Episode 294 - TD24 - Distinguishing Dogs From Wolves And Pleasure From Absence of Pain
Date: 08/07/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4665-episode-294-td24-distinguishing-dogs-from-wolves-and-pleasure-from-absence-of-pa/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 294 continues the deep dive into Cicero’s charge, raised in Tusculan Disputations section 18, that Epicurus evades his own stated position by calling “absence of pain” a “pleasure.” Cassius and Joshua examine this question from multiple angles: Norman DeWitt’s description of the “New Hedonism” and the static/kinetic pleasure distinction; Cicero’s fuller development of the same argument in De Finibus Book Two; and Cicero’s broader treatment of the sorites (heap) paradox in his Academica.
The episode centers on Cicero’s four-pronged attack: (1) Epicurus does not understand logic, specifically how the use of subdivision makes his position incoherent; (2) Epicurus uses language incorrectly; (3) his argument is self-refuting; and (4) his position is not merely philosophical but morally dangerous. Cassius and Joshua counter that Cicero himself applies the word “pleasure” to non-sensory experiences (notably in his account of Marcus Regulus), and that DeWitt is correct that the real issue is not whether the word “pleasure” was customarily applied to the static state but whether it ought to be.
The episode also covers the famous Chrysippus-versus-Carneades exchange on the sorites paradox in the Academica, in which Chrysippus proposed the strategy of hesychazo (falling silent before the ambiguous borderline), and Carneades replied that falling silent accomplishes nothing because the questioner will simply resume from wherever the silence started. Cassius argues this exchange illuminates Epicurus’s use of the sorites: the point is that dialectical logic cannot encapsulate reality in words, and that reality is tested through the senses, not through logical axioms. The episode closes with a passage from Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great on William of Ockham, starlight, and the relationship between reasoning and fact — and Cassius ties this back to the covered-father problem in Epicurean canonics.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 294 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. This week we’re continuing our series going through Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations from an Epicurean viewpoint. We’re in Part Three of that book discussing issues that Cicero is denominating under the topic of grief — but it really applies to all strong emotions in life.
Now last week, in episode 293, Cicero accused Epicurus of evasion in calling absence of pain a pleasure. We are in section 18 of Part Three, and some of the key language that we were discussing last week was where Cicero said: “Grant that to be in pain is the greatest evil. Whosoever then has proceeded so far as to not be in pain, is he therefore in immediate possession of the greatest good? Why, Epicurus, do we use evasions and not allow in our own words the same feeling to be pleasure, which you are used to boast about with such assurance? Are these your words or not? This is what you say in that book which contains all of the doctrines of your school, and I’ll perform on this occasion the office of a translator, lest anyone should imagine that I am inventing anything. Thus you speak, Epicurus: ‘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.’”
Now, that’s the dominant issue that we’re going to be discussing today — with one additional twist. Because in section 18, Cicero also gave us this part of Epicurus’s argument, where Cicero writes: “Epicurus said, ‘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 can 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.’”
So today we want to address head-on the question of whether Epicurus is evading things by talking about absence of pain in addition to pleasure, or whether there is a very understandable link between those two words that Epicurus is actually explaining through the use of this argument — which has been described as the sorites syllogism or paradox: the question of looking at a concept such as a heap and asking, do I still have a heap if I subtract X, Y, and Z? In other words, Epicurus was asking about the good: do I still have the good if I have to subtract the pleasures of taste or the pleasures of hearing or the pleasures of the eye or the pleasures of agreeable motions? Is Epicurus simply being simplistic and absurd by asking the question that way, or is there a reason why Epicurus used this argument, and why Cicero chose to preserve it of all things that he could have chosen to preserve?
We’re going to find today that in another of Cicero’s works — his Academica — Cicero has explained his objection to this argument in great detail. So we’ll get to that later in the episode. But as we start out, let’s focus on the general question that is of interest to most everybody who ever picks up a book about Epicurus: how does absence of pain relate to pleasure, and was Epicurus trying to simply gloss over the negative connotations of pleasure by using a term like “absence of pain”? That’s what Cicero is largely accusing Epicurus of doing, and what we’ll do today is discuss whether that criticism is warranted.
Joshua: It’s a very important question, Cassius, and it’s one that caused me some trouble when I first encountered Epicureanism — this idea of considering absence of pain to be a kind of pleasure. And I think that you’ve probably had a similar resistance to this idea when you first got interested in Epicurus as well. The way that I might’ve expressed it at the time: the idea that when you’re feeling basically nothing, you’re feeling pleasure — that this is a kind of ascetic view of the life of pleasure — is one that I had trouble grappling with when I first encountered Epicurus, and I do not claim to be a paragon of understanding of the system now. But I am in a position, I hope, where I can look at this and see what Epicurus is thinking and see what he’s doing.
