Episode 210 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 17 - Self-Approval As Pleasure
Date: 01/20/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3643-episode-210-cicero-s-on-ends-book-two-part-17-self-approval-as-pleasure/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Continuing De Finibus Book Two, sections 19–20. The episode opens with a recap of the main threads in Cicero’s Book Two attack on Epicurus: the definition of pleasure problem, the animality argument, the jurisdiction argument, the immorality arguments, and now the “glory of virtue” argument in which Cicero piles up historical examples of Roman heroes to show that their actions could not possibly have been motivated by pleasure.
A long digression: Joshua tracks the phrase “meaning of life” via Google N-Gram and identifies its first recorded use in English as Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1831), where it concludes with “Love not pleasure — love God.” Cassius notes this framing — the whole edifice of “meaningfulness” as a standard superior to pleasure — is essentially the same structure as what Cicero is doing.
Mark Twain’s What Is Man? (Chapter 2: “Man’s Soul Impulse, the Securing of His Own Approval”) is read and discussed. Twain argues through his dialogue that every apparently selfless action is in fact motivated by the agent’s desire for his own self-approval — which Joshua identifies as closely related to the Epicurean position. Cassius agrees but notes that psychological hedonism / self-interest as a stopping point is still not deep enough: you have to ask what kind of self-approval, and why, which brings you back to pleasure and pain.
Section 20: Cicero introduces Lucius Thorius Balbus — a man who supposedly lived a life of pure sensory pleasure without scruple, yet somehow died for his country in battle — as the “Epicurean” whose life Cicero claims Torquatus must approve of. Then he contrasts Balbus with Marcus Regulus (who voluntarily returned to Carthage and torture after negotiating a peace) and with Lucretia (who killed herself after being violated by the king’s son) and Lucius Virginius (who killed his own daughter to prevent her being taken by a powerful man). Cassius says that if Cicero admits Regulus had more pleasure in his hour of torture than Balbus ever had, then the argument is over — that is precisely the Epicurean position. Next episode will cover Cleanthes’ famous painting.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Episode 210 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.
After a special episode last week, we’re now back into Book Two of Cicero’s On Ends. And to get us back into the swing of where we were, let’s do a brief review of what’s been going on since we started back at the beginning of Book Two.
After letting Torquatus present Epicurean ethics in Book One, Cicero started off in Book Two by following up on the allegations against Epicurus that he had mentioned at the very beginning of On Ends, and now he goes into them in detail. To just quickly go over what the major ones are: first, Cicero started out and went on at length that Epicurus doesn’t know what pleasure is. “I allege that Epicurus himself is in the dark about it and uncertain in his idea of it.” And so there was a long discussion where Cicero attacked Epicurus’s decision to include within pleasure not just the sensory stimulations of life, but also everything else that’s a non-painful feeling. Cicero goes on and on: no one talks about pleasure that way, Epicurus is not being clear, freedom from pain is not the same thing as pleasure in Cicero’s opinion.
And then Cicero says that in holding pleasure to be the supreme good, Epicurus holds that any kind of pleasures are desirable, even the depraved ones, as long as they banish pain. Cicero says that Epicurus can’t even word his natural and necessary distinction without being awkward about it. He pits Epicurus against himself, saying one time that pleasure is the goal, but another time that absence of pain is the goal — because he refuses to accept Epicurus’s definitions.
Cicero says that the defense of pleasure based on looking at babies and animals makes no sense because they aren’t authorities on the subject. Cicero says the senses can’t decide about the goal of life because they don’t have jurisdiction to answer that question. And then Cicero says, “If we don’t refute the claim that pleasure is the supreme good, we must turn our backs upon virtue.”
And now we see the argument beginning to turn in the direction where we will get back into today’s material, because what Cicero is really basing his argument on is not solely his dislike of pleasure, but also his affection for virtue — that virtue itself is something that, even if it had no utility, would be desired for its own quality regardless of whether it has any advantages or not.
This leg of the argument takes us to where we often see, even today, people talk in the same terms. We had recently a conversation on the forum about meaningfulness. Meaningfulness or worthiness are concepts that people will use to discuss what they consider to be the ultimate good, which is much more important than pleasure. So this issue of meaningfulness or worth — the glamour that goes with these words — is where Cicero is going to dive in over the next several weeks by talking about particular individuals from the past.
We’re starting today around section 19 on page 55 of the Reid edition. And in this section, Cicero goes back to the well of talking about the Torquatus ancestors again.
Joshua:
Before we jump further into it today, Cassius — it’d probably be a good idea to remember that this issue of people using misrepresentation and deceitful arguments is something that Epicurus himself had warned about. In the Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus said around line 131: “When we say that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice, or willful misrepresentation.” So even Epicurus himself, while he was still alive, was dealing with the misrepresentations of people who were taking his words out of context.
Lucretius presents something similar in Book One around line 635. He says people “set up for true what can tickle the ear with a pretty sound and is tricked out with a smart ring.” So there’s willful misrepresentation, there’s ignorance, there’s prejudice, there’s “tricking it out with a smart ring and tickling the ear.”
And even in this On Ends, Torquatus previously in Book One around section 13 had said that those who place the chief good in virtue alone “are beguiled by the glamour of a name and they don’t understand the true demands of nature.”
So again, as we’re talking about what Cicero is doing, it’s probably worth pointing out that this is not something we should ascribe to a simple innocent difference of opinion. The Epicureans were constantly aware of and dealing with intentional misrepresentations of other schools. These arguments may seem attractive in talking about Torquatus’s own ancestors, but they can be seen as part of an intentional misrepresentation campaign and not just an innocent misunderstanding.
Cassius:
The names have changed, but the arguments are the same today as they were 2,000 years ago. We don’t talk about Lucius Thorius Balbus anymore, but we talk about Mother Teresa and other examples of people who are held up to be models of virtue who would never stoop to their own pleasure as a motivation.
Cassius, let me take off with something you mentioned there — this idea of meaning, the “meaning of life.” I’m looking at the Google N-Gram viewer — that’s Google’s library where you can do a word search and it brings up a timeline chart showing you how prevalent the word or phrase was throughout time in the English language. And for “meaning of life,” it basically takes off in the 1830s. I’ve mentioned before that I think the first known use of this phrase was in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, which was published in 1831.
My point in all of this is to say that people use this phrase, but it doesn’t have the pedigree that people think it has. The need to find something in life that redeems the whole enterprise — this is more novel than people imagine. It’s prompted by books like Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, who had lived under the Holocaust and had suffered greatly. There was another book called Fatelessness, which is the story of a 14-year-old Hungarian Jew in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. It seems that when you reach the utmost depth of despair, this question of meaning starts to sharply come into focus. And then out of that, we’ve made it into a kind of a buzzword.
But anyway, let me read this passage quickly from Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus — “The Tailor Re-tailored.” This is chapter 9, “Temptations in the Wilderness.” He says: “Have we not all to be tried with such? Not so easily can the old Adam lodged in us by birth be dispossessed. Our life is compassed round with necessity, yet it is the meaning of life itself no other than freedom, than voluntary force?” So he’s taking immediately here determinism versus free will, coming down on the side of free will. He makes a reference there to the old Adam lodged in us at birth, meaning original sin.
