Episode 270 - Life Is Desirable, But Unlimited Time Contains No Greater Pleasure Than Limited Time
Date: 02/20/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4292-episode-270-life-is-desirable-but-unlimited-time-contains-no-greater-pleasure-th/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Cassius and Joshua examine Principal Doctrines 18–21 — the challenging claim that infinite time contains no greater pleasure than limited time. They work through Cicero’s objection in On Ends, Book Two, Section 27, which argues that a pleasure-based system can never yield a “complete” or permanent happiness. The response draws on Dr. David Sedley’s 2016 article “Epicurean versus Cyrenaic Happiness”: happiness is a property of a whole life, not of discrete moments, and the mind can grasp the fullness of life’s pleasures from any temporal vantage point — past, present, or anticipated future. Joshua develops the “force multiplier” insight from the Letter to Idomeneus: Epicurus uses the human experience of time to extend pleasure’s coverage across past and future while confining pain to the present. Cassius draws on Diogenes Laertius’s account of the wise man — including the claim that the wise man can be happy even on the rack — and on Diogenes of Oenoanda’s Fragment Three, in which the elderly philosopher dedicates his inscription to “the fullness of pleasure.” Joshua quotes Norman DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy on the alpinist analogy: a climber at the summit cannot go higher, but that does not make duration irrelevant to the quality of the experience. Cassius closes with the synthesis: life is desirable, the completeness of pleasure is analogous to the completeness of wisdom, and Epicurean philosophy enables a person to see that even a finite or prematurely shortened life can be considered fully complete.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 270 of Lucretius Today. This is the 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 discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
This week we are completing our series on the key doctrines of Epicurus, with the topic being: life is desirable, but unlimited time contains no greater pleasure than limited time. We begin each week talking about Lucretius being the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world, and the subject of completeness is going to be a major part of our discussion today. These doctrines that we are going to be discussing are some of the most challenging and counterintuitive statements made by Epicurus in the Principal Doctrines, but they are very important as almost a final conclusion about the benefit and worth of Epicurean philosophy. In order to be sure that we understand everything as we should, we need to be able to read these and be confident in what is being discussed.
What we are discussing today begins with Principal Doctrine 18. Now, as we have discussed frequently, these were not originally numbered separately the way we have them today, so I am going to read them all as a group, starting with 18 down through 21. Quote: “The pleasure in the flesh is not increased when once the pain due to want is removed, but is only varied. And the limit as regards pleasure in the mind is begotten by the reasoned understanding of these very pleasures and of the emotions akin to them, which used to cause the greatest fear to the mind. Infinite time contains no greater pleasure than limited time, if one measures by reason the limits of pleasure. The flesh perceives the limits of pleasure as unlimited, and an unlimited time is required to supply it. But the mind, having attained a reasoned understanding of the ultimate good of the flesh and its limits, and having dissipated the fears concerning the time to come, supplies us with the complete life, and we have no further need of infinite time. But neither does the mind shun pleasure, nor when circumstances begin to bring about the departure from life, does it approach its end as though it fell short in any way of the best life. He has learned the limits of life, knows that that which removes the pain due to want and makes the whole of life complete is easy to obtain, so that there is no need of actions which involve competition.”
Now, before we go further, I would point out that while we often tend to focus on the rather shocking claim that infinite time contains no greater pleasure than limited time — and we pull that out of context as if that is the major thing being stated — there are a number of other things being repeatedly emphasized here. One is that you have to measure the limits of pleasure by reason, and that the limit of pleasure in the mind is begotten by the reasoned understanding of these very pleasures. And while the flesh perceives the limits of time to be unlimited, the mind, having attained a reasoned understanding, can see that that is not so. And then the last of these statements: he has learned the limits of life, knows that it is not necessary to be involved in struggle or competition.
There is definitely a major component here that in order to understand how infinite time contains no greater pleasure than limited time, you have to think about this. You have to reason it through. These are conclusory statements about infinite versus finite time. They are not going to be the same immediate observation as “snow is white and honey is sweet,” that you can simply look at and see that this is the case.
It is going to take a reasoned application of your thought processes to come to this conclusion. Having said that we have to reason our way through this, we then have to get into the process of how that reasoning is going to take place and what it is going to be based on. And as we have discussed in many other episodes, there is a background of attack by Plato and other philosophers who have objected to placing pleasure at the heart of philosophy — who have said that pleasure cannot sustain this kind of analysis, cannot sustain a life of happiness on its own, and in fact can be destructive of a life of happiness. But as Diogenes of Oenoanda said in Fragment Thirty-Two, even to the point of shouting about it to all Greeks and non-Greeks, the question is not what is the means to happiness. You cannot simply skip to that question of “give me the tools — that is all I really need to know.” That is not good enough. You have to reach the ultimate question, which is not what is the means to happiness. The question is: what is happiness, and what is the ultimate goal of our nature? Diogenes answered that, now and always, shouting loudly to all Greeks and non-Greeks, that pleasure is the end of the best mode of life. Torquatus in On Ends says that a life of happiness is a life of pleasure.
