Episode 217 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 24 - Does Luck Control Whether An Epicurean Is Happy?
Date: 03/06/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3737-episode-217-cicero-s-on-ends-book-two-part-24-does-luck-control-whether-an-epicu/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Recap of the time-and-pleasure debate from Episode 216, then continuing into Section 28. Main theoretical discussion: DeWitt’s “Unity of Pleasure” subsection — pleasure presented under three aspects (unitary good; health of mind and health of body; freedom from fear and from pain), showing how ataraxia, aponia, and eudaimonia are all expressions of the same telos. The Cyrenaic view from Diogenes Laertius — “our end is particular pleasure; happiness is the sum of all particular pleasures, including past and future ones” — is compared to Epicurus’s position. The “covered father paradox” is introduced to illustrate how the same word can have different meanings depending on context, and why Epicurean statements about pleasure require careful contextualization.
Main new Cicero attack: “fortune becomes lady paramount over happiness” — the wise Epicurean’s pleasures depend on external objects outside his control. Epicurean response: the project of philosophy is precisely to maximize what is within one’s control; fortune as a dispensing goddess has no more reality than fate. Discussion of whether wealth is required for happiness — no, Epicurean philosophy is not a philosophy for the rich alone. Thoreau on true wealth; Aristotle on external goods as a competing claim. Closing: Callistheni asks about instrumental vs. intrinsic goods; Joshua quotes Diogenes of Oenoanda Fragment 32 on virtues as means to the end of pleasure, not ends in themselves.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 217 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics.
This week we’re continuing in Book Two of Cicero’s On Ends, discussing Cicero’s attacks on Epicurean philosophy. Last week we dealt mainly with this question that was raised by Cicero about why Epicurus seemed to say that time is irrelevant to pleasure. We talked about several of the Principal Doctrines that indicate that an infinite life would hold no greater pleasure than a life of limited duration, which seems to be a part of Epicurus’ argument that reconciles us to being mortals — that we don’t have to be immortal in order to live a complete life, that extra time in life is desirable and provides us variation, but it does not make pleasure any greater than the pleasure that we can experience on any particular day while we’re alive. Cicero tries to take that and say that that makes no sense whatsoever. Epicurus is being absolutely ridiculous to say that you can’t have greater pleasure in a life of 100 years versus a life of one year. And we discussed that at length last week, but we’re going to be continuing with similar types of questions today.
And probably it would help us if we drop back and focus on why pleasure cannot be greater in an infinite life — the word “greater” and the meanings that are attached to that word. One of the discussions we had last week is that Epicurus says in Principal Doctrine 9 that pleasures do differ from each other in intensity, in duration, and in parts of the body that are affected. And so all pleasures are not the same in every respect, but they are the same in the respect that we find pleasure agreeable. And so it is necessary to be precise in your terminology to explain the context you’re talking about. Just because pleasure at a particular moment might be as intense as it could possibly be does not mean necessarily that it is the greatest pleasure that you can experience, because you have the three characteristics of pleasure to consider. And so it’s important therefore to keep your context and determine whether you’re talking about a hypothetical greater or an actual experiencing at a particular moment.
Now in our previous podcast episodes when we went through the DeWitt book, there was a section that I think is particularly useful in thinking about these questions of the nature of pleasure and how to view it. And I would cite to page 232 and his subsection on the unity of pleasure. And there DeWitt goes into this discussion about how Epicurus considered multiple aspects of pleasure. That if you’re looking for a single good — in DeWitt’s terms, a unitary good — you can call it simply pleasure. If you’re looking for a multiple perspective of pleasure, you can consider it to be the health of the mind and the health of the body. And another perspective which is equally valid according to DeWitt in this section is the seemingly negative aspect of considering it to be freedom from fear in the mind and freedom from pain in the body. DeWitt says that it was that aspect, that perspective, that Epicurus was looking at, which Epicurus needed to do for a variety of reasons we’ve discussed in the past, in terms of showing that pleasure is always available to you. If you consider pleasure to be only the stimulative sensations of the body or of the mind and you consider stimulation to be required, then stimulation is not always available and you’re not always going to have pleasure available. But if you consider the definition of pleasure to be wider than just stimulation and also include the normal healthy functioning of the mind or the body, then there are many other types of pleasure that are available to you as long as you’re living.
