Episode 223 - Cicero's On Ends - Book Two - Part 29 - Are Epicureans Undergoing The Exertions Of Life For Nothing More Than A Drop Of Honey?
Date: 04/16/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3798-episode-223-cicero-s-on-ends-book-two-part-29-are-epicureans-undertaking-the-exe/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Section 34 of De Finibus. Joshua returns after the eclipse trip; back to Cicero’s text. Cicero opens by telling Torquatus to “abandon pleasure to the beasts” and then lists animal behaviors — bearing and rearing young, wandering and exploring, assembling together, showing affection and memory — which he claims are “shadows of human virtues unconnected with pleasure.” His premise: if animals exhibit virtue-like behaviors that aren’t pleasure, surely humans can do even more. Panel response: every item on Cicero’s list is pleasure under Epicurus’s definition — parenting, exploring, socializing, and remembering are all pleasurable unless some specific pain interrupts them. Cicero is simply re-running his restriction of pleasure to Cyrenaic sensory stimulation.
Joshua quotes Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire passage on desert frogs — spending months dormant in dried mud, then emerging to mate in brief rain-filled pools — as a vivid illustration that the whole lifecycle, not just one stimulating moment, falls under the guidance of Venus (pleasure). Lucretius connection: ita capta lepore (“held captive by your charm”) in the proem to Book One uses the same Latin word lepore (charm/grace) that Lucretius uses when asking Venus to infuse his poem — connecting the charm that drives all animals through their cycles with the charm that motivates a poet through seven thousand lines of difficult hexameter. Even the toil of writing is pleasure; only specific painful moments are pain.
Cicero’s Xerxes/honey analogy (Section 34): Xerxes crossing the Hellespont with his enormous army did not do it for a drop of honey from Mount Hymettus — so why would a wise man with all his excellences and virtues merely strive for pleasure? Panel: the analogy backfires. Xerxes’s actual motives — avenging his father’s defeat at Marathon, restoring honor and power — are themselves pleasures in Epicurean terms. Cicero trivializes pleasure by insisting it means only honey/sensory stimulation; but all the grandeur and ambition and love of glory he attributes to virtuous action are pleasure too.
Cicero’s premise that animals and humans cannot share the same supreme good — because humans are divinely touched — examined and rejected. Joshua: this is rooted in Platonist soul-body dualism (souls preexist birth, become entombed in flesh); Dante places Epicureans in the sixth circle of hell precisely for denying the afterlife. From an Epicurean and Darwinian perspective, humans are fitted for their environment like any other species — not the summit of evolution.
New Herculaneum scroll fragment, likely from Philodemus: “They have nothing to say about pleasure either in general or in the particular when it is a question of definition” — discussed as a parallel to Cicero’s own complaint in Section 21 that Epicureans never discuss the great heroes of virtue. Lucretius’s honey image (Books 1 and 4) revisited: the philosophy itself is the bitter medicine, the verse is the honey coating the cup. Episode closes with Section 34 complete; Section 35 (the final section of Book Two) announced for the following week.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 223 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.
Last week Joshua was away and we discussed with Don some of the most important high-level conclusions that we can gain based on reading into the details of Cicero’s attacks against Epicurean philosophy. We’ll continue to apply those as we proceed to the end of Book Two, and we are really beginning to close in on that. But when we were last in Cicero’s texts, we were dealing with Cicero’s claim that the Epicurean happy man model totally fails because in Cicero’s viewpoint the Epicurean man cannot be constantly happy — the reason being that he cannot avoid being in pain and being wretched, since Epicurus considers pain to be the chief evil. Cicero says that Epicurean philosophy can never win the day, can never prove its point, so long as it connects everything with pleasure and pain. This week we pick up with Cicero saying that as a result, Epicureans like Torquatus should abandon pleasure to the beasts. Before we begin to discuss it, let’s refresh our memory on what Cicero is saying here:
“Hence, Torquatus, we must discover some other form of the highest good for man. Let us abandon pleasure to the beasts, whom you are accustomed to summon as witnesses about the supreme good. What if even beasts, very often under the guidance of the peculiar constitution of each, show — some of them — kindness, even at the cost of toil, so that when they bear and rear their young it is very patent that they aim at something different from pleasure? Others again rejoice in wanderings and in journeys. Others in their assemblages imitate in a certain way the meeting of burgesses. In some kinds of birds we see certain signs of affection as well as knowledge and memory. In many also we see regrets. Shall we admit, then, that in beasts there are certain shadows of human virtues, unconnected with pleasure, while in men themselves virtue cannot exist unless with a view to pleasure? And shall we say that man, who far excels all other creatures, has received no peculiar gifts from nature?”
