Episode 268 - Pleasure Is The Guide Of Life (The Role of Pleasure In Life)
Date: 02/10/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4283-episode-268-pleasure-is-the-guide-of-life-the-role-of-pleasure-in-life/
Summary
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Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 268 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucious 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 each of our podcast episodes. We’re continuing our series today on key doctrines of Epicurus, and this week and next week we’re focusing on aspects of the nature of pleasure. This week we’ll focus on how pleasure rather than virtue, as we discussed last week, is actually the guide of life according to nature, in contrast to virtue or piety or rationality or wisdom as others taught Epicurus held that pleasure is the guide to life. Today we’re going to discuss how Epicurus arrived at that conclusion and what it means for us in living our own lives. First, it’s very important to understand that when Epicurus spoke of pleasure, he meant much more than the stimulating pleasures that most people think about when they first consider the meaning of the word. We’re going to touch on that here today on the full epicurean meaning of pleasure, but we’ll reserve the main part of that discussion until we address the concept of absence of pain, which we’ll do next week. For today, we’re going to focus on the fact that almost everyone has at least a general sense of what pleasure means. It isn’t necessary to look up pleasure in a dictionary or engage in a long, abstract or logical argument about what pleasure means. Unlike virtue about which Plato and Aristotle said that we need to look to the best men of history to figure out what virtue is. Nature herself tells us through our own feelings of pleasure and pain, what it is we find to be desirable and what it is that’s undesirable. As epicure said, snow is white and honey is sweet, and we need no mathematics or geometry to understand that basic point. So given that nature gives all of us an immediate feeling of what is pleasurable, our first focus will be on the role of pleasure as part of the epicurean cannon of truth and how pleasure functions as the guide of life. Lucious states specifically that pleasure is the guide of life in this way. In book two, around line 1 67, retia says, but some in opposition to us ignorant of matter. Believe that nature cannot without the providence of the gods in such nice conformity to the ways of men, vary the seasons of the year and bring forth crops. Yes, and all the other things which divine pleasure. The guide of life prompts men to approach escorting them in person and enticing them by her fonds to continue their races through the arts of Venus, that mankind may not come to an end. Of course, the creatures also started off as poem with a beautiful description of how pleasure represented by Venus leads all living things on to do the things that they do and to continue their kind. Now, I’m not going to read all of that, but to sort of set the mood for today and the role of pleasure, let me read just a part of it. Mother of Aeneas, sons joy of men and Gods Venus, the life giver who beneath the gliding stars of heaven, Phyllis with life, the sea that carries the ships and the land that bears the crops for thanks to thee. Every tribe of living things is conceived and comes forth to look upon the light of the sun. Thou goddess thou does turn to flight. The winds and the clouds of heaven thee it thy coming for the earth. The quaint artificer puts forth her sweet sed flowers for the levels of ocean smile and the sky. Its anger past gleams with spreading light for when once the face of spring day is revealed and the teeming breeze of the west wind is loose from prison and blows strong first the birds in high heaven herald the goddess and thine approach their heart’s thrilled with thy might. Then the tame beasts grow wild and bound over the fat pastures and swim the racing rivers so surely in chained by thy charm, each follows thee in hot desire with or thou GOs before to lead him on yay. Through seas and mountains and tearing rivers and leafy haunts of birds and verdant planes, thou does strike fond love into the hearts of all and make us them in hot desire to renew the stock of their races each after their own kind. Now La Lucretius goes on and talks about how he’s asking Venus to come and help him in the composition of his poem, how he would like Venus to help bring peace to the Roman world so that he can concentrate on writing his poem. But here in this first section before Lucretius has done anything else, he’s calling everyone’s attention to the central role of pleasure as the guide of everything that living beings do here on earth. Now as we go forward, we’ll see that this same view is well entrenched in Epicurus own writing and throughout Epicurean philosophy. So there’s no significant doubt about the central role of pleasure in Epicurean philosophy, but the reason it is so important is that this question still causes a lot of confusion, especially when people start thinking about happiness as the goal of life. And in confronting that word happiness, they have to come to some understanding of, well, what exactly is happiness? There’s all sorts of conceptions that that word can include, many of which are not at all associated with pleasure, some of which are, and what our task is in understanding Epicurean philosophy is to decide how pleasure fits in as guide of life rather than the alternatives that people talk about. We continue to hear today there’s many different possibilities for what the guide of life should be. Large numbers of people say that the guide of life should be to conform yourself to the way that God would have you to act. That’s a version of piety in which the pattern of life that’s set forth in some holy book or by priests or by divine revelation should be the way you lead your life. Others who aren’t necessarily quite so religious will consider that the word virtue or goodness is the right description for how to live your life. We talked about that last week in how those who say that virtue is its own reward say that you should conform all of your activity to concepts of virtue that the best men of society will tell you how to emulate. There are others who will suggest that some form of rationalism or logic such as Plato and Pythagoras were doing in the ancient world with geometry or mathematics or just some type of pure logic that is not connected to the census and in fact is suggested to transcend the census that that should be the guide of life. So as we start out our discussion today, our emphasis will be on the fact that Epicurus has identified this question of what should be the guide of life as the central issue to be determined, and he’s rooted his answer in the faculty of pleasure and pain, which nature provides directly to each and every individual.