But in looking at the terminology of freedom from fear in the mind and freedom from pain in the body, that appears to some people to be a negative way of looking at things. And DeWitt says, quote: “This seeming negativism was spotted by the antagonists of Epicurus as a chink in his armor, and the arrows of their dialectic were concentrated upon it. And the weakness alleged” — DeWitt says — “was that of calling two disparate things by the one name of pleasure.” And there’s a lot of information in that section that’s helpful. DeWitt says it’s plain to see how Epicurus was led to switch emphasis and to talk about this aspect of pleasure, and this is where DeWitt explains it, so I’ll go ahead and quote it. “As usual Epicurus was working his way to greater precision in his analysis of the subject, and as will presently be shown in more detail, he discerned that according to Aristippus and Plato no such thing as continuous pleasure was possible. They recognized only peaks of pleasure separated by intervals either devoid of pleasure or neutral or mixed. From this it followed with inevitable logic that the wise man could not be happy at all times” — and I’ll insert there: could not be happy at all times if pleasure in the stimulative sense was what happiness is based on. “DeWitt continues: this conclusion was repugnant to Epicurus as a thoroughgoing hedonist and was repudiated. This repudiation could be made good only by vindicating for freedom from fear and pain the status of a positive pleasure. This in turn resulted in a doctrine of the unity of all pleasure.”
Now before we go further — Brian of EpicureanFriends has pointed out some citations from Diogenes Laertius when he’s talking about the Cyrenaics that I think is important to keep in context here. Diogenes Laertius in Book Two had recorded that those who adhered to the teachings of Aristippus and were known as Cyrenaics held the following opinions: “They laid down that there are two states, pleasure and pain, the former a smooth and the latter a rough motion.” And here’s the important part for this discussion: “And that pleasure does not differ from pleasure nor is one pleasure more pleasant than another. The one state is agreeable and the other repellent to all living things.” Now they go on and they don’t agree that the stable condition of the mind and the body is itself a pleasure. But the important thing for this discussion is that the Cyrenaics — with whom Epicurus does often agree in many respects — held that pleasures don’t differ from each other and that one pleasure is not more pleasant than another. That’s kind of the same thing we’re talking about here with Epicurus: that to be confident in understanding what their meaning is, you’re going to have to understand that they’re talking about pleasure in different contexts.
Because as we’re going to find Cicero arguing later on in our text — and as our friend Don has pointed out in our discussion — to many people eels are more pleasurable to eat than are, for example, sardines or sprats, using Cicero’s choice of fish. So all of us I think would agree that some pleasures are more pleasant than others, and yet the Cyrenaics took the position that that’s not the case and that pleasures don’t differ from each other. So presuming that the Cyrenaics are not just obstinate, stupid people, they must have had a reasoning behind their assertion. And presumably we’re going to find that it’s a terminology issue where words have different meanings.
And I’m throwing in many different things we’ve talked about on the forum this week, but another issue that Brian has brought up that’s relevant to that question of words having different meanings is the covered father paradox, that Epicurus was apparently laughing about in one of the recorded sections of On Nature that we still have. The covered father question being: is it possible to both know and not know someone at the same time? And although I’m not going to do a good job of explaining the paradox with a great deal of force — the issue involved a father who has a blanket over his head, and in certain situations you can take that person who is a father to his son and put him with a blanket over his head in front of the son, and the son will not be able to recognize the father with the blanket over his head. The paradox being that at that moment the son does know his father, but he does not recognize his father because his father is covered with the blanket at that particular moment.
Now if you take that as an argument that, well, knowledge is not possible because this is an example of how hard it is to know things — I think that would be the wrong direction to take. But if you take it in the direction of understanding that the word “know” can have multiple meanings, and meanings can differ according to the circumstances, then I think that’s a useful lesson — that you can at times both know and not know certain aspects of the same subject. So applying that to the question of pleasure here, you can take the position from different perspectives that pleasure does differ from each other at particular times in the sense of being greater or lesser or longer or shorter or the part of the body involved. But you can also take the position that pleasure does not differ from each other in the sense that all pleasure is agreeable. So it’s very important to take the circumstances into account when you’re talking about the words that you’re using.
The one additional thing I would quote in the section from DeWitt would be DeWitt’s observation that shows that this is what’s really going on here. DeWitt says: “There is also a catch to this line of reasoning. The conclusion clashes with the teachings of Aristippus and Plato, and it also violates the accepted use of language. It was not usual to call the possession of health a pleasure, and still less usual to call freedom from pain a pleasure. It was this objection that Cicero had in mind when he wrote: ‘You Epicureans round up people from all the crossroads, decent men I allow, but certainly of no great education. Do such as they then comprehend what Epicurus means while I, Cicero, do not?’ The common people of the ancient world, however, for whom Platonism had nothing attractive, seem to have accepted Epicurean pragmatism with gladness. Cicero, being partial to the aristocratic philosophy and having no zeal to promote the happiness of the multitude, chose to sneer.” And if there’s a word for where we are in Cicero’s text, Cicero is sneering at Epicurus’ arguments. He’s not providing a full explanation and allowing Torquatus to respond. And that’s what we’re here to do on behalf of Torquatus and Epicurus.
