Episode 284 - TD14 - In Dealing With Pain, Does Practice Make Perfect? Or Does Practice Make For A Happy Life?
Date: 05/31/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4477-episode-284-td14-in-dealing-with-pain-does-practice-make-perfect-or-does-practic/
Summary
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Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 284 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 texts and we discuss how epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of epicurus@epicureanfriends.com where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. This week we’re continuing in Cicero’s, tus and disputations from an epicurean viewpoint and we’re in the middle of his discussion about whether pain is an evil. This week we’re starting in section 13 where Cicero is ridiculing epicurus alleging that Epicurus took the position that pain is evil. And yet when Epicurus hypothesized that if he were in the bowl of Polaris being tortured, he would find that to be sweet. And as we discussed last week, Epicurus did not say that he said that the happy man will continue to be happy even under torture or in bad situations. And an analogy there could be made to Epicurus last day when he was under terrible kidney pain and yet he still considered himself to be happy. And while Cicero may be given to manipulating Epicurus words to make him look bad, there clearly is an important issue underlying this argument that we need to be continuing to explore and it has to do with the overall view of evil and also good. We know that Epicurus had attacked Plato’s views that the goal of life, everything revolves around this abstract absolute concept of the good. In turn, there’s also related to that a similar abstract view of evil in which evil is depraved and base and vicious and to be totally separated away from while the good is the goal, which is largely consistent with virtue or piety, and that’s really all that matters in life. So that the stoics were coming at this issue of pain from the point of view, that pain, something to be disregarded because all that really matters in life is to be virtuous and not to participate in vice. So pain’s one of these things that we’re indifferent to that may be useful at times may be hard to bear, but in the end it is not evil because what is evil is always base and vicious. And as Joshua brought up last week, pain actually does have a productive function in life In that pain is nature’s stop signal to tell us not to do something pleasure being the ghost signal. And therefore it is important for us to think about in what perspective Epicurus was describing pain to be evil because it’s not evil in the sense of a supernatural God-given or fortune given or fate given force. Epicurus doesn’t think that those things exist. And so pain is a feeling of nature that is undesirable as a matter of intrinsic nature, but sometimes we actually will choose to undergo pain, choose actions which bring pain if the result is greater pleasure or less pain in the end. So again, we talked about this last week, Epicurus doesn’t see pain as intrinsically supernaturally, base and despicable because it’s a faculty of nature and not something that is invested with this metaphysical baseness that the stoics and Cicero and Plato are considering evil to have. And as we saw last week, this is an instance in which Cicero is willing to criticize the stoics because we also saw last week how Cicero raised the point that in the stoics talking about pain as not an evil, they go way overboard and imply that pain is of no relevance to us at all. And Cicero of course says that’s just ridiculous to look at it that way. You’re playing word games, stoics, you’re trying to just define pain away when it is a very real thing that is very difficult, unpleasant, and hard to bear in Cicero’s words, also woeful and afflicting. So with that as background, let’s go into the rest of the text.
Joshua: Yeah, looking back at paragraph 12 in this section two that we’re going through, Cicero has said that the stoics infer from some petty quibbling arguments that pain is no evil, as if the dispute was about a word and not about the thing itself, and he finishes that paragraph with the sentence caches that you just read. If I ask why pain is to be avoided, the answer that comes back to me is it is disagreeable, it is against the nature, it is hard to bear, it is woeful and it is afflicting. And that takes us into paragraph 13. Here are many words to express that by so many different forms, which we call by the single word evil, you the stoics are defining pain instead of removing it when you say it is disagreeable, unnatural, scarcely possible to be endured or born, nor are you wrong in saying so, but the man who vaunt himself in such a manner should not give way in his conduct if it be true that nothing is good, but what is honest and nothing evil, but what is disgraceful? This would be wishing not proving this argument is a better one and has more truth in it. That all things which nature of horrors are to be looked upon as evil, that those which she approves of are to be considered as good for when this is admitted. And the dispute about words removed that which they with reason embrace, and which we call honest right becoming and sometimes include under the general name of virtue appear so far superior to everything else that all other things which are looked upon as the gifts of fortune or the good things of the body seem trifling and insignificant and no evil, whatever nor all the collective body of evils together appears to be compared to the evil of infamy. Wherefore, if as you granted in the beginning, infamy is worse than pain, pain is certainly nothing but while it appears to you basin unmanly to groan, cry out, lament or faint under pain while you cherish notions of probity, dignity, honor, and keeping your eye on them, refrain yourself, pain will certainly yield to virtue and by the influence of imagination will lose its whole force for you must either admit that there is no such thing as virtue or you must despise every kind of pain. Will you allow of such a virtue is prudence without which no virtue whatever can even be conceived. What then will that suffer you to labor and take pains to no purpose? Will temperance permit you to do anything to excess? Will it be possible for justice to be maintained by one who through the force of pain discovers secrets or betrays his confederates or deserts many duties of life will you act in a manner consistent with courage and its attendance, greatness of soul resolution, patience and contempt for all worldly things? Can you hear yourself called a great man when you lie, groveling, dejected and deploring your condition with a lamentable voice? No one would call you even a man while in such a condition you must therefore either abandon all pretensions to courage or else pain must be put out of the question.
