Episode 285 - TD15 - The Significance Of The Limits Of Pain
Date: 06/07/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4492-episode-285-td15-the-significance-of-the-limits-of-pain/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 285 continues Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, Book Two, sections 18–19. Cicero opens section 18 by departing from the Stoic argument about whether pain is an evil, instead offering his own view: whatever pain is, it is not as great as it appears, and all that is truly felt can be endured. He immediately attacks Epicurus’s Principal Doctrine 4, quoting the claim that intense pain must be brief and that long-lasting pain permits a predominance of pleasure — then mockingly asking what Epicurus means by “excessive” and “short,” arguing these are superlatives that leave no practical guidance. Joshua confirms that Cicero is linguistically correct that the Greek words Epicurus uses are superlatives. The extended Epicurean commentary argues that Cicero misreads the purpose of Principal Doctrine 4: it is not a clinical prescription for individual pain management but a philosophical assertion that pain has a limit — which, combined with Principal Doctrine 3 (pleasure has a limit), provides the philosophical foundation for standing against religions that threaten eternal punishment. Cassius cites Lucretius DRN 1.102 (“if men could see that there is a fixed limit to their sorrows, they might have the strength to stand against the scruples of religion and the threats of seers”) as the context for understanding PD4’s importance. The episode concludes with Joshua quoting the Torquatus summary of the Epicurean good life from De Finibus, touching on limits to both pain and pleasure, confident memory, and freedom from fear of the gods.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 285 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 at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
Today we’re continuing in Part Two of the Tusculan Disputations, which we are reviewing from an Epicurean perspective. Part Two discusses a topic that is central in Epicurean philosophy: pain and how we deal with it. Last week we focused on Cicero’s observation that we can prepare ourselves for bodily pain through exercise and training. In that section, Cicero did not explicitly set out Epicurus as an opponent, and as we talked about it last week, exercise, training, and practice are things which anyone — Epicurus included — could pick up on as a means of dealing with pain.
And as part of that presentation last week, Cicero criticized the Stoics for trying to argue that pain is not an evil. Cicero is saying that that ends up defining pain away, but not dealing with the reality that pain is very difficult to experience. This week, Cicero is going to tell us that he’s going to leave that argument to the Stoics — whether pain is evil or not — and he’s going to proceed to talk about his own opinions on how to deal with bodily pain, whether you’re a soldier or a philosopher or anyone else. We’ll be picking up today with section 18 and we’ll see that Cicero focuses his attack very quickly on Epicurus, particularly Principal Doctrine Number Four, and that’ll give us a good opportunity to review that doctrine and discuss it more closely.
One thing before we get started that I’d like to note is that as we come near the end of section two of the Tusculan Disputations, I see that many translators when they add section headings will call section two “On Bearing Pain” and section three “On Bearing Grief.” But I think what we’re finding as we’re going through here is that when Cicero talks about pain, he’s talking mostly about bodily pain. When Epicurus talks about pain, he can be talking about mental pain or bodily pain. So when we get to the next section and these translators call it “On Bearing Grief,” it’s really grief of mind, or mental pain. The section we’re finishing has been focused on how to deal with bodily pain, and then when we get to section three, we’ll move into dealing with mental pain, mental anxiety, and mental grief. But where we are today is section 18. So Joshua, if you could start us off today either with any comment you have or just start with section 18 of Part Two of the Tusculan Disputations.
Joshua: I will just echo and amplify what you’ve said about Cicero and this difference between pain and pleasure in the body and pain and pleasure in the mind. Plutarch, in Adversus Colotem — criticizing the Epicureans — says they notice the way in which the Epicureans decant pleasure from the body into the mind and then from the mind into the body and so on, and that in defining the highest good or the proper end of life, the Epicureans are trying to avoid being pinned down on this question because that subjects them to scrutiny. In other words, he’s accusing them of moving the goalposts or shifting the ground under their feet so as to avoid his criticisms. I don’t think he has much of a leg to stand on there, because Epicurus is very clear that pleasure is both bodily and mental, and when you are not experiencing any pain, that too is a bodily and mental experience. But that’s something we can watch for going forward.
