Episode 267 - Virtue Is Not Absolute Or An End In Itself - All Good And Evil Consists In Sensation.
Date: 01/17/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4227-episode-267-virtue-is-not-absolute-or-an-end-in-itself-all-good-and-evil-consist/
Summary
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Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 267 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 text 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@epicureanfriends.com where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. This week we’re back with Joshua, Don and Callini, and we’ll be examining one of the most interesting but also controversial aspects of Epicurean philosophy. The title of the episode is Virtue is Not Absolute or An End in Itself and that All good and evil consistent sensation. But ultimately what we’re talking about today is this controversial question of virtue. What is it? What role is virtue supposed to take in the day-to-day decisions that we make about how we live our lives? Epicurus differs dramatically from most other philosophers of the Greek tradition in his assessment of the nature of virtue and its role in human life. In Epicurus his time. Plato and Aristotle had combined and appreciation of virtue both for itself and for the benefits that it brings. But as we get into the discussion, I think we’ll see that Plato and Aristotle had held that virtue was grounded in their ideas of a universe that had been created by a God or a prime mover, some supernatural force. And so they evaluated virtue largely in terms of compliance with some kind of a divine order. Now, what many people are most familiar with today is the stoics and the stoic emphasis on virtue, and they extended the platonic and Aristotelian viewpoint of divine order being involved, and they came to claim that virtue itself is the goal of life. We’ve all heard cliche such as virtue is its own reward. That’s a stoic type of conclusion that says if you look for a reward for performing virtuous acts, then you’re sullying the act in itself. Virtue itself is such an excellent thing that it’s something you should strive for regardless of whether it brings you good or ill. And the big issue there becomes is virtue the end of life or is virtue the means of something else because they held that virtue is an end in itself rather than the means to another end. The stoics developed the idea that it’s inherently improper to seek any benefit from virtue, and as a part of this focus on virtue as being part of a divine plan, the stoics also held that virtue is essentially universal, that it’s the same for all people at all times and all places. And that sort of makes sense. If you believe that there’s a single divine creator of the universe, then this single divine creator from that point of view is going to set up standards of conduct to which living things should comply. And that standard of conduct is basically what the stoics were embodying in their view of virtue. This difference of opinion grew more stark as time went on and it continues in much the same form today. The question is whether virtue or being a good person is itself the goal of life, or again as Epicurus argues, is the goal of life happiness, which is based on pleasure. Now, Epicurus held that virtue is important, and in fact it is necessary and inseparable as a tool by which to attain that happy life. But this difference of opinion as to whether it is a means or an end is extremely important. In preparing for this episode today, I was thinking that it really could be very, very short because if we choose to focus on commonalities and the similarities between Epicurus and other schools, then everybody basically all the schools think that virtue is extremely important, but the role of virtue as the means or the end becomes so controversial. We have some significant texts that show how deep that divide becomes. The epicure endogenous of olander around 200 a d or somewhere in that time period is renowned for having erected a stone wall that contains his tribute basically to Epicurus and to epicurean philosophy. And this subject had apparently become so important by that time that dogen of lander included this statement in his inscription. I’m about to read the translation by Martin Ferguson Smith, who is the real expert on the oy ander inscription. Dogen NY says this, 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 to all Greeks and non-G Greeks that pleasure is the end of the best mode of life. While the virtues which are inopportune 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. Let us therefore now state that this is true, making it our starting point. So just as Dogen of O Ander said almost 2000 years ago, the issue is not whether we should be virtuous because Epicurus agrees with everyone else that we should be, but the question is why should we be virtuous and what is the ultimate goal of human life? Is it simply to be virtuous or is it to be happy using virtue as the tool for achieving that? It’s a subject that dogen Denise was so emphatic about that he said we needed to shout about it and we won’t be shouting today as we discuss it, but there’s a major, major divide between Epicurus view of this subject and the view of other philosophies and religions that all find a sort of supernatural basis in virtue. And so we need to explore what is virtue, what makes something virtuous, where virtue might come from. And as we dive into that, I think what we’re going to find is that Epicurus has an extremely well thought out position that makes a lot of sense and breaks down the whole foundation of virtue as it is generally promoted in the modern Western world. So let’s start off our discussion today with the question of what is virtue? There are specific Greek and Latin words that are being discussed, words that are not often occurring in the works of Epicurus himself. So to begin to get an idea of the different perspective that Epicurus places on this subject versus the stoics, the platonist and the aristotelians and the rest, let’s talk about the question of what is virtue?
