Episode 295 - Plutarch's Absurd Interpretation of Epicurean Absence of Pain
Date: 08/14/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4673-episode-295-plutarch-s-absurd-interpretation-of-epicurean-absence-of-pain/
Summary
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Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 295 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius who wrote on the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the epicurean text and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of epicurus@epicureanfriends.com where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. This week, Joshua is away and Dawn has kindly agreed to step in during his absence. Rather than continue in Tus and Disputations, we’re going to briefly take up a topic that we’ve not previously addressed on our podcast series. The essays of Plu Tar Against Epicurus, the one we’re going to focus on today is entitled That Epicurus actually makes life impossible. Sometimes I see the title is translated as Epicurus actually makes a pleasant Life impossible. But the thrust of this argument is that PLU tar is going to give a long and scathing denunciation of Epicurus viewpoint on pleasure, and he’s going to finish up the argument by talking about that not only is Epicurus positive arguments about the benefits of pleasure just wrong, but Epicurus does not even follow through and recognize that supernatural religion and life after death are among the things that bring people the most pleasure in life. So there’s a strong argument all the way through here, slashing and burning against Epicurean philosophy. And while of course we don’t particularly care what PLU Tar himself thought about all this, plu Tar preserves a lot of interesting information about Epicurus that we otherwise would not have this level of detail about. Now we’re going off on this excursion into plu tar for basically the same reasons that we’re doing the Cicero material. Most everyone who’s familiar with Epicurus at all has read the letter to Menoras and some of the basic epicurean material and the principal doctrines and the Vatican sayings. But not everybody is aware that there is a tremendous amount of additional material out there from which we can gain a greater understanding of what Epicurean philosophy is all about. It’s tremendously regrettable that we don’t have more of Epicurus own writings, but we do have the writings of Lucious, Andies of lander who are true epicurean, and we also have these enemies of Epicurus in Cicero and plu tar who have preserved for us the arguments of Epicurus while arguing against them. We started with Cicero because in the time that Cicero was writing, there were many strong epicureans, in fact, Cicero’s best friend, Atticus Cicero’s Associates, Cassius Long Genus and others with whom and to whom Cicero was writing. And so in Cicero’s work, Cicero actually brings into his dialogues epicurean speakers who will go on at length as Quais does in presenting the Epicurean point of view in a positive way By the time we get to plu tar. However, all of Plutarch’s material here is written as a discussion between overt enemies of Epicurus, and they quote him only enough to bring up the topic and make Epicurus basically look bad. So as we get into today’s discussion, Don, again, welcome back to the podcast and let’s talk about the background of Plu Tar and how he fits in with Cicero and other writers about Epicurus from the ancient world.
Joshua: Thank you for having me back. Yeah, this was a fascinating topic. I think I said the same thing about Cicero, that I’ll say about plu tar and is that it gives me great pleasure to know that they would be beside themselves to know that we are using their texts as a way to learn more about Epicurean philosophy. I think it would just drive them nuts. But plu tars interesting. The way that his essays are written really surprised me. I initially thought that Colo was a contemporary of plu tar almost not having known very much about the essays, and it amazes me that plu tar has such vehement for an essay written by Colos who was a pupil of Epicurus and plu tar himself is living several hundred years, three, 400 years after the beginning of the garden and the teaching of Epicurus and stuff that he can have that much antipathy towards the philosophy that he can still write several essays against these essays that Colos wrote just surprises me. But Plu Tar himself is an interesting individual. I will say that I enjoy some of his writings, his sayings of the Spartans and things like that are just fun to read. But my understanding is from what I read, that PLU Tar was a leading citizen and came from a wealthy family. He traveled extensively throughout the ancient world. There’s some talk of him meeting possibly some Roman emperors, that sort of thing. And he was also a priest of Apollo at Delphi and was also instrumental in reviving that site. I guess it had fallen into some disrepair and things, and he actually helped to revive the site, do some reconstruction, and was a priest of Apollo there at that site that we know of from the Oracle and that sort of thing. And I think that that definitely plays into his parts of his essays where he talks about the importance of the gods and paying respect to the gods, and people get so much pleasure from the gods and he had a vested interest in people part taking of the particular religion and that sort of thing. So I think that definitely is a way to see that particular frame that he’s writing in too. And one thing I did find interesting too is that from what I can see, he was also as anti stoic as he was anti epicurean. So the stoics did not get any relief from him either. So he was definitely a proponent and a student of Plato’s philosophy, and he was going all guns blazing, trying to tear down everything else that was against Blato.
Cassius: Yeah, Don, I think that’s a particularly important point because we don’t always stress this and new people to Epicurus don’t always pick it up very quickly, but there’s a major difference between the Platonist and the stoics. And the stoics to some extent agreed with Epicurus more on the issue of knowledge, the Epicureans and the stoics win agreement, that knowledge of this world and in this world is possible. And so frequently the academics, people like Cornes earlier on were attacking the stoics as much as they were attacking the epicurean for taking the position that it was possible to be certain about something in this world of material.
Joshua: I got the impression that the original essay that Colo wrote was talking about skepticism and that bent in philosophy, and that’s why he was saying that those philosophies don’t allow you to live because you can’t trust anything and all that kind of stuff. So that’s the impression that I get from that essay that Colo originally wrote. And then of course, this essay that we’re focusing on today is the one specifically where Plu Tar is saying, well, epic Cure’s philosophy doesn’t let you live either, and here’s why. And I thought that I didn’t like Cicero. Man, I find Plu Tart absolutely insufferable. So I like to read some of your other writings, man, but wow, you are a partisan to the nth degree,
Cassius: Right? One more word about that. There’s three major essays that have been preserved, and they’re in the single volume of the Loeb edition. There’s a shorter one on Living Unknown, and then there’s the one against Colos, as you said, which focuses on epistemology, on physics and so forth. And then today, which is focused on the ethics of pleasure. So there is a lot, but today’s focus is on pleasure as opposed to the skepticism and versus dogmatism and so forth. It can kind of be confusing because the title of today’s essay is generally referred to as According to Epicurus, life is Impossible. I think that lotus’s argument there that you can’t even live under the doctrines of the other philosophers is, as you say, directed mostly at the fact that the other philosophers are skeptics and they say you can’t really know anything with confidence, but today he tries to turn the tables on Epicurus in terms of pleasure. Plu tar starts the first couple of sections of this work saying that pleasure is an unsound basis for something to be called the good or the highest good of life because pleasure is something that is not firm. It’s basically a shadow. It’s something that is almost like a fme that doesn’t linger for very long, and so pleasure is not something that makes sense to claim to be the focus of life.
