Episode 289 - TD19 - "Epicureans Are Not Spocks!"
Date: 07/04/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4550-episode-289-td19-epicureans-are-not-spocks/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”This episode continues Tusculan Disputations Part Three (sections 9–10) on grief, anger, pity, envy, and all perturbations of the mind. The central question becomes: should the Epicurean wise man experience strong emotions — or should all emotion be eliminated?
Section 9 opens with Cicero quoting four lines from Homer’s Iliad spoken by Achilles against Agamemnon, the king of kings who took away Achilles’s prize Briseis after being forced to return Chryseis to her father, the priest of Apollo. Dionysius of Heraclea — the Stoic who famously abandoned Stoicism when in pain — here argues that just as a swollen hand is disordered, a puffed-up or agitated mind is disordered. The wise man’s mind is never disordered; therefore the wise man is never angry. The argument extends: whoever grieves may feel pity; whoever feels pity may feel envy; but the wise man cannot feel envy; therefore the wise man cannot feel grief. The Stoics reach the conclusion that all strong emotions — anger, grief, pity, envy, compassion — are perturbations that the wise man never experiences.
Section 10 begins. Cicero acknowledges the Stoic arguments are “strained and distorted” but endorses their general direction. He criticizes the Peripatetics for appealing only to moderation of the emotions rather than elimination. He then states flatly: envy and pity are connected in the same man; whoever is capable of pity is capable of envy; the wise man is incapable of envy and consequently incapable of pity.
The episode’s extended discussion focuses on the Greek term ataraxia (tranquility/freedom from disturbance) — a word used by Stoics, Epicureans, and Pyrrhonists alike but meaning very different things in each context. Joshua introduces Don Boozer’s commentary on the Letter to Menoeceus, which identifies ataraxia as a description of pleasure in Epicurus — not an end in itself but a kind of pleasure, contrasted with the kinetic pleasures of joy (chara) and merriment (euphrosyne). Cassius warns that when ataraxia is elevated as the primary goal divorced from the Epicurean framework, one ends up following the Stoics to their logically consistent but humanly monstrous conclusion: eliminating all emotion including compassion and pity.
Joshua quotes from Cassius Dio’s Roman History (Book 47) on Brutus’s death at Philippi — how Brutus quoted a line from Euripides’s Heracles just before his end: “O wretched Virtue, thou wert but a word, and yet I worshipped thee as real; but now it seems thou wert but Fortune’s slave.” This serves as a warning against putting abstract philosophical words on pedestals: Brutus devoted his life to an abstraction labeled “Virtue” and found it had no foundation.
Kalosyni draws a parallel to modern emotional intelligence — emotions as a holistic control panel that cannot be selectively shut off without damaging the whole system. Cassius closes by connecting these issues to cognitive behavioral therapy and its Stoic roots, and argues that the real divergence between Epicurean and Stoic analysis comes down to their fundamentally different views of the universe: natural vs. supernatural, one life vs. afterlife, and knowledge as possible vs. impossible.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 289 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. This week we’re continuing our series going through Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations from an Epicurean viewpoint. As we’ve seen in the past, we’re not interested in Cicero’s own personal Stoic or Academic Skeptic views, but Cicero does a very good job in going through many major issues of life and including within his discussion the Epicurean viewpoint. And by going through this text, we can see how strongly the differences of opinion existed among these philosophers about how to consider and how to deal with different problems of life.
We started off in part one with death. In part two we dealt with bodily pain, and now we’re talking in part three about different afflictions of the mind. In general, Cicero is categorizing this particular section as being about grief, but today we’re going to see how it extends to many other strong emotions as well, including anger and pity and envy. And we’re getting into some very interesting material in a section that is going to appeal, I think, to many of our listeners who are interested in the practical applications of Epicurean philosophy. Once you see how strongly the analysis differs between the Stoics, the Academic Skeptics, and the Epicureans, it’s much easier to see the implications of Epicurean philosophy in the way we bring it home into attempting to live better lives in the here and now.
Last week we got up through section eight, and we saw Cicero lead us through a number of definitional sections in which he was looking at the way that different philosophers had viewed the different emotions as disorders or diseases. Cicero concluded in section eight with a discussion of the Stoic viewpoint in which he talked about frugality and the different twists that the ancient Romans placed on that, with the concluding section in which he said: “Whoever is frugal — or, if it is more agreeable to you, whoever is moderate and temperate — such a one must of course be consistent. Whoever is consistent must be quiet. The quiet man must be free from all perturbation, therefore from grief likewise. And these are the properties of a wise man, therefore a wise man must be free from grief.”