And he goes on to say: “Thus have we a warfare, in the beginning especially a hard-fought battle, for the God-given mandate, ‘Work thou in well-doing,’ lies mysteriously written in Promethean prophetic characters in our hearts and leaves us no rest night or day, till it be deciphered and obeyed, till it burn forth in our conduct a visible, acted gospel of freedom.”
And further in that same paragraph he has this to say: “There is in man a higher than love of happiness. He can do without happiness and instead thereof find blessedness. Was it not to preach forth this same higher that sages and martyrs, the poet and the priest, in all times have spoken and suffered, bearing testimony through life and through death of the godlike that is in man?”
And he sums it up this way: “Love not pleasure — love God. This is the everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved.”
Cassius:
So he’s cited here that he is living in a wilderness — “the wilderness is an atheistic century” — that determinism and free will are part of this problem, and he’s coming down on the side of free will. But ultimately, in the battle between the divine spark that resides within us and the claims of the body — “the dictates of the clay” that makes us up metaphorically — the divine spark is to be honored and the clay is to be annihilated. The self is to be annihilated. And he sums it up by saying “love not pleasure — love God.”
So here, even in this phrase “meaning of life” — in what’s given credit as the first appearance in the English language of that phrase — the deck is very clearly stacked against Epicureanism from the outset. I have to say that’s part of what he had in mind, because the next thing he goes on to say after “love not pleasure — love God” is to quote the Stoic Zeno. So he’s clearly putting this in terms that are unfavorable to Epicurus.
And so this is part of the reason why I am skeptical of this phrase “meaning of life” as having any real value. I think it’s empty when you get down to it. What is the meaning of meaning? What is the definition? What is the ultimate purpose? You’re just supposed to bow down before the glory of the word, just like virtue or morality or similar words.
Joshua:
Yeah, what is the meaning of meaning. What is the definition. What is the ultimate purpose — just simply assert that meaningfulness is the stopping point. You don’t need to worry about what it leads to, you don’t even really need to give a definition for it. You’re just supposed to take off your hat and salute when meaningfulness is discussed.
And to the extent they do give you a definition, it seems to me they end up going down the lines of religion as you were just talking about from Thomas Carlyle, saying that deference to God is what’s important as opposed to deference to the flesh. And of course there’s no doubt it has a very powerful peer-pressure kind of pull because you’re conditioned to fall in line on those arguments.
So that brings us back to Titus Manlius Imperiosus Torquatus, the question of what drove him in his actions. Cicero cites several of them throughout the text. For example, that he took the necklace off his foe — this was the torque, a metal ring worn by the Gauls — he killed a very large, very frightening Gaul in a duel and took the torque off of him, which is where he was given the name Torquatus, which his descendants also bore.
He had a very strict view of military discipline. He said that for any soldier to abandon his post, the punishment was death. And his own son abandoned his post to go off and fight and win glory for himself, probably thinking it would please his father who was the commander. But instead, his father had to uphold the law he himself had laid down. So he executed his own son in service to military discipline.
And Cicero is, of course, saying that Torquatus did everything in the name of virtue. And Torquatus, the descendant of Imperiosus and these other figures, has argued already in Book One that everything he did there he did for pleasure — or self-interest if you prefer. Not only do his actions bring security to Rome, they also bring fame and fortune and high reputation to himself. That’s not without an element of self-interest involved, right?
Cassius:
Yes. Why don’t we spend some time talking about this element of self-interest, because we’ve been talking privately recently about a work by Mark Twain called What Is Man?, in which Twain has some interesting things to say about this issue. It’s related clearly to the question of pleasure and pain.
I think in the end we’ll conclude that self-interest isn’t any more of an endpoint than the word meaningfulness is, because you then have to decide: well, what is in your self-interest? But it can be useful. And I think Mark Twain did a good job in this material that you’ve pointed out to me, Joshua.
So that’s largely the way that Torquatus has talked about his ancestors without really using the “self-interest” term, because frankly the self-interest label doesn’t tell you anything more than meaningfulness does unless you explain what is your self-interest. Torquatus has gone further and stated that the reward that his ancestor would have gotten for these exploits was the esteem of his countrymen and the safety of his country — and these things were important to Torquatus to achieve. So he did them.
And so you’ve got the example of Publius Decius, who basically drove his horse at full gallop into the midst of the opposing enemy line — a clear sentence of death for himself. You’ve got to come to terms with these issues of: even though this person knew that he was about to die in moments by charging the line, is it really possible to analyze what he’s doing in terms of whether it’s in his own self-interest to do that or not?
Joshua:
Cassius, you mentioned that self-interest is kind of a thorny word. If you truly believe that Jesus Christ is the Messiah and that believing in him will get you into a paradise in the afterlife, you would say that it was in your self-interest to do so. Self-interest doesn’t necessarily mean the kind of immediate pleasure that Cicero has in mind. It’s a more comprehensive view of things. But it’s also less clear as to what it means, because motivation is very complex.
So we had a book that was suggested to us several months ago and I’ve only just recently followed up on it. It is called What Is Man? by Mark Twain of all people. And the second chapter of What Is Man? is called “Man’s Soul Impulse, the Securing of His Own Approval.” And he actually starts the theme a little bit at the end of the first chapter.
This book is written as a dialogue between a young man and an old man. The young man says that self-interest couldn’t possibly be a legitimate way of looking at everything — it would mean being always selfish and looking out for your own comfort and advantage. And the old man says: “It is a mistake. The act must do him good first, otherwise he will not do it. He may think he is doing it solely for the other person’s sake, but it is not so. He is contenting his own spirit first. The other person’s benefit has to always take second place.”
And the young man says: “What a fantastic idea. What becomes of self-sacrifice if this is true?”
And the old man says: “What is self-sacrifice?”
And the young man says: “The doing good to another person where no shadow nor suggestion of benefit to oneself can result from it.”
And then the old man sets up a case: a man is about to enter a horse car in bitter cold, snowing hard, midnight. He is about to enter the horse car when a gray and ragged old woman puts out her lean hand and begs for rescue from hunger and death. The man finds that he has a quarter in his pocket, but he does not hesitate. He gives it to her and trudges home through the storm. “Noble, it is beautiful, its grace is marred by no fleck or blemish of suggestion of self-interest.”
And the old man says: now let us add up the details and see how much he got for his 25 cents. “In the first place, he couldn’t bear the pain which the old suffering face gave him. So he was thinking of his pain, this good man — he must buy a salve for it. If he did not succor the old woman, his conscience would torture him all the way home. Thinking of his pain again, he must buy relief for that. If he didn’t relieve the old woman, he would not get any sleep. He must buy some sleep — still thinking of himself, you see. Thus, to sum up, he bought himself free of a sharp pain in his heart. He bought himself free of the tortures of a waiting conscience. He bought a whole night’s sleep — all for 25 cents. It should make Wall Street ashamed of itself.”
Cassius:
So that’s the kind of argument that Torquatus has already given in Book One here. Mark Twain, I think, does a very good job of expressing it. But when Cicero comes into this conversation with the sense that pleasure only means the kind of positive sensory stimulation that comes from things like eating a lot of very delicious food, it’s very easy for Cicero to make the argument. When you expand your understanding of self-interest and what that means, of personal advantage or mutual advantage and what that means, it becomes a lot more clear in one sense — but also a lot more muddy in another sense as to what exactly we’re talking about.
