Episode 218 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 25 - Can The Epicurean Not Distinguish Between Greater and Lesser Pleasures and Pains?
Date: 03/15/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3742-episode-218-cicero-s-on-ends-book-two-part-25-can-the-epicurean-not-distinguish/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Continuing in Section 28. Cicero presses two attacks: (1) Epicurus is inconsistent in claiming that cheap food brings as much pleasure as a lavish banquet — people obviously distinguish tastes; (2) the formula that intense pain is short and prolonged pain is light is naive, citing his friend Gnaeus Octavius who wasted away for months in agony.
Panel responses: Joshua (speaking from the Henry Ford Museum, with a detour through a Henry Ford–George Washington Carver “weed sandwich”) distinguishes Epicurus’s actual claim — a simple meal satisfies when it meets genuine hunger — from Cicero’s caricature. Don’s commentary on the Letter to Menoeceus clarifies that maza (barley cake) was everyday Greek food, not prison rations. DeWitt’s subsection “Continuous Pain Impossible” shows this doctrine is a logical corollary of the unity of pleasure, not naive optimism. Cassius reads Torquatus’s Book One Section 15 — the complete Epicurean picture: intense pain is short, moderate pain is manageable, and unendurable pain permits exit from the theater of life. Discussion of Vatican Saying 33 (bread, water, and rivaling Zeus in happiness) versus the cheese-and-sumptuous-dining letter fragment. The death of Titus Pomponius Atticus (March 31, 32 BC — starving himself to death at 77 when his illness became unendurable) is offered as a concrete historical example of the Epicurean approach to end-of-life decision-making.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 218 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics.
This week we’re continuing in Book Two of Cicero’s On Ends and we’re in Section 28. The book is largely devoted to Cicero’s attacks on Epicurean philosophy, and this week we’re continuing the discussion we’ve had over the last several weeks in which Cicero is trying to go through Epicurus’s approach to pleasure and point out things that Cicero thinks are contradictions or discrepancies. Last week we focused mostly on this issue of whether pleasures can be made better by additional time. Epicurus said that infinite time does not contain greater pleasure than limited time does. Cicero is going to expand on that this week. And as Joshua mentioned in the last episode, we did discuss many of the same issues we’re going to be touching on today, but it’s really so important that it deserves the scrutiny.
Cassius: So let me introduce what Cicero says in Section 28 and go through it. In the Rackham edition, at the bottom of page 67, Cicero’s talking to Torquatus and he says:
Come, you’ll say to me, these are small matters. The wise man is enriched by nature herself, whose wealth, as Epicurus has taught us, is easily procured. His statements are good, and I don’t attack them, but they’re inconsistent with each other. He declares that no less pleasure is derived from the poorest sustenance, or rather from the most despicable kinds of food and drink, than from the most rare dishes of the banquet. If he declared that it made no difference to happiness what kind of food he lived on, I should yield him the point and even applaud him, for he’d be asserting the strict truth. And I listen when Socrates, who holds pleasure in no esteem, affirms that hunger is the proper seasoning for food and thirst for drink. But to one who judges everything by pleasure, lives like Gallonius, but talks like old Piso Frugi, I do not listen, nor do I believe that he says what he thinks. He announced that nature’s wealth is easily procurable because nature is satisfied with little. The pleasure he says it has obtained from the cheapest things is not inferior to that which it has got from the most costly. To say this is to be destitute not merely of intelligence, but even of a palate. Truly those who disregard pleasure itself are free to say that they do not prefer a sturgeon to a sprat. But he who places his supreme good in pleasure must judge of everything by sense and not by reason and must say that those things are best which are most tasty. But let that pass. Let us suppose he acquires the most intense pleasures not merely at small cost but at no cost at all so far as I’m concerned. Let the pleasure given by the cress which the Persians used to eat as Xenophon writes be no less than that afforded by the banquets of Syracuse which are severely blamed by Plato. Let the acquisition of pleasure be as easy, I say, as you make it out to be. Still, what are we to say about pain? Its agonies are so great that a life surrounded by them cannot be happy if only pain is the greatest of evils. Metrodorus himself, who is almost a second Epicurus, sketches happiness almost in these words: a well-regulated condition of body, accompanied by the assurance that it will continue so. Can anyone possibly be assured as to the state of