Cassius: Okay, so going back to the beginning of 13, he is starting off by criticizing the stoics and saying that they’re defining pain away rather than removing it and that this kind of approach that nothing is good but virtue and nothing evil, but vice is wishing the question away and not proving the question. He dismisses that aspect of the stoic argument. Then he goes on and says that there is an argument that is a better one and has more truth to it, in which we look upon everything that nature of whores as evil and those things that she approves of as good looking at it that way removes the dispute about words. And then we see that that which we call honest right becoming, which is virtue appears so far superior to everything else in life that we simply recognize that everything else including pain is trifling and insignificant. So let me stop right there and try to restate that even more clearly. Cicero is criticizing the attempt to define pain away by saying that nothing is good but virtue and nothing is evil but vice. That’s the argument that Cicero raised in own ends, that this is itself just a circular word game. You’re not accomplishing anything by playing with these words, but Cicero says there is another argument the stoics attach themselves to, which involves nature and the stoics will say that nature is the standard and nature looks upon certain things as good and certain things as evil, and that if we use our lens of nature, we can see that virtue is so brilliantly more important and significant than any kind of pain, that it’s trifling insignificant in comparison. And from that perspective, you can realize that it’s totally inappropriate for the strong virtuous person to cry out in pain. As he gets to the end of the paragraph, he says, are you going to act in a manner consistent with courage, greatness of soul and so forth? If so, can you hear such a person lie, groveling, dejected and deploring their condition with lamentable voice? Because if so, nobody would even call you a man, much less a virtuous man. So I think that that’s where Cicero is largely going with this paragraph. He’s trying to get it out of a word game by taking it to this question of what nature is going to approve of and what nature disapproves of. Now maybe we’ll see as we go forward that Cicero is able to give more depth to that argument, but I think what we’re also going to find is that this is this stoic claim to follow nature, but what they do in claiming to follow nature is they identify nature’s goals with the goals of the stoa. They think that they can identify their own virtue as what nature is calling for, but they have no explanation. They have no proof of that. Again, this is where they go into their stories of the great men of the past who they say have acted virtuously and this is courageous and virtuous in chord with nature, but they don’t explain how it is that nature is validating their conclusions about what is virtuous. They do not go and in fact resist and deprecate epicures pointing out that nature has a way of directly communicating to us what it likes and what it doesn’t like. That’s pleasure and pain, but the stoics refuse to go that pleasure and pain as faculties of connection with nature are the way to steer your life. They want to steer your life by virtue, but they have no natural explanation as to what is virtuous other than their conceptions of what is virtuous. This point that I’m making now is one that I think we can find stated very well in Nietzsche his beyond good and evil. Section nine, he’s talking to the stoics, he says, you desire to live according to nature owe you noble stoics. What a fraud of words. Imagine to yourselves a being like nature, boundlessly, extravagant, boundlessly, indifferent without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice at once fruitful and barren and uncertain. Imagine to yourselves indifference as a power. How could you live in accord with such indifference and granted that your imperative living according to nature actually means the same as living according to life? How could you do differently? Why should you make a principle out of that which you yourselves are and must be in reality however it’s quite otherwise with you while you pretend to read with rapture the cannon of your law in nature, you want something quite the contrary. You extraordinary stage players and self delors in your pride. You wish to dictate your morals and ideals to nature, to nature herself and to incorporate them therein. You insist that it shall be nature according to the stoa and would like everything to be made after your own image as a vast eternal glorification and generalism of stoicism and then that nietzche continues on. But basically I believe we see this problem explained here in Nietzsche that the stoics are transferring their own values into nature and saying that nature is the source of this. Now that’s a variation of what Plato had done. And so even though Epicurus himself in his lifetime was not reacting to the stoics, they came along and developed their doctrines after Epicurus had already passed away. But the same thing is inherent in Platonism itself. Plato is looking at the good and to the extent that he’s interested in nature at all. Plato’s got his ideas, his ideals as the good, and he’s transferring them into nature rather than the other way around, rather than gathering from nature through pleasure and pain, what should really be thought of as good and evil. Now, I’ve gone on too long there and I’m going to turn it back over to Joshua, but I think that’s part of the underlying context of what we’re discussing here. Joshua,