Joshua: Yeah, the word that is used for virtue across the stoics and the epicureans and aristotelians is aite. So aate is the original Greek word that they were using. And the interesting thing that I find about that particular word is that it is sometimes translated as excellence. And basically what it’s trying to get at is whatever a things arete is the full realization of that thing’s potential or whenever it’s performing excellently. And so the early uses of the word that you could talk about the ate of a chimney or the ate of a hammer or that if it’s performing its function well and up to the highest level that it can perform it, that’s its ate and it got later on applied to things like morals and what we think of as virtues. But it started out something was actually performing at its highest point, I think why Aristotle finally comes down that humans ate as contemplation because it has to do with reason in the mind and that’s the highest thing that a human being can do. So that’s where it sort of came down there, but that sort is where the word started and it morphed into all these other semantic fields that it took over. And I’ll also add that I can only take small bits of Aristotle over long periods of time. So in looking at the Nick Mian ethics, I mean he tries to define virtue there and it always seems to come around that whatever he sees is good for the city or good for people acting in a certain way, but he never, at least to my mind, he never really comes around to really being able to define virtue because I think it’s such a slippery topic in my mind. It’s often if you’re doing something that I don’t like, then you’re being unvirtuous and that’s the word that I’m going to use to describe you. But it’s one of those things where you know it when you see it kind of thing. And to try and make that as the ultimate good or the goal of life or that sort of thing seems a really slippery slope. If you have something that you can’t really hold onto any better than jello to try and make that as your ultimate good, you’re going to have some problems. That’s why I think that Epicurus is idea where virtue is a tool in your life to work towards the goal of pleasure, the goal of happiness, that sort of thing. That makes a lot more sense in my mind.
Cassius: You don’t have to scratch the surface of this topic very far before you find that everybody seems to agree in the classical Greek circles that there are several virtues that stand out above the others. There’s a list of four classical virtues such as prudence, fortitude or courage, temperance and justice. And so you’ll see an awful lot of discussion about those as being examples of virtues. But you always have to ask this question about, okay, those may be particular virtues, but what is it that makes something virtuous in the first place? What is the unifying element in any course of conduct or in any attitude or action such as prudence for example, that makes it virtuous? And that’s where you don’t often get a lot of explanation. Just like he was saying, Don, they’ll always look back to the good of the city or the good of the state or the good of God or whatever. And that’s I think where the rubber meets the road on where you have to really think about where these people are coming from. Just like Epicurus is always doing, you go back to the universe’s composed of atoms and void, you try to pull things apart and look back at the origin of everything and these other guys are generally seeing a divine origin of some kind to which they’re attempting to comply. So simply listing out the virtues and you can go on and on and talking about lesser important virtues, but just simply providing a list of them. It’s not quite the same thing as talking about birds and pointing to different birds because we’re in a very abstract area and talking about these things. So providing the list doesn’t really tell you, well, who’s got the authority to make this list? How’d you come up with that list in the first place?
Joshua: And that’s where I think the contextual nature of Epicureanism is so interesting because he really, in those later principle doctrines really talks about justice because that’s a particular quote, virtue, that sort of thing and how it can be applied and how you can use it as a tool for more just existence and that sort of thing. But I think that trying to define virtue writ large, like you said, it’s basically you make a list of specific items and it doesn’t get you really any closer to what’s the unifying factor in all of ‘em.
Speaker 3: Isn’t it Aristotle that talked about excess and deficiency with regard to the virtues, and so in some sense that was some kind of attempt to define the virtues from that kind of method.
Joshua: Yeah, exactly. I think that’s one of the interesting things that I found in the early books of the Nicom ethics that he tries to say that to act virtuously is to find the mean between the two extremes kind of thing. And a lot of the things that Aristotle brings up, I really don’t see that Epicurus would necessarily disagree with him, but I think his framework, I don’t think Epicurus would agree with the way he was trying to set it up and the way he was defining it and Aristotle’s means it seems like he was trying to come up to some sort of absolute definition, and I think that Epicurus would try and get at it from a more contextual nature. It’s like, what are the results of this? What are the outcomes of this? When you make these choices, what happens? Whereas Aristotle was trying to put a point in the map and say, here’s where you have to be. And Epicurus I think would say, well, let’s look at the context here. What are you doing?
Speaker 4: Cicero in his on ends basically sets himself the task of determining what exactly these old philosophers meant by the various goals that they set up as the telos or the summa bonum the highest good, and in dealing with the question of virtue and morality, he has this to say, and I think at the very least this helps to clarify the issue. So in his response to Tor the epicurean, he says this by what is moral? We understand something of such a nature that even if absolutely deprived of utility, it may with justice be eulogized for its own qualities apart from all rewards or advantages. Now the nature of this object cannot be so easily understood from the definition I have adopted though to a considerable extent. It can as from the general verdict of all mankind and the inclinations and actions of all the best men who do very many things for the sole reason that they are seemly right and moral though they see that no prophet will follow. In the next paragraph, he goes on to give a list of the virtues, but this is his attempt at defining what we mean by virtue or morality. I’m kind of using them interchangeably here, but I’m going to quote from later in this book. So again, he says, what is moral? We understand something of such a nature that even if absolutely deprived of utility, it may with justice be eulogized for its own qualities apart from all rewards or advantages. And then regarding the relationship between morality and virtue, we have to rely on the definition given by Cato as Cicero’s interlocutor in book three or four of on ends. And Cato asked Cicero, why are you not stoic? Essentially, you’re the one person of all the people in Rome, I would’ve expected you of all people. Cicero, you find upstanding Roman man to be stoic. And Cicero says, our principles are at one and only our language is a variance. And Cato replies, our principles are very far from being at one for whatever that thing may be, over and above morality, which you declare to be desirable and among things good you thereby quench morality itself, which we may liken to the light cast by virtue and virtue to you, Cicero utterly destroy. So Cato is taking the position that morality is the light cast by virtue the outer sign of an inner virtuous existence is how you might put that. I don’t know if that helps, but Cicero deals with these questions at length. When we went through on ends books one and two, we barely scratched the surface on the philosophical conversations in that book, all of which deal with the question of what is the Telus, what is the highest good? How do we know it and how do we follow it?