So this was an example that we first saw last week of how Cicero is relating a viewpoint that’s generally associated with the Stoics — to come to the conclusion that when you’re a wise man, you’re going to be free from grief. That was a little hard to swallow last week, and I know some of us are tempted to say, well, there must be a way of looking at this in which this viewpoint makes more sense, in which we can reconcile it with a more common sense point of view. But I think we’re going to find today, as we go further in section nine, that the opposite is in fact the case — that our initial impression of this idea that grief is totally separate from the wise man is really stark, because Cicero is going to extend this type of analysis even further. And as he does that, we’re going to see the implications of taking this logical approach to grief and envy and anger and these other strong emotions. So I was going to start in section nine by giving us a famous example of men of the past — in this case, Achilles, who is famed for having been extremely angry — and he’s going to use that example to pursue the argument further. So Joshua, let us know if you have any thoughts, and when you’re ready, please go ahead and read section nine.
Joshua: Yeah, so at the end of section six, Cassius, which we covered last week, Cicero said this: “I shall advance something further. I shall not treat of grief alone, though that indeed is the principal thing, but as I originally proposed, of every perturbation of the mind — as I termed it, disorder as the Greeks call it — and first with your leave, I shall treat it in the manner of the Stoics, whose method is to reduce the arguments into a very small space; afterwards, I shall enlarge more in my own way.” So that’s the end of section six.
And we are starting today with section nine, and when we get into section 10, he’s going to say this — and we’re not there yet, but this is going to make it clear where we are in the broader train of thought. In section 10, coming up, he’s going to say: “Now, though these reasonings of the Stoics and their conclusions are rather strained and distorted, and ought to be expressed in a less stringent and narrow manner, yet great stress is to be laid on the opinions of those men who have a peculiarly bold and manly turn of thought and sentiment.” And then he’s going to shift into a discussion of the view of grief and all things that perturb the mind. So we are still in this section on Stoicism, I believe, and we’re going to get out of that quite quickly today, but it’s important to realize that we’re still there right now.
Cassius: Yeah, I agree exactly with what you’ve just said. It’s important for people to realize that there’s this continuing debate — even a joke out there in the world — about whether Cicero was really a Stoic or not. Most people think that he’s a Stoic and they associate everything he says with Stoicism, but as we see pretty clearly when you actually read his work, his heart is in Academic Skepticism. And so Cicero is always going to go back to the ultimate position that: “I don’t really know this for sure, I’m just telling you what I think is probable.” And he’s always going back to that point that anybody who takes a firm position — whether it be Epicurus or the Stoics — is really going over the line, because it’s impossible to really take a firm position. He’s into this skepticism in which knowledge is not possible. And I’ll say as a footnote: when we finish the Tusculan Disputations, there are going to be some sections of the Academica — the other dialogue by Cicero — that I want us to go through, that will really hammer this point home.
But my reading of these sections that we’re in now is that Cicero is personally a little uncomfortable with the Stoics taking such a firm, clear position, because he’s a skeptic at heart. But Cicero’s emotional attachment, however, is with the Stoics and their conclusions, because it is important to him that philosophy be used to train people to become strong, brave, manly, and so forth — the type of Roman citizen that he wants to promote. So like you said, it’s really important to keep in mind here that sometimes what we’re reading is Cicero’s own belief, and sometimes it’s his way of endorsing some of it without going too far. And we’ll try to make that clear as we go through all this.
But we’re still in a section where there’s the Stoic position and then there’s the Stoic method of argument. The position, of course, is extreme virtue — extreme devotion to this idea of the glory of virtue, the beauty of virtue, the divine guidance of the universe and so forth. But there’s also the Stoic method, which is heavily logic-based and syllogistic. That’s the part that we read a few minutes ago: if you’re frugal, then you’re moderate and temperate; if you’re temperate, then you’re consistent; if you’re consistent, you must be quiet; if you’re quiet, you’re free from perturbation; if you’re free from perturbation, you’re free from grief, and that’s what a wise man is. So therefore one plus two plus three equals six, and a wise man is free from grief. That’s the method that the Stoics like to use — to argue in extremely logical terms. So both of those things are important to keep in mind as we go through the discussion. And I think now we’ll go on to section nine, whenever you’re ready.
