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
Section titled “Summary”Cassius and Joshua discuss the role of pleasure as the guide of life in Epicurean philosophy — the first in a planned two-episode series on the nature of pleasure (the second episode to focus on “absence of pain”). The episode opens by contrasting pleasure with the three main rival candidates for guide of life: piety (conformity to divine will), virtue (Stoic/Platonic), and rationalism/a priori logic (Pythagorean/Platonic). Both Lucretius’s famous invocation of Venus in Book One and his statement of pleasure as dux vitae (“guide of life”) in Book Two are quoted to establish the Epicurean position.
Cassius explains that Epicurus grounds his answer in the faculty of pleasure and pain given directly by nature — not in abstract logic or revelation. Torquatus’s argument in On Ends Book One is examined: every creature at birth seeks pleasure as its supreme good, and this is done “while still uncorrupted” by false religion or philosophy. The episode discusses the key stumbling blocks people face when first encountering Epicurean hedonism (reducing it either to crude immediacy or to cave-dwelling asceticism), clarifies that all pleasures are good but not all are equally advantageous, and explains Principal Doctrine 9 (pleasures differ in intensity, duration, and parts of the organism affected). Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy is drawn on to explain pleasure and pain as a criterion of truth in the Epicurean canon, distinct from the five senses. Joshua discusses Vatican Saying 19 (“He has become an old man on the day on which he forgot his past blessings”) and the deathbed Letter to Idomeneus as illustrations of the Epicurean capacity to set mental pleasure against physical pain.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 268 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 each of our podcast episodes.
We are continuing our series today on key doctrines of Epicurus, and this week and next week we are focusing on aspects of the nature of pleasure. This week we will 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 of life. Today we are going to discuss how Epicurus arrived at that conclusion and what it means for us in living our own lives.
First, it is 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 are going to touch on that here today — on the full Epicurean meaning of pleasure — but we will reserve the main part of that discussion until we address the concept of absence of pain, which we will do next week. For today, we are going to focus on the fact that almost everyone has at least a general sense of what pleasure means. It is not 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 is undesirable. As Epicurus 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 canon of truth and how pleasure functions as the guide of life. Lucretius states specifically that pleasure is the guide of life in this way. In Book Two, around line 167, Lucretius 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 allurements to continue their races through the arts of Venus, that mankind may not come to an end.”
Of course, Lucretius also started off his 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 am 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’s sons, joy of men and gods, Venus the life-giver, who beneath the gliding stars of heaven fills 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 dost turn to flight the winds and the clouds of heaven; at thy coming the earth, the quaint artificer, puts forth her sweet-scented 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 hearts thrilled with thy might. Then the tame beasts grow wild and bound over the fat pastures and swim the racing rivers — so surely enchained by thy charm, each follows thee in hot desire whither thou goest before to lead him on. Yea, through seas and mountains and tearing rivers and leafy haunts of birds and verdant plains, thou dost strike fond love into the hearts of all and make them in hot desire to renew the stock of their races, each after their own kind.”
Now Lucretius goes on and talks about how he is 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 is 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 will see that this same view is well entrenched in Epicurus’s own writing and throughout Epicurean philosophy. So there is 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 what exactly happiness is. There are all sorts of conceptions that that word can include, many of which are not at all associated with pleasure and some of which are, and our task 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 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 act — that is a version of piety in which the pattern of life set forth in some holy book, by priests, or by divine revelation should be the way you lead your life. Others who are not 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 — 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 senses and is in fact suggested to transcend the senses — 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 has 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, virtue, and reason or rationalism or a priori logic that you have 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, 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 that we do not 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 — as we have talked about in the thought experiment of the painting of Cleanthes, putting pleasure on the throne with virtue as her handmaidens, virtue as her attendants.
And this, in Cleanthes’s mind, is supposed to drive us to anger and frustration. We are 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 is Lucretius’s dux vitae, divine pleasure, the guide of life. Epicurus in the Letter to Menoeceus, starting around section 129, 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 are going to get into a little bit here about how pleasure is not just in ethics held up as the guide. In Epicurus’s canon and his epistemology, he is also using the feelings as a standard — which is kind of what the word canon means. It is 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 is true in ethics, and as we are going to see in a little bit, it is also true to an extent in the canon — pleasure and pain are part of how we understand information about the world we are living in and about ourselves.
He goes on to say: “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 130 of the letter: “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 am going to re-read that. He said in section 129: “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 130 he says: “For the good on certain occasions we treat as bad, and conversely the bad as good.”
We are 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 Menoeceus section 130, 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: every pleasure is good, every pain is evil.
