Episode 290 - TD20 - TipToeing Around All Disturbance Is Not Living
Date: 07/11/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4610-episode-290-td20-tiptoeing-around-all-disturbance-is-not-living/
Summary
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Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 290 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@epicureanfriends.com where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. This week we’re continuing our series going through Cicero’s, tus, and disputations from an epicurean viewpoint, which means we’re generally disagreeing with what Cicero has to say about these different ethical positions, but because Cicero provides us in many cases the epicurean statements about these things, we can use Cicero’s own text to come to a better understanding of Epicurus viewpoint. Today we’re in part three, which is denominated as addressing grief, but what it’s really addressing is a whole series of strong emotions such as anger, pity, envy, and other things that constitute as Cicero has been describing perturbations or disruptions from the calmness that we would like generally to have. Now, last week we had a very good conversation about some important implications of deciding from a strictly logical point of view that calmness or tranquility is the goal because Cicero is illustrating for us here how the stoics took that to a logical extreme, at least from their point of view, concluding that because the wise man is always going to be calm and calmness means you’re not upset by strong emotions such as anger, envy or even pity that anger, envy, pity, grief or anything else. That’s basically a strong emotion. That means as a matter of logical necessity that the wise man will not experience these strong emotions and he will do everything he can to avoid the experience of any of these strong emotions, which we made a point last week of sowing how Cicero included within that even emotions such as pity or compassion, which most of us are accustomed to thinking of as beneficial emotions in human life. Cicero himself expressed reservations about the way the stoics were reaching these conclusions, and he said that they could be better stated than the stoics were making them out to be. But nevertheless, Cicero praised the stoics for their conclusions and said that the views of men such as the stoics who are so concerned about virtue need to be given a lot of respect. That led us last week to a discussion of the epicurean concepts of ataxia, tranquility, calmness, and to a discussion that we often have that the true goal of epicurean philosophy is pleasure and it is very difficult to square, depending on your viewpoints of the words involved. Certain statements of epicurus that would seem to indicate that tranquility or absence of pain is the goal of life as opposed to pleasure. Now, we’re not going to go down the rabbit hole of explaining in detail how all that can be reconciled, but suffice it to say that Epicurus clearly does have a more expansive definition of the word pleasure, then that which includes only stimulation and excitement With a much wider viewpoint, Epicurus is able to encompass all sorts of activities and conditions under the word pleasure, which Cicero refuses to allow to be a valid approach. Today, as we proceed through the end of section 10 and into 11, 12, 13 and following sections, we’re going to see that this difference is indeed a very strong difference of opinion. We’re going to remind everybody again that Dogen, his laity says that epicure has held that the wise man is going to experience emotion more deeply than our other men, and that that is not a hindrance to his wisdom. That’s a major part of the dispute right there is that Cicero, the stoics, apparently even the aristotelians have bought into this idea that you cannot remain wise while you are experiencing a strong emotion. That appears to be the point of disagreement because Epicurus embraces strong emotions of a certain type, certainly joy and delight, and the other activities and actions and pleasures of the body, which Epicurus says without which he would not even know what the good is. So there are complicated issues here, but one way of unwinding that complication and getting to the root of the issue and deciding what really is being discussed and what the positions really are is going to be to follow the statements of Cicero and the stoics to their logical extremes to look at the examples that Cicero is going to bring out for us and see that indeed he is not simply talking about ways to lessen the impact of grief, that indeed the argument being advanced by the stoics and endorse to a certain extent by Cicero, is that what we should do, instead of finding ways to channel strong emotions in a positive direction, what we should do is instead suppress all strong emotions all together because that is disruptive of our calmness. You can’t be wise, you can’t be tranquil and calm if you ever have any feelings that are strong. Now, that may make some logical sense, but I would submit that’s also why Epicurus disparages dialectical logic as the path towards truth and instead points to nature. The faculty’s given us by nature and a reasonable interpretation and application of those as the way to go rather than dialectically and logically concluding that a wise man must be calm, a calm man cannot experience grief or compassion or pity, and so