Episode 286 - TD16 - Confronting Pain With Reason Rather Than With "Virtue"
Date: 06/13/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4498-episode-286-td16-confronting-pain-with-reason-rather-than-with-virtue/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 286 continues the Tusculan Disputations, Book Two, sections 20–24. Cicero opens section 20 by appealing to the natural human desire for “credit and reputation and praise and honor and glory” as the real reason we should bear pain bravely, rather than the Stoic word-game about virtue. Cassius identifies this as circular morality — making the crowd the arbiter of right and wrong — and contrasts it with Epicurus’s appeal directly to nature through pleasure and pain. Joshua presents Cicero’s passage from On the Republic about the natural moral law (“true law is right reason in agreement with nature, the same for all nations and all times”), which both Cassius and Joshua agree is fundamentally incompatible with Epicurean physics. Sections 21–22 cover Cicero’s argument that reason must command the “soft and enervated” part of the soul, listing heroic exemplars for bearing pain: Zeno of Elea (who refused to name conspirators under torture), Anaxarchus the Democritean (tortured by the king of Cyprus), and Calanus the Indian (who voluntarily immolated himself). Section 23 revisits the Gaius Marius leg operation as an illustration of the practical balance between necessary and unnecessary pain. Section 24 uses the example of Epaminondas dying at Mantinea to argue that the thought of his victory over the Lacedaemonians assuaged his pain — an analogy Cassius extends to Epicurus, who also died in pain but with the satisfaction of his philosophical accomplishments. Joshua closes with a meditation on the White Ship disaster (1120 AD) and Lucretius’s plague ending, connecting them to the Epicurean focus on this life rather than abstract virtues or supernatural hopes.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 286 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean text and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
Today we’re continuing in Part Two of the Tusculan Disputations, where the topic is “Is Pain an Evil?” Last week we talked about Cicero’s criticism of Epicurus’s Principal Doctrine Four, and we basically saw how Cicero said, “I’m not going to go along with the Stoics and tell you how to live according to definitions like ‘evil,’ but I’m going to tell you that the way to deal with pain is to take it like a man.” And then he goes into his standard method of arguing things by examples of great men in the past who we are supposed to all acknowledge we should follow after and do exactly as they did, without any other real explanation. Beyond that, our natures tell us to acknowledge the greatness of these men who’ve approached pain in the way that they did.
Now, before we go further this week into section 20, I do want to make a couple of general comments about where we are, where we’re going, and why we’re even discussing the Tusculan Disputations in the first place. I know that it can seem to some people like we are just so deep in the weeds of going through some ancient texts that it’s just boring. And this is the only podcast we have at the moment for Epicurean philosophy, so people are going to say, “Well, I want to know how to live today. I don’t care how they lived two thousand or three thousand years ago or how the Romans or the Greeks lived. Let’s talk about today and what I’ve got to do later on this afternoon.”
And of course that’s a very legitimate concern. I wish we had more podcasts where we had more time to discuss things from all sorts of different angles than we have in the limited time we have here. But what we’re doing is going back into these core texts that have shaped the whole history of Western civilization. Cicero — in his De Finibus, in the Tusculan Disputations, and in other books like Academic Questions — systematized, preserved, and made understandable to generation after generation of leading intellectuals of Western history how to approach philosophy and what the basic ground rules are. Of course we have the original works of many of the Greeks, but Cicero here has been the transmitter and processor of a lot of that information for much of the Western world. He wrote in Latin as opposed to Greek, and he’s extremely famous and well-regarded in many circles — and rightly so — for being a very intelligent, very personable man, and a great man himself in many ways, being at the leading edge of all sorts of issues that were going on in his time.
A person like that is not going off into issues that are so abstract as to not be important. Cicero knows that ultimately what motivates people is what has to be dealt with at the most basic levels of human life. Are we concerned about following the gods? Are we concerned about what happens to us after death? Are we so concerned about the role of pain in life that we just are overcome by it and can’t take action to do things that are painful? Are we going to become obsessed by pain, are we going to become obsessed by pleasure? These questions that Cicero is addressing and giving us concrete clear examples of are in fact extremely practical and extremely important, and by seeing Cicero argue it through and give us concrete examples, we’re going to get a lot deeper understanding of the same issues that we confront today.
Just as he was confronting those issues back then, Cicero wanted the Roman Republic to overcome the changes that were going on. At the time, he was calling the Romans back to a more traditional view of morality and ethics and religion, and he saw Epicurean philosophy as a threat to that — as indeed it was, as indeed it is. And so Cicero focuses in what we’re going through on very important subjects that he knows are going to register with the people who hear him. He’s talking to other leading people of society. He’s telling them to focus on what’s important and he’s attacking the Epicurean view and saying, “No, you should not look to nature and pleasure and pain. You should look to the great men of the past. You should look to virtue. You should look to the leadership of the gods, the leadership of reason, the leadership of these ideal forms that Plato was talking about, and you should suppress your reliance on pleasure and pain — because ultimately it is unmanly and unvirtuous to be following those things.”
Those are the same issues that we all confront today — in different words, perhaps, in different examples. But in going through this, we’re really cutting to the heart of exactly why Epicurean philosophy arose in the first place, what it’s attacking, what it’s calling out the inadequacies of. And Cicero is arguing back that no, Epicurus, you’re wrong — these things are not inadequate, these things are not illogical or unreasonable. Cicero is defending these things directly against Epicurus, providing us an opportunity to understand how Epicurus was addressing them in a way that’s very difficult to get from the very short and fragmented texts of Epicurus himself. Generations, centuries have been spent by Judeo-Christian religious authorities in suppressing and destroying Epicurean texts, and there’s very little of it left. But there is enough of it left — especially combined with the arguments against it, like we have through Cicero — that we can reconstruct where Epicurus is coming from and see how it applies directly to the same arguments that are made today, just as they were made two thousand years ago.