Cassius: Joshua, let me add to that before you start reading. I think that continues to be a big issue — whether it’s Cicero who’s planted it in everyone’s mind or just how it has come down to us through history. When people hear about Epicurus for the first time and they hear “pain” or “pleasure,” they think immediately of bodily pain or bodily pleasure, and again, whether Cicero has created the issue or whether it’s always inherently been there from all the different attacks that have been made against Epicurus, that’s something people always have to keep in mind — that Epicurus is by no means saying that bodily pain or bodily pleasure is what he’s totally focused on to the exclusion of mental pleasures and pain. In fact, we know from Torquatus that he specifically says that mental pleasures and pains can be much more significant to us than bodily pleasures and pains.
So we always have to keep that distinction in mind and not fall into this trap that Cicero has either set or fallen into himself, of thinking all we’re talking about is cake and ice cream, sex, drugs, and rock and roll — all those different physical pleasures that we sometimes think are all there is to pleasure. But of course that is not all there is to pleasure, that’s not all there is to pain. If you think that you’re going to be burning in hell for an eternity because of the bad things you do, that is a type of mental pain that is so penetrating with some people — at the very least — that they just can’t get over it. The idea that they will burn in hell for eternity colors and determines everything they do and everything they think. So there’s no question, at least in my mind, that Epicurus is correct here and that you do need to be considering both mental and bodily pains and pleasures, even though we understand that they all stem from the body in the sense that we are physical beings.
There is no divine soul that divides us up into two pieces. From Epicurus’s perspective, the mind and the body are physical in nature, and it’s definitely useful to talk about mental pleasures and pains versus bodily pleasures and pains. But we don’t lose sight of the basic Epicurean physics worldview that everything about us is a combination of matter and void, and we’re not talking about some third divine fire-substance that is controlling the rest of our bodies or our minds. We’re talking about natural creatures, and everything that occurs to us — whether it be mental or bodily — stems from this physical nature that we have.
Joshua: That is exactly right. That’s why I keep talking about the mind as a force multiplier — and it can be a force multiplier for pleasure if you apply the philosophy and if you resolve your fear of death and of the gods. But it can also be a force multiplier for pain if you allow it to focus on your past mistakes or picture the future as something horrid that is just going to be even worse than it is now. So choosing the right mindset going into this — the memory of past pleasures, this ability of the mind to project itself back through memory into the past or through anticipation into the future — allows us to enjoy pleasures much more than you would think possible if you only lived in the moment. But the same is true for pain: if you allow yourself to wallow in that way or to focus only on the bad things, the mind can be a force multiplier for pain as well. Which I think is why it was so important for Epicurus to bring the message that he was bringing — that death is not an evil — because this is one of the great looming problems that every human being experiences: this knowledge that death is coming, and it’s coming quicker than maybe we would like.
Cassius: And Joshua, as we go to the text for today, let me make one more comment. We will quickly see that Cicero will start attacking Epicurus’s views on pain and he’s going to specifically attack what we have today as Principal Doctrine Number Four, and it’s a good time to remember that Epicurus’s Principal Doctrine Number Four is: “Pain does not last continuously in the flesh, but the acutest pain is there for a very short time, and even that which just exceeds the pleasure in the flesh does not continue for many days at once, but chronic illnesses permit a predominance of pleasure over pain in the flesh.” So Principal Doctrine Number Four is talking about the flesh, and so it is appropriate for Cicero to be looking at this part of Epicurus’s doctrines and talking about it as he’s going to do.
But in the end — and this is where we talk about how these doctrines were not originally numbered — that sentence flows directly after Principal Doctrine Number Three, which talks about: “The limit of quantity in pleasures is the removal of all that is painful. Wherever pleasure is present, so long as it is there, there is neither pain of body nor of mind, nor of both at once.” So we’ve set the context earlier in the Principal Doctrines that when we’re talking about pleasures and pains, we understand that there are both pleasures and pains of the body and of the mind, and of course, as we’ve talked about many times, as on the last days of Epicurus, you can savor the pleasures of the mind as something that offsets the current existing pains of the body. So Epicurus is not limiting his philosophy — as we sometimes think the Cyrenaics may have been doing — to bodily pains and pleasures. We’ll see that as we get into the discussion today. So whenever you’re ready, Joshua, our next section is 18.
Joshua: “I have now said enough about the effects of exercise, custom, and careful meditation. Proceed — we now consider the force of reason, unless you have something to reply to what has been said.”
Kalosyni: That I should interrupt you? By no means — for your discourse has brought me over to your opinion.