It becomes clear in the sense that it’s a lot easier for Torquatus to answer Cicero by saying that yes, they were acting in their self-interest because you have failed to take into account, Cicero, this, this, this, and this — all of which accrue to the person who acted with appearances of selflessness. But it becomes a bit more muddy because suddenly we’re tracing these tenuous links that can be difficult to sustain.
Joshua:
Yeah, Joshua, we’ll definitely have links in the show notes for this week to where you can read What Is Man? for free on the internet. I think the Gutenberg website has it.
Mark Twain’s focus on the word “self-approval” I think is particularly helpful because that’s basically what we’re talking about here. Torquatus’s ancestors, Torquatus himself, the example of Publius Decius — these are people who took actions in the midst of a battle because they, in their own minds, approved that this was the course for them to do. They weren’t looking for immediate sensory stimulation, which is what Cicero wants to limit pleasure to being. They were looking for the approval of their own conduct that came from within themselves for performing these heroic actions. They were understanding that their lives might be given up in the process, that they might not be around that much longer, but they were so convinced that it was so important for them to do what they wanted to do, that that approval factor would override any concerns of their personal safety or how long they’d continue to live.
Emily Austin, if I recall correctly, in her Living for Pleasure book goes into this aspect of things and discusses it in terms of psychological hedonism. But it can be said without use of philosophical jargon when you approach it the way that Mark Twain does. He challenges the young man: “Let’s really think about what the motivations of the people who were involved in it were, and how in every case, you can eventually trace it back to finding that these people did these actions not solely for the benefit of some other person or solely for the benefit of God or some other abstraction, but because they themselves approved the action as important for them to do. It was their own self-approval that was the heart of that motivation.”
And that is a fine way to get back and deal with what Cicero was alleging here, because that is the practical truth of the matter.
Cassius:
So there was a tradition in Rome, and it’s not clear when it started — writers like Livy put it deep into the historical Roman past — this tradition was the Roman triumph. The conquering hero, the general who had conquered some Roman enemy. In terms of spectacle, it would be hard to top it. The general would be riding in this great chariot with the most elaborate ceremonial dress. Before him would be sometimes the conquered general in a cage waiting to be executed. There would be exotic animals, money just being thrown to the crowd.
But the interesting thing is, when you read some of the negotiations that were taking place between the general and the Senate — because it was only the Senate who had power to authorize a triumph — some of these generals were so petulant in demanding what they thought was rightfully theirs in getting a triumph. And obviously, this puts the whole attention of the city of Rome on to you, you as the general, for basically that whole entire day. It brings wealth, inner reputation, fame.
So you have to keep this kind of stuff in the back of your mind when you read Cicero here on the selfless actions of these great Roman heroes. They were playing the political game as well.
Joshua:
Right. And now Cicero cites a couple more names in the context I think is worth us talking about. If we recall back in Book One, Torquatus had argued as part of his proof that you could simply think about contrasting in your mind the example of someone who was surrounded on all sides by numerous and vivid pleasures — free from pain, not afraid of death, not afraid of gods — who could be happier than such a person? If you think about that kind of person and contrast it with what can be the worst thing in the world — wracked by pain, no hope of pleasure, afraid of all these things — then you can arrive at the obvious conclusion that the best life is one of pleasure.
Well, here in section 20, Cicero decides to throw that back and try to twist it in his own favor against Torquatus. Because what he does is he cites Lucius Thorius Balbus, and he goes on and on about how this man lived in such a fashion that no pleasure could be discovered, however rare, in which he did not revel. Not only was he a zealot for pleasure, but he possessed ability and resource in this line of life. He was so devoid of superstition that he cared nothing for sacrifices, and so free from fear in the face of death that he died for his country on the field of battle. The bounds of his own passions weren’t prescribed by the classifications of Epicurus but by his own sense of repletion. Yet he took care of his health, availed himself of exercise and of the food that was at once pleasantest and easiest to digest, of wine sufficient to give pleasure without doing harm.
This is the man, Cicero says, that you, Torquatus, must pronounce as happy. “But I reject that. I have hardly the courage to say who it is that I prefer to him. Without hesitation to your man of happiness I prefer Marcus Regulus” — and Regulus, of course, had come back to Rome after a battle with Carthage, but then voluntarily went back to Carthage to surrender himself according to an agreement he had made to return.
And Cicero says that Regulus “was happier in the very hour at which he was tortured by want of sleep and hunger than Thorius Balbus was when drinking on his bed of roses.” And then he throws in the other examples of Lucretia — when Lucretia was violated by the king’s son, she called her fellow countrymen to witness and cut short her life by her own hand, giving freedom to the community — and Lucius Virginius, some poor man who in the 60th year after freedom had been won, slew his maiden daughter with his own hand rather than let her be sacrificed to the lust of Appius Claudius who then held supreme authority.
So Cicero has given us a list of people who have been put in terrible situations, suffered torture, basically all sorts of indignities, all sorts of circumstances that we would find pitiable. And yet Cicero says: those are the people I would rather be, because in doing those things and going through those troubles, they were more worthy, they were more virtuous, they were more moral than anything that Lucius Thorius Balbus, the representative of the Epicurean lifestyle according to Cicero, had ever done.
Cassius:
So the first thing to be said here is that Torquatus doesn’t have to agree with Cicero that Lucius Thorius Balbus is the prime example of the Epicurean life of happiness. When Cicero is choosing the contestants, obviously he’s going to choose one less favorable to the Epicureans and more favorable to himself. And I don’t know anything about this Balbus character either, but it looks to me that Cicero is probably citing a generally well-thought-of character — it looks like he died in battle for his country. So Cicero would certainly approve of that. It looks like Cicero is trying to say that no matter how happy a life you can stipulate for me, Torquatus, I am still going to side with the life that is the more noble and the more virtuous and the one that did not include pleasure within it but was solely devoted to morality as its goal.
Of course, if Torquatus had been allowed to answer here, he could have responded in the same way on their behalf as he did on behalf of his own ancestors — that what they did, they thought was going to be something that gave them the highest sense of self-approval of their own actions.
Joshua:
Yeah, I mean Cicero says himself that Marcus Regulus had more pleasure than Thorius Balbus in the hour in which he was tortured. And if that’s true — well, there you go.
Cassius:
That’s right. Yeah, that’s exactly what Mark Twain essentially is saying in that book What Is Man? — just that sense of glory you were talking about earlier in terms of the generals getting a triumph in Rome, there’s a huge emotional benefit that comes from certain things.
Joshua:
In fact, I think it says here that Marcus Regulus had already been triumphed in Rome. So the next two cases I think are more difficult. We have the case of Lucretia — she was violated by the king’s son, called her countrymen to witness, and cut short her own life by her own hand. So rather than be raped by an all-powerful absolute monarch’s son, she basically committed suicide in order to save her honor and her virtue.
And then we can look at the next case, which is the case of Lucius Virginius, a poor man, in the 60th year after freedom had been won, who killed his own daughter rather than let her fall into the lust of Appius Claudius who held authority at that time. In this case, this kind of honor killing is something that is viewed at least today with utter disdain and contempt. Obviously Cicero is writing in a different time.
