Episode 293 - TD23 - Cicero Accuses Epicurus Of Evasion In Calling "Absence of Pain" A "Pleasure"
Date: 07/30/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4649-episode-293-td23-cicero-accuses-epicurus-of-evasion-in-calling-absence-of-pain-a/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 293 is a pivotal installment in the Tusculan Disputations series. After a substantial recap of sections 16 and 17, Cassius and Joshua enter section 18 — Cicero’s sharpest direct attack on Epicurus, centered on the claim that calling “absence of pain” a “pleasure” is an evasion. The episode covers three of Cicero’s claims: that Epicurus wants us to ignore the future, that Epicurus does not value prudence, and that Epicurus reduces the good to bodily pleasure alone. Cassius and Joshua rebut these through Principal Doctrine 20, Letter to Menoeceus sections 131–132, Lucretius Book III (Munro translation), and a fragment from Epicurus’s lost book Peri Telous (On the End Goal), which Cicero claims to be translating directly.
The episode also examines the case of Marcus Atilius Regulus — the Roman general who returned voluntarily to Carthaginian captivity after negotiating a truce, suffering torture there — and asks whether “happiness” is a momentary feeling or an assessment of a whole life. Cassius argues that while extreme physical pain can overwhelm mental pleasure in the moment, Epicurus’s framework of the engaged philosophical mind (drawing on Principal Doctrines 18–21) remains the correct approach to the question.
In section 18, Cicero poses a reductio ad absurdum: if Telamon is suffering grief in exile, would you offer him a sturgeon? A water organ? Perfume? Each pleasure added one by one can never cure true grief, Cicero says — only the philosophy of Plato and Socrates can do that. Cassius responds with the sorites (heap) paradox: just as no single grain makes a heap but a heap is composed of grains with no magical threshold, Epicurus holds that the good life is composed of pleasures without any supernatural criterion for when “the good” is achieved. Joshua adds a parallel from Plato’s Philebus, where Socrates debates whether pleasure admits of limits. Both speakers close planning to continue into section 18 in detail next week.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 293 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. We’re continuing, as we have been, in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations. We’re in Part Three, which addresses grief and other strong emotions. Cicero is contrasting the approach that the Cyrenaics and the Stoics and the Platonists advocated against the approach that Epicurus advocates. Cicero analyzes Epicurus’s discussion of absence of pain, which is a subject of continuing interest because of the controversies that arise about how to interpret it, in section 18.
Cicero was going to say that absence of pain does not mean pleasure — and that is a contention that we’re going to have to examine very closely to see if we agree with that or not. This topic originated with the discussion of to what extent we should spend our time thinking about adversities, pains, grief in the future. The Cyrenaics in particular, and then as endorsed by Cicero here and the Stoics, think that it is important to spend a lot of time to think about death, destruction, disease, the bad things that can happen in life, and that thinking about them ahead of time prepares us for when they actually do happen. Now, we’ve examined already that there’s a significant difference between that approach and Epicurus’s, because Cicero tells us that Epicurus specifically advised that we not obsess over bad things that could happen — because that just adds to our grief to obsess over them ahead of time, when in many cases they may not actually happen.
So we saddle ourselves with additional pain and grief, from Epicurus’s point of view, if we unnecessarily and inappropriately think about these bad things happening in the future. Now, we spent a lot of time also emphasizing that Epicurus is absolutely advising that we do plan ahead, that we do use reason and experience to anticipate and prevent — if possible — bad things from happening to us and be ready to deal with them when they occur. But that does not mean that we keep them at the forefront of our minds all the time, as the Cyrenaics and Stoics were apparently suggesting you do as a way of training yourself to deal with the suffering and adversity of life. Epicurus is telling us to prepare for those things rationally but not get obsessed over them.
In section 16, Cicero puts a gloss over the Stoic-Cyrenaic position by saying that when we are thinking about grief ahead of time, we’re not actually suffering grief — we are participating in the best form of life, which is to be a philosopher. Cicero says that while the wise man is considering the state of human nature and the suffering that goes along with it, he is performing the special duties of philosophy. In that context, he attacks Epicurus and says that what Epicurus is really doing is trying to get you to throw a mist over your eyes and simply look away from these bad things — as if by turning away from them you could forget them. And Cicero says: that’s impossible to do, it’s ridiculous, and it’s not even a rational thing to try because it doesn’t work.
Having said that, Cicero says: well, Epicurus, if you were telling me to look away from suffering so that I could focus my attention on what is really good in life, meaning the virtues, then that might make some sense, according to Cicero. By thinking about virtue, you could erase these bad things from your mind if your mind is strong enough to do that. But Cicero criticizes the whole idea by saying that that’s not what Epicurus is telling us to do. Epicurus is not saying, take your mind off suffering and put it on virtue. Epicurus is telling us to take your mind off suffering and put it on ice cream and cake — continuing the accusation that Epicurus is always simply focused on physical stimulation, and that Epicurus is not thinking about mental pleasures, mental appreciation, satisfaction, all of the higher mental activities and literature and all sorts of other aspects of life that Epicurus does in fact include within pleasure, but that Cicero refuses to admit that he does.
In section 17, Cicero moved beyond the Stoics and the Cyrenaics and actually cited the people whom Cicero seems to appreciate the most: Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato. And he starts out section 17 by saying: if those three people asked someone why are you dejected, those people — forget the Cyrenaics and the Stoics for the moment — those people, the greatest of philosophers, would tell us that there is great power in the virtues, and to use the power of the virtues to prevent ourselves from drooping and wilting under the pain of adversity. Cicero says: what is worse or baser than an effeminate man? The virtues will not allow you to act in that manner, according to Cicero — not the least of which is prudence, which Cicero says is particularly distinct in the way that the great men, Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato treated it versus the way that Epicurus treated it.