Joshua: Yes, Cassius, and in addition to the three of piety and virtue and reason or rationalism or logic, a priori logic that you’ve isolated there as alternatives to pleasure as the guide of life, as the telos Cicero in on ends gives a list of other very minor philosophers and each of them coming up with their own opinions saying that, well, pleasure and morality or pleasure and virtue and so forth. Epicurus, I think is pretty courageous in taking the position that he takes, which is we don’t have to put virtue on the same footing or the same level that we put pleasure and Epicurus must have known he was going to get a lot of grief from these other philosophers for giving the appearance of demoting virtue, demoting reason, demoting logic and putting pleasure in that place on as we’ve talked about in the thought experiment of the painting, ofthe putting pleasure on the throne with virtue as her handmaidens virtue as her attendance. And this in the mind. Ofthe is supposed to drive us to anger and frustration. We’re supposed to be repulsed by the idea that pleasure would be on the throne rather than virtue or some of these other qualities. But Epicurus himself is quite clear that we are dealing with pleasure as the guide that’s Lucious divine pleasure, the guide of life Epicurus in the letter to Manus starting around Section 1 29 writes this, and for this cause we call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life for we recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us and from pleasure, we begin every act of choice and avoidance and to pleasure. We return again using the feelings as the standard by which we judge every good and we’re going to get into a little bit here how pleasure is not just in ethics held up as the guide in Epicurus canons and his epistemology. He’s also using the feelings as a standard, which is kind of what the word canon means. It’s a rule or a measuring stick by which you judge other things. So he says, using the feeling of pleasure as the standard by which we judge every good. It’s true in ethics and as we’re going to see in a little bit, it’s also true to an extent in canons pleasure and pain is part of how we understand information about the world that we’re living in and about ourselves. He goes on to say, and since pleasure and since pleasure is the first good and natural to us for this reason, we do not choose every pleasure, but sometimes we pass over many pleasures when greater discomfort accrues to us as the result of them. And similarly, we think many pains better than pleasures since a greater pleasure comes to us when we have endured pains for a long time. Every pleasure then because of its natural kinship to us is good. Yet not every pleasure is to be chosen even as every pain also is an evil, yet not all are always of a nature to be avoided and he continues in section one 30 in the letter he says, yet by a scale of comparison and by the consideration of advantages and disadvantages, we must form our judgment on all these matters for the good on certain occasions we treat as bad and conversely the bad as good. I’m going to reread that he said in section 1 29, every pleasure then because of its natural kinship to us is good. Yet not every pleasure is to be chosen even as every pain also is an evil, yet not all are always of a nature to be avoided. And then in section one 30 he says, for the good pleasure on certain occasions we treat as bad and conversely the bad is good. We’re going to develop this theme at great length in our next episode in the coming weeks, but I want to make it very clear here that in the letter to Menno said, section one 30, even though he says, for the good on certain occasions we treat as bad, pleasure is always good, every pleasure is always good. Not every pleasure is advantageous. Not every pleasure is to be chosen. We have this rubric of choice and avoidance, choosing pleasures, choosing pains when sometimes we think that enduring that pain will yield greater pleasure or allow us to escape even greater pain. But there should be no confusion here that every pleasure is good, every pain is evil. I started to thread this week about a poem by Alexander Pope called Essay on Man and in this poem, in his essay on man, which gave us the famous quote, the proper study of mankind is man, he’s trying to figure us out human beings, and he comes to the conclusion that pleasure should be held up as the guide, but he says that pleasure rightly understood is the greatest good pleasure wrongly understood is the greatest evil for Epicurus. All pleasure is good. Full stop, right? All pain is evil. Full stop. The moment you start picking and choosing which pleasures are good and which are bad, or which pains are good or which are bad, you have removed pleasure as the standard and put something else in its place, right? If you say that for example, only pleasures that lead to virtue are good, well then you’re not holding pleasure as the standard. You’re holding virtue as the standard, and I think we need to be very clear about this because Epicurus is always holding pleasure as the standard in ethics and we should not lose sight of that. Now he calls it many things there in section 1 29, he says, and for this we call pleasure the beginning and end of a blessed life. He says, we recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us. And he says that the feeling of pleasure is a standard by which we judge every good. So in this episode, we’re using pleasure is the guide of life, as Lucious says, Duke’s vita divine pleasure, the guide of life, but we shouldn’t refrain therefore from calling it the good Epicurus is very clear on this we call pleasure not just good agathon in Greek, but the good tag athon in Greek and lucious in the prom to book six doesn’t expressly state it, but he does say this. He says, so he the master epicurus then by his truth speaking words, purged the breasts of men and set the bounds of lust and terror and exhibited the supreme good. Wither we all endeavor and showed the path whereby we might arrive thereunto by a little crosscut straight and what of ills in all affairs I mortals, UpSpring, and flitted deviously about whether by chance or force since nature thus is destined and from out, what gates a man should Sally to each combat? There again, you see choice and avoidance, but pleasure in lucretius. Here is the supreme good in Latin sum bonum, it goes by many names in Epicurean philosophy. It is the guide, as you rightly say, it is the telos, the end or goal? It is Agathon good tag. Aon the good summa Bonnum the greatest good. This is the role of pleasure in epicurean philosophy and that’s probably the most important thing to say about it I think. So it’s good that we’re going through this, but of course when you talk about this and you have people likethe saying it’s morally reprehensible to hold pleasure up in that position to put pleasure on the throne with the virtues as handmaidens to pleasure. We have a lot of pushback in the ancient world, in the middle Ages, mostly from Christianity and in our own time we have a lot of pushback to the idea that pleasure should be held up as the guide of human life and that is going to merit I think some conversation this morning.