Cassius:
I do think it’s easy to take a sort of clinical psychological approach — that everybody does what they want to do and therefore they’re psychological hedonists — and I’m not sure that really answers the question as deeply as it needs to be answered. I think that it’s useful to talk about a self-interest analysis or psychological hedonism, but in the end it’s not good enough to stop there. I don’t think Epicurus would necessarily simply say, “well, decide what you’re going to approve of the most and do it.” I think we would have had a deeper discussion about what’s really going on and what the bigger picture is. Even Mark Twain’s characterization of self-approval is still a little bit short of the mark. It’s ultimately the sense of feeling of pleasure that you get from that self-approval, but you certainly have to think about the types of self-approval, the type of analysis that you’re conducting as to whether it’s really wise to pursue it or not.
Joshua:
Here’s what I would say about that: in the case of Lucius Virginius there, this kind of thing still goes on. And what we have here is a paradigm shift in the way human beings approach their lives. Rome was an honor society, not unlike Japan of the Edo period, not unlike in many ways America during the Old West. While these periods of time are sort of lauded for the actions of the people who lived there, the social mores of these periods is not one which we would applaud. And if you’re uncertain about that, you just go to the places that are in the world still today in the 21st century where honor killings are common and ask yourself whether that was very virtuous and wise. And I think most people are going to say no.
All I really do know is I’m just getting tired of all these names. You know, we’ve been going through Book Two and on the last page he mentioned Leonidas, Epaminondas, and some three or four others, all various virtuous people and so forth. He just goes on and on and on about this stuff. And I realize that this is Cicero’s understanding of what constitutes philosophy — extolling the lives of virtuous people.
Cassius:
Yeah, and certainly it’s one of the core perspectives of Epicurus that there’s not an absolute right and wrong, an absolute set of laws that you’ve got to confirm. Even these examples here — Lucius Virginius and Lucretia herself — if in fact, as may well have been the case given their culture, they would have lived a miserable life after these events took place that they stopped by their actions, then it’s certainly in Epicurean terms makes sense to avoid living a miserable life.
And so we’re always in that situation of saying that there’s different tastes and different perspectives on what brings us pleasure, and in the end each person has to decide that for themselves. You have to ultimately decide whether you’re going to go with what’s basically the superficial analysis, the standard position, the peer pressure cultural viewpoint, or whether you’re going to try to look beyond that and get to the real meaning of the word “meaning,” for example, in our discussion today.
Just like Epicurus himself was very happy to use the word “virtue” in an Epicurean context, I don’t think he’d have any problem in saying that “meaningfulness” also can be used in a legitimate helpful context — as long as you define what it is you’re talking about. What is meaningful to you? Is it something that you’re taking from other people without thinking about it, or is it really something that is bringing you personal enjoyment, emotional fulfillment in your own life? If that’s what you mean by meaningfulness, then more power to you in Epicurean terms. But if you’re attempting to use the word “meaningfulness” to overcome this idea that pleasure and feeling are the ultimate driving forces in your life, then you’re on the wrong track.
Okay. I see next week we’re going to get to an example where Cleanthes had a famous painting that’s been talked about now for thousands of years. And we’ll see how pleasure versus virtue factors into this great artistic idea that Cleanthes, the Stoic, had, that Cicero is going to cite for us approvingly next week. We’ll do that next week. In the meantime, please drop by the forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about our podcast. We thank you for your time. We’ll be back soon. Bye.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Episode 210 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.
After a special episode last week, we’re now back into Book 2 of Cicero’s On Ends. And to get us back into the swing of where we were, let’s do a brief review of what’s been going on since we started back at the beginning of Book 2. After letting Torquatus present Epicurean Ethics in Book 1, Cicero started off in Book 2 by following up on the allegations against Epicurus that he had mentioned at the very beginning of On Ends, but now he goes on to them in detail. To just quickly go over what the major ones are, he starts out and goes on at length that Epicurus, in Cicero’s opinion, doesn’t know what pleasure is. Cicero said: “As it is, however, I allege that Epicurus himself is in the dark about it and uncertain in his idea of it, and that the very man who often asserts that the meanings which are terms denote ought to be accurately represented sometimes does not see what this term pleasure indicates. I mean, what the thing is that’s denoted by the term.”
And so there was a long discussion where Cicero attacked Epicurus’ decision to include within pleasure not just the sensory stimulations of life, but also everything else that’s a non-painful feeling. And Cicero goes on and on and on at length about that. No one talks about pleasure that way. Epicurus is not being clear. Not only do the words differ, but the things differ — because freedom from pain is not the same thing as pleasure in Cicero’s opinion. And then Cicero says that in holding pleasure to be the supreme good, Epicurus holds that any kind of pleasures are desirable, even the depraved ones, as long as they banish pain, which is what Epicurus means by evil. Epicurus says that a profligate life is desirable. And that’s despicable according to Cicero. No reputable man would take that position.
Cicero says that Epicurus can’t even word his natural and necessary distinction without being awkward about it. It could have been done much more logically, Cicero says. And he particularly takes Epicurus to task for saying that sometimes pleasure is the goal, but what he really is saying at other times is absence of pain is the goal — so he tries to pit Epicurus against himself. Cicero says that the defense of pleasure based on looking at babies and animals makes no sense because they aren’t authorities on the subject. Babies and animals don’t know anything, so why should we listen to them about what the goal of life is? Cicero says that it may be difficult to determine whether nature really gave pleasure to man as a primary endowment, but certainly there are other primary endowments that are much more important, such as man’s intellectual ability and his ability to be virtuous. Cicero says the senses can’t decide about the goal of life because they don’t have jurisdiction to answer that question.
And so Cicero says, if we don’t refute the claim that pleasure is the supreme good, we must turn our backs upon virtue. And now we see the argument begin to turn in the direction where we will get back into today’s material, because what Cicero is really basing his argument on is not solely his dislike or distaste of pleasure, but also his affection of virtue — that virtue itself is something that, even if it had no utility, would be desired for its own quality regardless of whether it has any advantages or not. Cicero says that these classical virtues that we’ve been talking about in the last several weeks are basically lovely and beautiful in themselves. Cicero never allows lovely and beautiful to be discussed in terms of pleasure, but he sees the virtues and the moral sense that he’s promoting as something that is worthwhile in itself and needs no reward or justification.
This leg of the argument takes us to where we often see, even today, people talk in the same terms. We had recently a conversation on the forum about meaningfulness. Meaningfulness or worthiness are concepts that people will use to discuss what they consider to be the ultimate good, which is much more important than pleasure. So this issue of meaningfulness or worth, the glamour that goes with these words, is where Cicero is going to dive in over the next several weeks in our reading here by talking about particular individuals from the past.
We’re starting today around section 19 on page 55 of the Rackham edition. And in this section, Cicero goes back to the well of talking about the Torquatus ancestors again. He says: “Pray, what do you think Torquatus, that old Imperiosus, if he were listening to our talk, would find greater pleasure in giving ear to your speech about himself or to mine, in which I stated that he had done nothing from regard for himself, but everything in the interest of the Commonwealth? While on the contrary, you said he had done nothing but what he did out of regard to himself. If moreover, you had further chosen to make it clear and to state your view more plainly that he acted entirely with an eye to pleasure, how do you think he would have endured it? Be it so, suppose, if you like, that Torquatus acted for the sake of his own interest — I would rather use this word than pleasure, particularly in relation to so great a man. Did his colleague Publius Decius think of his own pleasure when he offered himself up and rushed into the midst of the Latin line with his horse at full gallop? Where did he expect to catch his pleasure, or when, knowing that he must instantly die, and seeking his death with more burning zeal than Epicurus thinks should be given to the search for pleasure? And if this exploit had not been justly applauded, never would his son have emulated it in his fourth consulship, nor would that man’s son again have died on the field of battle while conducting his consulship in the war with Pyrrhus, thus offering himself for his country as a third sacrifice from the same family in unbroken succession.”