Joshua: “Let the Stoics then think it their business to determine whether pain be an evil or not. While they endeavor to show by some strained and trifling conclusions — which are nothing to the purpose — that pain is no evil, my opinion is that whatever it is, it is not so great as it appears. And I say that men are influenced to a great extent by some false representations and appearances of it, and that all which is really felt is capable of being endured.
Where shall I begin then? Shall I superficially go over what I said before, that my discourse may have greater scope? This then is agreed upon by all — and not only by learned men, but also by the unlearned — that it becomes the brave and magnanimous, those that have patience and a spirit above this world, not to give way to pain. Nor has there ever been any who did not commend a man who bore it in this manner. That then which is expected from a brave man and is commended when it is seen — it must surely be base in anyone to be afraid of at its approach, or not to bear it when it comes.
But I would have you consider whether, as all the right affections of the soul are classed under the name of virtues, the truth is that this is not properly the name of them all, but that they all have the name from that leading virtue which is superior to all the rest. For the name ‘virtue’ comes from vir — a man — and courage is the peculiar distinction of a man, and this virtue has two principal duties: to despise death and pain. We must then exert these if we would be men of virtue, or rather if we would be men, because virtue from the Latin virtus takes its very name from vir, meaning man.”
Cassius: Now this is a section we’re definitely going to have to talk about for a few minutes because it really sets up where Cicero is going here. Cicero is disparaging the Stoic approach of dealing with things by assigning definitions to them. He’s already dispatched the Stoics for getting obsessed over whether pain is evil or not. Now he’s extending that by saying: Stoics, you talk about virtue. I don’t care about that word either. I don’t care about your word “evil,” I don’t care about your word “virtue.” What virtue really means, according to Cicero, is being a man — being a human being that everyone recognizes is superior to the things of this world. As he said earlier in that paragraph, if you are a man, you are going to be able to have the courage to face down both death and pain, not so much because you are a logical philosopher like the Stoics and can assign logical syllogisms to explain why virtue is the only good and anything not virtuous is base and horrible. You don’t have to go down that road. Cicero is saying all you have to do is think about what it means to be a man, and that’s going to take you to the right conclusion.
I don’t think we’re going to find that that’s a particularly satisfying way of looking at the problem, and we’re going to find that Cicero is going to begin an attack on Epicurus’s viewpoint very quickly. But at least what this section does here is illustrate for us the direction that Cicero is coming from. He’s not embracing the Stoic formulas, but he’s embracing the Stoic perspective that there’s something about being a man that’s going to tell you that you should be able to face down death and pain — and that “something” is a big question that we will see how Epicurus treats differently. But I suppose if you were looking for something positive to say about this, you could say that here again, Cicero is pointing out the inadequacies of Stoic logic to deal with these issues.
Joshua: Yeah, he is criticizing Stoic logic and Stoic word games here as he seems to think they are. He’s also doing something interesting. When it comes to how we know what the goal is and how we know that that goal is pleasure, Epicurus says: you look to the young of all creatures, to those who are closest to the state of nature, uncorrupted by culture and education, and we look to them as our standard-bearer for what we mean by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain — that is a newborn lamb taking its first breath and going toward warmth, and so on. And as we’ve seen Cicero do in the past, he rejects that view. But he does not reject the approach of looking to exemplars, because that is his whole business here. He gives us an exemplar who doesn’t exist — “the brave and magnanimous, those that have patience and a spirit above this world” — and he’s going to define pain as something that these people will not give way to. That’s how he’s going to deal with the problem.
That’s why he’s saying the Stoics are just listing synonyms for pain. But for Cicero, his usual procedure when it comes to this stuff is to take one of these figures he’s obsessed about from the Greek and Roman past — that we can’t even keep track of because there are so many of them, and they all have little Wikipedia stub pages because they’re listed in Cicero and nowhere else — and say: this is how we know that we should not give way to pain, because it becomes the brave and magnanimous not to give way. The Marcus Reguluses of the world don’t give way to pain. The Cato the Elders of the world don’t give way to pain. The Scipios of the world don’t give way to pain. Those are the guys we’re looking at to understand this. We’re not going to do the logic-shopping of the Stoics and we’re not going to look at newborn beasts of the field as the Epicureans do. We’re going to look at the illustrious figures of the Greek and Roman past to understand this, and that I think is why he makes the connection to this word “virtue,” which he’s correct to say does come from the Latin word for “man.”
