Episode 214 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 21 - Cicero Argues For Idealized Friendship and Happiness Which Epicurus Rejects
Date: 02/14/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3700-episode-214-cicero-s-on-ends-book-two-part-21-cicero-argues-for-an-ideal-view-of/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Continuing De Finibus Book Two, sections 26–27. Cicero wraps up his treatment of friendship by noting that Epicurus himself was a good man and that many Epicureans are good friends — but their lives refute their principles, since they are actually acting out of duty rather than pleasure. He then turns to section 26 where he addresses Torquatus’s “modern Epicurean” claim that friendship begins in advantage but develops into something valued for its own sake, arguing that this concession undercuts Epicurean logic. In section 27, Cicero moves to happiness: “if the life of happiness may cease to be so, then it cannot be really happy.” True happiness, Cicero argues, must be permanent and self-contained.
Discussion: an Oxyrhynchus papyrus written by an Epicurean on why fearing the gods for reward is the same problem Cicero is laying at Epicurus’s door on friendship; the analysis that Cicero is idealizing friendship, happiness, and virtue as Platonic absolutes and “letting the perfect be the enemy of the good”; Callistheni’s observation that Epicurean philosophy seeks to minimize the impact of necessity and chance on the operation of one’s life; and the episode closes with Brutus’s last words (“Virtue, thou wert but a name”) from Cassius Dio’s Roman History.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Episode 214 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 continue in Book Two of Cicero’s On Ends, and we are approximately at section 26, which begins in the Reid edition on page 64. Last week, we began a discussion in which Cicero was dealing with the issues of friendship. And Cicero had brought that section of his discussion of friendship to a conclusion by saying that the fact that Epicurus was himself a good man and that many Epicureans have been and are today true in their friendships and strong and serious in the conduct of their lives — not governing their plans by pleasure but by duty — this fact makes the power of morality seem stronger and that of pleasure less. “Some men indeed so live that their language is refuted by their life” — he’s referring to Epicurus and saying that Epicurean principles are refuted by the way he actually lived.
Now we turn to section 26. Cicero says: “Let us look into your assertions about friendship. One of these I thought I recognized as a saying of Epicurus himself, that friendship cannot be divorced from pleasure and deserves to be cultivated on that account because our lives cannot be secure or free from apprehension without it, and so cannot be agreeable either. To those arguments I’ve already made a sufficient answer. Now, let’s turn to something else you’ve said that Epicurus himself did not advocate. You have quoted another and more cultured maxim of the modern school, to which he, Epicurus himself, never gave utterance so far as I know — namely, that the friend is desired with a view to advantage in the first instance, but that when familiarity has been established, then he is loved for his own sake, even if the expectation of pleasure be disregarded.” Cicero’s saying that is not an argument that Epicurus himself ever made, and that it actually undercuts the Epicurean position.
Joshua:
So do we share Cicero’s view that Torquatus’s statement that friendship starts with advantage but turns into something else is a weak argument? It’s interesting to see Cicero take this up, because we have the Vatican Sayings. And Cicero’s referring there to Vatican Saying 23: “Every friendship in itself is to be desired, but the initial cause of friendship is from its advantages.” When Epicurus says in the Letter to Menoeceus that by a scale of comparison and by the consideration of advantages and disadvantages we must form our judgment on all these matters — it’s clear that friendship in Epicureanism starts in mutual advantage, just like justice starts in mutual advantage.
Cassius:
And those Principal Doctrines on justice appear to be saying that justice arises from the agreements of men over time not to harm and be harmed by each other — and there are two long doctrines about how when circumstances change, what previously was just is no longer just. It would be tempting to read an analogy there between justice and friendship: if circumstances can change so readily to make what was formerly just unjust, then potentially the Epicureans would have considered that circumstances could change to make what was formerly a friendship not so much to be valued.
So: is there ever a legitimate way of looking at a friendship in which circumstances change and you terminate the friendship? Must all friendships once entered be permanent from an Epicurean point of view?
Joshua:
I would say there’s nothing permanent except atoms and void if I was being particularly reductionist, but no, of course not. I don’t think friendship is like a golden chain that is never severed once forged. Everybody has people they used to be on very good terms with. Some friendships are very situational — people you used to work with, who you went different directions from in life. Other friends you’ve known since preschool and are still friends with. So friendship starts from advantage, some friendships get beyond that level, some maybe don’t.
Cicero seems to be deifying this concept of friendship, as if it is an absolute obligation in which once you’re a friend, you’ve sworn to die for each other. I don’t think most of us would think that’s a reasonable way of looking at the concept of friendship.
And there’s a particular resource here: there are papyri discovered in Egypt in a rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus. One of them appears to have been written by an Epicurean. Don has posted it to the forum with a Google translation from the French. It goes like this: “There is no true piety when one diminishes what is proper to nature.” And then it takes up the issue of fear and how fear relates to the gods: “What is the purpose of feeling fear? Are you afraid that the gods are going to behave unjustly?”
And here’s the connection: if your understanding of the gods is based on fear, aren’t you running into the same problem that Cicero is describing about Epicurean friendship? Isn’t it impossible to have a true feeling of reverence for the gods if your sole motive in going to them is for advantage — for reward or avoiding punishment? So they become sort of like a cosmic vending machine for the things you want. Cicero, if you’re going to the gods with personal advantage in view, how are you capable of treating them reverently? Doesn’t this just undercut that whole project?
Cassius:
That’s a very interesting point, Joshua. And I’m wondering now, as I think back about what we’ve read here in Book One and Book Two, the threat to Epicurean perspectives from virtue ethics is stronger than the threat from standard religion. Because Cicero has not been, in recent pages, appealing to the benefits of going to heaven. He’s been talking much more about the supposed glory and sanctity of the virtues — these things that are ends in themselves without there being rewards. The virtue-based argument is probably more potent, and one that has to be met more forcefully by the Epicurean perspective.
