Episode 296 - Ancient Criticisms Of Epicurean "Absence of Pain" Echo In The Modern World
Date: 08/22/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4687-episode-296-ancient-criticisms-of-epicurean-absence-of-pain-echo-in-the-modern-w/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”In this solo episode — with Joshua and Dawn both away — Cassius returns to Plutarch’s essay “That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible” for a slower, more careful reading of sections seven and eight, then adds a modern parallel from Paul Elmer More’s Hellenistic Philosophies (1923), a book cited by Norman DeWitt. More poses the central challenge: what can be said of a philosophy that begins by regarding pleasure as the only good and ends by emptying pleasure of all positive content? Cassius argues that both Plutarch and More commit the same error — accepting Cicero’s framing that Epicurus’s “absence of pain” designates a condition of nothingness rather than a fully positive state. The episode works through the full-cup model: the goal is a jar filled to capacity with pleasure, not an evacuated vessel. Plutarch’s animal argument (that animals seek song and play after eating, not mere absence of hunger) is turned back against him: Epicurus agrees that animals pursue positive pleasure. More’s intellectual lineage — from Aristippus through Epicurus — is traced, and his claim that Epicurus was ultimately forced into a “purely defensive attitude toward life” is examined and rejected. The episode closes with Horace’s Latin line Sperne voluptates: nocet empta dolore voluptas (“Scorn pleasures: pleasure bought at the price of pain is hurtful”) as a crux: if that line correctly represents Epicurus, the philosophy is indistinguishable from Stoicism; but read in full context, Epicurus says the opposite — pleasure is the beginning and end of the blessed life, and pains are sometimes worth enduring for the greater pleasures they bring.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 296 of Lucretius Today. This is the podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts and 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. Once again this week Joshua is away, and in the absence of our other podcasters, today I’d like to go back over some of the most important points raised by Plutarch in our discussion last week and add to Plutarch a modern interpretation of those criticisms from a writer mentioned by Norman DeWitt in his book Epicurus and His Philosophy. That writer is a man named Paul Elmer More, who was formerly literary editor of the Nation magazine and who wrote a book in 1923 called Hellenistic Philosophies.
Cassius: The only part that DeWitt quoted from that book was a question that More asked: “What in a word is to be said of a philosophy that begins with regarding pleasure as the only positive good and ends by emptying pleasure of all positive content?” Today we’ll go back into what Plutarch had to say about this question and then get More’s elaboration on that argument. Many people who study Epicurus think that the only issue involved in Epicurean philosophy is how to maximize pleasure and minimize pain and how to go about doing that. And while that is true to a large extent, there are much deeper issues involved. In our work reviewing Cicero’s On Ends, the Tusculan Disputations, and On the Nature of the Gods, we’ve been devoting a lot of attention to Cicero’s formulation of these criticisms, but the Plutarch criticisms are particularly important because they’re very focused and clearly stated, and they really bring to a head the questions that have to be answered before you can decide whether it makes sense to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.
Cassius: The first thing for us to do today is to go back to the Plutarch material from sections seven and eight. Today I’ll read through it more slowly so that we can digest exactly what Plutarch is saying. Then we’ll turn to More’s elaboration. We’ll be using today the translation in the Loeb edition prepared by Benedict Einarson and Philip De Lacy. So let’s start with section seven, and I’ll comment as we go forward. Plutarch writes: “Not only is the basis that they assume for the pleasurable life untrustworthy and insecure, it is quite trivial and paltry as well, inasmuch as their things delighted in, their good, is an escape from ills, and they say that they can conceive of no other — and indeed that our nature has no place at all in it — which to put its good except the place left when its evil is expelled.”
Cassius: “As Metrodorus asserts in his reply to the Sophists.” Now here I’ll stop and say that the theme Plutarch is going to pursue is that the good Epicureans have identified as their goal of life — pleasure as absence of pain — is something trivial and paltry and not worth pursuing. However, the way that Plutarch establishes this as the Epicurean goal is going to be a very great assistance as we go forward. So let me emphasize this next section, because he’s quoting from Metrodorus in his reply to the Sophists: “Hence this very thing is the good — escape from the evil — for there is nowhere for the good to be put when nothing painful to the body or distressing to the mind is any longer making way for it.” Plutarch is going to proceed to give a quote from Epicurus, but this full quote from Metrodorus already contains within it the answer that Plutarch is going to ignore. Yes, Metrodorus says that escape from evil, the absence of pain, is the good — but that’s not all Metrodorus says.