So with that as sort of a general recap of where we are, we’re going to go into section 20 today, where Cicero is going to give us some more examples. We’ll have a lot of good detail to talk about as we read today. Starting in section 20.
Joshua: “Will you, when you may observe children at Lacedaemon and young men at Olympia and barbarians in the amphitheater receive the severest wounds and bear them without once opening their mouths — will you, I say, if any pain should by chance attack you, cry out like a woman? Will you not rather bear it with resolution and constancy? And not cry ‘It is intolerable, nature cannot bear it’? I hear what you say: boys bear this because they are led thereby unto glory; some bear it through shame; many through fear. And yet are we afraid that nature cannot bear what is borne by many and in such different circumstances? Nature not only bears it but challenges it, for there is nothing with her preferable, nothing which she desires more than credit and reputation and praise and honor and glory.
I choose here to describe this one thing under many names, and I have used many that you may have the clearer idea of it. For what I mean to say is that whatever is desirable of itself, proceeding from virtue or placed in virtue and commendable on its own account — which I would rather agree to call the only good than deny it to be the chief good — is what men should prefer above all things. And as we declare this to be the case with respect to honesty, so we speak in the contrary manner of infamy: nothing is so odious, so detestable, nothing so unworthy of a man. And if you are thoroughly convinced of this — for at the beginning of this discourse you allowed that there appeared to you more evil in infamy than in pain — it follows that you ought to have the command over yourself, although I scarcely know how this expression may seem an accurate one, which appears to represent man as made up of two natures, so that one should be in command and the other be subject to it.”
Cassius: Okay, thank you, Joshua. When we get into 21, we’ll see that Cicero is going to turn into arguing about reason next as the way that you have command over yourself. But before we get there, there’s some important material here in this section. This just amplifies what I was talking about when we started the episode today — when Cicero says that nature not only bears pain but challenges pain, for there’s nothing with her preferable, nothing which she desires more than credit and reputation and praise and honor and glory.
Now that’s where Torquatus is telling Cicero in De Finibus that the Stoics are beguiled by the glamour of a name. These guys are interested in nothing but reputation with the public and in the idea of glory in the eyes of their fellow men — and that is as circular and ridiculous an argument as a way to base your morality as you could possibly have, because it is no basis for morality. The morality that you’re going to come to from that kind of a conclusion is going to be totally different whether you’re in India versus China versus Russia versus the United States. It’s all going to mean that you should look to the crowd around you for the compass about what you’re supposed to do, because the crowd is going to tell you what they esteem. That takes all of the focus away from your own ability to reason and understand the universe, your own feelings, and gives it over to other people in a way that goes far beyond when Epicurus says “don’t get involved in politics.” Well, he’s talking about in many cases the practical results of getting involved in politics. But Cicero is going a thousand times further and saying, “I’m not just talking about politics. I’m telling you that everything in life that is important is glory and honor and esteem in the eyes of the crowd.”
And so you should look to the crowd, the people around you, for everything that you decide to do — right or wrong, day or night, all the time. And if that’s not the morality of a sheep, I don’t know what could possibly be. Because Epicurean philosophy is not telling you to go take a poll every time you want to make a decision. Epicurean philosophy is telling you that nature gives you pleasure and pain, that those are rock-bottom things that you take as nature gives them to you and you can always look to them for guidance. Now you’ve got to use your head and apply them properly and think about what’s going to happen based on the things that you choose to do or the things you choose to avoid. But it is a system that nature has put in place, and it’s not a statistical poll that you’re going to take every time you want to make a decision.
So Cicero ought to be, from my point of view, embarrassed to be making this allegation. He’s claiming that this gives you praise and honor and glory when in the end what it really does is make you a slave of the crowd. Now, Cicero never gets very far from his Academic Skepticism and he throws in a little parenthetical statement here that’s significant to note as well. He starts talking about whether virtue is commendable on its own account and he throws in that he’d rather call virtue “the only good” as opposed to those who deny virtue to be the chief good — which I think probably is more an inside-baseball reference among the Academics and Aristotelians versus the Stoics, and again, it’s one of these definitional issues. Is virtue the only good or is it the chief good? Well, you go round and round and round on that question without ever coming to any conclusion about what virtue is in the first place, whether it has any kind of solid definition. And that’s where there’s an Epicurean fragment where Epicurus says that the escape from some calamity is the meaning of “good” for those who are capable of reasoning it out and don’t go walking around uselessly all the time. The issue is a clear explanation of what it is you’re talking about, and Epicurus gives a clear explanation by pointing to virtue as the tool by which we live happily — by which we seek pleasure, avoid pain, and succeed in living a happy life — not as something that we’re going to obsess over whether it’s the only good or the chief good.
Joshua: Yeah, Cassius, I think there are many, many things that can be discussed in this passage here and a lot of it settles around this word “nature,” which he uses several times throughout. He imagines his interlocutor saying that pain is intolerable and nature cannot bear it, and then he himself says, “Nature not only bears pain but challenges pain,” and this is where he gets into “for there is nothing with her preferable, nothing which she desires more than credit and reputation.” It’s interesting to try and understand what he means by the use of the word “nature” here, because he’s clearly not referring to the rocks and the trees outside. I think he’s referring to human nature here, and as you’ve said, his devotion to glory and to credit and to praise and reputation — that would seem to make him a slave to the crowd.