Joshua:
It’s something that strikes me as very interesting here, Cassius, in DeWitt’s book under this subsection “The Unity of Pleasure,” is that what he does here — I know this is kind of tangential to your main point regarding Cicero — but what DeWitt does here is gives us a way to thread the needle in dealing with all of these Greek terms and how they relate to each other. And it only occurred to me just now while you were reading it when he says: “It may be observed that the telos has been presented under three aspects. First, as a unitary good, it is pleasure.” So when we say hedonism, we’re talking about pleasure as the good, as the telos. But that’s not the only word that you hear in relation to Epicurean philosophy. You also hear about eudaimonia. Typically, when we’ve been talking about happiness last week and in the weeks before that, we haven’t been using the word eudaimonia, but that’s the word that Epicurus would have used. And when DeWitt says “second, as a dualistic good, it is health of mind and health of body” — I don’t know if I would call that an exact translation of eudaimonia, but it gets us part of the way there. And then he says “third, in a seemingly negative aspect: it is freedom from fear in the mind and pain in the body” — and here we have ataraxia and aponia, absence of pain. But DeWitt’s main point, of course, in all of this is that all of these terms and the states or conditions that they refer to or relate to are subsumed into pleasure in Epicurean philosophy, into the unity of pleasure.
It occurs to me that that could be a helpful way to talk about some of this stuff, because we haven’t been very good going through Cicero here on going back to the Greek words. When he’s talking about the blessedness of the gods or whatever — that’s the Greek word makarios, blessedness. When he’s talking about happiness we’re talking about in Greek eudaimonia. Like I said, it just occurred to me now to put it in these terms here by reading through DeWitt. But it occurs to me that that’s one helpful way to get a handhold on some of this material.
Cassius:
It doesn’t help us with the covered father situation, though. Before you go further — yeah, I don’t think what you’ve just said is a tangent by any means. And before we go on to the specifics of the covered father, an additional part of Diogenes Laertius’ Book Two that Brian cited for us relates to this issue of happiness as well, that you’ve just been talking about. Because that section — 86 through 90 of Book Two — Diogenes Laertius says: “They, meaning the Cyrenaics, also hold there is a difference between end and happiness. Our end is particular pleasure, whereas happiness is the sum total of all particular pleasures, in which are included both past and future pleasures.” So I think that’s another example of when we’re looking at the telos — happiness — fitting all of these words together: there’s no necessary conflict between or contradiction between the different perspectives. If you appreciate the direction you’re coming from, then all of these positions are true and they don’t contradict each other. But they fit together and explain how things can appear different depending on your perspective.
Joshua:
Yeah, there’s no conflict, as you say, between these positions — at least if you understand it as DeWitt understands it. The problem is we don’t always have DeWitt in the forefront of our minds when people ask us the question “how does that relate to ataraxia?” and we’re left standing there without a very good answer.
Cassius:
One of the things that’s very, very helpful about having DeWitt’s book is that he covers just about everything in the philosophy and so is a great resource to refer back to to settle some of these questions.
Yes, Joshua. And so citing DeWitt, we’re not going to go into the full section here on the unity of pleasure, but DeWitt takes us after that part we’ve been talking about directly back into the discussion of Principal Doctrine 9, that we discussed last week. “If every pleasure were alike condensed in duration and associated with the whole organism or the dominant parts of it, pleasures would never differ from one another.” And then DeWitt says: “Positively stated the meaning would be that pleasure is always pleasure. It is of no consequence that some pleasures are associated with the mind, others with the stomach, and others with other parts, or that some affect the whole organism and others only a part, or that some are brief and intense while others moderate and extended. In other words, it makes no difference that some pleasures are static and others kinetic. Pleasure is a unit. This unity could be expressed in ancient terminology by saying that all pleasure was a kind of motion, kinesis or motio, the ancient equivalent of reaction.”
So again, we have the same situation. Obviously the pleasures of the hand differ from the pleasures of the mind, and some pleasures are longer than others, and some pleasures are more intense than others. But at the very same time all pleasures are alike in that they are pleasing. So you have to be sure you don’t get confused and think that the differences prevent there being some common ground between pleasures. And at the same time you have to make sure that the emphasis on a common ground of pleasure does not trip you up into thinking that all pleasures are exactly the same. Everyone knows from their common experience that all pleasures are not exactly the same. Everyone knows from their common experience that a pleasure that lasts five seconds is going to most of the time be more desirable than a pleasure that lasts one second. But at the same time that those things are true, Epicurus can also take the position that no greater pleasure is experienced over a thousand years than would be experienceable in a hundred years or one year. The word “greater” has different meanings, just as all these other words we’re discussing have different meanings.
