Episode 271 - TD01 - Understanding Epicurus Through Tusculan Disputations
Date: 03/03/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4318-episode-271-td01-understanding-epicurus-through-tusculan-disputations/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”An introductory episode launching a new series working through Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations. Cassius explains how this work — written late in Cicero’s life amid personal grief over the death of his daughter Tullia — exposes the contrast between Stoic/Platonic philosophy and Epicurean philosophy across five key questions: (1) Is death an evil? (2) Is pain an evil? (3) Does the wise man experience grief and fear? (4) Does the wise man experience joy and desire? (5) Is virtue alone sufficient for happiness? Cassius contrasts the Stoic all-or-nothing approach to virtue with Epicurus’s more pragmatic position that pleasure and pain are nature’s guidance. Joshua provides background on the available translations (C.D. Yonge and Andrew Peabody) and the circumstances of composition. Two trivia items are addressed: Cicero’s claim that Democritus held the soul lingers in the body after death (examined through a 2002 JSTOR article by James Warren), and Cicero’s claim that only Epicureans read Epicurean texts (challenged on the grounds that Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, and others clearly engaged with those texts). The episode closes with a quote from Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens contrasting Zeno’s perfectionism with Epicurus’s humanistic approach.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 271 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 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 begin a new series of episodes in which we will work to improve our understanding of Epicurus by going through a book by someone who opposed Epicurean philosophy — Cicero, in his work Tusculan Disputations. In this book, Cicero addresses many of the greatest questions in life, and while Cicero opposes Epicurus and speaks for the Stoics or the Platonists, he provides us important details about the Epicurean positions on many important subjects.
Cicero considered himself to be an Academic Skeptic, and he took the position that he would rather be wrong with Plato than right with Epicurus, and he would affirm as true only those things which appeared to him to be probable, whether or not his position was consistent with a wider theory. In fact, Cicero even calls himself to task in this book by allowing his student to point out that Cicero had in his previous book On Ends said that the difference between the Stoics and the Aristotelians was only a matter of words, but here in Tusculan Disputations, he denies that that is a small difference and emphasizes how important the distinction was.
Tusculan Disputations was composed late in Cicero’s life during times which were very dark for him personally. Cicero had just suffered the death of his daughter Tullia in childbirth, and he was working under the additional accumulated stress of two failed marriages, the loss of many of his friends in the recent Civil Wars, and Julius Caesar’s increasing centralization of political power in Rome.
Cicero comments on this by writing the following: “I will send these five books also to my friend Brutus, by whom I was not only incited to write on philosophy, but I may say provoked. And in so doing, it is not easy to say what service I may be of to others; at all events, in my own various and acute afflictions which surround me on all sides, I cannot find any better comfort for myself.” We don’t have to read between these lines to see that one of the major reasons Cicero was writing Tusculan Disputations was to distract himself from his troubles and, if possible, to rise above them. It is likely for this reason that we see Cicero regularly praise the hardness of the Stoics and praise the Stoic insistence that virtue alone is required for happiness and that the virtuous man can always be happy regardless of his circumstances.
This struggle going on within Cicero allows us to isolate and focus on questions where Epicurean philosophy differs dramatically from the Stoic-Platonic-Aristotelian consensus. Modern Stoics to some degree have abandoned the logical gamesmanship of the ancient Stoics, but Cicero exposes their reasoning to us in all its extremes because Cicero very much wished that it were true. He very much wished that his personal troubles could be extinguished by simply appealing to virtue so as to become indifferent to the loss of his daughter and to the grief that he was experiencing. Another aspect of Stoicism that modern Stoics frequently abandon is the dedication to providence and to the ideas of fate that were later adopted by Judeo-Christianity to look for something divine and good even in the worst misfortunes. Likewise, in Tusculan Disputations, we see Cicero straining to accept the Stoic and even Cyrenaic teaching that we should constantly expect misfortune. But Cicero puts little effort into looking for something good in his troubles or thanking providence of the gods for them.