Let’s stop with that section already, because I find this part very interesting as another way of getting at Cicero’s insistence that pleasure does not include nearly as wide a list of things as Epicurus says it does. Because what Cicero has done here is list, in his viewpoint, a number of attributes that we can see in animals, and the premise of his question is that these attributes are not pleasure and that Epicurus is wrong to consider them pleasure. Going through quickly: some animals show kindnesses to each other even at the cost of toil — for example, when they bear and rear their young, it is patent that they aim at something different from pleasure. So bearing and rearing young is not something that Cicero considers to be compatible with pleasure. Then: rejoicing in wanderings and in journeys — we’re not supposed to consider wandering and exploration and seeing new things to be pleasures. He says others in their assemblages imitate a way of meeting together, so we’re not supposed to consider meeting with each other to be something that comes within pleasure. And then he says in certain kinds of birds we see signs of affection as well as knowledge and memory — so we’re not supposed to consider affection with our fellow creatures, or knowledge and memory, to be pleasures.
So he summarizes and says that if we can see these things in beasts — which are shadows of human virtues unconnected with pleasure — then why can’t we see those in men as well? And why are you Epicureans so obtuse as to not see that those things are not connected with pleasure? So to me, this opening section gives us a good reminder of the whole problem of Cicero’s approach to the nature of pleasure, and the importance of Epicurus’s approach to pleasure, to make clear that these activities of life — which are not what we consider to be normal sensory stimulation like eating ice cream or cake — these other activities of life are in fact something that comes within pleasure, and they are connected with pleasure, and they’re not just some virtue floating in the air.
Joshua: Yes, Cassius, it’s good to be back. Before we go too far into this, I do want to thank Don for stepping in last week. It’s always great to have Don’s opinion, especially when it comes to the roots and the finer shades of understanding of these words that we use all the time but don’t always have time necessarily to define. It’s great to have Don come in and be able to talk about that. He didn’t mention it last week but I will say it again — if our listeners have not looked at his translation and commentary to the Letter to Menoikeus, that is available on the forum, because what Don does in his commentary is to really break down the Greek and throw light on some questions that have lingered, and to also offer new insights into how we can understand it better than we have. Don, thank you for filling in for me last week — it was a very interesting episode.
Okay, what I have now is a rather long quote. This comes from a book called Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. Edward Abbey went to the University of New Mexico and took a degree in philosophy, but of course everybody who knows about Edward Abbey knows that the central part of his life, much like Thoreau going to Walden Pond, is that he served as a park ranger at Arches National Monument in Utah and wrote a book about it. It seems like a good response to some of what Cicero is saying, and he connects it back to virtue as well. He says this:
“The rain-filled potholes set in naked rock are usually devoid of visible plant life but not of animal life. In addition to the inevitable microscopic creatures, there may be certain amphibians like the spadefoot toad. This little animal lives through dry spells in a state of estivation under the dried-up sediment in the bottom of a hole. When the rain comes, if it comes, he emerges from the mud, singing madly in his fashion, mates with the handiest female, and fills the pool with a swarm of tadpoles, most of them doomed to a most ephemeral existence. But a few survive, mature, become real toads, and when the pool dries up they dig into the sediment as their parents did before, making burrows which they seal with mucus in order to preserve the moisture necessary to life. There they wait, day after day, week after week, in patient spadefoot torpor, perhaps listening — we can imagine — for the sound of raindrops pattering at last on the earthen crust above their heads. If it comes in time, the glorious cycle is repeated. If not, this particular colony is reduced eventually to dust, a burden on the wind.
“Rain and puddles bring out other amphibia, even in the desert. It’s a strange, stirring, but not uncommon thing to come on a pool at night, after an evening of thunder and lightning and a bit of rainfall, and see the frogs clinging to the edge of their impermanent pond, bodies immersed in the water but heads out, all croaking away in tricky counterpoint.
“Why do they sing? What do they have to sing about? Somewhat apart from one another, separated by roughly equal distances, facing outward from the water, they clank and croak all through the night with tireless perseverance. To human ears, their music has a bleak, dismal, tragic quality, dirge-like rather than jubilant. It may nevertheless be the case that these small beings are singing not only to claim their stake in the pond, not only to attract a mate, but also out of spontaneous love and joy — a contrapuntal choral celebration of the coolness and wetness after weeks of desert fire, for love of their own existence, however brief it may be, and for the joy in the common life.
“Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does. I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage, and without courage all other virtues are useless. Therefore the frogs, the toads, keep on singing, even though we know — if they don’t — that the sound of their uproar must surely be luring all the snakes and ring-tailed cats and kit-foxes and coyotes and great-horned owls toward the scene of their happiness. Up then, a few of the little amphibians will continue their metamorphosis by way of the nerves and tissues of one of the higher animals, in which process the joy of one becomes the contentment of the second. Nothing is lost except an individual consciousness here and there, a trivial, perhaps even illusory phenomenon. The rest survive, mate, multiply, burrow, estivate, dream, and rise again. The rains will come, the potholes shall be filled, again and again and again.”
Cassius: Yes, Joshua, that’s a very beautiful passage from Abbey, and it does help focus on this issue of the relationship of where pleasure lies in the cycles of life. The frogs that you’re talking about — the goal of their existence is the pleasure that comes from what they do, and they go through all sorts of transformations for long periods of time for the purpose of sustaining themselves. The continuing question I think still always comes back to — because somebody’s going to listen to that and say, well, you’re saying that the whole purpose of a frog is to mate — and that is part of the frog’s existence, to mate and to reproduce itself. But somebody listening to the example that Abbey’s giving may ask the question: so are you saying, Mr. Abbey, are you saying Epicurus, that everything you do in life is geared towards reproduction? Are you saying that the reproduction of the species is the goal of existence and that the pleasure that comes from the act of reproduction in that short period of time in a frog’s or in a human being’s life is the goal of everything?
And when you relate that to Cicero and his attack on Epicurean philosophy, Cicero is alleging that the exertions that animals go through in order to rear their young is something that is different from pleasure. He’s talking about adventuring or traveling. He’s talking about great migrations of the kind that I see every year with Canadian geese flying south every fall and flying back north every spring.
Joshua: Yes, and that takes us back to the very opening section of Lucretius, where Lucretius is explaining in terms of the discussion of Venus leading towards the continuation of the species. But maybe the real question here is what part of this process that’s being described is pleasure and what part is pain. And I think where Epicurus is saying we need to go here is that every part of the process — when Venus is leading the cattle to roll across the plains and leading every animal to do all these things that lead up to the reproduction process — I would say that Epicurus is saying that Venus is leading every step of the way unless you come to some specific pain. And the point that’s important to make is that Epicurus isn’t saying that the physical stimulation that’s involved in the moment of procreation, for example, is worth a lifetime of pain to get to that point. He’s saying that the lifetime to get to that point, including the exertions of normal life, is pleasure as well. And so from that frog’s point of view, unless that frog is at some point in the process feeling some kind of specific pain, the lifecycle of the frog from Epicurus’s perspective is pleasure for that frog unless it is suffering some specific pain.
The rest of the list, as you mentioned a moment ago, Cassius — the journeying, the wandering, the exploration, the assembling with each other, the act of remembering something, having knowledge of something — those are actions that Cicero is insisting are not pleasure. But when we do them, from Epicurus’s point of view, they are pleasure. And so if you fall into Cicero’s trap of thinking only those few moments of sensory stimulation are pleasure and only they are worthwhile, then you’re going to run into all sorts of logical difficulties and you’re going to end up concluding like Cicero that the wise man can’t always be happy, because there are only a few minutes in life where you’re going to be having sex or eating food or riding roller coasters or eating ice cream. And most of the rest of the time you’re doing other things. When you take the perspective that Epicurus has — that life itself is pleasurable unless you’re in pain — then all these other actions are brought also under the umbrella of pleasure. And it’s only when you’re specifically in some kind of pain that you’re in pain. So whether you’re a frog or a wise man attempting to live a happy life, that’s the perspective that leads you to understand that you can always have a balance of pleasure over pain, because unless you’re in pain you’re in pleasure, and the majority of experiences of life are pleasurable from that perspective.
Cassius: Yeah, I totally agree with that.
Joshua: Let me go back into Lucretius where you mentioned the movement of the animals. I’m reading the Loeb edition here — Martin Ferguson Smith translates. He says: “Next wild creatures and farm animals dance over the rich pastures and swim across rapid rivers. So greedily does each one follow you, held captive by your charm.” — ita capta lepore is the Latin, “held captive by your charm.”
I want to connect that to Lucretius’s whole project here, because that word lepore, which is the word for charm there, is interesting. A little bit further down in the invocation section — the Musae invocatio — he’s asking Venus to help him write his poem. He’s asking Venus to still the savage works of war by appealing to Mars, but also he’s asking Venus to help him write his poem and puts it this way: “Therefore, all the more, grant to my speech, goddess, an ever-living charm.” — quo magis aeternum da dictis, diva, leporem — that word leporem again meaning charm. He’s connecting the charms of Venus in its effect on the animals — causing them to pursue food, to move, to vie with each other for resources, and to propagate after their kind — with the charms of Venus that motivate Lucretius himself in writing a very beautiful work of high Latin poetry. Now, why is it that Cicero would approve of the latter if it wasn’t to do with Epicureanism, but doesn’t want anything to do with the former?