Cassius: Yes, it is Joshua, we’re going to move in a moment to discussing how Epicurus came to this conclusion and sort of the argument that he used in support of it, but it really makes sense to stress what you’ve just read from the letter to Menist before we go much further, because it’s amazing how people seem to just hear this explanation and it rolls out of their minds like water off a duck’s back. The question that everyone seems to be drawn to is, well, pleasure means immediate gratification. It means the pleasures of the moment. And obviously Epicurus must be talking that we should prioritize the pleasures of the moment because if you’re not prioritizing those pleasures of the moment and you’re actually embracing pain for the moment, that would totally contradict the idea that pleasure is the goal. And it’s very frustrating to hear that kind of an argument, but the best thing to do is to just try to talk someone through this because epicure clearly states that the total result, the end result, not only the result over time, but also the question of intensity, duration and parts of the body that are involved is the way that you are going to weigh pleasures. Now, again, we’re going to come back to that later on in our discussion today about how pleasures differ from each other. But the initial point is there are going to be many times when you’re going to actively embrace, at least for the moment activities that are painful to you but not to cause alarm in anyone’s mind. The reason you are embracing pain for the moment is because that activity that is currently painful to you is going to bring you an amount of pleasure that is going to outweigh the pain that you endure. There’s many examples, there’s many jokes about deferred gratification and placing marshmallows in front of children and saying that you’re going to have two in five minutes if you’ll just not eat the first one for that period of time. And we tend to trivialize, I think, what’s involved in that kind of thing. But it’s obvious when you think about it that if your goal is the greatest pleasure in your life, you do not measure that goal in terms of minutes or seconds or hours. You consider all of the factors that I just mentioned, not only the time, but also the intensity, also the parts of your body that are being affected. You may have an irritation on your finger or something that lasts a very long time, but the rest of your life can be extremely pleasurable while you are enduring that nuisance on your finger and any rational person is going to understand that the pleasure from the rest of your life can easily outweigh the momentary disadvantages that you may not be able to avoid. Bottom line is that Epicurus made this very, very clear that we sometimes will choose activities that are painful in order to, in the end have a result that is more pleasurable. It should not be very difficult to understand. It’s not very complicated, and yet it’s probably the number one stumbling block out there when people hear about epicurean philosophy for the first time, all of us are tempted to prioritize immediate pleasure, but as epicure says, as Lucretius explains to live your life successfully, it’s necessary to have a philosophy of life, to have an understanding of what’s going on, to have a realization that your life is not going to be over two seconds from now in most cases, that you look past the moment and arrange the activities of your life so that the total result is going to be the most pleasure that is possible to you.
Joshua: Yeah, people who come into PE curan philosophy from someplace on the internet that summarizes it quickly and poorly, perhaps people tend to deviate to one of two extremes, which is Epicurus was gorging himself on food and then throwing up so he could eat more. That’s the gluttony extreme or you have the extreme of asceticism. Epicurus talks about pleasure, but he doesn’t actually value pleasure. He values simplicity or he values freedom from any possible disturbance, tranquility. And the response to that is epicurus is that neither of those extremes, Epicurus is striking a position of balance here. And as you say, Cassius, this is a great stumbling block for people, but it’s also something that shouldn’t be as hard as it seems to be. The idea that sometimes you recognize not even that you choose pain, you recognize that you have to endure a certain amount of pain in order to avoid future pain. Going to the dentist to have a cavity filled isn’t pleasant, neither is putting that off and having to deal with the pain of the cavity. We make these decisions every day. It shouldn’t be as hard I think, as people sometimes make it out to be.
Cassius: Yeah, the dentist example is a great and clear example of the overall concept that’s involved here, and it’s one that you have to think about. This is another angle that comes from treating Epicurus as if he’s a life coach or a therapist or a clinician and that he’s recommending, well, you’re doing the wrong things in your life. You should be pursuing pleasure every moment of your life. Well, that’s true, but you have to think about what it means to pursue pleasure. Every moment of your life and every moment of your life is not going to be candy, ice cream and cake, it’s going to be occasionally going to the dentist. It’s going to be occasionally going to the doctor and having things that temporarily may be painful for you in order that you can live the happiest life possible in general through better health. Boy, that is the example that Lucretius uses, isn’t it? From the opening of book one and several times during the poem, the task of the philosopher is to rim the medicine cup with honey so that you can drink down the medicine that may be temporarily unpleasant for you to drink, but that will bring you health and a much better life for having drunk the medicine. Retia uses several examples of this in his poem, and that’s exactly why. Again, this is a philosophy that takes time to understand. It’s not a magic pill. It’s not something that you can apply in a superficial unthinking manner to just go out and pursue pleasure, which will lead to disaster unless you understand the way Epicurus has explained it. Quais says it as well that people don’t pursue pain because it’s pain or avoid pleasure because it’s pleasure, but they find other goals in life because they don’t understand how to follow pleasure and pain intelligently. That’s one of the many aspects of Epicurean philosophy that he has a lot of good advice on. But again, today we’re focusing on this question of is it right in the first place to consider pleasure to be the goal? And what we’ve already discussed is one of the major aspects of that. It is correct to understand that pleasure is the goal because you’re understanding that the goal is not the immediacy of the moment. The goal is all of the results, not only over time, not only now and in the future, but also intensity parts of the body, the other aspects of your life that are involved in deciding whether you are happy or not. Every aspect of your life comes into play and the way to set pleasure as the goal is to consider each and every aspect of your life and all of the results, all of the consequences that are going to follow. As epicure says, you make each decision considering what is going to happen if you make this choice or if you don’t make this choice. And when you consider those things, that’s what you’re doing. You’re calculating out to the best of your ability, the future consequences of your actions, and you’re making each action with the goal of maximizing your pleasure, minimizing your pain in the full context of your entire life. Now, we’ll continue to touch on this as we go forward, but let’s go ahead now and discuss, okay, Epicurus, you’ve suggested to us that pleasure is the goal of life. Well, what is your evidence for that? And there’s two primary ways to get at that. As we’ve already quoted Epicurus, he’s told us that pleasure is the first good and it’s natural to us. Well, the elaboration that we have on that in book one around line 