Episode 220 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 27 - Cicero Attacks Epicurus' End-Of-Life Decisionmaking
Date: 03/30/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3761-episode-220-cicero-s-on-ends-book-two-part-27-cicero-attacks-epicurus-end-of-lif/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Section 31 of De Finibus. Cicero attacks the provisions in Epicurus’s will — bequests for the children of Metrodorus and annual birthday celebrations plus monthly 20th-day dinners — as a fatal contradiction: a man who says virtue and posterity mean nothing beyond his own present pleasure has no rational basis for caring about anyone after he is dead. Panel responses: no contradiction exists because Epicurus derived real pleasure while alive from making those provisions (analogy: a host who pours wine for future generations gets genuine present pleasure from the act itself); the will expresses friendship and anticipation, not a belief in posthumous reward. Diogenes of Oenoanda Fragment 3 raised as a parallel — Diogenes inscribed his wall while dying for exactly the same reason. The Voconian-law passage from earlier in Book Two is recalled as further evidence that Cicero repeatedly misreads Epicurean generosity as philosophical inconsistency.
Section 32 (opening): Cicero introduces a formal syllogism — “He who is subject to the greatest possible evil is not happy so long as subject to it; the wise man is always happy though sometimes subject to pain; therefore pain is not the greatest possible evil.” Panel begins responding by returning to Torquatus’s ideal-life passage from Book One, which already answers the syllogism by showing that happiness is evaluated across the whole arc of a life, not reduced to any single painful moment.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 220 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 on page 71 at the beginning of Section 31. Last week we spent most of the episode talking about Cicero’s criticisms of Epicurus’s views of pain. We concluded the episode talking about the differences between Epicurus’s view of the relief that we get from knowing that there’s no possibility that pain can continue forever — that we do have the ability to manage pain, that it’s short if it is intense, and that if it’s inescapably unmanageable and intolerable, there’s always death that allows us to escape from pain, so that pain itself does not have the ability to hold us in its grip indefinitely.
Given Cicero’s attitude, he is of course not very happy about that and is very critical of Epicurus’s viewpoint. At the end of last week’s material, Cicero had begun to talk about the issues of Epicurus’s final days and the preparations that Epicurus had made to take care of the philosophic school and the children of Metrodorus — and Cicero is trying to accuse Epicurus of inconsistent behavior by being concerned about anything that should happen after his death. He’s saying that these are great moral acts, but that shows Epicurus’s inconsistency, because he’s committing them without any hope of reward. We’ll continue to tackle that today. But let’s go into Section 31 where Cicero expands on it further. And Cicero exhibits at the beginning of Section 31 a little bit of his trademark humor and sarcasm, because Torquatus is named after his ancestor who had twisted a type of necklace off the neck of an enemy. Cicero says:
You and your friends, Torquatus, may twist yourselves this way and that, but you’ll find nothing in this noble letter from the hand of Epicurus which harmonizes or accords with his dogmas. So he’s refuted out of his own mouth and his writings are put to shame by his own honesty of character. For from that commission about the children, from the remembrance of and tender feelings for friendship, and from the observance of the most important duties when at the last gasp — from that we learn that disinterested honesty was inbred in the man and was not bribed into existence by pleasures, nor called forth by the wages of rewards. What stronger evidence do we want to prove that morality and uprightness are in themselves desirable when we see such goodness displayed at the moment of death?
But while I regard as creditable the letter which I’ve just translated almost word for word, though it was by no means in accord with the spirit of his philosophy, yet I’m of the opinion that this same philosopher’s will is at variance not only with the seriousness becoming a true philosopher, but even with his own opinions. He wrote both many times in detail and also shortly and clearly in the book I’ve just mentioned that death is of no importance to us, for anything which is decayed is destitute of feeling, and what is destitute of feeling is of no importance whatever to us. This maxim itself might have been more neatly put, for when he puts it thus, what is decayed is without feeling, his statement does not sufficiently explain what it is that is decayed. Still, I understand what he means — as all feeling is quenched by decay, by which he means death, and as nothing whatever remains which is of any importance to us, I ask: how is it that he provides and lays down with such care and minuteness that his heirs, Amynomachos and Timocrates, should, with the sanction of Hermarchus, give a sum sufficient for the celebration of his birthday every year in the month Gamelion, and also money to provide each month, on the twentieth day after the new moon, a banquet for all those who study philosophy along with him, that so the memory of himself and of Metrodorus may be reverenced?