And in that connection last week, Joshua brought up a lot of good information showing that Cicero is again misrepresenting Epicurus’s position, because Epicurus places tremendous emphasis on prudence. But the point always comes back to this: the reason Epicurus places emphasis on prudence and the other virtues is not for the virtues themselves — not simply “be prudent in order to be prudent” — but be prudent because it leads to a life of happiness, which Epicurus identifies as a life of pleasure. So the reason prudence is important is not just for itself but for the benefits that prudence brings.
Once again, in that context, Cicero goes back to the argument that he brings up the most, which is: “And you, Epicurus, you ask me to take my mind off my misfortunes by bringing my thoughts over to pleasure — and, Cicero says, what pleasures? Pleasures of the body? Or those that are imagined or recollected on account of the body?” Cicero says: “Do I explain your opinion rightly? For your disciples say that I don’t understand what Epicurus means.”
Now that sets us up for today. Cicero is going to do us a favor and quote — or at least paraphrase — some major selections from what Epicurus has to say himself. Cicero is going to make it look like Epicurus is focusing on sex, drugs, and rock and roll — that that’s all Epicurus cares about. But as we go through these details, I think it will be directly obvious to us how Cicero is misrepresenting this, and how by putting a full definition on the type of pleasure that Epicurus is advocating, we can understand why Epicurus took the position he did and why the position that Epicurus takes is not only correct, but gives us a firmer position from which we can advocate for enlisting the virtues in the goal of living a better life. It makes no sense whatsoever to say, “I want to be virtuous so that I can be virtuous.” What is the benefit and the reward and the goal of being virtuous? And Epicurus explains to us that that goal is to live a life of happiness through pleasure and thereby live a better life.
Epicurus is going to explain from start to finish — from physics to ethics — how and why to live the best life possible. He’s not going to be like Aristotle. He’s not going to say: live a virtuous life by looking at the best men of Athens and emulate them, do what they do. He’s not going to avoid the question of why should I wish to live like the best men of Athens? He’s not going to rest on: well, popular opinion says that this is the best way to live. Epicurus says: popular opinion can be right, but it can be wrong, and you have to go back to nature for the foundation of why you do anything. In nature there is no supernatural god. There is no absolute form that everybody needs to conform to. In nature there is only pleasure and pain, and that is where we’re going to look for the way we live our lives.
Joshua: Cassius, I think there are three claims of Cicero that we need to touch upon again, and one of them especially is going to set us up for this episode and what we’re going to talk about today. Those three claims are: Epicurus wants us to bury our heads in the sand and ignore the potential pains and troubles and pitfalls that the future will bring; the second claim is that Epicurus does not value prudence; and the third claim is that Epicurus is only really interested in the pleasures of the body. I touched on the first two last week, but we’ll just go back to the text and see what we can pull out here that will give us a quick response to those points, and then we’ll move on I think to section 18 and this problem of pleasure, absence of pain, the pleasures of the body versus those of the mind, and everything else Cicero is going to get into there.
So let’s start with Principal Doctrine 20, in which Epicurus says this: “The flesh perceives the limits of pleasure as unlimited and unlimited time is required to supply it, but the mind, having attained a reasoned understanding of the ultimate good of the flesh and its limits, and having dissipated the fears concerning the time to come” — that’s the crucial phrase there: having dissipated the fears about future events — “the mind, having done that, supplies us with the complete life, and we have no further need of infinite time; but neither does the mind shun pleasure, nor when circumstances begin to bring about the departure from life, does it approach its end as though it fell short in any way of the best life.”
Epicurus is not advising us to bury our heads in the sand and to ignore the problems that we’re going to face in the future. When he talks about dissipating the fears concerning the future, we do that through the established ways which are recognized: celestial events are not caused by the will of the gods in an effort to cause pain and trouble to humans. That’s a whole field of potential future problems that Epicurus just takes out of the equation — right? That’s not happening; the gods don’t care, they’re not going to intervene, they don’t want to hurt you, so you don’t need to worry about it because you have a proper understanding. And it’s like that with most other future problems as well. We don’t fear death even though we know that death is inevitable, because there is no afterlife and there’s no pain or punishment — just as there’s no pleasure or reward beyond the grave. Death is the end, and because it’s the end, there’s nothing really to fear about it, because when you die — when you stop existing — you aren’t there to feel anything about anything. So there’s no regret when you’re dead, there’s no pain when you’re dead, and for those reasons death is not to be feared. And so here we have another huge fear about something that’s going to happen in the future to all of us, and Epicurus takes it off the table. He says: actually, there’s nothing to fear in it at all.
This is his attitude toward the problems that come to us from the future. And he does give other advice as well when he talks about securing yourselves from the dangers and the problems presented by other men, and cultivating friendship as a kind of safety net — something that you can rely on even when things do happen in the future that cause you problems. So Cicero, I think, is completely wrong in his view that Epicurus wants to bury his head in the sand and ignore the future.
On the subject of prudence, as well as this argument of Cicero’s that Epicurus is only interested in the pleasures of the body, we go to the Letter to Menoeceus at about section 131: “To grow accustomed, therefore, to simple and not luxurious diet gives us health to the full and makes a man alert for the needful employments of life” — Epicurus, what do you need to be alert for if you’re just going to ignore the future? I might ask, but that’s for another day — “and when after long intervals we approach luxuries, disposes us better towards them and fits us to be fearless of fortune.” There it is again: fearless of fortune, not because we ignore it but because we prepare for it. “When therefore we maintain that pleasure is the end, we do not mean the pleasures of the profligate and those that consist in sensuality, as is supposed by some who are either ignorant or disagree with us or do not understand, but freedom from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind.” It’s the body and the mind together, and they’re both essential in this project. And he bounces off of that immediately into this discussion of prudence. He says: “Of all this, the beginning and the greatest good is prudence. Therefore prudence is a more precious thing even than philosophy, for from prudence are sprung all the other virtues, and it teaches us that it is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently and honorably and justly, nor again to live a life of prudence, honor, and justice without living pleasantly, for the virtues are by nature bound up with the pleasant life and the pleasant life is inseparable from them.”