Cicero clearly wants to hope for an eternal life after death, so he takes even the Stoics to task for taking the position that souls survive death only for a short time. In the end, Cicero recites the Stoic and Platonic arguments with much less conviction than a devoted Stoic would have done. Through Cicero’s straining to find relief in the Stoic doctrines, we can come to see both the fundamentals of the Stoic-Platonic worldview and how Epicurus fought against it with much greater clarity. Today it can appear hard to believe that the Platonists and Stoics took their own views seriously, and so we may fail to recognize what Epicurus was saying when he responded to those arguments. Most importantly of all, Tusculan Disputations makes it clear how the Stoics were saying that they could defeat pain and fear, and therefore why they denounced Epicurus so strongly for rejecting their ideas.
If we look closely at each of the five questions that are addressed in Tusculan Disputations, and if we look for commonalities in how these opposing schools approach those questions, we can begin to see the outline of the major difference in approach. Let us look for that difference by examining the five questions that Cicero raises and how the opposing sides line up. To get started, let us look at the questions and how Epicurus and Cicero answered in very simple terms.
The first question is: Death — an evil? Cicero says no, it is not an evil. Epicurus agrees that it is not an evil, but they have very different reasons for reaching the same conclusion. The second question is: Pain — an evil? Cicero says that pain is not an evil. Epicurus says yes, it is an evil. The third question: Does the wise man experience grief and fear? Cicero says no, the wise man does not experience grief and fear. Epicurus says yes, he does. Fourth, does the wise man experience joy and desire? Cicero says, with the Stoics, no. To this question, Epicurus says yes. And the fifth and last question addressed in this book: Is virtue sufficient for a happy life? Cicero goes with the Stoics again and says that it is. Epicurus says no.
Now all of these questions and answers have subtleties that must be explored, but from a very high-level view, we can see the difference in approach between Epicurus and the other philosophies. Notice that the first two of these questions — as to death and to pain — are phrased in a very stark way. Most of us would immediately take the position that death and pain are both undesirable, but the schools related to Stoicism focused on whether these things were evil or bad in themselves. In regard to death, Epicurus could agree with Cicero that the state of being dead is not something that is in itself bad or evil, but for a very different reason than that given by Stoicism and Platonism. Whereas Cicero acknowledges the Epicurean argument that where we are not present, that can be nothing bad for us, Cicero prefers the supernatural perspective of the Stoics and Plato that the soul continues to exist after death and in a condition that is in fact preferable to that of being alive, since we are no longer held back in their opinion and encumbered by our bodies. Epicurus, of course, spends much time arguing that it is impossible for the soul to continue to exist once it is separated from the body, so there is no bridging this gap between them. If Cicero, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics are correct, then there is a supernatural force to which we can look to preserve our souls after death and to a better future. In the Epicurean worldview, such a perspective is nothing more than wishful thinking that has many harmful effects on how we live here and now in the time that is available to us.
When we look at the difference in regard to the question of pain, the question becomes not one of fact, but one of words in the way that we categorize and react to the feeling of pain. Epicurus holds that pain is given to us by nature as guidance on what to avoid, and Epicurus unhesitatingly characterizes pleasure as good and pain as evil. As Cicero has previously explained in his work On Ends, and which he explains further here in Tusculan Disputations, the Platonists and the Aristotelians and the Stoics are devoted to a divinely ordered universe, and to them that which is highest and best — just like the supernatural gods — can contain nothing that is not good. Therefore, all of Cicero’s answers in Tusculan Disputations in regard to pain and grief and even to joy and delight, which they consider to be disruptions or perturbations, are viewed in context with the ultimate evaluation that happiness comes through virtue and virtue alone.
Despite his own skepticism, Cicero is able to argue that virtue alone is sufficient for a happy life. In other words, if you take the Stoic position, no matter what pain and grief and trouble you may encounter, if you are virtuous, you are happy. The framing of this question has very great implications for how we understand Epicurus. From the logical Stoic point of view, which Cicero endorses as consistent with Platonism, being virtuous is an all-or-nothing proposition. If you are lacking one inch from a full mile of virtue or happiness, you are neither virtuous nor happy. You are either totally virtuous and totally happy, or you are not virtuous or happy. This perspective makes the perfect the enemy of what most people would consider to be the good, and it demands that the Stoic and the Platonist never admit that the wise man will experience any amount of pain or any amount of grief and fear, or any amount of joy or delight to detract him from his perfect state of wisdom and virtue.