I’m not able to deny that these directions show us a man as nice and kindly as you please, but to assume that any man has a birthday is utterly unworthy of a philosopher, more particularly a natural philosopher, for by this name he desires himself to be called. Why can the very day that has once been come round again and again? Assuredly it cannot. Or a day just like it? That’s not possible either, unless after many thousands of years have intervened so that there comes to pass the return of all the stars simultaneously to the point from which they set out. No one, therefore, has a birthday. But it’s customary, and I didn’t know it, I suppose. But if it be, is the custom to be observed even after death, and is provision to be made for it in his will by the man who has uttered to us his almost oracular speech that nothing after death is of any importance to us? Such things do not recall the man who had traversed and thought countless universes and boundless tracks, without shore and without end. Did Democritus ever do anything of the kind? But if a day was to be signalized, why the day on which he was born, rather than that day on which he became a wise man? You’ll tell me that he could not have become a wise man had he not been born. Nor yet if his grandmother had not been born, if you come to that. The whole notion, Torquatus, of desiring that the recollection of one’s name should be kept fresh after death by a banquet is entirely for unlearned men.
Now I say nothing about the way in which you celebrate such festivals or the amount of pleasantry you have to face from the wits. I only say this much, that it was more pardonable for you to observe the birthday of Epicurus than for him to provide by will that it should be observed.
Cassius: Okay, that is Section 31, attacking the final statements of Epicurus and his provisions and his will as inconsistent with Epicurean philosophy. And so Cicero would no doubt accuse us here of twisting ourselves this way and that to justify Epicurus, but I don’t think we’re going to have any problem explaining Epicurus’s position in making provisions while he’s alive for things that will happen after he dies. Cicero’s trying to say: the reason you’re doing it, Epicurus, is because you’re a good person. It’s inbred within you, and you have this virtue within you that makes you realize that it’s a good thing to do in and of itself even though you yourself don’t profit from it.
So we started to deal with this question a little bit back on page 53, when the discussion of the Voconian law came up. There was a man named Quintus Fadius Gallus, who had requested that his daughter inherit his property, but you couldn’t do that because of the Voconian law. So he got a friend of his, the executor, and promised to give the property to the daughter. And then after he died, the friend didn’t do it.
Joshua: Exactly. He asked his friend — his last name was Rufus — to pass the whole estate down to his daughter. But the Voconian law said that an estate exceeding a certain amount could not pass exclusively to the female heir. And so to get around this problem on your deathbed, you would ask a very close friend to manage the transition of your estate from yourself to your daughter by way of your friend as a workaround. And in this particular case, the friend did not pass the estate to the daughter. He kept it for himself.
Cassius: And he says on page 54, in Section 18: If a friend of yours on his deathbed asks you to hand over his property to his daughter and does not record the fact anywhere, as Fadius did, nor mention it to anyone, what will you do? You personally would hand it over — possibly Epicurus himself would.
So I read this in part to mention the fact that Cicero frequently oscillates between two positions: that Epicurus is despicable for even saying the things that he says, and also that the things he says are totally in conflict with what he has revealed his character to be. Yes, Epicurus probably would attempt to circumvent the Voconian law to help a friend. Yes, Epicurus did ask that the children of Metrodorus be maintained after his death — Metrodorus had predeceased him. And the consistent problem for Cicero is that this appears to be a violation of Epicurus’s philosophy. It reveals his character, but it violates his philosophy. And for Cicero, it adds a point in favor of Cicero’s philosophy, which places virtue and morality at the center.
But as we’ve been saying many times, pleasure in the understanding of Epicurus is a multifaceted complex issue that cannot be handled in a snide sentence or two. It’s a discussion that you have to have taking into account all of the surrounding detail — whether that happens to be the pain that you might get pursuing a given pleasure, or whether that happens to be justice or morality that centers on which pleasure you should pursue. When Epicurus is here writing his will, making his end-of-life decisions, setting aside money, establishing what had already been an ongoing practice to remember his birthday, and now saying continue to do this after I die — part of it is, I think, that Cicero is incapable of imagining that Epicurus can be experiencing pleasure while he’s setting some of this stuff up on his last day. Taking care of your friends after you’re dead — you can feel that as pleasure as you’re doing it even though you won’t be able to feel it as pleasure when it happens because you’ll be dead by that point.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, and I think your illustration of the Voconian law situation is very helpful too. It’s almost like Cicero is treating Epicurus or Torquatus as one of these provincial governors who he puts on trial. He’s got them in a witness box and he’s asking them questions and trying to trap them in inconsistencies to show that they’re lying. The Voconian law situation came up in the context of Epicurus saying that if someone doesn’t know that you’re doing wrong, there’s a question of whether you’ll do it or not. The issue there was focused on the discovery of the wrongdoing as the reason a person is not going to commit wrong — you can never live happily because you’re always going to be concerned that it will be discovered.