This is not, I think, how Cicero himself would see it. In fact, he says in De Finibus that it is Epicurus who is a slave to the crowd on the question of justice — which I don’t think is true — but Cicero would say that he himself is not a slave to the crowd on this question. He is aligned with nature, and not only with nature but with the moral law that is visible and manifest in nature. And so that’s another thing we have to bring in here when we’re talking about Cicero and his understanding of nature, because he says this in his book On the Republic: “True law is right reason in agreement with nature. It is of universal application, unchanging, everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions, and it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, although neither have any effect upon the wicked. It is a sin to try and alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal any part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by senate or people, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it.”
This is why we’re talking here about not just nature in a mechanical sense, but human nature — when it comes to this moral natural law view. He’s saying we don’t need to look outside of ourselves for an interpreter of that view because we are ourselves the nature in question. He goes on to say: “And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and for all times, and there will be one master and one ruler, that is God over us all, for he is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge.”
Now obviously the reference to God there has nothing to do with Christianity because Cicero predates Christianity. He’s talking about perhaps some version of a prime mover or some kind of Platonic deity in a sense. And it is his view of nature that allows him, I think, to say that there is nothing with nature, nothing preferable, nothing which she desires more than credit and reputation and praise and honor and glory — and he can say that and in his own mind not be a slave to the crowd, because in his view, as I said before, he is in obligation to and in harmony with the natural moral law.
Obviously, I think it goes without saying, this is incompatible with an Epicurean understanding of ethics, with an Epicurean understanding of justice, and most importantly of course with an Epicurean understanding of physics. There are no transcendental absolute moral rules that exist out there in the cosmos for you to follow. This is a very idealist view of nature, and it’s a view of nature that has survived into the twenty-first century. You still see this today when people say that something is wrong because it’s “unnatural.” This is an appeal to natural law. This is an appeal to the claim that there are moral truths accessible to us by a study of nature, and that those truths are the same in Athens and in Rome, yesterday and tomorrow and forever and ever until the end of time.
So again, as I think in a previous episode I said, what an incredible shift in perspective we get here. This is another example — and there are many others like it — of the kind of shift in perspective you get when you change a few basic key things in a system of philosophy. When Epicurus says, for example, as he does in the first Principal Doctrine, that a blessed and incorruptible being has no trouble itself and brings no trouble on anything else, and that nothing can be created out of nothing by the will of the gods — as Lucretius says as his first doctrine — when you analyze these two things, it’s clear that nature exists independently of any mind and it exists independently of any morality. And that view is fatal to Cicero’s entire argument, and many other arguments that have been made by many other people throughout the centuries.
Cassius: Joshua, it is amazing, it is breathtaking — the sheer hypocrisy of the position that Cicero is taking here — because Cicero is the first person to be an elitist and to look at the crowd around him and say that all the times and the morals are so decadent. He is the worst in terms of denouncing the morality of the common man. So who in the world are you supposed to look to for these examples? You’re supposed to look to the particular people that Cicero and people like Cicero point out to you as the examples that they think you should follow. There’s usually two sides at least to every question, and Cicero is not going to give you both sides. He’s only going to give you his side.
And as you’re saying, Joshua, it is very incompatible — these positions that Epicurus and Cicero are taking — and in the end they cannot be reconciled. One of these people is right and the other one is wrong, and there’s a great tendency among people of goodwill, like most Epicureans are, to look at a difference of opinion and say, “Well, this is just a matter of words. This is something that can be reconciled. There’s a middle ground between these two and we’re going to take the middle ground and everybody’s going to be happy.” Well, that is a great goal to have and where it is achievable it makes a lot of sense to pursue. Because it’s always very difficult to know in a particular situation whether you’ve reached a right or wrong conclusion or not. But as we see from history and from people like Cicero and the people who followed him in the Platonic religious community — Cicero is not just writing this book for the fun of it. He sees Epicurean philosophy as a threat to the Roman system, to the Greek system, and he wants it eliminated from philosophical discourse. He wants it defeated, he wants it out of the picture and out of the training of people.
And to give Cicero credit, he doesn’t seem to be doing that by force. He is talking to these people and engaging in the arguments and giving lip service at least to the virtue of having a discussion and letting people to some extent make up their own mind. But from the centuries after Cicero — again, as I said earlier — there have been countless instances where those who take the position of Cicero and carry it even further, in the religious-academic establishment community, aren’t going to just stop at having a nice disagreement and say, “Let’s go have cookies and talk about it further.” They are going to take action to suppress the ideas of Epicurus, and that’s why we have so few materials of Epicurus left today to work with.
These questions are vitally important. Cicero is seeing how vitally important they are, and this is something that I think is a thread I would suggest people take very seriously as they listen to our podcasts and read through these materials — that this is not a discussion of how much food to eat at lunch. This is a subject that hits at the most basic, fundamental, violent disagreements of human life, and it turns very ugly very quickly when people begin to see how deep these disagreements are.