This is why Cicero and the Stoics deny that the wise man — the virtuous man — will ever experience any amount of pain or grief or delight, and this logical extremism is why the Stoics twist themselves into pretzels talking about things that are “preferred” and “not preferred” and to which they are “indifferent.” In Tusculan Disputations, Cicero gives us these Stoic arguments, and here — in distinction from On Ends — Cicero tells us that even the Aristotelians did not agree with the Stoics on this, and that they held that there are other external goods which are necessary for happy living. For us, in attempting to understand the Epicurean perspective, the great benefit that will come from going through Cicero’s explanation of the Stoic position is that we can now see that the Stoics were playing an extremist logical word game, and that Epicurus had already identified this and reacted against it in the work of Plato. The worst of the Stoics did not develop their arguments until after Epicurus was already dead. But Cicero and Epicurus were right to see that the foundation of the Stoic position had already been laid by Socrates and Plato.
Cicero is more than happy to call Epicurus to his own side when Epicurean arguments serve his purpose, as in arguing that the state of being dead cannot possibly be a bad thing as we are not there to experience it. Cicero also approves of other Epicurean arguments that are hard for us to understand today, and in stating them, Cicero allows us to see how Epicurus responded to this all-or-nothing position that is inherent in any supernaturally based philosophy. Epicurus held that death is clearly not to be desired except in unusual circumstances, and that pain and grief and fear are not only undesirable but evil, and that virtue while necessary for a happy life is not sufficient for happiness. Epicurus does this by denouncing the all-or-nothing approach, and instead Epicurus embraces the faculty of pleasure and pain as the guidance of nature that we must enlist to the goal of an overall happy life.
Epicurus never claims therefore that human life can never experience even a moment of pain or grief or fear. The best example of this is what we have from Epicurus himself as written in his Letter to Idomeneus, where Epicurus claimed to be happy on the last day of his life, even though he was suffering terrible sharp pains from kidney disease. Epicurus argues that despite what the body would tell us about the moment, we can view our lives — as he did on that day — in total, and consider the past, the present, and the future, and that we are justified in considering ourselves to be happy whenever we have more reason for joy than for vexation, a condition in which the wise man will always find himself even in the worst circumstances. At the end of Tusculan Disputations, we even see Cicero begrudgingly admit that even Epicurus could hold that we can be happy in terrible circumstances. So Cicero’s own difficult circumstances appear to have made him more open to Epicurus’s arguments, but Cicero could never find it within himself — at least in Tusculan Disputations — to agree that the Epicurean perspective is correct.
Today we cannot do much more than introduce the subject, but having set out the goal, there are several more things to point out about our upcoming episodes. First, let us see what Joshua can tell us about additional background of this work by Cicero.
Joshua: Yes, let me start by talking about the translations that are available. We will be using the C.D. Yonge translation, which we are very familiar with in other works by Cicero. There is a translation by a scholar named Andrew Peabody. I do not know that James Reed, who we have often used in the past, translated this text. So those are the two main public domain translations, but we will be looking at the Yonge translation.
For the Tusculan Disputations, Yonge has an introduction in which he tells some of the main story about how this book came to be, and he writes this: “In the 62nd year of Cicero’s life, his daughter Tullia died in childbirth, and her loss afflicted Cicero to such a degree that he abandoned all public business, and leaving the city retired to Astura, which was a country house that he had near Antium, modern-day Anzio, where after a while he devoted himself to philosophical studies, and besides other works, he published his treatise De Finibus (On Ends), and also this treatise called Tusculan Disputations.”
He continues: “It was his custom in the opportunities of his leisure to take some friends with him into the country, where instead of amusing themselves with idle sports or feasts, their diversions were wholly speculative, tending to improve the mind and enlarge the understanding. In this manner, he now spent five days at his Tusculan villa, discussing with his friends the several questions just mentioned. For after employing the mornings in declaiming and rhetorical exercises, he used to retire in the afternoon into a gallery called the Academy, which he had built for the purpose of philosophical conferences, where after the manner of the Greeks, he held the school as they called it, and invited the company to call for any subject that they desired to hear explained, which being proposed accordingly by some of the audience became immediately the argument of that day’s debate.”