I started a thread this week about a poem by Alexander Pope called “Essay on Man.” In this poem, in his Essay on Man — which gave us the famous quote “the proper study of mankind is man” — he is trying to figure 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, while 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. If you say, for example, that only pleasures that lead to virtue are good — well then you are not holding pleasure as the standard. You are 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 129, 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 the standard by which we judge every good.
So in this episode, we are using “pleasure is the guide of life” as Lucretius says — dux vitae, divine pleasure, the guide of life. But we should not refrain therefore from calling it the good. Epicurus is very clear on this — we call pleasure not just agathon (good) in Greek, but tagathon (the good) in Greek. And Lucretius in the proem to Book Six does not expressly state it, but he does say this: “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, whither we all endeavor, and showed the path whereby we might arrive thereunto by a little crosscut straight.”
There again you see choice and avoidance, but pleasure in Lucretius is the summum bonum — the supreme good. 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 — tagathon, the good — summum bonum, the greatest good. This is the role of pleasure in Epicurean philosophy, and that is probably the most important thing to say about it.
So it is good that we are going through this, but of course when you talk about this and you have people like Cleanthes saying it is 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 some conversation this morning.
Cassius:
Yes, it is, Joshua. We are 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 have just read from the Letter to Menoeceus before we go much further, because it is 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 about prioritizing the pleasures of the moment, because if you are not prioritizing those pleasures of the moment and you are actually embracing pain for the moment, that would totally contradict the idea that pleasure is the goal. And it is 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 Epicurus 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 are 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 are 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 are many examples, there are many jokes about deferred gratification and placing marshmallows in front of children and saying that you are going to have two in five minutes if you will just not eat the first one for that period of time. And we tend to trivialize, I think, what is involved in that kind of thing. But it is 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 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.
The bottom line is that Epicurus made this very, very clear: 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 is not very complicated, and yet it is 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 Epicurus says, as Lucretius explains: to live your life successfully, it is necessary to have a philosophy of life, to have an understanding of what is 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 for you.
Joshua:
Yeah. People who come into Epicurean philosophy from someplace on the internet that summarizes it quickly and poorly — people tend to deviate to one of two extremes. Either Epicurus was gorging himself on food and then throwing up so he could eat more — that is the gluttony extreme — or you have the extreme of asceticism: Epicurus talks about pleasure, but he does not actually value pleasure. He values simplicity, or he values freedom from any possible disturbance, tranquility. And the response to that is that Epicurus is 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 is also something that should not be as hard as it seems to be. The idea that sometimes you recognize — not even that you choose pain, but that 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 is not pleasant, and neither is putting that off and having to deal with the pain of the cavity. We make these decisions every day. It should not 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 is involved here, and it is one that you have to think about. This is another angle that comes from treating Epicurus as if he is a life coach or a therapist or a clinician — and that he is recommending, well, you are doing the wrong things in your life, you should be pursuing pleasure every moment of your life. Well, that is true, but you have to think about what it means to pursue pleasure every moment of your life. Every moment of your life is not going to be candy, ice cream, and cake. It is going to be occasionally going to the dentist. It is 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, is it not? 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. Lucretius uses several examples of this in his poem, and that is exactly why — again — this is a philosophy that takes time to understand. It is not a magic pill. It is 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.
Torquatus says it as well: people do not pursue pain because it is pain or avoid pleasure because it is pleasure, but they find other goals in life because they do not understand how to follow pleasure and pain intelligently. That is one of the many aspects of Epicurean philosophy on which he has a lot of good advice.
But again, today we are focusing on this question of: is it right in the first place to consider pleasure to be the goal? And what we have already discussed is one of the major aspects of that. It is correct to understand that pleasure is the goal because you are 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, and all 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 Epicurus says, you make each decision considering what is going to happen if you make this choice or if you do not make this choice. And when you consider those things, that is what you are doing: you are calculating, to the best of your ability, the future consequences of your actions, and you are making each action with the goal of maximizing your pleasure and minimizing your pain in the full context of your entire life.
Now, we will continue to touch on this as we go forward. But let us go ahead now and discuss: okay, Epicurus, you have suggested to us that pleasure is the goal of life — well, what is your evidence for that? And there are two primary ways to get at that.
As we have already quoted, Epicurus told us that pleasure is the first good and natural to us. Well, the elaboration that we have on that in Book One around line 30 of On Ends is this — where Torquatus 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 is sweet — no one of which facts are we bound to support by elaborate arguments. It is enough merely to draw attention to the fact.”
And there is 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 as if under a veil, 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 is nothing left to him, it is inevitable that nature herself should be the arbiter of what is in accord with or opposed 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 will 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 will understand that pleasure, in this generic sense, is the goal of life.