Okay, that provides us some background from where we were last week, and so where we are today is in the upper half of page 67 of the Rackham edition. And I think the part that we’ve not read so far is where Cicero says: “Oh, but our philosopher is subject to pain as well. Yes, but he sets it at naught, for he says that if he were being roasted he would call out ‘how sweet this is.’ In what respect then is he inferior to a god, if not in respect to eternity? And what good does eternity bring but the highest form of pleasure, and that prolonged forever? What boots it then to use high-sounding language unless your language be consistent? On bodily pleasure — I’ll add mental, if you like, on the understanding that it also springs as you believe from the body — depends the life of happiness. Well, who can guarantee the wise man that this pleasure will be permanent? For the circumstances that give rise to pleasures are not within the control of wise men. Since your happiness is not dependent on wisdom herself but on the objects which wisdom procures with a view to pleasure, now all such objects are external to us, and what is external is in the power of chance. Thus fortune becomes lady paramount over happiness, though Epicurus says she to a small extent only crosses the path of the wise man.”
Now, as usual, there are several things being said in this paragraph that will probably take us all the rest of this episode to discuss for today. But first of all, let’s go ahead and use the perspectives we’ve been discussing to deal with the issue of: is the wise man happy under torture? Because the first thing Cicero says in that sequence we just read is that if the wise man is being roasted he would call out “how sweet this is.” Is that what the wise man would do when he’s roasted or tortured — call out “how sweet it is”?
Joshua:
Well, again, Cassius, to take this back to DeWitt, because he dealt with this question as well — and it relates directly to this issue of the continuity of pleasure — DeWitt says this. This is on page 242. He says: “Those who denied that pleasure was the telos were naturally not concerned with the question of the continuity of pleasure. But there was an analogous question of equal consequence: whether the wise man could be happy under all circumstances. The importance of this revealed itself shortly after Plato’s demise and showed no abatement for three centuries. In two passages Cicero lists the names of those who gave an affirmative answer, from which the name of Plato is conspicuously absent. And elsewhere he pretends to cite the opinion of Epicurus, misrepresenting him shamelessly and using his name as an excuse for parading a tedious collection of his own translations from Greek tragedy on the topic of pain. What Epicurus is on record as saying is this: ‘Even if under torture the wise man is happy.’ Cicero chose to imagine him in the brazen bull of the tyrant Phalaris, in which the victims were roasted alive, and as saying ‘how pleasant, how little this torture means to me.’ This is a shabby invention and shameless quibbling. It ignores the difference between suavis, which is pleasant, and beatus, which is happy.” And DeWitt finishes that by saying: “Even Epicurus himself could not have used pleasure as an invariable synonym for happiness. He died a happy man but in physical agony.”
So the first thing to say about Cicero here is that he’s actually totally misrepresenting what Epicurus said. He didn’t say that it would be sweet to be roasted alive, he didn’t say that it would be pleasant to be roasted alive. But the question of whether — and again we have this difficulty of the phrase “the wise man” — there’s that section in Diogenes Laertius about all of the things that the wise man will do and won’t do, how he’ll behave under these circumstances but not under these circumstances. And there’s a legitimate question as to how much that should be considered to apply to normal people — people like us, Cassius and Callistheni and Martin. But whichever way you slice that question, to say that it would be sweet to be tortured is obviously very different from saying continuous pleasure is possible even when you’re being tortured. And credit where credit is due — there has been such a long history of Christian martyrdom of people who face death gladly and willingly in horrific pain, and to all appearances were still happy. So it’s not necessarily a question of whether it’s possible. I’m not saying it would be easy. But we should deal with the question as Epicurus expressed it and not as Cicero is misrepresenting it.
Cassius:
Okay, let’s stay with this for a few minutes because I think people can have a real problem with this example, and they have to think through the Epicurean answer clearly before they can understand it. And before I launch back into that, I’ll say that I think this possibly relates to this comment we talked about earlier from the Cyrenaics that Diogenes Laertius recorded, where they said: “Our end is particular pleasure, whereas happiness is the sum total of all particular pleasures in which are included both past and future pleasures.”
Now, that’s where I think you have to go in order to understand what’s going on when you’re being roasted or otherwise tortured at any particular point. Kinetic pleasure is not the focus of your experience when you’re being roasted. Kinetic pain is going to be a very large part of your experience of that particular moment. And so you can’t consider yourself to be experiencing kinetic pleasure when you’re being roasted or you’re being torn on the rack. However, you can look to your mental experiences at the same time and you can see that there are pleasures involved in good memories. Now people are going to say this is so impractical when you’re being tortured, when you’re being roasted alive — there’s no way you’re going to be able to think happy thoughts at that particular moment. And there’s no doubt that that is a concern. It’s the same concern that Epicurus was facing, essentially, in his last days when he’s under excruciating pain from his kidney disease.