Joshua: And it seems to me that both Cicero and Plutarch seem to do, but they seem to just really always set up a straw man of Epicurus philosophy so they can knock it down easier. They never really dig into his expansive definition of pleasure and that you can either be in pleasure or you can be in pain. It seems like both plu, tar and Cicero are always saying, oh, this tiny sliver of this is what we’re going to refer to as pleasure and we’re going to use that completely throughout our essay, and we’re going to ignore all the other implications that Epicure brings up because it’s easier for us to knock down and it’s just so aggravating.
Cassius: Yeah, that’s exactly what I would pull out of as I read through this section. Three of the essay seems to really be where he gets in gear and attacking Epicurus, and that’s exactly where he goes at the beginning. He says that the epicurean base their claim to pleasure in the body, and that’s the horse that he’s going to ride throughout all of
Joshua: This. Exactly.
Cassius: He is not going to admit the wider definition of pleasure that Epicurus has. He’s going to try to come up with every quotation, every reference he can find that would indicate that what Epicurus is doing is focusing on the pleasures of the body because he can then say, Epicurus, well, there certainly are some pleasures in the body, but in terms of intensity, in terms of how long they last, the pains of the body are more significant than are the pleasures. And so it makes no sense to say that the removal of all pain is the definition of pleasure because as we all know, it’s impossible to get rid of the pains of life.
Joshua: We’re only mortal beings. We can only do what we can do. But one of the things that annoys me about those early sections, two sections three and four in the essay are when he sort of denigrates memory of bodily pleasures and by focusing on those transitory pleasures, and it’s like, well, you can’t remember the way they really happened and all this sort of thing. I think that you refer to that it’s an empty shadow or a dream, it’s a fme of the body’s pleasure is what the memory is. And I’m like, I don’t get that at all. I can relive pleasurable experiences that I’ve had in the past almost as vividly as whenever I experienced them. And I think that sort of shuffling off memory as a mere shadow of it really denigrates the ability to remember past pleasures and that sort of thing.
Cassius: Yeah. Don, on that point, this is something that I think you do a particularly good job of talking about in relation to Epicurus letter On his last day in section four, plu tar goes on the attack about the mental pleasures that Epicurus does talk about, and he says that there’s no way that these mental pleasures can rid us of bodily pains, but he goes into pointing out how Epicurus and other epicurean suffered the same kind of diseases that everybody else suffers and that when you have all these diseases, it’s just impossible to claim that your life is really pleasant. So if you don’t mind talking about that again and reminding what you pull out of the wording of that last letter, obviously Epicurus did not through the power of will make his kidney or other diseases go away. Let’s talk about that. Exactly.
Joshua: Exactly. Yeah. And from my reading of that, that letter where he talks about the pains are worse than he can ever imagine, nothing could be added to ‘em, that sort of thing. And the words that he uses leads me to think that, interpret it as that he wasn’t saying that his memories did away with the pain. He still felt the pain. He felt every bit of the pain. But what he could do was remember that he had lived his life well. He enjoyed his time with his friends, that he could array his memories against his pain. It didn’t make the pains go away, but it gave him a perspective on his life. It gave him a pleasure to remember those experiences in the midst of his pain and that sort of thing. So it’s not like he said that I can will my pain away by thinking these other things. It’s like I can remember these things if I’m happy with my life, I’m feeling pleasure with my life and I do battle against these pains with these memories that I can bring up and concentrate on
Cassius: What you’ve just referred to there I think is particularly important in terms of Epicurus considering himself to be happy there in that last day, in that condition even when he was under tremendous pain. And I think that that’s something that’s very important for us to point out to people who are relatively new to the philosophy that Epicurus is considering happiness in his own situation to include times when he is experiencing some amount of pain. And we’re going to talk in a few minutes further about absence of pain and so forth, but here is Epicurus on his last day claiming that it’s either among the happiest or simply a happy day even when he is experiencing these pains that are a part of life.
Joshua: And you remember too that from what I can gather from ERUs, that on that last day he was being attended to by his friends and his friends were taking care of him and they drew him the bath that he wanted to get in. They got him his wine and made sure that he was as comfortable as he could be and all that kind of stuff. So he had these people around him who cared about him, who loved him, and that’s another aspect of the whole thing that he knows that he’s lived his life in a way that these people still want to take care of him and care about him and love him and all this sort of thing. And so I think that that’s another aspect, knowing that you’ve lived your life well too.
Cassius: Yeah. Before we move to the absence of pain issue, I see in section six, I thought there was an interesting argument that PLU tar brought up that shed some light on what we read in principal doctrines for which a lot of people don’t particularly like this. It’s the issue about pain is usually short if intense or endurable if it is longer in time, and I think that Plutarch’s commentary here sheds some light on why that is given such a prominent position by Epicurus in that plu tar draws the comparison to the unjust man and says that in epicure in philosophy, a person who commits injustice is going to have to live in fear of punishment, and that epicure stresses that therefore that is why people will generally be just in their dealings, is because they don’t want to have to live in fear and they don’t want to have to deal with the pain of worrying that they’re going to be punished for their misdeeds. Putar uses that analogy in regard to bodily pain and says that Epicurus argument about happiness and pleasure fails because given that bodily pain does exist and is severe, epicureans have to live in fear of pain and that therefore is going to make their pleasant life in possible because they have to constantly be doing everything they can to avoid this monster of pain that they have identified as the worst thing in the world. Pain is terrible, and yet because they get sick, they know it’s going to come. So how can an epicurean even think about living happily when he’s constantly on the run from pain?