But before we do that, we need to look at what Cicero is thinking and what he’s doing. He develops this argument — which you’ve already summarized for us from the Tusculan Disputations — more fully in the second book of On Ends. And in the particular passages I’m going to read, he discusses this, and we discuss this in episode 201 of the podcast. This is Cicero at his most insistent and his most nitpicking, I think, when he is talking about words and logic and language — and he’s constantly picking Epicurus up on this, but nowhere more than on the subject of absence of pain. This one is really important to him. So I’m going to go now to book two of On Ends. He starts out this way:
He says, “Epicurus, I imagine, neither lacks the desire to express himself lucidly and plainly if he can, nor deals with dark subjects, as do the physical writers, nor with technical matters like the mathematicians, but speaks on a doctrine which is perspicuous and easy and which has already spread itself abroad. Still, you do not declare that we fail to understand what pleasure is, but what he says of it — it results not that we fail to understand the force of the word in question, but that he speaks after a fashion of his own and gives no heed to ours.” That’s going to be one of Cicero’s main criticisms.
He goes on to say that “Epicurus cannot bring it about that any man who knows himself — I mean who has thoroughly examined his own constitution and his own senses — should think that freedom from pain is one and the same thing with pleasure. It is as good as doing violence to the senses so as to uproot from our minds those notions of words which are ingrained in us. Why? Who can fail to see that there are in the nature of things these three states: one, when we are in pleasure; another, when we are in pain; and the third — the state in which I am now, and I suppose you are too — when we are neither in pain nor in pleasure? Thus he who is feasting is in pleasure while he who is on the rack is in pain. But do you not see that between these extremes lies a great crowd of men who feel neither delight nor sorrow?”
And Torquatus comes in here and says: “Not at all — and I affirm that all who are without pain are in pleasure, and that the fullest possible.” But Cicero is not done here. He’s going to keep going. Cicero goes on to say, a few more pages: “Then, blushing — for the force of nature is very great — Epicurus makes his escape in this way by denying that any addition can be made to the pleasure felt by one who is free from pain. But this condition of freedom from pain is not called pleasure. I am not anxious about terms, but how if the thing signified is entirely different? I shall find many persons, says Epicurus — or rather persons without number, who are not so pedantic or so troublesome as you are — and such that I may easily win them over to any doctrine I choose. Why then do we hesitate to say: if absence of pain be the highest pleasure, that to be without pleasure is the intensest pain? Why does not this hold good, as I put it? Because pain has for its opposite not pleasure but the removal of pain.”
And then Cicero summarizes his own criticism of this view. He says: “Very well. This stern and serious philosopher does not see that the only good within his knowledge is a thing not even to be desired, because — on the authority of the same thinker — whenever we are without pain, we do not crave that form of pleasure. How irreconcilable these statements are. If Epicurus had been instructed in the processes of definition and subdivision, did he only understand the power of speech or indeed the familiar usage of words, he would never have strayed into such rough paths. As it is, you see what he does? What no one ever called pleasure, he calls so — he rules two things into one: this active form of pleasure — for thus he describes those ‘sweet and sugared pleasures,’ so to call them — he sometimes so refines away that you think some Cynic is the speaker, while he sometimes so extols it that he declares himself to be without even an idea of what good is. Over and above this, when we get to this kind of language, it should be put down not by some philosopher but by the censor, for its fault is not a matter of language only but of morality as well.”
So Cicero’s argument against Epicurus is: one, you don’t understand logic and how the use of subdivision renders your view of pleasure and pain impossible; two, you don’t understand language and how you are using these words incorrectly in the first place; three, the very argument that you were making is self-refuting; and four, what you are saying is immoral — and is not fit for a philosophical response, but for a censorial one. So Cicero is quite cross with Epicurus about this whole issue — of pleasure, of course, but of suggesting that there is no middle state between pleasure and pain, and that when you are without pain, you are experiencing not only pleasure but, as Torquatus says, the fullest possible pleasure, because Epicurus himself had said that the limit of the quantity of pleasure is the removal of all pain.
Cassius: Joshua, let me give you a second to catch your thoughts there, by emphasizing how much I think you’re right in observing these arguments from Cicero are made over and over and over. The reason he’s focusing on this is that it is a tremendously important question. If any Roman or Greek listening to the words of Cicero would have come to the conclusion that the goal of life is nothingness — a feeling of nothingness — then that person would have nothing to do with Epicurean philosophy. If Cicero is right that Epicurus is being inconsistent; if Cicero is right that Epicurus has switched his wording at the last minute and led people to believe that he’s talking about the pleasures of taste and emotion and of hearing and of sight, but then at the last minute switched those entirely and said: “Well, I don’t have any pain, so I don’t need those pleasures” — that’s grossly ridiculous and self-contradictory on its face. So Cicero being a good lawyer is going to point it out and ride that horse as far as it will take him, and it will take him very, very far — unless there is a persuasive and clear answer to the question.
Now Cicero is not going to allow the answer to be developed very far. But in regard to Cicero versus Plutarch, for example, or other writers who came along after Cicero, I think it’s important to understand that Cicero was writing at probably the height of Epicurean influence in the Roman Republic. Lucretius had just written his poem. Philodemus had just been teaching many of the leading men of Rome. The men whom Cicero was looking to for the future of the country — such as Cassius Longinus — were Epicureans. Julius Caesar was heavily influenced by Epicurean philosophy. Cicero’s best friend Atticus was a strong Epicurean.
Cicero was writing at a time where he had to restrain himself and provide some information and some fairness in describing what Epicurus had to say. Not so much people like Plutarch, or others later on, who were not as dependent on fellow Epicureans for their own futures. Cicero was talking and writing with Cassius Longinus about the future of the Roman Republic and what was going to happen after the death of Julius Caesar, and they were talking Epicurean philosophy. At the same time, Cicero is going to be willing to make Epicurean arguments look bad — but at the same time, to have any hope of effectiveness, he had to maintain the respect of his listeners by not totally misstating the facts when he quoted Epicurus.