There is a very tight relationship between pleasure and happiness in Epicurean theory, but that does not mean that the two words mean exactly the same thing. One of the things we will be discussing today, and referring people to for more information when they want to dive deeper, is an article by Dr. David Sedley entitled “Epicurean versus Cyrenaic Happiness.” One of the major points that Dr. Sedley makes is that happiness is a concept that is much wider than pleasure itself — which people, including the Cyrenaics, tended to focus on as episodes and moments and discrete experiences. There is a difference between the way Epicurus looked at happiness in terms of a total, a complete or full result, versus the way the Cyrenaics and many people who have not thought through the problem tend to look at pleasures and pains of the moment that do not add together to come to anything wider than just the individual experiences themselves. In other words, just as Epicurus could look at atoms and void coming together into bodies and say that both the bodies have reality and the atoms and void that compose them have reality, an Epicurean could look at a flock of birds and say that the flock exists at the same time that the individual birds exist. The fact that the flock is composed of individual birds does not mean that the flock does not exist. All of which adds up to the analogy that a life of happiness can be composed of individual pleasures and pains. And while it is the individual pleasures and pains that we tend to focus on from moment to moment, it is also valid to look at the life of happiness as a total sum of these individual, discrete components.
It is appropriate for us to look not just at the individual pleasures and pains, but at our lives as a whole in total balance, to see how the pleasures and pains stack up against each other. And in that way we can see that a life that is predominantly pleasurable can itself be a source of pleasure to offset against the pains of the moment. There is a lot of depth in this analysis that we are not going to be able to get into today, but I think what we can do is point people to reasonable ways and alternatives for understanding these doctrines that really do make a lot of sense once you get into them. But before we go further, let us drop back and take up the objections to this kind of argument that are found in Cicero’s On Ends, Book Two, starting around Section 27, in which Cicero is beginning to come to the conclusions of his arguments against pleasure, and he is going to be citing exactly the doctrines that we are focusing on today.
One of the really good points that Dr. Sedley makes is that Cicero’s criticism here assumes conclusions about these doctrines that Torquatus has not stated — that the doctrines themselves do not state. Because even after reading all of these doctrines together, is Epicurus trying to say that it is not preferable to live a longer pleasurable life than a shorter pleasurable life? Dr. Sedley says that even though it is very popular nowadays to take the position that Epicurus says it does not make any difference how long you live, that is not the way to read these sections. And that is what we will be discussing today as we go further into it.
But for now, Joshua, if you could please — let us get Cicero’s objection here, and I think that will make the rest of the discussion a lot more clear.
Joshua: Yes, this is the Rackham translation of Cicero’s De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On the Ends of Good and Evil). This is the second book in which Cicero is responding to Torquatus and criticizing the Epicurean system. And he says this in Section 27.
“But we dwell too long upon the obvious. For when it has been conclusively proved that pleasure is the sole good, there is no room left either for virtue or friendship. There is no great need to say anything further. Still, I do not want you to think I have failed to answer any of your points, so I will now say a few words more in reply to the remainder of your discourse. The end and aim of every system of philosophy is the attainment of happiness, and desire for happiness is the sole motive that has led men to engage in this study.
“But different thinkers make happiness consist in different things. According to your school, it consists in pleasure, and conversely, misery consists solely in pain. Let us then begin by examining what sort of thing happiness, as you conceive it, is. You will grant, I suppose, that if there is such a thing as happiness, it is bound to be attainable in its entirety by the wise man. For if happiness, once won, can be lost, a happy life is impossible, since who can feel confident of permanently and securely retaining a possession that is perishable and precarious.
“Yet one who is not sure of the permanence of his goods must inevitably fear that a time may come when he may lose them, and so be miserable. But no one can be happy who fears utter ruin. Therefore, no one can be happy at all. For we usually speak of a life as a happy one, not in reference to a part of it, but to the whole of a lifetime. Indeed, a life means a finished and complete life. Nor is it possible to be at one time happy and at another time miserable, since he who thinks that he may be miserable will not be happy. For when happiness has once been achieved, it is as permanent as wisdom itself, which is the efficient cause of happiness. It does not wait for the end of our mortal term, as Croesus in Herodotus’s history was warned by Solon to do.
“It may be rejoined that Epicurus, as you yourself were saying, Torquatus, denies that long duration can add anything to happiness. He says that as much pleasure is enjoyed in a brief span of time as a pleasure however lasting. In saying this, he is grossly inconsistent. He places the chief good in pleasure, and yet he says that no greater pleasure would result from a lifetime of endless duration than from a limited and moderate period. If a person finds the sole good in virtue, it is open to him to say that the happy life is consummated by the consummation of virtue, for his position is that the chief good is not increased by lapse of time. But if one thinks that happiness is produced by pleasure, how can he consistently deny that pleasure is increased by duration? If it is not, pain is not either. Or if pain is worse the longer it lasts, is not pleasure rendered more desirable by continuance?