Joshua: One of the things that instantly jumped out at me, Cassius as I read this section was here towards the end when he says, will you act in a manner consistently with courage and its attendance, greatness of soul resolution, patience and contempt for all worldly things? This use of the word worldly as an insult is so familiar to me from Christianity. I couldn’t help but picking up on it here. So I went and looked at the Latin and it appears to me that the Latin there is spic, NTI, rum, human arm. So contempt for the things of mankind is the phrase there. And it’s interesting to me that he is holding this up as a virtue that is consistent with courage, a contempt for all worldly things. And to me, this is a sign that someone has got their priorities badly out of sorts if they are heaping contempt on this world or on humanity, mankind. And we see that in Christianity and it’s surprising to me that we see a very similar sentiment here in Cicero.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, let me emphasize that that’s a great benefit we get out of going through the details here that we don’t often talk about. In talking about Epicurus, you see how much is at stake in these arguments. They are not just superficial disagreements about words. They are a direct reflection of a totally different orientation towards the world and towards humanity, the things of this world as opposed to the things of some speculative other world. Plato had set all of this in motion. There were other philosophers, Pythagoras and all the rest who go down this other worldly path, but this was the dominant viewpoint of the Greeks of Epicurus time and it has continued to be the dominant viewpoint through the ascendancy of the Abrahamic religions that the world is despicable, the world is lowly, the world is to be looked down upon and we should be focusing our attention on these other worldly, metaphysically virtuous things, and that is what Epicurus is reacting against. So even when we talk about things like good and evil, these things are lurking in the background that Epicurus is not just talking to us as in casual conversation about pleasure and pain. He is unwinding the whole worldview of these people and telling us to focus on this world and what nature gives us in this world and not what Plato, Cicero, all the rest of these abstract otherworldly philosophies and religions are telling us to look to.
Joshua: Exactly. I’m reminded of a quote by Henry David Thoreau who said, fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this one and what a change in focus that is. And we learn to accept the things of this world not only as not contemptible, but as something that is kindred to us because we are ourselves of this world. So it’s as you say in unwinding these other systems, Epicurus is setting up an alternative that is so thoroughly and completely taking a different side on these things. It’s kind of interesting to see how even in a text like this one and a parent aside that Cicero makes here can tell us so much about the difference between these rival philosophical schools.
Cassius: Joshua, this is why they hate him so much. They don’t care about pleasure and pain in the sense of how much food to eat at your next meal or whether a particular desire is natural or necessary or not. Those are things that anyone of any common sense can understand. They hate Epicurus because he is rejecting their total worldview of a supernatural realm of life after death of all of these things that they use to control other people that they use as fictions in their own minds, whether they believe them or not. Epicure saw those views as very damaging to human life and he set on the path of showing people how there is another way to live, another way to look at the world and for that they hated him in ancient Greece. They hated him like Cicero did in Rome and they’ve hated him for 2000 years after that. That’s the level at which we have to understand where Epicurus is coming from and we’ll gain a lot of good practical information about the steps to take along the way in terms of making good decisions and making your life as happy as possible. But this is the deeper level we’re talking about now that explains why Epicurus is so slandered and so deprecated and pushed off into the background by the mainstream of philosophy because he is rejecting their basic worldview. So at this point, Joshua, let’s go forward into 14
Joshua: Very well that even though part of your Corinthian furniture we’re gone, the remainder might be safe without that. But if you lose one virtue though virtue in reality cannot be lost still, if I say you acknowledge that you were deficient in one, you would be stripped of all and you then call yourself a brave man of a great soul and dude with patience and steadiness above the frowns of fortune or philes for I choose to instance him rather than yourself, for he certainly was not a brave man who’d lay in his bed which was watered with his tears. I do not deny pain to be pain for were that the case in what would courage consist, but I say it should be assuaged by patience. If there be such a thing as patience, if there be no such thing, why do we speak so in praise of philosophy or why do we glory in its name? Does pain annoy us? Let it sting us to the heart. If you are without defensive armor, bear your throat to it. But if you are secured by volcan armor, that is to say by resolution, resist it. Should you fail to do so that guardian of your honor, your courage will forsake and leave you by the laws of like Fergus and by those which were given to the credence by Jupiter or which Minot established under the direction of Jupiter. As the poets say, the youths of the state are trained by the practice of hunting, running, enduring hunger and thirst, cold and heat. The boys at Sparta are scoured so at the altars that blood follows the lash in abundance. Nay, sometimes as I used to hear when I was there, they are whipped even to death and yet not one of them was ever heard to cry out or so much as grown. What then shall men not be able to bear what boys do and shall custom have such great force and reason? None at all.