therefore we need to write out grief, compassion, or pity entirely from our lives. Okay, so last week we read section 10 in its entirety. We only got to discuss about the first half of it, and so we’ll take a few minutes to pick out a couple of points about the remainder and then move into section 11 before we start reading the full sections again. Section 10 concluded with Cicero complaining not only about the stoic position on grief, but also about the Aristotelian or peripatetic position, and he says that for our friends, the Peripatetics, notwithstanding all their aridity 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 unfortunately Cicero doesn’t expand on that, so we don’t have too much more to talk about in terms of the peripatetic position on handling grief, other than the clue that Aristotle and the Peripatetics we’re suggesting that through moderation you could achieve the best result, Cicero is not buying that moderation is the key because he says that even those evils which may be moderate are in their nature, great, but our object is to make out that the wise man is free from all evil for the body as unsound, it is ever so slightly affected, so the mind under any moderate disorder loses its soundness. So again, Cicero’s goal is the complete eradication of grief from the experience of the wise man, and the last thing he says in section 10 is, I must therefore explain the origin of the pain of grief, which 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. So where we’re going to see Cicero go next is he’s going to start talking about, well, let’s talk about the cause of grief and decide if there’s not ways that once we identify the cause, we can pluck those out and separate ourselves from those causes which lead to grief in the first place. And that leads us to the first sentence in section 11, which when Joshua is ready, he will deliver for us on behalf of Cicero.
Joshua: Yeah, we ended last week in section 10 with Cicero demarcating the differences of opinion between him and the stoics, but he does come to the point of saying that he likes where they’re going with it. He says, 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 switches to the peripatetics and is not at all satisfied with what Aristotle and his successors have to say about what Cicero calls the disorders and diseases of the soul. He says, for our friends, the peripatetics, notwithstanding all their Ian 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, and we won’t dwell too long on that except to say that Aristotle had conceived as part of the cornerstone of his ethics, this golden mean, not the middle place necessarily, but the properly tuned point between two extremes. And there is a book by a writer named Chris John, Chris Johnson called Virtuous Emotions, and I’m reading a little bit from that book where he says this describing chapter seven of the book, he says, the first aim of this chapter is to analyze the concept of grief. The second is to argue for the putative rationality of grief, and the third is to offer a moral justification of grief along broadly Aristotelian lines as an intrinsically virtuous trait of character. With regard to this third and ultimate aim, the chapter argues not only that grief plays an unappreciated positive role in our moral experiences, but fleshes out a case for what exactly that positive moral role is. More precisely, it is argued that grief is best justified as an Aristotelian dessert based emotional trait incorporating two distinct dessert motivated desires, one specifically directed at the memory of the dead person as deserving of homage the other more cosmically focusing on the general undeserving, this of good people passing away. The argument goes against the grain of most previous instrumental justifications of grief. That’s one thing that’s out there on this subject, but it’s on point in line with Aristotle’s view of the golden mean that we can apply this even to things that Cicero thinks are evil, like perturbations of the mind, for example, that it would be unseemly to go too strong or too hard in one direction with grief and destroy your life over it, but it would also be equally uncanny to pretend that you weren’t hurt at all when someone close to you had died. So that’s one view that we can make of Aristotle’s position on that subject, but Cicero is not pleased at all with that. He says, our object is to make out that the wise man is free from all evil, and if grief is an evil, then the wise man must be free from grief. So we will go now into section 11, but we are going to get up to his response to Epicurus on this question, and this has kind of been Cicero’s mode throughout his works is look at what each of the schools says, and then he delivers his own opinion, which we’ve been getting quite a lot of on this question already. But so far in the text he has broadly aligned more closely with the stoic view than with the Aristotelian view. And as Cassius read for us this morning, Cicero says, 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. And then section 11 says this, the whole cause then is in opinion, and this observation applies not to this grief alone, but to every other disorder of the mind, which are of four sorts, but consisting of many parts. For as every disorder of perturbation is a motion of the mind either devoid of reason or in despite of reason or in disobedience to reason. And as that motion is excited by an