“Epicurus always speaks of the deity as happy and everlasting. But on what ground? Take away his everlasting life, and Jove is no happier than Epicurus. Each of them enjoys the chief good, that is to say, pleasure. Ah, but you say, Epicurus is liable to pain as well. Well, yes, but he thinks nothing of pain, for he tells us that if he were being burnt to death, he would exclaim ‘How delightful this is.’ Wherein then is he inferior to Zeus, except that Zeus lives forever? But what good has everlasting life to offer besides supreme and never-ending pleasure? What then is the use of your high-flown language if it be not consistent physical pleasure? And I will add, if you like, mental pleasure, so long as this, as you hold, is understood to have its source in the body. This constitutes happiness. Well, who can guarantee this pleasure for the wise man in perpetuity? For the things that produce pleasure are not in the wise man’s control, since happiness does not consist in wisdom itself, but in the means to pleasure which wisdom can procure. But all the apparatus of pleasure is external, and what is external must depend upon chance.
“Consequently, happiness becomes the slave of fortune. Yet Epicurus says that fortune interferes with the wise man but little—”
Cassius: Joshua, let me jump in there for just a moment and thank you first for reading it. There is an awful lot in what you have just read that we are going to have to sort out.
But let us drop back for just a second on some of the premises of what we seem to be arguing about. The title of our podcast today is “Life Is Desirable,” and that is one of the aspects of what we are talking about too. The question is, is life itself in fact desirable? Should we wish to continue to live, or is there an argument that we should not care about living any particular length of time? It is clearly one of the premises of the Epicurean position that, just as Epicurus said in the Letter to Menoeceus, life is desirable, and Epicurus ridicules the people who say that it would be good never to have been born, or once born, to hasten to pass the gates of death.
Epicurus is clearly valuing life for the possibility of pleasure and happiness that it brings. So one of the first premises to observe here is that Epicurus is certainly taking the position that life is preferable, and nobody in their right mind is going to argue against that. But there is a corollary question that Cicero is attempting to use as a hammer here, which is: how long do you need to live in order to have a happy life? How are you going to have a complete life if your goal is pleasure? And of course this is a topic we have discussed many times, going back into the Philebus material. Plato, Cicero, and Seneca will argue that pleasure can never be consummated, it can never be satisfied, because from their point of view, more pleasure is always better.
That is why this whole argument has come up in the first place, and that is what Cicero is attempting to draw out here. The Epicureans have a major inconsistency, he says, because you are saying happiness is based on pleasure, but pleasure can always be made better. Therefore you can never have a complete life. You are always going to be short because you are always going to be wanting more, and in the end you are not going to get it because you cannot live forever.
So one way to get at this would be to go through the things Cicero has said here and decide which of them we think Epicurus and Torquatus would have agreed with and which ones they would not have. One of the first things Cicero says at the beginning of Section 27 is that the entire end and aim of philosophy is the attainment of happiness. So the very first question is going to be: is Epicurus advocating that happiness should be the goal of life? Or is the thing in life which we do for its own sake — as Torquatus has expressed it — pleasure?
Epicurus has said the beginning and the end of the happy life is pleasure. However, at the beginning of his Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus has talked about happiness as the thing we are after, and I have already quoted Diogenes of Oenoanda saying that a life of happiness is a life of pleasure. Would Torquatus and Epicurus have agreed with Cicero’s statement that it is the desire for happiness that is the sole motive that has led men to engage in the study of philosophy?
Well, Epicurus certainly says something very similar about the study of nature — that if the study of nature did nothing to remove our fears about death and atmospheric phenomena and the gods and so on, there would be no need to study nature. And while in most cases the study of nature is itself pleasurable, there is no doubt that Epicurus has also said that there are many things we are going to do in life that are not immediately pleasurable but are in fact painful. So when you incorporate into your philosophy that it is possible you are going to choose either pain or pleasure at a particular moment, it is going to be necessary to have a higher perspective that explains how the total pleasure you experience in your life — for which you are sometimes going to engage in things that are painful — is the actual goal.
It seems to me very reasonable that that is where happiness and pleasure intersect, and I think Dr. Sedley’s article is largely in that same direction — that Epicurus, in talking about a complete life, is doing something that the Cyrenaics objected to. Epicurus is saying that rather than look moment by moment and decide you are never going to engage in anything that is painful, you have to take a higher or wider view of your life experiences and embrace the idea that you will do things at times that are painful for the sake of your wider or more complete life being more filled with pleasure than it otherwise would be.