So we can move on to section 21 at this point. But Cicero’s inconsistency and hypocrisy here are breathtaking when, again, you look back at what Cicero’s general estimation of the morality of the crowd is, and yet at the same time he says that we should take our morality from the fact that all men agree that this particular morality is the right one. All we can do in a podcast is try to point out a potential Epicurean response to such an argument. But in this case I think it’s clear that it’s Epicurus who is saying that you are responsible to go directly to nature, understand what nature has given you through pleasure and pain, and reasonably apply your mind in an intelligent way. In other words, Cicero says “Be a man.” Well, I think Epicurus would say “Be a smart man.” Epicurus is not telling you ever to run from pain as if it is the most important thing in your life to do. Epicurus is telling you there are times when you will embrace pain, so it takes wisdom — and as Epicurus says, prudence — to know when to embrace pain, when to do the things that are going to be painful, in order that the final ultimate result is more pleasure than pain and is more to your liking. That is a concrete method of analysis that everybody can understand. You don’t have to take a poll to decide what to do when you have that analysis available to you.
And Cicero knows that if the Roman Republicans — in addition to Gaius, in addition to Julius Caesar and others who were beginning to understand Epicurean philosophy — if they begin to understand that there is no religious or idealistic or philosophical authority to which people have to conform, then they will begin to take their lives into their own hands, and as Lucretius says, stand up to the oppressions of religion. Now that’s where we’re going to go next in 21, because Cicero is going to talk about what might happen if men were to take these morality issues into their hands. So let’s read that if you will, Joshua.
Joshua: Yeah, he sets up 21 in 20 with a rather complicated sentence. What he’s basically saying is this: as nothing is so odious and nothing is so detestable as infamy, anyone who is thoroughly convinced of this ought to have the command over themselves in order to be able to control their actions and behaviors and prevent themselves from falling into infamous and odious and detestable behavioral patterns. And then in 21 he’s going to have this extended meditation on what it means to be in command over yourself. He says at the end of 20: “I scarcely know how this expression of being in command over yourself may seem an accurate one, which appears to represent man as made up of two natures, so that one should be in command and the other be subject to it.” And then we get into 21, and this is where he says:
“Yet this division does not proceed from ignorance, for the soul admits of a twofold division, one of which partakes of reason, the other is without it. When therefore we are ordered to give a law to ourselves, the meaning is that reason should restrain our passion. There is in the soul of every man something naturally soft, low, enervated in a manner and language — were there nothing besides this, men would be the greatest of monsters. But there is present to every man reason which presides over and gives laws to all, which by improving itself and making continual advances becomes perfect virtue. It behooves a man then to take care that reason shall have the command over that part which is bound to practice obedience. In what manner? You will say: Why, as a master has over his slave, a general over his army, and a father over his son. If that part of the soul which I have called soft behaves disgracefully, if it gives itself up to lamentations and womanish tears, then let it be restrained and committed to the care of friends and relations, for we often see those persons brought to order by shame whom no reason can influence. Therefore we can find those feelings like our servants in safe custody and almost with chains; but those who have more resolution and yet are not utterly immovable we should encourage with our exhortations, as we would good soldiers, to recollect themselves and maintain their honor.”
He says: “The wise poet understood that custom was no contemptible instructor on how to bear pain, but the same hero in the poem — which Cassius and I are going to skip today — complains with more decency though in great pain.” And he ends the section by saying: “And so that soft place in his soul obeys his reason just as an unabashed soldier does his stirring commander.”
Cassius: Okay, Joshua, thank you. There are a couple of things here. This is an argument in 21 that we see stated perhaps not explicitly, but it is probably one of the biggest arguments ever made against Epicurean philosophy, and you see it in virtually every discussion of it. Where Cicero says “In the soul of man there was something naturally soft, low, enervated in a manner and language. Were there nothing besides this, men would be the greatest of monsters. But there is present to every man reason which presides over and gives laws to all.”
Now, the first thing to say there is that Epicurus is the first to say that reason is an extremely important aspect of human life. He says the wise man is going to order his affairs by reason, so that in the end luck and chance and these other outside forces are not able to upset his plans for happy living. So point one: Epicurus agrees that reason is critically important. But again, here is an issue that is starkly different between Epicurus and Cicero. Because Cicero is going to look to reason to find these illogical abstractions and ideals that are given by prime movers and gods, and saying that those are the things which we’re ultimately looking to through reason to suppress the emotions, the pains and pleasures of living. Now again, to some extent Epicurus agrees with that, but I think when you look closely at where Cicero is going with this, he totally takes it off the cliff — into saying that pain and pleasure are beneath man, that they’re distractions from the best life of reason and wisdom that we should all be aspiring to.
And so when Cicero says “it behooves a man then to take care that reason shall have the command over that part which is bound to practice obedience,” I would submit to you that there’s a major difference in application and implication there between the way Cicero is presenting that and the way that Epicurus is saying that. And I’m going to call out Cicero again here for hypocrisy and inconsistency. Because when he explains the point that he makes, the very next thing he says is that those people who do give in to emotion and behave disgracefully should be committed to the care of friends and relations, because “we often see those persons brought to order by shame whom no reason can influence.” Well, as usual, Cicero is blurring the distinctions. What’s wrong with shame? The thing that’s wrong with shame is the pain that it gives you to feel shame — that pain that comes from your action that is shameful is why you don’t do it. Epicurus says that over and over again. It’s not that there’s some abstraction called shame versus virtue. There’s the fact that when we do something that causes pain to others, that is going to lead to pain to ourselves, that puts us in disrepute, and we are going to suffer bad consequences from that. And that is why we don’t do it.