Cassius: That’s a great point. I think we can all experience that in our own day-to-day lives. I think about when I write something — sometimes it’s a burden, sometimes it’s painful, because my mind is somewhere else or it feels like I’m going down a dead end or there’s some other problem. During those times the act of writing can be painful. But often the act of writing is very pleasurable in the sense that it’s not painful, and you do get a sense of satisfaction and enjoyment and accomplishment. Lots of words that Cicero questions whether they are pleasurable or not — but you can certainly see that in many cases the same activity of writing is just like the animals who are in the process of crossing the streams or crossing the meadows or whatever. They’re doing what comes naturally to them in an effective way that’s not painful, and so the very same action in those situations is justifiably considered to be a pleasure. It’s only when those actions become for some reason specifically painful that it’s justified to consider them to be painful.
But to stick with the Lucretius analogy — somebody’s going to say, well, Lucretius says he’s doing all this because he’s trying to get the friendship and patronage of Memmius, and you could pick out that passage and say, well, everything that Lucretius did in writing this poem was painful to him but he did it all because he was looking for the pleasure of patronage. And I think that would be a very wrong way of looking at this, and that’s not the way Lucretius himself describes it. He continuously throughout the book talks about the pleasures of what he’s doing, and even though at those times when he’s writing he clearly is exerting effort that in some situations he found to be painful — if he’s staying up too late at night or getting sleepless because he’s working too hard without any breaks — it’s only the specific painful aspects of something that are painful. The rest of it, under Epicurean philosophy, is pleasure, and you profit from seeing it that way because then you see you can live a life that’s predominantly pleasure.
Joshua: Exactly. You’ve touched on a lot of what I wanted to touch on, which is that there are passages in this poem where Lucretius talks about burning the candle at both ends and how difficult it is to wrangle the Greek text and get it to work well in not just Latin but in Latin verse — he’s got to come up with new words to make this happen. There’s toil here. It must have taken him ages to write this thing — it’s seven thousand lines of dense intricate Latin hexameter. There’s difficulty here. But occasionally also there’s almost ecstasy. When he says in the proem to Book Four: “A pathless country of the Pierides I traverse, where no other foot has ever trod. I love to approach virgin springs and there to drink. I love to pluck new flowers and seek an illustrious chaplet for my head from fields whence before this the Muses have crowned the brows of none, because the subject is so dark and the verses I write so clear, touching every part with the Muses’ grace” — and that word “grace” again is lepore in Latin. Grace or charm. The toil and the pleasure we get from the toil, the hard work and the poem it produces, are all touched by the charms of Venus, by the pleasure in all aspects of its nature that affect us all the time in our life.
Cassius: Yes, I think we see that throughout Lucretius and throughout the rest of the accurate Epicurean texts. We can extend that by going further into Section 34. Let me read some of that, and then we’ll talk about this example of Cicero again attempting to trivialize the concept of pleasure. Cicero says in Section 34:
“We, in fact, if everything depends upon pleasure, are very far inferior to the beasts, for whom the earth, unbidden, without toil of theirs, pours forth from her breast varied and copious food, while we with difficulty or hardly even with difficulty supply ourselves with ours, winning it by heavy toil. Yet I cannot on any account believe that the supreme good is the same for animals and for man. Pray, what use is there in such elaborate preparations for acquiring the best accomplishments, or in such a crowd of the most noble occupations, or in such a train of virtues, if all these things are sought after for no other end but that of pleasure? — just as supposing Xerxes, with his vast fleets and vast forces of cavalry and infantry, after bridging the Hellespont and piercing Athos, after marching over-seas and sailing over-land, then when he had attacked Greece with such vehemence, had been asked by someone about the reason for such vast force and so great a war, and had answered that he wanted to carry off some honey from Hymettus. Surely such enormous exertions would have seemed purposeless. So precisely, if we say that the wise man, endowed and equipped with the most numerous and important accomplishments and excellences — not traversing seas on foot like the king, or mountains with fleets, but embracing in his thoughts all the heaven and the whole earth with the entire sea — if that man is in search of pleasure, then we shall be in effect saying that these vast efforts were made for the sake of a drop of honey. Believe me, Torquatus, we are born to a loftier and grander destiny.”
Cassius: So here we have an illustration of Cicero trivializing pleasure and saying there’s no way that either Xerxes as a great general, or a wise man with all of his endowments, is going to spend all of their resources and all their time — having put all of these excellences together — and just simply be satisfied and go after a drop of honey. And of course they’re right. Cicero is taking things to the farthest absurd that he can. When we say, as we sometimes do, that people like Xerxes are invading Greece for pleasure — at least partially — we’re not saying necessarily that this is because he wants to eat something sweet, right?