Now, Cicero tries to dig into different aspects of this by saying that “you will grant, I suppose, that if there is such a thing as happiness, it is bound to be attainable in its entirety by the wise man.” This is another way of asking the same question: does the fact that you have to suffer some periods of pain in life mean that by definition it is impossible for you to obtain the kind of life Epicurus is setting out as your goal? If the goal of life is complete pleasure in the sense of never experiencing any pain, then the very first moment you experience some amount of pain, you have lost your goal. You have to have a way of looking at this that allows you to experience pains at times in life and have a logical explanation for how it results in happiness. I do not think Epicurus would say that the person who experiences pain can never achieve the life of complete happiness.
Joshua: Yeah. What Cicero is really saying here is that it is the fear that that might happen that ruins the happiness in the moment you are currently in. It is not that you come to the end of your life and your situation changes and suddenly you do not have the things that make you happy anymore. It is the fear that this might happen throughout your entire life that makes happiness impossible under Epicurus’s system — from Cicero’s point of view.
Cassius: Yeah, what I am hearing you say there — and what I would focus on — is the entirety of life or the completeness of life. Because how would you reconcile, Josh, having said what you just said — what is the position of those momentary pains that you are going to have to engage in, which Epicurus says you are going to sometimes choose? How do you relate the periodic engagement in painful activity to a life of pleasure? How do you explain that to a child, for example, who says, “I thought you wanted me to have a life of pleasure — here you are telling me I have to occasionally engage in pain. How can you make sense of that to me?”
Joshua: Regarding this issue of completeness, what I noticed doing a word search of Cicero’s text is that when Torquatus uses the word “complete,” he is referring exclusively to the limit of the quantity of pleasure in a particular moment, or the limit of the quantity of pain in a particular moment — he is not using this idea of completeness to refer to life. This is very much an Aristotelian idea that Cicero is channeling, and it is not the only Aristotelian idea that we see in here. When Cicero says, for example, that wisdom is the efficient cause of happiness, he is making that claim on the basis of his understanding of Aristotle’s teleology, which Epicurus certainly rejects. In fact, in Lucretius, when he talks about the eye — how the eye does not develop in order to let you see — this is an explicit rejection of Aristotle’s teleology. But Cicero is using that as the basis for his conversation. So there is bound to be some friction here in looking at these two thinkers.
Cassius: Right, Joshua. In regard to completeness versus the pleasures or pains of the moment — we know that Epicurus himself was not able to secure himself against all pain, as in the example of the last days of his life when he was in such pain from his kidney disease. But there is an answer to how to deal with that pain, even intense pain, even pain that can be very long, and Epicurus gives that answer, and we have been discussing it a lot over the last several episodes. You offset pleasures against pains. By doing so, you are not eliminating the fact that pain is being experienced, but you are summoning and experiencing pleasure that offsets the pain and makes life worthwhile even though the pain is being experienced.
There is in this offsetting aspect something that is very closely related to this issue of completeness in terms of not taking things out of their context. Certainly pains do occur — as they did to Epicurus, as they do to everybody — and yet they occur in a wider context in which you can choose to focus on the pain you are experiencing in a particular moment, or mentally you can choose to focus on the wider context of the pleasures you are also able to experience at that moment or at other times in your life.
There is definitely a major subtlety going on here between the views that say you cannot even know if a person has been happy until the very end of their life and those who judge whether a life is happy only at its end. But Cicero, as he is talking about these other views, does not appear to be taking that position himself. Cicero is arguing that the wise man who has attained happiness has to feel confident of being able to permanently and securely retain possession of that happiness. And of course that is why Cicero says that pleasure is not going to work for you — because you cannot always be secure in constant pleasure. Which again leads us back to Epicurus’s wider understanding of what pleasure means, because that is going to be a point where Epicurus is going to factually disagree with Cicero and those who say you cannot constantly live in pleasure. He is going to say that it is not proper to look at the pains of life in isolation from the pleasures that also accompany life, and that the way to properly understand all this — the mental reasoning, the emotional evaluation that we were talking about when we first started off today and read the Epicurean quotations — that level of intellectual and emotional evaluation does not simply focus on the individual stimulative sensory pleasures or pains of the moment, but places them all in a context in which the pleasures outweigh the pain.
We have gotten fond it seems lately of quoting that line from Torquatus that the wise man is always going to have more reason for joy than for vexation. That does not mean the wise man is not going to be experiencing vexation on a fairly regular basis, but he is going to have more reason for joy than for vexation. And weighing them against each other and offsetting the pains against the pleasures, he is going to see that life is worthwhile, and life is desirable, and it is desirable to continue in life so long as you can continue to see that you have a net balance of pleasure over pain.
