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
Section titled “Summary”Cassius and Joshua explore the full Epicurean meaning of the phrase “absence of pain” — a continuation of the prior week’s discussion on pleasure as the guide of life. The episode is framed as controversial even within Epicurean circles: many who call themselves Epicureans misread the phrase as a call to asceticism, Buddhist withdrawal, or simple cave-dwelling minimalism.
Cassius opens by explaining that Epicurus needed an answer to Plato’s argument in the Philebus that pleasure cannot be the goal of life because pleasure can always be increased, so it is never complete. Epicurus’s answer — by expanding the definition of pleasure to include all experience that is not painful — resolves this logical objection, since a life fully filled with pleasure is analogous to virtue being “complete.” Key texts discussed include: the Letter to Menoeceus (sections 127–130), Epicurus’s fragment from the lost work Peri Telous (On the Goal), Cicero’s On Ends Book One (Torquatus in section 62 on the “continually happy wise man”), and Diogenes Laertius 10.34. The proem to Lucretius Book Two (“it is comforting to watch from land the trials of another”) is examined and reframed — not as a call to withdrawal but as an illustration of the mental pleasure derived from philosophical confidence, symmetrical with the invocation of Venus in Book One. David Sedley’s 2016 article “Epicurean versus Stoic Happiness” is recommended. Emily Austin’s Living for Pleasure is cited on the plague passage at the end of Lucretius Book Six. Principal Doctrines 1–4 are discussed as giving “philosophical confidence” — a pleasure in itself. The episode closes with the Letter to Menoeceus’s call to meditate on these things “night and day, by yourself and with a companion like yourself.”
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to episode 269 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean text, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
Today we are 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 are 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. But as to the full meaning of the word pleasure, 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 are 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 are 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 are going to see that there is very good reason to believe that Epicurus had a much wider view of pleasure in mind when he discussed absence of pain. As we get started, it is 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 atoms through the void in a totally natural way. And you cannot 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, ignoble, and absolutely unfit to be considered the goal of life. Epicurus also knew that the Cyrenaics before him had advocated for a central role of pleasure, but the Cyrenaics had focused on ordinary, active, and bodily pleasures, and they had not been successful in persuading others that their position was correct.
Arguments similar to those that had been used against the Cyrenaics were preserved in Plato’s dialogue, the Philebus, and there is one argument in particular that is very relevant to today’s discussion. Plato had argued in the Philebus 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 is not wise at all if he is 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 is a well-known argument, and Epicurus needed an answer both to it and to other arguments against pleasure — for example, that it is impossible to continuously live in pleasure throughout your life because pleasure is not always available to you.
What I will suggest to you today is that Epicurus’s answer to these problems involved rejecting the presumptions of Plato and the rest that pleasure means only active bodily pleasures. Epicurus reasoned 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 Cyrenaics had focused their attention on the ordinary bodily and mental pleasures directly in front of them, Epicurus held that it makes sense to look at pleasure from a much wider point of view. Epicurus held that life itself is pleasurable no matter what we are doing, if we are not in pain — and that it therefore makes sense to expand our view of pleasure to include everything in our lives that is 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, Epicurus 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 is 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 is the same situation as those who extol virtue as the goal of life, 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 is no reason for any Epicurean to follow the path taken by Philebus 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 do not have the responsive argument 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. 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 is 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 are 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 are 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 is why it is so important that Epicurus expanded his view of what constitutes pleasure — because the more pleasures that are available to you, the easier it is 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 realize 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 is 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 is no pleasurable alternative, if the situation is bad enough we can always escape even the worst of tortures through death.
There is much more to say about all of this, but for now let us 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 is 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 did not 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 ascetics of the world say that it does. Those views are false. But the majority of people who have been talking about Epicurus in the last fifty 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 is 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 us pull back for a moment and put this in more practical terms. When you first reject supernatural religion and those who say that it is 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 is impossible to constantly experience nothing but stimulating pleasures. We cannot 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 is where Epicurus saw that while active pleasures are good, too many of the most important experiences in life do not 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 pleasurably are those things that give us confidence in our ability to live happily.