So Cicero had previously tried to cross-examine them on what happens when you’re the executor of a will and you don’t carry out the wishes of the testator. Here, you can almost see Cicero rubbing his hands together in anticipation of the even stronger argument from his point of view: okay, well, maybe the dishonest executor has to worry about being found out and punished later in his life. But now we’re getting to the point where your life is over. You no longer have any possibility of worrying about pain or pleasure in the future. So therefore it’s an even better argument from Cicero’s point of view that if you’re doing something good while you’re on the brink of death, then you really must believe it’s the right thing to do, because you’re not going to be punished if you don’t do it. You’re not going to be rewarded if you do do it from Epicurus’s point of view.
Now, at least one way that an Epicurean would respond to this is that indeed Epicurus did not get any pleasure after he was dead from what he had done. He was not concerned about receiving any punishment after he was dead if he had not taken care of the children of Metrodorus. Metrodorus wasn’t waiting for him in some other world to punish him for not taking care of his children. Epicurus could only factor into his calculations those things that were happening to him while he was alive. And I think that the first and probably strongest argument in response to Cicero is that Epicurus was getting pleasure — very satisfying emotional fulfillment — in knowing that he was carrying out the wishes of his friend Metrodorus, that he was providing for his friends after he would himself be gone, and that his philosophy would be continued on by his friends. He knew that and appreciated it and got pleasure from it within his definitions of pleasure while he was still alive. He wasn’t anticipating benefiting from it after he died. He was experiencing the benefit from these actions while he was alive. And neither Epicurus nor Torquatus would ever admit, “oh well, at the end of our lives we’re just going to do it because it’s the right thing to do — we’re going to admit that there’s something that’s just the right thing to do regardless of the reward.” There’s no way an Epicurean would admit that even in the extremity of the last days of life.
It seems to me that in the case of Epicurus setting aside money for the children of Metrodorus, this costs him absolutely nothing. He gets pleasure from it and it costs him absolutely nothing, because the money the very next day will be totally worthless to him because he’ll be dead.
Joshua: Good point.
Cassius: So there are two sides to this question, but again, I think that Epicurus — he says himself in the letter to Idomeneus, he writes: On this blissful day, which is also the last of my life, I write this to you. My continual sufferings from strangury and dysentery are so great that nothing could increase them, but I set above them all the gladness of mind at the memory of our past conversations. And he expands on that theme in his last will: And from the revenues made over by me to Amynomachos and Timocrates, let them, to the best of their power in consultation with Hermarchus, make separate provision for the celebration of my birthday on the 20th of Gamelion, for the meeting of all my school held every month on the 20th day to commemorate Metrodorus and myself, and likewise provide for the maintenance of Metrodorus’s daughters and his son, and the son of Polyaenus, so long as they continue in their studies.
So what we have here on Epicurus’s last day is he’s writing these letters to and about his dearest and closest friends — friends that have been with him since he left Asia Minor at the age of 33 or so. As he’s thinking about the situation and trying to decide what needs to be done next, he’s making decisions for the continuance of this school as well as the education of the sons of Metrodorus and Polyaenus and the daughters of Metrodorus.
And there’s the broader issue here that relates to the birthday too — and that is, as DeWitt says many times in his book, Epicurus is a moral reformer. Cicero is going to make a big to-do about Epicurus putting a provision in his will for his birthday to be celebrated every year and for the 20th of every month to be set aside as a time of remembrance. But if what DeWitt is saying is true and Epicurus is a moral reformer, then we have a very small and new school who grew great in the lifetime of Epicurus into a philosophy that spans continents. And so on the last day of his life, he’s reviewing what they’ve done together — him and his friends. It would be silly to think that this was mere drudgery for Epicurus. It’s the culmination of a life of experiencing pleasure together. He’s setting aside money for the continuation of the Garden so that future generations can also experience that pleasure together. I think it’s very cold and cruel of Cicero to step in here at the end and say, well, you’re a fool for setting aside money if pleasure is the only thing of value to you.