opinion of either good or evil, these four perturbations are divided equally into two parts. For two of them proceed from an opinion of good, one of which is an exalting pleasure. That is to say a joy elated beyond measure arising from an opinion of some present. Great, good. The other is a desire which may fairly be called even a lust and is an immoderate inclination after some conceived great good without any obedience to reason. Therefore, these two kinds, the exalting pleasure and the lust have their rise from an opinion of good as the other two fear and grief have from an opinion of evil for fear is an opinion of some great evil impending over us, and grief is an opinion of some great evil present, and indeed it is a freshly conceived opinion of an evil so great that to grieve at it seems right. It is of that kind that he who is uneasy at it thinks he has good reason to be so. Now, we should exert our utmost efforts to oppose these perturbations which are as it were, so many furies let loose upon us and urged on by folly if we are desirous to pass this share of life that is allotted to us with ease and satisfaction. But of the other feelings, I shall speak elsewhere, our business at present is to drive away grief if we can, for that shall be the object of our present discussion. Since you have said that it was your opinion that a wise man might be subject to grief, which I can by no means allow of for it is a frightful, miserable and detestable thing which we should fly from with our utmost efforts with all our sales and ORs as I may say.
Cassius: Okay, Joshua, thank you for reading that and we’re going to next find that Cicero is going to go into at length to describe to us exactly how frightful miserable and detestable a thing that grief is. But before we get into that in section 12, let’s talk briefly about section 11 because my first observation on this section is that it is telegraphing to us what so many of us today think about stoicism because it is implying and going in the direction that well these strong emotions, whether they be grief or pleasure are the result of opinions. And he says that it’s a freshly conceived opinion of an evil, so great and degree that it seems right and that it is of that kind that he who was uneasy at it thinks he has good reason to be so without any further description or specification of what kind of a grief he’s talking about ciro or the stoics or both are willing to classify all grief as something that’s an opinion of something that you have suffered and that you think to yourself that you’re justified at having good reason to think of it that way and that we should therefore use our utmost efforts to oppose those perturbations. Well, when I read that kind of an argument, I’m immediately drawn back to what I’ve always understood about the essence of stoicism that you in your mind are responsible for what you feel that no matter what happens to you on the outside, no matter whether the Persians come and destroy Athens and destroy all of Greek civilization or whatever, it’s up to you whether you feel bad about that or not. If you decide that it’s your opinion that well, maybe it’s good that the Persians have destroyed Athens, maybe it’s good that the Persians have killed every man, woman and child who I’m related to in Greece, well then you won’t have to be perturbed about it. You could just go along in your life towards your goal, which as Cicero says here, that you desire to pass your life with ease and satisfaction. Well, if ease and satisfaction, which in this context evokes in my mind that he’s back talking about calmness and imperturbability and so forth, if those are your goal and it doesn’t matter to you, what happens to you in your life that you will not let it upset you? Well, that is certainly a position that can be logically defended if tranquility is the goal of your life, but Epicurus does not agree that thinking that all of these terrible things are not evil is the way to address them. Epicurus has a different way of addressing them that we’ll see as we go forward. But Cicero here is continuing to lay the foundation that all of these bad things in life are not really bad unless we think to ourselves and have the opinion ourselves that they are in fact bad. Nothing is evil in this analysis other than the fact that you are giving into grief means that you’re not a wise person, you’re not virtuous, and lack of virtue is something that the stoics are happy to classify as evil, but they don’t want to classify a natural and ordinary response to horrible things happening to you as grief. They want to find a way to logically define that out of life and they’ve found a way. If you follow their definitions and believe that this kind of reasoning is correct and valid and helpful, then by all means you’ve reached the conclusion that the wise man has no experience of grief or evil ever in his life, but it doesn’t strike me as the best approach to life. And we’ll continue to see how these issues unwind as we next go to illustrations that make clear that these horrible things in life that lead a normal person to experience grief are not just some abstractions that we can think our way out of. The examples that Cicero is about to give us in section 12 are going to illustrate for us that Cicero is in fact talking about terrible things and that using logical analysis is the way to deal with them. So Joshua, whenever you’re ready, section 12.