this body of his? I don’t say in a year’s time, but by the time evening comes. Pain then, that is to say, the greatest of evils, will always be the object of dread, even though it be not present, for it may present itself at any moment. How then can the dread of the greatest possible evil consort with the life of happiness? Someone tells me Epicurus imparts to us a scheme that will enable us to pay no heed to pain. To begin with, the thing is in itself ridiculous that no attention should be given to the greatest of evils. But pray, what’s this scheme? The greatest pain, he says, is short. First, what do you mean by short? Next, what by the greatest pain? May the greatest pain not continue for some days? Look to it that it may not continue for some months, even, unless possibly you refer to the kind of pain which is fatal as soon as it seizes anyone. Who dreads such a pain as that? I wish rather you would alleviate that other sort, under which I saw that most excellent and most cultivated gentleman, my friend Gnaeus Octavius, son of Marcus, wasting away, and not on one occasion only, or for a short time, but often and over quite a long period. What tortures did he endure, ye eternal gods, when all his limbs seemed on fire? Yet for all that we did not regard him as wretched, but only as distressed, for pain was not to him the greatest of evils. But he would have been wretched if he had been immersed in pleasures while his life was scandalous and wicked.
Cassius: Okay, so that’s Section 28, and it sets up for us this discussion again about being able to distinguish between greater and lesser pleasures and greater and lesser pains. Cicero cites examples of types of food which some people will say are clearly more tasty than others. He’s talked about pains clearly worse than others, and he’s saying, Epicurus, why are you trying to tell me that all pleasures are the same? That all pains are the same, and that you can deal with pains because the worst pains are short and other pains are manageable over time? That doesn’t even make any sense because that’s not our experience in the world, Cicero is saying.
So let’s first deal with the question: did Epicurus, in fact, as Cicero says near the beginning of Section 28, declare that no less pleasure is derived from the poorest sustenance, or rather from the most despicable kinds of food and drink, than from the rarest and finest dishes of the banquet? Did he, in fact, say that? Because we have on the forum one of our closest friends, Don, who has written clearly that he prefers eels to other types of fish. Now is Don being an improper and insufficient Epicurean by saying that eels appeal to him more than, for example, shrimp or sardines might? What justification can an Epicurean have in saying that he prefers one type of fish to another when Epicurus has said that the meanest fish allegedly produce as much pleasure as the fanciest fish? The question remains: did Epicurus really say that?
Joshua: I have in front of me, Cassius — I’m at the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation — a black and white photograph with Henry Ford on the right and George Washington Carver on the left. The description says that George Washington Carver and Henry Ford shared not only an interest in using agricultural products in industry, but also some quirky ideas about diet. Here they share a sandwich of “weed spread,” made with wild bergamot, narrow-leaf plantain, purslane, pigweed, milkweed, dandelion, lambsquarters, and wild radish. They shared this meal at Ford Motor Company’s George Washington Carver Nutrition Lab during Carver’s 1942 mid-war Dearborn visit.
So making a sandwich out of weeds is not to my appetite, and I think it’s absolutely correct to say that people have the ability to distinguish between things that give them more pleasure in terms of their taste and things that give them less pleasure. I think when we’re talking about Cicero — I mention this by the way because Cicero mentions eating cress — cress is a plant of the cabbage family, but it doesn’t look anything like cabbage. It’s got a long stem and small white flowers and pungent leaves. Some kinds are edible and are eaten raw as salad — that’s garden cress. There’s watercress and broadleaf cress. People are essentially eating weeds. Some of it’s probably quite tasty — my dad grows microgreens, which are quite tasty — but I think Henry Ford and George Washington Carver are going a little too far.
The question is, given that we’re endowed with senses — one of which is the sense of taste — the sense of taste allows us not only to determine what things are healthful and what things are foul, it also allows a gradation of what is pleasant or wholesome, and a gradation of what is foul or disgusting. And we register this as pleasure, so clearly it’s possible to favor one type of food over another, and it’s possible to prefer to your taste the richest viands over the most plain and simple garden weeds. The question then is, how do we connect that back with Epicurus’s broader conversation about not just pleasure, but about self-sufficiency?