Cassius: Joshua, let me jump back in on what you said there. You indicated you weren’t sure how helpful that was, but boy, I think that’s extremely helpful when we’ve gone through on ends in the past, we’ve only been through the epicurean sections, but Cicero does a very good job of bringing a lot of these issues together in the later books as well. And if I recall correctly, Cicero slashes and burns the stoics on this point, and in fact, I think this applies to Aristotle too. They end up taking the question of, well, what is virtue and their conclusion ends up being, well, virtue is what the best men of Athens do and that what we should do to find out what’s virtuous is just look for virtuous people and emulate them. And for that reason, they play some its emphasis like on plu tars lives and in examining the heroes of the past and talking about them all the time as if you’re going to understand what virtue is by watching virtuous people, well, there may be some merit in that as long as you know what a virtuous person is in the first place, but it’s pretty circular reasoning to just simply say, we know what is virtuous because that’s what virtuous people do ultimately, a lot of their problem derives. I think from that point and the rest of what you said as well, I thought that was an excellent presentation because people think, oh, Cicero is a stoic. Cicero wrote on duties and he’s just as much of a pro stoic person as Marcus Aurelius or anybody else who ever lived, but that’s not true. Cicero was an academic skeptic and it’s certainly not good that he didn’t like Epicurean philosophy, but he had some terrible things to say about stoicism and the word chopping that the stoics do, which is ultimately a large part of what we’re talking about today.
Joshua: I am really glad you brought up the whole circular reasoning thing that we can see virtue by what virtuous people do. That’s such a weird backended way. It’ll go about the whole thing. From what I can see when I went through and found the place where Aristotle starts to talk about the means and what he’ll do is say for instance, the trait of having fear or confidence or having that sort of trait that the deficiency is being cowardly, the excess is being reckless and just jumping into situations. And then the mean is courage. So he sees courage as a virtue because it’s between these two extremes for pleasure and pain. He’s like, you have a deficiency in it that your incentive, you just basically you don’t feel anything the other end. His excess is being self-indulgent and then right in the middle he’s saying that the mean, the virtue is being self-controlled. And so those kinds of things, I don’t think that Epicurus would have much of an argument with him, but the way he gets to those seems to me to be not the way that Epicurus would come at it as well. But the things that Aristotle comes up with in many ways it’s like, okay, well that makes sense, but his way of getting there and his way of applying them I think are dramatically different than one a way Epic cures would apply them and get to the same ideas
Cassius: As one more illustration of the direction these people are going in and why this is important. I’m going to take the liberty of citing a quote that I came across many, many years ago when I was in graduate school and it stuck with me then as being something brilliantly stated by Cicero. Of course now I see completely the opposite point of view, but in Cicero’s Republic, this formulation of what virtue would be, which of course here he says it in the form of true law. I’m going to submit to you that what I’m about to read is very closely aligned with this point of view that there is a true way of acting that is virtuous or morally excellent that everybody should follow. Here’s the quote, it’s from Cicero’s Republic book three, section 22. True law is right reason in agreement with nature. It is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting. It summons to duty by its commands and avert from wrongdoing by its prohibitions, and it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men. In vain though neither have any effect on the wicked. It is a sin to try to alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal any part of it, and it’s impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by Senate or people, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations. And all times there will be one master and ruler that is God over us all for he is the author of this law and it’s enforcing judge, whoever is disobedient is fleeing from himself and denying his human nature. And by reason of this very fact, he will suffer the worst penalties even if he escapes what is commonly considered punishment. So that’s a means of illustrating that if you believe that there is a moral excellence or single type of virtue that applies to everybody, then you’re going to go in that direction frankly, that if there’s a God that set it up, then that’s what everybody should be doing all the time everywhere, no matter who you are, how old you are, where you live, what language you speak or anything, there is something behind the concept of virtue that everyone needs to pay heed to or they’re going to be suffering the worst penalties either now or in some future life.
Joshua: And that sort of mindset is a way to really structure power and people that are saying this is the way it has to be and imposing that on everybody else. It’s definitely a way of structuring power in society too. So there’s an element of that in the whole thing. And one of the interesting things I think too, I mentioned from the Greek earlier, and I think it’s important to remember that the whole Latin word for virtue writ large tus or tus depending on your pronunciation preference, and it really has to do with being manly because it has the Latin word veer right in there and being courageous in battle and being a man of action. And those are the sort of connotations that I think it originally came in, I think it carried through, but that whole idea of virtu especially applied the Romans, many of the Romans I should say, didn’t see the epicureans as being manly. So that whole virtue versus pleasure, virtu versus opus is a big thing in the epicurean arguments in Roman times as well.