Joshua: Yeah, I think the key to understanding this is to go again, as you just cited, back to the Letter to Idomeneus and see what he is doing there. Because what he does in that letter — he is saying, “This is a happy day, which is also the last day of my life,” and the pain is terrible. But what he sets over and above that is the pleasure of the memory of his past experience. What he is doing essentially is using the human experience of time as a force multiplier for pleasure. He is trying to get people into the mode of thinking that pain only exists in the moment, and the thing that makes us dread the future or remember the past with horror is fear. You need to overcome the fear of what is going to happen tomorrow in order to reduce the pain.
But by the opposite token, by harnessing tomorrow and yesterday and the pleasures of them — both the ones you remember and the ones you anticipate — you have increased the coverage of pleasure and shrunk the coverage of pain. And so even if you are experiencing pain in the moment, that pain is still outweighed by the pleasure you remember from the past and the pleasure you anticipate from the future. As long as you are not also fearing pain in the future and ruminating on pain you have experienced in the past, the pleasure will always outweigh the pain, because the pleasure is three-dimensional in this way, while the pain is one-dimensional. It is the way we perceive time, and how Epicurus uses that — this is a really important aspect of how he sets pleasure over and against and above pain.
Because what Cicero is saying is: if you hold wisdom up as the good, if wisdom is the efficient cause of happiness, if wisdom produces happiness, and wisdom is a permanent state you can never climb back down from — once you achieve wisdom, you have it for the rest of your life, and wisdom produces happiness, therefore you have happiness for the rest of your life. Epicureans cannot go so far as to say you will never have moments when you feel pain. That would be the parallel in this argument. And the way that Epicurus solves the problem is by looking at the human experience of time and how we can use that as a force multiplier to overcome pain with pleasure — past, present, and future.
Cassius: Yes, Joshua. I think at least so far in this episode we are doing a good job of focusing on the day-to-day operation of pleasure versus pain and how the process is working. It really gets interesting to compare some of the specific things that Epicurus said versus what Cicero is alleging here, because sometimes you might think that Epicurus is going to be disagreeing with something that Cicero says, when apparently, according to Diogenes Laertius, he is not going to disagree with a particular statement.
I am looking around Section 118 of Diogenes Laertius’s biography of Epicurus, where he starts talking about what Epicurus has to say about the wise man. For example, just before Section 118, it says, quote: “When once a man has attained wisdom, he no longer has any tendency contrary to it, or willingly pretends that he has.” Now, that is not exactly the same thing as saying that once a man has attained wisdom he will never make a mistake. But Epicurus is to some extent agreeing that once you have attained wisdom, the wise man is going to continue in that state to some significant degree.
And then here is one of the most challenging aspects of Section 118 specifically. Diogenes Laertius says that even if the wise man be put on the rack, he is happy. It appears to be the case that Epicurus held that you can be put on the rack, you can be tortured, and still consider yourself to be in a position of happiness. Sedley goes into this and does a good job with it, I think, by pointing out that you are obviously not experiencing pleasure when you are on the rack. That is going to be painful. So you cannot say that even when the wise man is on the rack he is in a state of pleasure in the way that word is normally understood. But it appears that the word being used here is happiness. So you can somehow be happy even while you are being tortured in the moment.
And I would think that that analysis has to be part of what we are talking about today — that there is a way of looking at happiness that is not tied to every pain at any particular moment in your life, that you are offsetting pleasures against pains, and that you are looking at your life in a wider framework. Sedley goes into this in a way that certainly deserves consideration: this is an example of Epicurus distinguishing himself from the Cyrenaics — that you are not simply looking at the moment, but you are looking at a wider view of your life from a mental perspective.
Sedley goes into several examples, including ways to translate the Letter to Idomeneus that you talked about, Joshua — ways that make it focus on Epicurus seeing this last day of his life almost as the evening of his life. In other words, analogizing your life to a day in which you have a morning, an afternoon, and an evening, and that you are mentally taking stock of your life and realizing that even though you have had moments of pain, even though you may be experiencing moments of pain at that particular time, your life as a whole deserves to be called happy.
Further on down after Section 119, Diogenes Laertius says, “Also the wise man will feel grief.” So the wise man — Epicurus being a wise man — will at times feel grief. That does not mean that he cannot consider his life to be happy. But the wise man is a man, and he is going at times to feel pains, at times to feel grief. “Moreover, even if he is deprived of his eyesight, the wise man will not end his whole life.” You can be forced to lose significant aspects of your ability to enjoy life, such as your ability to see, and yet you are not going to end your whole life, because you are able to summon pleasures from other aspects of your experience that make life worthwhile to continue living.
And before he turns to the Letter to Menoeceus, the last thing Diogenes Laertius says is that “there are two ideas of happiness: complete happiness such as belongs to a god, which admits of no increase, and the happiness which is concerned with the addition and subtraction of pleasures.”
So when Cicero is complaining that Epicurus’s theory makes no sense because you cannot be happy if happiness is based on pleasure, the part that Epicurus and Torquatus would reject would not be that the goal of life is happiness. They would say that a life of happiness is a life of pleasure, that a life of pleasure is the very definition of happiness, and that happiness built on pleasure is as possible to be complete as is happiness based on virtue — as Cicero and the Platonists wish to suggest.