There is a kind of irony here with Cicero, because when we were going through On Ends he tells the story about Marcus Regulus in book two of De Finibus. Marcus Regulus was a Roman general who was captured by the Carthaginians, convinced his captors to let him go back to Rome to negotiate a truce or a peace, and he said, “I’ll go do that and once I have secured that, I will return to captivity” — he came back to Carthage and submitted to captivity, and he was as good as his word. He went through with it. And Cicero makes a comment in that text — which I don’t have in front of me, but we’re reading this, Cassius, and you probably remember this — we’re reading this and it’s like: this is what we’ve been trying to say to you Cicero for two books. And he just doesn’t want to get it. It’s not that he doesn’t know that this stuff is out there, because he makes the same arguments himself. He just doesn’t want to have to take Epicurus seriously, I think, is part of the problem.
And after this discussion of prudence in the Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus goes right into this — a sort of summary of his system of ethics. He says: “For indeed, who think you is a better man than he who holds reverent opinions concerning the gods” — so there’s the god issue; the gods do not intervene, they’re not going to punish you after you die and they’re not going to cause you pain or trouble while you’re alive — “who is at all times free from fear of death, and has reasoned out the end ordained by nature? He understands that the limit of good things is easy to fulfill and easy to attain, whereas the course of ills is either short in time or slight in pain. He laughs at destiny, or fate, whom some have introduced as the mistress of all things. He thinks that with us lies the chief power in determining events, some of which happen by necessity and some by chance and some are within our control; for while necessity cannot be called to account, he sees that chance is inconstant, but that which is in our control is subject to no master, and to it are naturally attached praise and blame.”
All over this text we see Epicurus concerned about things that are happening in the future that are going to cause us problems and his advice on what we should do about that. We see him draping prudence as a virtue with plaudits, and we see him repeatedly identifying that pleasures of the mind and of the body — and of both together — are important in all of this that we’ve been talking about here.
And in Lucretius we have more on the same lines. This is the Munro translation, Book Three, line 1076: “Once more, what evil lust of life is this which constrains us with such force to be so mightily troubled in doubts and dangers? A sure term of life is fixed for mortals and death cannot be shunned, but we must meet it. Moreover, we are ever engaged, ever involved in the same pursuits, and no new pleasure is struck out by living on; but whilst what we crave is wanting, it seems to transcend all the rest; then when it has been gotten, we crave something else, and ever does the same thirst of life possess us as we gape for it open-mouthed, quite doubtful what fortune the future will carry with it or what chance will bring us or what end is at hand, and not by prolonging life do we take one tittle from the time passed in death, nor can we fret anything away whereby we may happily be a less long time in the condition of the dead.”
This is Lucretius in his argument from symmetry, which just reinforces the idea that death is nothing to us — right? — because for an eternity you didn’t exist before you were born, and for an eternity after your death you will no longer exist; and if the former state didn’t bother you at all — and it couldn’t have — how could the latter state bother you, when it’s essentially the same state?
So with those points in mind, I think that sets us up for section 18 in the text today and onto further objections that Cicero is going to present here: that absence of pain is not pleasure, that there is a third neutral state, and that Epicurus is wrong about this — in Cicero’s eyes — and that Epicurus is only really interested again in the pleasures of the body.
I should mention before we start, though, there is one text which exists only in fragmentary form. This is a fragment from a lost book by Epicurus called Peri Telous — in Greek: “On the End” or “On the End Goal.” And in that fragment he says — and I’ll paraphrase slightly — “I do not even know what I should consider the good to be if I omit the pleasures of food, if I omit the pleasures of sex, if I omit the pleasures of music and dance and so on.” So again, I do want to reiterate: what Cicero is saying, that only bodily pleasure matters, is not what Epicurus is saying at all. Pleasure is pleasure, whether it’s pleasure of the mind or of the body, and they’re both important. And all pleasures are good by definition for Epicurus, because pleasure is the good. Cicero says that the good is that by which we measure all other things, but we measure the good itself by nothing — and for Epicurus, pleasure is the good; pleasure is that by which we measure all things, and we measure pleasure by nothing because it is the standard. So that’s true whether it’s pleasure of the mind or pleasure of the body, and that is the direction we’re going in section 18 today.
Cassius: Joshua, before we get into section 18, let me emphasize a couple of things that you just said. It was very good to quote Principal Doctrine 20, because where we’re going — as you’ve just said — is that Cicero is attempting to box Epicurus in on what pleasure means. And it’s a constant issue for us, because of the fragmentary nature of the materials that have been preserved from Epicurus, that we don’t have as many direct clear statements about pleasure from Epicurus as we would like to have. It is definitely possible and relatively easy to reconstruct what he’s talking about, just as you were doing, based on the material that does survive. But it’s frustrating to a lot of people that Principal Doctrine number one is not a full statement and definition of what pleasure is all about.
What you’ve done by quoting Principal Doctrine 20 though is to cite one of the many examples where this is discussed, if you’ll just read the material closely. Because in Principal Doctrine 20, you focused on the importance of dissipating the fears of things in the future — such as the fears of punishment after death or the wrath of the supernatural gods. But for those people who will spend the time to read Principal Doctrines 18, 19, and 20 together, you can see that Epicurus is not talking just about the pleasures of the flesh. In Principal Doctrine 18, Epicurus says: “The limit as regards pleasure in the mind is begotten by the reasoned understanding of these very pleasures and the emotions akin to them.” That’s an example of how the reasoning mind produces pleasures on its own.