Joshua: Let me say first of all though that I think we can almost turn Cicero’s argument on him when he says we should exert our utmost efforts to oppose these perturbations, which are as it were, so many Furies let loose upon us and urged on by folly. And he’s talking here about the feeling of grief, the feeling of what he calls disorders or diseases of the mind, these very natural emotions from my point of view. And he’s saying that these are furies let loose upon us, urged on by folly, and that the cause is in wrong opinion, wrong opinion, rooted in foolishness essentially is where he comes down to. But you could just as easily say to Cicero that his opinion that grief is something so horrible that it threatens human happiness, that that is an opinion which is rooted in folly. You could just as easily turn this around on him I think and say that if you are going to tiptoe through life afraid of ever getting close to something or getting hurt emotionally, you’re not even really living a full human life. I think that’s part of the problem here. I’m not saying that you have to become over mastered by the feeling of grief, but to say that you don’t feel anything at all. We’re talking to a guy here whose daughter I think has recently died and he’s saying, I feel no grief. The wise man feels no grief. Who in the room believes him? I dunno how you could. I think we’d have to say that the human response to this, apart from any philosophy is to engage with these emotions when they come, be gentle with yourself as you’re feeling them. And it’s true that you shouldn’t become dominated by these mental pains, but as Epicurus says, the pains we feel we make them worse by dreading them and that actually they’re not that bad when we experience them and we’re going to get through them, and that should be the focus that’s Epicurus remedy to this problem. It’s not that we should suppress it, push it down, pretend it doesn’t exist. I see I have so many problems with Cicero’s approach to this and to say as he does that people who do feel grief are urged on by folly. I think that is to me, the most insulting thing you could say to someone who has experienced deep loss. Can you imagine saying this to a grieving mother for example, that Well, you’re just a fool. You’re just a fool. If you feel any kind of negative emotion at all about this, I don’t know. I’m getting very riled up, Cassius, as you can probably tell from the tone of my voice.
Cassius: Jasper, before we move on to read section 12, you made a comment that I’d like to elaborate on as well. In many contexts, people will describe what we’re talking about right now as being human and that it’s only human to feel grief, and I think that’s correct. However, I would personally put a little bit different spin on it in these contexts because the issue of what is human is exactly the question we’re all arguing about because the stoics are saying that to be human is to be rational. What makes a human a human as opposed to another animal is this rationality and logic that we supposedly have in degrees much greater than any other animals. What I would simply focus on briefly would be that rather than continuing to argue about what it is to be human, I think the essential point is that nature has made us this way and that in looking for the proper standard of conduct, pues is always going back to nature and the faculties that nature has given us the way we are naturally as the way to analyze the problem. We’re going to continue to argue about what it is that makes someone human because Cicero and the stoics and most of these other Greek philosophers are going to want to argue that expressing and feeling these emotions is actually inhuman because if you apply their viewpoint of what it means to be human, we should be overriding these emotions through logic and reason. But at any rate, that’s just a minor point. But for purposes of ultimately where this comes down, it’s the way nature made us that we feel these things so strongly and to try to suppress these feelings. Yes, you can call it turning us inhuman and that makes a lot of sense. But ultimately I think it’s important to understand that suppressing these emotions is a rebellion against the way nature made us and an epicurean philosophy. We’re always looking back to nature and the way all living things are before they become corrupted by incorrect philosophies and religions as the source of the best standard of conduct.