The goal — whether you can achieve it or not — it’s still valid to think about the goal and the way the wise person is going to approach this situation. And I would say that we’re not talking about superhuman people in any of this. Epicurus was not superhuman, we’re not superhuman. But we’re talking about the goal to make the best of any particular situation. And this is where it becomes important how intense pain is going to be brief. Pain generally, even when it’s fairly large, is going to extend out over a period of time, and over a period of time it’s manageable by offsetting other pleasures against the pains that you’re experiencing. The point of happiness then is that happiness is the sum total of your experiences, of your particular pleasures and particular pains. Epicurus was successful in his last days offsetting the pleasures of his mind against the pains of his body. Diogenes Laertius records that the wise man is going to cry out in pain when he is on the rack — Epicurus does not take the forced Stoic position that the mind is capable of erasing pain. But this is the way to look at the availability of pleasure even under difficult situations. And the only way to do that is to keep in mind the wider definition of pleasure as including not just kinetic experience but also the normal healthy functioning of the mind and the body. You can be a happy person even though you go through troubles in your life. You can be a happy person even though you’re experiencing pain at particular times, if happiness is viewed as the sum of your experiences in which pleasures predominate over pains.
You know, Cicero himself had mentioned a previous case in the life of his paragon of virtue and wisdom, Marcus Regulus — who was tortured by the Carthaginians — and Cicero writes this: “I have hardly the courage to say who it is that I prefer to your man of pleasure. Virtue herself shall speak for me, and shall without hesitation prefer to your man of happiness her Marcus Regulus. And virtue proclaims that when he had returned from his own country to Carthage, of his own choice and under no compulsion but that of his honor which he had pledged to the enemy, he was happier in the very hour at which he was tortured by want of sleep and hunger than Thorius when drinking on his bed of roses. He had conducted important wars, had been twice elected consul, had enjoyed a triumph, though he did not regard his previous exploits as so important or so splendid as his last sacrifice, which he had taken upon him from motives of honor and consistency — a sacrifice that seems pitiable to us when we hear of it but was pleasurable to him while he endured it. In truth, happy men are not always in a state of cheerfulness or boisterousness or mirth or jesting, which things accompany light characters, but oftentimes even in stern mood.”
And I sternly condemn Cicero for his hypocrisy in having used that example himself earlier, and then denying an example like that to Torquatus and the Epicureans. Torquatus had said basically the same things about his own ancestors. Was it really a joyful, la-la moment in his life for the elder Torquatus to execute his son for violating the military orders? Well, no, it wasn’t. And yet you could still say that Torquatus was happy. This is a point that’s really not that difficult, and Cicero himself has made it himself. And yet he acts as if Epicurus is an idiot by saying something similar. It’s really irritating to see Cicero go back and forth using things that he knows better than to say.
Joshua:
Yeah, you mentioned in a previous episode, Cassius, that there’s this essay from the early decades of the 20th century by an academic named Mary Porter Packer, and that Norman DeWitt — who we’ve been quoting a lot today — in his review of that article said it was generally good but that Mary Porter Packer had acquitted Cicero of the charge of deliberately misrepresenting Epicureanism. This is not the first example of that that we have found.
Cassius:
That’s right. I can’t remember the exact wording from DeWitt, but his comment that I thought was a good quip was that Cicero could not have been nearly as effective in misrepresenting Epicurean philosophy if he had not understood it so well himself. You can’t read this neutrally and come to the conclusion that Cicero is just innocently not understanding Epicurean philosophy. He’s attacking based on his deep understanding of what Epicurus did in fact say.
Now the one additional new point we have time to raise in today’s episode is the last part of what we’ve read here in Section 27, because the last thing Cicero says in this paragraph is that the circumstances that give rise to pleasures are not within the control of the wise man. “Now all such objects that you require for happiness are external to us, and what is external is in the power of chance. Thus fortune becomes lady paramount over happiness, though Epicurus says she to only a small extent crosses the path of a wise man.” And that is going to be — and may still be — the title I give to this week’s episode: does luck control whether an Epicurean is happy or not? Is the happiness of an Epicurean subject to fortune?
So let’s deal with this issue: are only the lucky happy? Is luck lady paramount — to paraphrase yes indeed Frank Sinatra from that song that’s now stuck in my head. So because we just came off this issue of Cicero deliberately misrepresenting Epicurean philosophy or evading key fundamental aspects of it in making his criticisms, he says here when he starts off this section: “On bodily pleasure — I will add mental if you like, on the understanding that it also springs as you believe from the body — depends the life of happiness.” If you take out the parenthetical, what he’s saying is “on bodily pleasure depends the life of happiness,” and then he goes on to say that bodily pleasure is subject to chance.