Joshua: Well, that’s the thing. It seems to me another straw man that he sets up because he takes this one topic and just blows it out of proportion. You and Josh were talking about this on a recent podcast episode about thinking about the most evil things that can happen to you and that sort of thing, and just dwelling on that day after day, minute after minute. I mean, if you do that, you’re just going to be miserable throughout your entire life. I think that as be curious, at least lets us be a little bit more realistic. It’s like, yeah, we’re mortal beings living in a material world and we’re going to get sick and we’re going to have pain and that sort of thing, but you structure your choices in such a way that you are hopefully going to lead to the greatest pleasure in the end as well. I think that it’s a way to look at life without being constantly in fear, which it sounds like what plu tar wants people to do. And I think it goes back too to the whole idea of that there are some things that you have control of and there are some things that are going to happen by chance, and there are some things that are just going to happen because they’re going to happen because we live in a material world. So the things that you have control over are the things that you have control over
Cassius: That goes in exactly the right direction. Epicurus has a realistic common sense understanding of what life is all about. He’s not saying that we can eliminate all pain from life, but he is saying that if you approach life in the right way, if you use reason and rationally make your arrangements and Live your life in ways that are going to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, if you remember that even when you have bodily pain, there’s going to be sources of mental pleasure that offset that and that remind you that life is worthwhile, that you can live a happy life even as a human being. You don’t have to be a God. You don’t have to be some kind of a superhuman connecting to life outside the cave, as Plato might say. You can live a happy life as a human being in ways that make sense because it is generally true that pain is manageable. Pain is not such a monster. It has no power to keep us in its grip eternally. It’s not something that we have to live in fear of. We’re going to live responsibly and with common sense to minimize it, but we’re not going to be slave to running away from pain any more than we are a slave to a particular type of pleasure that would lead us to disaster if we spent all our time pursuing it.
Joshua: Right. And I think just on a quick tangent, I think this is the difference between pain and suffering. Pain is unavoidable, pain is unavoidable in the material world, but whenever you layer, whenever you start focusing on it and you start obsessing about it, the mental suffering that you lay on top of your pain can sometimes be worse than the actual pain itself.
Cassius: Now, Don here as we move forward into Section seven is a part that I particularly wanted to talk with you about today because just as we’re talking about that Epicurus is realistic, that pain is going to intrude in life and we’re going to have to deal with it, there is an argument that Plutarch is going to make here that well, Epicurus talks about absence of pain, and the issue becomes one of understanding that phrase and not letting it consume everything else in the sense that just as plu tar has been hammering that it is impossible to escape pain in life. If you set up as your goal absence of pain to the uninitiated or to the people who don’t have a deeper understanding of what Epicurus is doing, you get the idea that if absence of pain is your goal, then in fact you should always do everything that is humanly possible to you to never endure any pain at all. That is not what epicure says. He does say sometimes you’re going to be choosing pain. But in this section seven Plutarch says that it’s ridiculous for the epicureans to argue that being without pain makes them equal to the gods. And he goes into an elaborate argument that even the animals who epicures uses as his example of how nature tells us in the young of all species that we should pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Plu tar makes the point that even the animals, once they eat and are no longer hungry once they drink and are no longer thirsty, that the animals don’t just sit down and go comatose at that point until they get hungry again or until they get thirsty again. They will sing, they will fly around, they will play with each other. They will obviously pursue these pleasures of action that we see all around us, that we know is out there as humans. We sing, we dance, we do all sorts of things to have pleasure, but that if you strictly follow Epicurus according to plu tar, you would never do any of that because your goal is absence of pain. Your goal here, according to Plutarch’s interpretation is not singing, dancing, having fun, enjoying life. Your goal is absence of pain. An absence of pain once attained means you’re not going to have anything to do with singing, dancing, or having a good time. Let’s talk about that for a few.
Joshua: It’s just so aggravating. Like you said, it’s epicurus according to plu tart. It’s just so aggravating that they take that phrase absence of pain and just run with it and try and use it as a ball of a Play-Doh to make their own little image of what they want it to mean. And we’ve talked about this numerous times on the podcast, if you only can experience two things when you’re alive, that if you can only experience pain or pleasure, that as long as you’re alive, you’re going to be experienced one of those two, if there is no middle state, the middle state is that you’re dead and you’re not experiencing anything. And I think that plu tars insistence on this very narrow definition of what it means to have absence of pain is just so aggravating.
Cassius: Yeah, Don, we’re not going to have time to read very much of plu tar in today’s text, but this one is so significant to me that I’m going to read quickly some of what plu tar is saying here and let you comment even further. I think what you’ve said already is the answer, but everybody I think would profit from understanding how much he hits this point, and so therefore how important he thinks it is
Joshua: Exactly, and that he thinks that he can use that as a cudgel. I mean, he’s using that phrase absence of pain as a club and just hammering and hammering and hammering. Meanwhile, Epicurus is standing over here and going, man, you’re exerting yourself a little too much, I think.