Cicero doesn’t want to call that reasoning. He’s saying that “no reason can influence” the person who is brought to order by shame. But Epicurus would say absolutely that is what brings the person who makes a mistake into conformity with a principled method of living happily — to look at the consequences of what you’re doing and make your choices to bring the happiest life. So regardless of Cicero’s references to soldiers and poets and so forth here, when he says that “the soft place in the soul obeys reason just as an unabashed soldier does his stern commander” — the reason the unabashed soldier obeys his stern commander is the pain that comes from disobeying. And while I doubt it’s happened — but Cicero is going to be very happy that Cassius and Brutus assassinated Julius Caesar, who was essentially their commander — so even in Cicero’s own analysis, it is contextual whether you should obey the command that’s given to you or not. And you don’t just inflexibly say that there’s some abstract reason that’s going to say yes or no. There’s a process of analysis based on the circumstances and pleasure and pain that leads to the best answer for you. But it does not lead to an idealistic, piety, or virtue answer, because those don’t exist. That’s the directional difference here that is so important to understand between Epicurus and the philosophies that Cicero is advocating.
Joshua: The only thing I really have to add about this section is his view of the soul — that there’s a soft and enervated soul which, if that was the only thing we had, we would be monsters. But he says, luckily we have the rational soul, and the rational soul has the power to reign in, restrain, govern, command the soft part of the soul. Aristotle had considered the soul to have three major divisions: the vegetative or nutritive, the sensitive, and the rational — with each level sort of building on another, kind of like the idea that persisted for a long time into the twentieth century about the “reptile brain,” which I think our friend Don will be very quick to pounce on and say has been discredited as a model for understanding the brain.
Aristotle’s view is that plants have a vegetative soul which allows them to grow and reproduce, but they’re incapable of mobility and incapable of sensation. Then he would say that animals — building on the vegetative soul which they also have — in addition have a higher sensitive soul, and it’s the sensitive soul that allows for mobility and sensation. Some animals have this in a greater degree and some in a smaller degree, humans having their own large portion of it, of course. But in the human, the rational soul — which is unique to the human — builds on top of the sensitive and the vegetative soul, and it is the rational soul that allows for thought, reflection, ethical considerations, philosophy, all of this stuff. Aristotle thinks that makes us uniquely human.
I don’t know if Cicero is adopting this view of things with any degree of clarity, and I don’t fully understand if the system I’ve just described maps very closely on Plato’s own views or the views of Neo-Platonism. But there were a lot of arguments about how we should understand the soul — whether it exists apart from the body or cannot exist apart from the body, whether it precedes the body, whether it survives the death of the body, and so on. And this idea of dividing the soul into a number of phases is another aspect of that debate. And Cicero is tapping into that, at least metaphorically. I don’t know if he’s expressing well-thought-out physical conclusions here, but he’s making the claim that the part of us capable of reason and practical wisdom can command the part of us that is lazy and selfish and infamous and disgusting and so on. So all of these arguments in the ancient world about how they understood the soul are very interesting. They’re also very complicated. The simplistic overview of Aristotle’s thoughts that I’ve just given is probably even too simplistic to be very helpful, but it is worth keeping in mind, I think, that that argument is going on in the background while we’re talking in this text about his view of the rational over the enervated soul.
Cassius: Okay, Joshua, with that, let’s go into section 22.
Joshua: Yeah, in section 22 he says this:
“The man then in whom absolute wisdom exists — such a man indeed we have never as yet seen, but the philosophers have described in their writings what sort of man he will be if he should exist — such a man, or at least that perfect and absolute reason which exists in him, will have the same authority over the inferior part as a good parent has over his dutiful children. He will bring it to obey his nod without any trouble or difficulty. He will rouse himself, prepare and arm himself to oppose pain as he would an enemy. If you inquire what arms he will provide himself with, they will be intention, encouragement, discourse with himself. He will say thus to himself: ‘Take care that you are guilty of nothing base, foul, or unmanly.’
“He will turn over in his mind all the different kinds of honor. Zeno of Elea will occur to him, who suffered everything rather than betray his confederates in the design of putting an end to the tyranny. He will reflect on Anaxarchus, the pupil of Democritus, who, having fallen into the hands of the king of Cyprus, without the least entreaty for mercy or refusal, submitted to every kind of torture. Calanus the Indian will occur to him — an ignorant man, a barbarian, born at the foot of Mount Caucasus — who committed himself to the flames by his own free voluntary act. But if we have the toothache or a pain in the foot, or if the body be any ways affected, we cannot bear it. For our sentiments of pain as well as pleasure are so trifling and effeminate. We are so enervated and relaxed by the luxuries that we cannot bear the sting of a bee without crying out.
“But Gaius — a plain country man, but of a manly soul — when he had an operation performed on him as I mentioned above, at first refused to be tied down, and he’s the first instance of anyone’s having had an operation performed on him without being tied down. Why then did others bear it afterwards? Why? From the force of example. You see then that pain exists more in opinion than in nature. And yet the same Marius gave a proof that there is something very sharp in pain, where he would not submit to have the other thigh cut, so that he bore his pain with resolution as a man, but, like a reasonable person, he was not willing to undergo any greater pain without some necessary reason. The whole then consists in this: that you should have command over yourself. I have already told you what kind of command this is. And by considering what is most consistent with patience, fortitude, and greatness of soul, a man not only restrains himself but somehow or other mitigates even pain itself.”
Cassius: Okay, Josh, just a brief comment on that one. It’s just a normal list of Cicero citing great people, but I do find the example of Marius almost amusing, and you have to wonder if Cicero didn’t even mean it that way — in citing that Marius submitted to have an operation on one of his thighs and refused even to be tied down because he was such a manly, courageous person and he bore that pain with resolution. But on the other hand, he wasn’t going to get the other thigh operated on the same way, because he didn’t want any unnecessary pain. So even Cicero’s own example here gives us an Epicurean analysis of pain: if it makes sense to undergo an operation so as to relieve yourself from greater pain in the future, then yes, you’re going to do it. On the other hand, you’re not going to submit to operations that are not necessary, because they are painful and you’re not going to submit to unnecessary pain unless it really is necessary for your calculation of how the rest of your life is going to end up.