So there’s not a total misstatement here. Epicurus certainly does talk about absence of pain. Epicurus certainly did say that when we have no remaining pain, we have no need of pleasure. Those apparent inconsistencies have to be explained, because if you leave them at face value, no fair-minded neutral person is going to say that you’ve properly and fully responded to the criticism. So when we consider all of these quotations that you’ve just cited, it’s clear that a conflict of interpretation exists between Cicero and Torquatus, the Epicurean spokesman. Are they just talking past each other and is there no way to reconcile this? Or is there a way to reconcile? And let me say one more thing before you start back again, Joshua: you made the comment that this was a problem for you at the beginning of your reading of Epicurus and mentioned that it was probably a problem for me as well — and it certainly was, and is. I consider this to be the most important issue in Epicurean philosophy. If someone cannot state both sides of this argument and explain in depth why Epicurus would take the position that he’s taking, then I don’t think you can credibly maintain that you have an understanding of Epicurean philosophy and what Epicurus was all about — because Cicero’s arguments on their face are very, very effective and they must be answered in a persuasive way.
Joshua: Yeah, I agree. And actually one of my favorite very pithy criticisms of Epicurus on this point comes from Plutarch, when he says that Epicurus decants pleasure from the body into the mind and then back to the body again depending on the questions he’s being asked — that Epicurus is evading giving solid answers as regards pleasure by shifting pleasure around. That’s the same criticism that Cicero is making here, but Plutarch makes it in a very clear way by saying he’s decanting the pleasure from the body into the mind and then back into the body again to evade specific problems that he would otherwise run into.
The first place to look when considering this issue is one of my favorite passages from Norman DeWitt’s book — and I know it’s one that you’ve quoted many times as well. This is on page 240 in a chapter called “The New Hedonism,” in which Norman DeWitt says this: “This recognition of basic pleasures in its turn signified the recognition of a normal state of being consisting of health of mind and of body and freedom from fears and all unnecessary desires, which was called ataraxia or serenity. This condition was denominated static, but allowance must be made for a certain variation. Hunger and thirst recur and call for satisfaction, which is a moderately kinetic pleasure, whereupon the individual returns to the normal state of absence of pain. Epicurus described it in one of those reciprocal statements for which he had a preference: ‘Only then have we need of pleasure, when from the absence of pleasure we feel pain; and when we do not feel pain, we no longer feel need of pleasure.’ While these words have reference to the natural desires of the body, the description of the normal state must be understood to include freedom from pain in the body and distress in the mind. The extension of the name of pleasure to this normal state of being was the major innovation of the new hedonism. It was in the negative form — freedom from pain of body and distress of mind — that it drew the most persistent and vigorous condemnation from adversaries. The contention was that the application of the name of pleasure to this state was unjustified on the ground that two different things were thereby being denominated by one name. Cicero made a great to-do over this argument, but it is really superficial and captious. The fact that the name of pleasure was not customarily applied to the normal or static state did not alter the fact that the name ought to be applied to it, nor that reason justified the application, nor that human beings would be the happier for so reasoning and believing.”
So one of the first things I would say to Cicero is that he is always on the lookout for those sensory, physical, stimulating pleasures — and he’s looking for these and saying: this is what Epicurus means when he talks about pleasure. And Cicero behaves as if that’s the only thing that anyone means when they’re talking about pleasure. But as I quoted, I believe, last week — from his reference to Marcus Regulus — Cicero himself knows that pleasure is not limited to momentary, stimulating, physical pleasures. He says that himself. He says: “Virtue herself shall speak for me, and shall without hesitation prefer to your man of happiness her Marcus Regulus. And virtue proclaims that when he had returned from his own country to Carthage of his own choice, under no compulsion but that of his honor which he had pledged to the enemy, he was happier in the very hour at which he was tortured by want of sleep and hunger than Thorius Balbus when drinking on a bed of roses. He had conducted important wars, had been twice elected consul, and had enjoyed a triumph. Though he did not regard his previous exploits as so important or so splendid as his last sacrifice, which he had taken upon him from motives of honor and consistency — a sacrifice that seems pitiable to us when we hear of it, but was pleasurable to him while he endured it.” And Cicero says: “In truth, happy men are not always in a state of cheerfulness or boisterousness or mirth or jesting, which things accompany like characters, but oftentimes even in stern mood are made happy by their staunchness and endurance.”
Cicero is saying that Marcus Regulus is happy, that he is feeling pleasure from what he’s doing, even though what he’s doing is not connected with sensory stimulation of the kind that we customarily think of as pleasurable. So you could well ask Cicero: why are you taking the word “pleasure” and applying it to this other experience? Are you not doing the same thing — denominating two different experiences by the same word? But the fact is that this is how we use the word “pleasure.” It applies reasonably in different situations. It applies when we are dining on good food, but it also applies when we are just spending time with our friends — and even though those are two very different experiences, we still call them both “pleasure.” And as I see from this text, Cicero is not above doing this himself — so why does he criticize Epicurus for it?