Cassius: And if you look to the Letter to Menoikeus, it’s in that context that we have part of that conversation.
Joshua: So you mentioned Don, so I’m on Don’s translation and commentary to the Letter to Menoikeus, on page 15. Don translates around Section 131: A simple meal of hearty wholesome bread and spring water delivers the most extreme pleasure whenever food and drink have been brought to bear against hunger and thirst, and when extravagant experiences do come up every once in a while, they are experienced more intensely by us, and we are better able to fearlessly face the vicissitudes of fortune. And it’s immediately after that that he says this almost more controversial sentence: Therefore, whenever we say repeatedly that pleasure is the goal or telos, we do not mean the pleasure of those who are prodigal and those stuck in delighting in pleasures arising from circumstances outside of ourselves, like those who are ignorant, those who don’t agree with us, or those who believe wrongly.
We’ve dealt with that second part before, but the first part — when he says a simple meal of hearty, wholesome bread and spring water delivers the most extreme pleasure when food and drink have been brought to bear against hunger and thirst — there is a precondition here. And if you’ve been on a long hike in the mountains and you get to drink some water, suddenly that water is the best water you’ve ever tasted. So I think there is some truth to this. But to say that water is tastier than wine in general is something I’m going to probably disagree with.
Cassius: Yes, and Joshua, the last thing you said there reminds me of a rule I try to apply: if it appears that Epicurus is saying something that seems to defy common sense, then that comes into conflict with our presumption that we’re studying Epicurus because he’s a smart guy who does have common sense. If he appears to be saying something that seems contradictory to us, there’s something else going on that explains what he’s saying. Because Epicurus, if you take the position that he’s a philosopher worth reading and studying and following, is not going to say something that conflicts with common experience in such a way as to make himself look ridiculous. He’s got some kind of perspective on it that he’s inviting us to look to and understand, while at the same time not overturning the obvious pronouncements of the senses, which are the foundation on which he’s erected his whole philosophy.
So again, we started off by looking at the way Cicero describes this here, and Cicero’s sentence was: he declares that no less pleasure is derived from the poorest sustenance, or rather from the most despicable kinds of food and drink, than from the most rare dishes of the banquet. Somehow you have to reconcile that Epicurus has the same sense of taste that most everyone else has, and he can distinguish between a shrimp and an eel, just like Don can, and that he can prefer the one to the other, just like Don can. And yet Cicero’s trying to say that no less pleasure is derived from either one of those two in general. There’s got to be a problem with the way Cicero is failing to put it into the context of what Epicurus is saying. Because Cicero sees a context in which you could say that it makes no difference to happiness what kind of food you eat if happiness is something besides pleasure. What Cicero is saying is that if happiness is defined to be related to pleasure, then you’ve got to relate it to taste. Now is taste the only pleasure that is at work in Epicurean philosophy? Clearly no.
Joshua: Well, he’s using a classic legal-lawyer approach of taking things out of context and making them look ridiculous when isolated from the circumstances in which they make a lot of sense. That’s a very effective technique, but it’s something we have to get used to seeing. We run into the same type of issues today when people take Epicurean philosophy and turn it into an ascetic viewpoint of life that would make a medieval monk blush. Just like there’s controversy over the translation of — I think it’s Vatican Saying 73 — but the general way it is translated is that to err on the side of frugality can be just as damaging as to err on the side of luxury. The point is not to live a frugal life. The point is not to live a luxurious life. The point is to live a pleasurable life.
Cassius: And in the context of the definition of pleasure which Epicurus gives — which is not just simply the stimulation that Cicero focuses on, but is also a healthy, confident, non-stimulated type of appreciation of existence — there are all sorts of types of pleasures that sum up to a total life of happiness. That’s the context in which Epicurus is always talking. He’s never talking only about pursuing stimulative issues of continuous banquets and fish and so forth. He’s telling you that’s the wrong way to go, but he’s also not saying that you simply throw out all pleasure and go towards asceticism, because he’s got a definition of pleasure that allows you to pursue both as the circumstances allow.