And so Cicero proceeds into section 27 and says: “We dwell too long upon very simple matters. When we once have concluded and demonstrated that if everything is judged by the standard of pleasure, no room is left for either virtues or friendships, there is nothing besides on which we need greatly insist.”
And then: “Whereas the whole importance of philosophy lies in its bearing on happiness — whereas some place happiness in one thing, some in another, while you place it in pleasure — let us first examine the nature of happiness as you conceive it. Now you will grant me this, I suppose: that happiness, if only it exists at all, ought to lie entirely within the wise man’s own control. For if the life of happiness may cease to be so, then it cannot be really happy.”
Joshua:
Think we would grant that it’s desirable, but would we grant that happiness cannot exist if it can cease to exist?
Cassius:
You kind of gave the answer there — Epicurus says that some things are within our control, some things happen by necessity, some things happen by blind chance. The goal of philosophy in Epicureanism is to minimize the effect of necessity and chance on the operation of your happiness. I don’t think it’s possible to entirely eliminate those things. And I wouldn’t advise this kind of — it reminds me a lot of Stoic apathy, really. This kind of apathetic response to adversity: “Oh, my whole family was just killed off, that’s fine, I’m not going to allow that to affect me.” I don’t think that’s a healthy approach.
Your happiness depends on your ability to process trauma, not suppress it. And there will be swings, there will be highs and lows. I think it fluctuates. I think the goal of philosophy is not to eradicate necessity and chance, but to minimize their impact.
Cassius:
Right. It does seem that we’ve got a decent grasp on this issue. Cicero is saying you can’t be a friend unless you’re gonna die for that friend, and you can’t be happy if you can cease to be happy at any moment. And that strikes me as the old cliché of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Let’s see his explanation. He says: “For if the life of happiness may cease to be so, then it cannot be really happy. No one then can possibly be happy, for happiness is usually spoken of not with reference to some period of time, but to permanence, nor do we talk of the life of happiness at all unless that life be rounded off and complete. Nor can a man be happy at one time and wretched at another, since any man who judges that he can become wretched will never be happy.”
Joshua:
It’s interesting. It’s partially confessional here, because Cicero lost his daughter, didn’t he? She died, he was miserable after that. Is this Cicero saying to us, “I’ve never been happy. Everything I do, I do out of service, out of suffering”?
I find this pessimistic approach to the issue of happiness to be really off the mark. It’s bizarre to me that someone would arrive at the conclusion that unless happiness is a permanent and unalterable position, it isn’t really happiness. You’re probably familiar with the phrase “Kafka trap” — a rhetorical device in which any denial by an accused person serves as evidence of guilt. I feel one of these impending here. Cicero is saying happiness doesn’t exist unless it’s permanent. And then my response is: well, I’m not permanently happy. Some days I’m happy, some days I’m not. I’m capable of maintaining a kind of higher-level tenor of thought that keeps me going through the unhappy bits. But Cicero is saying: Josh, you’ve never known happiness, because if it can once escape you, you’ve never had it.
Cassius:
Yeah. And as we go further down, Cicero does come back to talking about how “he who places good entirely in virtue can say that happiness is consummated by the consummation of virtue.” So he’s not writing happiness completely out of his own philosophy.
The way I decode this and respond to it from an Epicurean perspective is to always go back to what is the meaning of pleasure — how pleasure is not simple sensory stimulation alone, and how therefore a life of continuous pleasure is possible when you look at the wider definition of pleasure. A life of happiness is a life of pleasure, because it is pleasure which is the groundwork and foundation of everything that is desirable.
This is going to continue in some very interesting material as we go forward in section 27 and for the next several pages. So rather than go further today, we’ll come back next week and continue around the top of page 67 of the Reid edition. In the meantime, closing thoughts for today. Martin?
Martin:
Alright, I have nothing to add, thanks.
Cassius:
Thank you, Martin. Callistheni.
Callistheni:
I just wanted to go back and point out something that Joshua said — about the idea that Epicurean philosophy seeks to minimize the impact of necessity and chance. If he has any further words on it?
Joshua:
Yeah, that’s a huge takeaway for me. The goal of philosophy is about living the good life. Epicurus noticed that in the operation of human life in nature, you can basically reduce everything going on into a couple of modes: some things happen by necessity, some things happen by chance, and some things happen because of our own free will. The problem that this lays before you is that if too much of your life is governed by necessity — whether it’s economic necessity, or living in an unstable country, or whatever — that’s a stumbling block to you in developing and cultivating decisions about how you should live your life. The goal of pursuing philosophy is minimizing the impact that necessity and chance have in the way that your life unfolds, because you want more of that future to be in your control than out of it.
When Cicero says “for if the life of happiness may cease to be so, then it cannot be really happy” — I personally need that to not be true. I need it to be the case that you can be unhappy one day and happy the next, because all of my sense of progress in developing as a student of philosophy is built on the assumption that happiness can be achieved, that it is within my grasp.
Cassius:
Cicero’s attitude here seems really corrosive to an understanding of human nature.
Joshua:
Brutus is reputed to have said something that might be a response to that. He’s about to kill himself at Philippi after losing the battle to Antony and Octavian. It actually comes from Cassius Dio’s Roman History, Volume 5, Loeb Classical Library 1917, section 49: Brutus uttered aloud this sentence of Heracles: “O wretched valor, thou wert but a name! And yet I worship thee as real indeed. But now it seems thou wert but fortune’s slave.”
So at any rate — if there’s a takeaway from today’s episode — it’s how Cicero is taking friendship and making it into an absolute, and talking about happiness as if it is a Platonic ideal. When you look deeply at how Cicero is analyzing these things, you can see a thread of continuity that distinguishes this absolutist perspective from the atomic perspective that Epicurus is talking about — dealing with nature as it really is and saying, let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good.