Joshua: I only have two more points to make before I start reading. One: our last episode was very, very heavy on terminology. Looking forward in the text today, we’re going to get a little bit more of that in the beginning, but I think we’re going to get over that relatively quickly. So in the beginning of section nine coming up here, Cicero is going to quote a passage from the Iliad, and then he is going to give the opinion of Dionysius of Heraclea, who was a Stoic whom we’ve already seen mentioned in the text. Just a slight background on this so we remember what’s going on. The poem that he quotes is this: “Well hast thou spoke, but at the tyrant’s name, my rage rekindles and my soul’s inflamed; his just resentment and becomes the brave, disgraced, dishonored like the vilest slave.”
So the tyrant in question here is Agamemnon, who is the high king — king of kings — of the Greek army in the Greek invasion force that had gone to Troy. And the speaker in this section is Achilles, who feels that he has been greatly wronged by Agamemnon because Agamemnon claimed as his personal spoils in a conflict a beautiful maiden named Chryseis, but she was the daughter of a priest of Apollo. And the priest appealed to Apollo to cause problems for the Greeks — the Achaeans, as Homer calls them. And so in counsel the Greeks had to come up with a way to placate Apollo and get him to stop bothering them, and what they proposed was that we need to convince Agamemnon that he’s got to give this young woman back to her father. And so when they finally prevail upon him to do so — and Achilles is a very pronounced voice in trying to convince him that he’s got to do that in order to save the army, in order to save the soldiers who had come from Greece — Agamemnon then says to Achilles: “Okay, I will give Chryseis back to her father, but that will leave me without spoils and I can’t go without spoils. I’m the high king, the king of kings. So what I’m going to do then is take your spoils, Achilles — the young woman you took, whose name is Briseis — not Chryseis, but Briseis.”
And that decision by Agamemnon sets up one of the major conflicts in the Iliad, which is the wrath of Achilles — I think wrath is the first word in the Greek text of the Iliad — the wrath of Achilles directed toward Agamemnon in particular, later also toward Hector and toward Troy. So that’s the backdrop to these four lines I’m about to read. So here’s section nine in Cicero’s text:
“Dionysius of Heraclea is right when, upon this complaint of Achilles in Homer — ‘Well hast thou spoke, but at the tyrant’s name, my rage rekindles and my soul’s inflamed, his just resentment and becomes the brave, disgraced, dishonored like the vilest slave’ — he reasons thus: Is the hand as it should be when it is affected with a swelling? Or is it possible for any other member of the body, when swollen or enlarged, to be in any other than a disordered state? Must not the mind then, when it is puffed up or distended, be out of order? But the mind of a wise man is always free from every kind of disorder — it never swells, never is puffed up. But the mind when in anger is in a different state. A wise man, therefore, is never angry. For when he is angry, he lusts after something — for whoever is angry naturally has a longing desire to give all the pain he can to the person who he thinks has injured him. And whoever has this earnest desire must necessarily be much pleased with the accomplishment of his wishes. Hence he is delighted with his neighbor’s misery. And as a wise man is not capable of such feelings as these, he is therefore not capable of anger.
But should a wise man be subject to grief, he may likewise be subject to anger — for as he is free from anger, he must likewise be free from grief. Again, could a wise man be subject to grief? He might also be liable to pity, or even might be open to a disposition towards envy — which in Latin is invidia. I do not say to envy — or nvidia in Latin — for that can only exist by the very act of envying. But we may fairly form the word invidia from in-video, and so avoid the doubtful name nvidia, which, as he’s already said, means envy — for this word is probably derived from in and video, ‘looking too closely into another’s fortune,’ as it is said in the Medus: ‘Who envies me the flower of my children?’ — where in that line the Latin is invidet flori. It may appear not good Latin, but it is very well put by Ennius; for as video governs an accusative case, so it is more correct to say invidere florem than flori. We are debarred from saying so by common usage; the poet stood in his own right and expressed himself with more freedom.”
Cassius: Okay, Joshua, that is as close as we’re going to be getting to discussing declensions and conjugations in Latin. Cicero is extending the argument from grief to anger and also to pity and to envy. Cicero has never been intending to limit his argument about how the wise man deals with grief. He’s looking at all strong emotions — whether it be envy, anger, pity — or as we go into the next section and see compassion or other things, the common denominator being, as in the illustration at the beginning of the passage, that these strong emotions are going to puff up or distend or simply make the mind be out of order, with the premise being that the mind of the wise man is always free from every kind of disorder, so it’s never swollen, never puffed up.