30 of on ends is this where Quata says, every creature as soon as it is born, seeks after pleasure and delights therein, as in its supreme good while it recoils from pain as its supreme evil and banishes that so far as it can from its own presence. And this it does while still uncorrupted and while nature herself prompts unbiased and unaffected decisions. So he says that we have no need for reasoning or debate to show why pleasure is a matter for desire and pain for aversion. These facts he thinks are simply perceived just as the fact that fire is hot, snow is white and honey sweet, no one of which facts are we bound to support by elaborate arguments. It’s enough merely to draw attention to the fact. And there’s a difference between proof and formal argument on the one hand and a slight hint and the direction of attention on the other. The one process reveals to us mysteries and things under avail, so to speak, the other enables us to pronounce upon patent and evident facts. Moreover, seeing that if you deprive a man of his senses, there’s nothing left to him. It is inevitable that nature herself should be the arbiter of what is an accord with or oppose to nature. Now, what facts does she grasp or with what facts is her decision to seek or avoid any particular thing concerned unless the facts of pleasure and pain? So what we’ll talk about for a few minutes now are these two aspects of arguing that pleasure is the goal. The first being that this is something obvious just like fire is hot, snow is white and honey is sweet, and all you have to do is direct your attention to this feeling which is immediate to you and given to you by nature. And you’ll understand that pleasure in this generic sense is the goal of life. But Epicurus also mentions, and Quata says that some epicurean stress this more than others do, but it’s still a part of it that even though you don’t really have to have an elaborate logical argument about this, there are things in life such as the existence of Adams and void as an example that are as if under avail and that you can’t see directly by observing it. And this is one of the more intricate aspects of whether this is actually epicurus as argument or just his followers later on. But in addition to simply saying that you can perceive it through your senses when you find pleasure, you can also observe that there are logical ways of arguing this, such as that nature herself doesn’t give us any faculty other than pleasure and pain by which to decide what to choose and what to avoid. Now you’re going to immediately have a chorus of objections that nature gives us reason, our mind and our ability to contemplate is given to us by nature. But in the end, the ability to reason logic, mathematics, geometry and so forth, can’t tell us what we should be doing unless there is some evaluative direct understanding we have of what is desirable and what is undesirable. And epicurus is pointing the way to pleasure and pain as the natural basis, the only basis given to us by nature for what is desirable and undesirable. So again, there’s these two methods and let’s talk about that for a few minutes before we go further, because some people will take the position that this is obvious, we don’t need any further discussion. There’s lots of people out there who want to discuss to death everything. Do we leave those people totally unsatisfied that there’s no way for us to reason ourselves to this conclusion or at least give any reasons in support of the conclusion? And I think what we’re seeing here in Quata is sort of a combination of the two that the senses are perceiving directly, that pleasure is pleasurable, pleasure is desirable, but also the mind is able to understand these things by thinking about the evidence that we have and concluding that this must be the case just like we conclude that Adams and void exist and must be the underlying functioning of nature. There’s a combination of perception of pleasure and pain and the ability of the mind to understand that this is also true.
Joshua: Those are good points, Cassius, and we are going to go next into the question of applying reasoning to this. But before we do that, one of the things we see in this passage is we’re getting this from Torti, we’re getting this from Cicero. Epicurus isn’t saying this directly, but as we’ve discussed many times, Cicero is not totally unreliable even though he is a hostile source on Epicureanism, he’s not totally unreliable in part because if he was totally unreliable, we would’ve heard about it from the epicureans who were in his circle at the time. Cicero here in on ends has Tous, his epicurean. Interlocutor say that we look to nature, we look to the young of all species. And there’s an argument later in the book, Cicero, in book two of V ends answers Torti in the first book at length. He criticizes Torti views on everything, but his criticism on this point is very stringent because for Cicero, nature is not something to be held up as the arbiter of what is good. Nature is something weak in ourselves that we have to overcome. This view of things was inherited by Christianity, which is why you have paintings of St. Jerome with a rock in his hand because he’s mortifying his flesh, beating his chest with a rock in order to push aside thoughts of pleasure. And ironically, it comes full circle because for St. Jerome, the greatest pleasure was reading Cicero and he had a dream in which God said, what is the condition of your soul? And he says, I’m a Christian. And God says, no, you’re not a Christian. You’re a ceron. You spend more time with his books than you do with mine. And Jerome throws away all of his works of Cicero and dedicates the rest of his life to translating the Bible into Latin, which is how you get the Vulgate. The idea that nature, particularly human nature, is something vile and contemptible and despicable and gross and base and mean, and it’s something that we have to work very hard throughout our lives To overcome that is antithetical to Epicurus view about nature, about looking to the young all species. Because Cicero says, why would you look to the young all species? Why would you look to those who have no life experience, no education, who have not learned discipline, who haven’t had to work a day in their lives? Why would you look to that when what you should be doing is you should be looking to humans who have lived a life. You should be looking at humans who have a lifetime of experiences that they can call upon. You should be looking to illustrious men who have been tested by adversity and who have overcome nature, who have used their education or their philosophy or their physical training, their experience in war, in politics, you should be looking to these men who have overcome nature and who live lives of moral excellence and of virtue, and that should be the goal. So Cicero is not at all interested in hearing Epicurus or Torti talk about looking to every creature as soon as it is born, seeking after pleasure because for Cicero, that is precisely what we need to overcome in ourselves. So we have a wide divergence here as we do on so much else in the ancient world. The question of where does knowledge of the good come from? And for some people knowledge of the good comes from, for Christians for example, it comes from revelation, it comes from the gospel, and it comes from the life of Jesus Christ. For people like Plato, again, nature, the world of sense, perception is flawed and muddled and confused and its logic, apriori logic and geometry that is going to lead you to knowledge of the good, knowledge of what is supposed to be the guide in your life. So we have widely divergent claims on this point, and I won’t dwell on that at any greater length than I have. But it is important to know that just going up to someone and saying, well, every creature as soon as it is born, seeks after pleasure and delights therein, is it supreme? Good? So clearly pleasure is the supreme good Cicero, Plato, these guys are not going to take that lying down, and that’s important to understand as well.