Well, Epicurus’ whole advice on this question deals at least predominantly with mental pleasure, which of course as he says is rooted in the body in Epicurean philosophy. But it’s the mind that allows us to revisit the memories of past pleasures, and it’s the mind that allows us to anticipate future pleasures, it’s the mind that we rely on to diminish our fear of death and of the gods and so forth. So to just tack the mental dimension on there at the end like it’s totally insignificant, and that bodily pleasure is the sum total of what Epicurus was talking about, is again totally misrepresenting the philosophy. And the next sentence: “Well, who can guarantee the wise man that this pleasure will be permanent?” Well, when the pleasure of remembering the past and anticipating the future — thinking of your friends — when that pleasure is in control of the mind, it’s clearly not subject to chance. So this is again Cicero taking every advantage he can get, even if he has to twist it just a little bit in order to make it fit.
But Epicurus I think is quite clear on this in his will, which I think Cicero is going to quote fully here later in the text. This question of mental pleasure, as he’s writing this letter — his Last Will and Testament — is so central to how he responds to the problem of the pain that he’s experiencing and the knowledge that he’s going to very shortly die.
Yes, that’s clearly one of the major ways Epicurus is looking at this question. DeWitt talks about control of experience — what you’re attempting to do in your life as an Epicurean is to use your study of nature, use your study of science, to arrange your affairs in ways that are most likely to lead you to pleasure as opposed to pain. And so when Epicurus talks about the fact that the wise man is only going to infrequently be subject to fortune or to things beyond his control, it’s because the wise man has acted as best he can to prevent things from happening that can be avoided. Obviously if you don’t act to prevent accidents and other bad things from happening, then it’s more likely that they’re going to happen. And that’s a direction I think we can also take this passage.
Before we move on to something else, we’re also talking to some extent here about the fact that the word “fortune” can have different meanings. We’re not simply talking about necessity versus free will issues, although that’s probably to some extent relevant here too. You are not bound by fate in an Epicurean universe and you have the ability to affect your future pleasures and pains. And so within the abilities that you have, you can act to maximize your pleasure and minimize your pains.
I believe, Joshua, you’ve brought this up more than I have in the past, but sometimes when these guys are talking about fortune they’re not really talking about the necessity-fate issue. They’re talking more about the Frank Sinatra song “Luck Be a Lady for Me” — there are people who think that there is a force of fortune out there in the world. And this phrasing here from Cicero evokes that kind of perspective: “fortune becomes lady paramount over happiness,” as if there is a goddess of fortune who is dispensing her favors in a capricious way. Then you need to satisfy the goddess of fortune so she’ll send fortune your way. That’s potentially a perspective that Cicero is evoking here, which of course is something that Epicurus would just totally reject. That fortune, as stated in the Letter to Menoikeus, is something that does not exist any more than does fate.
Joshua:
Yeah, there’s a scene from Romeo and Juliet shortly after Mercutio is killed by Tybalt — Tybalt is one of the Capulets, Mercutio is a friend of Romeo’s. Romeo avenges Mercutio’s death by stabbing Tybalt, and then cries aloud: “Oh, I am fortune’s fool!” Fortune’s fool. Romeo, you just stabbed a guy — that has nothing to do with fortune. You made a choice in that moment. Talking about fortune in these terms allows us to escape culpability, responsibility that we might otherwise have. And to view things as totally in the lap of the gods is as contrary to Epicurean philosophy as to view things as totally hitched to the star of necessity.
Cassius:
Right. And Epicurus is just going to reject both of those possibilities because of his understanding of the nature of the universe. And the confidence you get in rejecting those things comes from your understanding of the nature of the universe.
Now I can also think of one other related objection that some people have to what we’re talking about here, and I think there’s also some relationship with Aristotle going on as well, in terms of the issue of what external goods you need in order to be happy. It’s my understanding that Aristotle is thought to have taken the position that it’s necessary for you to have certain external goods before you can live happily. But from a more practical way of looking at it, I know some people tend to think that Epicurean philosophy is a philosophy for rich people — that if you’re an Atticus, or you’re a father-in-law of Julius Caesar like Piso, you can be Epicurean because you’ve got all the material blessings that you need, and it’s therefore very easy for you to spend all your time pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. But that the less well-off person or even the poor person — this is a terrible philosophy for them because happiness is beyond their reach, pleasure is beyond their reach because they don’t have enough money and they don’t have enough physical possessions to attain happiness.