Cicero is piling example upon example of the exploits of the glorious men of the past and saying that there’s simply no way they did their deeds for pleasure. So we’re now going to be dealing today with this question of how do you deal with people who say that meaningfulness and nobility and virtue and morality are really what should motivate you and that those things have nothing to do whatsoever with pleasure.
And before we jump further into it today, it’d probably be a good idea to remember that this issue of people using misrepresentation and deceitful arguments is something that Epicurus himself had warned about and occurs in several different places in the text that we’ve already read even before Book 2 of On Ends. In the Letter to Menoikeus, Epicurus said around line 131: “When we say that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice, or willful misrepresentation.” So even Epicurus himself, while he was still alive, was dealing with the misrepresentations of people who were taking his words out of context.
Lucretius presents something similar in Book 1 around line 635 when he’s talking about Heraclitus. Lucretius said: “Wherefore those who have thought that fire is the substance of things and that the whole sum is composed of fire alone are seen to fall very far from true reasoning. Heraclitus is their leader who first enters the fray of bright fame for his dark sayings, yet rather among the empty-headed than among the Greeks of weight who seek after the truth. For fools laud and love all things more which they can describe hidden beneath twisted sayings and they set up for true what can tickle the ear with a pretty sound and is tricked out with a smart ring.” So there’s willful misrepresentation, there’s ignorance, there’s prejudice, there’s tricking it out with a smart ring and tickling the ear.
And then even in On Ends, Torquatus previously in Book 1 around section 13 had said that those who place the chief good in virtue alone are beguiled by the glamour of a name and they don’t understand the true demands of nature. So again, in general, as we’re talking about what Cicero is doing, it’s probably worth pointing out that this is not something that we should ascribe to a simple, innocent difference of opinion or misunderstanding. The Epicureans were constantly aware of and dealing with intentional misrepresentations of other schools, and these arguments, while they may seem attractive in talking about Torquatus’ own ancestors, can be seen as part of an intentional misrepresentation campaign and not just an innocent misunderstanding.
But it’s not something that’s confined to Cicero. It is a constant argument that we hear in the world today about why pleasure cannot be the good, why you have to do something more meaningful with your life, and the refusal to accept any connection between meaningfulness or satisfaction and the word pleasure. The names have changed, but the arguments are the same today as they were 2,000 years ago. We don’t talk about Lucius Thorius Balbus anymore, but we talk about Mother Teresa and other examples of people who are held up to be models of virtue who would never stoop to their own pleasure as a motivation.
Joshua: Cassius, let me take off with something you mentioned there, which was this idea of meaning, the meaning of life, which I’m looking at the Google N-Gram viewer. I don’t know if people are familiar with this, but Google has this whole library of books, and you can do a word search in that library, and it brings up basically a timeline chart that shows you how prevalent the word was or the phrase was throughout time in the English language. And for “meaning of life,” it basically takes off in the 1830s. I’ve mentioned before, that I think the first known use of this phrase was in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, which was published in 1831. It doesn’t really go anywhere until the early 20th century, and then it kind of plateaus for a bit. And then around the year 1991 — I don’t know why — but around the year 1991, the phrase “meaning of life” just skyrockets.
My point in all of this, I guess, is to say that people use this phrase, but I’m not sure it has the kind of pedigree that we think it has, and people assume that we need to have a meaning of life, that we need to find something in life that redeems the whole enterprise. And this is more novel than people imagine. It’s prompted by books like Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, who had lived under the Holocaust and obviously had suffered greatly and had suffered great loss during that time. There was another book called Fatelessness, which is the story of a 14-year-old Hungarian Jew in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. And it seems to be this — it seems to be when you reach the utmost depth of despair that this question of meaning starts to sharply come into focus. And then out of that, we’ve made it into a kind of a buzzword.
But anyway, let me read this passage quickly from Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, “The Tailor Re-tailored.” This is chapter 9, “Temptations in the Wilderness.” Have we not all to be tried with such? Not so easily can the old Adam lodged in us by birth be dispossessed. Our life is compassed round with necessity, yet it is the meaning of life itself no other than freedom, than voluntary force? So he’s taking immediately here determinism versus free will, and coming down on the side of free will. He makes a reference there to “the old Adam lodged in us at birth,” meaning of course original sin. And he goes on to say: “Thus have we a warfare. In the beginning, especially, a hard-fought battle, for the God-given mandate — ‘Work thou in well-doing’ — lies mysteriously written in Promethean prophetic characters in our hearts, and leaves us no rest night or day, till it be deciphered and obeyed, till it burn forth in our conduct a visible, acted gospel of freedom. And as the clay-given mandate, ‘the mandate of the flesh’ — ‘Eat thou and be filled’ — at the same time persuasively proclaims itself through every nerve, must not there be a confusion, a contest, before the better influence can become the upper? To me, nothing seems more natural than that the Son of Man, when such God-given mandate first prophetically stirs within him, and the clay must now be vanquished or vanquish.”
And further in that same paragraph he says: “Unhappy if we are but half-men, in whom that divine handwriting has never blazed forth, all-subduing, in true sun-splendor! But we are in a wilderness. Our wilderness is the wide world in an atheistic century. Our forty days are long years of suffering and fasting. Nevertheless, to these also comes an end.” And then a little bit further down he has this: “There is in man a higher than love of happiness. He can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness. Was it not to preach forth this same higher that sages and martyrs, the poet and the priest, in all times have spoken and suffered, bearing testimony through life and through death of the godlike that is in man and how in the godlike only has he strength and freedom?” And he sums it up this way: “Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him.”
So he’s stated that he is living in a wilderness, that the wilderness is an atheistic century, that determinism and free will are part of this problem, and he’s coming down on the side of free will. But ultimately, in the battle between the divine spark that resides within us and the claims of the body — the dictates of the clay that makes us up metaphorically — the divine spark is to be honored and the clay is to be annihilated. The self is to be annihilated. And he sums it up by saying “Love not Pleasure; love God.” So here, even in this phrase — the origin of the phrase “meaning of life,” as I said, this is given credit as the first appearance in the record of the English language of that phrase — the deck is very clearly in this text stacked against Epicureanism from the outset. I have to say I assume this is part of what he had in mind because the next thing he goes on to say after “Love not Pleasure; love God” is to quote the Stoic Zeno. So he’s clearly putting this in terms that are unfavorable to Epicurus.
Cassius: Yeah, what is the meaning of meaning? What is the definition? What is the ultimate purpose? To just simply assert that meaningfulness is the stopping point — you don’t need to worry about what it leads to, you don’t even really need to give a definition for it — you’re just supposed to bow down before the glory of the word, just like virtue or morality or similar words. You’re supposed to just simply take off your hat and salute when meaningfulness is discussed, and it doesn’t make any sense to do that without a full and complete understanding of where that person is coming from, which they never are going to give you. And to the extent they do give you one, it seems to me they end up going down the lines of religion, as you were just talking about from Thomas Carlyle saying that deference to God is what’s important as opposed to deference to the flesh.