“These five conferences or dialogues he collected afterwards into writing, in the very words and manner in which they really passed, and published them under the title of Tusculan Disputations, from the name of the villa in which they were held.”
Cicero himself says, at the opening of Book One: “At a time when I had entirely, or to a great degree, released myself from my labors as an advocate and from my duties as a senator, I had recourse again, Brutus, principally by your advice, to those studies which never had been out of my mind, although neglected at times, and which after a long interval I resumed. And now, since the principles and rules of all arts which relate to living well depend on the study of wisdom — which is called philosophy — I have thought it an employment worthy of me to illustrate them in the Latin tongue. Not because philosophy could not be understood in the Greek language or by the teaching of Greek masters, but it has always been my opinion that our countrymen have in some instances made wiser discoveries than the Greeks with reference to those subjects which they have considered worthy of devoting their attention to, and in others have improved upon their discoveries, so that in one way or other we surpassed them on every point.”
We saw very similar kind of language when we went through his book On Ends, where he was advocating for the Latin language as not just a language of the vernacular but as a language of high literature. And we see the same thing here. It is not that the Greeks were bad or that we cannot understand philosophy in Greek, but that we ought to have a native language of philosophy as well. And this is a constant theme in Cicero’s works.
So that is the setup. He is retiring from public affairs, going to one of his country villas and having a conversation with his friends. Cicero, as we have seen in On Ends, I think goes beyond what Plato does with Socrates in actually allowing his interlocutor to present his own argument in one huge lump. Whereas with Socrates — and to some extent with what we are about to go through in Tusculan Disputations — you see the interlocutor only gets one or two or maybe three sentences to reply to a huge long paragraph by Cicero. The interlocutor is mostly there to engage the attention, offer compliments when appropriate, and try and learn something. The interlocutor in this text is not pushing back against what Cicero is saying. The value of going through this on the podcast is that we are going to have the opportunity to push back against some of what Cicero is saying and also to learn something ourselves, because we have never been through this text in any systematic way before.
Cassius: Yes, Joshua, and let me also say that in much the same way that Lucretius’s poem starts out in each of its six books with a discussion of background issues before it gets into the heart of each question, Cicero starts out each of his five sections in Tusculan Disputations with some background commentary about philosophy, the Latin language, and other issues, much of which is not of particular importance or relevance to us. There is a lot of very interesting information in those introductions, but they can be distracting and divert our attention from the main issues here. Therefore, in most cases we will not attempt to read those long introductory sections in our discussion. We will go straight to the heart of the big questions. Cicero does however mention Epicurus occasionally in these tangents that he goes on, so we will bring those out as best we can without interrupting our flow of the discussion of the big picture.
Today, for example, we will give you two items of trivia unrelated to the big questions we will start dealing with next week. First, Cicero mentions that there was a disagreement between the Epicureans and Democritus as to the soul and death, and that Democritus apparently believed that the soul continues to exist and have perception even for a period of time after the corpse is dead. Second, and in a totally unrelated vein, Cicero disparages the writing style of the Epicureans and asserts that no one but Epicureans themselves read the written Epicurean materials. We will take those two unrelated cases in order. Joshua, I think you found an article that discusses the Democritus issue.
Joshua: Yeah, I was very happy to find a JSTOR article that touches on exactly the question we are talking about. It was written by James Warren in 2002 and is entitled “Democritus, the Epicureans, Death and Dying,” and it deals with a lot of what we talk about. And in the article, Warren says this:
“There are a number of sources which suggest that Democritus undertook some minimal empirical research into the process of bodily decay. They report that as a result of his observations, Democritus argued that the soul lingers for a while in a corpse, and even that some psychic activities continue after the apparent point of death. In some sources, it has even been suggested that Democritus allowed that corpses retain some degree of perception.”