Speaker 4: So before we jump into how the epicureans responded to the claims about virtue and morality that these other philosophers were making, I think it’s important to realize that for the stoics at least virtue means living according to nature, aligning yourself with nature, and this sets up a contrast because epic also points to nature. If you read Norman DeWit, he says it a thousand times, nature furnishes the norm. Epic for his understanding of pleasure looks to the young of all species. This is how we know that pleasure is the good because newborns of all species, as soon as they’re born, they reach for pleasure and they avoid pain. This is the cue that nature has given them. And so we need to try and find an understanding here of how these two positions are different because Epicurus is not saying that there is some transcendental natural law assigned by providence written into the foundations of nature when he created it. And that’s why pleasure is the good Epicurus doesn’t believe in any of that. So this difference here, both groups of thinkers are looking to nature, not Cicero in the academics so much, but Epicurus and the stoics are both looking to nature as the guide. And the question is how does that differ? So we’ll have to consider that as we move forward.
Cassius: Joss, first of all, an answer to your question there, it seems to me that that is the important part where you get back into the epicurean physics for the epicureans nature is natural and has no supernatural God over it, but for these other guys, nature has some supernatural outside of nature force that ultimately is what they look to. And if there’s anything that distinguishes these positions, I’d say that primarily is it, but your statement there has just prompted me on something that I have to include when you start talking about the question of who’s living according to nature, people who are interested in that subject might very well enjoy reading Nietzsche’s statement in beyond good and evil, which I think is chapter one, section nine, just a small piece of it here, he’s talking to the stoics and Nietzsche says this, you desire to live according to nature. Oh, you noble stoics, what fraud of words? And then he continues on Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be in reality, however it is quite otherwise with you while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in nature, you want something quite the contrary. You extraordinary stage players and self dilu in your pride. You wish to dictate your morals and ideals to nature, to nature herself and to incorporate them therein. You insist that it shall be nature according to the stoa and would like everything to be made after your own image as a vast eternal glorification and generalism of stoicism with all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently and with such hypnotic rigidity to see nature falsely. That is to say stoically, that you no longer are able to see it otherwise and to crown it all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the mite hope that because you are able to tyrannize over yourselves, stoicism is self tyranny. Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over. It’s not the stoic a part of nature.
Joshua: Yeah, I think you could say you’re living according to nature, but then how do you define nature? Because everybody I think in those different schools is going to have a different way of seeing nature. So that’s one of the sticky wickets that whenever you use a word, what does it mean whenever you’re using it?
Cassius: Yeah, that’s exactly the point. Where does virtue come from? What is the goal of being virtuous? How do you know what virtue is and so forth. You’ve got to dig back down to that question of where this whole concept comes from in the first place in order to understand it. And of course when you take the position that there’s a divine order, you can say, well, the prime mover or this original God or whatever God is you prefer to talk about is the source of virtue. But of course in epicurean terms, the universe is eternal. The universe was not created by a supernatural God. And so the universe is what it is in terms of the atoms moving through the void and the things that arise from that process, which takes us to the question of what really then is the epicurean view of virtue? And the main point is in contrast to what the stoics and some others are saying, it is not virtue that’s the highest good but pleasure. And of course we’ve got many sources including the letter to men, the principal doctrines, many other statements throughout epicurean texts that focus on the role of pleasure as the ultimate good.
Joshua: I will offer that I don’t think there’s any better place to start than principal doctrine five because the way that he lists individual virtues there and their relationship to a pleasurable life just as a nice little encapsulization, I’ve always sort of liked that principle doctrine. So if you don’t mind, I’ll just read the Hicks translation here, which I think is a fairly good one, and then we can dig a little bit more and jump off from there if that’s okay with everybody.
Cassius: Yes.
Joshua: So Hicks translation of principle doctrine fives, it is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living pleasantly whenever any one of these is lacking, when for instance, the man does not live wisely, though he lives well and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life. So that integration of the individual virtues to the ultimate result of living pleasantly is really just bound up there together. I think you need one to have the other and seeing that as a way to encapsulate that the virtues are tools or steps on the way to living pleasantly is exactly where epicure comes down on this question. The virtues are not an end in themselves, they’re simply tools to get where you need to be.