So even here, Cicero’s examples are not entirely incompatible with an Epicurean viewpoint. But it’s not because of patience, fortitude, and greatness of soul that you do these things — it’s because you have an intelligent appraisal of pain and pleasure that you make your decisions intelligently to undergo pain when it is necessary for the better result. And so as we go into 23, Cicero is going to extend this military example a little bit further. Then he’s going to come back in a few moments to the way a philosopher should approach these things. But let’s first go ahead and read 23.
Joshua: “Even as in a battle, the dastardly and timorous soldier throws away his shield on the first appearance of an enemy and runs as fast as he can, and on that account loses his life sometimes, though he has never received even one wound — when he who stands his ground has nothing of the sword happen to him — so they who cannot bear the appearances of pain throw themselves away and give themselves up to affliction and dismay. But those who oppose it often come off more than a match for it. For the body has a certain resemblance to the soul: as burdens are more easily borne the more the body is exerted, while they crush us if we give way; so the soul by exerting itself resists the whole weight that would oppress it, but if it yields, it is so pressed that it cannot support itself.
“And if we consider things truly, the soul should exert itself in every pursuit, for that is the only security for its doing its duty. But this should be principally regarded in pain: that we must not do anything timidly or dastardly or basely or slavishly or effeminately. And above all things we must dismiss and avoid that Philoctetan sort of outcry. A man is allowed sometimes to groan, but yet seldom. But it is not permissible even in a woman to howl — for such a noise as this is forbidden by the Twelve Tables to be used even at funerals. Nor does a wise or brave man ever groan unless when he exerts himself to give his resolution greater force, as they who run in the stadium make as much noise as they can. The wrestlers too do the same when they are training, and the boxers, when they aim a blow with the cestus at their adversary, give a groan — not because they’re in pain or from a sinking of their spirits, but because their whole body is put upon the stretch by the throwing out of these groans and the blow comes the stronger.”
Cassius: Joshua, I am woefully ignorant of the way that certain sports are conducted, but it strikes me that what he’s referring to here — I think we see it in the Olympics in certain activities such as throwing the javelin or so forth, people will run and they’ll throw the javelin and they’ll — what is the right word?
Joshua: It is very common in martial arts as well, where it’s something like that.
Cassius: So yes, Joshua, as you’re saying, it’s like martial arts or certain gymnastics where you let off a noise or make a sound that is consistent with all the exertion that you’re making. You’re not in any way complaining — it’s not a noise of pain, it’s a noise of intense activity that goes along with what you’re doing. So I don’t think there’s anything much in this section 23 that Epicurus would disagree with. That’s just where it says: through exercise, through training, through focus, you can be more successful in certain activities even when it does involve pain. And if it does involve pain, there’s no shame, there’s no harm — and in fact it’s helpful if you will verbalize the intensity of what you’re doing with an appropriate sound.
Now, what is not appropriate according to Cicero is giving off these wails such as he references that certain cultures even to this day do in funeral ceremonies and so forth. The wailing and the outcry, Cicero is saying, is something that is not permissible, and that is almost certainly a cultural thing. But I don’t think there’s anything here that Epicurus would disagree with. And so we’ll go a little bit further into that with even more interesting examples in 24.
Joshua: “They who would speak louder than ordinary — are they satisfied with working their jaws, sides, or tongues, or stretching the common organs of speech and utterance? The whole body and every muscle is at full stretch, if I may be allowed the expression, every nerve exerted to assist their voice. I have actually seen the knees of Marcus Antonius touch the ground when he was speaking with vehemence for himself with relation to the Varian law. For as the engines you throw stones or darts with throw them out with the greater force the more they are strained and drawn back, so it is in speaking, running, or boxing — the more people strain themselves, the greater their force.
“Since therefore this exertion has so much influence — if in a moment of pain, groans help to strengthen the mind, let us use them. But if they be groans of lamentation, if they be the expression of weakness or abjectness or unmanly weeping, that I should scarcely call him a man who yielded to them. For even supposing that such groaning could give any ease, it still should be considered whether it were consistent with a brave and resolute man. But if it does not ease our pain, why should we debase ourselves to no purpose? For what is more unbecoming in a man than to cry like a woman?
“But this precept, which is laid down with respect to pain, is not confined to it — we should apply this exertion of the soul to everything else. Is anger inflamed? Is lust excited? We must have recourse to the same citadel and apply to the same arms. But since it is pain which we are at present discussing, we will let the other subjects alone. To bear pain, then, sedately and calmly — it is of great use to consider with all our soul, as the saying is, how noble it is to do so. For we are naturally desirous — as I said before, but it cannot be repeated too often — and very much inclined to what is honorable, of which if we discover but the least glimpse, there is nothing which we are not prepared to undergo and suffer to attain it. From this impulse of our minds, this desire for genuine glory and honorable conduct, it is that such dangers are supported in war, and that brave men are not sensible of their wounds in action, or if they are sensible of them, prefer death to departing the least step from their honor.
“The Decii saw the shining swords of their enemies when they were rushing into the battle, but the honorable character and glory of the death which they were seeking made all fear of death of little weight. Do you imagine that Epaminondas groaned when he perceived that his life was flowing out with his blood? No, for he left his country triumphing over the Lacedaemonians, whereas he had found it in subjection to them. These are the comforts — these are the things that assuage the greatest pain.”