I would call attention to the beginning of Lucretius’s Book Two, where he says it is sweet to see disasters happening at a distance and to know that you are immune from them. There’s a direct analogy here: if your mind has a grasp of a true philosophy such as Epicurus is talking about, you can have confidence that you yourself are not going to be exposed to these pains and griefs that other people are exposed to who do not follow a correct philosophy. But it’s not like falling out of the back of the turnip truck. You have to use your mind to understand these things.
As it says in Principal Doctrine 19: “Infinite time contains no greater pleasure than limited time, if one measures by reason the limits of pleasure.” Your mind has to be actively engaged in understanding these things to see the nature of pleasure and how continuing to live indefinitely is not going to produce a greater pleasure. And then in Principal Doctrine 20, as you quoted: “the mind, having attained a reasoned understanding of the ultimate good of the flesh and its limits, and having dissipated the fears concerning the time to come, supplies us with the complete life.” So it’s an engaged mind that is necessary to understand how pleasure is not simply bodily pleasure, but how it derives from a proper philosophical approach to life.
And in Principal Doctrine 21: “He who has learned the limits of life knows that that which removes the pain due to want and makes the whole of life complete is easy to obtain.” You have to learn the limits of life. It is over and over emphasized by Epicurus that the active mind is necessary to understand how pleasure is truly to be calculated — that it’s not simply a bodily function. But that’s where we are with Cicero at the end of section 17. He’s quoting Zeno of Sidon and talking about the fact that “I don’t know what you mean, but Zeno himself is talking about that he alone is happy who can enjoy present pleasure.” And the focus of all of this: what is present pleasure? What does pleasure really mean? Is it as Zeno is saying — that the happy man will have more of what is sweet than is bitter, and that whosoever reflects on these things is happy, being satisfied with the good things in life accompanied by absence of fear about death and of the gods? Or what?
Joshua: I did find that quote about Marcus Regulus from Cicero’s book two of De Finibus. I think it reinforces the same kind of point that we’ve been making. Let me read that quickly. In book two of De Finibus, Cicero is giving his prolonged response to Torquatus’s presentation of Epicurean philosophy, and Cicero says this: “There was a man of Lanuvium called Lucius Thorius Balbus. He lived in such a way that no pleasure could be imagined so exquisite that he had not a superfluity of it. He was greedy of pleasure, a critical judge of every species of it, and very rich.” And he goes on to say that Thorius removed all superstition from his life and so on. And then Cicero says this — speaking now directly to Torquatus: “No, you Torquatus. You call this man happy. Your principles compel you to do so. But as for me, I will not indeed venture to name the man whom I prefer to him; virtue herself shall speak for me, and she will not hesitate to rank Marcus Regulus before this happy man of yours — for virtue shouts loudly that this man, when of his own accord, under no compulsion except that of the pledge which he had given to the enemy, he had returned to Carthage, was at the very moment when he was being tortured with sleeplessness and hunger more happy than Thorius Balbus while drinking on a bed of roses. Regulus had the conduct of great wars; he had been twice consul; he had had a triumph; and yet he did not think those previous exploits of his so great or so glorious as that last misfortune, which he incurred because of his own good faith and constancy — a misfortune which appears pitiable to us who hear of it, but was actually pleasant to him who endured it — for men are happy not because of hilarity or lasciviousness or laughter or jesting, the companion of levity, but often even through sorrow endured with firmness and constancy.”
And I think, as we said at the time we went through this text several years ago now — it feels like — that Cicero is making Epicurus’s point for him when he says that Marcus Regulus could feel pleasure even in his most dire moments. This is what the end of Lucretius’s poem is about — feeling pleasure, reaching out for pleasure even in the darkest of times, and how this philosophy is going to get you through those times. And Cicero, by saying that Marcus Regulus, even when he was being tortured, even when he was in an enemy prison that he had walked voluntarily into after having left — says that this experience was actually pleasant to him while he endured it. So again, just to reiterate that point one more time: Cicero knows that the argument can be made, that these responses exist in the text, and that he could make them himself — and we know that because he wrote the Torquatus narrative in book one of De Finibus. So when we talk about pleasure as we’re about to do, we are talking about pleasure in all of its aspects — mental and bodily, the pleasures of the senses, and the pleasure of absence of pain and freedom from disturbance in the mind. It’s all pleasure. It’s all the good.
Cassius: Joshua, before we go into section 18, I really do like your example of going back to Marcus Regulus. So let’s make this absolutely clear, and let me ask you this question. We don’t know a lot about the life of Marcus Regulus, but let’s compare the life of Regulus and the life of Epicurus from an Epicurean perspective. Would you say that on the last day of Epicurus’s life and on the last day of Marcus Regulus’s life, would it be appropriate to call them happy?
Joshua: I think so, yeah. I mean, Epicurus certainly says in the Letter to Idomeneus that he was happy, and that the pain that he was experiencing from kidney stones or strangury or dysentery or whatever it was — that even though the pain was so strong that nothing could be added to it, he was able to set over and against all that pain the pleasure of the remembrance of his friends, particularly the friend he’s writing to, Idomeneus, in that moment — that the pleasure that he’s experiencing, even though his body is wracked with pain, that the wise man always has more reasons, as you quote often Cassius, for joy than for vexation. I think that’s the answer. Yes, I think they were happy.
Cassius: Okay. You’ve talked mostly about Epicurus. What about Marcus Regulus himself? How would you analyze his situation?
Joshua: I don’t know much about him, but I would analyze it mostly along the same lines. If Cicero says that he’s feeling pleasure in doing these things — virtue, which is what Marcus Regulus and Cicero are all about — if virtue truly is the pedestal upon which pleasure stands, then that experience — that a life dedicated to virtue can be a life of pleasure — and dying in that way for virtue, for your country, as he was doing: I think you can be happy.