Cassius: Yes. And Joshua, before we move on to the issue of whether you can reason your way to the same conclusion or not, I’d like to point out something that I don’t think we emphasize often enough and we were just talking about how here’s Quata telling us to look at the young of all species. Of course, basically that’s what Lucretius is doing as well in the very opening to the poem that we quoted earlier in this episode of the podcast, he’s saying, look at all of these animals out there who nature is stirring to continue their kinds and do all the things that they do. This observation of the way things are argument is clearly in lucious just as well as it’s being stated by quata. But one thing that we don’t always mention in this regard, we emphasize the young of all species, but I’d like to repeat this part of what Quata says that every creature as soon as it is born, seeks after pleasure and delights therein as its supreme good and recoils some pain as the supreme evil. But then he goes on and says, and this it does while still uncorrupted and while nature herself prompts unbiased and unaffected decisions. So it’s an important observation that living things can become corrupted. Perverted is a word other translators used by false religions, by false philosophies. In other words, there’s no magic cutoff necessarily that a puppy or a kitten knows better for itself. What is the goal of its life than a 1-year-old cat or one-year-old dog? It’s only if something has intervened to corrupt them that will break this connection with nature that the argument would go in a different direction. Because as long as you’re in contact with this calling of nature, and frankly, that’s what Epicurus is setting out as always for us to do, set the goal of nature in its seat and always call everything to the tribunal of the goal of nature else. You’ll be confused else. You’ll be unable to determine what’s right and what’s wrong. As long as you’re able to do that, then it’s nature herself that will prompt unbiased and unaffected decisions and that would apply to humans as well as it would apply to any other animal. But you’re exactly right that the stoics and academic skeptics and others, they don’t like these animal arguments because we are better than animals. We are higher than animals, and it’s ridiculous to compare yourself to a cow or to some other animal as the goal of life because we can do so much better than that. Well, that’s another example of how Epicurus is saying. Think about what the term pleasure means. And if you think that you are no better than a cow, then maybe you should be out in the field eating grass all day, but you are a human being and you have all sorts of other abilities that cows don’t have by which you can experience pleasure through your mind and through all sorts of activities that other animals don’t have. But that’s no reason to separate out and say that their goal is different than yours. From the natural perspective, at its most general level, pleasure is the goal of every living thing. And then you apply the capabilities that nature gives you to attain pleasure in the ways that you have available to you. Not every human is able to see. Not every human is able to hear. Not every human is able to have as creative a brain as other humans have, but within the capacities that we do have, it still makes sense to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, whether you’re a one day old baby or whether you’re the genius of the ages at the height of their ability at 50 years old. In each and every case, your context is going to determine what is possible for you. But from a general philosophical framework, it’s pleasure. That is your goal.
Joshua: One last thing on nature versus looking to illustrious men, there’s a quote from Epicurus. He says, flee from all indoctrination, blessed one, and set sail in your own little boat. I think this relates directly to what you’re talking about Cassius, which is it’s not just looking to nature or human nature, it’s looking to nature uncorrupted by false ideas, by fear. Epicurus despises fear, especially fear about false dangers like death, like punishment in the afterlife and so forth, flee from all indoctrination and set sail in your own little boat. And there’s many other quotes in Epicurus about dropping anchor in a safe harbor. And the idea is for the Greeks of his time, the symposium is the place that you send unruly boys so that you can turn them into future leaders of the state. And for Epicurus, the training that they get in the symposium tells them to deny that which is most important and most essential in themselves, which is the pursuit of pleasure. And so when he says it’s variously translated, he’s talking about public education or flee from the schools and so forth. And people have latched onto that and said, Epicurus is an ignoramus who hates education. It’s not that he hates education, it’s that he hates indoctrinating young people in false ideas that lead to unhealthy behavior patterns later in life, unhealthy thought patterns later in life, like being terrified in the face of death, like false beliefs about what happens after you die and so forth. So a lot more to be said on that, but I’ll leave it there.