Cassius: Joshua, I think that’s a good direction for us to take this. We’ve already suggested in our discussion so far today that Epicurus is himself getting pleasure from the actions he’s taking while he’s alive and reflecting on the past and thinking about the things that are going to happen in the future. Maybe it’s just me who’s regularly concerned about this, but I think it’s well worth hitting the point that Cicero has been trivializing Epicurus’s definition of pleasure throughout the whole book. He has been trying to say that the pleasures of the body is what Epicurus is concerned about — as if Epicurus’s life has been devoted to eating, drinking, and getting massages to the exclusion of longer-term intellectual and emotional pleasures. It bears repeating that Epicurus’s definition of pleasure is so wide that when we say that Epicurus is getting pleasure out of what he’s doing in the remaining days and hours of his life, it’s not like he’s getting massages and having a good time drinking and eating. Epicurus had devoted his life almost from the beginning to looking for the truth of philosophy, to determine where cosmos came from, and then building a philosophy ever after based on these initial positions of atomism that go into the physics and positions about logic that deal with the canonics. And Epicurus’s emotional satisfaction from these explorations and discoveries is not something to trivialize as if it’s a nice game of cards with a cigarette and some beer. There’s every reason to think that what Epicurus is talking about here in terms of pleasure, especially in the extremity of being almost about to die, would involve the deepest emotional feelings of satisfaction and accomplishment that anybody could have in life.
So when Cicero continuously trivializes Epicurus’s point of view that he’s concerned only with the body, he’s trying to contrast that trivialization against what we all recognize as admirable — taking care of your friends, caring for the children of your deceased friends, providing for people in the future who are going to continue your philosophy. We can all recognize that those are noble, admirable, desirable things to do — but they do not stem from being in themselves noble. They are noble because of the results that they bring. You always look to the results of your actions to determine whether you should do them or not. And the same analysis that applies to all other Epicurean decisions is applying here. Epicurus is not changing his position, not all of a sudden becoming a Platonist trying to do the ideal thing when he dies. He is consistently applying his own philosophy to the decisions he has to make at the last moment.
I’ve had friends who were about to pass away who were so despondent about their passing that they got into depression in the final months and years of their lives and stopped worrying about what was going to happen to their friends or relatives. They were just so consumed in their own sorrow of their own passing that they lost all interest in the obligations of life they had normally conducted up to that point. But Epicurus, using his own philosophy, is concerned about these things to the very end, and he’s concerned about them because he knows they are the things that give him pleasure and emotional satisfaction in life.
Callistheni, this is a good illustration of why going through Cicero like this can bring to light super important issues that we’ve discussed in the past but don’t always seem to hit home until you really look at somebody like Cicero interrogating Torquatus or Epicurus. This is an issue we’ve talked about many times — the relationship between virtue and pleasure. The goal, the telos, is pleasure. It is not virtue and never will be virtue. But Epicurus is observing that there are certain instruments in life that are necessary for obtaining pleasure, just like it’s necessary to have food and water and air to live. And this term virtue — which is otherwise so ambiguous and meaningless, as Epicurus says, you spit upon virtue, spit upon the beautiful, unless it brings pleasure — he says over and over in terms of justice: there’s no such thing as justice in itself, there’s no such thing as virtue in itself, but there are actions in life that consistently can be taken that are calculated to produce beneficial, pleasurable results. So there’s no inconsistency here between talking about virtue and talking about pleasure. You choose to live virtuously in order to live pleasantly. And you take actions in regard to your friends — you support your friends, you help your friends, and you provide for them even after you’re dead — because it brings pleasure to you to do so. Pleasure, in this case, very widely understood.
Joshua: What I should do here is cite Fragment 32 from Diogenes of Oinoanda, because this inscription says essentially the same thing: If, gentlemen, the point at issue between these people and us involved 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.
Cassius: It’s like when you were talking, Callistheni, it reminded me of something else we should include here — something we’ve talked about before in this series. If it’s really true that just as the host that pours the wine gets pleasure and just as the guest that drinks the wine gets pleasure, then Epicurus on his last day, setting aside money for the children of Metrodorus and establishing customs for the school of philosophy he founded to follow after he’s gone — if we really think it’s true that the host gets just as much pleasure as the guest, then Epicurus on his last day is pouring the wine for future generations.