Let us take a look at the first four of Epicurus’s Principal Doctrines to see how this confidence works. Doctrine 1 answers the priests 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 are dead. Doctrine 2 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 3 answers 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 4 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 is severe enough, will be brief. Epicurus reminds us that there is no reason to fear anything as being truly terrible in life when we know that there is nothing truly terrible in not living.
But now you should see the pattern: we embrace and combine both bodily and mental pleasures. There is 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 thirty thousand 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 are doing it. This feeling of confidence is in itself a pleasure if we take the time to think about it. And even if it is not 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 have introduced a lot in this opening. But before we go further, let us 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 Menoeceus, and starting in that text at the end of section 127, we get his views on pleasure and the relationship between pleasure and pain. He starts this way:
“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 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 the prodigal and those that consist 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 revelings, 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.”
Cassius, you started the episode by saying what a controversial issue we have on our plate today, and this from the Letter to Menoeceus is very controversial in the academic literature. I am also going to quote from a fragment of a lost work called Peri Telous in Greek — “On the End Goal” — very much like Cicero’s book De Finibus in Latin — quoted by Diogenes Laertius in Book 10 of his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, relentlessly ridiculed by Cicero and by Plutarch. And in that passage, as translated by C.D. Yonge 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 amatory pleasures and from music and from the contemplation of beauty.”
I think it is important to keep that one to hand. Any time we look at the Letter to Menoeceus, these are both written by Epicurus, and they seem to be saying opposite things about pleasure. I think he is actually being very consistent here, because he is giving us an understanding of pleasure but he is also adding to that a program of choice and avoidance. To deny in that fragment from the lost work On the Goal that good food was pleasurable would betray in yourself a muddled understanding of pleasure. I think Epicurus does not 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 are pleasurable. This is why we have the program of choice and avoidance.
There is one other thing I want to say about the passage from the Letter to Menoeceus, and that is the claim in section 130 in which he says: “Plain foods 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 has gone into a study of the Greek language and the cultural context of the time and the agricultural and economic issues. I recommend — anybody, do not switch to just eating bread and water necessarily, I mean you could choose to do that — but before you interpret Epicurus as ascetic 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 Menoeceus. 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 have 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 in On Ends Book Two, section 23. Cicero speaks to the Epicurean Torquatus and says: “At one time you mean by the word the very same thing which I have 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 two hundred years, Cicero — 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 is useful to emphasize to people that they should not be surprised to find that what Epicurus wrote in the Letter to Menoeceus needs more explanation. You are in good company with Cicero.
In fact, there is 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 are asleep? Does absence of pain mean that you are under anesthesia? Does it mean that you are high on marijuana? What does it mean exactly to say that you are 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 is 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 do not have to do that and we should not do that. Epicurus in the Letter to Menoeceus was writing a short letter to a student, and he could expect that Menoeceus knew the rest of what Epicurus taught and therefore that Menoeceus would understand what he said without more background. But we were not alive to be taught by Epicurus directly, so we have to look to other sources — such as you have 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’s 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’s view of pleasure, but to add the experience that Cicero and the Platonists 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 at this moment — and you too, I imagine — which is to say neither in pleasure nor in pain.
This is another hint that shows us what Epicurus was doing. Torquatus tells us that Epicurus held that there are only two feelings — pleasure and pain — and that is what we also see in Epicurus’s Principal Doctrine 3, where he stressed that wherever pleasure is present, there is neither pain of body nor of mind, nor both at once.