Cassius: Let me ask you this: is happiness, in the sense we’re talking about it right now, a feeling of the moment, or is happiness an assessment of someone’s life in general that transcends the moment but includes an assessment of a much longer-term view of someone’s life?
Joshua: Well, that’s a very difficult question. I think it was Aristotle that Cicero quotes as saying that you can’t judge whether someone has had a happy life until they’ve died — right? You have to have the whole experience of their life in order to judge whether it was happy. But I’m just looking at their last day on earth — that’s the question. We’ve talked about multiple viewpoints of this from the ancient world. Again, this viewpoint that maybe the first 99.9% of your life was happy, but if your last day wasn’t happy, your life wasn’t happy or something — you have to have the whole life to judge a person’s happiness. I tend to resist that view. I don’t know. I’m curious though what your answer is to that.
Cassius: Yeah, I think this is an important question because Cicero uses this argument against Epicurus and tries to ridicule Epicurus’s position that the wise man in the bull of Phalaris is still happy. There are several ways to approach the question, because it is intuitively questionable to look at the last ten minutes of Marcus Regulus’s life, or maybe even the last ten minutes of Epicurus’s life when his bodily pain is at the highest — because some people are just intuitively going to conclude that if you’re under immense, urgent, extreme physical pain, your mind can hardly even be functioning; it’s going to be so overwhelmingly painful for you bodily. So I do think it’s important for us to distinguish between the pleasures and pains of a particular moment versus an evaluation of a longer-term period.
For those of us who think that Epicurus probably did hasten his own death on his last day because of his immense physical pain and his assessment that it wasn’t going to get any better, I think we would probably come to the conclusion that he justified his death by in fact accepting that the physical pain he was suffering did overwhelm and did make unenjoyable the mental pleasures of his recollection of his conversations with his friends — which is what he cites as making him happy on his last day. Likewise, Marcus Regulus — presumably when he’s being physically tortured, at some point his mind would have left him under the influence of the physical pain.
So I do think that Cicero has a lawyer-like argument that if you take this to an extreme, most people are going to conclude that mental pleasures cannot make this type of physical pain go away. And so the assessment that Epicurus was happy during his last moments, or that Regulus was happy during his last moments, is more of a reflection of what we were talking about earlier from Principal Doctrines 18, 19, and 20 — with the mind having a reasoned understanding of things such as allows us to act appropriately under any circumstance. And there will be circumstances in life when physical pains overwhelm mental pleasures. As Epicurus says in Principal Doctrine number four: “Pain does not last continuously in the flesh, but acutest pain is only there for a very short time.” And as we know from the Letter to Menoeceus, death is an escape from the worst pains in life for which there is no other remedy — death allows us to know that there is no fear of eternal punishment, because consciousness simply does not continue to exist indefinitely.
So this is a difficult question that we’ll no doubt want to come back to. But just as with the word “pleasure” itself — pleasure is a feeling which we understand because our senses tell us that snow is white and honey is sweet — pleasure is also a concept that can be discussed in words, and depending on the situation it’s appropriate to view pleasure from either perspective. I would say the same thing about happiness. It is possible to say that you feel happy at a particular moment; it’s also possible and legitimate to look at a person’s life and say that they have lived a happy life. And when you look at it that way — when you say that a person has lived a happy life — then whether you’re an Epicurus or a Marcus Regulus, it’s appropriate to summarize the overall effect of this accumulation of time of pleasures and pains and judge whether that life has been well spent or not.
Joshua: Right. And we’ve already talked about the case of one Stoic who irritated Cleanthes by saying — in contrast to Zeno of Citium’s view, the founder of Stoicism — that pain isn’t evil, because “I, Dionysius of Heraclea, have spent so much time studying philosophy. I have applied so much time to philosophy, and yet I’m unable to bear pain. That itself is a sufficient proof that pain is an evil.” We’ve already talked about one case just here in the Tusculan Disputations of someone saying that it didn’t matter how much time he put into philosophy — even the sternest and most strict and rigid philosophy like Stoicism — it didn’t help; he still failed in maintaining equanimity in the face of pain. And at that moment, Cleanthes struck his foot on the ground and said: “Zeno, hear us thou this below.”
Every time we talk about torture and such horrible experiences, I always want to make sure to say this: I am not claiming that I would be happy or lighthearted in the face of torture. I have no doubt that I would collapse under the weight of that. So I don’t want anyone to go away from this thinking that I would bear that well. I don’t know that I would — you don’t know until you’ve been tested.
Cassius: Josh, well that’s exactly right, and I’m sure that Epicurus would say the same thing that you just said. That’s why Diogenes Laertius records that the wise man will cry out under torture, according to Epicurus. Epicurus is not setting up some kind of superhuman test like the Stoics are attempting to do, or even the Cyrenaics to some degree. And it is very much like what you just quoted — I believe it’s Dionysius the Renegade, so named because he left Stoicism over this very point. He knew that no matter how much time he had spent preparing and thinking about virtue and the goals of the Stoics, that in the end when confronted by extreme pain, virtue doesn’t make that pain go away. Now Epicurus is not saying that pleasure makes that pain go away either, but you’re in the same situation of analyzing the question: is life worthwhile even though pains do occur? And Epicurus is telling you: don’t use these false analogies and false ideals of virtue as being the remedy for pain. Just look at it realistically and realize that life has both pains and pleasures, and it is the pleasures that make life worthwhile. It is not your dreaming up some ideal system of virtue that makes life worthwhile. It is what nature gave you through pleasure that makes life worthwhile.