Cassius: He says, “For there is nowhere for the good to be put when nothing painful to the body or distressing to the mind is any longer making way for it.” Now, this is a very important explanation for the meaning of what Epicurus has to say in the Letter to Menoeceus at line 130, which is one of the most famous passages among people who read Epicurus today — because it fits into the categorization of Epicurean philosophy that follows what Plutarch is saying here. But Metrodorus’s statement that the reason absence of pain is the goal is that it means you have reached a point where there is no longer any place to put pleasure explains what Epicurus is saying in his own letter to Menoeceus. This is a section that causes a lot of confusion and seems to point in the direction that all you need to do in life is somehow get rid of your pain and that in itself is a full explanation of the goal of life.
Cassius: Here’s the text: “The right understanding of these facts enables us to refer all choices and avoidance to the health of the body and the soul’s freedom from disturbance, since this is the aim of the life of blessedness. For it is to obtain this end that we always act, namely to avoid pain and fear. And when this is once secured for us, all the tempest of the soul is dispersed, since the living creature has not to wander as though in search of something that is missing and to look for some other thing by which he can fulfill the good of the soul and the good of the body.” And this is a particularly critical sentence: “For it is then that we have need of pleasure when we feel pain owing to the absence of pleasure, but when we do not feel pain, we no longer need pleasure.”
Cassius: Now, despite the fact that the very next sentence says “and for this cause we call pleasure the beginning and the end of the blessed life, for we recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us, and from pleasure we begin every act of choice and avoidance, and to pleasure we return again, using the feeling of pleasure as the standard by which we judge every good” — despite that, people interpret section 128 as implying that all we need is absence of pain and that somehow that is something different from or better than pleasure itself. What they’re doing when they do that is falling into the trap that Cicero and Plutarch have laid: arguing that the only meaning of the word “pleasure” is stimulations of the body. And of course, as we’ve discussed many times, Epicurus is using the word “pleasure” in a much more expansive sense, because in Epicurean philosophy there are only two feelings — pleasure or pain.
Cassius: When you have no pain, what you have is pleasure. When you have no pleasure, what you have is pain. Anytime you’re experiencing a pleasure in a part of your experience, that part of your experience has no pain. Anytime you’re experiencing pain in a part of your experience, that part of your experience has no pleasure. As Epicurus himself did on his last day, what you do is identify that even when your body is in pain — or a part of your body is in pain — there are other parts of your body or your mind experiencing pleasure. And even though they cannot coexist in the same part of your experience, you have the ability through your mental evaluation to place a higher value on the pleasures you’re experiencing than on the pains you’re experiencing. Looked at in this way, this is the analogy of the jar or the vase that you’re trying to fill with pleasure, and in so doing the jar becomes full when all pain has been crowded out — has been replaced by the pleasure you’re pouring into the jar. The ideal of life, a full jar, is a jar full of pleasures in which there is no pain remaining.
Cassius: You do not reach that point by evacuating pain from the jar, leaving an empty jar and having no concern whatsoever for what is left. That’s the furthest thing from the case, because what Epicurus is telling us is — through philosophy, through the Epicurean perspective — to identify that whatever you’re doing in your life is pleasurable as long as it’s not painful. Now, that does not mean that all pleasures are the same. It would be ridiculous to say that Epicurus could not see the difference between the pleasures of trimming your fingernails versus the pleasures of friendship and literature and studying philosophy, exercise, dance, food, drink — all of the active pleasures of life. Epicurus said that he could not recognize the good without those active pleasures. You don’t drain those from life in order to achieve absence of pain; you fill the jar with those pleasures, and you thereby have a jar that is full of pleasures and not pain.
Cassius: You crowd out, you exclude from your life pains by placing pleasures in their place. Viewed from that perspective, it’s ludicrous to interpret Epicurus as suggesting that we’re going to deprive ourselves of these ordinary pleasures. But that’s exactly the way that Cicero and Plutarch and others wish to interpret this statement in section 128. When Epicurus says “when we feel no pain, we have no need for pleasure,” you can certainly see how that statement, stated in isolation, can be used to reach that conclusion. But when you look at the full context of the philosophy, as is amply documented in the text, that becomes a ludicrous interpretation of what Epicurus is saying. Epicurus has a philosophy that requires understanding. As people will often say about the Bible — you can prove anything from the Bible by reading it out of context — a very similar principle applies here.
Cassius: If you take a certain sentence like “when we have no pain, we have no need of pleasure,” you can make it look like the best of life is to be anesthetized — that the best of life is basically to be dead, because you have no pain when you’re dead, and you have no pain when you’re anesthetized. That’s the absurd reading which Cicero and Plutarch are pushing. Let’s get back to the text in section seven, where Plutarch then writes: “Epicurus too makes a similar statement, to the effect that the good is a thing that arises out of your very escape from evil and from your memory and reflection and gratitude that this has happened to you. His words are these: ‘For what produces a jubilation unsurpassed is the contrast of the great evil escaped, and this is the nature of the good, if you apply your mind rightly and then stand firm, and do not stroll about prating meaninglessly about the good.’” Before we proceed, let’s note that you can take part of that out of context and make it sound absurd, but if you read the whole thing, the key to the reply is contained within it.