So I have to take Cicero to task on this question of constantly going to “pleasure only means sensory stimulation of the body, and any pleasure of the mind is just pleasure of the body referred to the mind — it’s really all about the body.” In Cicero’s understanding of Epicureanism, he discounts mental pleasure as a rule except as connected with the body. But the fact that Cicero does that himself, it does not follow that we should do that. It does not follow that we should look at Epicurus’s view of pleasure and say that he’s only talking about pleasures of the body. We shouldn’t look at Epicurus’s view of pleasure and say that he’s only talking about what we might term “positive pleasures” — right? Because as DeWitt says, when he’s talking about absence of pain as not just pleasure but the fullness of pleasure, he’s expressing it in a negative way. We should understand that for Epicurus that is also pleasure.
And so where I come down on this is the same place Norman DeWitt comes down. And I think that passage is very helpful for that reason, when he says: “The fact that the name of pleasure was not customarily applied to the normal or static state did not alter the fact that the name ought to be applied to it.” Those are really two separate questions. There’s the historical question of the use of language, but there’s also the question of how we should use language to better communicate and understand what we’re talking about. And I don’t think that what Epicurus is doing here with the word “pleasure” is at all out of bounds on that front, because I think Epicurus explains himself more clearly than Cicero is going to pretend that he does.
Cassius: Right, Joshua. What I’m hearing you say is that there’s a disagreement here in terms of how to communicate between Epicurus and Cicero, and Cicero is being a hypocrite because Cicero is just as guilty of switching his terminology as Epicurus ever was. Now from that observation, do we just walk away and say this is an example of some people saying “tomato” and some people saying “to-mah-to” and just walk away from the argument? Of course I don’t think that is the appropriate response. And so one way of getting further at the detail here is to examine exactly what this object is that one is calling one thing and the other is calling another, and dig into exactly the phrasing that Cicero is using here.
And one particular line that I’d like to go to next — and get your opinion on, Joshua — is near the beginning of section 18. Cicero says — I’ll read both the Yonge and Hicks translations. Yonge says: “Grant that to be in pain is the greatest evil. Whosoever then has proceeded so far as to not be in pain, is he therefore in immediate possession of the greatest good?” Hicks phrases it this way: “Grant, if you like, that pain is the highest evil. Does the man who is not in pain at once enjoy the highest good if he be free from evil?” That’s where Cicero specifically accuses Epicurus of shirking the question. But why don’t we deal precisely with Cicero’s question? In what sense, if any, is it correct to say that not to be in pain is at once to enjoy the highest good? Or in what sense is it true that someone who has proceeded so far as to not be in pain is in immediate possession of the greatest good? That kind of question strikes people as pretty clear, pretty persuasive. Just because I don’t have any pain in my elbow, does that mean that I’m experiencing the greatest possible pleasure that could ever exist for a human in thousands of years? Epicurus is either being ridiculous, or there’s an explanation for this. What is that explanation?
Joshua: Well, the answer to Cicero’s question — “Grant that to be in pain is the greatest evil; whosoever then has proceeded so far as not to be in pain, is he therefore in immediate possession of the greatest good?” — and the answer to that question is: if by “proceeded so far as not to be in pain” you mean that this person has freed themselves from all pains of the body and all disturbance of the mind — these two are a package deal; they are both part of the process; this is what I’m talking about when I say that Cicero ignores mental pain and mental pleasure in Epicureanism, he only wants to talk about the body — the person who has freed themselves from pain of the body and disturbance of the mind has reached what Epicurus calls “the limit of the quantity of pleasure.” There is no increase in the quantity of pleasure beyond that point; there is only at that point variation in the pleasures that we experience within those limits.
This is quite important, because if there is no limit to pleasure — as Socrates alleges in the Philebus dialogue — then there is no possession of Epicurus’s greatest good. We would be on a hedonic treadmill, you might call it, pursuing pleasure to ever-increasing heights but never having any chance of actually reaching or achieving it. So the short, immediate answer is: yes, whoever has proceeded so far as to feel no pain in the body and no disturbance in the mind is in possession of the greatest good.
Cassius: Joshua, after listening to what you just said, my question would be: I’m standing here as Cicero describes himself — in some combination of bewilderment and glazed-over nothingness — because I don’t understand what was said in that condition. I’m not in pain, but I’m certainly not in pleasure. Is that condition of blankness a condition of pleasure? Is that what you’re telling me?
Joshua: Epicurus is very clear on this point. The feelings are pleasure and pain, and when you’re not in pain, you are in a state of feeling pleasure. And actually Cicero himself gives a very good description of this in book one of De Finibus. He says: “Let us imagine an individual in the enjoyment of pleasures — great, numerous, and constant, both mental and bodily — with no pain to thwart or threaten them. I ask, what circumstances can we describe as more excellent than these or more desirable? A man whose circumstances are such must needs possess, as well as other things, a robust mind, subject to no fear of death or pain — because death is apart from sensation and pain, with lasting is usually slight, when oppressive is of short duration, so that its temporariness reconciles us to its intensity and its slightness to its continuance — when in addition we suppose that such a man is in no awe of the influence of the gods and does not allow his past pleasures to slip away, but takes delight in constantly recalling them. What circumstances is it possible to add to these to make his condition better?”
