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
Section titled “Summary”Cassius, Joshua, Don, and Kalosyni discuss one of Epicurus’s most controversial positions: that virtue is not an end in itself but a tool for achieving a pleasant life. The episode opens by contrasting Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics — all of whom ground virtue in divine order or a supernatural framework — with Epicurus, who holds that pleasure is the highest good and virtue is instrumentally necessary for reaching it.
The Greek word aretē (excellence/virtue) is examined along with Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean from the Nicomachean Ethics. Cicero’s critique of Epicurean hedonism in On Ends is discussed, along with Torquatus’s defense that the virtues are inseparably linked to living pleasantly (Principal Doctrine 5). Diogenes of Oenoanda’s Fragment 32 — where he shouts to all Greeks and non-Greeks that pleasure is the end of the best life — is cited as the definitive Epicurean statement on this divide. Other topics include: the medieval fresco depicting Epicurus as the personification of gluttony crushed underfoot; the painting from On Ends of Pleasure enthroned with the virtues as handmaidens; Nietzsche’s critique of Stoic “living according to nature” (Beyond Good and Evil §9); the Stoics’ claim that virtue is fully within our control while pleasure depends on externals (answered by the deathbed Letter to Idomeneus); a 1429 letter by Cosimo Raimondi to Ambrogio Tignosi defending Epicurean pleasure against Stoic claims; and Principal Doctrines 17, 22, and 25. The episode closes with Kalosyni recommending Matthew Stewart’s Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (2014).
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 at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
This week we are back with Joshua, Don, and Kalosyni, and we will 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 Consists in Sensation.” But ultimately what we are 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’s time, Plato and Aristotle had combined an appreciation of virtue both for itself and for the benefits that it brings. But as we get into the discussion, I think we will see that Plato and Aristotle 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 have all heard clichés such as “virtue is its own reward.” That is a Stoic-type conclusion that says if you look for a reward for performing virtuous acts, then you are sullying the act in itself. Virtue itself is such an excellent thing that it is 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 to 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 is inherently improper to seek any benefit from virtue, and as part of this focus on virtue as being part of a divine plan, the Stoics also held that virtue is essentially universal — that it is the same for all people at all times and all places. And that sort of makes sense, if you believe that there is 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 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 Epicurean Diogenes of Oenoanda, around AD 200 or somewhere in that time period, is renowned for having erected a stone wall that contains his tribute to Epicurus and to Epicurean philosophy. And this subject had apparently become so important by that time that Diogenes of Oenoanda included this statement in his inscription. I am about to read the translation by Martin Ferguson Smith, who is the real expert on the Oenoanda inscription. Diogenes of Oenoanda 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-Greeks, that pleasure is the end of the best mode of life, while the virtues — which are inopportunely messed about by these people, being transferred from the place of the means to that of the end — are in no way an end, but the means to the end. Let us therefore now state that this is true, making it our starting point.”
So just as Diogenes of Oenoanda said almost two thousand 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 is a subject that Diogenes was so emphatic about that he said we needed to shout about it. And we will not be shouting today as we discuss it, but there is a major, major divide between Epicurus’s view of this subject and the view of other philosophies and religions that all find a sort of supernatural basis in virtue.
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 are 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 us 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 Platonists, and the Aristotelians and the rest, let us 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 aretē. So aretē 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 is trying to get at is whatever a thing’s aretē is — the full realization of that thing’s potential, or whenever it is performing excellently. And so the early uses of the word — you could talk about the aretē of a chimney or the aretē of a hammer, as if it is performing its function well and up to the highest level that it can perform. That got later on applied to things like morals and what we think of as virtues. But it started out as something was actually performing at its highest point.
I think that is why Aristotle finally comes down to saying that the human aretē is contemplation — because it has to do with reason in the mind, and that is the highest thing that a human being can do. So that is where it sort of came down, but that is where the word started, and it morphed into all these other semantic fields that it took over.
I will also add that I can only take small bits of Aristotle over long periods of time. So in looking at the Nicomachean Ethics, I mean, he tries to define virtue there and it always seems to come around to whatever he sees as good for the city or good for people acting in a certain way. But he never — at least to my mind — really comes around to being able to define virtue. Because I think it is such a slippery topic. In my mind, it is often: if you are doing something that I do not like, then you are being unvirtuous, and that is the word I am going to use to describe you. But it is one of those things where you know it when you see it. And to try and make that the ultimate good or the goal of life — that seems a really slippery slope. If you have something that you cannot really hold onto any better than jello, and you try to make that your ultimate good, you are going to have some problems. That is why I think that Epicurus’s idea — where virtue is a tool in your life to work towards the goal of pleasure, the goal of happiness — that makes a lot more sense in my mind.