Cassius: Exactly. And it’s interesting how people can sometimes get confused, I think because they say, okay, there’s a list of principle doctrines by Epicurus, and of course everybody knows Epicurus is concerned about pleasure. Why isn’t the very first principle doctrine a statement that pleasure is the goal of life? And principle doctrine one is not a statement about pleasure. Now, pleasure is mentioned in three, but it doesn’t really say that it’s the goal of life. Then you get to five which you just read and it’s very, very good and it implies that it’s the goal of life, but it doesn’t really come out and say it explicitly. So sometimes people can say, well, there’s something going on here that we don’t really understand and maybe pleasure is not what Epicurus is focused on, but when you get to the letter to menaces, there’s section 1 29 for example that says, and for this cause we call pleasure the beginning and the end of the blessed life for we recognize pleasure as the first good and innate in us and from pleasure, we begin every act of choice and avoidance and to pleasure. We return again using the feeling as the standard by which we judge every good. So you have that in the letter to men. There’s really just no doubt that everybody understood Epicurus to be emphasizing the role of pleasure. By the time you get 200 years later or more, you get Cicero talking about it and putting the following words in Quata mouth when he explains the epicurean view of ethics, Quata says, we are inquiring then what is the final and ultimate good, which all philosophers are agreed must be of such a nature as to be the end to which all other things are means. While it is not itself a means to anything else, this Epicurus finds in pleasure, pleasure, he holds to be the chief, good pain, the chief evil, and then Atu goes on for paragraph after paragraph and page after page explaining how all that works. But clearly instead of virtue being the goal of life, Epicurus is holding that it is pleasure. Now, we’re not going to have time to go off on a long divergence into what he means by pleasure, but to the extent that Epicurus is reducing the goal of life to a single word or a single concept, it is definitely pleasure and not virtue.
Joshua: Oh yeah, definitely. Joshua, I know that you brought up on the podcast a couple times about the painting about Epicurus being tread underfoot are the virtues on the throne in that particular painting, if I remember correctly?
Speaker 4: Yes, Don, there is a painting, I think it’s a fresco, I’m not sure, by an artist named Rafino Deni, and it’s got different titles depending on where you read, but it’s an allegory of St. Augustine as master of the order, and it’s in some church somewhere. It’s very faded, the pain is falling off in some places it looks like, and it’s difficult to make out some of the figures it was painted. It says here on this website I’m reading from in the second half of the 14th century, and at the top in the center you have St. Augustine sitting on what looks to me kind of like a throne, and then down there’s three levels below him. So the level below him on the left, you have important figures from Hebrew and Christian religion, and then on the right side you have noble pagans like Aristotle and Plato and Socrates. And then on the next level down you have personifications of the seven virtues in Christianity, and then below that writhing in misery, you have personifications of the seven vices. And in the very bottom right hand corner, you can just make out the name or part of the name of Epicurus groveling face down in the mud essentially as the personification of gluttony. This is how he was perceived in the Middle Ages. You’re right to say it’s a very striking painting and loaded with theological implications, and I think it’s typical of the way Epicurus was viewed after the end of classical antiquity by people who weren’t necessarily reading his books anymore. Instead, they were reading Pagan and Christian criticisms of Epicureanism, and this is the image that comes down to us epicurus as a glutton. You recently did an excellent presentation, Don, on this question of bread and water and what that means in relation to things like asceticism and so forth, and I thought your presentation was excellent and we should probably link to that in the thread, but this painting is going in the opposite direction. Epicurus is glutton, symbolic of gluttony and deserves to be crushed into the ground like the miserable sinner that he is.
Joshua: Yep. Yeah, that’s sort of like here are the virtues that we need to uphold and here’s the things that we need to totally stamp out and just grind into the mud. And just so happens that epicure is one of those things that needs to be grounded to the mud from the viewpoint of a number of the schools and Christianity come after.
Cassius: Okay, before we leave the subject of paintings and imagery, I want to throw in that same discussion. It took me a while to come up with this, but it’s in, I believe book two of onions as well, where another famous painting is discussed. Cicero says that Leathes is reputed to have suggested to people that they should think of a painting of a court, so to speak, with something on a throne and the subjects around the bottom of the throne paying homage to the person on the throne. And what Cthe was suggesting is that you should consider not virtue being on the throne, but pleasure being on the throne and have the subjects around who were bowing to it, beep the virtues. Andthe is saying that that should in your mind evoke such revulsion at the very thought that the virtues could be the handmaidens of pleasure. That’s a phrase you often hear people say, the idea that the virtues should be the handmaidens of pleasure is supposed to evoke the most terrible reaction in you because you’re supposed to understand the excellence of virtues. And as Joshua was just talking about the low life aspects of pleasure and that that kind of imagery is supposed to impress upon you the right order of preference between the two. And ultimately, I would link that to what we discussed earlier about how you’re supposed to understand virtue in terms of what the great men of Athens do. This is another one of these imagery issues that seeks to play on your emotions. As Quata says in Book one, those who say that the end is virtue are beguiled by the glamor of a name, and that is a repetitive aspect of this as well. These virtues that certain people are suggesting are not only being pushed on you as just simply the preferred way of living, but one of the preferred methods of encouraging people to comply is to evoke a sort of poetic or emotional connection to these virtues that overwhelms the person who really should think about where did these virtues come from and why is this person telling me to do this in this particular context when my own interests seem to be divergent from that, with the point being that these are important issues to think about. Epicurus is accused of being the philosopher of sensation and of pleasure as if he’s not the one who’s paying attention ultimately to the rationality of a situation. But there’s no reason for an epicurean ever to abandon the fact that they are the ones being rational because the ultimate way you unwind whether something is rational or not is in reference to the goal to the end, to the ultimate reason why you are doing something. You may want to stand in front of a tank like the famous picture of the student in Teman Square from some number of years ago. Is that bravery? Is that courageous or is it foolhardy? And the only way you can decide that question is to look at the issue from all the different angles that are involved because an action may be foolhardy in one situation, but in another situation, the very same action could be the height of prudence or the height of courage to carry out. We’ve been hitting on that regularly in the discussion today, but the context drives the analysis, but the context always is based on the ultimate goal. Now, for that point, there are a number of principal doctrines that probably should not go further without citing.