Now the thing is, when you read this passage, he mentions “pleasures great numerous and constant, both of body and of mind” — he mentions that at the beginning. But everything else he’s talking about here is philosophical. I mean, everything he’s talking about here is about removing the fear of death, removing the fear of the gods, teaching yourself to recall your past pleasures as a way to feel pleasure in the moment. And it’s not a bodily pleasure that you’re going to feel — it’s going to be the pleasure of the memory of your past experiences. That is a mental pleasure.
Cassius: Joshua. So we’ve discussed this many times — that Epicurus’s viewpoint of pleasure is much wider than just bodily stimulation. And so Epicurus does include mental pleasure as much or more as he includes bodily pleasures in his calculations. So we’ve made that point a good number of times. The next point that people will often question about this is to observe: okay, I understand your point. You’re including bodily pleasure and mental pleasure in the word “pleasure.” I understand your point that mental pleasures are even more important than bodily pleasures. I understand your point. What then do I make of this absence of pain — which I’ll accept for the moment includes mental pleasures? Are you telling me that absence of pain, this mental condition, is the true goal of life? What about the pleasures of taste and of the eyes and of the ears and of touch? Those to me don’t have anything to do with the pleasures of the mind. Why are you evading and seemingly deprecating those physical pleasures and saying that the greatest good is to be free from pain? What happened to those physical pleasures that you talk about so much?
And as Cicero is expressing this bewilderment, this challenge to Epicurus’s viewpoint, the next bit of information he gives us becomes particularly important — because Cicero himself is seeing how it relates to the question. And this is where what Cicero quotes from Epicurus — this sorites argument about subtracting pleasures from the good — comes in. So that’s a question that we have to confront as well: has Epicurus subtracted the pleasures of taste and the eyes and the ears and of touch from his concept of the best pleasure, and ended up with something that a normal person doesn’t recognize as pleasure? Has Epicurus, some intellectual who fancies himself to have figured everything out and is somewhat smarter than everyone else, arrived at some condition which is superior to the pleasures of the eyes and the ears and of touch and of taste? Because that’s the quotation that’s next — where Epicurus is saying he cannot form any notion of the chief good apart from these particular pleasures.
Joshua: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Epicurus says in the fragment that survives from his book Peri Telous, or “On the End Goal”: “I do not even know what I should consider the good to be if I omit the pleasures of sex, and if I omit the pleasures of food, and if I omit the pleasures of sound and of beautiful forms.” To say that freedom from pain in the body and disturbance in the mind is the limit of the quantity of pleasure is not at all to deprecate the pleasures of sensory experience. But the real point is this: when you are not feeling pain, you are not nothing. It’s not like you stop existing when you stop feeling pain. What you are when you stop feeling pain is a product of nature — and it’s nature that has equipped us with pleasure and pain as the goal and the guardrails, the guideposts on the way of life. And so when you’re not experiencing any pain, you are still what you are — which is a being that was born out of nature, responds to her calls, and is cognizant of her guidelines for life.
And when you’re not in pain, you’re still alive, you’re still what you are, and what you are is a product of nature living in nature, living naturally. You could say it’s not at all contradictory to say that this experience is pleasurable, and that — as Epicurus says — this is the limit of the quantity of pleasure. This is you in your natural condition. And as I said a minute ago, this is not at all to suggest that the sensory pleasures of the body are not to be included in all of this. When I said earlier that once you’ve reached the limit of the quantity of pleasure, what is available to you at that point is variation in the experience of pleasure — that’s where these sensory experiences of the body come in as well, along with other experiences of the mind. So it’s all part of the experience. But that to me is the main point: to not be in pain is to still be. There’s a difference between absence of pain and death. Even though we would say the dead are beyond sensation of any kind — it’s true, they don’t feel pain, they don’t exist, they don’t do anything, they don’t experience anything — but you experience life while you are alive, even when you’re not in pain, even when you’re not feeling any mental disturbance, and even when you’re not feeling any particular sensory stimulation that you can point to and say “that feels pleasurable.” You’re still alive in nature, as a product of nature. So I think that’s all part of the equation as well.
Cassius: Okay, Joshua. Yeah, you’re describing the relationship between absence of pain and pleasure, and here I’d like to take a quick excursion into another book from Cicero that we don’t talk about very frequently — his Academica — that will help us understand further what was in Epicurus’s mind when he’s criticizing these people who call themselves wise, saying that he’s asked them what’s left of the good if you subtract the pleasures of taste, the pleasures of the eye, the pleasures of the ears, going on down the list. This form of argument that Epicurus is making has more to it than meets the eye, and Cicero has more to say about it in the Academica.
There are two passages I’d like to go through quickly — one of which I’ll read myself, and then the second one I’ll ask you, Joshua, to read. But let me quickly go to the setup for this in section 16 of the Academica, where Cicero is quoting perhaps one of his favorite philosophers, Antiochus, and he reports that Antiochus said this: “In the first place they are troublesome in this, that they use a most captious kind of interrogation. And the system of adding or taking away step-by-step minute items from a proposition is a kind of argument very little to be approved of in philosophy.” So here is Cicero quoting one of his favorite philosophers criticizing this method of argument.