Cassius: When Epicurus says “what produces a jubilation unsurpassed is the contrast of the great evil escaped, and this is the nature of the good” — well, just as in the beginning of Book Two of Lucretius, when you realize that you have escaped from some disaster, when you know that some disaster exists that you are immune from, that is in fact a great pleasure. There’s no doubt about that. But Epicurus never says that that is the full meaning of pleasure. Lucretius described at the beginning of Book One that pleasure guides all living things — to procreate, to do all the things that they do actively in life, to pursue pleasure. He has not said that the knowledge that you are not subject to burning in hell or subject to the decrees of an angry god will take the place of the normal active pleasures of life. He is saying that they go hand in hand together, and that you enjoy the normal pleasures of life at their greatest extent when you don’t have to worry at the same time that by experiencing those pleasures you’re going to be sentenced to hell or that you might be violating the dictates of a god.
Cassius: It makes perfect sense that the best experience of the normal pleasures of life is one in which no fear or anxiety of punishment for experiencing those pleasures is going to be experienced later. That’s all Epicurus is saying. He’s not saying: get rid of the ordinary pleasures of life. But getting back to Plutarch — that’s what Plutarch wants you to accept: that you’re supposed to get rid of the normal pleasures of life in order to somehow experience absence of pain, which Plutarch then takes as the greatest Epicurean pleasure and then ridicules it this way: “Oh, the great pleasure and blessed state this company enjoy, as they revel in suffering no hardship or anxiety or pain. Is this not a thing to make them proud? And when they style themselves imperishable and equal to the gods, and from excess and preeminence of blessings they explode into wild cries of rapture and ecstasy because they alone, scorning all other blessings, have discovered one as great as it is godlike — to wit, not to suffer any ill.”
Cassius: Even today, as we go through this more slowly, it’s hard to fully appreciate the depth of sarcasm included in that sentence. Plutarch has first suggested that Epicurus wants us to abandon the normal pleasures of life in favor of absence of pain, and Plutarch then takes that suggestion and gives it the ridicule it would deserve if it were meant as Plutarch implies — because how many people of good common sense are going to consider what they believe to be essentially a negative situation, freedom from pain, as the very best thing you could experience in life, apart from the ordinary pleasures which we all enjoy? And how ridiculous it is to a normal person to consider that kind of an attitude deserves to be called godlike and would lead an Epicurean to explode in wild cries of rapture and ecstasy.
Cassius: Now, as we go through this, we need to anticipate the objection from some that Plutarch is understanding Epicurus correctly — that absence of pain is in fact a state of withdrawal from pain and that’s all you need to know — and they’re going to say that the sensibilities of normal people who like normal pleasures are exactly what we’re trying to overcome, that it is the enjoyment of singing, dancing, joy, and delight that we need to understand is not the purpose of life, and that the purpose of life is this higher state of contemplation — absence of pain — which puts these normal, ordinary, bodily and mental pleasures to shame. They’re going to say that Plutarch has it right here, and that those who want to cling to ordinary pleasures simply don’t understand Epicurus. And in partial reply to that, we go further in this very same section and see what Plutarch uses to bolster his argument, because in bolstering his argument by pointing to the animals, he’s going to point us right back to where Epicurus says is the starting point for our analysis — that when we look at the young of all living things, they all pursue pleasure and avoid pain.
Cassius: Plutarch says: “Therefore in felicity they” — the Epicureans — “are no whit inferior to swine or sheep, since they count blessedness for everything to go well with the flesh and with the mind and its concern for the flesh.” So Plutarch starts out by pointing us back to this analysis: Epicurus says, let’s look to nature for guidance through pleasure and pain, and Plutarch says the Epicureans have achieved the felicity of nature by avoiding pain. But then Plutarch goes further and says: “Actually, for the cleverer and more graceful animals, the escape from evil is not the highest end. Rather, when they have had their fill, they turn to song, or revel in swimming or in flight, and for pure joy and high spirits they take up a playful imitation of words and sounds of every kind and greet one another with caresses and gambols — since once they have escaped evil, they instinctively seek out the good, or better, let us say, they expel from their nature everything painful or alien to it as an impediment to the pursuit of what belongs to that nature and is a higher good.”