Cassius: Yeah, the training is extremely important. As an illustration of that, we could have opened this podcast and said, just look over there, think about your sensations. Snow is white, honey is sweet, some things are pleasurable, some things are painful. You know that directly from nature without anybody telling you, enjoy talking to you today, see you next week. And we could have just left the argument at that point because we’re pointing to the obvious aspects of pleasure and pain. And ultimately that is the most potent argument in support of Epic’s position. But it is certainly possible to communicate with people, think about abstract ideas, think about words and the meanings behind them and explain how this works. ATU goes into a lengthy discussion in Book one about how pleasure is the goal of life and not virtue. And that explanation is an example I think right there of how the reasoning process can be used to bolster the direct communication from nature about what’s pleasurable or what’s painful to you. And as one very brief and basic example, Dogen EU records at 10 34 about the epicureans that quote, the internal sensations they say are two pleasure and pain, which occur to every living creature, and the one is akin to nature and the other alien by means of these two choice and avoidance are determined. And to elaborate on that, Quata says in book one that therefore epicurus refuse to allow that there is any middle term between pain and pleasure. What was thought by some to be a middle term, the absence of all pain was not only itself pleasure, but the highest pleasure possible. And here’s the key sentence. Surely anyone who is conscious of his own condition must necessarily be either in a state of pleasure or in a state of pain. Now, I would submit to you that is an example of logical reasoning. If you’ve come to the conclusion that there are no alternatives other than one pleasure or two pain, then if you’re not in one, you’re in the other and Atu later on says that nothing could be more true, nothing could be more positive than a statement like that because you’ve basically set it up as a mathematical equivalency. Those are ways to approach the issue of pleasure and pain and how they relate that go beyond saying, look over there or feel this. Your mind can grasp that these relationships exist and can be utilized to understand how to make your life happier. So this issue of pleasure being the goal, nature tells us directly, and frankly, that’s the best evidence on which you can then reason that this is the right conclusion. So after pointing out that pleasure is the goal of life, we also wanted to mention today that Epicurus considered pleasure and pain to be part of his canon of truth. Norman Dewitt says it this way in his book, Epicurus in His philosophy, this means that pleasures and pains are nature’s go and stop signals on all levels of existence that of the lower animals included. They’re distinct from the sensations by two removes in the meaning of the canon. Sensation is restricted to sensory stimulus. It’s the intelligence that registers recognition or non-recognition. It is the feelings that register pain or pleasure. These are accompaniments of sensation as Aristotle had observed in advance of Epicurus, the prevailing belief that Epicurus was an empiricist has led scholars to merge the feelings with the sensations. It’s true that both may be called by the Greek word pathe, but this coincidence of predicate is offset by logical absurdities. Since the sensations are confined to the five senses, the merging of the feeling with the sensations would exclude fears and hopes and all the higher emotions. Again, since Epicurus reduces all sensation to touch the merging of the feelings would confine these also to touch still again according to Epicurus, the higher emotions which are included in the feelings have a different seat from the sensations deep in the breast. How then could they be one with the sensations? Lastly, unless the feelings are something distinct from sensations and anticipations, Epicurus would lack a criterion on the level of the higher emotions where the issue of happiness and unhappiness is ultimately decided. Okay? Now the point that DeWitt’s making here is that pleasure and pain are separate from the five senses. Pleasure and pain operate not only on the five senses, but they operate on everything that comes to our attention at all. And of course, our attention, our minds, our souls are operating at various levels. They’re not only just registering the results of what the five senses tell us at any particular moment, but our thought processes and our emotions that are also self-generated within us are also being evaluated by pleasure and pain. We are all certainly familiar that what we’re thinking about at a particular moment can be generating pleasure or pain within us. Even though we’re not touching or seeing something at that moment, our thoughts, our emotions can be much more significant to us than anything that our senses are bringing to us at that moment. So pleasure and pain are operating as a criteria, evaluating not only the sensations but also what’s going on in our minds, our emotions, our thoughts and our conclusions. And as such, they are serving as one of the three legs of Epicurus canon of truth by which we decide what is real and true to us. In other words, one of the points that we’ve been stressing today is that it’s not the pleasures of the moment that are ultimately the goal of life. It is the full context, the full extent all of the consequences of our actions and the pleasure or pain that results from those that ultimately is our guide. And that is an example of how pleasure and pain are operating at a level separate from the immediate responses of the five senses because we have to think through the consequences of our actions, again, beyond the pleasures and pains of the immediate moment to consider the pleasures and pains that we can expect to arise in the future. And it’s in this sense that we are going to ultimately decide what to do in the moment because the feelings of pleasure and pain are going to ultimately lead us to pass on what is the right course of conduct. To back up for just a moment, the context in which we’re discussing this now becomes easier to see. I think when you consider that having decided that pleasure is the guide of life that doesn’t answer every question that’s going to come to you in your life, you’re going to have to evaluate the circumstances of your life so that you can then plan how best to achieve your goal. Having identified pleasure as the goal doesn’t get you moment by moment to where you need to be. The entire purpose of Epicurus is cannon of truth, is to help us separate the real from the illusory. As Lucretius discusses in book four at length, there are many situations in life where we think we see things that are not really there. We deal with illusions of OACs in the desert of oars that appear to be bent of hallways that seem to converge but really don’t. And we have to have a mechanism for separating out things that are illusions from things that are ultimately true and this process of determining what is true so that we can then act wisely, so that we can then decide those things which are most likely true, those things which are not likely true, those things which are possibly true requires a process of evaluation in which we have a dependable reference point. We test visible illusions using the eyes repeatedly from different distances and over time, and we test illusions as to what is going to bring us happiness by testing through the use of the faculty of pleasure and pain at different times and from different perspectives. So as Dogen ISTs talks about when he explains the canon to us, he tells us that quote, thus in the canon, epicure says that the tests of truth are the sensations and the preconceptions and the feelings