Continuing back to the quote — Antiochus said: “They call it sorites when they make up a heap by adding grain after grain — a very vicious and captious style of arguing. For you mount up in this way: ‘If a vision is brought by God before a man asleep of such a nature as to be probable, why may not one also be brought of such a nature as to be very like truth? If so, then why may not one be brought which can hardly be distinguished from truth? If so, then why may not there be one which cannot be distinguished at all from truth? If so, then why may not there be one such that it is actually no difference between them?’ If you come to this point, because I’ve granted you all the previous propositions, it will be my fault, but if you advance them of your own accord, it will be yours. For who will grant to either that God can do everything, or that, even if he could, he would act in that manner? And how do you assume that if one thing may be like another, it follows that it may also be difficult to distinguish between them; and then that one cannot distinguish between them at all; and lastly that they are identical? So that if wolves are like dogs, you’ll come at last to asserting that they’re the same animal. And indeed there are some things that are not honorable which are like things that are honorable; some things not good, like those that are good; some things proceeding on no system, like others which are regulated by system. Why then do we hesitate to affirm that there is no difference between all these things? Do we not even see that they are inconsistent? For there is nothing that can be transferred from its own genus to another. But if such a conclusion did follow — that there was no difference between perceptions of different genera, but that some could be found which were both in their own genus and in one which did not belong to them — how could that be possible?”
Now I’ll be the first to say that I certainly didn’t read that very well. It’s very dense and difficult to follow. But I do think it becomes pretty clear when you analyze what Cicero is saying here: there’s a reason he’s objecting to this argument, because this argument focuses the attention on what is it that really makes one thing different from another? What is it that really makes a heap a heap? What is it that really makes something good to be good? What is it that really makes a dog a dog and a wolf a wolf?
A lot of people think that this kind of questioning is irrelevant and useless and the worst aspect of philosophy — and if you leave it in that condition, then I would agree that this is totally unproductive, totally ridiculous, and totally a waste of time to talk about this. But Epicurus is using this type of argument for a reason. He’s pointing out that if you’re going to talk about the good, you have to be specific about what it is that makes something good. Can the good be defined through words that are adequate to give you a complete understanding of the good, or must the good be illustrated through examples — and must you then realize that it is your pronouncement that something is good that gives meaning to the term?
Now, a dog has a different atomic structure than a wolf does, but dogs don’t know the term “dog” any more than wolves know the term “wolf,” and our calling a dog a “dog” does not make a dog any more than calling a wolf a “wolf” makes it a wolf. The illustration often used in discussing Plato is that when you see a four-legged animal with a long neck and a long tail in front of you, and you make additional observations about how tall he is, how heavy he is, how he walks, Plato will tell you that your senses will never be satisfactory to allow you to conclude that this animal in front of you is a horse. But at the same time, Plato will tell you that oh, there is such a thing as “horseness” that exists in an ideal form in another dimension, and that the horseness — the state of being a horse — can be defined through words that we can be absolutely confident about.
If we go down the rabbit trail far enough, Aristotle might say: “No, Plato, horseness does not exist in another dimension, but there’s something within the horse that tells you that it is a horse.” Or some religionist person might tell you: “I know it’s a horse because God tells me it’s a horse, or God has defined what a horse is and it’s in the Bible, and therefore it must be.” So what’s really important about this type of argument is to think about what it means to be real and true and to exist. And that’s what Epicurean canonics is attempting to address — that what we consider real is tested by the senses and by reasonable inferences from the senses, and not because there’s some other dimension of ideal forms, or words, or logos, or any divine beings that have the copyright or the patent on what actually is true. We’re not living in a cave watching flickers of firelight in the dark and guessing at things that exist in reality only outside the cave. What we’re doing, according to Epicurus, is living in a real world and using our senses to understand what this real world is about.
And if we’re going to talk about pleasure or if we’re going to talk about good, we’re ultimately going to get down to cases, as they say. We’re going to talk about the good in terms of things that are good, and pleasure in terms of things that are pleasurable. So when Epicurus says that these men are saying nothing when they talk about the good after having subtracted from pleasure the pleasures of taste and of the eyes and of the ears and of touch and of the nose — he’s saying that it is improper to talk about pleasure without understanding that pleasure does not exist apart from these actual real-world instances of pleasure.
As Frances Wright points out in her book A Few Days in Athens, those who are like Aristotle are wrong to assert that yellowness can exist apart from things that are yellow — apart from things that in our experience appear to us to be yellow. And you begin to understand this point of view by doing what Epicurus is doing here, in terms of talking about subtracting pleasures, and by pursuing this road that Cicero is so critical of — getting down to cases and talking about specifics.
And in this context, absence of pain is not a concept that has some ideal-form existence — it is not some particular pleasure defined by the creator or the prime mover or by the consensus of mankind as the number one experience of pleasure that everybody should seek to experience in the same way that everybody might want to climb to the top of Mount Everest or have some particular experience that we can put our fingers on. There is not, in a Platonic world, a single instance of absence of pain that should be thought of as the goal.
Pleasure in this conceptual perspective is a useful term because it describes particular experiences of particular people at particular moments at particular places. When we find those experiences to be beneficial — bringing us happiness, bringing us pleasure — we call them “pleasure.” And in the same way we can call them “absence of pain,” because if there are only two feelings, then if it’s not painful, then it is pleasure or absence of pain. But to think that Epicurus was using the term “absence of pain” to describe a particular experience of a particular person at a particular time — a particular thing that we need to pursue in a concrete sense — would be to elevate that term into something that’s the opposite of Epicurean philosophy, because Epicurean philosophy doesn’t deal in Platonic ideals. Epicurean philosophy deals in reality, and we come into contact with reality through our senses, through our real experiences in life.