Joshua: There are all kinds of ways to talk about this stuff, but clearly what you just said, Joshua — wait, and what you just said, Cassius — is probably the most important way. Even those of us who read Epicurus, who study him, who think about it regularly and do our best to understand all the texts — it’s easy for us to slip back into this idea that pleasure is just sort of a nice feeling of stimulation, the kind of thing you get when you drink wine or drink beer with friends. But that’s not the only viewpoint of pleasure. If you fall into that trap of thinking of pleasure only as this type of stimulation, then Cicero has you in his trap and he will convict you of not understanding Epicurus, of being inconsistent, of having a position that doesn’t make sense — because you cannot continuously in life sustain these tickling sensations of pleasure. That’s only a part of the definition of pleasure. There are other types of pleasure that are important to us. These stimulations are desirable and nice in themselves and are part of pleasure, but they are not the whole of pleasure, as Cicero is trying to allege.
Cassius: So to go forward as we continue through Section 31: the middle part is an interesting discussion of the birthday celebrations — not only his birthday but also the 20th of each month as a banquet for all those who study philosophy along with him, so that the memory of himself and Metrodorus might be reverenced. This is probably some of the better information we have about some of the celebrations and customs of the Epicurean movement, but Cicero is not bringing it up to appreciate it, he’s bringing it up to ridicule it. One of the ways he ridicules it is to take the position that the same day never occurs twice, and that it’s ridiculous to talk about reliving a birthday because the stars are never in the same position as when you were born unless you wait thousands of years.
So as we get toward the end of Section 31, Cicero is going back to trying to make Epicurus sound logically absurd. He says that Democritus never did anything of the kind, and Democritus is the person you model yourself after. And if you want to observe a particular day, why not observe the day that you became a wise man, because that’s a whole lot more important if you’re a philosopher than the day you were born? And he tries to ridicule Torquatus by saying, well, you’re probably just going to tell me that you never become a wise man if you’ve not been born, so that’s why you should celebrate the day you were born. Cicero says the whole notion of desiring that your name be recalled after you’re dead is entirely for unlearned men, and that at least he can excuse Torquatus and the followers of Epicurus for wanting to celebrate his birthday, but it makes no sense for Epicurus to have established it because after he was dead he was gone, and while he can excuse Torquatus because Torquatus gets pleasure out of it, it’s totally ridiculous for Epicurus to have set it up because he got no pleasure out of it after he was dead.
Joshua: Well, since we continue this practice ourselves, it’s not at all surprising that most of us are going to think highly of it. Cicero is bah-humbugging this.
Cassius: Yeah.
Joshua: He’s Ebenezer Scrooge on the question of birthdays. It did make me think — I just looked up the earliest known custom of celebrating birthdays, and it seems to be a tradition that dates back to ancient Egypt, which was a rigorously religious country at the time these books were written. So is he talking about astrology here, with the stars coming back around again? And even if that is the criticism, can’t we just say that another excuse for friends to get together and celebrate the memory of a lost, very dear friend? They’re coming together on these days to celebrate a life of pleasure and to remember a dear friend who is gone, to anticipate the pleasure of friendship to come. Regardless of what the stars are doing, is this a bad thing in itself? I don’t see why it would be.
Cassius: Certainly not. And neither would be the idea of preparing a will — when you go into the bank and set up a bank account listing a beneficiary on it for what happens after you’re gone. Preparation for things that will happen after you die is not inconsistent with Epicurean philosophy, and in fact if you’re going to be applying Epicurean philosophy consistently, those kinds of things are exactly part of what the reasonable Epicurean is going to do. You know, Philodemus has a whole book on property management. And as we see from Epicurus’s will, he had accumulated a significant amount of property, including slaves and money and so forth. So Epicurus himself was responsible with his property — not responsible in the sense of responsible to Plato or responsible to God, but responsible in the sense that he was managing it intelligently for the purpose for which it was obtained, which was to bring pleasure. So Cicero’s whole series of allegations here about what Epicurus is doing at the time of his death are easily met and overcome.