Joshua: That was a great reply, Cassius and well stated that what we’re arguing about is exactly that question. What does it mean to be human? In the opening to Lucius’s poem, we see Venus, this life giver, right, the teeming breeze of the west wind that blows over the land and engenders new life, new growth, and the process as we see in Lucius’s poem, the process of how this works is emotional essentially, right? The animals respond emotionally to this life-giving wind that she blows across the land, bound over joyous meadows and taken in the drive of the urge of love to come and so on. So there’s this powerful passionate response from the living things that are there by this rejuvenating presence. And you are right to say that there are people who would look at that and say, well, of course they respond that way. They’re animals. They’re the lowest of the low among the beasts, but no human being should ever model their own lives and their own response on that. So that was very well said. I will go now into section 12 and we are going to get into a bit of poetry here, but don’t worry because Cicero will feel no emotional response from reading any of this. Section 12 says this, that descendant of Tantalus, how does he appear to you? He who sprung from plops who formerly stole hip from her father-in-law king and married her by force, he who was descended from Jupiter himself, how brokenhearted and dispirited does he seem, stand off my friends, nor come within my shade that no pollutions, your sound hearts pervade so foul a stain my body doth partake. Will you condemn yourself DSEs and deprive yourself of life on account of the greatness of another’s crime? What do you think of that son of pbis? Do you not look upon him as unworthy of his own father’s light, hollow his eyes, his body worn away, his furrowed cheeks, his frequent tears betrayed his beard neglected and his Ry hairs rough and combed bespeak, his bitter cares? Oh foolish iets. These are evils which you yourself have been the cause of and are not occasioned by any accidents with which chance has visited you and you behaved as you did even after you had been in ear to your distress and after the first swelling of the mind had subsided. Whereas grief consists as I shall show in the notion of some recent evil, but your grief, it is very plain, proceeded from the loss of your kingdom, not of your daughter, for you hated her and perhaps with reason, but you could not calmly bear to part with your kingdom. But surely it is an impudent grief which praise upon a man for not being able to command those that are free guy. It is true the tyrant of Syracuse when driven from his country taught a school at Corinth so incapable was he of living without some authority, but what could be more impudent than Tarquin who made war upon those who could not bear his tyranny and when he could not recover his kingdom by the aid of the forces of the Ians and the Latins, he said to have be taken himself to Cuma and to have died in that city of old age and grief.
Cassius: Thank you, Joshua. Cicero has been driving home that grief can in fact be extremely destructive and that these are examples of people who have visited upon themselves destruction that was beyond what they really had to go through, other than the fact that they failed to evaluate their situations and channel their emotions in the proper direction. People like Ds as a tyrant of Syracuse, Tarquin as a tyrant over Rome are driving themselves to destruction for reasons that are not necessary and that they could have handled much better by not letting this type of grief get to them. And to a certain extent, Cicero is certainly correct in these observations that would’ve been well known to people who were reading what Cicero had to say. And so as Cicero often does, he gives us interesting observations about mythology and events of the past and uses those to draw out his point, how destructive grief can be. But the point in issue is all grief is all strong emotion destructive, and how therefore should we treat the idea that all strong emotion should be eliminated from our lives? Our next section 13 is relatively short, so why don’t we go into that and that will finally introduce us to Epicurus opinions and we’ll launch us off into what will become in the remainder of the time we have today and then into next week an extremely interesting discussion of the differences between Epicurus viewpoint, not only with the stoics, but also with the cyac who are reputed to have valued pleasure in somewhat the same way that Epicurus did. But Epicurus position is different even from the Sacs in terms of how to deal with grief. So when you’re ready, Joshua 13,