And therefore the implication of all this becomes clear: the Stoic is ending up taking the position that all strong emotion is a disorder of the mind, and that you cannot be wise in the presence of disorder. And so therefore it is either true as a matter of logic, or true that your goal should be — if you wish to be wise — that you must separate yourself from strong emotion. As we’ve discussed previously, Diogenes Laertius records specifically that Epicurus holds a very different position: that the wise man is going to feel strong emotion, but that is not a hindrance to his wisdom. This is the important point here.
The Stoics — as a matter of goal for their lives in terms of wishing to be a wise man, and in terms of their method of analysis in which they drive everything back down into a logical definition — think that they have a firm foundation for the view that the happy man, the wise man, is going to be totally insulated from strong emotion. When we talk about the differences in the modern world and in application between the Stoics and the Epicureans and other schools, this is the point that comes up over and over again. But the Stoics and others like to gloss over it as being insignificant and try to say, well, all the Stoics really want you to do is be calm, and everybody wants to be calm — so let’s just put aside the extremities to which the Stoics are recorded to have gone. That’s very much like what Cicero is trying to do here. He’s continuously making excuses that the Stoics might be a little over the top in the way they’re expressing things, but this is an admirable point of view, so I’m going to go with it anyway.
Well, that’s a very, very different attitude from the realistic approach that Epicurus takes about humanity, life in general, what we can expect out of life, and what we should even strive for in life. We do wish to be wise, but we are not going to be able to — nor should we try to — insulate ourselves from strong emotion. Ultimately, emotion as a subcategory of pleasure and pain is what life is all about. We are not wise for the sake of being wise. How many times does Epicurus make this point, and the Epicureans harp on this over and over again? Wisdom is a tool to happiness. It is not the goal in and of itself. Like any other tool — like virtue — these are tools for the achievement of something else, and that something else that Epicurus, I think rightly, identifies is the emotional satisfaction, the pleasure that comes from life. So this is a point that’s hard to overstate or overemphasize, and as we continue through the text, we’ll have plenty of other opportunities to say something very similar.
Joshua: It occurs to me, Cassius, this discussion is leading us in a direction of something that we don’t often talk about on the podcast, and that is probably due for some level of consideration here today since we’re getting into explicitly in Cicero the idea of the disturbance or perturbation — as he says — of the mind. That’s the question at issue here, and the Greek term relevant to some part of this is one that many people who have spent any amount of time with Greek philosophy will be familiar with, and that term is ataraxia, which if you go to the Wikipedia page, it says this: “In ancient Greek philosophy, ataraxia — generally translated as ‘unperturbed,’ ‘imperturbability,’ ‘equanimity,’ or ‘tranquility’ — is a lucid state of robust equanimity characterized by ongoing freedom from distress and worry. Achieving ataraxia is a common goal for Pyrrhonism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism, but the role and value of ataraxia within each philosophy varies in accordance with their philosophical theories.” And then we get this line which I think is important: “The mental disturbances that prevent one from achieving ataraxia also vary among the philosophers, and each philosophy has a different understanding of how to achieve ataraxia.”
The first thing I want to mention here is, as I’ve already said, we don’t talk about ataraxia that much on the forum. It’s not because we think that this was a later addition and that Epicurus didn’t write about it — we accept that Epicurus wrote about it. The problem is that when you have a word in another language that describes a mental state, it starts to get elevated into something beyond anything that Epicurus talked about. I think that’s my opinion, Cassius, and I’m sure you’ll have more to say, but you could compare the way that ataraxia has developed to the way that “Nirvana” or something has developed, or moksha, I think, is another one from the Hindu world.
So there are pitfalls here, just as there are with the word eudaimonia, which the Wikipedia page also mentions. But Epicurus used both of these words, and he used them including in the Letter to Menoeceus. In that letter he says this: “The steady contemplation of these facts enables you to understand everything that you accept or reject in terms of the health of the body and the serenity of the soul” — serenity of the soul being ataraxia or something like that in Greek. So that’s the major appearance of this word, and he’s including it here directly in the context of the health of the body and the serenity of the soul, and he says that is the goal of the completely happy life.