Joshua: One of the things I want to put in here before you go down that road is that I think it’s important to remember too that to me, whenever we talk about pleasure being the highest goal, what is the end cause of everything that you do? Somebody asks you, why did you do that? Okay, why did you do that? Why do you think that to me, the ultimate good that whenever we say that pleasure is the highest good is that that is the final answer you’re going to get. And to me, whenever people say that they’re acting virtuously or virtue is its own reward or Well, why do you do that? And it’s like, well, they might say something like, well, it gives me satisfaction to do that, or I enjoy doing good for the community, or it all comes back to pleasure if you say that you’re doing something because it makes you feel good because it gives you a sense of satisfaction. I mean, that’s pleasure. That’s the pleasure writ large at epic years talks about, and I think people try and dress up being virtuous as being, like you said, its own reward, but in the end you’re doing it because it gives you a sense of wellbeing or satisfaction or whatever synonym you want to give to it. If there’s only two feelings, there’s pleasure and pain, and if you give the reason that it gives you a quote pleasant feeling, that’s why pleasure is the highest good. I mean, that’s one of the things that I think is so frustrating about this from my perspective is that people try and dress up virtue and all these fancy clothes and fancy words and synonyms and things like that, but they’re basically saying the same thing when it comes down to the end, at least to me.
Cassius: Yeah, that’s right. We have it stated explicitly in principle doctrine number 22 where it says quote, we must consider both the real purpose and all the evidence of direct perception to which we always refer the conclusions of opinion. Otherwise all will be full of doubt and confusion. And then principle doctrine 25 says, if on each occasion instead of referring your actions to the end of nature, you turn to some other narrower standard. When you’re making a choice or an avoidance, your actions will not be consistent with your principles. So I would see those two as saying the very same thing you were just saying, Don, is that you’ve just got to always think about what the ultimate goal is and think about that in analyzing the actions you’re going to take on a day-to-day basis because otherwise it makes no sense to take actions without some type of a goal in mind.
Joshua: I found it interesting that Aristotle has a piece that really struck me whenever I was going through it, and I’m just going to read a part of it here just to give you an idea of, and I’m going to try not to scream at the end, but he says, pleasure causes us to base actions and pain causes us to abstain from doing noble actions. An index of our dispositions is afforded by the pleasure or pain that accompanies our actions. Amen is temperate if he abstains from bodily pleasures and finds this abstinence itself enjoyable. And I’m like, well, you’re right there. It’s like he’s finding this abstinence enjoyable, so you’re saying that he’s taking pleasure in this, so if you’re using that as a criticism, I mean you’ve sort of shot yourself in the foot there, so that just seems to be a circular reasoning again for Aristotle.
Cassius: Yeah, it’s so easy to get into circular reasoning if you don’t make yourself extremely clear about this question. Now, the largest, longest discussion of this question of virtue that we have in the ancient text is probably book one of own ends where Tous gives this very long discussion and goes through all of the different virtues showing how we act virtuously for the reason that we want to live happily, we don’t live happily in order to be virtuous or anything like that, he puts the horse and the cart in the correct order. One of the examples that Atu gives is in regard to his own ancestors, and this is a point that people who are attracted to stoicism probably don’t hear very often, but as Cicero pointed out to Atu, ATU ancestors were strong military leaders who charged the enemy and stole a necklace from a foe and then later on even had one of their own children executed because they disobeyed orders. They did all sorts of things that are praised by stoics, but Cicero used to confront torta and said, how can you defend your ancestors doing all these things that don’t seem to have anything to do with pleasure whatsoever? Well, Tous gives a long explanation that I won’t give all of here, but the heart of his explanation was this. Tous said, can you then suppose that those who heroic men performed their deeds without any motive at all? Tota says what their motive was. I’ll consider later on for the present, I will confidently assert that if they had a motive for those undoubtedly glorious exploits, that motive was not a love of virtue in and of itself. And then Atu goes on to a long discussion of the things that his ancestors had done, and he reconciled them all to the epicurean viewpoint by saying that this is a principle of wide application. Here’s the rest of the quote. People of your school have found a favorite field for the display of your eloquence in recalling the stories of brave and famous men of old and in praising their actions, not on utilitarian grounds, but on account of the splendor of abstract moral worth. But all of this falls to the ground if the principle of selection that I have just mentioned be established, the principle of foregoing pleasures for the purpose of getting greater pleasures and enduring pains for the sake of escaping greater pains. Point being that if you put the ultimate goal of pleasure in its proper place and you realize that sometimes you’re going to have to do certain things that are painful in order to get to that goal, then you have no problem reconciling the issue of virtuous conduct with the goal of pleasure. Sometimes virtuous conduct can be for the moment painful to undergo. Sometimes courage and other virtuous actions are very painful, but the point of the virtuous actions is the result that you’ll get from undertaking them, which is either greater pleasure or lesser pain, and that’s what Epicurus is talking about. That’s how you reconcile the fact that Epicurus places such stress on acting virtuously, but not for the purpose of simply acting virtuously, but for the purpose of getting more pleasure or less pain and therefore a happier life.