That ought to be clear when you start the analysis the way he does around line 129 of the Letter to Menoikeus, when he says: We call pleasure the beginning and the end of the blessed life. We recognize pleasure as the first good innate within us, and from pleasure we begin every act of choice and avoidance, and to pleasure we return again, using the feeling as the standard. And the part that should make it most clear: Since pleasure is the first good and natural to us, for this reason we do not choose every pleasure, but sometimes we pass over many pleasures when greater discomfort accrues to us, and similarly we think many pains better than pleasures since a greater pleasure comes to us when we have endured pains for a long time.
So the goal is always pleasure, even though you are occasionally choosing pains in order to get to the goal of summing up pleasures to the highest total possible under your circumstances. But Cicero is not allowing that kind of analysis here. He’s just saying, well, if it tastes better, that’s what you should go for. Just as he previously said length of time is a problem for Epicurus, Cicero is always attempting to isolate individual items and not allow the big picture that Epicurus emphasizes to take its place.
Cassius: And of course we can flip over and do the same analysis on the pain side, because Cicero points out that his friend Gnaeus Octavius wasted away over a long period, all his limbs seemingly on fire. We all do know people who go through intense pains lasting for quite a long period of time, and Cicero is throwing those out there: what are you trying to tell me that your little formula about pain — that intense pain is short and long pain is manageable — does when I have friends who have gone through long periods of intense pain? How am I supposed to take that formula as a remedy for pain?
And so in response to what Cicero is saying here, I think you’ve got some material from the DeWitt book, Joshua.
Joshua: I do, under the chapter called “The New Hedonism,” which we’ve been quoting from quite a lot recently. On page 244, DeWitt starts a new subsection called “Continuous Pain Impossible.” He says: Having laid down the two principles that pleasure and pain are true opposites and that continuous pleasure is a possibility, Epicurus was forced by a necessity of thought into positing that continuous pain is impossible. Principal Doctrine 4: pain does not prevail continuously in the flesh; the peak of it is present for the briefest interval, and the pain that barely exceeds the pleasure in the flesh is not with us many days, while protracted illnesses have an excess of pleasure over pain in the flesh.
And DeWitt says: This is among the more unfortunate doctrines of Epicurus and rightly incurred the sharpest ridicule. It reveals more faith in doctrine and more determination to live by it and to maintain control of experience than is consistent with medical knowledge. He seems to have been reasoning from his own malady, a stone in the kidney, which is accompanied by spasms of extreme agony separated by long intervals of immunity. And then DeWitt says he had taken this stand, however, and continued to maintain it. So if Norman DeWitt is critical of Epicurus, you know we’re on difficult ground here. Do you have a response to that, Cassius?
Cassius: Yes, Joshua. I think what I would say is that, as usual when I critique DeWitt, he’s not following his own leads aggressively enough. Because my initial response is that I don’t think DeWitt is giving Epicurus enough credit for taking his positions to the proper logical conclusion. DeWitt starts out by saying that Epicurus was forced by necessity of thought into positing that continuous pain is impossible. I think that’s exactly what Epicurus was looking at. And he was saying that continuous pleasure is possible in life because you have an understanding that pleasure is not just sensory stimulation, but it is also your appreciation for existence even when you’re not being stimulated, and that your mind is able to understand that these other pleasurable things are reason enough to continue living because they are worth having.
Now Epicurus is not a magician and can’t guarantee that pain won’t intrude into your life at times, but I think what Epicurus was saying relates back to what Torquatus talks about in terms of leaving the theater when the play has ceased to please us. The point that Epicurus would have been concerned about is that continuous pain is impossible, and continuous pain is impossible because, as Epicurus says even in the Letter to Menoikeus in Section 126: the many at one point shunned death as the greatest of evils and at another yearned for it as a respite from the evils of life. And so Epicurus knows that death can free us from continuous pain. So even though that’s an extreme condition you’re not going to want to choose unless you absolutely have to, I think it fits Epicurus’s perspective that neither nature nor men can sentence you to continuous pain forever that you can’t get out of — because either it’s intense and short, or it’s manageable if it’s long, or if it is unendurable you have the option of leaving life and thereby escaping continuous pain.