Cassius: Here, Plutarch is attempting to exploit what he thinks is a contradiction in Epicurus — because he says: when you look at the animals, they don’t just stop after they’ve gotten rid of their hunger by eating or their thirst by drinking; they don’t stop and do nothing. Once they get rid of their hunger and thirst, they turn for pure joy and high spirits to song and swimming and embracing each other and dancing. They instinctively seek out something better than just nothingness and pursue this joy and delight in life. And here, as we discussed last week, is the essential problem Plutarch thinks he is pointing out, because he’s wanting everyone to believe that Epicurus does not want humans to pursue joy and delight in dancing and celebration as the animals do.
Cassius: He’s wanting everybody to think that Epicurus says: you stop when you get absence of pain — because the last thing you want is any pain or any inconvenience or any turbulence in life whatsoever, because the greatest good is this feeling of nothingness that comes when you’ve achieved absence of pain. Plutarch goes on in section eight in this way: “For what is imposed by necessity is not good. The object of our aspiration and choice lies beyond the escape from ills — yes, and so too does what is pleasant and in harmony with our nature. As Plato said, who forbade us to regard riddance from pain and discomfort as pleasure, but as instead some trick of perspective — as it were, a blend of what is in harmony with our nature and what is alien to it, like a blend of black and white which occurs when people ascend from a lower to a middle region and suppose, in their lack of any experience or knowledge of the higher region, that the middle is the summit and the end. So Epicurus supposes, and Metrodorus, when they take the position that escape from ill is the reality and upper limit of the good.”
Cassius: Before we go further, what we’ve just read is also extremely important, because Plutarch is pointing out to us that Plato’s position — which Plutarch believes is the gold standard for correctness in philosophy — is that absence of pain cannot be held to be a pleasure. This is the issue that’s discussed frequently about whether there are three conditions — pleasure, pain, and an intermediate or neutral state — or whether there are only two. When you’re a Platonist, you take the position that there is a neutral state and you do not regard this neutral state as pleasure. You’re not experiencing pleasure in Plato’s view unless you’re experiencing stimulation of the body or the mind — the type of pleasure considered to be joy and delight such as dancing, food, celebration of any kind. Plutarch is pointing out to us that Plato held that this middle condition — where you’re not being stimulated but you’re not in pain — is really a trick of perspective, because it is ridiculous to hold this neutral condition to be the very highest good.
Cassius: This is the position according to Plutarch of people who don’t understand that they have not reached the summit of experience — they’ve just reached a slightly better position. In other words, from the Platonic view, these are people who may understand that they are in a cave and have to be careful in how they interpret the flickers of light on the wall, but who have not escaped the cave to realize that there’s a true reality outside. These are people who have gone part of the way but not all the way towards experiencing the best of life. Plutarch ridicules this position in the part that comes next. He compares it to that of a slave released from prison: “And thus their delight — the Epicurean delight — is that of slaves or prisoners released from confinement, overjoyed to be anointed and bathed after the cruel usage and the flogging, but knowing neither the taste nor the vision of a free man’s delight, pure, untainted, and bearing no welts from the lash. For it does not follow that if an itching of the skin or a rheumatic flux of the eye is foreign to our nature, scratching the skin and wiping the eye are on that account a glorious experience. Nor does it follow that if pain, fear of the supernatural, and terror about the hereafter are evil, escape from them is godlike and bliss beyond compare.”
Cassius: “No, these men coop up their delight in quarters that are small and cramped, and there it circles about and wallows, advancing no further — this delight of theirs — than to escape the anxiety about the ills of the hereafter that comes from false notions, and taking as the final goal of wisdom a state in which it would appear the brutes begin.” In other words, there he’s saying: the animals don’t have any fear of the gods, the animals don’t have any fear of burning in hell for an eternity. Does it really make sense that this state of animals who are ignorant even of the question is the highest level to which we as humans can ascend?
Plutarch continues: “For if it makes no difference in the freedom of the body from pain whether it has got free by your own efforts or by a natural process, so too in peace of mind the unperturbed condition achieved by your own efforts has no advantage over the condition when it is that of nature. Indeed, it might be urged with some reason that there is greater strength in the condition that is naturally imperturbable than in one that escapes disturbing influences by exercising care and taking thought.” In other words: O Epicurean, you are so ridiculous to take pride or pleasure in the success of your philosophy in freeing you from fear of the gods and fear of punishment after death — because that’s the way the animals already are. They go to no effort whatsoever philosophically to reach that opinion, and yet you’re saying that with all the mental ability you have, the best you can do with that mental ability is basically get back to the condition of a cat or a dog. How ridiculous is that?