Cassius:
You do not have to scratch the surface of this topic very far before you find that everybody in the classical Greek circles seems to agree that there are several virtues that stand out above the others. There is a list of four classical virtues: prudence, fortitude or courage, temperance, and justice. And so you will see an awful lot of discussion about those as being examples of virtues. But you always have to ask this question: 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 is where you do not often get a lot of explanation. Just like Joshua was saying, they will always look back to the good of the city or the good of the state or the good of God or whatever.
And that is, 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 being 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 are attempting to comply. So simply listing out the virtues — and you can go on and on talking about lesser virtues — but just simply providing a list of them is not quite the same thing as talking about birds and pointing to different birds, because we are in a very abstract area when talking about these things. So providing the list does not really tell you: well, who has the authority to make this list? How did you come up with that list in the first place?
Joshua:
And that is where I think the contextual nature of Epicureanism is so interesting, because Epicurus really, in those later Principal Doctrines, talks about justice — because that is a particular virtue, that sort of thing — and how it can be applied and how you can use it as a tool for a more just existence. But I think that trying to define virtue writ large — like you said — it is basically you make a list of specific items, and it does not get you any closer to what the unifying factor in all of them is.
Don:
Is it not 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 is one of the interesting things that I found in the early books of the Nicomachean Ethics — that he tries to say that to act virtuously is to find the mean between the two extremes. And a lot of the things that Aristotle brings up, I really do not see that Epicurus would necessarily disagree with him. But I think his framework — I do not think Epicurus would agree with the way he was trying to set it up and the way he was defining it. Aristotle’s mean — it seems like he was trying to come up to some sort of absolute definition. And I think that Epicurus would try to get at it from a more contextual nature. It is 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 on the map and say, here is where you have to be. And Epicurus I think would say, well, let us look at the context here. What are you doing?
Kalosyni:
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 summum 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 Torquatus the Epicurean, he says: “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 profit 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 am kind of using them interchangeably here). And I am going to quote from later in this book. So again he says: “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.”
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 asks Cicero, “Why are you not a Stoic? Essentially, you are the one person of all the people in Rome I would have expected, Cicero — upstanding Roman man — to be a Stoic.” And Cicero says, “Our principles are at one, and only our language is at 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, you utterly destroy.”
So Cato is taking the position that morality is the light cast by virtue — the outer sign of an inner virtuous existence, as you might put it. I do not 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 telos, what is the highest good, how do we know it, and how do we follow it?
Cassius:
Kalosyni, let me jump back in on what you said there. You indicated you were not sure how helpful that was — but boy, I think that is extremely helpful. When we have gone through On Ends in the past, we have 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 is virtuous is just look for virtuous people and emulate them. And for that reason, they place such emphasis — like on Plutarch’s Lives — in examining the heroes of the past and talking about them all the time, as if you are 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 is pretty circular reasoning to just simply say we know what is virtuous because that is what virtuous people do. Ultimately, a lot of their problem derives 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 is just as much of a pro-Stoic person as Marcus Aurelius or anybody else who ever lived. But that is not true. Cicero was an Academic Skeptic, and it is certainly not good that he did not 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 are 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 is such a backwards way to 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 mean: what he will do is say, for instance, the trait of having fear or confidence — 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 is between these two extremes. For pleasure and pain: the deficiency means you are insensate, you just basically do not feel anything; the other end, his excess, is being self-indulgent; and right in the middle he says that the mean — the virtue — is being self-controlled.
