Episode 269 - By Pleasure We Mean The Absence of Pain (All Experience That Is Not Painful)
Date: 02/10/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4284-episode-269-by-pleasure-we-mean-the-absence-of-pain-all-experience-that-is-not-p/
Summary
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Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 269 of Lucious 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 all of our podcast episodes. Today we’re continuing our series on key doctrines of Epicurus. Last week we discussed the central role that pleasure plays as the guide of life and as part of the epicurean canon of truth. This week we’re going to dive deeper and focus on the full meaning of the word pleasure as Epicurus uses it so that we can also get behind the real meaning of the phrase absence of pain. Now, before we start, let me say that the subject of this episode is one of the most controversial topics in epicurean philosophy. There are other disputes such as about virtue that are between epicureans and stoics, and the lines of battle between schools are very clearly drawn as to the full meaning of the word pleasure. However, or the phrase absence of pain, there is a major difference of opinion even among those who consider themselves to be epicurean. So what you’re going to hear today is one way of interpreting epicurus, but by no means the only way when you go out onto the internet, you’re going to read many different opinions. So be prepared to think about this issue closely and make up your own mind which positions make the most sense to you. Here we go. There are many good people out there who think that they have a basic understanding of epicurean philosophy and that as a result of that basic understanding, all they need to do is go out and drink wine and eat cheese and stay away from any kind of pain or exertion as much as they possibly can, and that makes them an epicurean. As we dive deeper into the text, we’re going to see that there’s a very good reason to believe that epicure has had a much wider view of pleasure in mind when he discussed absence of pain. As we get started, it’s important to understand that Epicurus builds his philosophy like an architect with one platform resting on another epicurean philosophy starts with a view of the universe as being totally natural with no supernatural gods, no ideal abstract virtues and based on the movement of Adams through the void in a totally natural way, and you can’t let the implications of that foundation ever slip from your grasp. If you want to understand the details of what Epicurus is talking about, Epicurus was a philosopher and as the founder of a school, he went to great effort to show his students how his own views were different and better than other schools. Epicurus was well aware that the leading schools of his day were based on Plato and Aristotle and others who had held that pleasure was disreputable, ign noble and absolutely unfit to be considered the goal of life. Epicurus also knew that the sacs before him had advocated for a central role of pleasure, but the sacs had focused on ordinary, active and bodily pleasures and they had not been successful in persuading that their position was correct. Arguments similar to those that had been used against the sacs were preserved in Plato’s dialogue, febu, and there is one argument in particular that is very relevant to today’s discussion. Plato had argued in Febu that pleasure could not be the goal of life because pleasure can always be made better by adding more pleasure to it, and this argument means that the pursuit of pleasure could never be satisfied. You could never find yourself at the best state of pleasure because it could always be made better by adding more pleasure to it. This was in contrast to virtue Plato held because virtue is supposedly complete in itself. A wise man, for example, is either perfectly wise or he’s not wise at all if he’s making any mistakes. This line of argument may not impress us today, but in the world of Greek logic, it was very persuasive and it prevailed for hundreds of years to be cited by both Cicero and Seneca. Many years after Plato, it’s a well-known argument and epicure has needed an answer both to it and to other arguments against pleasure. For example, that it’s impossible to continuously live in pleasure throughout your life because pleasure is not always available to you. What I’ll suggest to you today is that Epicurus answer to these problems involved rejecting the presumptions of Plato and the rest that pleasure means only active bodily pleasures. Epicurus reason that yes, pleasure does include wine and cheese and the rest, but pleasure also includes all kinds of mental experiences, not only of joy and delight, but also of pleasurable appreciation of being alive and confidence in our ability to live happily and avoid unnecessary and unmanageable pains. Whereas the Sacs had focused their attention on the ordinary bodily and men pleasures directly in front of them, epicure has held that it makes sense to look at pleasure from a much wider point of view. Epicure has held that life itself is pleasurable no matter what we’re doing if we’re not in pain and that it therefore makes sense to expand our view of pleasure to include everything in our lives that’s not painful. Looking further at our lives as a whole, it also makes sense to evaluate the total experience of our lives rather than just the immediate experiences of the moment. And from that point of view, it becomes possible to see how we can fill the total experience of our lives with as much pleasure as possible. Just as in the old story of the leaky vessel which can never be filled, epicure has pointed out that if we consider our life as a whole to be like a vessel and that if we fill any leaks in our life or that vessel that prevent it from being filled, then a life can be filled to the rim and even to overflowing with pleasures that crowd out all the pains. This is a big picture look at pleasure versus pain in which it’s clear that you offset pains with pleasures that are greater than those pains and that you work to maximize the amount of pleasures in your life or in your vessel so that any pains that do remain are only those that are absolutely necessary to achieve the happiest life through pleasure that is possible to you. While it may not be possible for many people or any people