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, he’s begging the question here. As we’re going to see as we proceed, he is not going to assert any kind of explanation for his position other than what you’ve just said — that we should just automatically recognize that these great men he is going to cite are examples that we should follow. But again, anybody looking at this from the outside is going to say, well, why should I follow those examples? Because there are all sorts of men who have lived over the course of history. Why should I look to this particular set of men as my example instead of a whole other set in some other part of the world or some other people who have done absolutely the opposite of what these men you’re citing, Cicero, have done? So we’re again going to have this appeal to emotion from Cicero as he proceeds into section 19 and takes up what Epicurus has offered to us in Principal Doctrine Four as a reasonable direction from which to analyze the problem of pain in the first place.
Joshua: And he makes a good pun on the name of Epicurus, by the way, here in the first two sentences — the name “Epicurus” literally means “helper.” So in section 19, it reads this way:
“You may inquire perhaps how, and such an inquiry is not amiss. Her philosophy is ready with her assistance. Epicurus offers himself to you — a man far from a bad, or I should rather say a very good man. He advises no more than he knows. ‘Despise pain,’ says he. Who is it that says this? Is it the same man who calls pain the greatest of all evils? It is not indeed very consistent in him.
Let us hear what he says: ‘If the pain is excessive, it must needs be short.’ I must have that over again, for I do not apprehend what you mean exactly by ‘excessive’ or by ‘short.’ That is excessive than which nothing can be greater; that is short than which nothing is shorter. I do not regard the greatness of any pain from which, by reason of the shortness of its continuance, I shall be delivered almost before it reaches me. But if the pain be as great as that of Philoctetes, it will appear great indeed to me, but yet not the greatest that I am capable of bearing. But the pain is confined to my foot. But my eye may pain me. I may have a pain in the head, or sides, or lungs, or in every part of me. It is far then from being excessive. ‘Therefore,’ says he, ‘pain of a long continuance has more pleasure in it than uneasiness.’ Now I cannot bring myself to say so great a man talks nonsense, but I imagine he is laughing at us.
My opinion is that the greatest pain — I say the greatest, though it may be ten atoms less than another — is not therefore short because acute. I could name to you a great many good men who have been tormented many years with the acutest pains of the gout. But this cautious man does not determine the measure of that greatness or of duration, so as to enable us to know what he calls ‘excessive’ with regard to pain or ‘short’ with respect to its continuance. Let us pass him by then as one who says just nothing at all and let us force him to acknowledge — notwithstanding he might behave himself somewhat boldly under his colic and his strangury — that no remedy against pain can be had from him who looks on pain as the greatest of all evils. We must apply then for relief elsewhere, and nowhere better, if we seek for what is most consistent with itself, than to those who place the chief good in honesty and the greatest evil in infamy. You dare not so much as groan or discover the least uneasiness in their company, for virtue itself speaks to you through them.”
Cassius: Thank you for reading that, Joshua. We could almost have devoted the entire episode — or a series of episodes — to this one passage, because it gives us in pretty clear and focused form an attack on Epicurus’s Principal Doctrine Number Four that most of us can say is one of the doctrines that is the most difficult to accept as written, at least, and we have to think about what Epicurus meant when he wrote it, what’s behind it. And Cicero is setting it up for us here to talk about.
Before we get into some of the details, let me point out that there is a Wikipedia article on Philoctetes, who is reputed in Greek mythology to have been suffering very great pain. He’s involved with Hercules and some of the gods, and Cicero seems to imply that he doesn’t handle his pain with quite the bravery that Cicero thinks he probably should. As we see, Cicero criticizes Philoctetes for groaning under pain, and as he closes this paragraph, he makes the comment that you dare not so much as groan or discover the least uneasiness in the company of these people through whom virtue speaks.
It’s worth noting in that regard that we do have Diogenes Laertius section 118, where Diogenes tells us that Epicurus says — in the context of the wise man on the rack — yet when he is on the rack, then he will cry out and lament. So there’s probably other documentation for that position as well. But again, to set the stage here, Epicurus has taken the position that even when you’re under torture, you can still consider yourself to be happy. But as a fact for us to put into the mix here — if Diogenes is correct — you can be on the rack, you can be happy, but that doesn’t mean you’re not going to cry out in pain when you’re being tortured.