Cassius:
That’s probably a good place to stop for today. We’ll come back in a week. In the meantime, please drop by the forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about anything we’re discussing here. We thank you for listening and we’ll be back next week.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 214 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 continue in Book Two of Cicero’s On Ends, and we are approximately at Section 26, which begins in the Rackham edition that we’ve been using primarily on page 64. Last week we began a discussion in which Cicero was dealing with the issues of friendship, and Cicero was making his general point that if pleasure is your goal, then that crowds out every other consideration, and you’re not going to have any friendship. You’re not going to have the possibility of having the kind of true friendship that Cicero gave several examples of in terms of Orestes or Pylades, and you’re going to ultimately drop away from your friendship as soon as something adverse happens so that the friend is no longer productive to keep. And Cicero had brought that section of his discussion of friendship to a conclusion by saying that to his mind, the fact that Epicurus was himself a good man and that many Epicureans have been and are today true in their friendships and strong and serious in the conduct of their lives, not governing their plans by pleasure but by duty, according to Cicero — this fact makes the power of morality seem stronger and that of pleasure less. Some men indeed so live that their language is refuted by their life. He’s referring to Epicurus and saying that Epicurean principles are refuted by the way he actually lived. Cicero says, and while the rest of men are supposed to be better in their words than in their deeds, these men seem to be better than their words. And that finishes Cicero’s initial takedown of the Epicurean view on pleasure.
And now we turn to Section 26, where Cicero goes forward and says this — let us look into your assertions about friendship, talking to Torquatus about the Epicurean assertions. One of these I thought I recognized as a saying of Epicurus himself, that friendship cannot be divorced from pleasure and deserves to be cultivated on that account because our lives cannot be secure or free from apprehension without it, and so cannot be agreeable either. To those arguments, Cicero says, I’ve already made a sufficient answer. Now, Cicero says, let’s turn to something else you’ve said that Epicurus himself did not advocate. Cicero says: you have quoted another and more cultured maxim of the modern school, to which he — Epicurus himself — never gave utterance so far as I know. Namely, that the friend is desired with a view to advantage in the first instance, but that when familiarity has been established, then he is loved for his own sake, even if the expectation of pleasure be disregarded. Now, we talked about that both last week and in the past, how Torquatus himself had said that there are varying views within the Epicurean school about the nature of friendship, and that some people take the position in the Epicurean school that friendship starts out from advantage but it turns into something else when you’ve matured the friendship into a pleasure of its own. Cicero is saying that that is not an argument that Epicurus ever made.
And Cicero says that although this utterance may be criticized in many ways, I — Cicero — still welcome the concession they make, since it is enough for my purpose, though not for theirs. Cicero is saying that this modern Epicurean argument that friendship starts with advantage but turns into something else is something that Epicurus would not have used, and it actually undercuts the Epicurean position. Cicero says: for they say that right action is sometimes possible without hope of or seeking after pleasure. Others also, as you insist, maintain that wise men enter into a sort of league with each other, binding them to entertain for their friends the very same feelings that they entertain for themselves. That such a league is not only possible but has often been made, and is of a special importance for the attainment of pleasures. Cicero says, if they found it possible to establish this league for friendship, let them also establish another, namely to feel regard for equity, temperance, and all the virtues from pure love of them apart from interest. Or for men to cultivate friendships with an eye to gains and benefits and advantages — if there be no feeling of affection which renders friendship inherently, from its own nature and its own power, through and for itself desirable — can there really be any doubt that we should prefer our estates and our rents from houses to our friends? At this point, you may quote once more what Epicurus said in most excellent language on the merits of friendship. I’m not inquiring, Cicero says, what he says, but what is open to him to say consistently with his own system and doctrines. Friendship has ever been sought for the sake of advantage. Do you imagine that Triarius here can bring you more advantage than the granaries at Puteoli would if they belonged to you? Bring together all the points in common in your school — the protection friends afford. Enough protection is already afforded you by yourself, by the laws, by ordinary friendships. Already it will not be possible to treat you with neglect while you will find it easy to escape from unpopularity and dislike, since it is with reference to such things that Epicurus lays down his maxims. And apart from this, with such revenues at your command for the display of generosity, you’ll defend and fortify yourself excellently by means of the goodwill of many, without the friendship of the Palatine Order. But for a friend to share your jests and your secrets, all your hidden thoughts — you had better keep all of them to yourself — but allowing all these privileges to be far from odious, what are they compared with the advantages of such great wealth? You see then that if you gauge friendship by disinterested affection there is nothing more excellent, but if by profit, that the closest intimacies are less valuable than the returns from productive property. You ought to love me myself and not my possessions if we are to be true friends.
So we’ll stop there. And I think this is a good challenge and does point out some interesting aspects of how as Epicurean philosophy developed over the years, it might not always have gotten stronger but it might have made some admissions that it arguably should not have made. Because Cicero is saying that if you ever take your eye off of pleasure as the ultimate goal, and you say that there’s something else that’s desirable of and for itself, then you’ve undercut your logic and you’ve admitted that there’s something higher and better that is separate from pleasure.
Joshua:
Do we share Cicero’s view that friendship starts with advantage but turns into something else? That is a weak argument. Well, it’s a very interesting question, and it’s interesting to see Cicero take this up because we have this document that came from the Vatican libraries in like 1887 or something, but its provenance is unknown. The Vatican Sayings — or the Vatican Maxims as it’s come to be known — and we kind of know by reading through it that it’s not a document that was prepared to be a list or an outline of the philosophy in the way that the Principal Doctrines appears to be exactly that. In fact, Cicero earlier in this text had said that the Principal Doctrines was a list curated by Epicurus himself — that is the impression that Cicero got. And Cicero didn’t know, presumably, about the Vatican Sayings because this is just quotations that were taken from a variety of different works written by Epicureans, but we don’t know which works, we don’t know which authors and so forth.