It’s a very interesting phenomenon but not something that can be lightly brushed off without thinking about it, because there’s no doubt it has a very powerful peer pressure kind of pull. You’re conditioned to fall in line on those arguments. And of course, as you were saying, as you were listening to different people who are discussing the meaningfulness of it, obviously there are many hard situations, difficult situations in life that bring about a lot of pain, and there are various ways that you can try to deal with that. One of them is to simply say that pleasure and pain have no significance and what’s really significant is God and the hereafter and these other things that are beyond pleasure and pain — but it seems to me you have to suspend a lot of judgment on those issues before you can go down that road with intelligence.
So that brings us back to Titus Manlius Imperiosus Torquatus, and the question of what drove him in his actions. Cicero cites several of them throughout the text. For example, that he took the necklace off his foe — this was the torque that was worn, it’s a metal ring, a very rigid stiff ring that goes around the neck, and it was worn by the Gauls. He killed a very large and frightening Gaul in a duel and took the torque off of him, and this is where he was given the name Torquatus, which his descendants also bore. He had a very strict view of military discipline. He said that for any soldier to abandon his post was punishable by death. And his own son abandoned his post to go off and fight and win glory for himself, probably thinking it would please his father, who was the commander, but instead his father had to uphold the law that he laid down, so he executed his own son in service to military discipline.
And Cicero is, of course, saying that this is all in the name of virtue. And Torquatus, the descendant of Imperiosus and these other figures, has argued already in Book 1 that everything he did there, he did for pleasure — or self-interest, if you prefer to have it that way. Not only do his actions bring security to Rome, they also bring fame and fortune and high reputation to himself, to the point where someone like Cicero can use his name as an anecdote for the name of virtue. That’s not without an element of self-interest involved, right?
Joshua: Yes. Why don’t we spend some time talking about this element of self-interest that you’ve raised there, because we’ve been talking privately recently about a work by Mark Twain called What Is Man? in which Twain has some interesting things to say about this issue.
Cassius: It’s related clearly to the question of pleasure and pain to talk about self-interest. I think in the end we’ll conclude that it probably isn’t any more of an endpoint than the word meaningfulness is, because you then, if you want to talk about self-interest, have to decide: well, what is in your self-interest? But it can be useful, and I think Mark Twain did a good job in this material that you’ve pointed out to me, Joshua, of showing how it’s very possible to analyze everyone’s actions in terms of that they are doing what they think is in their self-interest. And when you discuss it in those terms, it’s easy enough to conclude that thinking that what you’re doing is in your self-interest is, in fact, the same thing as thinking what you’re doing is going to bring you pleasure. So that’s largely the way that Torquatus has talked about his ancestors without really using the self-interest term. Frankly, the self-interest label doesn’t tell you anything more than meaningfulness does because you’ve not explained what is your self-interest. Torquatus has gone further and stated that the profit — the reward that his ancestor would have gotten for these exploits — was the esteem of his countrymen and the safety of his country, and these things were important to Torquatus to achieve. So he did them.
Joshua: And so you’ve got the example of Publius Decius, who basically drove his horse at full gallop into the midst of the opposing enemy line — which was basically a clear sentence of death for himself. You’ve got to come to terms with these issues: even though this person knew that he was about to die in moments by charging the line, is it really possible to analyze what he’s doing in terms of whether it’s in his own self-interest to do that or not? I think Torquatus would say you could reconcile it.
Cassius, you mentioned that self-interest is kind of a thorny word. If you truly believe that Jesus Christ is the Messiah and that believing in him will get you into a paradise in the afterlife, you would say that it was in your self-interest to do so. Self-interest doesn’t necessarily mean the kind of immediate pleasure that Cicero has in mind. It’s a more comprehensive view of things, but it’s also less clear as to what it means.
So we had a book that was suggested to us several months ago, and I’ve only just recently followed up on it. It is called What Is Man? by Mark Twain of all people. And the second chapter of What Is Man? — this book is written as a dialogue between a young man and an old man — the second chapter is called “Man’s Soul Impulse: The Securing of His Own Approval.” He actually starts the theme a little bit at the end of the first chapter.
So in general you have the old man who is putting forward the view, and the young man is asking for a further explanation. The young man says here, because it puts him in the attitude that it would be selfish to do everything with reference to your own advantage — because it puts you in the attitude of always looking out for your own comfort and advantage — whereas an unselfish man often does a thing solely for another person’s good when it is a positive disadvantage to himself. And the old man says: “It is a mistake. The act must do him good first, otherwise he will not do it. He may think he is doing it solely for the other person’s sake, but it is not so. He is contenting his own spirit first. The other person’s benefit has to always take second place.” And the young man says: “What a fantastic idea! What becomes of self-sacrifice if this is true?” And the old man says: “What is self-sacrifice?” And the young man says: “The doing good to another person where no shadow nor suggestion of benefit to oneself can result from it.” Like a Decius charging his horse at full gallop into the opposing line. The old man says: “There have been instances of it, you think?” And the young man says: “Instances? Millions of them! Millions of people have acted selflessly.”
And the young man says, take this for instance. Take the case in the book here: “The man lives three miles uptown. It is bitter cold, snowing hard, midnight. He is about to enter the horse car when a gray and ragged old woman, a touching picture of misery, puts out her lean hand and begs for rescue from hunger and death. The man finds that he has a quarter in his pocket, but he does not hesitate. He gives it to her and trudges home through the storm. There it is — noble, it is beautiful, its grace is marred by no fleck or blemish or suggestion of self-interest.” And the old man says: “What makes you think those things?” And the young man says: “What else could you think? Do you imagine that there is some other way of looking at it?”
And then the old man says: “Can you put yourself in the man’s place and tell me what he felt and thought?” And I’ll skip down here to another passage by the old man. This is his longer explanation: “Very well. Now let us add up the details and see how much he got for his 25 cents. Let us try to find out the real why of his making the investment. In the first place, he couldn’t bear the pain which the old suffering face gave him. So he was thinking of his pain, this good man. He must buy a salve for it. If he did not succor the old woman, his conscience would torture him all the way home. Thinking of his pain again. He must buy relief for that. If he didn’t relieve the old woman, he would not get any sleep. He must buy some sleep — still thinking of himself, you see. Thus, to sum up, he bought himself free of a sharp pain in his heart. He bought himself free of the tortures of a waiting conscience. He bought a whole night’s sleep — all for 25 cents. It should make Wall Street ashamed of itself.”
I’ll probably stop there.
Cassius: So that’s the kind of argument that Torquatus has already given in book one here. Mark Twain, I think, does a very good job of expressing it. But when Cicero comes into this conversation with the sense that, well, pleasure only means the kind of positive sensory stimulation that comes from things like eating a lot of very delicious food — and obviously, Imperiosus and Decius were not eating delicious food when they acted heroically in the Legion — and so it’s very easy for Cicero to make the argument. But when you expand your understanding of self-interest and what that means, of personal advantage or mutual advantage and what that means, it becomes a lot more clear in one sense, but also a lot more muddy in another sense as to what exactly we’re talking about here. It becomes clear in the sense that it’s a lot easier for Torquatus to answer Cicero by saying, yes, they were acting in their self-interest because you have failed to take into account, Cicero, this, this, this, and this, all of which accrues to the person who acted with appearances of selflessness. But it becomes a bit more muddy because suddenly we’re tracing these tenuous links that can be difficult to sustain and we’re working in a text in which Cicero is clearly using language that stacks the deck in his advantage.