Cassius: Yes, yes, yes. And of course, we are going to defend Epicurus viewpoint on absence of pain, but it’s clear that Epicurus has a viewpoint and plu talk has a very, very different viewpoint of what they’re talking about, and we therefore need to understand what those differences would be. But here’s what Plu tar says in Section seven in a fairly sarcastic manner, at least starting out. He says, so this single thing to escape evil, he says, is the supreme good for there’s no room to lodge this good in where nothing of what is painful and afflicting goes out like unto this is that of Epicurus where he says, the very essence of good arises from the escaping of bad and a man’s recollecting considering and rejoicing within himself that this is befallen him for what occasions transcending joy, he says, is some great impending evil escaped. And in this slice, the very nature and essence of the good, if man attained to it a right and contained himself when he is done and not ramble and prayed idly about it, oh, the rare satisfaction and Felicity, these men in enjoy that can thus rejoice for having undergone no evil and endured neither sorrow nor pain, have they not reasoned thank you to value such things as these and to talk as they’re want when they style themselves in mortals and equal to Gods. And when through the excessiveness and transcend of the blessed things they enjoy, they rave even to the degree of whooping and hollering for the very satisfaction that to the shame of all mortals, they’ve been the only men who could find out this celestial and divine good that lies in the exemption from all evil, so that their beatitude differs a little from that of swine and sheep when they place it in the mere tolerable and contented state, either of the body or of the mind upon the body’s account. But even the wiser and more ingenious sort of brute do not esteem escaping of evil their last end when they have taken their past, they’re disposed next by fullness to singing, and they divert themselves with swimming and flying, and their gaity and sprites prompt them to entertain themselves with attempting to counterfeit all sorts of voices and notes. And then they make their caresses to one another by skipping and dancing one towards another nature, inciting them after they have escaped evil to look after some good, or rather to shake off what they find uneasy and disagreeing as an impediment to their pursuit of something better and more congenial. And so in Section eight, plu Tart goes on and says, Epicurus deprives us of these things that the animals themselves do. But what he’s done in the part that I’ve just read is largely sarcastically say, should we not just give thanks to Epicurus because he of all men has recognized what nobody else has ever recognized that all we have to do is get rid of pain and we will be at the height of the glories of the gods.
Joshua: Oh my heaven. It’s just so frustrating. I do find it interesting there, the part that he quotes up hear to say the very essence of good arises from escaping him bad and that sort of thing, that to me echoes exactly what Lucious says in his work about standing on a cliff and seeing a shipwreck or seeing a battle and knowing that you’re not involved in that and that you’re lucky not to have to experience those particular misfortunes. That’s the situation. You can feel bad for someone who has been in a shipwreck or a hurricane or something like that. But at the same time, I think you can also go, man, I feel so lucky for not having been there or done that or that sort of thing. And I think that’s the situation the Epicures quote is talking about, but plu tar takes that and says, oh, well, you’re saying that, oh, you feel so great because you haven’t experienced any pain whatsoever and you’ve avoided all pain. And I don’t think that’s at all what that quotation is saying, but plu tar is taking it and just extrapolating it out of all bounds that it’s actually referring to.
Cassius: Yeah, Don, that’s a very good parallel, and I was thinking before we started today that I wanted to make sure we brought that up, that Lucretius in his poem at the beginning of Book one sets forth very clearly how Venus motivates the animals and humanity to do things through the active pleasures that everyone is pursuing. And then at the beginning of book two, he says that it is sweet also to have these mental understandings and pleasures of realizing that you are able to enjoy your life without the fear of all of these disasters that other people tell you have to be encountered. So both of the first two books of Lucretius make this point that pleasure is both of body and of mind, and just as Lucretius does not at the beginning of book two do anything to take away from the pleasures of the body, he’s simply adding the pleasures of the mind. Epicurus does not get rid of the pleasures of the body. He just adds to them the pleasures of the mind to come up with a more complete and full picture of pleasure.
Joshua: Exactly. Exactly. And that’s inconvenient for both plu Tars argument and Cicero’s argument, so they conveniently brush that aside.
Cassius: And so just to make sure we cover it and leave no ambiguity on this point, to say that Epicurious tells us not to do the things that the animals do in terms of singing and dancing or embracing each other or playing is absolutely ridiculous because Epicurus does not tell us to get rid of those things,
Joshua: Even Plutarch later on that the epicurean took pleasure in the festivals and that sort of thing.
Cassius: Absolutely, absolutely.
Joshua: So I’m like, you can’t have it both ways. So many times, plu tar is saying one thing and then a few paragraphs later, he’ll say something completely opposite to that and hope that you don’t remember that you just read what you read a couple paragraphs before. It’s just so frustrating.
Cassius: And plu Tar continues to hammer the same argument in Section eight by basically saying that by making escape from evil, by making absence of pain, your essence and consummation of the good, you’ve basically drained life of all of the really good things in life. And you’ve made yourself basically the equivalent of a criminal who’s just been released from prison. And of course, criminals released from prison are very happy about that, but the life of a criminal just released from prison is not the highest idea of how most people will want to spend their time. Yes, we want all pleasures, including relief from pain, but there’s so much more to life other than getting yourself out of jail, so to speak.
Joshua: And that’s the frustrating thing. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I remember Epicure saying that he can’t conceive of the good without pleasing forms and pleasing sounds and all that sort of thing. Absolutely. You just can’t, can’t have it both ways. Plu tar just seems to be notorious for this, that he goes on and on about that. They’re just sitting around and they feel their bellies, and then they don’t do anything else. And then later on or in another essay he’ll talk about, oh, they’re just botched orgies and just, oh, they’re just terrible, and they just do all these profligate things. And I’m like, which is it? Pick a lane, buddy.
Cassius: Exactly. Don, that’s a very important point. They’re arguing out of both sides of their mouth, they’re making inconsistent claims about Epicurus. On the one hand, he’s a reprobate old man who’s chasing after women and can’t give up his food and sex and music and dance. On the other hand, he’s an aesthetic who says, no, you should not have anything but absence of pain. And those two things are not reconcilable other than in the minds of somebody who is trying to attack Epicurus and use any argument that he possibly can find.
Joshua: Yeah, they’re just throwing the spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. It seems sometimes.
Cassius: And Don, another theme of what I wanted to hit on today in the brief time we have is this, it seems to me that Plutarch here is doing much of what Cicero was doing in terms of attempting to divide pleasures against themselves rather than looking at what epicure said and say that sometimes you’re going to choose pain, sometimes you’re going to choose pleasure, sometimes you’re going to eat fish and so forth, but you’re not going to eat fish constantly. You’re going to let the circumstances dictate as to what to pursue at a particular time with the goal of maximizing pleasure in the end, but not choosing every pleasure, not choosing every pleasure, every moment. And in fact, like I say, sometimes choosing pain because you rationally are going to understand that certain activities are going to lead you to disaster. As much as we value the pleasures of a proper philosophy and realizing that we are free from fears of punishing gods and burning in hell, there are going to be times when that’s not the thing to focus on. If you’re living in Naples, Florida and there’s a hurricane bearing down, you’re not going to want to sit there and choose that moment to pull out the letter to ous and read about the atoms and the voids you’re going to get out of town before the hurricane hits. There’s a time and a place for all sorts of pleasures and actions in Epicurean philosophy. And so when you set pleasure in the general sense as your goal, you coordinate pleasure towards that goal. And they’re not enemies of each other,
Speaker 3: But
Cassius: I think Cicero is a lawyer and Plutarch is a priest of Apollo or whatever. They realize.