What he’s referring to there in that passage is Vatican Saying 23: “Every friendship in itself is to be desired, but the initial cause of friendship is from its advantages.” So we don’t know when this idea entered Epicureanism, but I would say it’s not inconsistent with the philosophy more broadly to say that you can read this interpretation into what Epicurus had to say about friendship from the beginning. It’s just that someone later than Epicurus wrote it down in these terms. But when Epicurus says in the Letter to Menoikeus, for example, “every pleasure then, because of its natural kinship to us, is good, yet not every pleasure is to be chosen, even as every pain also is an evil, yet not all are always of a nature to be avoided” — yet by a scale of comparison and by the consideration of advantages and disadvantages we must form our judgment on all these matters. And it goes on: for the good on certain occasions we treat as bad, and conversely the bad as good. So it’s clear that, take it any way you like, friendship in Epicureanism starts in mutual advantage, just like justice starts in mutual advantage. There’s a reason that Epicurus in his will, which we’re going to come to in this text a little later, there’s a reason in his will that he decides to commemorate the life of his late friend Metrodorus, who predeceased him.
So I don’t think this is quite the innovation that Cicero is making it out to be, or that Torquatus made it out to be in Book One.
Cassius:
You’ve raised a couple of interesting points that I’d like to comment on, Joshua. It is interesting to think about the Vatican Sayings and to some extent how little we know about them, and how it does appear that some of the material in there is clearly not from Epicurus himself. So if Cicero is to be believed here and Torquatus is correct in the way he described it in the beginning in Book One, we do have the potential — if not likelihood — that that particular saying that you quoted is something that does not trace back fully and directly to Epicurus himself. Even though the sentiment may have been there, it may be that that’s something that whoever collected that list that ended up in the Vatican was taking from a source that’s not a letter of Epicurus himself.
And I was struck as well when you compared this issue to that of justice a few minutes ago. That is particularly interesting to me because I find those Principal Doctrines on justice to be extremely deep to think about, in that they appear to me to be saying that certainly, as you were saying, justice arises from the agreements of men over time not to harm and be harmed by each other — that’s one of the earlier doctrines on justice. But then there are two very long ones about how when circumstances change, what previously was just is no longer just. And it would be tempting to read an analogy there between justice and friendship — that if circumstances can change so readily to make what was formerly just unjust, then potentially the Epicureans would have considered that circumstances could change to make what was formerly a friendship not so much to be valued.
So you can certainly see from Cicero’s point of view that there’s a challenge here about the nature of friendship. And so it’s probably still a very valid challenge to consider. Is there ever a legitimate way of looking at a friendship in which circumstances change and you terminate the friendship? Must all friendships once entered be permanent from an Epicurean point of view? Let’s throw that out for discussion for a moment. What do you guys think about that? Is it ever legitimate to end a friendship?
Joshua:
I would say there’s nothing permanent except atoms and void if I was being particularly reductionist about this, but no, of course not. I don’t think that friendship is like a golden chain that is never ever severed once forged. Everybody, I think, has people they used to be on very good terms with. In my life, I have some friendships that are very situational — people that I used to work with. Some of them I still keep in touch with, most of them I don’t. Not that we had a falling out, but we just went different directions in life, and that’s fine, that happens. I have other friends that I met when I was in preschool and kindergarten, and we went all through school together, and we’re still friends to this day. So friendship starts from advantage, some friendships get beyond that level, some maybe don’t, but then certainly some friendships just don’t last your whole life.
Cassius:
Yeah, Cicero seems to be sort of — maybe romanticizing is not exactly the right word — but he’s deifying this concept of friendship as if it is an absolute obligation in which once you’re a friend, you’ve sworn to die for each other. And I don’t think most of us would think that’s a reasonable way of looking at the concept of friendship. I can be your friend, you can be my friend, without us having a pledge of mutually assured destruction if something happens where we are in a bad position. I don’t think that it would be reasonable from most of our perspectives, and specifically from an Epicurean perspective, to take that position that every friend should be a friend to the death or can be a friend to the death. And yet that seems to me to be where Cicero is going here — that you can’t have any friendship at all unless your friendship is based on a death oath.
Joshua:
You know, there’s a particular resource that’s sometimes interesting to us, and that is the private letters of Thomas Jefferson. And during his political career, he was constantly at odds with John Adams in particular over issues like what is the role of the central government, what is the role of the banking system, should there be a national bank and so forth — most of it’s well outside of our normal interest here. But what’s interesting is that even though they were bitter rivals politically, they ended up becoming very good friends later in life and actually died on the exact same day on the 4th of July, I think it was 1826. And John Adams’ last words were “Thomas Jefferson survives me,” even though Thomas Jefferson had died a few hours earlier.
So every once in a while you do get these friendships that last right up to the bitter end. But there’s no expectation. You mentioned that Cicero had some very romantic ideas about friendship. Cicero has some very romantic ideas about a lot of things. And what he’s about to say about happiness, a little bit later in this text — we might get to it today — it blew my mind when I read it because it was so strange. He says something like: if happiness is real, then it’s permanent. You can’t be happy one minute and then wretched another. It’s like — isn’t it possible to be happy today but unhappy tomorrow? And if not, what is the point of studying philosophy? Because presumably whatever level of happiness I’m at, I’m locked in forever now. There’s absolutely no point of even reading this stuff anymore if that were true. So Cicero’s got some unique opinions, and I don’t know if it’s a privilege to be able to share them here, but it’s certainly an interesting exercise.
Cassius:
Yes, that’s in Section 27, and we’ll dive into that in just a minute. But yeah, that seems to me to be the common thread here — about a lot of this, the way you’ve just said it, Joshua — whether romanticism is the right word or not. Cicero is taking these words like he does with virtues. All of these virtues are wholly sanctified ideas that are absolute and to be dealt with as if they’re gods themselves, and to be treated with kid gloves and all the different other clichés I can think of in terms of a sort of cultish approach to the idea that courage or wisdom or temperance — these other virtues are just absolute, inviolate ideals that we aspire to and maybe we don’t reach them, but they exist out there in heaven and we should always keep them the focus of our attention and never let them down and be willing to die for them if we have to. And he’s treating friendship in just the same way. Just like he says you can’t be virtuous unless you’re devoted to virtue as your ultimate good, he’s saying you can’t be a friend unless you’re devoted to friendship as being this ideal in which you’ve pledged to die for each other. And that’s just not a way that I think many of us would agree with, to say the least.