Cassius: Plutarch continues: “But let us grant that the two states are equally unperturbed, since even so these gentlemen will be seen to be no better off than the brutes in this matter of not being disturbed by the hereafter and by tales about the gods and of not anticipating endless anxiety and pain. Thus Epicurus himself says: ‘If we were not troubled about misgivings about celestial phenomena and again about death and pain, we should never have stood in need of natural philosophy’ — given that Epicurus imagines that his system leads us to the state in which brutes are permanently placed by nature. For the brutes have no wrongheaded misgivings about the gods and are not troubled with baseless notions about what awaits them after death. Indeed, they have no idea or knowledge whatever of anything to fear on either score.”
Now, Plutarch has a lot more to say about this and other criticisms of Epicurus. But at this point let’s switch over to a modern interpretation of Plutarch’s arguments, and as I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, this comes from the book Hellenistic Philosophies by Paul Elmer More. While Paul Elmer More is not a Cambridge academic who has spent his entire life in philosophical teaching, More had many credentials when he wrote his book: he taught Sanskrit at Harvard, and more to the point for our discussion, he was literary editor of the Nation magazine in the early 1900s and was influential in the intellectual understanding of the Epicurean viewpoint.
Cassius: More begins this volume with a section on Aristippus, and then he proceeds to Epicurus starting on page twenty of the book. More has this to say: “The difficulty that confronts us when we try to understand Epicurus is the extraordinary paradox of his logic. What in a word is to be said of a philosophy that begins with regarding pleasure as the only positive good and ends by emptying pleasure of all positive content? There is no possibility, I think, of really reconciling this blunt contradiction, which was sufficiently obvious to the enemies of Epicurus in antiquity. But it is possible, with the aid of Plutarch’s shrewd analysis, to follow him step by step from his premises to his conclusions and so to discover the source of his entanglement.” As we proceed through this, obviously More thinks that Epicurus’s logic is paradoxical and that there’s no possibility of really reconciling it, because it bluntly contradicts itself — and these blunt contradictions were obvious to the enemies of Epicurus in antiquity, with the implication that they should be obvious to us today as well. But if we go back to Plutarch’s shrewd analysis, which More obviously thinks a great deal of, then we can understand why Epicurus is so confused in his point of view.
Cassius: More’s next paragraph: “Epicurus began with the materialistic and monistic theses which had allured Aristippus and which, mingled in varying proportions from the teachings of Heraclitus and Protagoras and Democritus, had come to be the prevailing belief of the Greek people. They were indeed no more than the essence refined out of the [verbose] lecturing and debating of the so-called Sophists, against whom Socrates and Plato had waged a relentless but unsuccessful warfare. This visible, palpable world of bodies is the only reality, and the only thing which to man in such a world has any certain value is his own immediate physical sensations. Pleasure we feel and pain we feel in their varying degrees and complications, and we know that all men welcome pleasure and shrink from pain by a necessity of nature. Pleasure in fact is simply a name for the sensation which we do welcome and pain for the sensation from which we shrink. The example of infants and animals is before us to nullify any attempt to argue away this primary distinction. These are the premises of Epicurus, as they had been of Aristippus, and to these he will cling through thick and thin, whatever their consequences may be and however they may entangle him in self-contradictions.”
More says: “He — Epicurus — seems to have even gone out of his way at times to find the grossest terms to express the doctrine. Whether his motive was to shock the Philistines of morality or to fortify himself and his friends in their positive belief, the avowed program of the school was not to save the Greeks but to indulge the belly to the limit of safety with meat and drink. And in a letter to a friend Epicurus says, ‘I invite you to continuous pleasures, not to virtues that unsettle the mind with vain and empty hopes of fruition.’”
Cassius: More continues: “The program is simple enough in all conscience and might satisfy the most cynical votary of the flesh. But desiring, like his predecessor, to be a voluptuary, Epicurus was driven despite himself to be a philosopher — even more a philosopher than the Cyrenaic. Whether his wisdom came from deeper reflection or greater timidity, his experience might be described as the opposite of that of Johnson’s humble acquaintance who had been trying all his life to attain philosophy but failed because cheerfulness would break in. Aristippus could make a boast of his ἔχω, ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἔχομαι — meaning to the effect ‘I have pleasure, but I am not owned by pleasure.’ But however he might twist about, this dependence on the fleeting sensation of the moment left him at last a prey to the hazards of circumstance. Clearly, the hedonist who was enough of a philosopher to aim at liberty and security must embrace a wider view of life than the Cyrenaic, and so the first step of Epicurus was to take happiness, conceived as a continuous state of pleasure rather than particular pleasures, for the goal.”