Joshua: Exactly. Yeah.
Cassius: They realize that it’s an effective argument to divide and conquer, so to speak. They know that some people like sun pleasures and some people like other pleasures, and they like to go to one side and say, well, Epicurus has made you a second class citizen, or Epicurus has made you the prime citizen, and these other pleasures are less worthy than you are. And by dividing these pleasures against themselves as if one is bad and another is good, you create an unworkable situation and something that makes no sense. And so it can be an effective argument. So it has to be responded to. I think by emphasizing that pleasure as a wide concept embraces all of these things at the right time and the right place in the right way.
Joshua: I’ve always seen Epicurean philosophy as a philosophy of personal responsibility that you’re responsible for charting your course in many ways, but he says too that some things just happened to you and you don’t have any control over them, but your reactions to those things are in your control too. That sounds stoic, but that seemed to me to be a general sort of thing between the stoics and the epicureans taken into completely different paths. But I think that Epicurus always says, you make your choices
Cassius: And the stoics restrict whatever freedom of choice, they do admit down to a very minimum because they’ll say that everything is being ordained by God or to fade and set in motion by the prime mover and intended for beneficial results and so forth.
Joshua: It’s more of an accept what happens to you sort of thing.
Cassius: And while Epicurus is saying, you’re responsible for your reaction to it, when he says that, he means that you can plan ahead. You can plan your reactions to it. You can do everything you can to overcome these bad situations. And even though you cannot avoid each one, that doesn’t mean that you’re going to say that, well, my mind refuses to acknowledge that my kidney stones are extremely painful.
Speaker 3: You’re
Cassius: Going to feel your emotions, you’re going to be more in touch with reality because you are so concerned about realizing that the senses are not lying to you and that what they’re telling you is something you need to be paying attention to. You can’t just override them by saying that my willpower will make them cease to exist because it won’t. The wise man’s going to feel things more intensely than other people do because he’s going to recognize that reality cannot be escaped by saying that your mind can make things go away, it can adjust, it can help you reorganize your world, but it’s not magic. It’s not a divine thing that has the power to make pain go away. And Don, before we move past that point, I think Brian has brought this up to us recently in some passages that he has cited from the epic curia material and so forth. One of the points that is included here about metro Dous and Epicurus talking about absence of pain is that especially metro Dous, I think has explained this concept of absence of pain by pointing out that the issue is that once pain is driven out, there is no further room for pleasure. Now, the reason I think that is important is because again, it’s not a perspective in which all of your attention is on pain and you’re simply removing one pain, we’re moving another pain, we’re moving another pain. The reason that this is working towards the goal is that Epicurus position, there are only two feelings, and when a pain is removed, it is replaced by a pleasure. Now, when you only talk about pain and pleasure, we’re not presenting what pain and what pleasure we’re talking about individually. We’re just talking about them generically that whatever experiences pain is pain, whatever experiences pleasure is pleasure. The point you arrive at when you have driven all pain away from your life is that you have your life and it is full of pleasures. It is not just empty at that point. That’s the continu
Joshua: Issue. Exactly.
Cassius: The vase analogy, the jar analogy. You have driven out pain from your jar by filling your jar with pleasures up to the rim where the pleasures start to spill over again. You have not emptied your jar of pains by draining everything out of your jar so as to have an empty jar. You don’t have an empty jar out of the process of driving pain away. You have a full jar full of
Joshua: Pleasures. Good point. Good point. Yeah, and it’s basically, it’s that whole thing where there’s only two different kinds of experiences you can have, and that’s what really gets lost in plu tar and Cicero, the whole gang.
Cassius: Right. So by the time we get to about section 10 of this essay, plu Tar is going to turn to the argument that Epicurus praise of pleasure is not only wrong for the reasons we’ve discussed previously, but Epicurus even under his own theory, is ignoring the greatest source of pleasures in life, such as a proper understanding from Plutarch’s point of view of what happens to us when we die and our proper relationship with the gods. Now, there’s all sorts of interesting aspects of this because of course we have to deal with the reason the Epicurus rejects these arguments is because he doesn’t believe they’re true, not because he doesn’t think they’re productive of pleasure. So it is interesting to observe that Epicurus is not just so totally gold driven that he’s going to embrace any argument that’s possible to enhance pleasure. He is only going to endorse and embrace those arguments which are truly effective and which he considers to be true to pursue pleasure.
Joshua: Right, right. Yeah. Being a priest of Apollo, he has a vested interest in people continuing to see the gods as bestowing blessings and reigning down curses.
Cassius: Right now around Section 10, when Pluto starts talking about the memories of our dead friends, he also starts throwing in the pleasures of mathematics and
Speaker 3: History
Cassius: And geometry and so forth as being more pleasurable than the pleasures of the body. But he’s introducing this switch in emphasis by going back to the fact that there’s more to life than bodily pleasure, and Epicurus is not paying sufficient attention to the pleasures of the mind,
Joshua: And that’s just not the case. Like I said, he just sets up straw man after straw man after straw man.