And Epicurus would say that ultimately, if there’s pleasure and pain in life, then you judge everything by pleasure and pain — you have to approach everything with that standard. And so from that point of view, Cicero is right. It’s just that his assessment of the conclusion is dead wrong, at least from an Epicurean point of view.
Joshua:
It’s like Cicero’s taking friendship as a Platonic ideal.
Cassius:
Yes. Like there’s an ideal form of it.
Joshua:
Yes, I think that’s what’s going on. Let me get something in here, because Cicero has left an opening and I want to seize it. There’s a set of papyri that were discovered in Egypt in a rubbish dump near a place called Oxyrhynchus. And one of them appears to have been written by an Epicurean. Don has posted it to the forum with a Google translation from the French. So don’t rely too heavily on what I’m about to read, and it’s also quite a fragmentary document, although it is unusually well-preserved given Egypt’s climate. These papyri were discovered in the 19th and 20th centuries in different collections. No idea who wrote it, but it appears to have been written by an Epicurean. And it goes like this: “There is no true piety when one diminishes what, as I said, is proper to nature, nor when, at least of course, the following words are repeated: ‘I fear all the gods and worship them. And for them I make all kinds of sacrifices and offerings.’” So the writer of the papyrus quotes that, and then a little later he takes up this issue of fear. How does fear relate to the gods? And he says: what is the purpose of feeling fear? Are you afraid that the gods are going to behave unjustly? And if so, how do you understand that to be a kind of divinity? Why do you look to these gods for reward?
Presumably Cicero is one of these people — I don’t know. He’s part of this old Academy tradition. In a separate document, he puts words into — I think it was Cato’s mouth — but he says something like, “I believe that the souls of men are immortal, and I would not have this ripped from me while I was still alive.” Cicero wants to believe in an afterlife. But if your understanding of the gods is based on fear, which is the issue that this papyrus takes up, aren’t you going to run into the same problem that Cicero is describing about Epicurean friendship? Isn’t it impossible to have a true feeling of reverence for the gods if your sole motive in going to them is for advantage of reward and avoiding the disadvantage of being punished by them? So that’s the question to me.
Cicero has this frequent line of attack. He says: your philosophy is inconsistent. To the extent that your philosophy is consistent, it is not consistent with your behavior. And to the extent that your philosophy is consistent with your behavior, it’s not good. In other words, Epicureanism is useless no matter how you slice it — that’s Cicero’s approach. But this response here on the question of the gods — which is: if you’re going to the gods with personal advantage in view, how are you capable of treating them reverently as divine figures? Doesn’t this just undercut that whole project and they become sort of like a cosmic vending machine for the things you want? You send up a little smoke from burnt offerings and they send prosperity to your life. So I see a way in which the ancient Epicureans could have taken Cicero’s argument and thrown it right back at him only in a slightly different way.
Because of course the Epicureans have no use for advantage from the gods — the gods don’t interfere in human life at all for reward or punishment. So there is no advantage to be got there. But that’s exactly what people like Cicero presumably are looking for when they look to the gods — they’re looking for advantage. It’s like what we quoted two weeks ago, I think, from Demosthenes: it requires no courage for a political leader like Demosthenes to stand in front of an Athenian crowd and say, “We’ve done all the sacrifices, we sacrificed to Zeus, we sacrificed to Athena, and the auspices were good for you.” It requires no courage to do that. But it does require courage to do as the Epicureans do and say that the gods had no role in creation and they have no role in the maintenance or sustenance of the universe, that they have no role in interfering for good or evil in human life. But Cicero looking to the gods for personal advantage — it’s exactly the problem that he wants to lay at the feet of the Epicureans on this issue of friendship, but he appears to be blind to the fact that he’s very guilty of this himself.
I’m assuming he’s taking the standard view here. If Cicero rejects the intervention of the gods, I’ve never heard that anywhere. And like I said, in — I think the Tusculan Disputations — he does appear to put his own words into the mouth of the piety faction in that text.
Cassius:
Joshua, I think that’s an excellent point. And I do see, I think, pretty much exactly what you’re talking about. And I’m wondering now, as I think back about what we’ve read here in Book One and Book Two so far of On Ends, that what you’ve brought up may be pointing out to us that the threat to Epicurean perspectives from virtue ethics is stronger, to some extent, than the threat from this intervening-god standard religion. In the sense that Cicero has not been in recent pages going through this discussion requiring us to appeal to the benefits of going to heaven and living in paradise for eternity. He’s been talking much more about the supposed glory and sanctity of the virtues and these things that are ends in themselves, without there being rewards. So while I gather you’re right — Cicero was part of the standard Roman religious viewpoint, and he would say that the gods are deserving of worship and will reward the gods’ friends and punish the gods’ enemies — he does not seem to be really relying on that argument here in the discussion with Torquatus.
And so I do think you’re right in saying this is a good response from an Epicurean point of view to those people who advocate religion and the rewards you get from going to heaven, or the different things that the gods of other religions promise to the people who support them. They too are subject to the same objection that these rewards are things that are being purchased from the gods as if with money. And so that’s a good response to them. And maybe that’s why Cicero is relying on this other virtue-based argument. The idealization of these things that he’s talking about in terms of the virtues, or in terms of friendship — that they are ends in themselves, that virtue is its own reward, that friendship is its own reward — is probably a more potent argument, and therefore one that has to be met more forcefully by the Epicurean perspective.
Guess where all this comes down? What is ultimately motivating everyone? Is it pleasure and pain, or is there something else out there? And you can say it’s the reward that a god might give you, but it is apparently attractive to a certain type of person to argue that virtue is its own reward — that the very nature of asking for a reward undercuts the merit of the action that’s being conducted. So I think that’s a very interesting point you brought up there.
And so Cicero proceeds into Section 27 and says: “We dwell too long upon very simple matters. When we once have concluded and demonstrated that if everything is judged by the standard of pleasure, no room is left for either virtues or friendships, there is nothing besides on which we need greatly insist.” And I think that’s a pretty good summation of what we’ve just been talking about. If you put pleasure in the driver’s seat, there’s no room left for either friendship or virtue. Cicero is applying the same analysis to friendship as he is to virtue.