That’s not going to be the method you’re going to want to follow. You’re going to want to avoid death as long as you can continue to live pleasantly. And as Epicurus says, it’s a very little man who has many reasons for ending his life. But the doctrinal issue is that continuous pleasure is possible through the management of your mental and physical pleasures, and the flip side of that is true: continuous pain is not something you are forced to endure. If unendurable pain confronts you and there is no way out of it other than death, death does allow you to escape. And so from that point of view, which is absolutely true, continuous pain is impossible.
I think the problem comes when people do as Cicero is doing here: they trivialize what Epicurus is saying by implying that you can just mentally wish away your pains and think about the good things in life and that’s going to make the pain go away. It doesn’t. It didn’t for Epicurus. He could still say that he was happy because he was aware that he had more pleasures than pains in his life in general, but that didn’t get rid of the pain of his kidney disease. If you can’t cure the pain of the kidney disease and it becomes unendurable for you, then you can exit the theater when the play has ceased to please you.
Cassius: So summarizing, DeWitt continued: There’s another saying extant which is supplementary to the former: acute pains quickly result in death. Protracted pains are not marked by acuteness. In protracted suffering, the principle of the subtraction of pain from pleasure holds good. Upon this notion depends the calculus of pleasure. The title is neither ancient nor precise. It’s no more of a calculus of pleasure than of pain, and it more rightly should be called a calculus of advantage. The right way to judge all the pleasures and pains is by measuring them against each other and by scrutiny of the advantages and disadvantages.
And for me, one of the lines that really hits this home is Section 125 of the Letter to Menoikeus: for there is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living. To me, if you take that and think about it and see where it goes, that is why Epicurus can say that the Epicurean is going to be stronger and more confident and have a more vigorous approach to life than somebody who is always worried about the possibility of pain overwhelming him — because the person who knows that there is nothing terrible in not living always has an escape if somehow he comes into circumstances where tremendous unrelenting pain is confronting him.
Joshua: Yeah. When you put it in those terms — I guess I should say, when Epicurus puts it in those terms — I can’t help but applaud when he says that there’s nothing terrible in life when you understand that there’s nothing terrible in the end of life. It’s certainly the case among the Greeks and Romans that they had a more free conversation about this than we do.
Cassius: Seneca said that the road to freedom is always before you — if you don’t see it, turn over your wrist. I do have to apologize; I realize this can be sensitive to some people, but it’s part of the cultural conversation and we have to deal with it.
Now it’s March 10th when we’re recording this. On March 31st is the anniversary of the death of Titus Pomponius Atticus, Epicurean and friend of Cicero. He outlived Cicero by several years, and on his biography on Wikipedia it says: Atticus lived out the remainder of his life in Rome. Just after his 77th birthday he fell ill, and at first his ailment appeared minor, but after three months his health suddenly deteriorated. Deciding to accelerate the inevitable, he abstained from ingesting any nourishment, starving himself to death, and dying on the fifth day of such fasting, which was the 31st of March in the consulship of Demetius and Socius, that is in the year 32 BC. He was buried at the family tomb, located at the fifth mile of the Appian Way.
Joshua: What makes this interesting in the case of Atticus is that he had managed to endure pretty much all of the political struggle at the end of the Roman Republic. He lived to the ripe old age of 77, which a lot of these men didn’t, and suffered his last illness and died in a time of peace — for him, at least. When you take another case, the case of Cassius Longinus, his falling on his sword was done in a time of war and after having failed in his main cause, so it’s maybe a little less applicable to what we’re talking about. But Atticus’s case is right on point with what you’re saying, Cassius.
Cassius: I’m not advising people to do this. I’m not saying that the pain you’re experiencing is so horrible that you need to do this.
Joshua: And I also don’t feel entirely comfortable, living as I do in a time of widespread, easy access to prescription painkillers, looking down on people who didn’t have access to the pharmacology that we have and who made those decisions.