Those kinds of things — I do not think that Epicurus would have much of an argument with him. But the way he gets to those seems to me not the way that Epicurus would come at it. And Aristotle’s means — it seems like he was trying to arrive at some sort of absolute definition. I think that Epicurus would try to get at it from a more contextual nature: what are the results of this? What happens when you make these choices? Whereas Aristotle was trying to put a point on the map. The things that Aristotle comes up with — in many ways it is like, okay, that makes sense. But his way of getting there, and his way of applying them, I think are dramatically different from the way Epicurus 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 am 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 he says in the form of “true law” — I am going to submit to you that what I am 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 is the quote — it is 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 averts 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 is 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 its 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 is 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 are going to go in that direction — frankly, that if there is a god that set it up, then that is 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 are 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 — where people who are saying “this is the way it has to be” are imposing that on everybody else. It is definitely a way of structuring power in society. And one of the interesting things too — I mentioned the Greek earlier — is that the Latin word for virtue writ large, virtus, really has to do with being manly, because it has the Latin word vir right in there, and being courageous in battle and being a man of action. Those are the sort of connotations that I think it originally carried. And that whole idea of virtus — especially applied to the Romans — meant that many Romans did not see the Epicureans as being manly. So that whole virtus versus voluptas is a big thing in the Epicurean arguments in Roman times as well.
Kalosyni:
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 is 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 Epicurus also points to nature. If you read Norman DeWitt, he says it a thousand times: nature furnishes the norm. Epicurus’s 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 are born, reach for pleasure and avoid pain. This is the cue that nature has given them.
And so we need to try and find an understanding 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 is why pleasure is the good. Epicurus does not believe in any of that. So this difference — both groups of thinkers are looking to nature: not Cicero and 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 will have to consider that as we move forward.
Cassius:
Kalosyni, first of all, an answer to your question there — it seems to me that that is the important part where you get back into Epicurean physics. For the Epicureans, nature is natural and has no supernatural god over it. But for these other guys, nature has some supernatural force outside of nature that ultimately is what they look to. And if there is anything that distinguishes these positions, I would 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 is “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 is talking to the Stoics, and Nietzsche says:
“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-deluders! 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 are no longer able to see it otherwise. And to crown it all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that because you are able to tyrannize over yourselves — Stoicism is self-tyranny — Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over. Is not the Stoic a part of Nature?”
Joshua:
Yeah, I think you could say you are living according to nature, but then how do you define nature? Because everybody in those different schools is going to have a different way of seeing nature. So that is one of the sticky wickets: whenever you use a word, what does it mean whenever you are using it?
Cassius:
Yeah, that is exactly the point. Where does virtue come from? What is the goal of being virtuous? How do you know what virtue is? You have 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 is a divine order, you can say, well, the prime mover or this original god or whatever god 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 is the highest good, but pleasure. And of course we have many sources — including the Letter to Menoeceus, the Principal Doctrines, and many other statements throughout Epicurean texts — that focus on the role of pleasure as the ultimate good.
Joshua:
I will offer that I do not think there is any better place to start than Principal Doctrine 5, because the way that Epicurus lists individual virtues there and their relationship to a pleasurable life is just a nice little encapsulation. I have always sort of liked that Principal Doctrine. So if you do not mind, I will 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 is okay with everybody.
Cassius:
Yes.
Joshua:
So the Hicks translation of Principal Doctrine 5: “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 Epicurus comes down on this question. The virtues are not an end in themselves — they are simply tools to get where you need to be.
Cassius:
Exactly. And it is interesting how people can sometimes get confused, I think, because they say: okay, there is a list of Principal Doctrines by Epicurus, and of course everybody knows Epicurus is concerned about pleasure. Why is not the very first Principal Doctrine a statement that pleasure is the goal of life? And Principal Doctrine 1 is not a statement about pleasure. Now, pleasure is mentioned in 3, but it does not really say that it is the goal of life. Then you get to 5 — which you just read — and it is very, very good and it implies that it is the goal of life, but it does not really come out and say it explicitly.
So sometimes people can say, well, there is something going on here that we do not really understand and maybe pleasure is not what Epicurus is focused on. But when you get to the Letter to Menoeceus, there is section 129, 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 Menoeceus. There is really just no doubt that everybody understood Epicurus to be emphasizing the role of pleasure. By the time you get two hundred years later or more, you get Cicero talking about it and putting the following words in Torquatus’s mouth when he explains the Epicurean view of ethics. Torquatus 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 Torquatus 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 are 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. Don, I know that you brought up on the podcast a couple of times the painting about Epicurus being tread underfoot — are the virtues on the throne in that particular painting, if I remember correctly?