to have a completely pleasurable life with absolutely no pain in it, that’s the same situation as those who extoll virtue as the goal of life or the good because who in real life is absolutely virtuous. Yet that did not stop Plato or the stoics from saying that virtue could be complete. Well, Epicurus answered that in the same way as to pleasure. Pleasure can be complete. If the vessel of your life is completely filled with pleasure, that answers the logical objection that it is impossible to satisfy the pursuit of pleasure. It puts it on the same plane as virtue itself and you can see that there’s no reason for any epicurean to follow the path taken by Filus in that dialogue of Plato who ended up admitting that pleasure could not be the goal. That kind of logical argument will back down certain people when they don’t have the responsive argument that they need to show the fault. In the logic of the platonic argument, Epicurus provides the answer, the key to the platonic argument by showing that complete pleasure is as much theoretically possible as is complete virtue. Before we move on from the implications of this big picture view of pleasure and pain, one more thing deserves comment, and that is the problem that some people seem to have when they think that Epicurus is telling them that the most important thing for them to do with every moment of their life is to avoid any possible pain From the big picture perspective. Of course, that’s not the way you look at life at all. You look at life as the net of the pleasures and pains that you experience, and so even when you must engage in certain painful activities so long as the result is more pleasure than pain, then you are achieving your goal of happiness through pleasure because you’re filling your life as much as possible with pleasures. Once you realize that the big picture result rather than moment by moment experiences is what you’re really after, you can see that it makes no sense at all to focus on avoiding pain at every moment as the primary problem. No mortal human being is going to be able to abolish every moment of pain from their lives. To focus on avoiding pain at every moment is going to take your eye off the target of living the happiest most pleasurable life that is possible to you, and that’s why it’s so important that Epicurus expanded his view of what constitutes pleasure because the more pleasures that are available to you, the easier it’s going to be to fill your vessel as close to the rim as possible. Epicurus saw that it was false to limit the application of the word pleasure to bodily or mental stimulations when we realized that life is short and forever after death, we cease to exist. We can mentally appreciate that simply being alive while not in pain is itself a very great pleasure. Just as our minds can be taught many other things, a proper philosophy of life can teach us to appreciate the pleasures that are available to us in thousands of ways, not the least of which is that of having confidence that we will not be tormented by supernatural gods or consigned to a painful hell or anything else that’s painful after death. This tremendously expanded recognition of pleasure makes it much easier to see that the pleasures of life can outweigh all but the worst of situations and even in those terrible situations to which there’s no pleasurable alternative, if the situation is bad enough, we can always escape even the worst of tortures through death. There’s much more to say about all of this, but for now, let’s note that this viewpoint resolves the contradictions that some people think they see in epicurean philosophy. Opponents such as Cicero argued that this kind of pleasure is not pleasure at all and that we should reject Epicurus because he’s changing the rules of the game, which the established leaders of philosophy have already set that pleasure is disreputable and ignoble opponents who are stoic or Buddhist might say that Epicurus didn’t include normal pleasures in his philosophy because he said that the highest pleasure is absence of pain and that means nothingness just like the Buddhist and the aesthetics of the world say that it does. Those views are faults, but the majority of people who’ve been talking about epicurus in the last 50 years hold views that are very similar to those stoic or Buddhist views and what they will not tell you and what you have to dig out of epicurean philosophy for yourself and with the help of friends is that Epicurus endorses all kinds of pleasure, active and stable, mental and bodily and everything in between because it’s the faculty of pleasure and pain that nature gives us as our true guide of life rather than the logic and supernaturalism that the other philosophers and the priests want you to believe. But we have a long way to go before we reach our final conclusion today, let’s pull back for a moment and put this in more practical terms. When you first reject supernatural religion and those who say that it’s your job to be a good person instead of pursuing your own view of pleasure, you run into a problem that has to be dealt with and that problem is that it’s impossible to constantly experience nothing but stimulating pleasures. We can’t live every moment drinking wine, eating cheese, and pursuing the pleasures of sex or partying or mountain climbing. If we try to do that, we can expect disaster to result, but are wine and cheese and sex and partying and mountain climbing, all there is to pleasure. Maybe nature provides you with many pleasurable options to pursue and you just need to open your mind to pursuing these more intelligently. That’s where epicure saw that while active pleasures are good too many of the most important experiences in life don’t involve sensory stimulation at all. Many of the best pleasures in fact arise from our own mental processes, from our own thinking about our lives and appreciating how we can live happily and especially important to us in living pleasurable are those things that give us confidence in our ability to live happily. Let’s take a look at the first four of Epicurus principle doctrines to see how this confidence works. Doctrine one answers the priest and explains to us why we can have confidence that there are no supernatural Gods plotting against us to cause us harm or to bribe us to follow their rules or to sentence us to torture in hell After we’re dead. Doctrine