If we move from there and we go to page 59 of a different document — this is called Meditate on These Things: Epicurus’s Letter to Menoeceus, a new translation with commentary by our own very close friend Don Boozer, active on the forum and one of our great resources when it comes to questions about the Greek language, because neither Cassius nor I are at all competent to answer questions about the Greek language — on page 59 of Don’s text and commentary, he has this to say about the passage from the Letter to Menoeceus which I just read. Don says: “This demonstrates that Epicurus was concerned with our entire existence, the wellbeing of both our physical and mental health — that his sōtēria is physical and ataraxia is mental or soul. By contemplating and following Epicurus’s philosophy, we come to understand that all our decisions — of which actions to choose and from which actions to flee — are going to affect whether our physical, material health and wellbeing are to be maintained or not and whether our minds are to be troubled or not.”
“It may be interesting to take a look at the connotation of ataraxia here again. Ataraxia is a widespread term in both popular and academic writings on Epicurean philosophy. Ataraxia and aponia — translated as ‘tranquility’ and ‘freedom from pain’ respectively — are sometimes held up as the only goal or only good of Epicurus’s philosophy. The two are referenced together only, to the best of my knowledge, in the famous or infamous lines about static and kinetic pleasures. Ataraxia and aponia are given as examples of one kind of pleasure; chara (which means joy) and euphrosyne (which means mirth or merriment) are given as examples of the other kind, which is the kinetic or moving pleasures.” And then he goes on to say: “Consider another instance of ataraxia in fragment 519: ‘The greatest fruit of justice is serenity.’ In parsing ataraxia itself, it’s helpful to consider the opposite of ataraxia — taraxia — meaning trouble, disorder, or confusion. So ataraxia conveys ‘without trouble, without disorder, and without confusion.’ I’ve also seen it written that there’s also the sense of calm seas.” And he says that book 1, 63 includes the text “to flee from all indoctrination and set sail in your own little boat.” He says: “Ataraxia is a description of pleasure — a kind of pleasure. Epicurus repeatedly states that his good is pleasure writ large, and the goal of his philosophy is to lead the most pleasant life possible.”
Okay, I’m going to stop there in Don’s text. So this is going to set up for us, I think, a large part of where we’re going to go in this text. Cassius, we’re going to have to find a way to separate out where we agree with Cicero and the Stoics and the Peripatetics and the rest of them on mental disturbances that are made antithetical to health and happiness — and where we disagree with them on emotional experiences that, even though these other philosophers might say that these are disturbing experiences, we can say that actually there’s nothing disturbing about pity. Not only is it not the case that the wise man will never experience pity, but the wise man — as Epicurus says — will feel more deeply than others, I think is a quote.
I’m curious to know, Cassius, what you think about all of this. Because that seems to me to be a challenge for us to say — as we read through Cicero, he’s saying that the Stoics hold that no wise man is ever going to feel anger, envy, wrath, pity — that these are disturbances of the mind, and just like a swollen hand doesn’t work properly, a swollen mind or an agitated or disturbed mind isn’t working properly, and the wise man is someone whose mind always works properly, therefore he’s never going to experience it. I think we’re going to find that we disagree with some of what he’s saying about many of these emotions, and that Epicurus, because he’s not an absolutist on some of these points, is going to include emotional experience as part of what it means just to be human. I think we all experience these things.
Cassius: I’m intending everything that I’m about to say, Joshua, to be in agreement with what you have just discussed, because I think everything you’ve brought up is well stated. The way I think I would summarize it at the moment is that what we see over and over again is that there are words that are very important in the discussion of these issues — like virtue, or pleasure, or gods — and you can go on and on. Today the focus is on tranquility, or calmness, or ataraxia. In all of these situations there are different definitions and understandings attached to those words, which illustrates how the different schools are using them in very different ways. And if we’re going to get anything out of the study of philosophy, if we’re going to practically apply any of this, we have to understand what those differences are and why they came into being — so that we can avoid the difficulties that come from too loose an understanding of what we’re talking about.
Back to the Letter to Menoeceus — Epicurus is always stressing clarity and frankness, and within the realm of what is possible, he’s stressing certainty: that you should be very, very precise when you’re dealing with a very important subject, and not get carried away by the glamour of the name of virtue, or fear of gods, or narrow definitions of pleasure that can be turned against you and lead to all sorts of innocent mistakes or intentional maliciousness when other people fail to be as clear as Epicurus is telling you to be.