Cassius: Okay, Joshua. Once again, I would say that the majority of this is consistent with Epicurus, with a very important caveat. We know from Epicurus’s own example what’s recorded — that in his last days, even though he was under tremendous pain, we don’t have any record that Epicurus was screaming in pain the entire time. We have record instead that he was dealing with his pain and thinking about how he was in fact living a happy life despite the pain that he was under at that time, which he said could not be greater. While Epicurus did say that the wise man will cry out while on the rack, I don’t think that’s necessarily a general endorsement of screaming every time you stub your toe. Epicurus is going to apply the same test which he applies to everything else: what will happen to me if I do this versus what will happen to me if I don’t? If crying out is useful — as Cicero is talking about here, as it is useful when you’re trying to do something with intensity — then he’s going to do it. If it’s not useful, if it just increases his own pain, if it increases his pain and he realizes that the people around him are going to be affected by his screaming, then he’s not going to do it. Epicurus is going to apply a practical test about whether to give off sounds when you’re in pain or not.
And the key to the difference is the section where Cicero says “to bear pain, then, sedately and calmly — it is of great use to consider with all our soul as the saying is how noble it is to do so, for we are naturally desirous, as I said before, but it cannot be too often repeated, that we are very much inclined to do what is honorable, of which if we discover but the least glimpse, there’s nothing we’re not prepared to undergo and suffer to attain it.”
Well, in the Epicurean perspective, there’s nothing that we’re not prepared to undergo and suffer to attain a happy life. But we are not willing to undergo and suffer all sorts of torments and stupid results — that would be like the example Cicero gave previously of having an operation in one thigh and saying, “Give me another one, doctor, I enjoyed it so much.” That would be ridiculous to do. Epicurus is saying we are going to endure pain, we are going to vocalize it when appropriate, when it makes sense to do so for the greater goal of living a happy life. It always comes back to this: what is the ultimate goal? Epicurus is saying the ultimate goal is living a happy life. Cicero is hiding the ball, playing a shell game with you, and saying that what you should do is be noble and be honorable, and that if we can even glimpse this honor and virtue that Cicero was talking about, we should be prepared to undergo anything — not in exchange for a happy living, but in exchange for nobility and honor and virtue.
That’s what Cicero was saying, and people might think, “This is Cicero two thousand years ago, we don’t think like that anymore.” But we do think like that when we talk about being a good person as opposed to using a more practical analysis for how to live our lives. When we start talking about being a good person “for the greater good of something else,” when we dissemble about what our goal really is, we go down the same path that Cicero goes down. The path of Epicurus is totally distinct, and that path is to live a happy life, which we judge by the pleasure and pain that we experience when we’re doing it. We’re not pursuing some fictitious abstract goal of virtue and honor as the way we judge our actions.
Joshua, one more thing about section 24 at the end: Cicero gives the example of Epaminondas and says, “Do you suppose that Epaminondas groaned when he perceived that he was dying? He did not,” Cicero says, “because he left his country in triumph over the Lacedaemonians, whereas before he started his campaigns they were in subjection to the Lacedaemonians.” Cicero says, “These are the comforts, these are the things that assuage the greatest pain.” I would say that applies directly to Epicurus. Epicurus saw and knew at the end of his life that he was leaving his friends and the people who followed his philosophy in a position to triumph over the false philosophies and religions of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and all the rest. And so he was happy at the recollection of his dealings with his school. Those things gave him comfort even though he was in the sharpest of pain from kidney disease. And that analogy — I don’t think there’s any significant difference between kidney disease versus being wounded in battle. You’re in tremendous pain, but you take comfort in the accomplishments of your life and the value that they’ve given to you in terms of pleasure and the happiness that it therefore brings to you despite the pain that you’re in.
So even Cicero’s example here I think is totally reconcilable with an Epicurean point of view. But Epaminondas was not happy or satisfied because he was noble. Epaminondas was happy or satisfied because he had won a war over the Lacedaemonians and left his friends and his society in a much better position than they were when he came to power. So again, that’s the way it appears to me that Epicurus is suggesting we analyze things. Okay, we’ve just about come to the end of the episode for today. Any final thoughts on this episode, Joshua?
Joshua: Yeah, Cassius, your description of this feeling of Epicurus’s dying — and leaving because he knows he’s not unhappy to be dying at that moment, in part because he knows that he is leaving behind his friends who will have each other, who will mourn him, and who will carry on the legacy that he spent his whole life building, this school of philosophy, and it did continue for centuries after — it reminded me of this horrible tragedy that happened in the twelfth century in the English Channel. It was the twenty-fifth of November in the year 1120, and in this tragedy, the Anglo-Norman aristocracy had traveled to France to engage in some diplomacy. And now on the return journey back across the channel to England, there were several ships, and most of the court traveled with King Henry the First. But a number of the younger people, including the Crown Prince, boarded a smaller, newer, faster vessel called the White Ship.
And as the fleet departed, they stayed in the harbor and inaugurated a party boat essentially, and they spent most of the night drinking. And then they thought — because it’s such a fast ship — wouldn’t it be funny if we could beat the rest of them home? And so the prince gave orders to fly out of the harbor and shoot across the channel, and they shot straight into a rock right off the coast and sank. I think the only person to survive was a French butcher or something.