He compiles a number of sources from the ancient world on that question. The first is from Aulus Cornelius Celsus, in a text on medicine, who says: “Indeed Democritus too — a man of justly great reputation — proposed that there are not even sufficiently sure signs of when life has come to an end, which doctors had trusted in previously. He went so far as also to deny that there were certain sure signs of imminent death.”
And then Tertullian, the early Christian thinker, in a text called De Anima, or On the Soul, writes this way on the same topic: “Democritus too notes the continued growth for some period of time of the nails and hair of those awaiting burial.”
And then a very simple passage from Alexander of Aphrodisias, in his commentary on Aristotle’s topics: “Dead bodies perceive, as Democritus thought.”
And Warren summarizes all of this in the following way. He says: “While most of these sources seem happy to talk as if Democritus asserted that the dead showed signs of such residual psychic processes, Celsus takes Democritus to be arguing that there is no definite criterion by which we can determine whether a person is dead or alive. This could follow from the same empirical observations as referred to in the other sources — warmth, usually a sign of life, is present even in the bodies commonly designated as dead. Similarly, hair and nails continue for some time to grow on such bodies. Perhaps therefore the boundary between being alive and being dead is neither simple nor clear. In that case, when the other testimonial refer to dead bodies or corpses, perhaps they are echoing an original Democritean assertion of the following sort: what we call a corpse still retains warmth, still grows hair and nails, and perhaps still perceives.”
So it is clear from all of this that it was not only the Epicureans who were suggesting that Democritus may have held that perception lingered, and that perhaps the soul itself — the atoms of the soul — lingered in the body for some time after death. And what we get here is an interesting idea from James Warren, which is maybe what Democritus was really saying is that it is not possible to know exactly when a person has died. And I think in bioethics today, this is still an interesting question. So we can defend Epicurus on that point from Cicero’s charge, but it does raise some interesting questions about the nature of death and the nature of the soul.
Cassius: Yeah, people who argue that Epicurus says that death is nothing to us, and by that Epicurus means that we should never even think about death or be concerned about death — I have always thought that is an oversimplification of where Epicurus is coming from. Obviously, you live your life with the knowledge that you are going to die at some point, and you want to have an understanding that for an eternity to come when you are dead, you are not going to be suffering in hell or anywhere else. But as far as the manner and time of your death — but especially the manner for this current discussion — Epicurus is certainly not saying, as far as I can see, that we should not be concerned about dying a painful death or a lingering death. The circumstances of how we die are going to be known to us to some degree, up to the point where death becomes final.
And Epicurus is certainly saying that pain is undesirable to go through. So Epicureans are always going to be concerned about the manner of death and the time period of death, and that the ultimate thrust of where Epicurus is coming from is the question of the state after you are clearly dead. We know that Democritus was already of the disposition that the only reality is the atoms and the void. So I could see the possibility that Democritus is focusing on what is going on inside the body at the very deepest level as what is really real, whereas the external manifestations of the body in terms of its warmth or its giving off breath are not ultimately what is going on — because what is ultimately going on is the atoms moving through the void. But while all of this is interesting to talk about, I am not sure that it is of any major philosophical concern to Epicurus. Also, Joshua, let us talk about what Cicero had to say about only Epicureans reading Epicurean texts.
Joshua: Yeah, Cicero’s interest in cultivating a domestic Latin literature, as opposed to merely importing Greek literature, is clearly relevant here, and so he is probably specifically responding to the two early Epicureans who introduced Epicureanism into Rome in the Latin language. In fact, in another section of Tusculan Disputations preceding this one, he says: “But during this silence, Amafinius rose and took upon himself to speak — on the publishing of whose writings the people were moved and enlisted themselves chiefly under this sect, either because the doctrine was more easily understood, or because they were invited thereto by the pleasing thoughts of amusement, or because there was nothing better and they laid hold of what was offered them.”