Joshua: Yeah, I think that’s a good way to sort of sum it up because the tools in the toolbox basically is the way I think of it, and then you have the ultimate, you want to build a nice house to live in, but you’re going to use all the tools at your disposal to do that, and the virtues are one of them.
Cassius: Before we move towards the end of the episode, there are so many aspects of this that we’d like to cover but just don’t have time to, but a question that our readers on the forum have brought up to us is sometimes you’ll hear stoics or others say that, well, we should not be concerned about pleasure because pleasure and the happy life. Those depend on things that are external to us. On the other hand, virtue is totally within our control, and that’s what makes it the focus of our attention is because if we focus on only those things that are within our control, then that’s the best we can do as human beings. We shouldn’t try to depend on anything that’s outside of our control. Anybody have any thoughts about that?
Speaker 4: Yes, I do. Let me point to Epicurus says, letter to a domes which only survives in three sentences unfortunately, and I’m going to read the entire thing. Epicurus says this on this blissful day, which is also the last day of my life, I write this to you, my continual sufferings from strang 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, but I would have you as becomes your lifelong attitude to me and to philosophy, watch over the children of metro Dous. That was the Hicks translation, and I’ll read the Bailey translation as well on this truly happy day of my life as I’m at the point of death, I write this to you, the disease in my bladder and stomach are pursuing their course lacking nothing of their natural severity, but against all, this is the joy in my heart. At the recollection of my conversations with you, do you as I might expect from your devotion, from boyhood to me and to philosophy, take good care of the children of metro? Doris Epicurus is on his deathbed here. He’s about to take his last drink of wine and expire, and even in this what we would think of as a miserable condition, he says that this is a blissful day on this truly happy day of my life. And the reason it’s a happy day is because he’s filled with memories which he has cultivated over a lifetime of human interaction that he is able to call to mind at his last moment. So the argument that for pleasure or tranquility, we rely on externals, whereas virtue is self-sufficient and we can provide it for ourselves. Epicurus would certainly say that you can provide pleasure for yourself. You don’t have to rely on wealth, you don’t have to rely on power or fame. You can provide everything that you need for yourself. Even the poorest and lowliest among us can provide the pleasure that we need to live happily for ourselves.
Joshua: Well put Joshua. Yeah,
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, I’m not going to be able to go into this very far either, but for people interested on that subject, there is a very interesting letter that has been preserved from, I believe it’s the 15th century 1429, a writer by the name of Cosmo Ramon, a letter to Ambrogio osi, and that letter defends Epicurus on these issues and says this as part of it. If we were indeed composed solely of a mind, I should be inclined to call Reus happy and entertain the stoic view that we should find happiness in virtue alone. But since we are composed of a mind and a body, why do we leave out of this account of human happiness, something that is part of mankind and properly pertains to it? Why do they, the stoics consider only the mind and neglect the body when the body houses the mind and is the other half of what man is? If you are seeking the totality of something made up of various parts and yet some part is missing, I cannot think it perfect and complete. We use the term human, I take it to refer to a being with both a mind and a body as for their assigning happiness to the mind alone on the grounds that it is in some sense the master and ruler of man’s body. It is quite absurd to disregard the body when the mind itself often depends on the state and condition of the body and indeed can do nothing without it. He continued on and said, I find it surprising that these clever stoics did not remember when investigating the subject that they themselves were men. Their conclusions came not from what human nature demanded, but from what they could contrive in argument. Some of them, in my view, placed so much reliance on their ingenuity and facility and debate that they did not concern themselves with what was actually relevant to the inquiry. They were carried away instead by their enthusiasm for intellectual display intended to write what was merely novel and surprising things that we might aspire to, but not one we should spend any effort in attaining. Then there were some rather cantankerous individuals who thought that we should only aim for what they themselves could imitate or lay claim to. Nature had produced some bullish and inhuman philosophers whose senses had been dulled or cut off altogether, one who took no pleasure in anything, and these people laid down that the rest of mankind should avoid what their own natural severity and austerity shrank from others. Subsequently entered the debate men of great and various intellectual abilities who all delivered a view on what constituted the supreme good according to their own individual disposition. But in the middle of all this error and confusion, Epicurus finally appeared to correct and amend the mistakes of the older philosophers and put forward his own true and certain teaching on happiness. The point is that human beings are composed of both mind and body, and it makes no sense to act as if, okay, I have control of my mind and so therefore that’s all I’m going to be concerned about. Your mind doesn’t exist unless you have a body and you need to be taking into account your entire context in order to decide whether your life is healthy or not. Bottom line being, it just makes no sense to consider that what’s under your control and reduce that down to a mental attitude because as a human being, you have many more issues to be concerned about other than those which may or may not be directly under your control. As Epicure says in the letter of men, some things are in our control, other things are not, and we do the best we can with our circumstances.