Cassius: Right, Joshua. Let me also quote where this has been said specifically by Torquatus in Book One, Section 15, to show how Cicero is leaving out this aspect when he’s talking about intense pain and saying that these remedies are ridiculously insufficient. Because what Torquatus said in Section 15 of Book One is this:
The performance of labors, the undergoing of pains, are not in themselves attractive, nor are endurance, industry, watchfulness, nor yet that much-lauded virtue, perseverance, not even courage. But we aim at these virtues in order to live without anxiety and fear, and as far as possible to be free from pain of mind and body. The fear of death plays havoc with the calm and even tenor of life, and to bow the head to pain and bear it objectively and feebly is a pitiable thing. Such weaknesses cause many men to betray their parents or their friends, some their country, and very many utterly to ruin themselves.
And here’s the point relevant to what we’re talking about right now:
This strong and lofty spirit makes light of death, for the dead are only as they were before they were born. It is schooled to encounter pain by recollecting that pains of great severity are ended by death and slight ones have frequent intervals of respite, while those of medium intensity lie within our own control. We can bear them if they are endurable; or if they are not, we may serenely quit life’s theater when the play has ceased to please us.
That’s the point that wraps all of this together and doesn’t just try to pull the pain issue out of context and say that you’re crazy if you think you can mentally will away your kidney stones. The full picture is that we’re talking in principles about what you’re generally going to encounter in life — that the pains you’re going to encounter are generally going to be manageable. If they’re not manageable, then you’re confronted with the issue: are you sentenced to unendurable pain that has no way for you to get around it? And the answer is no. You’re never sentenced to unendurable pain with no escape as a human being, because there is always escape if you truly find yourself in circumstances that warrant it.
That’s why the issue of determinism, free agency, and so forth are so important with Epicurus. He’s insisting that you’re never forced, against your will and without respite and forever, to endure the kind of pain that you can’t find a way to deal with. In most cases, if you’re confronted with a terrible situation, there are ways out. What Epicurus is saying as a matter of philosophy is that pain does not have the power to hold you in its grip without any escape, forever. You are the one in control of your life. The wise man can find more reason for joy than for vexation, Torquatus has said, and the wise man, if faced with an unendurable situation, also has a remedy at that point of his life.
I think we can also put that in the context of something that came along later — and there were ideas of it already in Epicurus’s time, and he was responding to them — but no one has quite invented an afterlife like the Christian understanding of hell: pointless torture forever, not rehabilitative, not accomplishing anything, and totally inconsistent with a being alleged to be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. One of the many reasons that Epicurus challenges the prevailing religion of his own time is that he says the things attributed to the gods are totally inconsistent with what the character of such a being would be. And I think that’s even more so in the case of what was to come. The problem of hell continues to be, I think, a real challenge to Christianity.
Cassius: Okay, let’s begin to wrap up. Let’s go around the table and see if we have any final thoughts on this question of whether an Epicurean has any problem distinguishing between greater and lesser pleasures and greater or lesser pains. Martin, do you have any problem distinguishing between greater and lesser pleasures and greater and lesser pains, even though you think highly of Epicurus?
Martin: Yeah, of course not, because this misrepresents Epicurus’s thinking.
Cassius: And you see no contradiction between what Epicurus has said versus also distinguishing between greater and lesser pains and pleasures?
Martin: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Cassius: Okay, Callistheni?
Callistheni: You know, I think it’s important to consider how prudence can be employed when one is navigating through life, and that requires considering the outcome of what one chooses to do. So there are a lot more layers to the whole thing than just saying, oh, you’re going to choose between sardines versus wild salmon. We really have to consider the long-term well-being of our lives. So it really just depends on your particular circumstance.
Cassius: Joshua.
Joshua: Well, I don’t think Don will ever forgive me if I don’t talk a little bit more about this bread and water issue. Let me quote what he has to say on page 73 of his commentary to his translation of the Letter to Menoikeus. The two key words here are maza and hydro — which has become hydro in a lot of words we use, of course — meaning bread and water. And Don said: A number of commentators point to these two words to insist that Epicurus and all those who lived or studied in the Garden ate only bread and water. I have always been curious about which kind of bread was being referred to. It turns out it is maza, which was an ancient Greek barley cake or a thick barley porridge, as opposed to artos, a cake or loaf of wheat bread. Maza could be a quick, hardy, simple meal all by itself, and more importantly, it was the kind of dish that people ate every day.