two answers the concerns that everyone has about death and explains why we can have confidence that when we are dead we will suffer no pain or anguish of any kind because we are not there to experience anything at all. Doctrine three answers to the complaints of Plato and other philosophers and tells us that the limit of pleasure can be reached when our lives are filled with pleasure and that we need not worry that a life that is more pleasurable than painful is beyond our reach. Doctrine four answers the concerns we all have about facing pain and gives us confidence that any pain in life that we do encounter will either be manageable or if it’s severe enough will be brief. Epicurus reminds us that there’s no reason to fear anything as being truly terrible in life when we know that there’s nothing truly terrible in not living. But now you should see the pattern that we embrace and combine both bodily and mental pleasures. There’s nothing contradictory between those two, and in fact, they mutually support each other. As an example, think of the stimulation that many of us get when we fly through the air in jet planes. We take a window seat and look out at the world below from 30,000 feet and even the rush of takeoff and landing are exciting and fun for most of us. On the other hand, remember too that the only reason that most of us are willing to get on an airplane in the first place is that we have confidence in the engineering of the airplane and the professionalism of the pilots and crews. We understand at least generally how airplanes work and we have confidence due to that understanding that flying is not magic and will be safe when we’re doing it. This feeling of confidence is in itself a pleasure if we take the time to think about it. And even if it isn’t a pleasure of stimulative action, this feeling of confidence is something that we can enjoy just the same and it makes it possible for us to experience the stimulative pleasures that we otherwise would not have the confidence to undertake. So as we go further today, once we understand how Epicurus arrived at his position, we can take that perspective and use it ourselves, widening our objectives beyond just wine and cheese parties so that we can find a net balance of pleasure in the way we live our own lives. I’ve introduced a lot in this opening, but before we go further, let’s drop back and examine what Epicurus himself had to say about pleasure, absence of pain, and how all of this fits together.
Joshua: Right Cassius and as with everything else in Epicurean philosophy, we are dealing with fragmentary sources. The text that deals most comprehensively with the ethics that survives is his summary in the letter to Manus and starting in that text at the end of section 1 27, we get his views on pleasure and the relationship between pleasure and pain and he starts this way, he says, and for this cause we call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life. For we recognize pleasure is 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 feeling as the standard by which we judge every good. And since pleasure is the first good and natural to us for this very 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 when therefore we maintain that pleasure is the end, we do not mean the pleasures of propagates and those that consistent in sensuality as is supposed by some who are either ignorant or disagree with us or do not understand, but freedom from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind for it is not continuous drinkings and reveling nor the satisfaction of lusts nor the enjoyment of fish and other luxuries of the wealthy table which produce a pleasant life, but sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance and banishing mere opinions to which are due the greatest disturbance of the spirit end. Cassius, you started the episode by saying what a controversial issue we have on our plate today, and this from the letter to EU is very controversial in the academic literature. I’m also going to quote from a fragment of a lost work called Perry Telos in Greek on the end goal or on the end very much like Cicero’s book, Debus in Latin, quoted by DGen LAIs in book 10 of his lives and opinions of eminent philosophers relentlessly ridiculed by Cicero and by Plu Ark. And in that passage as translated by CD Young in 1895, he says this, for I do not know what I should consider the good to be if I put out of sight the pleasures which arise from flavors and those which are derived from amateur pleasures and from music and from the contemplation of beauty. I think it’s important to keep that one to hand. Anytime we look at the letter to Manus, these are both written by Epicurus. They seem to be saying opposite things about pleasure. I think he’s actually being very consistent here because he’s giving us an understanding of pleasure, but he’s also adding to that a program of choice and avoidance to deny in that fragment from the lost work on the end that good food was pleasurable would betray in yourself a muddled understanding of pleasure. I think Epicurus doesn’t do this. He acknowledges that luxurious foods are pleasurable. He acknowledges that drinking bouts are pleasurable. He acknowledges that music and dance and sex are all pleasurable, but it does not follow in any of these cases that we should necessarily pursue these things just because they’re pleasure. This is why we have the program of choice and avoidance. There’s one other thing I want to say about the passage from the letter to Manus and that is the claim in section one 30 in which he says, plain Saabs bring us a pleasure equal to a luxurious diet when all the pain due to want is removed and bread and water produce the highest pleasure when one who needs them puts them to his lips. Our friend Don from the forum has prepared a presentation on this issue of bread and water and he’s gone into a study of the Greek language and the cultural context of the time and the agricultural and economic issues, and I recommend anybody don’t switch to just eating bread and water necessarily. I mean you could choose to do that, but before you interpret Epicurus as acetic on this point, I recommend people go to the YouTube channel, Cassius Amicus and watch Don’s video because it is very good on this point. Cassius, he says quite a lot of things here in the letter to Manus. Where do you want to start?