So that’s an interesting juxtaposition here: Cicero is focusing on not crying out in any circumstances, and that seems to be a significant difference with Epicurus — that Epicurus is willing to cry out when he’s under extreme pain, but that does not prevent him from considering himself to be happy. There are all sorts of ways we can take that as we get further into the text here. Cicero himself admits that sometimes verbalizing your pain can be actually helpful in dealing with it, but that’s a more practical side of things that we haven’t gotten to yet.
Because we first have to deal with the generality of Cicero’s attack on Principal Doctrine Four, and almost in the same way that Cicero has attacked the Stoics for their wording about evil and virtue, it appears that what Cicero wants to start out his attack against Epicurus on is to say that: well, Epicurus, your statement makes no sense because you haven’t defined “excessive” or “short” in terms of pain. Cicero admits that he himself doesn’t regard the greatness of any pain which is extremely short and from which he is delivered almost before it reaches him. But Cicero explains that if you’re not going to be clear about what is “excessive” and if you’re not going to be clear about what is “short,” then we should just pass Epicurus by as one who says nothing, and we should go elsewhere to those who want to talk about virtue.
So what we will need to do here in terms of explaining Epicurus is to deal with Cicero’s criticism that: well, Epicurus, you’re not being very precise about your wording, so therefore I’m just going to ignore you. And let’s talk about what Epicurus actually was saying and how what he said makes sense. Again, we are talking about Principal Doctrine Number Four: “Pain does not last continuously in the flesh, but the acutest pain is there for a very short time, and even that which just exceeds the pleasure in the flesh does not continue for many days at once, but chronic illnesses permit a predominance of pleasure over pain in the flesh.” And of course Cicero knows many men whose pain has lasted for a very long period of time, and certainly Principal Doctrine Four regularly gets singled out as a position in which Epicurus is particularly vulnerable.
But of course there are always many levels to what Epicurus is saying, and this statement comes in the context of all of the initial very pithy renderings of Epicurus’s positions. In the first four Principal Doctrines, he’s dispatched the entire subject of gods in Principal Doctrine Number One in basically two sentences. He’s dispatched the question of death in basically one sentence. He’s dispatched the argument against pleasures not being possible to be the greatest good because there’s no limit to them — he’s dispatched that in two sentences in Principal Doctrine Number Three. So parallel with the other initial Principal Doctrines, you would expect that Epicurus is distilling the essence of the question in a very short presentation that has to be expanded.
The essence — I would say — of what Epicurus is dispatching in Principal Doctrine Number Four: Epicurus is not attempting to be a medical doctor telling you that when you get struck by an arrow in your heel, this is the prescription to take for it. He’s taking a very general view of the question of pain and stating that — contrary to what those who advocate supernatural religion and idealistic philosophy may imply to you, contrary to what the poets are going to tell you, contrary to these ideas that you should live your life scared of eternal flames and eternal punishment and torments from which there is no relief — there is relief from pain, in that there is a limit to pain just as there is a limit to pleasure. Acute pains cannot torment you forever, because chronic illnesses either permit a predominance of pleasure over pain in the flesh — as in Epicurus’s last days — or, as is also implied in Epicurus’s final days: if your pain is so acute and so continuous and so without hope of respite, there is always death as an escape from that pain. As Torquatus says, you can leave the stage when the play ceases to please you.
As Epicurus himself — we’ve talked about this a number of times — Diogenes records that Epicurus drank unmixed wine and went into a warm bath. It’s not stated explicitly that he did this in order to bring his suffering to an end, but a lot of people take that position and I think it’s reasonable to conclude that that may be what’s implied here. We know other Epicureans did something similar. We know Atticus stopped eating when he became so sick, and there are other examples as well. But just as Principal Doctrine Number Three has focused on the limit of pleasures in life, Principal Doctrine Number Four is setting up conceptually that there is a limit to pain for humans as well.
Now we’re going to talk further about how Epicurus is right in practical terms as well — that in virtually every situation in life, the kind of pains that we know to be acute have a tendency to go away when what is instigating them also goes away. We also know that people who have chronic illnesses in many instances are able to live with those pains despite the fact that they don’t go away. But in this initial presentation of the point in Principal Doctrine Number Four — which is again not Epicurus attempting to emulate Hippocrates or any other medical doctor talking about specific pains and instances — what Epicurus is setting out is that there is a limit to pain in life.