Cassius: Okay, Joshua, thanks for that. Seems to me that much of those examples given there in 14 are pretty standard calls to looking at the virtues of particular people in the past to try to emulate them. And we’ve seen that kind of thing before. One thing that jumps out at me about this paragraph that’s going to cause me to wish to book market and have it for the future is that the very beginning part emphasizes something that I don’t think many people understand about stoicism, but Cicero says this very clearly here and gives an example. He says that in terms of your possessions, your Corinthian furniture, you can lose part of your furniture, but the remainder of your furniture could be safe. However, here’s the point quote, if you lose one virtue, though virtue in reality cannot be lost still, if I say you should acknowledge that you would deficient in one, you would be stripped of all. That’s the point that the stoics continuously hit on about. For example, you can drown an inch below the waterline just as well as you can drown a hundred feet down. And while that is true in reality, this idea that there is a complete virtue that if you fail to attain one aspect of this complete virtue, then you might as well not be anywhere close to it at all. You’re totally depraved. That kind of an impractical, idealistic attitude is what is very foreign to Epicurious view of happiness. Where we’re sometimes choosing pain, we’re sometimes choosing pleasure, but we know that there’s a net balance of happiness that we’re aiming for, that pains are not intrinsically evil so that we have to avoid every one of them in every moment lest we lose our happiness in a second of pain. That’s not the way things are, that’s not the way Epicurus tells us to look at life, but that is what the stoics, that is what Abrahamic other type religions are saying to people that God is so holy and even the best of men are depraved, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God that we’re just worms in comparison to this idea of a perfect God. And if this is not an explanation of this statement that you should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, I’m not sure what would be because that’s exactly what the stoics have done, the platonists have done, they have set up this idea of perfection and it has become an enemy of the good life. Their idea of a perfect existence, deprecates undermines, destroys one’s confidence in the desirability of living a good life. The idea that we can’t live forever, so therefore we should basically wish we’d never been born. We can’t have everything we would like to have, so therefore we should be suen and sour and throw away the things that we do have. That’s the kind of attitude that comes from Platonism, from stoicism. That’s what Epicurus is revolting against
Joshua: Regarding this idea in stoicism that if you haven’t attained perfection of virtue in all areas, then you might as well be at the bottom of the mountain that if you’re not at the top of the mountain, you might as well be at the bottom because there’s no real difference. Epictetus in his discourses says this, which I think reinforces the same point amongst stoics. He says, why do you call yourself a stoic observe in this way how you conduct yourselves in all that you do and you’ll find out what philosophical school you belong to. For the most part you’ll discover that your epicureans or a few of you that you are paras and pretty feeble ones at that or where do you in fact demonstrate that you consider virtue to be of equal value or even superior to everything else? Show me a stoic if you have one among you where or how. Oh yes, you can show me any number who can recite all the arguments of the stoics, but can they recite the epicurean arguments any less well and those of the parapets, can’t they explain those too just as accurately? Who then is a stoic as we call a statue fit in if it has been fashioned in accordance with the art of PHUs? Show me someone who has been fashioned in accordance with the judgments that he professes show someone who is ill and yet happy in danger and yet happy dying and yet happy exiled and yet happy show me such a person by the gods. How greatly I long to see a stoic. He’s speaking to this group of people and saying, you’re not stoics, you’re epicureans, you’re not stoics, you’re peripatetics, you’re not stoics because you haven’t attained this level of perfection that they hold in virtue above everything else that is. And so we see the same point here, reinforce in tus and disputations when Cicero says if you lose one virtue, you would be stripped of all virtues. There is no halfway mark, there is no three quarters way mark. You either have it all or you don’t. And if you don’t, then you have failed in the only purpose which matters in this life and that is the cultivation of virtue.