Joshua: Pleasure takes all different forms and there’s a lot more to it than simply going to get honey and raising a huge army and crossing the Hellespont. The reason that’s been handed down through history for why he went to war with the Greeks was to avenge his late father — I believe Darius I — who attempted an invasion and suffered an embarrassing defeat at Marathon in 490 BC. So avenging your father’s failure presents to the whole family — doesn’t it? — and to the whole society, really, if he’s the king, as a kind of pain, a thorn in one’s side. And so to pull the thorn out, obviously, is pleasure. We’re reducing it to simple terms here. There’s obviously a lot more involved when you’re invading a country than just pulling out a thorn. But that’s kind of his goal — to avenge his father’s failure and in so doing restore honor, dignity, lands, wealth, titles, power, and so forth to his people. And so obviously there’s pleasure involved there.
Cassius: Yeah, that’s the key point. Cicero’s attempting to trivialize pleasure as representing honey — something that is a very concrete, specific example of a type of sensory pleasure — and insists that that’s the only thing the word pleasure means. When, as you just said, Joshua, all of the many reasons that people go to such exertions in life, all of the things that they seek to accomplish — those are pleasure too in Epicurean philosophy. And Cicero is just never going to admit that.
But as frustrating as it can be for us to talk about it, this is just such a huge point in defending Epicurean philosophy against people who attack it — because that’s the whole key to this argument that pleasure is something trivial in life. It’s just sex, drugs, and rock and roll, it’s just something ephemeral, it’s not those deeper satisfying emotionally-driven things that we associate with the word virtue and nobility and worth and grandeur and greatness. All of those things have nothing to do with pleasure in the eyes of somebody like Cicero. And that is just not a philosophically accurate description of Epicurean philosophy. It is not a philosophically sound assessment of life itself, because those virtues have no existence and no merit on their own except for the results that they bring in terms of pleasure and pain.
But we don’t want to skip over one phrase that Cicero uses here. He says: “Yet I cannot on any account believe that the supreme good is the same for animals and for man.” That’s one of the huge premises here as well — that mankind is something divine, part of your divine fire if you want to take it from a Stoic perspective, that you’re a piece of God and all the rest of these living things are just categories below you. Their life is of a distinct and different kind from a man, and therefore there’s no way we can accept that they have the same supreme good, the same goal as we do as humans.
But again, philosophically speaking, the supreme good is a concept that you use to describe a goal. And it’s important to realize when you talk about a supreme good that you’re looking for some word that you can use to embrace everything else within it. And Cicero and the Stoics and the Platonists and Aristotelians want to use virtue as that word — as if it has no connection to pleasure and pain — while Epicurus is the one who’s taking the more practical and insightful approach of saying that virtue is just a tool. What is important in the end is pleasure. And so the word that we use to describe our supreme good is not virtue, it’s not divinity or being holy or pious, it is pleasure.
Joshua: Joseph Conrad, in his novel The Shadow-Line, writes this: “All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature, and however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is. Marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural, which — take it any way you like — is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living in their countless multitudes, a desecration of our tenderest memories, an outrage on our dignity.”
Cicero here is demanding for mankind a level of respect and appreciation that befits a being touched by the divine in ways that he thinks animals are not. You see that all throughout this passage — he begins by saying that mankind and animals cannot possibly have the same supreme good. Two weeks ago I mentioned Plato’s understanding of mankind — that your soul predates your birth. In fact, there may be an endless transmigration of souls. But your soul predates your birth. At birth, your soul becomes entombed in your body, and your body is weak and gross and ineffectual. But your mind, containing the divine spark, is something pure and noble, and in many ways perfect — so perfect, in fact, that before you were born you knew everything. After you are entombed in your flesh, you cannot access that knowledge anymore except by recollection through learning. He thought that you never learn anything new — you simply recollect things that your soul knew before you were born but that have been forgotten because you were entombed in your flesh. It’s a rather high-minded way to talk about human nature. Unfortunately it’s also false to everything that we know about human nature.
In fact, the flesh — as Cicero himself here seems to concede — is not something gross and defiled, is not something sinful and inherently bad. The flesh is beautiful. Our bodies are beautiful, they are useful, and they are well-disposed to the wide variety of things that we want to do in our life. If you want to pursue pleasure, the body is well-disposed to the pursuit of pleasure. But if you want to make a name for yourself as an athlete, the body is well-disposed to that as well. This view that we are a soul trapped in the body is at the heart of so much of this wrong thinking in the ancient world, and you see it here in Cicero.