But Epicurus also mentions — and Torquatus says that some Epicureans stress this more than others do, but it is still a part of it — that even though you do not really have to have an elaborate logical argument about this, there are things in life such as the existence of atoms and void as an example that are as if under a veil and that you cannot see directly by observing them. And this is one of the more intricate aspects of whether this is actually Epicurus’s 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 does not give us any faculty other than pleasure and pain by which to decide what to choose and what to avoid.
Now you are 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, cannot 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 are these two methods, and let us talk about that for a few minutes before we go further. Because some people will take the position that this is obvious, we need no further discussion. And there are lots of people out there who want to discuss everything to death. Do we leave those people totally unsatisfied that there is 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 are seeing here in Torquatus is sort of a combination of the two: the senses are perceiving directly that pleasure is pleasurable and 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 atoms and void exist and must be the underlying functioning of nature. There is 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 that we are getting this from Torquatus, we are getting this from Cicero. Epicurus is not saying this directly. But as we have discussed many times, Cicero is not totally unreliable even though he is a hostile source on Epicureanism. He is not totally unreliable in part because if he were totally unreliable, we would have heard about it from the Epicureans who were in his circle at the time.
Cicero here in On Ends has Torquatus, his Epicurean interlocutor, say that we look to nature, we look to the young of all species. And there is an argument later in the book — Cicero in Book Two of On Ends answers Torquatus in the first book at length. He criticizes Torquatus’s 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 is 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 am a Christian.” And God says, “No, you are not a Christian — you are a Ciceronian. 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 that it is something we have to work very hard throughout our lives to overcome, is antithetical to Epicurus’s view about nature and about looking to the young of all species.
Because Cicero says: why would you look to the young of all species? Why would you look to those who have no life experience, no education, who have not learned discipline, who have not had to work a day in their lives? Why would you look to that? What you should be doing is looking to humans who have lived a life. You should be looking at humans who have a lifetime of experiences 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, their philosophy, 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 Torquatus 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? For some people, knowledge of the good 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 it is logic, a priori 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 will not dwell on that at any greater length. 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 as its supreme good — so clearly pleasure is the supreme good” — Cicero, Plato, these guys are not going to take that lying down. And that is 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 would like to point out something that I do not think we emphasize often enough. We were just talking about how here is Torquatus telling us to look at the young of all species. Of course, basically that is what Lucretius is doing as well in the very opening to the poem that we quoted earlier in this episode — he is saying, look at all of these animals out there whom 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 Lucretius just as well as it is being stated by Torquatus.
But one thing that we do not always mention in this regard — we emphasize the young of all species — but I would like to repeat this part of what Torquatus says: that every creature as soon as it is born seeks after pleasure and delights therein as its supreme good and recoils from pain as its 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 is an important observation that living things can become corrupted — perverted is a word other translators use — by false religions, by false philosophies. In other words, there is no magic cutoff necessarily where a puppy or a kitten knows better for itself what is the goal of its life than a one-year-old cat or one-year-old dog. It is 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 are in contact with this calling of nature — and frankly, that is what Epicurus is always setting out 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 will be confused, else you will be unable to determine what is right and what is wrong — as long as you are able to do that, then it is 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 are exactly right that the Stoics, Academic Skeptics, and others do not like these animal arguments, because we are better than animals. We are higher than animals, and it is 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 is 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 do not have, by which you can experience pleasure through your mind and through all sorts of activities that other animals do not have. But that is 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 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 are a one-day-old baby or whether you are the genius of the ages at the height of their ability at fifty 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 is pleasure that is your goal.
Joshua:
One last thing on nature versus looking to illustrious men: there is 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 are talking about, Cassius, which is that it is not just looking to nature or human nature — it is 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 are many other quotes in Epicurus about dropping anchor in a safe harbor. The idea is that 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 is variously translated — he is 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 is not that he hates education. It is 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. So a lot more to be said on that, but I will 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 are pointing to the obvious aspects of pleasure and pain. And ultimately that is the most potent argument in support of Epicurus’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. Torquatus 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 is pleasurable or painful to you.
And as one very brief and basic example, Diogenes Laertius records at 10.34 about the Epicureans that: “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, Torquatus says in Book One: “Therefore Epicurus refuses 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 is 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 have come to the conclusion that there are no alternatives other than one — pleasure — or two — pain — then if you are not in one, you are in the other. And Torquatus later on says that nothing could be more true, nothing could be more positive, than a statement like that — because you have 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 is 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 and 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 are distinct from the sensations by two removes in the meaning of the canon. Sensation is restricted to sensory stimulus; it is 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 is true that both may be called by the Greek word pathē, but this coincidence of predicate is offset by logical absurdities. Since the sensations are confined to the five senses, the merging of the feelings 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 is 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 are not only just registering the results of what the five senses tell us at any particular moment — our thought processes and our emotions, which are also self-generated within us, are also being evaluated by pleasure and pain. We are all certainly familiar that what we are thinking about at a particular moment can be generating pleasure or pain within us even though we are 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 criterion, evaluating not only the sensations but also what is 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’s canon of truth by which we decide what is real and true to us. In other words, one of the points that we have been stressing today is that it is 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 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 is 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 are discussing this now becomes easier to see, I think, when you consider that having decided that pleasure is the guide of life does not answer every question that is going to come to you in your life. You are 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 does not get you moment by moment to where you need to be.