Cassius: Okay, Joshua, there’s upcoming a number of related subjects that we’ll go ahead with in section 15 and as far as you think makes sense to continue,
Joshua: Right In section 15, he starts out this way. There is some difference between labor and pain. They border upon one another, but still there is a certain difference between them. Labor is a certain exercise of the mind or body in some employment or undertaking of serious trouble and importance, but pain is a sharp motion in the body disagreeable to our senses, both these feelings. The Greeks whose language is more copious than ours expressed by the common name of ponos. Let me make a point here about the word ponos in Greek, which he’s right. It can mean pain, but it also means hard labor. The Greeks did have a second word for pain, which was sort of just pain and that was alga. I think as in we would prescribe someone analgesic, which is a pain killer. Epicurus uses both words, ponos and alga. So it is clear he’s talking at least in some senses about pain and not about labor. In some cases he might be talking about labor, therefore continued Cicero they call industrious men, painstaking or rather fond of labor. We more conveniently call them laborious for laboring is one thing and enduring pain another. You see, oh, Greece, your barrenness of words. Sometimes though you think you are always so rich in them, I say then that there is a difference between laboring and being in pain. When Kayas maus had an operation performed for a swelling in his thigh, he felt pain when he headed his troops in a very hot season, he labored yet these two feelings bear some resemblance to one another for the accustoming ourselves to labor makes the endurance of pain more easy to us. And it was because they were influenced by this reason that the founders of the Grecian form of government provided that the bodies of their youth should be strengthened by labor which custom the Spartans transferred even to their women who in other cities lived more delicately keeping within the walls of their houses. But it was otherwise with the Spartans. And in these laborious exercises, pain interferes sometimes they are thrown down, receive blows, have bad falls and are bruised and the labor itself produces a sort of callousness to pain. As to military service, I speak of our own not of that, of the Spartans. For the use to march slowly to the sound of the flute and scarcely a word of command was given without an app ice. You may see in the first place Wence, the very name of an army ex is derived. And secondly, how great the labor is of an army on its march. Then consider that they carry more than a Fortnite provision and whatever else they may want that they carry the burden of the stakes for as to shield sword or helmet. They look on them as no more encumbrance than their own limbs For they say that arms are the limbs of a soldier and those indeed they carry so commod easily that when there is occasion they throw down their burdens and use their arms as readily as their limbs. Why need I mention the exercises of the legions? How great the labor is, which is undergone in the running encounters and shouts. Hence it is that their minds are worked up to make so light of wounds in action. Take a soldier of equal bravery but undisciplined and he will seem a woman. Why is it that there is this sensible difference? Betwixt a raw recruit and a veteran soldier. The age of the young soldiers is for the most part in their favor, but it is practice only that enables men to bear labor and despise wounds. Moreover, we often see when the wounded are carried off the field. The raw untried soldier though, but slightly wounded, cries out most shamefully. But the more brave, experienced veteran only inquires for someone to dress his wounds shall then a veteran soldier be able to behave in this manner and shall a wise and learned man not be able. Surely the latter might be able to bear pain better and in no small degree either At present, however, I am confining myself to what is engendered practice and discipline. I am not yet come to speak of reason and philosophy. You may often hear of old women living without vs for three or four days, but take away a wrestler’s provisions for but one day and he will implore the aid of Jupiter Olympia, the very God for whom he exercises himself. He will cry out that he cannot endure it. Great is the force of custom sportsmen will continue whole nights in the snow. They will bear being almost frozen upon the mountains from practice. Boxers will not so much as utter a groan, however bruised by the estis. But what do you think of those to whom of victory in the Olympic Games seemed almost on par with the ancient console ships of the Roman people. What wounds will the gladiators bear who are either barbarians or the very dregs of mankind? How do they who are trained to it prefer being wounded to basically avoiding it? How often do they prove that they consider nothing but the giving of satisfaction to their master or to the people for when covered with wounds? They send their masters to learn their pleasure. If it is their will, they are ready to lie down and die. What gladiator of even moderate reputation ever gave a sigh? Whoever turned pale, whoever disgraced himself either in the actual combat or even went about to die, who that had been defeated ever drew in his neck to avoid the stroke of death. So great is the force of practice deliberation and custom. Shall this then be done by a Sam Knight rascal worthy of his trade? And shall a man born to glory have so soft a part in his soul as not to be able to fortify it by reason and reflection. The sight of the gladiators combats is by some looked on as cruel and inhuman. And I do not know as it is at present managed, but it may be so. But when the guilty fought, we might receive by our ears perhaps, but certainly by our eyes we could not better training to harden us against pain and death. But I have now said enough about the effects of exercise custom and careful meditation proceed. We now to consider the force of reason unless you have something to reply to what has been said.