One of the most important sections of what you have quoted today, Joshua, is where Cicero says around Section 89 of this passage: “If a person finds the sole good in virtue, it is open to him to say that the happy life is consummated by the consummation of virtue. For his position is that the chief good is not increased by lapse of time.” So Epicurus has to find a way to respond to this idea that virtue can be complete, whereas pleasure cannot be complete.
What Cicero is suggesting is: “I am telling you that happiness consists in virtue, and I am telling you that virtue can be complete, and so therefore happiness can be complete. You, Epicurus, are saying that happiness consists in pleasure, but you can never have complete pleasure, and therefore you can never have complete happiness.” That is what has to be dealt with. And if you are going to prove that it is possible to achieve complete pleasure in the same way that it is possible to achieve complete wisdom, then you are going to be taking the position that you do not have to live an infinite period of time in order to get to that point.
For example, we can follow Cicero’s illustration and talk about wisdom. Cicero is saying it is possible to consummate wisdom by being a wise person who never ceases being wise. Well, in Epicurus’s case, Epicurus is saying that it is possible to consummate pleasure — for example, in the analogy used in Book Six of Lucretius, by filling the jar of your life with pleasures. But at that point, when you have filled the jar with pleasures, you are not increasing the total amount of pleasure in your life. You are just varying it. And as Dr. Sedley discusses in this article, part of the way you can fill the jar of your life with pleasure is to reflect on the success you have had through philosophy — of understanding the way the world works, of insulating yourself from the fears and troubles that most people suffer from supernatural gods, or worrying about torture and hell after death — and you can see that your whole life, no matter how long it is, has been full of pleasures, even though there have been times when parts of your life experienced pain.
Joshua, these are no doubt very difficult issues. I think there are definitely some good answers available when you start thinking about the different ways in which the words happiness and pleasure can be used, when you start thinking about the different ways to consider something perfected or completed or full. As we speak about this, though, I am very impressed with Dr. Sedley’s analysis in his article “Epicurean versus Cyrenaic Happiness.” He uses this as the abstract and sort of the summary of his article. And what I am about to quote from this abstract — every sentence of it is equally subject to question and interpretation. But this is a perspective that, for the moment, I will say is Dr. Sedley’s — think about it after I finish reading.
Quote: “Eudaimonia. Happiness is a property of a whole life, not of some portion of it. What can this mean for hedonists? For Epicurus, it is made possible by the mind’s capacity to enjoy one’s whole life from any temporal viewpoint, to relive past pleasures and enjoy future ones in anticipation, importantly including confidence in a serene closure. Enjoying your life is like enjoying a day as a whole, not least its sunset, although pleasure is increased by greater duration — contrary to a more favored reading — and premature death therefore better avoided. The finitude of human life as such does not lessen its value, and even a premature death need not prevent a life being enjoyable as complete. In this chapter, the above interpretation is documented, explained, and contextualized in terms of Epicurus’s diametrical opposition to his contemporaries, the Cyrenaics.”
So to emphasize: Dr. Sedley believes that happiness is a property of a whole life and should not be seen as a property of some portion of life. Dr. Sedley is saying that Epicurus says this is possible because the mind has the capacity to enjoy the whole life at any particular time — that it can at any moment relive past pleasures and enjoy future ones in anticipation, including the anticipation of being able to confidently end your life in serene circumstances. He is making an analogy here between enjoying your life in the same way that you enjoy a day as a whole. That day as a whole is not simply a sunset — it includes sunrise and sunset and everything in between.
Dr. Sedley thinks that the better argument about what Epicurus really taught is that pleasure is better by greater duration, and premature death therefore is better avoided. But just because we are finite creatures who do not have an infinite life, that itself does not lessen the value of life, and we can consider — even if we have a premature death — that our life has been complete from this viewpoint in which you are judging your whole life through this philosophical perspective.
So people can decide whether they agree or disagree with Dr. Sedley’s position. But that is what he explores in this article by pointing out that this wider viewpoint of the pleasures of a life is something that Epicurus developed differently and in opposition to the Cyrenaic viewpoint of focusing on individual pleasures in isolation, as opposed to as a whole.
If Sedley is correct, I think that would go in the direction of where we started the episode today — that seeing the point that an infinite life is not necessary does require an intellectual process of reasoning through these arguments. Again, it is not going to be something as easy to see as the fact that honey is sweet or snow is white. You have to think about this and realize that an unlimited time is not necessary, because in fact your body — your flesh — is telling you that yes, it wants to live forever, and it is necessary to live forever in order to get all that it wants. Dr. Sedley is saying that Epicurus is counteracting that philosophically by explaining how the mind can understand that that is not necessary.