Cassius: More continues: “This is the initial and perhaps the most fundamental difference between the strictly Epicurean and the Cyrenaic brand of hedonism. But how, taking individual pleasures still in the grossly physical sense, was a man to assure himself of their consummation in happiness? It was well to make a god of the belly, and in the Epicurean language, of any other passage of the body that admitted pleasure and not pain. But as soon as he began to reflect, the philosopher was confronted by the ugly fact that the entrances of pain are more numerous than those of pleasure and that the pangs of pain may surpass in intensity any conceivable pleasure.” This is an argument More is taking directly from Plutarch, as we discussed last week. More continues: “Epicurus saw that there was something ephemeral and insecure in the very nature of pleasure, whereas pain had terrible rights over the flesh and could dispute her domain with a vigor far beyond the power of her antagonist.”
Cassius: More continues: “Evidently, in a world so constituted, the aim of the philosopher will be lowered from a bold search for sensations to the humbler task of attaining some measure of security against forces he cannot control, and so I think we shall interpret the curious phenomenon that the greatest of all hedonists was driven to a purely defensive attitude toward life.” Let’s stop there again. This is the essence of the majority modern view of Epicurus — that despite Epicurus’s reputation as the greatest of all hedonists or advocates of pleasure, Epicurus was driven, and we should interpret him, to be focused entirely on a purely defensive attitude toward life.
Continuing with More: “On the one hand, Epicurus knew, as Plato had shown, that the recovery from disease and the relief from anguish do bring a sense of actual wellbeing, and hence it was possible for Epicurus to define pleasure in negative terms without seeming to contradict flagrantly his grosser views about the belly and other bodily organs. Again, since positive pleasure and pain, by some law of nature, are so intimately bound together that the cessation of one is associated with the access of the other, then clearly the only pleasure free of this unpleasant termination is that which is itself not positively induced, but comes as the result of receding pain. For the content of happiness, therefore, the Epicurean will look to sensation of a negative sort. The limit of pleasure is reached by the removal of all that gives pain. Pleasure in the flesh admits of no increase when once the pain of want is removed — it can only be variegated.”
Cassius: More continues: “But the philosopher cannot stop here. Such a state of release, though in itself it may not be subject to the laws of alternating pleasure and pain, is yet open to interruption from the hazards of life. And so Epicurus, in More’s view, in his pursuit of happiness is carried a step further. Not on the present possession of pleasure, whether positive or negative, will he depend for security of happiness, but on the power of memory. Here at least we appear to be free and safe, for memory is our own. Nothing can deprive us of that recollected joy, which is the bliss of solitude. Even what was stressful at the time may often by some alchemy of the mind be transmuted into a happy reminiscence.” And More quotes a poem: “Things which offend when present and affright in memory, well painted, move delight” — that’s apparently from Cowley, who wrote upon his majesty’s restoration.
More continues: “The true hedonism then will be a creation in the mind from material furnished it by the body. Plutarch describes the procedure of Epicurus thus, and exposes also its inadequacy.” And here More is going to paraphrase what Plutarch had to say: “Seeing that the field of joy in our poor bodies cannot be smooth and equal, but harsh and broken and mingled with much that is contrary, Epicurus transfers the exercise of philosophy from the flesh — as from a lean and barren soil — to the mind, in the hope of enjoying there, as it were, large pastures and fair meadows of delight. Not in the body but in the soul is the true garden of the Epicurean to be cultivated. It might seem as if by waving a magic wand we had been translated from a materialistic hedonism to a region like that in which Socrates and Plato looked for unearthly happiness.” Again, More is arguing that Epicurus’s view is a hollow shell of the Socratic and Platonic ideal.
Cassius: More continues: “But in fact there is no such magic for the Epicurean. The source of the pleasures which compose our happiness is still physical and only physical. The office of the soul so-called is merely to retain, by an act of selective memory, the scattered impressions of sensuous pleasure and to forecast these by an act of selective expectation. ‘If you hear the Epicurean crying out and testifying that the soul has no power of joy and tranquility saving what it draws from the flesh and that this is its only good, what can you say but that he uses the soul as a kind of vessel to receive the drainings from the body, as men rack wine from an old and leaky jar into a new one to take age, and so think they have done some wonderful thing?’” This is a reference that Joshua quoted last week about how Plutarch talks about Epicurus decanting pleasure from one place to another, from the body to the mind and back again.
More continues: “And no doubt wine may be kept and mellowed with time, but the soul preserves no more than a feeble scent of what it takes into memory — for pleasure, as soon as it has given out, once in the body forthwith expires, and that little of it which lags behind in memory is but flat, and like a queasy figment, as if a man should undertake to feed himself today on the stale recollection of what he ate and drank yesterday.” I’ll interject there that that’s actually an effective parody of this position: while we certainly can gain great pleasure from memory, we cannot feed ourselves on the food we ate yesterday, and we cannot satisfy our thirst by thinking about what we drank yesterday.