Joshua: Yeah. And you could ask the same question of Diogenes of Oinoanda, whom we’ve already quoted. Why, when you’re dying, put up this massive inscription in the town marketplace? What’s the point? He says in Fragment 3: I wanted to refute those who accuse natural science of being unable to be of any benefit to us. In this way, even though I am not engaging in public affairs, I say these things through the inscription, just as if I were taking action, in an endeavor to prove that what benefits our nature — namely freedom from disturbance — is identical for one and all.
But Cicero’s broader point, it seems to me Cassius, is not just what’s the point of doing anything on your last day on earth. You can even extend this by saying: well, if you’re just going to end up dead, then what’s the point pursuing pleasure ever at any point in your life? I think that’s where he’s going with this argument — it’s an argument that doesn’t just apply to the last day of one’s life. All pursuit of pleasure is transitory and meaningless, Cicero wants to suggest.
Cassius: Yeah, I think that’s a great observation about Diogenes of Oinoanda. Now we don’t really know in terms of Lucretius whether he was anticipating his own death at the time he wrote his poem, so it’s hard to say that about Lucretius. But absolutely, Diogenes of Oinoanda has clearly recorded that he put up this wall nearing the end of his life. So while he certainly received pleasure from doing so while he was still alive, he was doing this thinking about the pleasure that would come to the people in the future who came by and saw the stone — or else he wouldn’t have bothered to put it up in such a permanent way.
Joshua: Exactly. And the Ciceros of the world are never going to go away, so why should the Epicureans of the world go away? Why shouldn’t we try to get a word in by any means within reason, even if that includes writing books that are going to survive long after we die?
Cassius: Right. Now we are beginning to close in on the end of Book Two. We have a good number of weeks left, but probably less than 10 pages or so remaining. We’re not closing today’s episode quite yet, but as we near the end of Section 31 and transition to Section 32, Cicero says at the very beginning of 32 that he’s going to return to his theme, because, as he says, he drifted into consideration of the letter to Idomeneus and the last will of Epicurus. And although we’re not going to get very far into Section 32 today, I think it’s a good summation for this episode and introduction to episodes to come for us to focus on a particular sentence that Cicero starts out with in Section 32.
Because Cicero has been, throughout Book Two, trivializing, taking Epicurus out of context, attempting to say that Epicurus is inconsistent, chopping different words in ways that Epicurus didn’t chop them and trying to line them up to make him look ridiculous. Even in material we’ve discussed today, he’s trying to say that the doctrine that death is nothing to us automatically means that you’re not going to do a will, that you’re not going to care about what happens after you’re dead — which of course it does not mean. Cicero is trying to take sections like that out of their context and place them in a very narrow perspective that undermines Epicurean philosophy.
And I think we can see that extremely well in this very first statement he makes in Section 32, which is this: But to return to our theme — for we were speaking about pain when we drifted into consideration of this letter — we may now thus sum up the whole matter. Rackham translates that as: but to return to our subject — for discussing the question of pain when we digressed to the letter of Epicurus — the whole matter may be put in the following syllogism. And here is a statement that Cicero is alleging to be particularly important, particularly damaging to Epicurus:
We may now thus sum up the whole matter: he who is subject to the greatest possible evil is not happy so long as he remains subject to it, whereas the wise man always is happy though he is at all times subject to pain. Pain, therefore, is not the greatest possible evil.
Or in the Rackham version: A man undergoing the supreme evil is not for the time being happy; but the wise man is always happy and sometimes undergoes pain. Therefore, pain is not the supreme evil.
This is a logical proposition — or as Rackham calls it, a syllogism — which Cicero contends sums up the whole matter. Cicero has teed this up as a challenge to Epicurus and Torquatus, and we need to swing and hit it. Basically the summary is: if someone is experiencing the greatest possible evil, we cannot define him as happy while he’s subject to that evil. Now, if we presume also that the wise man is always happy from an Epicurean point of view, and if we acknowledge that even the wise man sometimes undergoes pain — then you’ve got a logical contradiction, because if pain is the greatest evil and the wise man does undergo pain at times, then the wise man can’t be happy. Epicurus allows the wise man to experience pain. He allows the wise man to even choose pain at certain times. But if pain is in fact the greatest evil, then you’ve got your wise man experiencing the greatest evil — he can’t be happy under those circumstances. Your philosophy makes no sense, Epicurus, and I’ve just exposed you as a totally illogical thinker.