Just to hammer this home: if you are not experiencing pain, what you are experiencing is pleasure. When you think like an Epicurean, there is no neutral state, as the other philosophers want to argue. The ultimate statement of this is from Torquatus in On Ends Book One, section 38: “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 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 is the key to understanding Epicurean pleasure and how it relates to the absence of pain. We do not normally think in this way because we are jaded about our valuations of life, but if we understand the true value of life, we are 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 toward 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 is not painful. Whether you are 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 is simply showing us that nature has given us a guide in pleasure and pain, and there is no reason to look for a supernatural god or for imaginary virtues or imaginary ideals. And he is telling us that it is up to us to live our lives to its best effect, because we will not be punished or rewarded after we are dead.
This means that there is no excuse to be afraid of life. There is no reason at all to think that you should desire the least possible so as to avoid all pain. If we think the phrase absence of pain changes the focus of life from pursuing pleasure to avoiding pain, then we are making a very major mistake — because the phrase absence of pain means the same thing as pleasure. If you think it through, you will realize the only way to be absolutely sure to avoid pain is to commit suicide, and that is 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 in how we go about it.
Now, let us talk about some of the objections to this perspective. Joshua —
Joshua:
The proem to the second book of Lucretius’s poem is famously difficult, Cassius, 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 are trying not to arrive at — which is that we should remove ourselves and spend all our time in navel-gazing in a cave and so forth. 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 plains 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 1 through 13. And one thing we can certainly say about this passage is that he is not recommending what Epicurus in the Letter to Menoeceus refers to as the pleasures of the prodigal — all-night drinking bouts and so forth. What he is 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, and so forth. 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 is going on here. Because I agree with you, Cassius — I do not think that Epicurus is saying that we should go to the top of Mount Etna and look down on everybody and just stay up there forever. Epicurus certainly did not 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 Dromos — the main road going out of the Dipylon Gate out of the ancient city of Athens. And people talk about the Garden of Epicurus as if it is in a wilderness. It is actually closer to the city walls than the Academy was. So Epicurus did not live his life by going to a mountaintop and scorning people for their pursuits. What he did was move to Athens from the provinces, from the outskirts. He moved to the main proving ground of Greek philosophy at that time, and while he did not go to the gymnasium to teach (because he would have been ejected probably) and he did not hold forth in public in the Agora, he built a community of people, he corresponded with people all over the Aegean 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 — this is to me at a great distance from what Lucretius seems to be proposing here of “let us all go to the mountaintop and look down on everybody.”
Epicurus does not go in the direction that Cicero goes — climbing the ladder of power, going from a relatively low rank to become consul of Rome and so forth. Epicurus does not 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 is 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. And that is 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 do not think — was “let us all go to the mountaintop together and withdraw from human life.” That is not how I read it.
And as a counterpoint to what we read here in the proem 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. Something horrible, something unimaginably horrible has happened to the city and to its people. Death is rampant, it is everywhere, it is in the streets. People are pulling their neighbor’s body off the pyre so they can put their own family member’s body on the pyre. 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 are left with is living for today, living for pleasure, in a way that does not 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 is very good on this point.
Cassius:
Okay, Joshua, you have covered a lot in that last section, so let us talk about how that fits in with the rest of what we have discussed. As to the opening of Book Two of Lucretius — something very challenging is being said when Lucretius says that it is 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 would like to suggest is that we think of that opening in the same way that we think of other very challenging things that Epicurus says — when he says “by pleasure I 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, on their face they can sound ridiculous. In each case, what is 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 taught that the spirit is born and dies with the body and cannot survive without it. So we know that when we die, we are no more, and that is nothing to us. Epicurus 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 are 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. Epicurus is not 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 are 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 taught that when we do not 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 is not saying that the sun is the size of a basketball, because he cannot 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 senses which will ultimately tell you how huge the sun is.
In the case of the phrase “by pleasure I 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 is in Principal Doctrine 2. 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 are only two feelings — when you have one, you do not have the other. When you do not have the other, you have the one. So saying the 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 Lucretius is an example of this pattern. Lucretius has already covered in the opening of Book One the pleasurable activities of all living things. What Lucretius still needs to cover are the pleasurable activities of the mind, and that is what he is 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 Plutarch 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 have narrowly avoided some kind of terrible danger: when we have missed being hit by the bus, or missed being hit by the falling tree that fell to our side. We get an immense feeling of joy, relief, and delight that we are still alive.