And when Cicero tries to say that it’s impossible for a thing to be in more than one genus at a time, he’s identifying that there is this conflict between those who would reduce everything to words and the facts of reality. And when our preexisting words conflict with what we find to be real, Epicurean philosophy goes with the real and with nature — as opposed to with what we wish to define through logic. So Joshua, that’s the first part of the Academica. When you go further down into what appears to be section 28, Cicero is still talking about this, because frankly that’s what most of the Academica is about — this confrontation with skepticism that destroyed the unity of the Academy and led it to be split off in so many different directions. Epicurus, in using this argument about subtracting pleasures, is telling us to look at the realities that our senses give us. So Joshua, could you read starting with “what is there that can be perceived by reason?”
Joshua: “What is there that can be perceived by reason? You say that dialectics have been discovered, and that that science is as it were an arbiter and judge of what is true and false. On what subject will a dialectician be able to judge? In geometry, what is true and false? Or in literature or in music? He knows nothing about those things. In philosophy, then, what is it? How large is the sun? What means has he which may enable him to judge what the chief good is? What then will he judge — of what combination or disjunction of ideas is accurate, of what is an ambiguous expression, of what follows from each fact, or what is inconsistent with it? If the science of dialectics judges of these things or things like them, it is judging of itself — but it professes more. For the judge of these matters is not sufficient for the resolving of the other numerous and important questions which arise in philosophy.
But since you place so much importance in that art, I would have you to consider whether it was not invented for the express purpose of being used against you. For at its first opening, it gives an ingenious account of the elements of speaking and of the manner in which one may come to an understanding of ambiguous expressions and of the principles of reasoning. Then after a few more things, it comes to the sorites — a very slippery and hazardous topic, and a class of argument which you yourself pronounce to be a vicious one. What then? You will say, ‘Are we to be blamed for that viciousness?’ The nature of things has not given us any knowledge of ends, so as to enable us in any subject whatever to say how far we can go. Nor is this the case only in respect of the heap of wheat from which the name is derived, but in no matter whatever where the argument is conducted by minute questions — for instance, if the question be whether a man is rich or poor, illustrious or obscure, whether things be many or few, great or small, long or short, broad or narrow, we have no certain answer to give. How much must be added or taken away to make the thing in question either one or the other?
‘But you say the sorites is a vicious sort of argument. Crush it then if you can to prevent its being troublesome, for it will be so if you do not guard against it.’ ‘We have guarded against it,’ says he — ‘for Chrysippus’s plan is, when he is interrogated step by step, by way of giving an instance whether there are three or few or many, to rest a little before he comes to the many’ — that is to say, to use their own language, hesychazo in Greek, which means to come to a halt. ‘Rest and welcome,’ says Carneades; ‘you may even snore for all I care.’ But what good does he do? For one who follows will waken you from sleep and question you in the same manner. ‘Take the number after the mention of which you were silent, and if to that number I add one, will there be many?’ You will again go on as long as you think fit.
Why need I say more? For you admit this: that you cannot in your answers fix the last number which can be classed as few, nor the first which amounts to many. And this kind of uncertainty extends so widely that I do not see any bounds to its progress. ‘Nothing hurts me,’ says he, ‘for like a skillful driver I will rein in my horses before I come to the end — and all the more if the ground which the horses are approaching is precipitous. And thus too,’ says he, ‘I will check myself and not reply any more to one who addresses me with captious questions.’
If you have a clear answer to make and refuse to make it, you are giving yourself airs. If you have not, even you yourself do not perceive it. If you stop because the question is obscure, I admit that it is so. But you say that you do not proceed as far as what is obscure — you stop then where the case is still clear. If then all you do is hold your tongue, you gain nothing by that, for what does it matter to the man who wishes to catch you whether he entangles you owing to your silence or to your talking? Suppose for instance you were to say without hesitation that up to the number nine is few, but were to pause at the tenth — then you would be refusing your assent to what is certain and evident; and yet you will not allow me to do the same with respect to subjects which are obscure. That art therefore does not help you against the sorites, inasmuch as it does not teach a man who is using either the increasing or diminishing scale what is the first point or the last.
May I not say that that same art, like Penelope undoing her web, at last undoes all the arguments which have gone before? Is that your fault or ours? In truth, it is the foundation of dialectics that whatever is enunciated — and that is what they called axioma in Greek, which answers to our Latin word effatum — is either true or false. Every axioma, he’s saying, is either true or false. What then is the case? Are these true or false? If you say that you are speaking falsely and that that is true, you are speaking falsely and telling the truth at the same time. This sorites, you say, is inexplicable — and that is more odious than our language when we call things ‘comprehended’ and ‘not perceived.’”
Cassius: Okay, Joshua, thank you for reading that. We’re going to be running long today, so we’re going to have to bring this to a conclusion and then come back in the coming weeks to these issues. But in summary, Cicero is giving a very good description here of the problem — and it is that dialectical logic rests on an assumption that there is a difference between what is true and what is false. But nature herself does not tell us what is true and what is false in the words and tools that dialectical reasoning wants to use.