What’s the response to that? This is a high-level, logical, syllogistic, propositional type of attack. Cicero is saying that Epicurus’s way of putting these words together makes no sense and has to be rejected. We have to take up that challenge and put these words together in a way that does make sense if we’re going to maintain that Epicurean philosophy is correct. But Epicurus has said the wise man is always happy. Torquatus has said in Book One that the wise man will always have more reason for joy than for vexation. How can both be true? We’ll finish today with some preliminary comments on it and come back to it next week.
Joshua: I would say what Torquatus himself said: there are more reasons for joy than for vexation. I’ll quote again from Book One of On Ends where Torquatus says: Let us imagine a man who is living in the continuous enjoyment of numerous and vivid pleasures of both body and of mind, and who is undisturbed either by the presence or by the prospect of pain. What possible state of existence could we describe as being more excellent or more desirable? Now, he will have no fear of death because he will know that death only means complete unconsciousness, and he will have no fear of pain because he will know that while he is alive, pain that is long is generally light and pain that is strong is generally short — in other words, the intensity of pain is alleviated by the briefness of its duration. Let such a man, moreover, have no fear of any supernatural power. Let him never allow the pleasures of the past to fade away, but let him constantly renew their enjoyment in his recollection, and his lot will be one which will not admit a further improvement.
Cassius: Joshua, I think by quoting that, you’re doing exactly what needs to be done. And by talking about Epicurus in his last day, by bringing up these quotes which are summarizing the most desirable life, you are showing the point that I don’t think people appreciate nearly enough, but which I think is the key to this.
When you look at Cicero’s formulation, he’s trying to say that the happy man cannot experience pain. But the truth is, in Epicurean philosophy, happiness does not require the total absence of pain. Happiness does not require the total absence of pain. Happiness requires that you have more reasons for joy than for vexation. There can be no better example of how these concepts fit together than Epicurus on his last day. He is happy — and yet he is in extreme pain. There is nothing that can be deduced from that other than that you can be happy when you are in pain, that happiness itself does not require the total absence of pain. You offset the one against the other. You don’t look for an ideal of happiness which in human terms requires the total absence of pain. That’s a huge point that we easily get drawn into when we discuss absence of pain because of the framing of the Letter to Menoikeus, but Epicurus was certainly himself in pain as he was dying. You can experience pleasure even while at other parts of your experience you are experiencing pain. And that’s the way Principal Doctrine 3 has to be read. Pain and pleasure are both given by nature — those are the only two feelings that we have. But it does not require you to extinguish every last ounce of pain in your experience in order to experience any pleasure. No matter how many times people want to say that the absence of pain is the goal of Epicurean philosophy, what that really means is absence of pain is pleasure, and you do experience pleasure even when in other parts of your experience you are experiencing some degrees of pain. The pleasure outweighs the pain for the wise man who orders his thoughts and his actions in the proper way.
I think Cicero is doing us a great service by focusing on it in this way, because he’s forcing us to this conclusion through this suggested syllogism: you’ve got to reconcile happiness and pain. You can’t reconcile it by saying that the elimination of pain is the only and ultimate goal of your life. Your goal of your life is to be happy, which means the dominance of pleasure over pain, not the elimination of every pain. You choose pain at times, in fact, in order to reduce pain or have greater pleasure. There’s not a logical contradiction, and Cicero’s attempt to summarize it in this way falls flat on its face.
Joshua: Cicero, at the end of his syllogism, is trying to prove that pain is not the greatest evil. Because I think Cicero would agree with you, Cassius. I think Cicero would say, yeah, you can be happy and experience pain — we virtue seekers do it all the time. That’s the whole point of pursuing virtue rather than pleasure: virtue allows you to be happy even under the most dire circumstances. That’s what allowed Marcus Regulus to be happy even when he was being tortured by the Carthaginians. So it’s not that he disagrees that you can be happy while experiencing pain. It’s the claim made by the Epicureans that pain is the greatest evil.