And as Lucretius says, this is how you can have confidence in standing down against the threats of religions and false philosophies and the poets who say you’re going to be tormented forever like some Greek god. Lucretius says this explicitly: that unless you know that there’s a limit to pain, you have no way of withstanding the threats of these priests. Understanding that there is a limit to pain is one of the most important tools to employ in realizing that these threats of unlimited pain are false.
Joshua: Cicero says hereafter, quoting Epicurus: “If the pain is excessive, it must needs be short.” He says, “I must have that over again, for I do not apprehend what Epicurus means exactly by ‘excessive’ or by ‘short.’” He says that “excessive” is that than which nothing can be greater; and “short” is that than which nothing else is shorter. Now I hate to ride to Cicero’s aid here, but unfortunately he is totally right about this. It sounds wrong in English the way he said it, but with the Greek words that Epicurus is using, those are the meanings — or at least for the word he uses for “short” or “shortest.” The word that Epicurus uses for “short” there is a superlative form, and the word that he uses for “excessive” is pleon or something like that. And while pleon is certainly related to the word for a plenum — like an area totally filled up with body, as used in the arguments of Aristotle to say that there is no vacuum in nature — the word he uses for “shortest” is certainly very closely related to the superlative degree of that word and may be the superlative degree of that word with a slightly different twist or case put on it. I’m certainly no expert in Greek, but Cicero seems to be right about what he’s saying here: that the words Epicurus is using to mean “excessive” and “short” are superlatives. They do go directly to the extremes.
Cicero also makes the further point which is — contrary to something, Cassius, that you and I have been saying for a long time — when you look at Epicurus on his last day in this world and the pain that he was suffering, and he says in this letter that he wrote to Idomeneus: “I’m writing to you on a very happy day, which is also the last day of my life.” The pain from the strangury and his other conditions was so intense that nothing could increase it. There again we have the superlative — nothing could be added to the pain that he’s experiencing right now. That is the definition of “superlative.” But because the mind acts as a kind of force multiplier for pleasure if you use it correctly, he says, “I set over and above it all the pleasure of the memory of our past friendship.” It’s because the mind can project itself back and forward into memory and hope and so on that we are able to do this — that we are able to set pleasure over and against pain, even over and against pain that cannot be increased, as he seems to be saying is the kind of pain that he’s feeling at that moment. We also have to allow for hyperbole here; I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that either. But Cicero is fundamentally right about the use of the two words he’s complaining about there. So we pick up on Cicero on a lot of things, and I do want to give him credit where it’s appropriate.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, Cicero’s a smart guy and he’s a smart lawyer, and he’s going to come up with arguments that make sense on their face, superficially at least, in order to persuade his people that Epicurus needs to be just thrown out of court on this particular issue. So that’s where again I would go back to what I said a few minutes ago, and this time let me actually cite the specific statement of Lucretius. I would say at this moment the best way to diagnose Cicero’s misdirection and realize that it has no force and effect against Epicurus is that Cicero is attempting to say: oh my gosh, I know all sorts of intense pains that don’t go away immediately; I know all sorts of people who are tormented by things like gout, and it’s just pitiful how they live for years dealing with these intense pains. And so Epicurus, you’re just absolutely full of junk when you say that pains are generally short if strong and manageable if long. I don’t want to go to you, Epicurus, as a doctor because you’re absolutely unrealistic in your prescription for the way things really are.
My response to that is that Cicero is taking Epicurus’s statements and applying them in a context which Epicurus does not intend. Epicurus is not the type of person who’s going to walk up to some person who’s suffering in pain and say, “You can ignore that pain because you can offset pleasure against it and it’s nothing — if you’ll just think about it properly, you’ll see that your pain will just disappear.” Well, your pain does not disappear and Epicurus knows that your pain does not disappear. And Epicurus says that when you’re in pain, there’s nothing wrong with crying out about it. Because that’s not what Epicurus is doing here — he is not setting himself up as a doctor. Epicurus is a philosopher and he’s dealing with the fundamental root issues of philosophy that are at the source of all of our problems.