Cassius: Okay, Joshua, thank you for reading those paragraphs there. That’s information that I think we can talk about for a few minutes. I don’t know that it’s a philosophical difference between stoicism and Epicurus. It’s basically as Cicero has just said, a reference to how practice exercise, custom thinking about what you’re doing can help you overcome pain. And I don’t know that Epicurus would disagree with that at all. The examples that Cicero uses about gladiators and Spartan military training and so forth. I think we recognized that Epicurus himself had a training in the military when he was growing up. And it’s probably obvious that when people go through training bootcamps of various types, they do get used to things that are more painful if you’ve never experienced them in the past. So I think what Cicero is really doing in this section is he’s itemizing some ways in which pain is in fact endurable, which is something that Epicurus himself says in principle doctrine. Number four, that you can manage the pains of life, you can condition yourself through exercise, through diet, through training of mind to be able to deal with pain and not let it overcome you. Not because you’re worried about looking shameful, but because in life you are going to experience a certain amount of pain. And as Epicurus himself says, you frequently prefer a simple diet, which is not necessarily painful to have of course, but a simple diet s you to periods of deprivation and does not prevent you from enjoying a more luxurious diet when it is available to you. But conditioning yourself to limit your desires to things that are attainable, to have a lifestyle that is sustainable by you is something that allows you to more easily endure the periods of time when luxuries are not available to you. So I don’t know what your thoughts are on this section, but as Cicero has concluded here, he is talking about that he’s been addressing the effects of exercise, custom meditation, the effects of practice which allow you to better endure pain and realize that pain’s not something that’s the end of the world for you. In most cases it can be dealt with that can be managed.
Joshua: Yeah, those are good points. He is onto something here because the research I’ve looked at says that athletes, for example, endure pain more easily than people who are not athletes. And that exposure to pain and hardship obviously makes it more easier to endure. I think that’s very reasonable. I do find it interesting, there was, I can’t remember which text we were reading, but it was from Cicero and he was making this claim that Epicureanism is a life devoted to laziness and induce or whatever. And he says, you’re almost as bad as boys who go to a country house. And he says, but at least the boys usually engage in some kind of sporting activity or games that they will go out for a hunt or whatever. And so actually you epicureans are even worse than that. And I will make the further point that among the Romans there was this ideal of healthful productive leisure, which they called O Otium, Cicero himself in his retirement here writing the Tuscan Disputations. This would be an example among the Romans of good O tm of this idea that you go to your country house not to be indolent and not to spend all your time just satisfying yourself, but to do something that is healthful to you productive. And that is something for the good of humanity, right? That you spend your time doing things to improve the literary or intellectual or philosophical life of your country. And Cicero has very much devoted himself to that.