Epicurus 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 do not understand the way the world works are subjecting themselves to. 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 is a picture of the great mental joy that we can experience when we have the confidence that comes from a proper understanding of the universe.
Lucretius extends this metaphor even further in the opening of Book Six, where he makes clear that what Epicurus has done is to show us not only how to be secure, but also from what gates we can sally forth successfully and 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 is another article by David Sedley, which contrasts Stoic against Epicurean happiness. We will get into that article more next week, but Dr. Sedley makes an important point there that Epicurus was expanding his perspective on pleasure past that of the Cyrenaics, and telling us that we can get great pleasure from looking not only moment to moment — as the Cyrenaics were doing — but looking at our lives in their widest possible perspective, at your life as a whole.
Just as Lucretius 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 are 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 is 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 is the way I think I would link Book Two’s opening to the proper interpretation of what Epicurus is saying. Now, we are not going to have time to go very far into the other examples that Cicero preserved for us on this point, but we have both the story of Chrysippus’s hand and the story of the host pouring wine who is 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 quart jar does not contain as much pleasure as a full gallon jar — that is the same situation that is 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 philosophical way of looking at things, is to fill with pleasure whatever experience is available to you.
And that is 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 ascetic, I would 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 is only through that faculty of pleasure that we can come to understand that even though there is no supernatural god, even though there is no life after death, no absolute virtue — there is something that nature has given to us that is reliable and stable to which we can look to navigate through life.
What it comes down to in large degree is that Epicurean philosophy is a philosophy — it is not a magic pill. As Lucretius says, you cannot 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 Epicurus said for himself, it was 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 Torquatus 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 is 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 dependent 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 vexation.”
Cicero is 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 Eclogues or maybe his Georgics, thought to be a reference to Lucretius, who was a huge influence on Virgil, particularly in his early work. He says: “Happy is he who knows the causes of things and has trod beneath his feet all fears, inexorable fate, and the din of the devouring underworld.” And I think that is kind of on the same point — the same point that Lucretius makes in the opening to Book Two, as we have been saying. And it ties in directly with what he says in the proem to Book One with this image of Epicurus being the only one to raise his eyes to the heavens and stare down the horrors of supernatural religion and what they have done to mankind groveling on the ground.
And I will reiterate the last point there because I think it is 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 vexation.”
Last week I quoted from the Letter to Idomeneus, as preserved in a fragment in Book 10 of Diogenes Laertius, the biography of Epicurus, about the last day of his life. And this passage from Torquatus ties in so clearly with what Epicurus says in that letter — when he says, “I am 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. And 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 are going to be taking up another challenging question: how can Epicurus say that pleasure is not greater in an infinite time than it is in a limited time? I think we are 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 are abandoning the ordinary stimulative pleasures of the body and of the mind — but that we are adding to them the mental confidence and appreciation that comes from a proper understanding of the way the world works.
So it is 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 is 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, published in 2016, called “Epicurean versus Stoic Happiness” — because that deals directly with what we will be talking about next week regarding issues related to duration of pleasure and the effect 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 is a great article. And I will 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 would 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 at the same time, absence of pain is not a difficult concept. It is not a different type of pleasure. It is a logical deduction that the best that any human being can do — in 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 climb as close to a completely happy life as you can by getting your life as full of pleasures as you possibly can. But you cannot 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 is very easy to fall in with the crowd and to go along with ideas that obviously do not work for a majority of people.
Epicurus said, set sail away from the conventional education. The best way forward is what Epicurus said at the end of the Letter to Menoeceus: “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 a mortal being.”
That is what we attempt to do at the EpicureanFriends.com Forum — 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 would like to discuss about Epicurean philosophy. Thanks for your time today. We will be back very soon. See you then. Bye.