It does not get rid of pain to say that you can still consider yourself to be happy even when you are in pain, but it gives you a way of understanding that your life is worthwhile and your life should continue as long as you possibly can. That prevents you from just losing hope and losing all connection with reality. Epicurus is diagnosing where all of these other philosophers have gone wrong. And again, here’s the context. This is Principal Doctrine Four, right up there in the heart of where he has distilled the most important aspects of nature and the way the universe works. He’s told you there are no supernatural gods. He’s told you there is no life after death. He’s also told you that pleasure has a limit — and the reason he’s telling you pleasure has a limit is because Plato and these other jokers say that it doesn’t, and that’s why you can’t go by pleasure, you have to go by virtue. So he’s told you pleasure has a limit, and now in Principal Doctrine Number Four, he has told you that pain has a limit.
Cassius, some people are going to say: where are you getting this from? Where has anybody else said anything remotely like this? And I point you to the very beginning of Lucretius On the Nature of Things. Go to section 102 of that. Let me first read you the Cyril Bailey version of it, at line 102. This is Lucretius to Memmius, whom he’s attempting to persuade of the truth of Epicurean philosophy. He says: “Memmius, you yourself sometimes, vanquished by the fearsome threats of the seers’ sayings, will seek to desert from us. Nay, indeed, many a dream may they even now conjure up before you, which might avail to overthrow your schemes of life and confound in fear all your fortunes.” And here’s the explanation, here’s why this is so important and why it ranks up there with the first four doctrines. Lucretius says, quote: “And justly so, for if men could see that there is a fixed limit to their sorrows, then with some reason they might have the strength to stand against the scruples of religion and the threats of seers. As it is, there is no means, no power to withstand, since everlasting is the punishment they must fear in death, for they know not the nature of the soul, whether it is born and finds its way into them at birth, or whether it is torn apart by death and perishes with us.” And then he goes on and talks about the issues of death.
But what he said here is that the limit to your sorrows — the limit to your pain — is an absolutely necessary understanding that you’re going to have to have if you’re going to stand up to the false claims of supernatural religions and false philosophies. And that is what Principal Doctrine Number Four gives to us. It affirms that there is in fact a fixed limit to pain. In most cases it’s going to be manageable and endurable, but even if it comes to the point where Epicurus himself saw that his strangury was not going to get better, nobody — no force of nature, no supernatural gods, no Platonic ideals — can hold you in the grip of interminable pain. There is always the escape through death that allows us to know that no power over us can hold us to eternal punishment. That’s something that Lucretius thought important enough to start talking about before he got into any basic atoms, before he discussed anything else.
Again, this is where I would say Principal Doctrine Four is not intended to mean that Epicurus is setting himself up as a clinician who’s going to tell you how to deal with your gout. He’s going to tell you that yes, your gout is bad, it’s okay to cry out, but just know that if you’ll think about things properly, if you’ll work to overcome it, the pain even of gout can be managed. And if at some point your gout gets so bad, if at some point your kidney disease gets so bad, there is an exit that allows you relief from that pain as well. So this is the limit of pain. Just as the limit of pleasure is critical to Epicurean philosophy because you’ve got to stand up to these false claims — if you’re going to have confidence in the worldview that Epicurus is giving to you — and which is not in the end altogether different from some of the things that Cicero says when Cicero says that whatever pain is, it is not as great as it appears, and that men are influenced to a great extent by false representations and appearances of pain.
That’s true from Epicurus’s point of view as well, because pain is not as great as it appears. Pain can be managed and it’s not capable of holding you in its grip forever and without relief, because relief is always possible. Most of the time in practical terms, through removing yourself from the problem, curing the disease, finding analgesics to lower the pain — there’s always either ways to manage the pain or to escape from it. And that is why pain is not nearly so great a threat to us as it appears. That’s why, once you realize that, you then have the strength to stand against the scruples of religions and the threats of the seers, of the poets, of those who are claiming that you better do what I say or you’re going to be punished forever. Those claims are false.