Cassius: Yes, he has. And as you’re saying in this section we’ve just been reading, Cicero has not at least here been specifically criticizing Epicurus. He hasn’t brought Epicurus in as the example of Slothfulness that he sometimes will bring Epicurus in when he is talking about evil or the good things like that. So I don’t think there’s any problem with reconciling much of what Cicero is saying here, which is common sense with the actual practice of the epicurean during the ancient world as well. We regularly talk about the phrase a sound mind and a sound body. And a sound body is going to require diet, exercise, taking care of yourself, being independent, being able to do the things that are totally consistent with the views of what Cicero is talking about here. As we know in Cicero’s time, Cicero ended up relying on Cassius longus and Epicurean general in Cicero’s dialogue in own ends with Torti, who is a well-known general and defending the Epicurean viewpoint. So there’s no problem here in reconciling the idea of exercise and toughening yourself up with also being epicurean because that is one way to deal with the pains of life. If you’re prepared both in mind and in body, then you’re going to be able to better endure those pains that do come your way. I mean, gosh, the philosophy of Epicurus is largely about preparation of your mind to beat back the claims that are false and manipulative about supernatural gods, about life after death, about other things that hold you in sway by people who are using those against you. And just in the same way, you’re not going to just prepare only your mind, but you’re also going to prepare your body against the diseases and the problems that occur in life. Just like Thomas Jefferson says, in talking to William Short, it’s against the views of Epicurus to engage in idleness that leads to slothfulness. And as Jefferson said, to short, you should brace yourself up and not indulge in these things that are going to lead to haute or vegetation in life. And so here Cicero is not directly criticizing Epicurus, and I think the epicureans of Cicero’s Day could have read this and largely had no problem with this part of where Cicero is going. Now, when we come back next week, Cicero, as he said in wrapping up section 17 at the beginning of 18, he said that he’s said enough about exercise and custom and so forth, and next he’s going to proceed to the force of reason, which means he’s going to get back into the discussion of how we should think about pain and better acclimate ourselves to those times when we do endure pain. And he’s going to go back into citing the stoics, which we can fruitfully use to contrast against the way Epicurus approach things. But we’ll reserve that for next week. Any final thoughts for today, Joshua?
Joshua: Yeah, I did find that citation. It’s from Cicero’s on the nature of the God Section 37 it looks like. And he says this, he says, I will conclude with observing that the barbarians paid divine honors to beasts because of the benefits they receive from them. Whereas your Gods epicurus not only confer no benefit, but are idle and do no single act of any description, whatever they have nothing to do. Your teacher says Epicurus, truly like indolent boys, thinks nothing preferable to idleness. Yet those very boys, when they have a holiday, entertain themselves in some sportive exercise. But we are to suppose the deity in such an inactive state that if he should move, we may justly fear he would be no longer happy. This doctrine divests the gods of motion and operation besides it encourages men to be lazy as they are by this taught to believe that the least labor is incompatible even with divine happiness.
Cassius: That’s exactly on point, so I’m glad you found that. I would just simply reject that categorization of epicurean principles completely. We know that Cicero is totally in disagreement with Epicurus views of the gods. And of course we also know that what epicure said about the gods are that they do not create universes. They do not meddle and attempt to look over the movements of every bird. They don’t watch the groundhogs to determine when to change the seasons. What Epicurus is saying is that that kind of ridiculous laboriousness would be painful even to an intelligent person, much less to a God. That’s what Epicurus is talking about. Epicurus never says that the Gods do nothing at all. He’s saying they don’t engage in what we would consider work, which we consider to be pain because they don’t have, they have plenty of things to do in their inner MIA that will give them enjoyment that does not require them to engage in painful activities such as we engage in ourselves. The nature of the intermedia, according to Epicurus, is such that it provides to the gods what they need so they don’t have to quote work unquote to gain what they need like we do here on earth. Cicero is just attempting to transmute that into saying that, well, your gods are idle and therefore we should be idle. It should be our goal to be idle. And I just think that’s a totally unfair accusation and characterization of where Epicurus is coming from. Again, one of the best ways to analyze these attacks is to look at what the actual epicurean did. Epicurus was not idle. He led a campaign of philosophical revolution. Phil Deemus ran a school. Lucretius wrote his poem, DOIs erected a Wall. Cassius was a general to the extent Julius Caesar held epicurean views. Julius Caesar was obviously not just indolent. And this is where Cicero says to Cassius in one of his letters, that observing you, Cassius and what you’ve been doing, there must be more vigor in your philosophy than I had understood. That’s the problem here is that Cicero does not understand the vigor in Epicurean philosophy and he wants to discredit it by claiming that there is none, and that’s just absolutely false. So sometimes there’s things that we can understand through Cicero that are slightly off, but could be better stated. And then there’s some things that are just absolutely slander, false. I would say that that is one of them. Thomas Jefferson had no problem seeing that, and we can have no problem seeing that either. So with that, why don’t we bring today’s episode to a conclusion. As always, we invite you to come by the epicurean friends.com forum and discuss this and anything about Epicurus with us. Thank you for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.