And I don’t think Epicurus would take that position at all. It seems like Epicurean philosophy was appealing according to Cicero to the middle classes of the Roman era as much or more than to the higher classes. And I think if you look at Epicurean philosophy at the root of this full definition of pleasure that Epicurus is focusing on, you don’t have to be rich in order to be a happy person. Joshua, do you have to be rich to be a happy person?
Joshua:
No, certainly. I’m not rich, and I like to think that I am happy.
Cassius:
Same here. But that’s a concern some people have, so I think we could address that for a few moments by emphasizing that the Epicurean approach doesn’t require a lot of money in order to constantly be surrounded by these stimulating physical pleasures. And the obvious continuation of that sentence is: because pleasure includes more than these costly, stimulative pleasures. You don’t have to have a continuous banquet of caviar and expensive food and fish in order to dine happily. If there is anything that modern Epicureans like to talk about, it’s that simple fare can provide pleasure just as well as expensive fare can. We can give example after example — regular blankets can provide just as much heat for you to sleep under at night as can some expensively woven, colored, jeweled blanket. You don’t have to have riches in order to obtain pleasure in Epicurean philosophy, because it is relatively easy to obtain pleasure if you think about pleasure in the wide definition that Epicurus espouses.
Certainly there’s a minimum of existence that’s involved — just like a minimum of air and water and food to sustain yourself, you have to have a minimum. But this minimum that you’re talking about is not that difficult to get in most circumstances. Now, sometimes it’s absolutely impossible — you’re in the middle of a war, you’re in the middle of a famine, you’re in the middle of some natural disaster. At those times even the minimum is not available. And Epicurus is not a magician. He can’t wave a magic wand and say “think about being happy” and that will give you the food or the water or the air or the shelter that you need to survive. Sometimes survival is not possible — Epicurus is not a magician. But in most cases survival is possible.
For some reason I think of the Jefferson head-and-heart letter where Jefferson uses the phrase “the greater part of life is sunshine.” You don’t have to take the position that you look at everything through rose-colored glasses and everyone has all the resources that they would like to have. But in most cases for most of us our survival is really not in jeopardy, our choices from day to day and moment to moment do not generally involve us staying alive through adversity. We’ve got circumstances largely under control and happiness is possible in the great majority of those situations.
Joshua:
Yeah, there’s a quote by Henry David Thoreau — he says that “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone” — which is perhaps a bit vague in its own terms. But when you consider Epicurus’ advice when it comes to desire, and specifically how he categorizes desires, you have desires that are natural and necessary to be fulfilled, desires that are natural but unnecessary to be fulfilled — they can enrich your life but you can live without them, you can even be happy without them — and then there are vain desires, desires that are unnatural and unnecessary, and spending your life hoping for these things is actually more corrosive to your happiness than if you just let them be and focused on the blessings you already have.
Cassius:
We could certainly go on and on talking about this aspect of Epicurean philosophy because it seems to be the one aspect of Epicurean philosophy that just about everybody agrees on — in terms of Epicurus’ emphasis on pleasure and happiness being relatively available to most people most of the time. And Principal Doctrine 3, which talks about the pain that does come our way, reinforces that by emphasizing that pain that comes our way is generally going to be short if it’s intense, or manageable if it’s long. And if the pain that comes our way is so unmanageable and so intense that we can’t stand it, then we do at some point die, and that’s always an alternative if you want to think about hypotheticals in which you’re led to an extreme and you have to take extreme positions and take extreme action. Unendurable pain is not something that has the ability to keep you in its grasp forever.
Cicero uses some examples we’re going to be seeing as we go further here about how pain can be very intense and last a long time, as Cicero saw some of his friends going through very serious physical ailments. But my eyes catch back on the quote that Joshua pulled earlier from this section, where Cicero says “well, who can guarantee the wise man that this pleasure will be permanent?” Well, nobody can guarantee anybody that life is permanent. Life is not permanent. But while you’re alive you have the ability — as Torquatus said earlier — the wise man is always going to have more reason for joy than for vexation, if he has a proper understanding of philosophy and the world around him and his own circumstances. While we may be going slowly through this section, it’s raising a lot of important issues and giving us some context to evaluate these issues, which I think is always helpful for us to do.
Okay, well, as we begin to come to the close of today’s episode, let’s talk about closing thoughts on what we’ve discussed today. Martin, anything for today?
Martin:
(No comment today.)
Cassius:
Thank you, Martin. Callistheni?
Callistheni:
I do wonder if Epicurus presented some kind of idea that there are goods, because I think Aristotle says something about goods — goods that lead to happiness. And I have also one more thing: when circumstances are under control, this is something that leads to a sense of well-being or happiness. What percentage of the population feels like their circumstances are under control?