Joshua: In line with what you’ve said about the promise of a limit to pain and the realization that there is also a limit to pleasure, we see the same point echoed in the Torquatus section of De Finibus when Torquatus gives us the sort of summary — the best summary he can come up with — of the life of pleasure. And this is what he says, and he follows it up with the life of pain:
“But that pleasure is the boundary of all good things may be easily seen from this consideration. Let us imagine a person enjoying pleasures great, numerous, and perpetual, both of mind and body, with no pain either interrupting him at present or impending over him. What condition can we call superior to or more desirable than this? For it is inevitable that there must be in a man who is in this condition a firmness of mind which fears neither death nor pain — because death is void of all sensation, and pain, if it is of long duration, is a trifle, while if severe it is usually of brief duration, so that its brevity is a consolation if it is violent, and its trifling nature if it is enduring — and when there is added to these circumstances that such a man has no fear of the deity or the gods and does not suffer past pleasures to be entirely lost but delights himself with the continued recollection of them, what can be added to this which will be of any improvement to the life of pleasure?”
I think that is such a powerful passage and it should give us hope, because he’s talking about limits — and those are true limits to both pain and pleasure. But he’s touching on almost everything we’ve been talking about here: both here and elsewhere in Epicurean philosophy we do hear a lot about confident expectation for the future, that we can lay the groundwork today and expect confidently that it will continue to bear fruit tomorrow. And keeping the symmetry here — but it’s true whether you lay the groundwork for a harvest of pleasure or whether you lay the groundwork for a harvest of pain. This is why choice and avoidance is important. But the ability to have that confidence is what gives us hope. So whether we’re going through Cicero or whether we’re reading Lucretius or Epicurus himself, we keep coming back to the same issues. And I think it’s worthwhile to do it. Cicero is offering us a particular view and a particular insight into these questions, even though we may not agree with the conclusions that he is reaching. The fact that we see how he’s reaching them tells us how we can arrive at our own insights about things that we’ve been thinking about for a long time. Because, Cassius, I’ve never heard the way you describe this Principal Doctrine — as “this is not a medical diagnosis, this is a philosophical description” — that’s something we’ve never talked about before, and that’s why I think going through Cicero’s work can be very helpful to us.
Cassius: Right, Joshua. Of course, when I say it’s not a clinical description, that’s not to say that it’s not realistic, because in most cases it is true. If Epicurus were to come up with something that made absolutely no sense and was totally contrary to every living human experience, then it would not be valid to draw any kind of philosophical conclusion from it. But what we do see in general life is that Epicurus is correct. Yes, there are exceptions to the rule about how intense pain can be and how long-lasting it can be, but in general Epicurus is correct about the intensity and duration of pain. And in every case, Epicurus is correct that pain does have this limit — that you will not feel any pain after you are dead. And while people today might think that that’s a ridiculous thing to even talk about, this is key to the main issue with Epicurean philosophy in getting rid of these false ideas about the nature of the universe and supernatural gods. Because many of us today are not exposed to the type of people who are tormented by the idea that they are going to burn in hell for eternity. But there have been a lot of people for a lot of years, and there continue to be a lot of people who think that that is a valid threat and it scares the daylights out of them, and it makes them subservient to these claims of how to live your life according to the gods or according to idealism so that you can avoid such a thing.
So definitely there are many aspects of diagnosing individual pains and individual conditions. I don’t think anybody who’s got a halfway sympathetic viewpoint about Epicurus is going to think that Epicurus is the callous type who is going to walk up to somebody who’s got a terrible condition, terrible disease, terrible injury, and say, “Don’t worry about your pain because your pain will be short and endurable, and if it is intense then you can get rid of it because you can die.” He’s not going to walk up to somebody and say this is the prescription for how you get through this moment and how you deal with this intensity of pain. He may in fact tell you that once you go to the dentist, your pain will be gone. He may in fact tell you that there are all sorts of ways to distract your mind from an individual pain at a particular moment. But a person as reasonable, as sympathetic, as compassionate as Epicurus is not going to be doing the kinds of things that we ourselves realize make no sense.
Epicurus is going to be doing exactly what Lucretius points out at the beginning of his poem. He’s going to be telling people that this is a world in which you can expect to live happily again. As Joshua cited, this section from Torquatus about the best life of the man who is going to have confidence that his pleasures will continue and that he will not be overcome by unendurable pain — this is the prescription for confident, happy living. And it is much more reasonable, much more persuasive, much more connected with reality than anything that the Stoics or the Academic Skeptics or Cicero or any of his friends have to say, because it’s grounded in a realistic view of the nature of the world.
With that, let’s bring today’s episode to a conclusion. As always, we invite you to drop by the forum. Let us know if you have any thoughts or comments about this episode. We’ll be back again to continue this next week. See you then. Bye.