for he says all sensation is irrational and does not admit of memory for it is not set in motion by itself, nor when it is set in motion by something else. Can it add to it or take from it. So as part of the cannon, in addition to the senses, you need the continuing faculty of pleasure and pain so that you can constantly be taking all of the input, not only that the senses give you without remembering anything or without giving you any opinion, but also considering the memories that you do have in your mind and your own thought processes. And those require an evaluation of pleasure and pain that is separate from the immediacy of the five senses themselves. So in addition to considering pleasure to be the guide of life, pleasure and pain are also with us always as a faculty of nature that we’re going to be using in this process of deciding when we need to avoid or delay a certain pleasure or when we need to embrace a particular pain. Here’s a very important implication of what we’ve been discussing so far with pleasure as the goal of life and pleasure and pain as parts of the cannon of truth. In addition to the stumbling block of people thinking that the immediate pleasures of the moment is what Epicurus is talking about, there’s another stumbling block, and this is the question of, okay, Epicurus says that pleasure is the goal of life. I get a lot of pleasure by sitting on the floor of a cave staring at a candle. Therefore, it is perfectly appropriate for me to spend my entire life sitting on the floor of a cave in isolation staring at a candle because I get pleasure from that and pleasure is the goal of life according to Epicurus. Therefore, I am living a perfectly epicurean life by choosing to devote my life to the austerity of living in my cave, staring at my candle. Here’s where Norman Dewitt introduces this aspect of pleasure as a criteria of action and a criteria of truth. He says, it would also be obligatory should the feelings be merged with the sensations to ignore all gradations of pleasure, which Epicurus did not like. Plato and Aristotle, Epicurus recognized the existence of higher and lower pleasures and he employed the same terminology. The pleasures of the flesh are denoted by the noun, hedon and the verb hema, the higher pleasures by the noun eufor soon. And the verb, for instance, it is the latter verb he employs when he speaks of the higher enjoyment experienced by the wise man in attendance among public spectacles and also when he speaks of the serene joy with which the wise man approaches the end of life. He has still another synonym to employ Kara when he denies that unlimited wealth can bring any worthwhile happiness, and he uses the same word of that peak of happiness that comes from the confident expectation of health of the body and peace of mind. These are feelings but not sensations in the meaning of the cannon. Okay, the point here being that when you say pleasure is the goal of life, you don’t default to the position that any and every pleasure is the goal of life. As we discussed earlier, all pleasures are desirable, but that does not mean that all pleasures are equally desirable at the very basic level. You have to be able to calculate how desirable a pleasure is in order to offset pleasures against pain. And so it’s also important to observe that Epicurus did not advise any particular type of pleasure as the most desirable epicurus knew that pleasures differ in intensity, duration, and parts of the body affected. And we see that stated as a premise of principle doctrine number nine in which Epicurus explained that these differences are why pleasures are not all the same. Principle doctrine nine says, if every pleasure could be intensified so that it lasted and influenced the whole organism or the most essential parts of our nature, pleasures would never differ from one another. Now, Epicurus regularly speaks in these if then statements that highlight the fact that something that he’s suggesting as an if is not true. And this would be an example of that because pleasures do differ one from another in the ways that he’s listed in their intensity in the duration of how long they last and in the parts of the body, the parts of the organism that are affected. And that’s why he says that every decision we make has to be evaluated in terms of the pleasure and pain that result in particular from making that decision. The only way we can weigh and balance the pleasures and pains of life against each other is to recognize that they differ in intensity and duration in parts of the body. The key here is that this weighing process is necessarily something that’s individual. There is no supernatural gods or sources of absolute morality that tell everybody all the time and everywhere what to do. Epicurus tells us to look through our own feelings of pleasure and pain and our own circumstances and then do our best to evaluate what’s going to make us happiest within that context. Some people are going to choose a quiet life disengaged from society. I don’t mean to slam sitting in a cave and looking at a candle as something that you would never wish to do, but people are different and others will choose action and engagement with society as something that’s more pleasurable to them than the pleasures of the quiet life of solitude. In every case, the most important thing that we know is that our lives are short. We are eventually going to die, we’re forever going to cease to exist, and whatever experiences we decide to prioritize for ourselves have to be achieved while we’re alive. And that’s where epicure says that longest in time does not mean the best duration is not the only factor. The goal of happiness is not just the longest or the most intense or which that prevails over the largest part of the body. In fact, the only way you can really sum it up is to say whatever is most pleasant to you. And that’s what epicure says in the letter to Menoras at section 1 26 where he says quote. And just as with food, the wise man does not seek simply the larger share and nothing else, but rather the most pleasant. So the wise man seeks to enjoy not the longest period of time, but the most pleasant. Again, that’s in section 1 26 of the letter to Menoras. And anytime you run into this issue of, well, time is the most important. I want it now and I want it longest, and that’s going to be my criteria for what is most pleasant. You should go to that section of 1 26 and realize that Epicurus has specifically said that what we want is not the longest period of time, but that which is the most pleasant
Joshua: Yeah principle, Dr nine that you quoted their Cassius, if every pleasure could be intensified so that it lasted and influenced the whole organism or the most essential parts of our nature, pleasures would never differ from one another. This is interesting in light of something we’ve talked about many times, which is, can you have pleasure in one part of your being and pain in another? And I think the answer is yes. In Epicurus letter to a domes as quoted by DIYs LAIs, he says that he’s writing to a domes on a very happy day of his life, which is also the last day of his life and the pain of kidney stones or whatever, kidney failure, whatever he had going on, the pain was extreme, but he set over and above that pain the pleasures of the memory of the time that they had spent together with each other. The pleasure of the memory of human connection is what sustains him in spite of the horrible physical pain that he’s feeling. The question of, are all pleasures the same that principal Dr. Nine tries to answer? It’s somewhat difficult to talk about, but to me it seems like he says if every pleasure could be intensified so that it lasted and influenced the whole organism, et cetera, when you ate ice cream, it was as good as an orgasm or something. I mean, that’s kind of where he is going here, so that your whole being always