The animals — which do not possess the imagination that we have, do not possess the sense of time that we have — are focused with their noses to the earth, just like Epicureans are portrayed as pigs not able to ever look up at the sky. This view that animals are beneath us because we possess something heavenly, as Cicero says here, is rooted in this problem of seeing the body as something lowlier than the mind. And it’s at the root of so much of what we’ve been dealing with in Cicero and elsewhere. I’ve quoted before from Tertullian, who repudiates all classical culture by imagining the same people who are involved in that culture after the Day of Judgment when they are burning in hell — that it’s the body, it’s the body that needs to be punished, the body of the poets and the athletes and the playwrights and the charioteers, because they did not use their mind to elevate themselves into the glorious appreciation for the divine that they should have.
In Dante’s Inferno, the Epicureans are to be found in the sixth circle of hell — the circle of heresy. They lie unconscious in lidless coffins, and on the day of judgment the lids of the coffins will close over them and they will wake up and be trapped in that condition forever, never able to escape. And the crime for which this is a fit punishment is that they deny the afterlife. We deny the afterlife in part because we do look at the lives of animals and we see kinships and similarities there — similarities that people like Cicero are at pains to avoid, because they want to see mankind as something greater and better. Whereas I would say that humans are a variation in a kind of species, not a better species necessarily. This is a false understanding of Darwinian evolution, that humans are the peak of evolution. Humans are fitted for their environment in one particular way, just like lampreys are fitted for their environment in one particular way. We don’t constitute the summit of the mountain. It’s very possible that long after we’re all dead, some species more intelligent and more fit for its environment will come along and put our species to shame.
So that’s rather a long-winded take on what he’s saying here, but the fact is what he’s saying here is the same kind of thing we’ve been dealing with ever since we started Book Two. He simply doesn’t want to see that there is pleasure in the mind that is connected with the body, but also different from it. You see that here at the end of Section 34 when he says: “If gods exist, as even your school supposes, I ask you how they can be happy when they cannot realize pleasure with their bodily faculties? Or if they are happy without that kind of pleasure, why do you refuse to allow that the wise man can have similar intellectual enjoyment?”
Cassius: We don’t refuse that. We acknowledge intellectual enjoyment. We acknowledge it in Lucretius writing his difficult poem. We acknowledge it in Epicurus gathering friends about him and teaching them philosophy. We acknowledge it even here in Cicero writing this book, and we acknowledge it in ourselves having this conversation. There’s no denial of mental or intellectual pleasure in Epicurean philosophy. Cicero is reading that in because he doesn’t understand what we are saying when we say that animals and humans are similar in more ways than he thinks.
Joshua: That’s right. He’s reading these things into Epicurean philosophy that don’t exist. I notice in the middle of this paragraph that he does refer to the Cyrenaics. Maybe his accusations — just as Torquatus has said in Book One — maybe his accusations are valid against the Cyrenaics, or somebody who does simply see life as nothing more than one excited sensory stimulation after another. But that’s not the direction that Epicurus is coming from. As Cicero says about the gods — the gods don’t have bodies — how can they possibly pursue the kind of pleasure you’re talking about? And it’s just totally a fallacious argument, because Epicurus is not limiting himself to the pleasures of the body.
Cassius: Let me go back briefly to two more things from Section 34 that we haven’t covered in detail. Cicero starts talking about the fact that if pleasure is the supreme good, it would be enviable to live day and night without intermission in a state of extreme pleasure, all the senses being agitated by and steeped in sweetness of every kind. That’s a variation — in a twisted kind of way — of what Torquatus has said in the first place, because Epicurus is not saying that your senses are going to be agitated every moment of your life in order to be experiencing pleasure. He’s saying that you can experience pleasure without these stimulations, as long as you have a proper understanding of the way the world works and have confidence in being able to sustain your condition in a way that is not painful. That’s where Cicero says that maybe the Cyrenaics would like to live like that, but nobody else who’s decent would even want to live like that.
He also says: consider the men of art who’ve created such fantastic artistic efforts in the past, whether you’re talking about Homer or whether you’re talking about Phidias and so forth. Cicero is trying to allege to Torquatus: you can’t be telling me that Homer or Archilochus or Pindar, or Phidias or Polyclitus or Zeuxis, were motivated by pleasure in producing that kind of art. And then: why begrudge a citizen achieving beauty of action any less than achieving beauty of form?
So Cicero says, why are people misunderstanding all of this? Because your philosopher Epicurus, in talking about pleasure, is taking counsel not with the higher part of his mind but with the passionate side — that is to say with the most frivolous part of his soul.