Cassius:
One thing I would say in response to that, Callistheni, is that I think the first question is going to be another example of the main theme of our podcast today — that words can have different meanings in different contexts. Certainly the word “good” is going to be subject to the same qualifications. You can consider a good to be something that is desirable in and of itself, in which case Epicurus would say the only thing desirable in and of itself is pleasure. On the other hand, there are things that are tools to obtaining pleasure which are desirable to have for the sake of obtaining pleasure. So some of the things that you’re talking about in comparing them to what Aristotle is saying may be things that Epicurus would consider to be good as tools for obtaining pleasure, but not things that are good in themselves as Aristotle might have thought of them. We can address that over time because those are interesting questions that are certainly beyond the scope of my reading of Aristotle to be able to talk about, but certainly would be helpful if people can bring to our attention particular quotes that talk about things like that.
Joshua:
Callistheni, regarding your first question, the way that philosophers talk about this issue of things that we pursue in service of the good — we call those instrumental goods, like Cassius says, they’re tools to get us to the goal — and we distinguish instrumental goods from intrinsic goods. Epicurus never puts it in these terms, but actually Diogenes of Oinoanda kind of does deal with this question in Fragment 32. He says: “I shall discuss folly shortly and virtues and pleasure now. If, gentlemen, the point at issue between these people and us involves inquiry into what is the means of happiness and they wanted to say the virtues — which would actually be true — it would be unnecessary to take any other step than to agree with them about this without more ado. But since, as I say, the issue is not what is the means of happiness but what is happiness and what is the ultimate goal of our nature, I say both now and always, shouting out loudly to all Greeks and non-Greeks, that pleasure is the end of the best mode of life, while the virtues, which are inopportunely messed about by these people, being transferred from the place of the means to that of the end, are in no way an end but the means to the end.”
So he’s only talking about virtue there, but it does give us a very good understanding of where this conversation might have gone in the ancient world — that virtue is not the good, but virtue is instrumentally good in that it is useful in service of the pursuit of the intrinsic good. And the intrinsic good is pleasure. I don’t know if that’s helpful, but again, that’s Fragment 32 from the inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda.
Cassius:
Joshua, any comment on Callistheni’s second question about how many people in the world today think they have their circumstances under control?
Joshua:
That question’s a little more difficult, I think. I wouldn’t really know how to grapple with it.
Cassius:
Yeah, nobody can really know. It’s relevant for why people approach philosophy — if some people are coming to philosophy for the sake of finding answers that help them in life, and a kind of therapy to improve their life. Yeah, because if the answer is “no one is happy,” that’s a real problem not just for philosophy but for mankind. And of course Epicurus is taking the position that even in the worst situations of life when you’re under a lot of stress and a lot of pain, you can still be happy. Now that doesn’t mean you’re not going to try to control the pain in any way that you can — Epicurus had different types of medications available to him for his kidney disease, he would certainly have been taking them to minimize the pain. But the ultimate position of Epicurean philosophy is that you can be a happy person even though pain is present, because there are ways to find pleasures in virtually every situation that can outweigh the pains that come your way.
Okay, Joshua, closing thoughts for today?
Joshua:
Cassius, you mentioned a little bit ago that we’re going through this material very, very slowly. And I do feel that. But it’s like you’ve been saying — Cicero raises so many interesting, not always well-founded but often interesting objections. And these are objections that if we want to defend Epicurus, then we have to grapple with these problems. So we’re taking our time going through this. And it’s been, I think, rather rewarding for the most part — sometimes quite difficult, but rewarding. And I would just finish that by saying that we’ve been getting good comments from Brian and Don and others on the forum. I’m not mentioning everybody, but it’s really helpful to have those comments and questions and problems to work through while we’re working through this. So if you have anything to add, please go to the forum and post your comments there.
Cassius:
Yeah, exactly, Joshua. I’m finding this material to be extremely interesting. And yes, we do have to go through and put it in a modern context so that people who don’t understand who Piso Frugi or the different people that Cicero is naming are. But it’s really not that hard to do because it seems to me that most of these questions — and maybe even all of them — are the same things that we’re going to deal with today in our own understanding of Epicurean philosophy versus the competing possibilities. All we have to do is look back and see that life, apparently in 50 BC in Rome, was not all that different than life today, in that many of the intellectual and physical challenges were very similar to what we face now. And going through this material and seeing the way Epicurean philosophy is attacked is a really good way to deepen our understanding of the direction that Epicurus is coming from. Okay, we’ll come back next week and continue at the top of Section 28 of Book Two of On Ends. And so in the meantime, drop by the forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about anything we’ve discussed here or anything else related to Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back next week. See you then.