And Cicero says: “And yet lest it should be thought that any passage is left without reply, I’ll now say a few words about the remainder of your speech. Well then, whereas the whole importance of philosophy lies in its bearing on happiness, and it is from a desire for happiness alone that men have devoted themselves to this pursuit, and whereas some place happiness in one thing, some in another, while you place it in pleasure, and similarly on the other side, all wretchedness you place in pain — let us first examine the nature of happiness as you conceive it.” And here comes this contention that we’ll have to address. Cicero says: “Now you will grant me this, I suppose, that happiness, if only it exists at all, ought to lie entirely within the wise man’s own control. For if the life of happiness may cease to be so, then it cannot be really happy.” Okay, and he’s going to go on with an explanation of that, but let’s hammer that point for just a minute. Just like he’s saying if friendship can be broken you don’t really have a friendship, he’s saying that if happiness can cease to be, then it cannot be really happy. Do we agree? Would we grant Cicero that contention?
Think we would grant that it’s desirable, but would we grant that it cannot exist if it can cease to exist?
Joshua:
Well, you kind of gave the answer there, Cassius, which is: Epicurus says that some things are within our control, some things happen by necessity, some things happen by blind chance. The goal of philosophy in Epicureanism — kind of as I understand it — is to minimize the effect of necessity and chance on the operation of your happiness. I don’t think it’s possible to entirely eliminate those things. And we know a lot more about mental health than they did in the ancient world. I wouldn’t advise this kind of — it reminds me a lot of Stoic apathy, really — this kind of apathetic response to, “Oh, my whole family was just killed off, that’s fine. I’m not going to allow that to affect me.” I don’t think that’s a healthy approach. And I think that your happiness depends on your ability to process trauma, not suppress it. And there will be swings and there will be highs and lows. And it’s possible, I think, even when you’re very sad, to still be happy in many ways. But I think it fluctuates. I guess that’s my final answer: I think it fluctuates. I don’t think that the goal of this pursuit — to eradicate necessity and chance and fate and whatever from the operations of the things that we do when we pursue philosophy to make us happy — I don’t think that will ever be fully successful.
Cassius:
Right, and I will hold that to be your final answer because we’ll go forward here and see what Cicero does to explain his position, and we’ll probably come up with some more ideas after we get that. But it does seem that we’ve got a decent grasp on this issue. Cicero is saying: you can’t be a friend unless you’re going to die for that friend. He’s saying: you can’t be happy if you can cease to be happy at any moment. And that strikes me as the old cliché of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and for the reasons that that cliché seems persuasive to me — that you should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good — I think that’s what Cicero is doing here. But let’s see his explanation for his position, because he says:
“For if the life of happiness may cease to be so, then it cannot be really happy. Who indeed has any faith that a thing which is perishable and fleeting will in his own case always continue solid and strong? But he who feels no confidence in the permanence of the blessings he possesses must needs apprehend that he will sometime or other be wretched if he loses them. Now no one can be happy while in alarm about his most important possessions. No one then can possibly be happy. For happiness is usually spoken of not with reference to some period of time, but to permanence, nor do we talk of the life of happiness at all unless that life be rounded off and complete. Nor can a man be happy at one time and wretched at another, since any man who judges that he can become wretched will never be happy. For when happiness has been once entered on, it is as durable as wisdom herself, who is the creator of the life of happiness, nor does it await the last days of life as Herodotus writes that Solon enjoined upon Croesus.”
So Cicero is alleging that you can’t really have true happiness unless you are convinced that you will never lose it — that a man cannot be happy at one time and wretched at another, since any man who judges that he can become wretched will never be happy. I don’t know — if this is not just the deification, the idealization of happiness, I don’t know what would be. So what do we make of this argument that true happiness is something that cannot be interrupted?
Joshua:
Well, it’s interesting. I mean, it’s partially — it seems confessional here — because Cicero lost his daughter, didn’t he? She died, he was miserable after that. Is this Cicero saying to us, “I’ve never been happy”? Everything I do, I do out of service, out of suffering, I do it for my country, I do it for my kinsmen. I don’t do anything for myself because all I’ve ever gotten out of this has been rotten misery. He has a very important sense of his contributions to the Roman way of life, which is fine — he was a very important figure. But I find this pessimistic approach to the issue of happiness to be really off the mark. As I said before, this is just bizarre.
Cassius:
It’s bizarre to me that someone would arrive at the conclusion that, well, unless happiness is a permanent and unalterable position, then I don’t want anything to do with it. Unless it is unchanging, then it isn’t. If it’s not unchanging, then it isn’t really happiness. You’re probably familiar with the phrase “Kafka trap,” right? — a rhetorical device in which any denial by an accused person serves as evidence of guilt. I feel one of these impending here, because Cicero is saying that happiness doesn’t exist unless it’s permanent. And then my response to that is, well, I’m not permanently happy. Some days I’m happy, some days I’m not. I’m capable of maintaining a kind of lofty tenor of thought that keeps me going through the unhappy bits. I can see like a kind of higher-level happiness that’s there that sustains me, but I’m not permanently happy. It’s Cicero saying, “Josh, you’ve never known happiness.” Because if it can once escape you, you’ve never had it. I don’t know — I find this very strange.