Tranquility, calmness, ataraxia — these are words that are used by all of these schools. But when we see them actually used by the Stoics and we follow their reasoning to its logical conclusion, it becomes possible to see why such deep division of opinion and even anger between the schools came to be. Many of us are attracted — and properly so, I would say — to the goal of being calm and tranquil and not letting our emotions get the better of us to do stupid things. And if we understand ataraxia, calmness, tranquility in that kind of sense — in the sense of sailing forward on a smooth ocean — then that certainly is compatible and agreeable to Epicurus’s goal of living a happy life. I don’t see how anybody could argue otherwise.
But if we consider tranquility, calmness, ataraxia to be simply sitting still on that ocean, then our minds can quickly turn to the idea that being becalmed can be deadly to a sailor, whereas calmness is what you’d like to achieve so as to get your job done and get your travels accomplished successfully. The warning or concern I would have for people who are really, really focused on tranquility and calmness is that you risk falling prey to the conclusions of the Stoics. And those of us who are most attracted to calmness and tranquility, I think, can immediately see the starkly incompatible result of that line of thinking.
When you see here that Cicero is recording for us from the Stoics that the Stoics concluded that not only are things we’re familiar with as turbulence, not only are perturbations — things that bother us — to be eliminated from our lives, but compassion and pity are likewise to be eliminated from our lives from that same line of thinking. As we’ll see in the next section, I’ll go ahead: Cicero says that a wise man is incapable of envy and consequently incapable of pity. But if a wise man were used to grieving, then pity would be familiar to him, and therefore grief is a feeling which cannot affect a wise man. And of course this follows.
The next thing he says is: “Oh, this is strained and distorted” — but this is the position that the people in the Stoic school, who thought that they were simply logically extending what Socrates and Plato had already said, came to. It’s easy for us to look at ataraxia and say that Epicurus is telling us to get rid of harmful, bad emotion. And yes, that is exactly what he’s doing — he’s saying get rid of harmful and bad emotion. But all emotion is not harmful and bad. It’s the Stoics — and people extending on Plato — who want to say that virtue is the only thing in life, wisdom is the only thing in life, who are reaching the conclusion that all emotion is bad. So they are going to not only throw out the bathwater, they are going to throw the baby out with it. They are going to throw out the good emotions along with the bad emotions.
And they are the people who have elevated ataraxia, calmness, tranquility to such an iconic word that whenever we hear it nowadays it’s really not possible to separate out what type of ataraxia, what type of calmness you’re really talking about. Because normally when you hear these concepts used — tranquility, calmness, “keep a stiff upper lip” — you’re normally being talked to by somebody who’s quoting Marcus Aurelius or some other Stoic, and you’re buying this package deal that says all emotion needs to be suppressed. That’s why it’s important to study Epicurus. That’s why it’s important to understand what’s really being talked about here, so that you can consistently read — or be talked to by the people in the media, the internet — and make sense of what is being said and avoid a dramatically bad misunderstanding.
So Joshua, we may need to continue in section 10 next week, but I think it would be good for us to at least read it and get started with section 10, because it will help us see even further how far the Stoics were going with these conclusions. So when you’re ready, section 10.
Joshua: Therefore, says Cicero: “Compassion and envy are consistent in the same man. For whoever is uneasy at anyone’s adversity is also uneasy at another’s prosperity. As Theophrastus, while he laments the death of his companion Callisthenes, is at the same time disturbed at the success of Alexander, and therefore he says that Callisthenes met with the man of the greatest power and good fortune, but one who did not know how to make use of his good fortune. And therefore, as pity is an uneasiness which arises from the misfortunes of others, so envy is an uneasiness that proceeds from the good success of another. Therefore, whoever is capable of pity is capable of envy. But a wise man is incapable of envy, and consequently incapable of pity. But where a wise man were used to grieve, pity also would be familiar to him. Therefore, to grieve is a feeling which cannot affect a wise man.
Now, though these reasonings of the Stoics and their conclusions are rather strained and distorted, and ought to be expressed in a less stringent and narrow manner, yet great stress is to be laid on the opinions of those men who have a peculiarly bold and manly turn of thought and sentiment. For our friends the Peripatetics, notwithstanding all their vain gravity and fluency of language, do not satisfy me about the moderation of these disorders and diseases of the soul which they insist upon. For every evil, though moderate, is in its nature great — but our object is to make out that the wise man is free from all evil. Whereas the body is unsound if it is ever so slightly affected, so the mind under any moderate disorder loses its soundness. Therefore, the Romans have — with their usual accuracy of expression — called trouble and anguish and vexation, on account of the analogy between a troubled mind and a diseased body, disorders.