Joshua: Let me just explain a little bit of the mythology here before we go forward. I know it’s going to be confusing, but Cicero starts off in 12 by talking about the descendant of Tanus. He’s talking about Thiis whose father was plops, whose father was Tanus. And Cicero’s challenge here is will you thiis condemn yourself and deprive yourself of life on account of the greatness of another’s crime? So this is what Cicero is talking about here is because of grief, because of these overmastering, these overpowering emotions that we feel they drive us to the worst evils. And he pulls several examples of this and discusses it at length. So he starts talking about Tantalus, who is the patriarch of the house of Atress Atress, who was a brother of plos, the uncle of this thiis we’re talking about here was himself the father of Nan and men who are famous for their role as leaders of the Greek army in the Trojan War as described in the Iliad. And then Nan, who sacrificed his own daughter to the gods in order to gain a fair passage to sail to Troy. When he goes home, his wife is turned against him because he murdered their daughter and then he ends up getting killed. And basically every descendant of Tantalus ends gruesomely. And we get into a similar story here with this son of pbis, actually the son of Helios ais, who was a king and the father of Madea. Madea was kind of like a witch, right? She was this mysterious sort of female figure who was associated with poisons and people greatly feared her, and she fled her father’s house with Jason, Jason and the Argonauts in that famous story. And when the King, king ais was pursuing them, she cut up someone’s body and threw the stuff behind the boat to leave a trail of blood in the water while King ais was pursuing them at sea. Madea distracted her father by killing and dismembering her own brother, absti, who was the son of ais and throwing pieces of his cadaver overboard and ais paused to gather the pieces of his son, and that’s how Jason and Madea escaped. But at every stage of what we’re talking about here, we have strong emotions, these perturbations of the mind. This is where I was talking about, and it’s driving these characters in mythology to commit the most heinous, bloody cruel crimes, which it is possible to imagine. And Cicero is using this to justify his point that there is no moderation in evil for every evil, though moderate is in its nature. Great. This is what he’s talking about. You think that grief isn’t a problem because you see it in a fairly mild form when you see mourners, at funerals, weeping and so on. But when you look at the true end, the true extreme, the true summit of depravity and crime that these emotions lead to, then you’ll understand this is what Cicero is saying. Then you’ll understand why I say that these emotions are incompatible with a mind of wisdom and philosophy. The wise man will not experience them because he knows the dangers to which these emotions lead. And then he ends that section by talking about Tarquin, the last king of Rome who was driven out of the city by the leading figures of the Roman aristocracy, including the ancestor of Marcus, Brutus, Brutus, and Cassius of Philippa fame and the assassins of Julius Caesar. So that episode is frequently on his mind, at least in the play by Julius Caesar, and here he’s talking about grief, but it’s also going to lead into what he’s going to talk about next, this problem of lust, this lust for power. So we’ll get into that here in section 13. Do you then think that it can befall a wise man to be oppressed with grief? That is to say with misery, for as all perturbation is misery, grief is the rack itself. Lust is attended with heat, exalting joy with levity, fear with meanness, but grief with something greater than these. It consumes torments, afflicts and disgraces a man. It tears him praise upon his mind and utterly destroys him. If we do not so divest ourselves of it as to throw it off completely, we cannot be free from misery. And it is clear that there must be grief where anything has the appearance of a presence soar and oppressing evil. Epicurus is of opinion that grief arises naturally from the imagination of any evil so that whoever is eyewitness of any great misfortune, if he conceives that the like may possibly befall himself becomes sad instantly from such an idea. The CIC think that grief is not engendered by every kind of evil, but only by unexpected unforeseen evil. And the circumstance is indeed of no small effect on the heightening of grief for whatsoever comes of a sudden appears more formidable. Hence, these lines are deservedly commended. And we finished section 13 with Quaran. I knew my son when first he drew his breath destined by fate to an untimely death. And when I sent him to defend the Greeks, war was his business, not your sportive freaks.