Now, that’s a very compelling argument. But you’ve got Cicero being the lawyer who thinks that he’s got to save his society from this decadent viewpoint — and so he’s going to twist and distort this position to make it look like Epicurus is the one who’s unreasonable and ridiculous as to what pleasure means. And the way to do that from Cicero’s point of view is to reduce pleasure down simply to eating, drinking, having sex, sleeping — things that are bodily and that are easy to ridicule as something that anyone can do. If there’s anything about the Romans and the Greeks and the way they were approaching philosophy, they wanted to live the best life possible to them — and a life of sleeping, eating, drinking, and repeat, over and over and over, without doing anything more than a cat or a dog does instinctively, repels them as something that they can do better than that. So Cicero ridicules Epicurus by saying: you’re trying to get these people to live a life of animals. I, Cicero, am trying to point to a higher way of living — and the reason I, Cicero, am right and Epicurus is wrong is because all you do, Epicurus, is repeatedly talk about the pleasures of the body. And I am not just a body; I am a mind as well, and I, Cicero, listening to Plato, Pythagoras, Socrates, and the Stoics, know that the way to the best life is through the mind. Want to say more, or are you ready for section 18?
Joshua: I’m ready for section 18, except we do have three Greek names in section 18 and I just want to go over those quickly. So we have Thyestes and Atreus — we’ve already talked about them in a previous section. They are descendants of Tantalus and members of the house of Atreus, this cursed lineage in Greek mythology, and pretty much everybody as part of that family ends up in horrible situations. The third name we have is Telamon. Telamon is the brother of Peleus. Peleus is the father of Achilles, and Telamon himself is the father of Ajax the Great. There are two Ajaxes in the Trojan War — this is the big one, sometimes known as Telamonian Ajax because of his father. Okay, in section 18, Cicero starts this way:
“You have here a representation of a happy life according to Epicurus in the words of Zeno of Sidon, who was scholarch at the Garden when Cicero went to study there, so that there is no room for contradiction in any point. What then can the proposing and thinking of such a life make the grief of Thyestes or Atreus less? Or the grief of Telamon, who is driven from his country to penury and banishment, in wonder at whom men exclaimed: ‘Thus — is this the man surpassing glory raised? Is this that Telamon, so highly praised by wondering Greece, at whose sight like the sun all others with diminished luster shone?’
Now should anyone, as the same author says, find his spirits sunk with the loss of his fortune, he must apply to those grave philosophers of antiquity for relief, and not to these voluptuaries. For what great abundance of good do they promise? Suppose that we allow that to be without pain is the chief good — yet that is not called pleasure. But it is not necessary at present to go through the whole. The question is, to what point are we to advance in order to abate our grief? Grant that to be in pain is the greatest evil — whosoever then has proceeded so far as not to be in any pain, is he therefore in immediate possession of the greatest good? Why, Epicurus? Do we use any evasions, and not allow in our own words the same feeling to be pleasure, which you are used to boast of with such assurance? Are these your words or not? This is what you say in that book which contains all the doctrine of your school. For I will perform on this occasion the office of a translator, lest anyone should imagine that I am inventing anything. Thus you speak: ‘Nor can I form any notion of the chief good abstracted from those pleasures which are perceived by taste, or from what depends on hearing music, or abstracted from ideas raised by external objects visible to the eye, or by agreeable motions, or from those other pleasures which are perceived by the whole man by means of any of his senses; nor can it possibly be said that the pleasures of the mind are excited only by what is good, for I have perceived men’s minds to be pleased with the hopes of enjoying those things which I mentioned above and with the idea that it should enjoy them without any interruption from pain’ — from Epicurus.”
And Cicero picks up again: “And these are his exact words, so that anyone may understand what were the pleasures with which Epicurus was acquainted. Then he speaks thus a little lower down: ‘I have often inquired of those who have been called wise men, what would be the remaining good if they should exclude from consideration all these pleasures — unless they meant to give us nothing but words, I could never learn anything from them; and unless they choose that all virtue and wisdom should vanish and come to nothing, they must say with me that the only road to happiness lies through those pleasures which I mentioned above’ — from Epicurus. What follows is much the same, and his whole book on the chief good everywhere abounds with the same opinions.
Will you then invite Telamon to this kind of life to ease his grief? And should you observe any one of your friends under affliction, would you rather prescribe him a sturgeon for the pleasure of the table than a treatise of Socrates? Or advise him to listen to the music of a water organ rather than to Plato? Or lay before him the beauty and variety of some garden, put a nosegay to his nose, burn perfumes before him, and bid him crown himself with a garland of roses and woodbines? Should you add one thing more, you would certainly wipe out all his grief.”
Cassius: Okay, Joshua, this one’s going to consume us for the rest of the day, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it consumes our next episode as well — because here is the direct, clear, central attack on Epicurean philosophy, and how one deals with this attack is going to say as much about how one interprets Epicurus than anything else could. We’re constantly coming back to this question: what does pleasure mean? What does absence of pain mean, and how do they relate to each other?
When Epicurus talks about absence of pain, is that something other than pleasure? Is it something entirely new — so that once we eliminate pain from our lives, we suddenly have a flash of transcendence where we have moved into some new state that’s not the pleasures of the body or the pleasures of the mind, but something entirely different and superior? Because that’s where Cicero is trying to pin Epicurus down: you don’t really claim pleasure to be your greatest good — you claim that absence of pain is really your goal in life. With Cicero characterizing this as an evasion: “Why are you evading the real meaning of pleasure, Epicurus? Because you go on and on and on in your book about the chief good saying that the pleasures you’re talking about include those of the body, include those of motion and music and of the eyes and of eating and all these other things that everybody else understands to be pleasure. You admit, Epicurus, that this is what you mean by pleasure. Why do you then evade and say that the goal is absence of pain?”