So I remember you made a comment, Joshua, about the way there was so much error in the ancient world about these points. But the error persists all the way to today. The question is: what do you consider pleasure to consist of? And are you limiting pleasure to these immediate sensory stimulations — honey and sex and drugs and rock and roll and the things that Cicero finds so easy to trivialize? When you should be looking at pleasure in a much more expansive way, as Epicurus is doing it — as the foundation of everything that you experience in life, unless you’re suffering some specific pain. The value of life itself when you’re not in pain is something worth having and worth considering to be pleasure. And therefore, when you say that your ultimate good is pleasure, you’re specifically including all these activities that Cicero thinks you’re excluding.
Okay, there’s one more thing I wanted to mention in today’s episode. That was brought up last week by one of our friends on the forum, Titus. We have been hearing about recent discoveries of the Herculaneum Scrolls, and one of the fragments that appears to have come to light just within the last several months is likely attributable to Philodemus, where he’s criticizing certain people with what I understand the translation at the moment to be is something like this: “They have nothing to say about pleasure either in general or in the particular when it is a question of definition.” I don’t know if anybody has any specific comments on that today, but I certainly think it is involved in what we’re talking about — fighting those people who are attacking Epicureans, maybe even Epicureans who are getting away from a proper understanding of the word pleasure over time. Because this question of what is pleasure — which Diogenes of Oinoanda was shouting about — and its proper role in relation to virtue, it’s clear this is an extremely large issue.
Joshua: So we’re lacking some clarity, given the fragmentary nature of some of this. It occurs to me that this is actually quite similar to a charge that was leveled by Cicero against the Epicureans in Section 21 in Book Two of this very book. Cicero has this to say:
“You must either blame these examples, Torquatus, or must abandon your advocacy of pleasure. But what kind of advocacy is this, or what sort of case can you make out for pleasure, which will never be able to call witnesses either to fact or to character from among men of distinction, while we are wont to summon as our witnesses from the records of the past men whose whole life was spent in noble exertion? In your debates, history is silent. I have never heard that in any discussion carried on by Epicurus the names of Lycurgus, Solon, Miltiades, Themistocles, and Epaminondas were mentioned — men who are ever on the lips of all the other philosophers. Now, however, seeing that we Romans also have begun to handle these issues, what fine and great men will Atticus produce for us from his stores? Is it not better to say something of these men than to talk through such ponderous tomes about Themista?”
Cicero is making the case that the Epicureans can’t even talk intelligently about virtue because you never inquire into or discuss the nature of the men who most exhibit virtue in their lives — these illustrious heroes from the Greek and Roman past, standards of virtue in every other school of philosophy — but instead Epicurus, you like to write books and dedicate them to Themista or to Metrodorus or Polyaenus. Who cares about those people? I want to hear you talk about Themistocles. I want to hear you talk about Homer and Achilles and the great struggles of the past that have produced actions so virtuous and so godlike that it totally changes the nature of the conversation. Why don’t you talk about these people?
So when I see this fragment thought to be from Philodemus — where he says that they have nothing to say about pleasure either in general or in the particular when it is a question of definition — I don’t know if he’s talking about Epicureans of his own day who’ve lost sight of this. Philodemus is quite capable of chastising his fellows — he says elsewhere that his contemporary Epicureans are blameworthy because of their appalling lack of attention when it comes to the books. They don’t read the books. They call themselves Epicureans, they maybe attend the meetings, but they never spend any time with the texts themselves and so they don’t really understand this on a very deep level.
The other problem — just as we’ve been talking about here with Cicero — is that people like Cicero don’t really understand pleasure either. If Cicero had understood pleasure as the definition or understanding of it was laid down by Epicurus himself, he would know that intellectual enjoyment figures under Epicurus’s understanding of pleasure, just as absence of pain figures under Epicurus’s understanding of pleasure. And he wouldn’t constantly fall into this trap of making Epicurus look like a fool when really it’s Cicero who hasn’t understood these issues as deeply as he should have. For Cicero, pleasure means one thing and one thing only — it means the stimulation or agitation of the senses. He doesn’t account for this whole other vast experience of pleasure in human life. And it’s because he’s inattentive to it in the exact same way that he accuses the Epicureans of being inattentive to history — history is silent in their debates, and the names of Lycurgus and Solon and Miltiades and Themistocles are never mentioned.
Cassius: That’s well stated, Joshua. I don’t think I have anything to add to that. Cicero criticizes Epicureans for failing to pay attention to virtue and the sources of evidence for virtue, while the Epicureans criticize Cicero for failing to pay attention to pleasure and the source of proper understanding of pleasure — which is nature. So from whatever school you’re in, it’s very important to be able to stick to the fundamentals and to explain the basis of your fundamentals. In Epicurean philosophy, pleasure may be the goal, but you can’t leave it just with the single word pleasure without being clear about what the word pleasure means.