Kalosyni:
Yes, Don — there is a painting, I think it is a fresco. I am not sure of the artist’s name, and it has got different titles depending on where you read. But it is an allegory of St. Augustine as master of the order, and it is in some church somewhere. It is very faded — the paint is falling off in some places — and it is difficult to make out some of the figures. It was painted, it says here on this website I am 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 below him there are three levels. 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 are right to say it is a very striking painting, and loaded with theological implications. I think it is typical of the way Epicurus was viewed after the end of classical antiquity by people who were not 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 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 as glutton, symbolic of gluttony, and deserves to be crushed into the ground like the miserable sinner that he is.
Joshua:
Yep. Yeah, that is sort of like: here are the virtues that we need to uphold, and here are the things that we need to totally stamp out and just grind into the mud. And it just so happens that Epicurus is one of those things that needs to be ground into the mud, from the viewpoint of a number of the schools and Christianity that came 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 is in, I believe, Book Two of On Ends as well, where another famous painting is discussed. Cicero says that Cleanthes 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 Cleanthes 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 — be the virtues. And Cleanthes 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 is 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 are supposed to understand the excellence of the virtues. And as Joshua was just talking about, the low-life aspects of pleasure — and 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 are 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 Torquatus 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: these are important issues to think about. Epicurus is accused of being the philosopher of sensation and of pleasure, as if he is not the one who is paying attention ultimately to the rationality of a situation. But there is 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 Tiananmen 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 have been hitting on that regularly in the discussion today. But the context drives the analysis, and the context always is based on the ultimate goal. Now, for that point, there are a number of Principal Doctrines that we 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 is important to remember too that whenever we talk about pleasure being the highest goal — what is the final 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 — whenever we say that pleasure is the highest good — is that it is the final answer you are going to get. And to me, whenever people say that they are acting virtuously, or virtue is its own reward, and you ask why — they might say something like, well, it gives me satisfaction to do that, or I enjoy doing good for the community. It all comes back to pleasure if you say that you are doing something because it makes you feel good, because it gives you a sense of satisfaction. I mean, that is pleasure. That is the pleasure writ large that Epicurus 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 are doing it because it gives you a sense of wellbeing or satisfaction or whatever synonym you want to give to it. If there are only two feelings — pleasure and pain — and if you give the reason that it gives you a pleasant feeling, well, that is why pleasure is the highest good. I mean, that is one of the things that I think is so frustrating about this from my perspective: that people try and dress up virtue in all these fancy clothes and fancy words and synonyms and things like that, but they are basically saying the same thing when it comes down to the end — at least to me.
Cassius:
Yeah, that is right. We have it stated explicitly in Principal Doctrine 22, where it says: “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 Principal 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 are 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 — you have just got to always think about what the ultimate goal is and think about that in analyzing the actions you are 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 when I was going through it, and I am just going to read a part of it here just to give you an idea. And I am going to try not to scream at the end. He says: “Pleasure causes us to do 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. A man is temperate if he abstains from bodily pleasures and finds this abstinence itself enjoyable.” And I am like — well, you are right there! It is like he is finding this abstinence enjoyable. So you are saying that he is taking pleasure in this. So if you are using that as a criticism, you have sort of shot yourself in the foot there. That just seems to be circular reasoning again for Aristotle.
Cassius:
Yeah, it is so easy to get into circular reasoning if you do not make yourself extremely clear about this question. Now, the largest and longest discussion of this question of virtue that we have in the ancient text is probably Book One of On Ends, where Torquatus 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 do not 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 Torquatus gives is in regard to his own ancestors, and this is a point that people who are attracted to Stoicism probably do not hear very often. But as Cicero pointed out to Torquatus, his 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 Torquatus and say: how can you defend your ancestors doing all these things that do not seem to have anything to do with pleasure whatsoever? Well, Torquatus gives a long explanation that I will not give all of here, but the heart of his explanation was this. Torquatus said: “Can you then suppose that those heroic men performed their deeds without any motive at all?” And Torquatus says what their motive was: “I will 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 Torquatus goes on to a long discussion of the things that his ancestors had done, and he reconciled them all to the Epicurean viewpoint. Here is 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.”
The point being: if you put the ultimate goal of pleasure in its proper place, and you realize that sometimes you are 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 will get from undertaking them — which is either greater pleasure or lesser pain, and therefore a happier life. That is what Epicurus is talking about. That is 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 is a good way to sort of sum it up, because the tools in the toolbox is basically the way I think of it. You want to build a nice house to live in, but you are going to use all the tools at your disposal to do that — and the virtues are one of them.