The entire purpose of Epicurus’s canon 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 oases in the desert, of oars that appear to be bent when placed in water, of hallways that seem to converge but really do not. And we have to have a mechanism for separating out things that are illusions from things that are ultimately true. 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 Diogenes Laertius talks about when he explains the canon to us, he tells us: “Thus in the canon, Epicurus 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 canon, 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 are 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 is a very important implication of what we have been discussing so far, with pleasure as the goal of life and pleasure and pain as parts of the canon 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 is another stumbling block. 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 is where Norman DeWitt introduces this aspect of pleasure as a criterion of action and a criterion 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 do. 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 hedonē and the verb hēdesthai. The higher pleasures by the noun euphrosunē. 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 — chara — 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 canon.”
Okay, the point here being that when you say pleasure is the goal of life, you do not 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 pains.
And so it is 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 Principal Doctrine 9, in which Epicurus explained that these differences are why pleasures are not all the same. Principal Doctrine 9 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 he is suggesting as an “if” is not true. And this would be an example of that, because pleasures do differ from one another in the ways that he has 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 is 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, duration, and parts of the body.
The key here is that this weighing process is necessarily something that is individual. There are 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 is going to make us happiest within that context.
Some people are going to choose a quiet life disengaged from society. I do not mean to slam sitting in a cave and looking at a candle as something you would never wish to do — but people are different. And others will choose action and engagement with society as something that is 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 are forever going to cease to exist, and whatever experiences we decide to prioritize for ourselves have to be achieved while we are alive. And that is where Epicurus 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 that which 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 is what Epicurus says in the Letter to Menoeceus at section 126, where he says: “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 is in section 126 of the Letter to Menoeceus. And any time you run into this issue of “well, time is the most important, I want it now and I want it longest, and that is going to be my criteria for what is most pleasant” — you should go to that section 126 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, Principal Doctrine 9 that you quoted there, 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 have 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’s Letter to Idomeneus, as quoted by Diogenes Laertius, he says that he is writing to Idomeneus on a very happy day of his life, which is also the last day of his life. And the pain of kidney failure or 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 is feeling.
The question of “are all pleasures the same?” that Principal Doctrine 9 tries to answer — it is 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 — when you ate ice cream, it was as good as an orgasm, in other words — so that your whole being always felt just pleasure, pleasures would never differ from one another. But you would 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 either. And so any time you felt pain, you would feel torture.
We are speaking hypothetically here. In the world we actually live in, with the nature 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 the 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 is 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 ever drank. He is not thinking, wow, that was an exceptionally pleasurable wine. He is 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 is partially what the philosophy itself is for: cultivating that understanding. It is 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 — is something that practice in the philosophy is going to make very important, especially as you get older and your body does not work as well as it used to, and you have aches and you do not heal as quickly as you did before, and you do not bounce back from things as easily as you did.
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. As you get older and your body does not heal as quickly and the physical pain increases, lasts longer, and does not 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 is 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, 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 a problem. But the mixture in our being — 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 are 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 is 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 would really like to go back to the point that we have 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 that 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 Epicurus 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 is something we will continue to have to deal with. But there is this corollary, and listening to your explanation, Joshua, brings that frustration also to my mind — that Epicurus said pleasure is the goal, therefore I can pursue any pleasure 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 am 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 did not say what pleasure. He did not say how to pursue pleasure. He just said pleasure is the goal.
And by God, I get pleasure in my cave, and that is 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 have gone into a discussion of the role of pleasure in human life. Next week when we come back, we will go into a deeper discussion of what Epicurus really meant when he used the word pleasure. As always, we invite everyone to drop by our forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about anything we have discussed today, or anything you would like to see us address as we go deeper into the question of pleasure in human life.
So I will close with the reminder that, as Joshua brought up, we have Epicurus’s Letter to Menoeceus — Epicurus’s statements on the nature of pleasure and the goal of life — and we have his statements on the last day of his life. A synopsis of these issues that we have 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 vexation. Thanks for your time today. We will be back next week. See you then. Bye.