Cassius: Given that our focus today is on absence of pain, the first thing I think we need to do is reinforce that there clearly is a question of terminology going on here. Epicurus himself says in the part that you’ve just read, that there were people out there even in his own time who were misrepresenting or misunderstanding what Epicurus had to say about pleasure. We can confirm this through Cicero and on ends book two section 23, Cicero speaks to the epicurean tous and says at one time, you mean by the word the very same thing which I’ve just said, A pleasant emotion affecting the senses and you give it the description of consisting in motion and of causing variety at another time. You speak of some other higher pleasure which is susceptible of no addition whatsoever, but that it is present when every sort of pain is absent and you call it a state not motion. Let that then be pleasure. And then Cicero goes on and describes what Epicurus is talking about as two different things. Cicero says, not only that pleasure, which you say consists in motion and which all men, whether living in cities or in the country, all men in short who speak Latin call pleasure, but even that stationary pleasure, which no one but your sect calls pleasure at all. So after 200 years, Cicero who’s one of the leading smart men of Rome and a highly intelligent person is saying that Epicurus is using the word pleasure differently than any other school uses the word. So before we go any further, it’s useful to emphasize to people that they should not be surprised to find that what Epicurus wrote in the letter to Menis needs more explanation because you’re a good company with Cicero. In fact, there’s hardly any better way of getting a blank stare or inviting an argument than to say By pleasure we mean the absence of pain and stopping there without giving more of an explanation. Does absence of pain mean that you’re asleep? Does absence of pain mean that you’re under anesthesia? Does it mean that you’re high on marijuana? What does it mean exactly to say that you’re feeling no pain? Because that phrase I’m feeling no pain has largely been identified in recent decades with the idea of being under some kind of drug induced stupor. Is that what Epicurus was talking about? Of course, that’s very, very unlikely. Cicero and the opponents of Epicurus want us to stop there without an answer and walk away from Epicurus confused, but we don’t have to do that and we shouldn’t do that. Epicurus in the letter to Meninas was writing a short letter to a student and he could expect that menaces knew the rest of what Epicurus taught and therefore that menaces would understand what he said without more background, but we weren’t alive to be taught by Epicurus directly, so we have to look to other sources such as you’ve done Joshua, where Epicurus is recorded to have said that he would not know what is the good without the pleasures of sensory stimulation that he listed from these and other sources. We know with certainty that Epicurus included within the word pleasure, all of the normal sensory stimulative things that everyone recognizes as pleasure. Epicurus enemies were all too happy to confirm that Epicurus embraced those normal pleasures because those other philosophers described them as unworthy and they wanted to discredit him. So first the starting point is to recognize that pleasure does include wine and cheese and all of the other activities that everyone understands to be pleasurable. So the answer to understanding Epicurus is not to subtract experiences from Epicurus view of pleasure, but to add the experience that Cicero and the Platonist did not want to characterize as pleasure but which are clearly pleasurable when you start to think about them from the epicurean perspective. As we also know, Cicero had asked who could avoid seeing that three states exist in the nature of things. First, the state of being in pleasure, secondly that of being in pain and thirdly, that of being in such a condition as we are in this moment, and you are too I imagine, which is to say neither in pleasure nor in pain. This is another hint that shows us what Epicurus was doing. Dous tells us that Epicurus held that there’s only two feelings, pleasure and pain, and that’s what we also see in Epicurus principle doctrine three, where he stressed that wherever pleasure is present, there is neither pain of body or mind or both at once. Just to hammer this home, if you’re not experiencing pain, what you’re experiencing is pleasure When you think like an epicurean, there’s no neutral state as the other philosophers want to argue. The ultimate statement of this is from Quata in own end’s book one section 38, 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 pleasure but the highest pleasure possible. Surely anyone who is conscious of his own condition is necessarily either in a state of pleasure or in a state of pain. That’s the key to understanding Epicurean pleasure and how it relates to the absence of pain. We don’t normally think in this way because we’re jaded about our valuations of life, but if we understand the true value of life, we’re never just existing in a neutral condition. Even when some part of our body or mind is in pain, we have the power to summon into our experience the pleasurable memories of the past or pleasurable appreciation of things present or future and we can offset those pains with pleasures. The important thing to repeat at this point I think is that absence of pain is not some ambiguous concept that invites us to emulate the hippies who turn on tune in and drop out from society. The real implication of the epicurean attitude towards pleasure and that absence of pain is pleasure is not that we should run from pain, but that we should see that the entire spectrum of human activity, mental and physical is included within the goal of pleasure. So long as it’s not painful, whether you’re an artist or a writer or a farmer or an astronaut, whatever you find to be pleasurable is what nature is calling you to pursue, but to pursue intelligently. Epicurus has not dismissed mountain climbing or any of the things in life that require exertion to bring pleasure. He’s simply showing us that nature has given us a guide in pleasure and pain and there’s no reason to look for a supernatural God or for imaginary virtues or imaginary ideals, and he’s telling us that it’s up to us to live our lives to its best effect because we won’t be punished or rewarded after we are dead. This means that there’s no excuse to be afraid of life. There’s no reason at all to think that you should desire the least possible so as to avoid all pain. If we think the praise absence of pain changes the focus of life from pursuing pleasure to avoiding pain, then you’re making a very major mistake because the phrase absence of pain means the same thing as pleasure. If you think it through, you’ll realize the only way to be absolutely sure to avoid pain is to commit suicide, and that’s exactly the opposite of what Epicurus tells us to do with our lives. Epicurus tells us that nature is telling us to pursue pleasure and that requires that we be alive and that we use our intelligence and how we go about it. Now, let’s talk about some of the objections to this perspective. Joshua