Cassius:
Before we move toward the end of the episode, there are so many aspects of this that we would like to cover but just do not have time to. But a question that our readers on the forum have brought up to us is: sometimes you will hear Stoics or others say that we should not be concerned about pleasure, because pleasure and the happy life depend on things that are external to us. On the other hand, virtue is totally within our control, and that is what makes it the focus of our attention — because if we focus only on those things that are within our control, then that is the best we can do as human beings. We should not try to depend on anything that is outside of our control. Anybody have any thoughts about that?
Kalosyni:
Yes, I do. Let me point to the Letter to Idomeneus, which only survives in three sentences unfortunately, and I am going to read the entire thing. Epicurus says:
“On this blissful day, which is also the last day of my life, I write this to you. My continual sufferings from strangury and dysentery are so great that nothing could increase them, but I set above them all the gladness of mind at the memory of our past conversations. But I would have you, as becomes your lifelong attitude to me and to philosophy, watch over the children of Metrodorus.” — Hicks translation.
And I will read the Bailey translation as well: “On this truly happy day of my life, as I am 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 Metrodorus.”
Epicurus is on his deathbed here. He is 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 is a happy day is because he is filled with memories which he has cultivated over a lifetime of human interaction, and which 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 do not have to rely on wealth, you do not 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.
Cassius:
Well put, Kalosyni. Yeah, Joshua, I am not going to be able to go into this very far either, but for people interested in that subject, there is a very interesting letter that has been preserved from — I believe it is the 15th century, 1429 — a writer by the name of Cosimo Raimondi, a letter to Ambrogio Tignosi. 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 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 in 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, intending to write what was merely novel and surprising — things that we might aspire to, but not ones 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 — 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 is all I am going to be concerned about. Your mind does not 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. The bottom line is that it just makes no sense to consider what is 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 Epicurus says in the Letter to Menoeceus, 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 EpicureanFriends.com forum. 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 is 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 are doing? And I think as Epicurus said — from what we have quoted before — you have 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 are not only going to have Epicurus against you — you are going to have Cicero against you, you are going to have Friedrich Nietzsche against you. You are going to have lots of people who think through to the ultimate foundation of why you are pursuing virtue in the first place.
So we do not have time to go off in any new directions, but we are going to take the time to have some concluding statements. So Don —
Don:
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 Principal Doctrine 17, which in my own translation reads: “One who is just and virtuous has peace of mind, but one who is unjust has an overflowing agitation, confusion, and uncertainty.” And I have always taken that to mean: if you treat people virtuously, treat people justly, the chances are they are probably going to treat you that way too. If you are a jerk, you have got to look out for everybody. You have got to look out for ulterior motives. You have got to keep an eye on everybody. But I think that that Principal Doctrine just sort of shows me that there is a pleasurable reason to treat people virtuously. So if you need a reason not to be a jerk, that is a good Principal Doctrine to point to. You do not need a divine mandate to treat people virtuously or to act virtuously yourself.
Cassius:
That is 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. Kalosyni?
Kalosyni:
Yeah, that was very well said, Don. And I do not 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 am going to post that into the episode thread. If anyone has feedback, I would like to hear it.
And regarding what I said previously about this question of nature — aligning yourself with nature — I am going to finish by making a book recommendation. This book was published in 2014 by Matthew Stewart, and it is called Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. It is expressly political in many ways and so it is outside 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 is 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’s Dangerous Idea.” One of my favorite quotes from the book is in that chapter, and Matthew Stewart says: “In Epicurus, however, there was none of that compromising, dialectical spirit that pervaded Aristotle and the others and allowed them to be wrestled to the ground and marked with the sign of the cross.”
And so there we have it — Epicurus, in placing the standard in pleasure rather than in virtue or morality or reason or a priori logic or forms, really sets himself apart as a philosopher in a lot of interesting ways. That is kind of the whole point of this series, Cassius — as we go through this list you have on the front page of the forum — 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:
All right, thank you for that, Kalosyni. I will close by citing what Diogenes of Oenoanda had to say. Again, this statement about shouting to all Greeks and non-Greeks that it is pleasure that is the end of life is one of the most explicit statements of this. But after that paragraph, he continues on. Diogenes says:
“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 kinds of questions we discuss at the EpicureanFriends.com Forum. We invite you to come there and ask us questions, give us comments, let us know what you think about this and our other podcasts. Thanks for your time today. We will be back again.