And in this book I read recently by David Mitchell called Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England’s Kings and Queens, he talks about the effect that the death of the young prince had on the king and the effect that the loss of this whole generation of young aristocracy had on European government. And there’s a very excellent passage in his book on this, and it goes this way. He writes:
“William Adelin was obviously Henry the First’s favourite son, but he also personified his father’s strategy for the future. A prince named after the Conqueror, but given the old Anglo-Saxon heirship to signify his descent through his mother Queen Matilda of Scotland from the House of Wessex, he was to unite Normandy and England in one royal house under one rightful king. He gave all of Henry’s prudent brutality, his administrative reforms, his building of an aristocracy he could trust and who trusted him — in full reward of his struggle — a reason and point. The Prince’s death was more than the tragic death of his son. It was also Henry’s death.”
And it’s said that King Henry the First never smiled again after he heard the news of the White Ship.
Well, that was a bit of a tangent, but I do think it’s relevant to what we’re talking about — particularly when we’re presented with apparently these two competing options: either things go well for you up until you die, and then you can die happily and die without tremendous suffering from your pain; or things go horribly, in which case you are exposed to greater fear when you die. I think that the story of this disaster bears fruitful comparison with the way that Lucretius chooses to end his poem with this horrible account of the plague in Athens.
As we’ve mentioned about this episode in Lucretius’s poem recently, there are also several different interpretations as to how we should read this part of his poem and what we should look for in it and what we should take away from it. And I think, as we’ve said many times recently, even Cassius — and as you and I both agree — Emily Austin has hit upon an interesting solution to this problem, by going back to Thucydides and his account of the plague, and by seeing where Lucretius’s mind was going, even if he didn’t finish the poem explicitly that way. And that is: when you have tragedy on this level, you can look at it and say that this is symbolic of the futility of all human endeavor or whatever. Or you can look at it and say, look — this tragedy is affecting the pious and the impious, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak. It’s affecting everybody equally. And in that sense it is kind of an equalizer, and what we should do now is say: how can we build for ourselves a life where we are focused — not as Cicero would have us focus on things like glory and credit and praise and reputation — how can we focus on a life that is most deeply satisfying for us, for the people who are on the ground, for the people who are living it, while so many around them are losing it?
And the direction they go in is clearly: all this praying to the gods isn’t working. So how about we rethink our view of this idea of divine intercession, and of the supernatural in general, and of the idea of life after death — and instead of focusing on those things, instead of waiting around for the gods to save us, why don’t we employ our philosophy here? Why don’t we stop focusing on the next life, which isn’t promised to us, and instead focus on this life? Why don’t we stop restricting ourselves on the basis of what some people want us to do or say, and instead live a life that brings us pleasure and satisfaction? I think that’s the answer to the question here, and I think that Cicero is getting close to it — but he’s not ever going to state it as clearly as I’ve just stated it, because he doesn’t want to see a society that isn’t in fear of the gods, that isn’t hoping for life after death, or that isn’t focused on virtue and duty and obedience over leisure and choice and human satisfaction.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, we are faced in life with deciding — before we are on our deathbed — what is it that really makes us happy in life? Is it going to be a matter of being noble and virtuous in the abstract, or is there going to be something concrete that we can look back on, be satisfied with, and be confident in from our own analysis of our lives — which is the only analysis that really makes any difference in the end? There are many different ways to do that. There is the Epaminondas way of being a general and thinking that his happiness is tied up with the happiness of his city-state, and realizing that even though he was dying from a battle, he had brought his country victory over the Lacedaemonians and left them in a much better place than they were. That is one way of deriving happiness from your life.
It is not altogether different from what Epicurus did in starting a school of philosophy, interacting with his students and his friends, and writing all these books and going on a philosophical campaign against the errors that were causing so much pain and trouble for the people around him — and to look back at the end of his life and realize that despite the fact that he’s in tremendous pain at that moment from kidney disease, he is truly happy because of what he’s accomplished. The examples of Epaminondas and Epicurus are consistent in the people involved getting tremendous emotional satisfaction — which means pleasure — from their activities of life.
You can contrast that with what is preserved about the final days of Brutus after the Battle of Philippi, when he says something to the effect that “Virtue — now I see you were but a name.” This claim of Cicero and the others — that virtue, honor, glory are in themselves a goal worth living for — is ridiculous. That’s what the Athenians realized who survived the plague: that they needed to live their lives realizing that life is short and that they need to be happy in the time that they have. Sometimes you have to be happy by being a general on the battlefield. Sometimes you have to be happy by running a philosophical school. But the achievement of looking back on your life and seeing the pleasures that you’ve experienced and the accomplishments that you have made is tremendously pleasurable. In contrast to the King of England who, because of the imprudent decisions of his chosen heir, sees all of his plans basically dashed on the rocks and drowned in the English Channel.
We’re not just talking about cake, cookies, and wine and the immediate pleasures of the moment. We’re talking about the long-term mental pleasures that you can get from your life when you realize that what you’re doing is successfully opposing pain, promoting pleasure, and leading to a better result. Because Lucretius talks about the hearts in darkness of all the people who are wandering around doing stupid things, living wasted lives because they don’t understand the way things really are.
If Epicurean philosophy brings a description and an explanation of the way things really are, and gives us an anchor and a guide by which we can live more successfully — which means more happily — and that happiness is based on nature through pleasure and pain, and not through idealistic abstractions that do not exist, then that is what Epicurus is offering us. Okay. With that, we have probably one more episode next week on the remainder of Part Two, after which we’ll turn to Part Three of the Tusculan Disputations. That’s all the time we have for this week. As always, we invite you to drop by the EpicureanFriends.com forum and discuss this and any of our other episodes or issues regarding Epicurus with us. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back next week. See you then. Bye.