The Greeks call all perturbation of mind pretty nearly the same name, or they name every turbulent motion of the soul pathos — that is to say, a distemper. But we have given them a more proper name, for a disorder of the mind is very like a disease of the body. But lust does not resemble sickness — neither does a moderate joy, which is an elated and exalting pleasure of the mind. Fear too is not very like a distemper, though it is akin to grief of mind. But properly, as is also the case with sickness of the body, so too sickness of mind has no name separated from pain. And therefore I must explain the origin of this pain — that is to say, the cause that occasions this grief in the mind as if it were a sickness of the body. For as physicians think they have found out the cure when they have discovered the cause of the distemper, so we shall discover the method of curing melancholy when the cause of it is found out.”
Cassius: Thank you, Joshua. That passage has a lot of information in it, and like I say, I think we’re going to have to continue over into next week to really get to all of the detail. But what I would like to make sure to focus on today is to point out to everybody who has a question or doubt about this point — a particular passage that I think is very clear. And I’ll read the Hicks translation in addition to the Yonge translation. But for those who think that tranquility and calmness is the ultimate goal, realize that carrying that to its logical extreme will lead you to the conclusion that the Stoics reach.
Yonge says it this way: “And as pity is an uneasiness which arises from the misfortunes of another, so envy is an uneasiness that proceeds from the good success of another. Therefore, whoever is capable of pity is capable of envy.” Here’s the conclusion from Yonge: “But a wise man is incapable of envy and consequently incapable of pity.” If tranquility is your number one goal, you will be led to the conclusion that the Stoics reached — that if tranquility is your goal, you will be both incapable of envy but also of pity.
Hicks says it this way: “Therefore, the man who comes to feel compassion comes also to feel envy. The wise man, however, does not come to feel envy, and therefore he does not come to feel compassion either. But if the wise man were accustomed to feel distressed, he would be also accustomed to feel compassion. Therefore, distress keeps away from the wise man.”
So I don’t think it could be much more clear than this. And I think these two translations show that this is the essential point that’s being made. The Stoics — and those who advance tranquility to its logical conclusions — will tell you to get rid of all emotion in your life. All emotion in your life. And essentially adopt the model that many of us of a certain age think of as the Mr. Spock model. You will be all reason, all logic, all virtue in that sense, and you will divorce yourself from emotion. And if you can picture the life of a Mr. Spock and conclude that that’s the way you want to live your life, then you are probably made of a different type of constituency than the people who are attracted to Epicurean philosophy. Because Epicurus tells us that the wise man will feel his emotions more deeply than others. This will not be a hindrance to his wisdom, but will indeed be part of the canon of truth in which you understand the reality around you. And that’s such an important distinction between these schools that we just need to stress it over and over again.
Now, this paragraph includes some other important information about the Peripatetics and Cicero’s criticism of them and their discussion of moderation as the way to deal with all of this. That’s the kind of thing that I will postpone until next week. But Joshua, let’s talk about this paragraph in the time we have remaining today.
Joshua: Well, regarding our discussion of ataraxia, tranquility, et cetera — Cassius, you often reference a passage from Book 47 of Cassius Dio’s Roman History, which is the fifth volume in the Loeb edition of that work, in which he writes this. He says: “Now, Brutus, who had made his escape up to a well-fortified stronghold, undertook to break through in some way to his camp. But when he was unsuccessful and furthermore learned that some of his soldiers had made terms with the victors, he no longer had any hope; but despairing of safety and disdaining capture, he also took refuge in death. He first uttered aloud this sentence of Heracles, which is quoted from Euripides. He says: ‘O wretched Virtue, thou wert but a word, and yet I worshipped thee as real indeed; but now it seems thou wert but Fortune’s slave.’” And then Cassius Dio continues: “He called upon one of the bystanders to kill him. His body received burial at Antony’s hands, all but his head, which was sent to Rome. But as the ships encountered a storm during the crossing, that too was thrown into the sea. At his death, the majority of his soldiers immediately transferred their allegiance when a proclamation of amnesty was issued to them,” and so on.