Joshua:
Yeah, there’s some really important stuff going on here. It seems to me that we’re going to have to be pretty subtle about it, and the way you asked the question earlier is really important. Is Cicero saying here that he’s never been happy? I doubt that Cicero would admit that he is saying that here, and yet it’s clear that he’s using the word happiness in ways that we need to be clear on. Because I presume Cicero would say at certain parts of his life he’s been happy. But the happiness that he would say he experienced apparently is not the same definition of happiness that he is saying the Epicureans are holding. Because as he opens this discussion, he says: “whereas some place happiness in one thing, some in another, while you place it in pleasure, and similarly on the other side, all wretchedness you place in pain — let us first examine the nature of happiness as you conceive it.” So to some extent he presumably is going to be talking about happiness from an Epicurean point of view, but he’s switching back and forth, it seems to me, so it’s confusing. Because I don’t think he — and as we go further down, I scanned ahead a moment ago — he does come back to talking about how “he who places good entirely in virtue can say that happiness is consummated by the consummation of virtue.” So he’s not writing happiness completely out of his own philosophy by any means, but he is trying to assert a definition of happiness philosophically in which you’re not really happy unless you’re confident of keeping that happiness.
And of course, Epicurus does in fact talk a lot about this in terms of confidence. When Torquatus gave his example of the ideal life — where the man is surrounded by numerous and vivid pleasures and so forth — an important component of that was that he was confident of retaining that status and that he would not be facing pain in the future. And so there’s clearly an implication in Epicurus’ point of view that it is important to be able to have confidence that your pleasurable life will continue. And that’s why Torquatus is making the point that you can offset against the pains that may occur the pleasures of good memories and pleasures of the mind and of being alive, that will allow you — as Epicurus did in his final days — to continue to feel himself to be happy even though he was experiencing a tremendous amount of pain from his physical disease. And of course, Epicurus is reputed to have said that he calls you to continuous pleasures.
So there’s definitely an issue here that Cicero is not making up out of nothing. Epicurus admits that you have to be confident in being able to continue to experience a happy life. I guess my preliminary analysis of it would be that Epicurus is saying that you have a happy life by the practical experience that you can offset pleasures against pains. And as Torquatus has said earlier, the wise man is always going to be able to find more cause for joy than for vexation. And from that point of view, you are able to maintain your happy life even while you are experiencing pains of a kind.
Cassius:
Yeah, Epicurus had said that the man who is free from hunger, from cold, from thirst, and who is assured of being free of these going forward, can rival Zeus in happiness — which Cicero is going to get into that comparison as well here. But the argument here — I kind of see what Cicero is saying. He’s saying that if you place the standard of happiness in pleasure, pleasure is fleeting, pain creeps in eventually always, you’re bound to be unhappy. But if you place the standard in virtue, virtue endows you with the kind of self-sufficiency that is required to weather all the pains and still be happy because you are virtuous. So this is his argument for virtue and that pleasure is fleeting at best, that pain is inevitable at worst, and that the best you can hope for is to grasp each pleasure before it slips away from you, which they all will do eventually. It is a rather bleak portrait of Epicurean philosophy that he’s painting here. Eventually we’re going to have to get into this argument from Philebus, probably about the limits of pleasure and so forth, but I think that’s coming.
Yes, I agree with what you’re saying, Joshua. Cicero is trying to argue that from his point of view, of course, pleasure is agreeable stimulation of the senses alone. He refuses to accept the Epicurean definition of pleasure as the absence of pain and all these other things in life that may not be stimulative but which are pleasurable to us. And so he’s trying to say, you can’t have permanent and continuous experience of stimulating sensory agreeableness — you’re going to have periods of pain. And because you’re going to have periods of pain, you can’t be continuously happy if you’re defining happiness solely in terms of pleasure, which again, Cicero means as sensory stimulation.
That’s where you take Cicero’s argument and you begin to unpack it, because pleasure is not simply sensory stimulation from the Epicurean point of view. And you do always have available to you these non-stimulative pleasures of appreciating your life and your memories and things that are not painful in your experience, that you can offset against the pains that you might be currently confronting. So Cicero’s argument, once again, is going to have to be dissected based on Cicero’s definition of pleasure as sensory stimulation. That is not the full meaning of the word pleasure as Epicurus asserts it to be. And when you use the full meaning, you can see that it is in fact possible.
I remember that in DeWitt’s book he talks about — and I forget where this reference is, and maybe it’s right here in Book Two of On Ends about Phalaris’s bull — and how Cicero is ridiculing Epicurus for suggesting that you can be happy even while you’re being tortured inside Phalaris’s bull. And DeWitt makes the comment that this is Cicero being petty. That’s right here on page 67, by the way. And so that’s the way I think you decode all of this and respond to it from an Epicurean perspective — always go back to what is the meaning of pleasure, how pleasure is not simple sensory stimulation alone, and how therefore a life of continuous pleasure is possible when you look at the wider definition of pleasure. And that relieves any apparent contradiction in saying that a life of happiness is a life of pleasure. That’s exactly the phrase that I think Torquatus himself used. And Diogenes of Oinoanda says basically the same thing — that a life of happiness is a life of pleasure, because it is in fact pleasure which is the groundwork, the framework, the foundation of everything that is desirable. So you deal with this argument by showing that you may not be continuously experiencing sensual stimulation, but you are able to continuously experience pleasure once you recognize the full depth and breadth of the meaning of the word pleasure.
This is going to continue on in some very interesting material as we go forward in Section 27 and for the next several pages here. So unfortunately we’re probably at the end of a normal episode for today, and rather than go further today we’ll come back next week and continue around the top of page 67 of the Rackham edition, and we’ll go forward from there. So in the meantime, closing thoughts for today. Martin?
Martin:
All right, I have nothing to add, thanks.
Cassius:
Thank you, Martin. Callistheni?
Callistheni:
I just wanted to go back and point out something that Joshua said because he summarized something very well in a manner which was very helpful, and I wanted to ask if he has any further words on it. And it was about the idea that Epicurean philosophy seeks to minimize the impact of necessity and chance.
Joshua:
Yeah, that’s a huge takeaway for me, because the goal of philosophy is about living the good life. That’s kind of what the Greeks were interested in. That’s what philosophy is for, for some of these later thinkers like the Epicureans and the Stoics and so forth — getting away from some of the stuff that Plato was talking about with ideal forms, although there is a well-developed physics in Epicurean philosophy. It’s about how you live your life.