felt just pleasure. Pleasures would never differ from one another, but you’d have to accept the alternative under those conditions, which is that for some people some of the time, if every pain could be intensified so that it lasted and influenced the whole organism or the most essential parts of our nature, pains would never differ from one another. And so anytime you felt pain, you would feel torture. It would be horrible. We’re speaking hypothetically here in the world we actually live in with the nature that we have actually been endowed with. We feel pleasure and pain and we feel a range of lengths of pleasures and intensities of pleasures. And we feel pleasures of the mind that are different, not necessarily better, but different from the pleasures of the body. And the same is true with the pains that we feel. And as Epicurus says in that letter that he writes on the day of his death, the ability to set pleasure over and above pain is something we cultivate through the philosophy. It’s something that we cultivate by forging those connections that he says are so important. At the end of his life, Epicurus, on the last day of his life in horrible physical pain is not remembering the best wine he’s ever drank. It’s like, wow, that was exceptionally pleasurable wine that I drank. He’s remembering the people in his life, the mental pleasure of the memory of the moments that he spent with the most important people of his life. And you talked today about distinguishing between the pleasures of the moment versus the pleasure of life as a whole, the pleasures of the moment versus the life of pleasure. And for Epicurus, that’s partially what the philosophy itself is for is cultivating that understanding. It’s cultivating the understanding that there will be times in your life when you are experiencing terrible pain and the ability to set pleasure against pain, to set pleasure over and above pain, to use pleasure to counter pain in a way that practice in the philosophy is something that’s going to become very important, especially as you get older and your body doesn’t work as well as it used to, and you have aches and you don’t heal as quickly as you did before and you don’t bounce back from things as easily as you did before. And Epicurus says in Vatican saying 19, he has become an old man on the day on which he forgot his past blessings. Think about that for a moment, what I’ve just been talking about with, as you get older and your body doesn’t heal as quickly and so forth, and the physical pain increases, lasts longer, doesn’t go away as easily as it did when you were in your youth, Epicurus is not saying he becomes an old man on the day when his body is a wreck. That’s how we tend to think of it. He says he has become an old man on the day on which he forgot his past blessings. The moment you stop setting pleasure over and against pain is the day you become an old man and Epicurus right up until the last day of his life, he has not lost the power to set pleasure over and against pain. And if things were different, if all pleasures were the same and all pains were the same, and you were comprehensively either fully in pleasure or fully in pain. I think that would be problem. But the mixture in our being of some parts pleasure, some parts pain, gives us this superpower to set pleasure against pain and to store up pleasure in our minds, the pleasures of our past blessings and the pleasures of the memory of human connection. And to set that against even the most horrifying of physical pain. I think it would be fair to say that what we’re talking about today, pleasure is the guide of life. Epicurus, even until the last day of his life, never stopped being guided by pleasure in the things that he did. And I think that’s something to keep before your eyes, keep before your mind as we study the philosophy and as we continue to grow older.
Cassius: Joshua, listening to your explanation of that as we begin to come to the conclusion of today’s episode gives me the place that I’d really like to go back to the point that we’ve reserved the full meaning of the word pleasure in epicurean terms for next week and for another discussion. But there are these preliminary observations about pleasure and the role that it serves that are important for people to understand. And by gosh, it is so frustrating to hear people say that Epicurus is concerned about the pleasures of the moment, and Epicurus is always going to avoid every pain because he is concerned about living the most austere, the most simple, the most minimal life possible so that he can never experience even a moment of pain. It is so frustrating to hear that when it is so clear that Epicure says that we are going to take steps to embrace pain when necessary to bring us to a greater pleasure. Okay, I will leave that where it is because it’s something we’ll continue to have to deal with. But there’s this corollary and listening to your explanation, Joshua brings that frustration also to my mind that well epicure said, pleasure is the goal. That means I can pursue any pleasure that I want to, no matter the type of pleasure, no matter the duration, the parts of the body, or the intensity of that pleasure. As long as I’m pursuing pleasure, I have a complete and full understanding of epicurean philosophy. And that means that my life inside my cave, living the absolutely simplest and minimalist life that I could possibly lead is exactly what Epicurus would tell me to do because he told me to avoid every pain. He told me that pleasure is the goal. He didn’t say what pleasure. He didn’t say how to pursue pleasure. He just said, pleasure is the goal. And by God, I get pleasure in my cave, and that’s all I want out of my life. And that is almost as frustrating to me as hearing someone say that the pleasures of the moment was what Epicurus was teaching us to pursue. How stupid do you think Epicurus was? Do you think Epicurus was not able to distinguish between pleasures that are intense versus those that are not intense, that he was not able to understand how long pleasures last or what parts of his body, including his mind, are involved in pleasure? Of course, Epicurus understood all those things, and to reduce down epicurean philosophy into whatever pleasure I find to be pleasurable at this particular moment is an absurd interpretation of epicurean philosophy and is an insult to his intelligence as well as your own. To not be able to understand that pursuing pleasure as the goal does not mean that all pleasures are the same. All of these issues take thought and consideration of all of the context and all of the circumstances that each person is involved in, but there are very ready and understandable and persuasive answers to these questions about pleasure and how it serves in human life on which Epicurus has a lot of important things to say. So this week we’ve gone into a discussion of the role of pleasure in human life. Next week when we come back, we’ll go into a deeper discussion of what epicure really meant when he used the word pleasure. As always, we invite everyone to drop by our form and let us know if you have any questions or comments about anything we’ve discussed today or anything you’d like to see us address as we go deeper into the question of pleasure in human life. So I’ll close with the reminder that as Joshua brought up, we have an Epicurus letter to MIUs Epicurus statements on the last day of his life, a synopsis of these issues that we’ve been discussing. Pleasure is the goal of life, and we can experience that even when we are in the presence of very difficult pains. Pleasure is the goal of life, but pleasures differ, one from another, pains differ, one from another, and the wise man is going to be able to understand how these things work and always have more reason for joy than for Vation. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back next week. See you then. Bye.