And then he finishes out the book here. But that quote from Brutus facing his own death — this is what he says: “Virtue, you were but a name; you were just a word and I worshipped you as something real.” The concern with words like ataraxia for me — particularly words that are not in English — I don’t want to sound too particular about this, but when you have a word that you’ve selected, that you’ve lifted up out of an old book in a different language, and you put that word on a pedestal, it takes on a new life in many ways. And so to me, the concern would be: do you want to find yourself in the same place that Brutus found himself, looking at ataraxia — having relied on that — and then finding yourself quoting Euripides’ Heracles in a place of death: “O wretched Virtue, thou wert but a word, and yet I worshipped it as something real.”
We’ll probably have much more to say about this as we go forward. And I think I agree, Cassius, with your instinct to hold some of the rest of section 10 off until next week, because it is quite long and there’s probably a lot we need to go through more finely than we’ll be able to right now.
Cassius: Kalosyni, any thoughts today?
Kalosyni: Yes, I was thinking about how Epicurean philosophy does correspond with modern psychology’s take on emotions and their importance, because emotions are a whole continuum between joy and sorrow. And if you cut off your feelings of one, you’re basically shutting down that system, which is really a life-protective system. When you feel emotions — when you feel joy, happiness — that’s coming because you have been able to meet important needs in your life, that those emotions well up when that has happened. And then on the inverse, when certain needs are not being met, then all the negative emotions flow up, and that’s indicating that something is not being met in your life. And so it’s important for experiencing the fullness of life and joy and happiness. You can’t really have joy and happiness without the other emotions, as they’re a whole system. But what is so good about Epicurean philosophy is it does say that you can develop a full and happy life so that there’s more joy, more happiness than sorrows.
Cassius: Kalosyni, thanks for that. And before we close, I’ll add the additional comment there in relation to modern psychology — which is generally outside the scope of what we talk about — that those people who get involved in modern psychology are going to be confronted with one of the big things in psychology today: cognitive behavioral therapy, and its supposed actual relationship to Stoicism. It’s far too deep a well to go down today, but think about the implications of focusing on something like calmness as your goal, focusing on tranquility as your goal, without examining the nature of the universe, without examining whether there are supernatural gods, without examining whether there is life after death. Those are the questions that ultimately drive much decision-making in life if you’re a rational person. And so it’s going to be important to understand where some of these ideas came from so that you can decide whether they’re the way you want to go or not.
Okay, as we begin to close today, I think where I would bring us back is to ask the question: well, if these people have different ways of speaking, different terminology, different definitions of the words, and they’re using the words in such a different manner — what’s behind that? Where does that come from? How do you pick up on and understand when a word is being used in a different way? That’s where I think Epicurus reminds us that ultimately Principal Doctrine number one, Principal Doctrine number two — all of Epicurean thought is focused on: what really is the nature of the universe? What is our manner of finding knowledge, if knowledge even exists at all? And lurking behind all of these differences in viewpoint and differences in terminology, I would suggest, is this totally different view of the universe in which Epicurus is telling us that the universe is natural, that there are no supernatural forces or supernatural gods, and that this life is the only life that we have, because death is a state of nothingness to us.
That primary focus about the nature of human life is totally different between Epicurus versus whether you talk about the Stoics or the Academic Skeptics or any of the other different sects of the Greek schools who were debating whether you could determine what knowledge is from different points of view, and generally concluding that knowledge was — like Democritus said — at the bottom of a dark well, and basically knowledge is impossible to find. The kind of things that we will hear eventually in the Academica when we get to that book by Cicero. Epicurus’s orientation is drastically different. It is possible, it is necessary, and it is doable for us to learn and understand and grasp the important aspects of life, which tell us that it is natural that this is the only life that we have, and we are going to be therefore practical. We’re not going to let our speculative syllogisms run amok and take us into all sorts of directions that even Cicero is embarrassed to endorse.
We’re going to take a position on living our lives that is consistent with what is possible — with what we see and experience through our feelings, through our senses — and we’re going to do our very dead level best to live as happily as possible. So we’ll come back next week and return to section 10, maybe go into a little more detail about exactly how Cicero is criticizing the Aristotelian-Peripatetic position. It really is interesting — one of the sidelines of all this — to see how the Stoics, the Aristotelians, the Platonists disagreed among themselves, and why, I think, is extremely revealing and leads us to understand why Epicurus was rejecting so much of their positions. We’ll come back into that next week. In the meantime, as always, we invite you to drop by the forum if you have any questions or comments about this or any of our other discussions of Epicurean philosophy. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.