So Epicurus noticed that in the operation of human life in nature, there’s a lot going on, but you can basically reduce everything going on into a couple of modes, and those modes are: some things happen by necessity — it’s woven into the fabric of the atoms and the void that, for example, if you fall off a building you’re going to hit the ground really hard. Some things happen by chance — they are probabilistic, some days it might go one way, some days it might go another way. And some things happen because of our own free will, because of the choices that we make as human beings.
And so the problem that this lays before you is: if too much of your life is governed by necessity, if you are hampered in making choices by necessity — by the fact that you have been channeled into one way of living and can’t get out — and this could be economic necessity, a lack of money or resources, this could be if you happen to live in an unstable country, that’s a kind of necessity that imposes itself on you — all of these things, necessity, chance, some people think of fate even though that has no operation in the Epicurean cosmos, but it’s a hindrance to you, it’s a stumbling block to you in developing and cultivating decisions about how you should live your life. Necessity is kind of the opposite of a decision that you make — necessity on the one hand, choice on the other. And the goal of philosophy, the project of pursuing philosophy, is in my mind the project of minimizing the impact that necessity and chance have in the way that your life unfolds, because you want more of that future to be in your control than out of it. You want more of what you’re going to do tomorrow to be in your control rather than out of it. That’s kind of the goal, and it’s hugely important.
When Epicurus talks about philosophy, he says no one should put off the study of philosophy when they are young or neglect it when they are old. You have to seize your chance, seize the day — pluck the right fruit, as Don would say — you have to take that opportunity now because you might not have it later. The opportunity that you take now saves you the necessity that you might otherwise experience later. So it’s a huge component of philosophy, and the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of pleasure, is developing a sense of things that are in our control, things that are not in our control right now but that maybe we can get to a point where we can move them into our control, and minimizing the impact of chance and necessity.
When Cicero says “for if the life of happiness may cease to be so, then it cannot be really happy” — I personally need that to not be true. I need it to be the case that you can be unhappy one day and happy the next. Because all of my sense of progress in developing as a student of philosophy is built on the assumption that happiness can be achieved, that it is within my grasp, and that some days I make good progress, some days I might slip, but I always have this goal in view and that I can move toward that goal and that it’s productive to do so.
Cassius:
Cicero’s attitude here seems really corrosive to me to an understanding of human nature. But if Cicero were standing here listening to you, Joshua, I suspect he might say something like: “Joshua, you’re being practical about what you’re doing in terms of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. But I’m telling you that you should not accept any amount of pain. You should not accept anything but the perfect, the best, the highest. And by setting your sights to allow that you may experience pain at certain times, you’re depriving yourself of the true experience of the glorious life of virtue that’s possible if you will simply put virtue in the role of guide of your life and stop being practical and accepting things that are less glorious than virtue itself.”
Brutus is reported to have said something that might be a response to that — which is, when he’s about to have to kill himself at Philippi after losing the battle to Antony and Octavian, he says: “Virtue, thou wert but a name, and I thought you were something real. But now it seems thou wert but fortune’s slave.” That’s the deal. These ideals are not real. But that’s not the best answer that we could come up with.
Joshua:
I’m sure — well, I don’t think that’s actually a horrible answer. Brutus has fallen under this way of these thinkers who are enamored of the grandeur of the name of virtue. He gets to the end of his life and virtue has not helped him one whit in preserving the Republic that his ancestors fought so hard for. That has not helped him one whit in staving off death. And even there in the moment of death, virtue — this thing that he’s dedicated his life to — has not calmed his soul in the final moments, which is kind of the image that we’re supposed to have of virtue.
I think that fragment comes from Plutarch — is that right? — which is surprising, that Plutarch would let this secret out into the world, because I see Plutarch as one of these virtue-seeking philosophers. And when you consider further that the people who are trying to sell you on a particular understanding of virtue, or on a particular understanding of morality, also have ulterior motives in mind — when you’re dealing with pleasure and pain, I know everyone has an ulterior motive in mind because they’re thinking about their own pleasure and their own pain. I expect that that’s baked into the equation. But when you go to a philosopher who talks all day long about virtue, virtue, virtue, virtue — be mindful of what he’s doing with his other hand. It’s like the image that Lucretius used of Agamemnon sacrificing his own daughter, and while he’s hugging her with one arm, he’s hiding the knife blade with the other.
Cassius:
Yeah, that’s a very good answer. And of course, we do the best we can extemporaneously to try to explain these things. Let me correct myself and get it right here at the very end of the episode. It appears that these last words of Brutus come not from Plutarch, as I usually say, but from Cassius Dio in a book called Roman History — and I’m looking at what appears to come from Volume 5, Loeb Classical Library, 1917. But here’s the way the story ends in Cassius Dio, in Section 49:
“Now Brutus, who had made his escape up to a well-fortified stronghold, undertook to break through in some way to his camp. But when he was unsuccessful and furthermore learned that some of his soldiers had made terms with the victors, he no longer had any hope. But despairing of safety and disdaining capture, he also took refuge in death. He first uttered aloud this sentence of Heracles: ‘O wretched valor, thou wert but a name, and yet I worship thee as real indeed. But now it seems thou wert but fortune’s slave.’”
So he’s actually quoting Heracles from another work. At any rate, if there’s a takeaway from today’s episode from what we’ve learned in looking at what Cicero is arguing here, it’s how he is taking friendship and making it into an absolute — in which you’re not really a friend if you’re not going to die for this person — and he’s talking about happiness as if it is again a Platonic ideal, in which you can’t be happy, it’s not justified to think of yourself as being happy, if you can lose for a moment this happiness that in Cicero’s mind is incompatible with happiness being a life of pleasure. So when you look deeply at how Cicero is analyzing these things, I think you can see a thread of continuity that distinguishes this absolutist perspective from the — let’s call it — atomic perspective that Epicurus is talking about. He’s dealing with nature as it really is. He’s talking about what’s possible given the way men are made, and he’s saying let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good. That’s probably a good place to stop for today. We’ll come back in a week. In the meantime, please drop by the forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about anything we’re discussing here. We thank you for listening and we’ll be back next week.