Joshua: The Prom to the second book of Lucius’s poem is famously difficult. I think Cashs on this point. Let me read that and talk about some of what might appear to be the implications and see if we can work through this problem because what he is suggesting here might seem to reinforce the point that we’re trying not to arrive at, which is that we should remove ourselves and spend all our time in naval gazing in a cave and et cetera. What he says is this, it is comforting when winds are whipping up the waters of the vast sea to watch from land the severe trials of another person. Not that anyone’s distress is a cause of agreeable pleasure, but it is comforting to see from what troubles you yourself are exempt. It is comforting also to witness mighty clashes of warriors embattled on the planes when you have no share in the danger, but nothing is more blissful than to occupy the heights effectively fortified by the teaching of the wise tranquil sanctuaries from which you can look down upon others and see them wandering everywhere in their random search for the way of life, competing for intellectual eminence, disputing about rank and striving night and day with prodigious effort to scale the summit of wealth and to secure power. That is book two lines one through 13. And one thing we can certainly say about this passage is he is not recommending what Epicurus in the letter to Minchi refers to as the pleasures of the prodigal all night drinking bouts and so forth. What he’s proposing here, somewhat metaphorically with his reference to the heights effectively fortified by the teachings of the wise reads like withdrawal, it reads like seclusion from a world that is confused, that is manic in its pursuit of fame, power, wealth, rank, name, et cetera. And what Lucretius seems to be saying here is you pull back from all of that and you put yourself at a distance from all of that. And when you occupy the heights effectively fortified by the teachings of the wise as he says, you look down from these heights and it reframes your view of the pursuits of human life in such a way as to make them seem frivolous, silly, given the scale of things just unimportant. And so someone reading this might think, well, Lucretius wants me to go live in a Buddhist monastery and withdraw from the world. And so this passage I think is a place that we need to examine carefully if we want to understand what’s going on here because I agree with you Cassius, I don’t think that Epicurus is saying that we should go to the top of Mount Aetna, for example in Greece and look down on everybody and just stay up there forever. Epicure certainly didn’t live his life that way. His followers did not live their lives that way. I can recommend again a video by our friend Don on the location of the garden on the Drmo, the main road going out of dip pylon gate out of the ancient city of Athens, and people talk about the garden of Epicurus as if it’s in a wilderness. It’s actually closer to the city walls than the academy was. So Epicurus did not live his life by going to a mountaintop and scorning on people for their pursuits. What he did was moved to Athens from the provinces from the outskirts. He moved to the main proving ground of Greek philosophy at that time and while he didn’t go to the gymnasium to teach because he would’ve been ejected probably and he didn’t hold forth in public when the Agora, he built a community of people, he corresponded with people all over the aian world and that life, life of being plugged in, of being on the main road outside of the main metropolis, dealing with people who are coming in with their own problems and their own backgrounds and so forth. This is to me kind of at a great distance from what Lucretius seems to be proposing here of let’s all go to the mountaintop and look down on everybody, right? Epicurious does not go in the direction that Cicero goes, right? Climbing the ladder of power, going from a relatively low rank to become consul of Rome and so forth. Epicurus doesn’t necessarily recommend that course, but he certainly is not withdrawn from the world in the way that I think people today seem to think that he has withdrawn from the world. And so the idea that we would associate well if absence of pain is the limit of the quantity of pleasure, then there’s no need to pursue anything apart from our immediate security and safety apart from our immediate need for food and shelter and clothing and so forth. We can scale back all of our pursuits, we can scale back all of our effort in all arenas and just focus on existing in this state of absence of pain. And that’s not the reading I get from the life of Epicurus. He was out there, there was a big statue of him seated in a public place in the city and the purpose was to draw people in so he could share this message. And the message I don’t think was let’s all go to the mountaintop together and withdraw from human life. That’s not how I read it. And as a counter poise to what we read here in the ProAm to Book two, I would suggest looking at Book six, this horrible account of the plague in Athens and particularly Dr. Emily Austin in her book Living for Pleasure has given an interpretation of the account of the plague in Athens, which is something horrible, something unimaginably horrible has happened to the city and to its people and death is rampant, it’s everywhere. It’s in the streets. People are pulling their neighbor’s body off the pire so they can put their own family members body on the pire. People have sort of come to realize that all of the structures and institutions that are built around them to contain the fear and to contain the very human response to death when all of that crumbles, what are you left with? And what you’re left with is living for today, living for pleasure in a way that doesn’t make you more withdrawn, it makes you more open and more vulnerable and more available and more free and more human. And so I think contrast those two passages and read Emily Austin’s book because it’s very good on this point.