Cassius: More goes on: “What the Epicureans have is but the empty shadow and dream of a pleasure that has taken wing and fled away, and that serves but for fuel to foment their untamed desires — as in sleep, the unreal satisfaction of thirst and love only stings to a sharper lust of waking intemperance. Memory, though it promised a release from the vicissitudes of fortune, is still too dependent on the facts of life, too deeply implicated in the recurrence of passionate desires. There is no finality of happiness here, and so the Epicurean is driven on to further refinement. If pushed hard, the Epicurean will take refuge in imagining a possible painlessness of the body and a possible stability of untroubled ease. Life itself in some rare instances may afford the substance of discomfort, and memory then will be sufficient. But if the substance eludes us, we have still that within us by which the exercise of free will can lull the mind into fancying it remembers what it never possessed. Step by step the reflective hedonist has been driven by the lessons of experience from the pursuit of positive pleasure to acquiescence in pleasure conceived as the removal of pain, from present ease in the flesh to the subtilizing power of memory in the mind, and when memory is starved, to the voluntary imagination that life has gone well with him.”
Cassius: More continues: “The fabled ataraxia — or imperturbable calm — of the Epicurean turns out to be something very like a pale beatitude of illusory abstraction from the tyranny of facts, the willful mirage of a soul which imagines itself but is not really set apart from the material universe of chance and change. Ἔχω, ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἔχομαι was the challenge of Aristippus to the world. The master of the garden, Epicurus, will be content with the more modest half — οὐκ ἔχομαι.” In other words, Aristippus at least went for both: he wanted pleasure but not to be a slave of pleasure. More is trying to say that Epicurus tells us to be content with saying “I am not a slave of pleasure,” but to have no real pleasure at the same time.
More continues: “There is something to startle the mind in this defensive conclusion of a philosophy which opened its attack on life under such brave and flaunting colors. There is much to cause reflection when one considers how in the end hedonism is forced into an unnatural conjunction with the other monistic philosophy with which its principles are in such violent conflict. For this ataraxia of the avowed lover of ease and pleasure can scarcely be distinguished from the apathy which the Stoic devotees of pain and labor glorified as the goal of life. This is strange. It is stranger still, remembering this negative conclusion of the Epicurean and Stoic — by which the good becomes a mere deprivation of evil — to cast the mind forward to the metaphysics of another and later school of monism, which led the Neoplatonists to reckon evil as a mere deprivation of good. Into such paradoxical combinations and antagonisms we are driven as soon as we try to shun the simple truth that good is good and evil is evil, each in its own right, and judged by its immediate effect on the soul.”
Cassius: Now there, in that last part, More is going back to his own Platonism, which DeWitt identifies as More’s personal point of view. But in reading that I think it’s very helpful to point out that that’s the essence of the Platonist or religious point of view: that good is good and evil is evil, each in its own right, that there’s no subjectivity or relativity or circumstances that can modify that. We will never — as Epicurus said at line 130 of the Letter to Menoeceus — take this attitude. Yet by scale of comparison and by the consideration of advantages and disadvantages we must form our judgment on all these matters, for on certain occasions we treat the good as bad and conversely the bad as good. That is key to all of this. Epicurus is identifying stability and constancy in the feelings of pleasure and pain given to us by nature. More, Plutarch, these Platonists, the religionists assert that there is an intrinsic and absolute good and an intrinsic and absolute bad that never changes — that the good is never bad and the bad is never good. And that difference of perspective is hugely important in understanding the difference between these philosophies.
Cassius: Now More goes further in this section on Epicurus to complete his comparison of Epicurus to the Platonists and the Christians: “It may appear from the foregoing that the hedonist in his pursuit of the summum bonum argues from point to point in a straight line. In practice he seems rather to follow no single guide, but to fluctuate between two disparate yet inseparable motives. At one time, in a world where physical sensation is the only criterion of truth and the basis of all reality, the liberty of enjoyment is the lure that draws him on. At another time, in a world of chance and change, or of mechanical law which takes no great heed of our wants, it seems as if security from misadventure must be the limit of man’s desire. Other philosophers — the Platonist in his vision of the world of Ideas, the Christian in his submission to the will of God — may see their way running straight before them to the one sure goal of spiritual happiness, in which liberty and security join hands. The path of the hedonist wavers from side to side, aiming now at positive pleasure and now at mere escape from pain. And this, I take it, is one of the curious reprisals of truth — that the dualist should have in view a single end, whereas the monist should be distracted by a double purpose. Whether one or the other of the revolving objects stands out clearer before the hedonist’s gaze will depend perhaps chiefly upon his temperament. With an Aristippus, the pleasure of the moment is supreme, though he too will have his eye open for the need of safety. With an Epicurus — more timid by nature and more reflective — the thought of security at the last will almost if never quite obliterate the sentiment of pleasure.”