Cassius: Yeah, I do think they go hand in hand. Yes, you’d have to deal with this issue because he’s emphasizing pain as not just being evil, but the greatest possible evil. I would infer from that that he’s emphasizing it as the greatest possible evil as a means of contrasting it to being happy — because Cicero or anybody would understand that you’re going to have some pain in your life. But if you’re characterizing pain as the greatest possible evil, that makes it more clear that a happy person is not going to be experiencing the greatest possible evil. But nevertheless, that is Epicurean philosophy — that pain is evil. And that’s another example of the perspective question: not only is pain the greatest possible evil, in the Epicurean framework it’s the only evil. All things that are evil are pain in that Epicurean position, because there’s only two options — pleasure which is good and pain which is bad. Well, then pain is not only bad, it is the greatest possible bad because there’s nothing else that’s either good or bad. There are all sorts of different ways to come at this logically, but no matter how you slice it, I do think that you’ve got a logical problem being asserted here that has to be met on logical terms.
Joshua: Yeah. Now the way that I’ve talked about this in the past is by pointing to that same passage from Book One of On Ends and just going to the next paragraph. Torquatus says: On the other hand, imagine a man who is crushed beneath the heaviest load of mental and bodily anguish which humanity is able to sustain. Grant him no prospect of ultimate relief. Let him neither have nor hope to have a gleam of pleasure. Can one describe or imagine a more pitiable state? If then a life full of pain is the thing most to be avoided, it follows that to live in pain is the highest evil, and it also follows that a life of pleasure and happiness is the ultimate good.
So that’s the essential argument right there. Yes, you can be happy and experience pain, but if your life is nothing but pain — if it’s pain and anguish without any relief, so bad you can’t even get enjoyment from the memory of past pleasures and the anticipation of future pleasures — then you’ve reached a point where you are living in, as he says here, the most pitiable state. So pain is the greatest evil, but that doesn’t mean that every little bit of pain causes us to abandon all hope and abandon our pursuit of a life of pleasure and happiness. We have to be able to experience some measure of pain, which we are all liable to, and still push forward.
Cassius: You know, as you say it that way, Joshua, I think that your wording is correct, but somebody might say, well, “pursuit” means you haven’t obtained it yet. But I think that is the point: that you have attained the status of being a happy person, even though you are in pain. You’re not simply enduring pain so that you can get past the pain to experience some state of total happiness or total pleasure. You’re actually happy while you are in pain. Do you agree with that?
Joshua: Yeah.
Cassius: I think some people might not agree with that. And so it’s interesting to think about and hit home that they always talk in terms of, well, the reason you pursue pain is to pursue pleasure — but in the meantime, you’re not experiencing happiness as long as you’ve got some pain. I don’t think that’s entirely clear to everybody, but that’s where Cicero is coming from. This question of happiness and what does happiness require — and can you say somebody is happy while they are experiencing certain different things? So there’s more to discuss on that and we’ll come back next week and take it up further. But let’s begin to bring today’s episode to a conclusion. Martin, any closing thoughts for today?
Martin: No, nothing from me today.
Cassius: Thank you, Martin. Callistheni?
Callistheni: The last few things that you were saying about happiness — it seems so simple, but then you think about it and you go, wait a minute, this is a lot more complex than you realize. So yeah, thank you. It’s been a good episode.
Joshua: Yeah. We talk about the apparent problem: how can the wise man be happy while he’s being tortured? Well, that’s just an extreme version of the question of how can you be happy while you’re experiencing any pain at all in your life? And I don’t know that we all have thought it through to reconcile it, but I think the obvious answer is: absolutely, you can be happy even though there are certain pains that are bothering you during your life. Which, if you think that through, leads you to the conclusion that this idea that the total absence of pain is the state that an Epicurean needs to be in at all times — that’s just not even in the ballpark of what’s going on here. You can define that as a goal: that every aspect of your experience is in pleasure and not in pain. But as far as day-to-day life goes, for as far as I can tell, I don’t think I’ve ever been able to experience a moment when I thought that every bit of mental and physical pain was removed from my life. And yet you can be happy even though you have annoyances and even significant pains in your life. It’s not just a matter of experiencing pleasure to offset pain, but realizing that the status of pleasures that offset pains constitutes happiness.
We’re getting very close to the end here, and Cicero’s argumentative tempo will start to pick up as we run into a period of summarizing previous conclusions and dealing briefly with some of the things he hasn’t dealt with yet. The end is in view for our reading of Cicero.
Cassius: Joshua, you’re certainly right, and as we get closer and closer to the end here, the pace and the intensity is going to pick up. We’ll come back and continue it next week. In the meantime, please drop by our forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about anything that we’ve said today or discussed about Epicurus in any of our episodes. Thanks for your time. We’ll be back next week. See you then.