Dr. Sedley says, quote: “That happiness is the goal is for Epicurus, as before him for Aristotle, a near truism which he can safely invoke at the outset. What happiness consists in, on the other hand, is a theoretical question which can be broached only in due course and with the support of argument. When, as more often, Epicurus specifies pleasure or painlessness as the goal, it is this latter question — one that needs the support of argument — that he is addressing.” And in fact, Dr. Sedley says, we must note that happiness is indissolubly bound to philosophizing, indeed to the theory and practice of Epicurean philosophy. If Dr. Sedley is correct here, Epicurus was saying that in order to live a truly happy life, you have to philosophize. You have to think about these things — about what has been taught all the way from Atomism to the canon of truth to pleasure’s role in life, all of the different things that have come under the category of what we discussed last week under the beginning of Book Two of Lucretius: that the way to be in a fortress, safe and secure and happy, separated from the diseases and illnesses and problems that people who do not understand these things are going to suffer — the way to experience that sweetness through philosophy is to understand these things that are being taught. And unless you do go to the trouble of thinking them through and understanding them, you are not going to be able to attain that level of happiness which Dr. Sedley is saying, quote, “is indissolubly bound to philosophizing.”
This is where Dr. Sedley says that we are far from the Aristotelian approach, because he points out that in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle had described happiness in terms of that of the good citizen, not of the philosopher in particular. Dr. Sedley says that Epicurus is taking sides with those who say that philosophy is the only route to true happiness, and that Epicurus will go further and insist that it is Epicurean philosophy alone that can deliver happiness.
So we do not have time to go through Dr. Sedley’s article as a whole today, but I would recommend it for those who are interested in this subject as perhaps one of the better ways of understanding where Epicurus is coming from in general. Because to repeat: to look at the surface of these doctrines and think that Epicurus is saying it makes no difference how long you live, or that the length of time you experience pleasure is of no significance whatsoever — those conclusions would be very counterintuitive. And Dr. Sedley, who is one of the greater minds in the world today on Epicurus, thinks that is not what Epicurus is saying, despite the fact that so many commentators seem to read it that way. Cicero read it that way. Dr. Sedley says that is not what these doctrines are saying, and that there are ways to understand Epicurus focusing on happiness as a concept understood to be the fullness of pleasure — as Diogenes of Oenoanda said, and that makes perfect sense.
Diogenes of Oenoanda had said in Fragment Three of his inscription: “Having already reached the sunset of my life, being almost on the verge of departure from the world on account of old age, I wanted, before being overtaken by death, to compose a fine anthem to celebrate the fullness of pleasure, and so to help now those who are well constituted.” So Diogenes of Oenoanda commissioned this inscription to commemorate for all time, for the people who would read it, that he himself had experienced the fullness of pleasure, even though he was at the verge of being about to die himself.
Lucretius talks regularly about Epicurus exploring the universe through his mind, as if he is up above the world looking down — looking down also on the Intermundia, looking down and seeing all sorts of things, but not seeing Hell or any reason to be concerned about being consigned to eternal punishment. And from this point of view, in which you understand that this is the nature of the universe and your place in it, you can construe where Epicurus is going as saying that no matter how long you live, you can attain this understanding of your life, which is something that can be considered complete — having experienced the fullness of these pleasures that Diogenes of Oenoanda is talking about. And even if you, by chance, come to a premature death, you have still achieved a complete life, which means that every minute as you are living it provides a sense of completeness, because you do understand your place in the universe and why it is not necessary to live forever.
This is one of the deeper subjects we have been dealing with in the core doctrines of Epicurus, and there will be a lot more to say about it on the forum and in future discussions. But we are going to have to consider today’s episode to be complete very soon as well. And as we do that, let us talk about whether anyone has any final thoughts. Joshua?
Joshua: Yeah, I will return to Norman DeWitt’s book at the end. Here he says in the chapter “The New Hedonism,” under the heading “Pleasure Not Increased by Immortality”:
“As will be presently shown, Epicurus maintained that pleasure is not altered in kind by the fact of duration or extension. Here he declares that it is not increased in quantity. All pleasures have fixed ceilings and fixed magnitudes. When in the words of the doctrine he speaks of measuring the limits of pleasure by reason, he means recognition of the fact that for the body, health and the expectation of its continuance is the limit of pleasure, and that for the mind the limit is the emancipation from all fear of the gods or death. The attainment of this state, he now declares, is a condition of one dimension. He seems to think of it as an alpinist would regard the ascent of an arduous mountain peak. The pleasure would not be increased by remaining on the peak.”
I merely quote that because I think he is close to my own thinking on this issue. But as you have said, Cassius, throughout the episode, this is a very difficult topic, and it borders on other very difficult topics. Like Epicurus when he says pain is light if it lasts for a long time and is short if it is intense — people have really pushed back on some of these ideas. It is difficult in many ways to get to the heart of what he is saying, and it is an ongoing project, so we will keep working on it.