Cassius: Yeah. He specifically says that Epicurus is saying, don’t pursue mathematics, don’t pursue history, don’t pursue geometry, don’t pursue music, don’t pursue poetry. You should set sail and fly from these liberal arts and just simply indulge yourself in wine, women in song, the bodily pleasures of the moment, and that this is of course hypocritical of Epicurus since he spends all of his time talking about going to public events and getting enjoyment out of those and writing all these books where he’s discussing these things. How much of a hypocrite can epicurus be according to plu tar? Again, you have these inconsistent arguments going on,
Joshua: But go ahead. Exactly, exactly. And I think that one of the things that plu tar is that avoiding having epicurus say is that you can take pleasure in the performances and the public spectacles and that sort of thing, but you don’t have to know or you don’t have to engage in critical analysis and music theory and how to play an instrument and all this sort of thing. You can just take pleasure in the sensory enjoyment of the whole thing too. So I mean, it seems like plu tar is like, well, you have to break it down and you have to compare this composition to this composition and how these poets said these certain things. And it’s like, no, you just let it go and enjoy it and take enjoyment in the moment that plu tar, everything has to be analyzed and criticized and broken down, and that’s the real pleasure. It’s like, oh, these baser pleasures of taking enjoyment in music and song and that sort of thing. Again, I think he dodes too much.
Cassius: Yeah, Don, you’ve hit that point again, that plu tar is attempting to divide us and say that some pleasures are better than others. I suspect that the truth is, and this is something that Francis Wright talks about, I think in a way that is probably accurate as well, that in fact there are some people who really get a lot of pleasure in solving mathematical problems or studying something in the details of something. And if you get pleasure out of that, then absolutely that pleasure is as desirable as any other kind of pleasure. So studying poetry, if you enjoy it, is something great to do. Just studying history or reading literature or pursuing any of these sciences or liberal arts that Epicurus clearly was aware of himself. You’ve got Epicurus writing about all these things. You’ve got Phil Edemas, you’ve got Lucretius, you’ve got Dogen of, or every one of these people is obviously educated about the details of these things. And so the point is not don’t get an education. The point is to remember that you’re getting an education for the sake of pleasure. It’s the constant theme about virtue itself. You don’t pursue virtue for the sake of virtue. You pursue virtue for the sake of living happily through pleasure. You don’t pursue studying music or studying anything else for the thing itself. It’s not the slogan from the movie opening about art for the sake of art.
Joshua: It’s
Cassius: Not art for the sake of art. It’s art for the sake of pleasure and epicurean viewpoint.
Joshua: Yeah, no, I think you’re absolutely right. Yep.
Cassius: And in that context, plu tar gets back into pitting the pleasures of the mind against the pleasures of the body. And around 15 says that the pleasures of food and drink are of the body, are nothing in comparison to the heroic actions of the great men of the past now, which is not to say that the great men of the past didn’t do things that were very pleasurable or that we get a lot of pleasure about thinking about the great men of the past and what they did. It’s just that the pleasures of the body are pleasurable. Two, and you don’t have to only one or the other. You don’t do one solely for the sake of the other, which is a big issue because there certainly has been a lot of discussion in the past about how actions are taken arguably for the sake of resolving them in the sense that you eat because you want to get rid of hunger, you drink because you want to get rid of thirst. There is a lot of discussion philosophically about whether one action is the cause or the goal of another action and so forth. But in this generic term, pleasure is for the sake of happiness, and all of the pleasures are pleasurable and therefore all desirable to the extent they take you towards this goal.
Joshua: Exactly. Exactly. I know we’re sort of hopping around. I would encourage anybody who’s interested to actually go and read these actual essays, they’re not that long. They’re just longer than you can read the whole thing in an hour long podcast and go into anything. But I think that one of the parts that really annoyed me was whenever he was talking about the memory of loved ones and that sort of thing, and it really, really annoyed me. So I’m going to go off on a little diatribe here. The section, I believe it’s section 27 in the essay, and I’ll just read just a snippet of it here. If then as epicure says, the remembrance of a dead friend be a thing every way complacent, we may easily from Vince, imagine how great a joy they deprive themselves of who think they do not, but embrace and pursue the phantoms and shades of their deceased familiars that have in them neither knowledge nor sense, but who never expect to be with them again, or to see their dear father and dear mother and dear sweet wife, nor have any hopes of that familiarity and dear converse, they have that think of the soul with Pythagoras, Plato and Homer, and it just annoys me to no end that he’s like, I don’t expect to talk with my deceased loved ones with my father and that sort of thing, but remembering them, remembering the times with them brings me a lot of joy. I can accept that they’re not living in some afterlife. They’re not living with Pythagoras and Plato and Homer and that sort of thing, but that doesn’t diminish the pleasure of that recollection. And so I think that it’s one of those things where he’s setting up this thing where they go, oh, well, the Epicureans are taking away the chance to talk with dead loved ones and dead family members, and they’re just phantoms and shades and oh, they’re taking away the promise of the afterlife. And that’s sort of thing. It’s like, no, what epicure does is put the emphasis on the life that we’re living now that you have to have those relationships now. You have to make those memories now because at some point they’re going to be gone. They’re not going to exist. And I put on the forum whenever I was responding to this, I sort of ended that section with you. So with all due respect, bite me, Plutarch, you, insufferable jerk.
Cassius: Yes, indeed. Dawn, that discussion leads us into where I think we begin to set the stage for our final analysis here of the time we have available today. It leads into an argument that we don’t spend a lot of time with. We talk about pleasure and pain and the practical realities of pursuing pleasure, avoiding pain and so forth. But what plu tar comes up with as he begins to close his essay is he’s no longer pitting pleasures against pleasure. He’s sort of pitting pleasures against truth. And he’s looking at Epicurus and he’s saying, Epicurus, your life would be more pleasurable if you believed that there was an eternal God creating and organizing and supervising the universe. And if you believed that there is a life after death which you will spend eternity in associating with people that you like. So we’re going to have to deal with this ultimate question of, if pleasure is our goal, why don’t we pursue supernatural religion and why don’t we pursue a belief in life after death? Because those things are among the greatest pleasures, especially that normal people, simple people, people who don’t spend all their time pursuing philosophy. That’s what the great majority believes, gives them the greatest pleasure in life. Who are you epicurus to deprive these people of the only comfort that so many of them have? Not only let’s go further. Let’s go the whole way here with this argument. Epicurus, some people are fortunate in this world and they have a lot of things and have a lot of enjoyment now, but a lot of people are not fortunate. They spend their time poor, diseased, oppressed. The only thing they have to hope for in life is something better beyond the grave, or that there is a supernatural God who’s going to appear and vindicate them. Are you telling me that you want to take away the only comfort that these people have by telling them that there is no God? There is no life after death trial, Allah, you just take that home with you and live with it? Because that’s the truth, is that what you want to do, epicures and even those people who have something more in life, especially the rich people who have all sorts of conveniences in life, they can’t take any comfort in your position because they’re going to lose these good things that they have. So whether you’re fortunate and rich or poor and oppressed all across the board, you’re doing everything you can to make these people’s lives miserable or precarious. You’re demoralizing them. You’re taking away everything that they find to be good in life. And you tell me that you are the philosopher of pleasure. You’re the most painful philosopher you could possibly be. Why should I listen to you in what you’re saying makes no sense. If in fact, absence of pain and if in fact pleasure is your goal, you’re doing it exactly the wrong way. How would you respond to that, Don?