The conclusion that Cicero is trying to bring his listeners to is that Epicurus is unwilling to embrace fully the meaning of pleasure, and that by cloaking it with the term “absence of pain,” he makes his philosophy much more respectable and he’s come up with something that people can really adopt. But Cicero is saying: “You are evading, Epicurus. Just be direct and say that bodily pleasure is the goal of life, and I’ll at least have more respect for you for being honest.” But what Epicurus is really doing, Cicero says, is being ridiculous — because people who face true grief in life, like Telamon and the other people that Cicero has mentioned, you cannot fix their grief by giving them a sardine or caviar or telling them to listen to music. The true griefs in life have to be addressed by the philosophy of Plato, the philosophy of Socrates, the philosophy of Pythagoras — who are going to tell you how the universe really is, and are going to call you to the truth, as opposed to trying to evade the truth through bodily pleasure. So let’s pick this apart in section 18 for the remainder of the time we have today. Where would you like to start?
Joshua: Well, the first thing I did was go to the very end there where he says: “Will you then invite Telamon to this kind of life to ease his grief? And should you observe any one of your friends under affliction, would you rather prescribe him a sturgeon for the pleasure of the table than a treatise of Socrates for the health of his soul?” — I think is what Cicero was saying there — “or lay before him the beauty and variety of some garden?” I was wondering if that was a dig at Epicureanism and the Garden, but the word in Latin is flores rather than hortus, so I don’t think the word is actually “garden.” He’s saying, will you show them flowers? Really, the most interesting thing in this paragraph for me is that I mentioned earlier in the episode this lost book by Epicurus called Peri Telous — in Greek, “On the End Goal” — and Cicero says here in this text that he is translating directly from this book. He says: “What follows is much the same, and his whole book on the chief good everywhere abounds with the same opinions.” So he has the Greek text of this most coveted — for me — of Epicurean texts, maybe alongside Epicurus’s book on the canon, “the book that fell from heaven.” He has this text in front of him. I’m very envious of that — I thought that as I was reading it. He’s got the Greek text in front of him, he’s sorting all this stuff out at his desk, and he’s translating line by line — or so he claims — and we don’t really have the ability to test this because we don’t have that book. He claims he’s translating from the Greek, from Epicurus’s own words. That is such an interesting moment in the text for me — completely secondary, of course, to the main point, which is: “No, Epicurus, absence of pain is not called pleasure. No, Epicurus, absence of pain is not the chief good.” Cicero is objecting to every single position that Epicurus is taking about pleasure, pain, what constitutes the chief good, the relationship between pleasure and virtue — and we’ve talked about most of it already in setting up this paragraph. But he is hitting Epicurus really hard here. As you quoted, Epicurus is evading — and in any case, Epicurus: why would you, if your friend came to you saddened with grief, why would you present pleasure as if that were going to solve their problem? When what they really need, in Cicero’s view, is a lecture on how to be a real man — a virtuous, upstanding Roman citizen — that’s going to get them through their grief. And pleasure, drowning, wallowing in pleasure is only ever going to make things worse for Cicero.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, many aspects of this have to be commented on as we transition from this week to next week’s discussion. One thing I would mention is something that first came to my attention through the Norman DeWitt book — the argument that is apparently known as the sorites, or heap issue. And I think we see examples of it here in this paragraph: one being used by Epicurus, and one being used by Cicero against Epicurus. The heap issue being the question of: if you have a heap of sand and you remove grain by grain each particular grain of sand, at what point does what you’re working with cease being a heap? Is there a particular grain? Do you get down to three or four grains, and by the removal of a single grain no longer have a heap? In other words, it’s a method of focusing your attention on the question of what really makes something the thing that you’re talking about.
What really makes a heap a heap? And Epicurus is using it here in terms of pleasure and the good, because what Cicero quotes him as saying is: “I have often inquired of those who have been called wise, what would be the remaining good if they should exclude from consideration all these pleasures — unless they mean to give us nothing but words.” In other words, when he talks about the pleasures of taste and music and external objects visible to the eye and agreeable motions — which of those can you do without and still have the good? In other words, when you relate pleasure to the good, how many pleasures do you have to have to constitute the good? What is it about the good that makes it good? How many of the pleasures of life can you remove and still have a good life? What is it that makes a good life good? And Epicurus concludes from this exercise that they “must say with me that the only road to a good life lies through those pleasures which I mentioned above.” In other words, there’s no certain number of those pleasures, there’s no accumulation of those pleasures that is the magic number. It’s not like you have to have two or three or four — that it’s not a good life to have two of these pleasures, but if you get up to three, all of a sudden you have a good life. Epicurus is saying that these pleasures make up the good life, and the fact that there is no magic number of them tells you that there’s not an overlay that tells you when you’ve reached the good. The good is simply composed of a number of pleasures, and there’s not a magic number blessed by God or blessed by eternal forms or blessed by the universe that separates the good life from the not-good life.
Cicero on his part says: Epicurus, let’s talk about somebody who’s suffering tremendous grief like Telamon. Let’s first give him a sturgeon — and if that doesn’t get rid of his grief, let’s give him some music; and if that doesn’t work, let’s give him in addition to the sturgeon and the water organ some flowers. Well, has he gotten rid of his grief yet? Maybe not. Okay, well let’s give him some perfume. Has that gotten rid of his grief? Well maybe not — but just add one more pleasure and surely you’ll wipe out all of his grief. That’s the last sentence that you quoted there, Joshua: “Should you add one thing more, you would certainly wipe out all his grief.” Well, that is sarcasm — saying to Epicurus: no number of these bodily pleasures will solve the problem of grief, and you should not even start down that road in the first place.
Joshua: I think you’re right about that last line, Cassius. The Loeb edition of the Tusculan Disputations in a footnote says “the grosser Epicurean pleasures Cicero forbears to mention” — in other words, this “one more thing” that you’re going to add could be a succession of pleasures so debased and forbidden and so forth that Cicero doesn’t even want to talk about the direction that he fears all of this is going.