Yeah, Joshua, we’ll definitely have the links and the show notes for this week to where you can read What Is Man? for free on the internet. I think the Gutenberg website has it. Mark Twain’s focus on the word “self-approval” I think is particularly helpful because that’s basically what we’re talking about here — that Torquatus’s ancestors, Torquatus himself, the example of Publius Decius, these are people who took actions in the midst of a battle because they, in their own minds, approved that this was the course for them to do. They weren’t looking for immediate sensory stimulation, which is what Cicero wants to limit pleasure to being. They were looking for the approval of their own conduct that came from within themselves for performing these heroic actions. They were understanding that their lives might be given up in the process, that they might not be around that much longer, but they were so convinced that it was so important for them to do what they wanted to do that that approval factor would override any concerns of their personal safety or how long they’d continue to live.
And that’s a very rational way of looking at it, just totally apart from all of these issues of fighting between the philosophical schools. Emily Austin, if I recall correctly, in her Living for Pleasure book goes into this aspect of things and discusses it in terms of, I think the term is “psychological hedonism,” that people will use to describe it. But it can be said without use of philosophical jargon when you approach it the way that Mark Twain does. He challenges the young man: let’s do basically a game — let’s look at everything that you’re putting up to me as an example of this selfless noble virtuous conduct, and let’s really think about what the motivations of the people who were involved in it were, and how in every case you can eventually trace it back to finding that these people did these actions not solely for the benefit of some other person or solely for the benefit of God or some other abstraction, but because they themselves approved the action as important for them to do. It was their own self-approval that was the heart of that motivation.
And that is a fine way, I would say, to get back and deal with what Cicero was alleging here, because that is the practical truth of the matter. And you can pretty it up with lipstick on a pig and all sorts of dressing to make things look more glamorous than they really are. But in the end, everyone is acting according to the way they think is most appropriate for them to act, that will obtain for them their own approval for what they are doing.
Joshua: So there was a tradition in Rome — and it’s not clear when it started, writers like Livy put it deep into the historical Roman past, perhaps even beginning with Romulus himself — and this tradition was the Roman triumph, the conquering hero: the general who had conquered some Roman enemy, like for example Caesar when he subdued Gaul, would return to the city and be treated to this parade. And it would be the most lavish spectacle and entertainment that the Romans afforded to anyone, more or less. The general would be riding in this great chariot with the most elaborate ceremonial dress. Before him would be sometimes the conquered general or whatever in a cage, waiting to be executed. There would be exotic animals, money just being thrown to the crowd. In terms of spectacle, it would be hard to top it.
But the interesting thing is, when you read some of the negotiations that were taking place between the general and the senate — because it was only the senate who had the power to authorize a triumph — in the case of the civil war at the end of the republic, my memory of this is that the senate was kind of using this as a bargaining chip with Julius Caesar: if you want your triumph, you have to do things the way we want. And it’s funny because some of these generals were so petulant in demanding what they thought was rightfully theirs in getting a triumph. And obviously, this puts the whole attention of the city of Rome on to you — one person — for basically that whole entire day, which is hugely important if you want to go into politics. It brings wealth, inner reputation, fame. So it would be hard to top that as a kind of reward for behavior on the battlefield. But it also gives the lie to Cicero here in his position, because generals know that this reward is there if they have some great conquest — that for just one day, you will be like a god on earth. The Romans had kicked out the kings, but for just one day you will be basically the king of Rome. And that is available to you only if you bring back some great military conquest. So you have to keep this kind of stuff in the back of your mind when you read Cicero here on the selfless actions of these great Roman heroes. They were playing the political game as well, and there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that Cicero is not putting into this text because he wants the focus to be on virtue rather than on all of the surrounding detail.
Cassius: Right, Joshua. And he mentions a couple of more names in the next section in a context that I think is worth us talking about for just a moment. If we recall back in Book 1, Torquatus had argued as part of his proof that pleasure was the goal, that you could simply think about contrasting in your mind the example of someone who was surrounded on all sides by numerous and vivid pleasures, was free from pain, wasn’t afraid of death, wasn’t afraid of gods — who could be happier than such a person? And if you just simply compare that with what can be the worst thing in the world — to be wracked by pain, have no hope of pleasure, be afraid of all these things — Torquatus said you can arrive at the obvious conclusion that the best life is one of pleasure.
Well, here in section 20, Cicero decides to throw that back and try to twist it in his own favor against Torquatus, because what he does is he cites Lucius Thorius Balbus: “No pleasure could be discovered, however rare, in which he did not revel. Not only was he a zealot for pleasure, but he possessed ability and resource in this line of life. He was so devoid of superstition that he cared nothing for sacrifices and was so free from fear in the face of death that he died for his country on the field of battle. The bounds of his own passions weren’t prescribed by the classifications of Epicurus but by his own sense of repletion. Yet he took care of his health. He availed himself of exercise and of the food that was at once pleasantest and easiest to digest, of wine sufficient to give pleasure without doing harm. He gave heed to those matters in the absence of which Epicurus says he fails to understand what the good means. He kept all pain aloof. But had it come, he would have endured it without weakness, though he would have resorted to physicians rather than philosophers. He had admirable complexion, perfect health, extreme popularity, and his life in fact was replete with all the diverse forms of pleasure.”
This is the man, Cicero says, that you, Torquatus, pronounce as happy — at least your system compels you to do it. But I reject that. I look at another person as the person that I prefer to emulate. And without hesitation, to your man of happiness, I prefer Marcus Regulus — the man who had come back to Rome after a battle with Carthage, but then voluntarily went back to Carthage to surrender himself according to an agreement he had made to return. He was taken captive by the Carthaginians and then negotiated: “I’ll go back to Rome and negotiate a peace. And when that’s done, I will come back to Carthage willingly and go back into chains.”
And Cicero says: “He was happier in the very hour at which he was tortured by want of sleep and hunger than Thorius Balbus was when drinking on his bed of roses. He had conducted important wars, been twice elected consul, and even though his sacrifice seems pitiable to us when we hear of it, it was pleasurable to him when he endured it. In truth, happy men are not always in a state of cheerfulness or boisterousness or mirth or jesting, which accompanies light characters, but oftentimes even in stern mood are made happy by their staunchness and endurance.”
And then before we start analyzing this, he throws in the other examples. Of Lucretia: “When Lucretia was violated by the king’s son, she called her fellow countrymen to witness and cut short her life by her own hand, and the indignation felt at this by the Roman people, with Brutus for their leader, gave freedom to the community, and in remembrance of the lady, both her husband and her father were elected consuls in the first year.” And Lucius Virginius: “Some poor man sprung from the people, in the 60th year after freedom had been won, slew his maiden daughter with his own hand, rather than let her be sacrificed to the lust of Appius Claudius, who then held supreme authority.”