Joshua: I just want to add that this is obviously a very intricate and complicated discussion that can go in any different directions, and I definitely encourage people to stop by the epicurean friends.com forum, and we have a number of threads that address a number of these different issues. So I think that anybody who wants to delve into these deeper, there’s more than enough opportunity to take advantage of that.
Cassius: Yeah, this is clearly one of the most important topics of why the Forum exists, why we talk about philosophy at all. It really is the question of what is the purpose of life and what is the very nature of everything that we’re doing? And I think as Epicure said, from what we’ve quoted before, you’ve got to have a big picture framework in mind. And frankly, this is the question of what is the highest good? What is the pinnacle of the pyramid? What is the reason for which we do everything else? And if you go down the road of thinking virtue is its own reward, then you’re not only going to have epicurus against you, you’re going to have Cicero against you, you’re going to have Frederick Nietzche against you. You’re going to have lots of people who think through to the ultimate foundation of why are you pursuing virtue in the first place? So we don’t have time to go off in any new directions, but we are going to take the time to have some concluding statements. So Don,
Joshua: As far as closing thoughts, I want to sort of bring it home with the whole idea of the virtues as being tools for living a pleasant life. I go back to Principle doctrine 17, which my own translation is one who is just moral and virtuous, has peace of mind, but one who is unjust as overflowing with agitation, confusion, and uncertainty. And I’ve always took that to be, if you treat people virtuously, treat people justly, the chances are they’re probably going to treat you that way too. If you’re a jerk, you got to look out for everybody. You got to look out for ulterior motives. You got to keep an eye on everybody. But I think that that principal doctrine there just sort of shows me that there’s a pleasurable reason to treat people virtuously. So if you need a reason to not be a jerk, and that’s a good principle doctrine to sort of point to, you don’t need a divine mandate to treat people virtuously or to act virtuously yourself.
Cassius: That’s a great point, Don. Thank you for making that point, and thank you for being with us here today for this discussion of virtue. One of our most important topics, Joshua.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was very well said, Don. And I don’t have too much to add. I did make a chart yesterday trying to get a handle on what we mean when we talk about ethics, morality, virtue, and I’m going to post that into the episode thread, and if anyone has feedback, I’d like to hear it. And regarding what I said previously about this question of nature, aligning yourself with nature. I’m going to finish by making a book recommendation. This book was published in 2014 by Matthew Stewart, and it’s called Nature’s God, the Heretical Origins of the American Republic. It is expressly political in many ways, and so it’s outside of the scope of what we normally talk about both here on the podcast and on the forum, but it does get into deep detail discussing what we mean when we say nature. This is the question, Don, you proposed earlier in the episode. It’s not enough to just throw another word out as if that solves the big problem. We have to understand what we mean by these words. And so that book, nature’s God by Matthew Stewart is I think, helpful to shed light on the issue. The third chapter of that book is called Epicurus Dangerous Idea. One of my favorite quotes from the book is in that chapter, and Matthew Stewart says this in Epicurus. However, there was none of that compromising dialectical spirit that pervaded Aristotle in the others and allowed them to be wrestled to the ground and marked with the sign of the cross. And so there we have at Epicurus in placing the standard in pleasure rather than in virtue or morality or reason or a priority, logic or forms, really sets himself apart as a philosopher in a lot of interesting ways. That’s kind of the whole point of this series. Cassius, as we go through this list that you have on the front page of the forum, is trying to get a better understanding of what Epicurus means when he diverges as thoroughly as he does from this herd of other thinkers in the ancient world. Anyway, I thought the book was very good.
Cassius: Alright, thank you for that. Joshua. I’ll close by citing what Dogen of Olander had to say. Again, this statement about shouting to all Greeks and non-Greek that it is pleasure, that’s the end of life, is one of the most explicit statements of this. But after that paragraph, he continues on endogen, he said this. Suppose then someone were to ask, though it is a naive question, who is it whom these virtues benefit? Obviously the answer will be, man, the virtues certainly do not make provision for these birds flying past, enabling them to fly well or for each of the other animals. They do not desert the nature with which they live and by which they have been engendered. Rather, it is for the sake of this nature that the virtues do everything and exist. And of course, from the epicurean perspective, the nature of man is that we have pleasure and pain as the basis for all of our choices and avoidances. So the virtues are not there for some other purpose beyond what nature has given us. From the epicurean perspective, there is no supernatural realm, no realm of ideal forms. The reality is that we were born like every other creature to live happy lives, and virtue is therefore an indispensable, inseparable, but simply a tool for the goal of living happily, not an end in itself. These are The kind of questions we discuss at the Epicurean Friends Forum, we invite you to come there and ask us questions, give us comments, let us know what you think about this in our other podcast. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again.