So Amafinius and another Roman named Rabirius were the two early proponents of Epicureanism in the Roman world. Of course, the context of all of this is funny because probably around the time that Cicero is writing this, he also has taken into his hands Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things — this magisterial, beautiful, well-written and well-stylized poem, which does exactly what Amafinius and Rabirius and others like them are trying to do: introduce Epicureanism to the Romans. But he does it in a way that is exquisitely lovely. So it is possible that Lucretius has not come into his hands at this point, but if it has come into his hands and he does not mention it, that is a huge omission on his part, because Lucretius was read and admired not only by Cicero himself but by Ovid, Virgil, and some of the greatest writers of Latin antiquity — reading Lucretius, incorporating his own lines into their works, praising his poetry, praising even his philosophy. And to say that nobody but the Epicureans reads this stuff — that would be a mistake on Cicero’s part.
Now, he does not say that. He does not say that only the Epicureans read Lucretius. What he says is only the Epicureans read the works of Epicurus and Metrodorus, and even that we have to take as bold. The fact that Diogenes Laertius, when he compiled the Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, was able to insert whole texts from Epicurus suggests to me that these texts were still in circulation. People were still reading them — certainly the Epicureans. But for Cicero to say that only the Epicureans read Epicurean texts, while he himself is reading them — that is a mistake on his part. We talk about the names constantly: Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, and others. All of these people, contemporary to Cicero or later than Cicero, are still reading the works of Epicurus and the works of Metrodorus, whom he also mentions here. And they are still responding to the claims even though many of them were hostile to the claims — they are arguing against what the Epicureans are saying. But before you can do that, you have to read the books. And so this to me is just a misstep on Cicero’s part, claiming that only Epicureans read Epicurean texts.
Cassius: As we close today, for those of us who are familiar with Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens, it is here that I think we can see how Frances Wright summarized the conflict between Epicurus and the Stoics, because she had her Epicurus say this to Zeno. Here is a quote, referring first to Zeno the Stoic:
“His severe eye looks with scorn, not pity, on the follies and the vices of the world. The Stoic would annihilate them, changing them to their opposite virtues, or he would leave them to their full and natural sweep. Be perfect, or be as you are. I allow of no degrees of virtue, so I care not for the degrees of vice. You are ruined. If it must be, let it be in all its horror and in all its vileness. Let it attract no pity, no sympathy. Let it be seen in all its naked deformity and excite the full measure of its merited abhorrence and disgust. Thus says the sublime Zeno, who sees only man as he should be.”
And then Epicurus goes on and says this in contrast:
“Thus says the mild Epicurus, who sees man as he is, with all his weakness, all his errors, all his sins, still owning fellowship with him, still rejoicing in his welfare and sighing over his misfortunes. I call from my gardens to the thoughtless, the headstrong, and the idle. Where do you wander, and what do you seek? Is it pleasure? Behold it here. Is it ease? Enter and repose. Thus do I court them from the table of drunkenness and the bed of vice. I gently awaken their sleeping faculties and draw the veil from their understandings. Thus do I win their ears and their confidence. Step by step, I lead them on. I lay open the mysteries of science. I expose the beauties of art. I call the graces and the muses to my aid. The song, the lyre, and the dance. Temperance presides at the repast, innocence at the festival. Disgust is changed to satisfaction, listlessness to curiosity, brutality to elegance. Lust gives place to love, ribaldry and hilarity to friendship. Tell me not, Zeno, that the teacher is vicious who watches depravity from the youthful heart, who lays the storm of its passions and turns all its sensibilities to good. I grant that I do not look to make men great, but to make men happy; to teach them that in the discharge of their duties as sons, as husbands, as fathers, as citizens, lies their pleasure and their interest. And when the sublime motives of Zeno shall cease to affect an enervated generation, the gentle persuasions of Epicurus shall still be heard and obeyed.”
Of course, the part I would highlight from what I just quoted: “I grant that I do not look to make men great, but to make men happy.” I think that is an important insight into what Epicurus is doing. He is not attempting to make men perfect. He is not attempting to say that he can extinguish all pain or fear or grief. But he is saying that even in the presence of those problems, men can still be happy.
That is what we will be discussing next week, but that is all we have time for today. There is a lot more to come as we go through Tusculan Disputations, and we will do our best to see if we cannot enlist one of Cicero’s most famous allegedly pro-Stoic works to bring you the full depth and superior reasoning of Epicurean philosophy. Thanks for your time today. As always, we invite you to come by the EpicureanFriends.com forum where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. We will see you again soon. Bye.