So Cicero has now given us a list of these people who have been put in terrible situations, suffered torture, all sorts of indignities, all sorts of circumstances that we would find pitiable. And yet Cicero says, those are the people I would rather be, because in doing those things and going through those troubles, they were more worthy, they were more virtuous, they were more moral than anything that Lucius Thorius Balbus, the representative of the Epicurean lifestyle according to Cicero, had ever done. And he says: “You must either blame these examples, Torquatus, or you must abandon your advocacy of pleasure.”
Joshua: Yeah, so the first thing to be said here is that Torquatus doesn’t have to agree with Cicero that Lucius Thorius Balbus is the prime example of the Epicurean life of happiness. And I don’t know the full story with this guy, so it’s hard to judge one way or another. But when Cicero is choosing the contestants, obviously he’s going to choose one less favorable to the Epicureans and more favorable to himself.
Cassius: Yeah, before we go forward there, Joshua, I don’t know anything about this Balbus character either, but it looks to me as I’m reading that section 20 that Cicero is probably citing a generally well thought-of character. It doesn’t look like he’s saying that Balbus had done anything necessarily wrong, and in fact it looks like he died in battle for his country, so Cicero would certainly approve of that. It looks like Cicero is trying to say that no matter how happy a life you can stipulate for me, Torquatus, I am still going to side with the life that is the more noble and the more virtuous and the one that did not include pleasure within it but was solely devoted to morality as its goal. Of course, if Torquatus had been allowed to answer here, he could have responded in the same way on their behalf as he did on behalf of his own ancestors — that what they did, they thought was going to be something that gave them the highest sense of self-approval of their own actions.
Joshua: Yeah, I mean Cicero says himself that Marcus Regulus had more pleasure than Thorius Balbus in the hour in which he was tortured — and if that’s true, well then there you go.
Cassius: That’s right.
Joshua: Yeah, that’s exactly what Mark Twain essentially is saying in that book, What Is Man? Just that sense of glory you were talking about earlier in terms of the generals getting a triumph in Rome — there’s a huge emotional benefit that comes from certain things. In fact, I think it says here that Marcus Regulus had been given a triumph in Rome, so the next two cases I think are more difficult a little bit.
So we have the case of Lucretia. She was violated by the king’s son, called her countrymen to witness, and cut short her own life by her own hand. So rather than be raped by an all-powerful absolute monarch’s son, she basically committed suicide in order to save her honor and her virtue. While it might be difficult to decide in that case, we can look at the next case, which is the case of Lucius Virginius, a poor man sprung from the people, in the 60th year after freedom had been won. So Brutus — the ancestor of the more famous Brutus — had organized the Roman people and thrown off the king after the king’s son had tried to take Lucretia. And then 60 years after that happened, Lucius Virginius killed his own daughter rather than let her fall into the lust of Appius Claudius, who held authority at that time.
So in these two cases, Lucretia sacrificed herself. We can probably say that the system that compelled her to think that was the better course was not a wisely established system. But in the second case here, the case of Lucius Virginius, this kind of honor killing is something that is viewed at least today with utter disdain and contempt. Obviously, Cicero is writing in a different time.
This is why I’m not particularly satisfied or happy to talk too much about this psychological hedonism issue, because just as you were talking about with Lucretia or even Lucius Virginius, just because you get your own self-approval, you still have to deal with this question of what is it that you’re approving of and how did you reach this opinion that you were going to approve of it? I do think it’s easy to take a sort of clinical psychological approach that everybody does what they want to do and therefore they’re psychological hedonists, and I’m not sure that really answers the question as deeply as it needs to be answered. I think that it’s useful to talk about a self-interest analysis of psychological hedonism, but in the end it’s not good enough to stop there. I don’t think Epicurus would necessarily simply say, well, decide what you’re going to approve of the most and do it. I think we would have had a deeper discussion about what’s really going on and how short their life was and how they were going to be gone for an eternity, and let them think about what’s the bigger picture. Even Mark Twain’s characterization of self-approval is still to me a little bit short of the mark. It’s ultimately the sense of feeling of pleasure that you get from that self-approval, but you certainly have to think about the types of self-approval, the type of analysis that you’re conducting as to whether it’s really wise to pursue it or not.
Here’s what I would say about that: in the case of Lucius Virginius, this kind of thing still goes on. And what we have here is a paradigm shift in the way human beings approach their lives. Rome was an honor society, not unlike Japan of the Edo period, not unlike in many ways America during the Old West. And while these periods of time are sort of lauded for the actions of the people who lived there — people who are a law unto themselves because no law is adequate to meeting the problem of their enemies — the social mores of these periods is not one which we would applaud. And if you’re uncertain about that, you just go to the places that are in the world still today in the 21st century where honor killings are common and ask yourself whether that was very, very virtuous and wise. And I think most people are going to say no, that it wasn’t wise, that this is not the answer.
All I really do know is I’m just getting tired of all these names. On the last page he mentioned Leonidas, Epaminondas, and some three or four others, all various and so forth. He just goes on and on and on about this stuff. And I realize that this Arpinate’s understanding of philosophy is extolling the lives of virtuous people. But if Epicurus is here in this company, he’s going to have a totally different conversation.
Cassius: Yeah, and certainly it’s one of the core perspectives of Epicurus that there’s not an absolute right and wrong, an absolute set of laws that you’ve got to conform to. Even these examples here, Lucius Virginius and Lucretia herself — if, as may well have been the case given their culture, they would have lived a miserable life after these events took place that they stopped by their actions — then it’s certainly in Epicurean terms sensible to avoid living a miserable life. And so we’re always in that situation of saying that there are different tastes and different perspectives on what brings us pleasure, and in the end, each person has to decide that for themselves.
Each of us have viewpoints about which is wisest, but in the end, you’ve only got one life to live, and whether you’re wise or not, the pleasure and pain that’s involved in your own life is the number one thing you have to take into account. You have to ultimately decide whether you’re going to go with what’s basically the superficial analysis, the standard position, the peer pressure cultural viewpoint, or whether you’re going to try to look beyond that and get to the real meaning of the word “meaning,” for example, in our discussion today. What ultimately should be the thing that we look to as our driving force? Is it an image that we construct in our minds? And if it is, if it does become that — which seems to be a legitimate position for many people — you still have to connect it to what is the reality of the world and therefore what’s going to be most successful for you.
Just like Epicurus himself was very happy to use the word virtue in an Epicurean context, I don’t think he’d have any problem in saying that meaningfulness also can be used in a legitimate helpful context as long as you define what it is you’re talking about. What is meaningful to you? Is it something that you’re taking from other people without thinking about it, or is it really something that is bringing you personal enjoyment, emotional fulfillment in your own life? If that’s what you mean by meaningfulness, then more power to you in Epicurean terms. But if you’re attempting to use the word meaningfulness to overcome this idea that pleasure and feeling are the ultimate driving forces in your life, then you’re on the wrong track. So just like so many of these other words, it’s getting to the heart of what is meant by these calls to morality, calls to virtue, calls to meaningfulness, that you have to understand what’s behind those things before you can evaluate them and decide how best to follow them.
Okay. I see next week we’re going to get to an example where Cleanthes had a famous painting that’s been talked about now for thousands of years, and we’ll see how pleasure versus virtue factors into this great artistic idea that the Stoic Cleanthes had, that Cicero is going to cite for us approvingly next week. We’ll do that next week. In the meantime, please drop by the forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about our podcast. We thank you for your time. We’ll be back soon. Bye.