Today, we think of bread and water as being like prison food. But when it’s the daily meal that people eat all over the country every day, it becomes a little more ridiculous to think of them as ascetics. And to me, it’s a lot like saying, if I had oatmeal for breakfast this morning, that doesn’t just mean I had oatmeal — I could have put blueberries or fresh fruit or honey into it and still called it oatmeal. So I think there’s probably a cultural context to this bread and water reference that people miss out on when they go on the internet and read what people have to say, which is that Epicureans only ate bread and water. Epicurus is on record asking a friend to send him a pot of cheese so that when he likes he may dine sumptuously.
Cassius: Joshua, that’s a great lead-in to what I wanted to say next before we close, because we haven’t talked about Vatican Saying 33. Let’s relate it to what you said. So the pot of cheese reference is “dining sumptuously.” That’s apparently a fragment, not a lot of context around it, but all we really know from it is that there are certain circumstances in which Epicurus thought that a pot of cheese would allow him to dine sumptuously. At least in my own mind, I’ve often combined that with Vatican Saying 33, but it doesn’t necessarily go with it. Vatican Saying 33 is: The flesh cries out to be saved from hunger, thirst, and cold. For if a man possessed this safety and hoped to possess it, he might rival even Zeus in happiness.
So I was combining those incorrectly in my mind. There’s not a saying where Epicurus says all he needs is a pot of cheese and water and he can compete with Zeus in happiness. So I would relate that to what we’ve been talking about today: when Epicurus talks about competing with Zeus in happiness, he’s not necessarily saying that eating a slice of bread is the same thing as eating an eel, to use Don’s analogy. Different things produce different types of pleasure that have to be factored into the total of your experience. To imply that all you need in life is bread and water, I think, would be a gross miscarriage of what Epicurus is saying. If you conclude from that that once you get bread and water you should stop — Epicurus is quoted to have said that the wise man can be happy even while being tortured. It would be wrong to conclude from that observation that the wise man should be satisfied to be tortured, that he wouldn’t want to get off the rack.
There’s always this interplay between how much is enough and this call to pursue pleasure that is clearly stated throughout Epicurus’s philosophy — that nature calls us to pursue pleasure. And what Cicero and the opponents of Epicurus end up doing is to take things out of this overall context of pursuing the overall life of happiness, in which many types of pleasures are combining with many types of pains, and isolate certain passages that make it sound like Epicurus has no common sense. We ourselves should take from that a warning not to fall for the same problem of taking things out of context. Epicurean philosophy is a systematic view of the world and how to live, and just as it’s possible to prove almost anything out of isolated quotations, you can do the same thing with Epicurus’s writings by taking things out of context and going off in a direction that would be very inappropriate from what Epicurus was really suggesting.
Joshua: First of all, yes — it was Diogenes Laertius who quotes Epicurus as saying in a letter to a friend: When you like, send me a pot of cheese, that I may dine sumptuously. So since we’ve been quoting from the Letter to Menoikeus here, I should quote how it ends — and again, this is from Don’s translation:
Meditate day and night then on this and similar things by yourself, as well as together with those like yourself, and never — neither awake nor in sleep — throw yourself into confusion, and you will live as a god among humans, because no person who lives among eternal pleasures is like a mortal being.
That’s a very high-minded sentiment, and coming as it does at the end of Epicurus’s longest surviving text on ethics and pleasure needs to be understood in its context. It’s a context we’re constantly trying to delimit here, and one of the reasons our conversation with Cicero has been so fruitful, I think, is that it gives us a good chance to defend these ideas against an adversary who was certainly hostile to them. Epicurus’s advice at the end of the day is: meditate day and night on this and similar things by yourself, as well as together with those who are like yourself.
Cassius: That’s a good place to end, Joshua. That’s what we do on a regular basis at the Epicurean Friends Forum. We’ll close our episode for this week, but come back next week and continue talking about much the same kind of argument from Cicero in Section 29. Drop by the forum if you have time and let us know if you have any comments or questions about this or anything else we’ve discussed about Epicurean philosophy. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back next week.