Joshua: That was quite passionate. I’m like, oh my. Do I need to rethink my entire position? Oh my heavens, what’s up? It just sets up the wrong frame. I think believing in something that is not true doesn’t really give you comfort in the end, I don’t think. I mean, I know of people who have the thought of the afterlife and it’s like, oh, someday we’ll see you again and all this. I know that it works, but it seems hollow to me in any number of ways, and I think it also always takes an emphasis off of the present life. But you’re living too. I think it’s kind of almost lets you off the hook in some ways. It’s like, oh, well, I have my reward in the afterlife or something like that, or I’ll be rewarded in the afterlife, that sort of thing. It’s like, no, it’s like this is all you got. This is the life you have to live, and if it needs to be improved, it’s up to you to improve it. It’s up to you to make the changes that you need to make because this is it. And the last line about capable of no higher good than the escape of evil, it goes back to that whole misinterpreting, that passage, that lucretius quotes and that he quotes from Epicurus and that sort of thing. It doesn’t mean what I think he thinks it means, and it’s so circular in the way that he misrepresents things, and it is just so frustrating,
Cassius: Don. One of the ways that this comes home in my understanding and analysis of the whole problem is it enforces to me the importance of realizing the emphasis that epicure has placed on the physics and even the epistemology, even the canons from the point of view that most people come to Epicurus to hear about pleasure and pain and how to live happily. But if Dogen Ous is right, what got Epicurus moving down the road of philosophy in the first place was the issue of chaos and the nature of the universe and wanting to understand the truth of the way things really are. That’s what Lucius’s poem and Epicurus books were named after. The nature of things and on nature, we want to know the reality of things,
Speaker 3: And
Cassius: We don’t put it quite the same way Pluto does today, but if you’re a younger person, and I know you’re going to with great fondness, embrace the analogy that I’m about to bring up here, Don. But a lot of people today will talk about an experience machine or hooking themselves up in a laboratory to some type of situation that would produce pure pleasure. There is, in my mind, a great commonality between the experienced machine hypothetical and this challenge that plu tar is raising here because plu tar is saying, go with me here epic ears. So you don’t even have to admit that there’s a real supernatural God or there’s a real life after death. Just stay with me here and realize that people get great pleasure out of these things and thinking about there being a supernatural God is going to make society better because people get worried about being punished by the gods. Well, you should be promoting supernatural religion Epicurus, because you say that it’s fear of punishment that prevents people from doing injustice. So you should be out there with me at the temple of Apollo at Delphi telling everybody that God’s going to punish you if you do wrong. So Plutarch is setting out this challenge, put away truth and reality and the nature of things epicurus, and just follow your own instinct to pursue pleasure and let it take you wherever you want to go. Put aside all this moralizing about good and bad and evil and pain and pleasure and canons, and my gosh, put aside that physics that makes no sense. You claim to follow Democrats at one moment and the next moment you throw him out and say He’s basically an idiot, throw away all that stuff epicurus and pursue pleasure regardless of what you think the nature of the universe would be. And I think that’s a challenge that has to be met as well. I think Epicurus would reject it and say, there’s no way you should go in that direction because it won’t work. But I think Epicurus would come at it even more from saying just that it won’t work because it’s not true. Going back to his own upbringing and interesting chaos, I think we don’t admit truth is an enemy of pleasure. I don’t think truth is an enemy of pleasure. They go hand in hand.
Joshua: Agreed. Yeah, no, that’s well put. Well put.
Cassius: So Donna, what other ways might we suggest someone who’s hearing Plutarch’s argument go ahead and believe in God? Go ahead and believe in life after death because it’ll make you happier to live that way.
Joshua: Well, you having lobbed the ball over to my side of the net, I mean, I will sort of remind you that even in the letter of Manus, I mean, Epicurus says you do better to believe in the Gods and that sort of thing than to be stuck in a deterministic universe and that sort of thing. He doesn’t endorse the position, but he’s like, if it makes you happier to believe that and you can’t accept what I’m telling you, it’s like, okay, you can do it. I don’t agree with you, but I think that it still brings a pleasure to whoever believes it that I think that he would say, well, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree, but at least you’re going to be happy. So I think that’s one way to look at it as well. But I think that you’re absolutely right that he’s trying to, in his philosophy, build on a foundation of here’s how the universe works and here’s the laws that we’re working with in the material world, and here’s how I’m building up my philosophy from the ground up kind of thing. And I never thought of it before I became a member of the forum, but I think you’re right that I think that you have to look at those building blocks that support the whole edifice. And you can’t just come in on the top floor of the ethics and the letter to Manus and go, oh, I got this. I know what’s going on here. I mean, you really have to look at the foundations and the structure that undergirds of the whole thing too.