Cassius: Thank you. We’re going to have the same problem we ran into last week in terms of not having time to extend this to where we really would like to go to complete the analysis of what’s introduced here in section 13 about what Epicurus had to say. But the first comment I would make about it is that I see this as another example where Cicero is more than happy to bring in Epicurus in support of Cicero’s own position. And here Cicero is using Epicurus to confirm that grief arises naturally from the imagination of any evil. And whoever sees a great misfortune and thinks that it might befall himself, then such a person is going to become sad instantly from such an idea. Now at this moment, Cicero does not attack that, and he goes on to say that the sacs have a little bit different view because they think that if you think about and expect an evil to happen, then it doesn’t hurt you as badly. And that’s the purpose of this poetry here at the end, that if you go around life thinking about how your son from the first moment he drew his breath is destined by fate to an untimely death, then when it happens, it’s not going to hurt you so badly. So be that as it may, that’s the first distinction that Cicero has introduced for us here between Epicurus and the SRECs. And when we come back next week, we’re going to expand that further because Cicero is going to explain to us the logical implication of this difference, which is that the sacs therefore believe that you should spend a lot of your time anticipating and thinking about the bad things that are going to happen to you. But Epicurus does not think that you should do that. And in fact, Epicurus has a very different method of dealing with those griefs that actually occur to you. Of course, to some extent. We’re talking about the difference between things that will occur in the future that are bad versus things that have already occurred to you that are bad, and we’re going to find some very interesting material here in the next sections about what Epicurus tells us is the way to deal with both of them, both the expectation of future problems and the experience of problems that have already happened to us. But unfortunately, we’re going to have to put off that until next week due to our time constraints today. I think in summary, we’ve seen it hammered home by Cicero himself that he considers all strong emotion, all perturbation to be misery. While grief may be worse, grief may be the rack itself, but Cicero is perfectly happy to equate lust and exalting joy as also things that are strong emotions that can consume and torment and afflict and disgrace us, and that unless we throw them completely off, we cannot be free from misery. So I think what we’re seeing is the groundwork for a vastly different perspective on the nature of life, what is included in being a wise man, what is included in living a happy life, and that the way you analyze these questions leads to very, very different conclusions as to how to live your life and deal with the experiences that come your way. With that, I think we’re about out of time for this episode. Joshua, any closing thoughts?
Joshua: In a previous episode of going through Otus and Disputations, we address something that we’ve spoken about many times and in different contexts, and it’s this idea among the stoics that if you are one inch underwater, it’s the same as being a thousand feet underwater, that if you are not at the top of the mountain, there is no midpoint on the path to virtue. This is what we’re talking about, and Cicero himself brought this up in Tuscan Disputations. I’m seeing a little bit of this from him here. This idea that every evil though moderate is in its nature grade, that we have to be extremist about this because otherwise we open the door to allowing evil into our mind and into our philosophy. And so Cicero, like the stoics, goes to the greatest extreme of saying you either have it or you don’t. There’s no such thing as progress on this path. You have either achieved it or you are still flailing about in the darkness and drowning in an inch of water because the difference between achieving a mind free from grief, the difference between achieving a life full of virtue, the difference between achieving a life lived for virtue and its opposite is so stark and so black and white that we cannot allow any shade of anything to get in here and color what should be perfection, right? This is the goal. We’re looking for perfection. And if you haven’t attained that, then you have not attained the gold that we all are striving for in this stoic or Smithsonian philosophy. There’s a passage we quote sometimes from Francis Wright who was an 18th century reformer who grew up in the British Isles but traveled to America and she was an acquaintance of Thomas Jefferson and she wrote a book called A Few Days in Athens, and this book is a fictionalized account of a young man’s encounter with Epicurus and his gradual understanding of epicurean philosophy and his gradual dissolution of the lies that he had been told about Epicurean philosophy. Toward the end of that book, there is a great argument between Epicurus on the one side and Zeno the founder of stoicism on the other. And in that section, there’s a passage from Zeno that we sometimes quote and he says this, whatever may be your virtues, epicurus, they are, but the virtues of temperament, not of discipline and such of your followers as shall be like you in temperament, may be like you in practice, but let them have boiling passions and urgent appetites, and your doctrine shall set no offense against the torrent shall ring no alarm to the offender, tell us not that that is right, which admits of evil construction, that that is virtue which leaves an open gate vice. I said