Cassius: Okay, Josh, you’ve covered a lot in that last section, so let’s talk about how that fits in with the rest of what we’ve discussed. As to the opening of Book two of Lucretius, something very challenging is being said when Lucretius says that it’s sweet to be up in a fortress looking at the distress of others, and we have to figure out what that means. So what I’d like to suggest is that we think of that opening in the same way that we think of other very challenging things that epicure says when he says, by pleasure mean the absence of pain, or when he says death is nothing to us, or when he says all sensations are true or when he says the size of the sun is as it appears to be. All of those are challenges for us to think about and understand where he is coming from. In the case of every one of those phrases that I listed on their face, they can sound ridiculous. In each case, what’s necessary is to think back to what Epicurus had taught previously about his premises on how the world operates. In the case of death is nothing to us. Epicurus is taught that the spirit is born and dies with the body and can’t survive without it. So we know that when we die, we are no more and that is nothing to us. Epicure is not saying that we should be unconcerned about when or how we die because that could be very painful or cost us a lot of time that we could be using to enjoy pleasure. What you do is throw out any inference that contradicts what Epicurus has already said about nature and what you’re left with is the very sensible observation that the state of being dead is nothing to us. In the case of all sensations are true, Epicurus taught that the senses have no opinions of their own. So what they give you is raw data and it is your mind that forms opinions that are either right or wrong. Epicure isn’t saying that the senses are telling you that what you see across the desert is an oasis that would contradict what he said about the senses not having opinions. So once again, you throw out the false inference that contradicts what Epicurus has already said, and what you’re left with is the very helpful and obvious conclusion that the senses do not lie because the senses do not have opinions of their own. And in that sense, all sensations are truly telling you what it is that they perceive. In the case of the phrase the size of the sun is as it appears to be, Epicurus has taught that when we don’t have enough information to be sure of any one conclusion, we keep open to any option that is consistent with what we do. See, Epicurus isn’t saying that the sun is the size of a basketball because he can’t get close enough to the sun to be sure of how large it really is. Throw away any inference that contradicts what Epicurus has already told you and you arrive at the common sense conclusion that the sun is whatever size your senses may ultimately be able to confirm that it is When you get telescopes, when you get rocket ships to move closer to the sun, it is your sense which will ultimately tell you how huge the sun is. In the case of the phrase, by pleasure mean the absence of pain. We have the same kind of pattern going on. Epicurus has already told us that there are only two feelings in life that everything fits under one of the two, and that the absence of sensation is death to us. That’s in principle doctrine. Number two, once you throw away any inference that contradicts what Epicurus has already said, you arrive at the common sense conclusion. Again, that absence of pain means exactly the same kind of real world experiences, as does the word pleasure because there’s only two feelings when you have one. You don’t have the other. When you don’t have the other, you have the one. So saying absence of one means the presence of the other. So all of these examples exhibit the same pattern. Epicurus teaches premises about the way the world works and expects us to use our mind to put things together. So what we see in Reus is an example of this pattern. TIUs has already covered in the opening of Book one, the pleasurable activities of all living things. What TIUs still needs to cover are the pleasurable activities of the mind, and that’s what he’s doing in the opening of Book two. And while he could have chosen any common activity of the mind that is not painful, what he chose was the same kind of mental activity that plu tar tells us. Epicurus himself said is pleasurable, which is the great joy and delight and relief that we all feel when we realize that we’ve narrowly avoided some kind of terrible danger when we’ve missed being hit by the bus or missed being hit by the bawling tree that fell to our side. We get an immense feeling of joy, relief, delight that we are still alive. Epicure has said that kind of feeling is available to us all the time when we realize that we are metaphorically in a philosophical fortress and that we are not subject to