Cassius: Yeah, that’s right Don. And as I’m looking at the final sections of Plutarch’s essay here, that’s kind of where he ends up, is on this issue and challenge of Epicurus. Your philosophy is demoralizing and dispiriting the idea that there is no God looking after us, the idea that we are not going to survive death and for an eternity we cease to exist. That’s about as demoralizing and depressing an attitude as anybody could possibly have, and it harms everybody to do this. And then to quote him one more time as we begin to conclude today, PLU tar says so large a field and one of so great pleasures, Epicurus holy cuts off when he destroys the hopes and graces, we should derive from the gods and by that extinguishes, both in our speculative capacity, the desire for knowledge, and in our active capacity, the love of glory and confines, and to bases our nature to a poor narrow thing, and that not cleanly either to wit the content the mind receives by the body as if it were capable of no higher good than the escape of evil. So he summarizes everything in this argument that saying that absence of pain is the goal of life, means that what you’re trying to do is to make sure you never suffer a moment of bodily pain. And if that is your goal, Epicurus, you cut yourself off from the greatest pleasures of life, which include not only belief in the gods and the belief in life after death, but in the heroic actions, deeper mental experiences that all of us know exist and is possible to us, but which you are trying to cut off by saying that our goals should be absence of pain.
Joshua: And again, he’s defining that absence of pain so narrowly that it’s easy for him to knock down because that does sound sort of demoralizing and that sort of thing. The way Plutarch writes it, it’s like, yeah, I can see why you’re railing against this, but that’s not the point. It’s just so frustrating.
Cassius: Well, enduring frustration seems to come with the life of a study of epicurean philosophy because it is so frustrating to hear people misrepresent, misunderstand, categorize him in ways that seem to have nothing to do with the way Epicurus really meant all this to go. But I do think that it’s possible, and Don, you, and I’ve discussed this a little bit recently, that that’s one of the things that we’re doing at the Epicurean Friends form, I think, which is a more productive way of pursuing this. Rather than just read one letter, put it down and say, well, that’s nice. Let’s move on to something else. There’s a lot of material that can be taken and analyzed and brought back to create a much more full understanding of what Epicurus was talking about. I mean, to some extent, that’s what the epicurean themselves were doing. That’s what Epicurus was doing. Writing all these books and letters, what Lucretius was doing, writing his poem, what Dogen of WAN was doing with his wall is going out and interacting with other people with these issues, and he’s finding new ways to express them and getting a lot of pleasure out of doing that. They enjoyed bringing all this to the attention of other people and getting the benefit out of it.
Joshua: Exactly, and one of the frustrating things about looking at this is that we only have one side of the conversation, and even that we only have just a small percentage of the anti epicurean side of the conversation. Back in the day, I’m sure it was much more of a dialogue, and there was much more the treatises flying back and forth between the schools and going out into the general public, and that it was much more of a, here’s my position on this, well, here’s my position. Well, here’s how you got my position wrong. And it was even in the Ara in Athens, you would’ve had people conversing with each other and that sort of thing. You would’ve had conversations going on in the garden. You would’ve had conversations going on in the Stowe. It was much more a give and take of ideas and that sort of thing. Whereas now we’re reading one sliver of the anti side of the argument and trying to piece together what the other side was. That’s one of the frustrations that you have with studying anything from the ancient world. We’re lucky to have the texts that we have, but again, so much has been lost to the sands of time, so to speak. But that’s one of the things I think that is really interesting to dig into Cicero and Plu tar and pull these things out. It’s like, oh, I see the thread where Metro Doors was going, and I see the thread UR was going, and to know that PLU Tar and Cicero had these texts in front of them, and they were quoting from them. They had the actual texts with them. It’s just so tantalizing and frustrating at the same time. One thing I do want to bring up is that I do find plu tar interesting to read some of his other stuff. If anybody ever gets a chance to read his sayings of the Spartans, there’s some great one-liners in there from the Spartans that he’s preserved. So PLU Tar has done a service in preserving some of that material. He’s done a service that he would be aggravated about preserving some of the epicurean texts and snippets that we were able to have last to us and that sort of thing. So the fact that these ancient authors have been preserved for centuries is amazing in and of itself, and that we have them to dig into, I think is just very cool. And I’m glad I had the opportunity to dig into this particular one with you today.
Cassius: Yeah, I remember I had a copy of Plutarch’s Lives of these contrasting lives of these great Romans and Greeks, and yeah, there’s a tremendous amount of good material in here. So it’s kind of interesting to realize that somebody like Plu Tar could been so smart and so well-educated forth to realize that that person has such a strong antipathy towards Epicurus and Epicurean philosophy. Sort of the same way with Cicero. It’s hard to deny that Cicero was a major figure and an extremely intelligent person, as is plu tar, and yet they came to these conclusions that are very, very different than did Epicurus. So it certainly shows that there’s a lot of difference of opinion to get to the bottom of and make decisions ourselves,
Joshua: And it gives me, I don’t know whether their hope is the right word, but I find it interesting too that Plu Tar is writing in almost 400 years after Epicurious time, and he still felt strongly enough that the Epicurean School was still strong enough that he felt the need, that he had to counter it with these essays that he wrote, and to know that that was a tradition from establishment of the garden in Athens over several centuries. And Plu Tar was still mad enough about the fact that the Epicureans were strong enough to challenge the Platonists. And now here we come today and it’s like, oh, Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, they’re the only philosophers you need to know. Where’s, back in the day, Plato was fighting for the survival of the Platonist philosophy. So I think that’s just to sort of put things into perspective from the ancient world.
Cassius: Yeah, there’s so much interesting interplay between Aristotle versus Plato, and there’s agreement, there’s disagreements between them, but most of that is lost on most of us today. But as you dig into it, compare it to what Epicurus was saying and so forth, it becomes much easier to understand what the fighting was all about.
Joshua: Exactly. Exactly what the fighting was all about.
Cassius: What the fighting was all about. Yes, indeed. Okay. Well, thank you for being here with us today, Don. This has been a great discussion of Plu Tar, and we’ll come back to it in the future as time allows, but I think this excursion into it today has been well worthwhile, so that our listeners will know that this is something that they can get a lot out of if they’ll take the time to go read these essays.
Joshua: Yeah. This is our Plutarch Amous Bouche.
Cassius: Yes. Yes. Alright, well, with that, let’s bring today’s episode to a close. We invite everyone as always, to drop by the Epicurean Friends Forum and let us know if they have any questions or comments about this or anything else regarding Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.