that with a prophet’s eye. I saw your future fame, but such fame as I foresee can, but Ill satisfy the ambition of a sage. Your garden shall be crowded, but they shall be disgraced. Your name shall be in every mouth, but every mouth shall be unworthy. That speaks it. Nations shall have you in honor, but here it is, so they shall be in ruin. Our degenerated country shall worship you and expire at your feet. Zeno meantime may be neglected, but he shall never be slandered. The portico may be forsaken but shall never be disgraced. Its doctrines may be discarded but shall never be misconstrued. I am not deceived by my present popularity. No school now in such reput as mine, but I know this will not last. The iron and the golden ages are run youth, then manhood are departed and the weakness of old age steals upon the world. But oh, son of Niles, in this gloomy prospect, a proud comfort is mine. I have raised the last bulwark to the fainting virtues of man and the departing glory of nations. I have done more when the virtue and glory of nation shall be dead and when in their depraved generation, some solitary souls born for better things shall see and mourn the vices around them here in the abandoned portico. Shall they find a refuge here shutting their eyes upon the world? They shall learn to be a world to themselves here steeled in fortitude shall they look down in high unruffled majesty on the slaves and the tyrants of the earth. I see a great deal of agreement between Cicero and the stoics on this point of perfection. You have either retained it or you haven’t, and if you haven’t, you are beset by evil because all evils are great in their nature, even if the present experience of it doesn’t feel great, the nature of evil is great, and unless you have attained to the perfection, the excellence, the virtue required in order to approach and respond to it, you are going to be a victim of it. And I also see in Cicero a sort of vain ambition to, as it were, raise the last bulwark to the fainting virtue of man and the departing glory of nations, right? Cicero here at the end of the Roman Republic writing these philosophical texts because he’s trying to educate a generation of civic-minded virtuous Romans, who he hopes is going to rise up and restore things and carry his torch forward. He was doomed to disappointment in that. But the motive and the ambition that drives him is very similar to what I’m reading here in Francis Wright’s book. This idea that I’m going to do this, I’m going to raise this up to keep the evil out, and even if I fail in the short term, just as Zeno says here, some people will come along and read my works, and here they shall find a refuge shutting their eyes upon the world till they learn to be a world to themselves, steeled in fortitude and in high unruffled majesty, look down on the slaves and the tyrants of the earth. I think I see broad similarities between these two opinions.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, that’s a good place to close our episode for today. And I would echo exactly what you just said. People can think that what we’re discussing here as differences between the stoics and the epicurus are mostly a matter of words, and that yes, the stoics got out of hand, took things to an extreme that they should not have taken it to. And just like Cicero, we can look at the stoics as being admirable and noble in their intentions. But no, you shouldn’t really take it to that kind of extreme. Well, there’s more to it than that because the stoics aren’t just a little off base in taking something to an extreme that they should not have gone to. The stoics are following the path that you inevitably reach when you set out with a monotheistic view of the universe in which there is a divine creator, a prime mover, a divine fire that leads everything to happen through providence so that everything that does happen is exactly according to the will of the Gods, which means that we should therefore accept our faith, reconcile ourselves to what happens to us, and simply decide that it’s our opinion that makes it bad, and we can change what’s really important by simply changing our opinions about it. It’s not just a strategic era of the stoics to carry things further than they should be carried, which is the way that Cicero tries to back off from their position and say, well, I wouldn’t say it the same way, but I do essentially agree with where they’re going both the way they are saying it, and the direction they’re going are equally wrong from the epicurean perspective, the universe does not exist with a divine creator who orders everything around and makes all happen for good for those who love the Lord and that kind of an attitude. Instead, we have a brief period of life on this earth and then it’s over. And so we have to use the time that we do have in the best way possible to us, and that means studying nature, making decisions about what the nature of the universe really is all about, and then pursuing whatever conclusions we reach to their logical conclusions. And in that sense, the stoics are not wrong. You get your premises right and you should ride those premises logically as far as they can take you. But it is important to get your premises correct in the beginning about the nature of the universe because once you get started on these roads and continue following the logic of them, it leads to disaster If you haven’t started out with the right understanding of the way things are. Okay. With that, let’s end today’s discussion. We’ll be coming back next week. In the meantime, we invite all who are interested in these ideas to come by the forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about this or anything else about Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.