Epicurus, by using the sorites argument that Cicero is objecting to so much, is pointing to the answer to these questions of reality: that nature tells us through the senses what is real and what is not. And we can go on and on; we can stop; we can rest. We can talk about a couple of instances like Chrysippus does and hesitate before he gets to the ninth, when he wants to say that nine is few but eight is not. We can talk; we can use words; we can rest; we can do whatever we want to do. But in the end, dialectical logic is not the way that you come to an understanding of reality. Dialectic rests on the assertion — the axioma — that you have stated something to be true or false, but your statement does not make it so.
All this relates back to absence of pain and pleasure, because just like the dialectician through words cannot encapsulate all that is true or all that is false within those words, the words “pleasure” and “absence of pain” cannot within those words give a complete understanding and description of every example and instance of pleasure or absence of pain. Speaking in words and using logical arguments is necessary for purposes of communication, but in the end you test the validity of what conclusion your logic has led you to reach through the senses and through the real experiences of life. Joshua, I’m sorry we’re running out of time, but what would be your final thoughts for today’s episode?
Joshua: On the subject we’ve been talking about of the relationship between logic, dialectic, reason, and fact — I thought there was a very interesting paragraph or two in Christopher Hitchens’s book God Is Not Great, discussing William of Ockham. Not on his famous razor, his principle of economy, but on a separate question which I found very interesting. Hitchens writes this: “Ockham was interested, for example, in the stars. He knew far less about the nebulae than we do, or than Laplace did — in fact he knew nothing about them at all. But he employed them for an interesting speculation: assuming that God can make us feel the presence of a non-existent entity, and further assuming that he need not go to this trouble if the same effect can be produced in us by the actual presence of that entity, God could still, if he wished, cause us to believe in the existence of stars without there being actually present — every effect which God causes through the mediation of a secondary cause he can produce immediately by himself. However, this does not mean that we must believe in anything absurd, since God cannot cause in us knowledge such that by it a thing is seen evidently to be present, though it is absent, for that involves a contradiction.”
And then Christopher Hitchens says: “Before you begin to drum your fingers at the huge tautology that impends here, as it does in so much theology, consider what Father Cosin the eminent Jesuit has to say in commentary: ‘If God had annihilated the stars, he could still cause in us the act of seeing what had once been, so far as the act is considered subjectively, just as he could give us a vision of what will be in the future. Either act would be an immediate apprehension — in the first case of what has been, in the second case of what will be.’” And then Christopher Hitchens says: “This is actually very impressive and not just for its time. It has taken us several hundred years since Ockham to come to the realization that when we gaze up at the stars, we very often are seeing light from distant bodies that have long since ceased to exist.”
I bring that up because we’re talking about the relationship between dialectic and reason and fact, and what this point expresses — I think very interestingly — is that where William of Ockham and the Jesuit commentator had inferred that God could cause us to experience starlight even if there were no stars, that actually this use of logic touches on something that is very real in nature — which is that we are experiencing starlight from stars that either no longer exist, or no longer emit light because of the distance the light had to travel to get here. So the relationship between fact and reason is interesting for a whole number of reasons, but it’s partially interesting because sometimes you can be right about the facts, but the process by which you arrived at them can be laughably absurd. I think that’s always worth keeping in mind. Now, Cassius, that might feel like a left turn out of nowhere from where we’re going. How would you sum up where we are here?
Cassius: Joshua. Here’s how I would bring that to a conclusion today. What I’ve just heard you describe is, in my mind, a variation of the “covered father” problem — that when we think about dialectical logic, there are going to be situations where we both know and not know at the same time. You know your father, but if he is standing in front of you with a sack over his head, you may not know that that particular individual is your father. At that moment, dialectical logic rests on these assertions of essential truth or falsity, which can only be defined in words and are not necessarily reflective at all of what we think of as practical reality.
When we are looking at the sky, we think we see the light of a particular star — but from another perspective, that star may have ceased to exist millions of years ago. What really matters is what these observations do to our minds and our ability to live happily. Does the covered-father problem cause you to collapse into absolute skepticism and cynicism and say, “Oh my God, I don’t care — nobody can know anything anyway”? Does the fact that the star you see at night might have ceased to exist millions of years ago cause you nothing but despair and depression because it’s just impossible to know anything? That’s where all this is going. Dialectical logic has its uses in communication, but it also has its limits.
And Epicurus is saying: in relation to the good, you want to know what the good is? You talk about specific instances of good, and you don’t look to Plato in his forms and ideas. You don’t look to some other dimension for a god to tell you the answer to that. You look to the reality of what your senses tell you, what the senses of other people around you are telling them that you can compare with your own — focus your attention on reality. And you never let the flights of dialectical logic that might seem to be depressing and dispiriting and contradictory prevent you from living a successful, effective, and happy life. Because the difference between words and reality, the difference between the map and the territory — and maps are useful, but they are not the real world — that’s the point I think we take away from the sorites syllogism and from Epicurus’s example that we’ve talked about in this episode.
So as we bring things to a conclusion, that’s where we’ll stop it for today. There’s an awful lot more to say about this, and we invite you to communicate with us by dropping by the EpicureanFriends forum and letting us know your thoughts about these issues. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again very soon. See you then. Bye.