Okay, why don’t we bring today’s episode to a close. Let’s go around and see if anyone has closing comments. Martin, closing comments today?
Martin: No comment today, thanks.
Cassius: Thank you, Martin. Callistheni?
Callistheni: I was thinking about how pleasure motivates action — both physical pleasure and also seeking mental pleasure. The exception would be if someone is concerned about propitiating the gods, and if they’re fearful of the gods, then they’re going to be motivated to do things that are not necessarily for their own pleasure. They’re trying to deal with this thing that is beyond the realm of the material realm, because if somebody is concerned about whether or not the gods are going to be angry, they’re going to have to take that into consideration — which is a completely different angle as far as whether or not you’re seeking pleasure.
Cassius: I can see a couple of different directions this might be going, because I think you’re right. Religion seems to change the equation a little bit. You can take this in directions that Lucretius does — where Agamemnon sacrificing his own daughter in order to secure the passage of the fleet to Troy doesn’t appear to us to be done out of desire for pleasure, so that’s one aspect to it. In Rome there were a group of young women who were dedicated to the temples and to chastity — the Vestal Virgins — and if they were caught in adultery they were buried alive. So you have to think in these terms, which is part of the problem: religion and belief in the gods warps our sense of pleasure by offering pain if we fail to do what religion wants.
Callistheni: No, that’s exactly where I was going — it’s about this fear of pain that takes things to an otherworldly level, like you’re not part of the earth anymore, you’re part of this strange cosmos that has these supernatural things. And so the body is removed in some sense from that, and your own personal interaction with nature and the material realm is somehow made secondary. And I think you’re absolutely right that as Cassius has said many times, if it turns out that any one or more of these religions are true, of course that does radically change the arithmetic, the hedonic calculus.
Cassius: Whether it changes the goal — which is to experience pleasure or avoid pain — I think is slightly a separate question. It certainly changes how we do that. To make Callistheni’s point part of what we’re talking about: this is the issue of psychological hedonism again — that everything you do because you wish to do it should be considered to be pleasurable. That’s a complicated topic and we’ll set aside some time at some point to deal with that. But where it comes back is exactly what this quote from Philodemus is saying — you have to think about the definition of pleasure, you have to think about what it is you mean by pleasure. If you’re doing something because you think a god tells you to do that, you have to decide whether that’s really within your definition of pleasure or not. Maybe it is, maybe it’s not. But at least wrapping it up for today — Philodemus is telling us that we really need to think about what we mean when we talk about pleasure, and I think that’s very good advice. Joshua, closing thoughts for today?
Joshua: There’s something from Cicero that I don’t quite want to let pass, which is when he talks about Xerxes invading the Greeks for a drop of honey. Because honey does feature in Lucretius’s understanding of how he’s presenting the philosophy, but it features in a slightly different way. This quote appears twice in the poem — it appears in Book One and again in the proem to Book Four. Lucretius says: “I write clear verse about dark things, touching them with grace and charm. This makes sense, for just as doctors do when they give bitter wormwood to a child — they first take pains to smear the rim of the cup with the sweet golden honey, to fool the unsuspecting patient as far as the lips till he gulps down the dose of bitter wormwood, fooled but not betrayed but rather given health and strength — so I, harsh as my system may appear to those who have not used it, and in general people shrink back and set lips and minds against it, have nevertheless for your sake wanted to explain the way things are, touching it with the taste of honey and the sound of music, so that I may hold your mind with poetry while you are learning all about the form and pattern of things and seeing its usefulness.”
So he is talking about pleasure, but he’s talking about the pleasure of his verse as drawing you in so that you take in what he’s saying — and that’s going to help you avoid the pain. This is medicine. This is what the philosophy is in Lucretius’s view — it’s medicine that’s going to help you avoid pain. And so when we do read this orphaned quotation from Philodemus as it survives in a fragment from Herculaneum, knowing the broader meaning of pleasure in all its aspects and variations really allows us to grapple with the philosophy in very interesting ways. And part of that is in seeing the philosophy itself, and Lucretius’s poem, as a cure — a draft from nature’s spring to strengthen you against the pain that you experience in life. And to that end, I think we should do our best to heed its call.
Cassius: Very well said, Joshua. We have come to the end of Section 34, and that leads us next week to Section 35 — which is the last section of Book Two. So we are closing in on our discussion of Book Two. We may be able to finish next week, but we’ll probably have two more sessions before we move on to another topic. There’s an awful lot in this material — there was a lot today, there’ll be a lot next week, and there’ll be a lot for us to summarize. So we’ll do that over the next episode or two. In the meantime, please drop by the forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about this episode or any of the other things we discuss about Epicurus. Thanks for your time today — we’ll be back next week. See you then!