Cassius: Yes, Joshua. I am glad you quoted the DeWitt section because he is also a very good source of reflection on these topics. In this chapter on “The New Hedonism,” he has subsections entitled “Pleasure Not Increased by Immortality” — which is relatively short, even though it is directly on point with what we are discussing — followed by a much longer discussion entitled “The Fullness of Pleasure.”
There are obvious points about Epicurean philosophy that do not require a lot of thought, and there are deeper points of Epicurean philosophy that do require a very great deal of thought in order to understand. Nobody ever said that life or Epicurean philosophy was easy. But life becomes much happier from the Epicurean perspective when you take the time to dig into these issues and understand the depth of their meaning.
So in closing, here is one way to bring all of these ideas together. As Joshua has said, there is a force multiplier effect that comes from the mental appreciation of pleasures past, present, and future, which the mind can use to compensate for physical pain, which exists only in the present. The body itself does not have a memory or an appreciation for either the past or the future. The bodily pains of the present cannot always be eliminated, but they can be compensated for by the mental pleasures of the past and the future, combined with any physical pleasures that might be available at the time in other parts of our experience.
Then there is the important insight that pleasure is not limited to sensory stimulation. Epicurus points out that the mind can appreciate pleasure on its own without outside stimulation, and that while these pleasures are not the same thing as sensory stimulation, they are accessible to the person who understands, through Epicurean philosophy, the nature of life and can find pleasure in appreciating all that life affords.
This wider understanding of pleasure is not the same thing as the force multiplier effect of summoning past and future to the aid of the present. Neither in the example of responding to the challenge of Chrysippus’s hand, nor in the example of the host who is pouring and the guest who is drinking, are the subjects in those examples consciously engaged in deliberating the past, present, and future pleasures. What they are doing in those examples is experiencing life in the present in a healthy condition and without pain, and that too is an important aspect of pleasure. This is where we see that Epicurus is considering the normal healthy state to be pleasure as well — just like the stimulating sensory experiences that everyone recognizes as pleasure.
All this together means that there are many sources of pleasure available to us, and this makes it possible to see that life is not necessarily dominated by suffering, because the wise man is always going to be able to find more reason for joy than for vexation.
All this takes us back to the main insight of today’s episode, which is that infinite time is not required in order to experience the fullness of pleasure, or complete pleasure in the life we have. The fullness of pleasure does not mean that we never experience any pain, or that we never choose activities that will bring pain, or that there are not times when we experience very great pain. The fullness of pleasure is that which was seen by Diogenes of Oenoanda, who erected a stone wall in appreciation of Epicurus and of complete pleasure, and who shouted to all the world that a life of happiness is a life of pleasure — and a life of pleasure is not one in which all pains are eliminated, but one in which we always have more reason for joy than for vexation.
To use DeWitt’s analogy, a mountain climber who reaches the top of the Alps can never go higher, no matter how long he stays there. But that does not mean that being on the peak for a second, or a day, or a month is exactly the same experience, or that we should disregard extent of time as irrelevant to our preference in pleasures.
Life is desirable, and we should wish to live as long as we can continue to experience more pleasures than pain. But when we do reach the end of our lives, we need not have any regrets that we have failed to live a full life — and that is because a longer life does not at all equate to a more pleasurable life. We may individually have our bucket lists of things we would like to accomplish in our lives, but nature has no such list for us. Nor is there any supernatural god or absolute virtue that will scold us if we fail to conform to their standard of being a good person or living a good life. Epicurus is pointing to a very practical way of looking at life and telling us that there is no one but ourselves who can judge what way of spending our time is going to be the most pleasurable for us.
It is here at this point that the Stoics and the religionists are going to say that you should seek for meaningfulness, or satisfaction, or virtue, or piety. But the key insight of Epicurus is that those words have no meaning on their own, and they are ultimately a deception. There is nothing in words like meaningfulness or satisfaction or virtue or piety that makes those words worthy of being your goal, unless you judge the activities associated with them will bring you a feeling that they are desirable. And if you do find those activities to be desirable, then that means you find them pleasurable. And that word — pleasure — is the word that Epicurus identifies as the power through which nature guides us.
We can say we are happy at any particular moment in life, and we can associate that happiness with any combination of mental and physical pleasures in the present. But through Epicurus we can grasp that it is possible to live a happy life, and that even if we must suffer pains — even of torture in the present — we can look to the totality of our life, past, present, and future, and to all of the pleasures, mental and physical, stimulative and non-stimulative, which our lives contain. And thereby we see that we have no need of infinite time. We can live a complete life of happiness through pleasure in whatever time is available to us.
Thanks for your time today. We will see you again soon. Until then, as always, we invite you to drop by the EpicureanFriends.com forum and join us in the pursuit of the philosophy of Epicurus.