrete example of a criminal preying on the Roman Empire. And the only people who were standing up to him were the Epicureans. All of the other schools of philosophy, all of the various classes and conditions—everybody was going to this charlatan as if he had a semblance of the truth. But what Lucian is getting at in this letter is that it was not this charlatan, this mountebank, this thug, who had grasped the truth—it was Epicurus who had grasped the truth.

And if I can quote now from Henry David Thoreau, in his conclusion to Walden, he says: “No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infinity of our natures, we suppose the case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.”

That’s kind of my answer to Cicero. Everything he’s been saying here—any truth is better than make-believe. You claim, Cicero, that virtue is your guide, that virtue is founded in nature, that nature tells you to pursue virtue. But that is a lie, and any truth is better than make-believe. It helps to put this in proper perspective by citing an example where it was really only the Epicureans among the ancient pagans who were willing to look at this most cruel and unjust person and attempt to bring him low. And Cicero’s friends in all of these other schools of philosophy would not raise a finger to do anything about it. It was Epicurus and his followers—because they had grasped some semblance of the most important truth there is: that the wild grotesque supernatural claims made by these other people are lies, and that truth is better than any make-believe. So that’s my year-end conclusion—that is my response to almost everything that Cicero has to say, and that’s something I’m going to be thinking about as we go forward into the next twenty-five or so pages of this book.

Cassius: That’s a great way to summarize the situation, Joshua. In contrast to Cicero saying that it’s impossible to be a good man unless you consider virtue to be the basis of the supreme good—the fact of the matter is that even in Cicero’s own world, his best friend was an Epicurean. Cassius—the one he was ultimately relying on against Julius Caesar—was an Epicurean. Torquatus, who he’s talking to, is an Epicurean. And yet the goodness of these people as persons is beyond dispute.

We frequently overlook the foundations and think: well, Epicurus talks about being happy, I want to live happily, so therefore I’m going to listen to what Epicurus says about the subject of happiness. But Epicurus is not suggesting that you start that way. As Epicurus himself did when he was a young person and challenged his teachers as to chaos and where the universe comes from—it is supremely important to focus on the issue of what is true versus what is false and use the truth as the basis for your life, because you only get one life to live. You have to live it as productively as you can, and you don’t know what is the most productive way to live unless you first pursue the truth about the nature of the universe. That’s what Epicurus continuously calls us to do, and that’s what we’ll get back to in 2024.

In our next episode we invite everyone, as we always do, to drop by the forum and let us know your thoughts about the podcast and the forum in general. Thank you for your time this week. We’ll be back soon. Goodbye!

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