all of the pains and terrors and worthless struggles that other people who don’t understand the way the world works are subjecting themselves to so seen in that way. The opening of Book two is not a call to retreat to a fortress and stay aloof from the world. It’s a middle picture of the great mental joy that we can experience when we have the confidence that comes from a proper understanding of the universe. Lures extends this metaphor even further in the opening of Book six where he makes clear that what Epicurus has done is to show us how to not only be secure, but also from what gates we can Sally forth from and successfully encounter and defeat the obstacles that pose a problem for our happy living. Joshua, I want to thank you for finding an article just recently that helps a lot on this point. It’s another article by David Sedley, which contrasts reac against Epicurean happiness. We’ll get into that article more next week, but Dr. Sly makes an important point there that Epicurus was expanding his perspective on pleasure past that of the sacs and telling us that we can get great pleasure from looking not only moment to moment like the Sacs were doing, but looking at our lives in their widest possible perspective as your life as a whole. Just like talks about Epicurus traveling the universe through his mind, taking a higher, wider perspective of everything that is going on and appreciating that in addition to the details. When we do that and we successfully banish pain to the lowest possible point in our lives, we can get great pleasure from realizing that we’re fortunate to experience the pleasures that are available to us. And again, let me repeat as with the airplane analogy, having this kind of philosophical confidence is pleasurable in itself, but it’s also essential to having the confidence to go out and engage with the rest of the world and to live your life to its fullest. When you have the kind of confidence that you can navigate through life and enjoy all the pleasures that are available to you free from supernatural, gods free from fear of hell and the like, then you can engage in the drinking of wine and the eating of cheese and mountain climbing and all the rest in an intelligent manner. So that’s the way I think I would link book two’s opening to the proper interpretation of what Epicurus is saying. Now, we’re not going to have time to go very far into the other examples that Ciceros preserved for us on this point, but we have both the story of Christopher’s hand and the story of the host pouring wine who’s said to experience pleasure at the same level as the guest who is drinking the wine. And if someone wants to object that a full court jar does not contain as much pleasure as a full gallon jar, that’s the same situation that’s involved in comparing any two people with different circumstances as to virtue or any other characteristic. The best that we can do as humans is to fill our own experiences whether those experiences are longer in time or shorter in time, no matter what other circumstances are involved, the goal, which is the philosoph way of looking at things, is to fill with pleasure whatever experience is available to you. And that’s where Epicurus as a philosopher is going to tell you to keep your eye on the target of whatever your experience may be, work as hard as you can to fill that experience with pleasure to all those who attempt to see Epicurus as an aesthetic, I’d urge them to look further into those examples and see that Epicurus is not abandoning the ordinary bodily and mental pleasures at all. Another thing to remember is that the feeling of pleasure is not just a physical guide but a mental guide. It takes application of your mind to understand the points that Epicurus is making, but no amount of logical reasoning on its own would ever convince you of the truth that pleasure is desirable if you did not have the faculty of pleasure available within you to recognize what is pleasurable and what is not. It’s only through that faculty of pleasure that we can come to understand that even though there’s no supernatural God, even though there’s no life after death, no absolute virtue, there is something that nature has given to us that’s reliable and stable to which we can look to navigate through life. What it comes down to a large degree is that epicurean philosophy is a philosophy. It’s not a magic pill. As Lucrecia says, you can’t just observe the daylight and have that itself magically transform your thinking about how to live better. You actually have to work. You actually have to think. You have to pursue a scheme of systematic understanding. You have to study nature just as epicure said for himself. It’s that study of nature that brought him the greatest pleasure. You have to think through these things and not blindly accept what other people tell you about the meaning of epicurean philosophy.