And in fact in the beginning of section 19 he says: “These admissions Epicurus must make, or else remove from his book all that I have rendered word for word, or preferably the whole book should be flung away, for it is full of pleasures.” I think you’re exactly right that the sorites syllogism is relevant here, and that this question of how many pleasures do you have to add in order to be happy is a very interesting one — and we know that Epicurus has an answer to that.
We also know that Plato discussed this problem in his Philebus dialogue, in which Socrates is speaking with the interlocutor Protarchus. He’s talking here about whether the good — whatever it turns out to be, or the telos, whatever it turns out to be — whether it is subject to limits. That is kind of the question. Socrates in the text says: “All things which do not admit of more or less but admit their opposites — it is to say, first of all, equality and the equal, or again the double, or any other ratio of number and measure — all these may I think be rightly reckoned by us in the class of the limited or finite.” And this is going to be a major focus of this dialogue, where he’s trying to find something that constitutes the good — as you’ve been describing, Cassius — whatever that turns out to be: whatever this good is, it has to have a limit, otherwise you’re going to be chasing it forever and you’re never going to reach it. And with pleasure, Socrates says this: “And from a kindred mixture of the finite and infinite come the seasons and all the delights of life.” And Protarchus says “Most true.” And Socrates responds: “I omit ten thousand other things, such as beauty and health and strength and the many beauties and high perfections of the soul. Oh my beautiful Philebus, the goddess — methinks seeing the universal wantonness and wickedness of all things, and that there was in them no limit to pleasures and self-indulgence — devised the limit of law and order, whereby, as you say Philebus, she torments, or as I maintain, delivers the soul.”
And this problem of whether pleasure has a limit is going to be the grounds — from Socrates’ point of view — of discarding pleasure as having any hold on what constitutes the good. Pleasure is ruled out because there is no limit to pleasure; pleasure can be increased infinitely. And Cicero — I think this is probably the direction you’re going, Cassius, I may have anticipated you a little bit — this is the direction that Cicero is taking this: that pleasure has no limit, and that if there is no limit, how do you know when you’ve reached the point that you need to reach for pleasure? So gross a thing is pleasure to be sufficient to stand up against grief and pain and death — all these things we’ve already talked about.
Cassius: Exactly, Joshua. Now we’re going to run long if we don’t bring this conversation to a conclusion, but the place that I’d like to leave it today would be to follow up on what you just said and ask this question: how do you know when you have a heap of sand? How many grains of sand do you have to add to the stack in front of you before you have a heap?
I would say that there’s a direct analogy between that and what Epicurus is talking about here in terms of the relationship between pleasure and absence of pain as being the good. You don’t have a heap of sand by the magical addition of something in addition to the grains of sand that you’re adding. At some point, you make a mental assessment that you have a heap of sand — and nothing new, nothing different has been added supernaturally through ideal forms or through any other outside force. You’ve simply added grains of sand to the point where you come to the conclusion that you have a heap. I think Epicurus is doing something very similar to that with pleasures adding up to the chief good. You add the pleasure of taste to the pleasure of the eyes, to the pleasure of the ears, to the pleasures of the nose, and all of the mental pleasures of life — and you eventually come to the point where you have the good. But there is no magic to it, where you have all of a sudden flashed into a transcendent experience — as I keep expressing this. There’s nothing new about absence of pain above and beyond the pleasures that are in front of you. Pain is quantifiable as something that you can recognize as pain; pleasures are recognizable as things that you can — either through the body or through the mind — recognize as pleasures. But there’s nothing magic about absence of pain that prevents Epicurus from calling it pleasure. Absence of pain can be mentally identified as the limit of pleasure in the same way that a number of grains of sand can be mentally identified as a heap.
In order to be happy, it is not necessary to eliminate every bit of pain from your life. We have the example of Epicurus himself on his last day stating that he was happy even though he was experiencing tremendous pain. Therefore it makes no sense to obsess over absence of pain as some kind of unidentifiable state of a higher pleasure that requires us to embrace some type of Buddhist or Stoic detachment. God doesn’t tell us when we have a heap; Plato doesn’t tell us when we have a heap. But it is useful for us to use the term “heap” in the same way — neither God nor Plato nor anyone else tells us when we have reached the chief good. When we have the happy life, the happy life is composed of the pleasures that we can and do experience and identify for ourselves — just like we can experience and identify for ourselves the grains of sand that compose the heap.
I realized by leaving it at that point we’re in the middle of an extremely deep discussion that calls for all sorts of replies and elaborations. But let’s for the moment adjourn the discussion today on that point and come back next week to explore it further — perhaps even incorporating comments that we get on the EpicureanFriends forum about this question. We’re going to be long, but any final short words there, Joshua, before we adjourn?
Joshua: Just one more quote from the Philebus to think about. This is Socrates again speaking: “And if we erred in any point, then let anyone who will take up the inquiry again and set us right. And assuming memory and wisdom and knowledge and true opinion to belong to the same class, let him consider whether he would desire to possess or acquire — I will not say pleasure, however abundant or intense — if he has no real perception that he is pleased, nor any consciousness of what he feels, nor any recollection, however momentary, of the feeling. But would he desire to have anything at all if these faculties were wanting to him? And about wisdom, I ask the same question: can you conceive that anyone would choose to have all wisdom absolutely devoid of pleasure rather than with a certain degree of pleasure, or all pleasure devoid of wisdom rather than with a certain degree of wisdom?” This gets very deep, and like you said, we are out of time — but that is something to think about. And we are going to have to return next week to all of these loose ends that we’ve got in the text, and there are a lot of them that are going to have to be wrapped up. And our introduction to the text next week will probably be even longer than it was today, which I think is the longest we’ve ever had for an introduction to a reading.
Cassius: Very true, Joshua. Well, we’ll be back next week to discuss this further. In the meantime, please drop by the EpicureanFriends forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about this or any of our other discussions about Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back next week. See you then. Bye.