Joshua: Yeah, I think those are good points Cassius, and I think we can continue on that line by looking at what Cicero has the epicurean Toti say in the first book of On ends around Section 62. He says this, for this is the way in which Epicurus represents the wise man as continually happy. He keeps his passions within bounds about death. He’s indifferent, he holds true views concerning the eternal gods. Apart from all dread, he has no hesitation in crossing the boundary of life if that be the better course furnished with these advantages, he is continually in a state of pleasure and there is in truth no moment at which he does not experience more pleasures than pains for he remembers the past with thankfulness and the present is so much his own that he is aware of its importance and its agreeableness, nor is he independence on the future, but awaits it while enjoying the present. He is also very far removed from those defects of character, which I quoted a little time ago. And when he compares the fool’s life with his own, he feels great pleasure and pains, if any befall him, have never power enough to prevent the wise man from finding more reasons for joy than for vaccination. Cicero is a very hostile to Epicureanism, but he does a really good job in book one of presenting the views in a way that is wonderfully quotable. And I think that passage from Section 62 is exactly on point. It slightly reminds me of something that Virgil wrote, I think probably in his Eck logs or maybe his Georges thought to be a reference to Lucious, who was a huge influence on Virgil, particularly in his early work. He says, happy is he who knows the causes of things and his trod beneath his feet, all fears inexorable fate and the din of the devouring underworld. And I think that’s kind of on the same point. It’s the same point that Lucretius makes in the opening to book two as we’ve been saying, and it ties in directly with what he says in the prom to book one with this image of Epicurus being the only one to raise his eyes to the heavens and to stare down the horrors of supernatural religion and what they’ve done to mankind groveling on the ground. And I’ll reiterate the last point there because I think it’s so good, and pains, if any befall him have never power enough to prevent the wise man from finding more reasons for joy than for Vation. Last week I quoted from the letter to Aeu as preserved in a fragment in book 10 of DIY LAIs, the biography of Epicurus about the last day of his life. And this passage into our Claus ties in so clearly with what epicure says in that letter when he says, I’m writing to you on a very happy day, which is also the last day of my life because the pains of my physical condition cannot be surpassed. But I set over and above them all the pleasures of the recollection of our past friendship. And I think that when it comes to exploring the balance between pleasure and pain and the absence of pain being the limit of pleasure, we look to these moments when pain is extreme and we see we can still set over and above that the pleasures not just of the moment but of our lives. Pleasure kind of lifts us up out of time in a way because we can recall past pleasures and we can anticipate future pleasures and we can enjoy the pleasures of the moment and the pains that Epicurus is experiencing are only of the moment everything else is pleasure. Any cause upon that pleasure to counterbalance the effect of the pain. And as I said last week, this is evidence that even at the very end of his life, Epicurus has not stopped using pleasure as the guide in everything he does.
Cassius: Right. Joshua, as we get to the end of our program for today, our discussion has been focused on deepening our understanding of the meaning of pleasure in the epicurean context. When we come back next week, we’re going to be taking up another challenging question. How can epicure say that pleasure is not greater in an infinite time than it is in a limited time? I think we’re going to find that our discussion today and how absence of pain constitutes the limit of pleasure is going to help us understand that point. But for today, our goal has been to show that absence of pain really does mean the same thing as pleasure, and that this terminology does not mean that we’re abandoning the ordinary stimulative pleasures of the body and of the mind, but that we’re adding to them the mental confidence and appreciation that comes from a proper understanding of the way the world works. So it’s critical that we realize that pleasure is the same thing as absence of pain, and that we never let our minds get corrupted by the idea that some kind of cowardly fear of pain should be what really drives our lives. It’s not fear of pain, it is the pursuit of pleasure that ultimately is the driver of the epicurean life. So as we close today, Joshua, any final thoughts?
Joshua: I do want to recommend again, Cassius, the article that you mentioned earlier in the episode by David Sedley that was published in 2016 called Epicurean versus Sic Happiness because that deals directly with what we’ll be talking about next week regarding issues related to duration of pleasure and the effect that that has on our understanding of pleasure. David Sedley is always a treat writing on all things epicurean, and I recommend people take a look at that.
Cassius: Yes, Joshua, that’s a great article, and I’ll just use that to drive home the point that the worst thing we can do is to accept the view of pleasure promoted by Plato and the Ciceros and the stoics of the world because they’d like nothing more than to see Epicurus stripped of the real meaning of his philosophy. And the real meaning of his philosophy is that pleasure is an extremely wide concept, including all of the mental and physical activities of life that are not painful. Pleasure is not simply limited to bodily stimulations as Plato or Cicero or the stoics would like you to believe. And the same time, absence of pain is not a difficult concept. It’s not a different type of pleasure. It is a logical deduction that the best that any human being can do in an analogy with a vessel is to fill their life with pleasure to the rim as closely as possible. Your vessel may not be the same size as other people’s vessel may be, but the best you can do as an individual is to clum as close to a completely happy life as you can by getting your life as full of pleasures as you possibly can. But you can’t get to where you need to be in understanding Epicurus by just falling off the turnip truck. You have to think about the philosophy. You have to study it, you have to talk about it with other like-minded people. It’s very easy to fall in with the crowd and to go along with ideas that obviously don’t work for a majority of people. Epicure said, set sail away from the conventional education. The best way forward is what epicure said at the end of the letter to menaces. Meditate, therefore on these things and things akin to them night and day by yourself and with a companion like yourself. And never shall you be disturbed, waking or asleep, but you shall live like a God among men. For a man who lives among immortal blessings is not like immortal being, that’s what we attempt to do at the Epicurean Friends Forum and bringing these ideas to your attention and discussing them among like-minded friends of Epicurus. We invite you to drop by the forum and discuss this episode or anything else you’d like to discuss about epicure in philosophy. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back very soon. See you then. Bye.