Cassius: More writes: “It was still as a good Epicurean that Horace could write” — and here I’ll quote — Sperne voluptates: nocet empta dolore voluptas — which is translated into English as “Despise pleasures: pleasure bought with pain is hurtful.” Now that’s the end of section one of More’s work, and we’re going to stop quoting More for today. But he ends it on an extremely important point: is Horace correct that Epicurus’s position is to despise pleasure, and that pleasure bought with pain is hurtful? Because that is the understanding that has been promoted by Cicero, that has been promoted by Plutarch, that has been promoted by enemies of Epicurus throughout the last two thousand years, and which is now promoted by many self-stated friends of Epicurus as something we should embrace as good rather than quail from as ridiculous, as Plutarch and Cicero expect their readers to do. Someone has it right and someone has it wrong.
Cassius: Plutarch, Cicero, and in this sentence Horace are either correct in saying that absence of pain is more important than pleasure, or else they misunderstand or intentionally misrepresent what Epicurus had to say about absence of pain and what he meant by the term. Most of what we discuss at EpicureanFriends.com and in our Lucretius Today podcast is our effort to explain why this representation by Cicero, Plutarch, More, and Horace is incorrect, and why it prevents us — both theoretically from understanding Epicurus and practically from applying Epicurean philosophy in an effective way.
A topic that we’ve been discussing extensively in recent weeks is the effect of artificial intelligence on the world around us and the very negative effects that it has in undermining our confidence in the pictures we see and the things we hear — that we can no longer trust to be real and not generated by AI — and how difficult it is now and is going to become to separate the real from the artificially generated.
Cassius: While that is true, what I would suggest is that it provides an opportunity for us to understand that distortion of reality did not start with artificial intelligence. For two thousand years, Epicurus has been represented by mainstream intellectuals as being an ascetic who wants us to despise pleasure, never engage in anything that is painful, and to value a condition which they want us to understand to be nothingness as the ultimate goal of life. The energy that people are now devoting to fighting back against AI distortion of reality would also be productive to apply to what is accepted as the orthodox truth from the past. As I’ve said a number of times on the EpicureanFriends forum: if I thought that the statement “despise pleasures: pleasure bought with pain is hurtful” was a correct statement of Epicurean philosophy, I would shut down the EpicureanFriends forum tomorrow and never have a thing to do with Epicurus whatsoever, because such a position would be Stoicism, Buddhism, nihilism on steroids.
Cassius: And in fact I think that’s exactly what it has been turned into by people who have turned Epicurus into an apostle of minimalism at all costs, simplicity at all costs, avoidance of all physical and mental pain at all costs. The antidote to that is what we do at EpicureanFriends.com and what we discuss on the Lucretius Today podcast. The antidote is to go back to the original text — what Epicurus and the authentic Epicureans had to say — and also to consult the reliable quotations from the enemies of Epicurus, because when we do that, it is definitely possible to see that Epicurean philosophy is not a maze of contradictions as Paul More would have us believe, but a consistent philosophy that answers the questions posed and answers the challenges posed by Plato and Aristotle and Socrates and all of the other Greek philosophers who held that pleasure should not be identified as the goal of life.
Cassius: But most critical and most practical of all is to take a position on this question about absence of pain and what it really means — to go back into section 128 of Diogenes Laertius’s biography, which contains a letter to Menoeceus written by Epicurus himself, where he says: “The right understanding of these facts enables us to refer all choice and avoidance to the health of the body and the soul’s freedom from disturbance, since this is the aim of the life of blessedness. For it is to obtain this end that we always act, namely to avoid pain and fear.” Well, does that mean that we are never going to do anything that could possibly lead to any moment of pain, bodily or mental, and that that avoidance is the focus of our lives? Yes, Epicurus says that when once this is secured, all the tempest of the soul is dispersed, since the living creature has not to wander as though in search of something that’s missing and to look for some other thing by which he can fulfill the good of the soul and the good of the body. And he says: “For it is then that we have need of pleasure when we feel pain owing to the absence of pleasure, but when we do not feel pain, we no longer need pleasure.”
Cassius: Well, as tempting and as persuasive as Cicero and Plutarch and Paul More and even so-called friends of Epicurus can be, that does not mean that our fundamental goal in life is to avoid every moment of pain of body or of mind, and that if we do so we have somehow automatically achieved the godlike state that is our goal in life. That’s not true. And if you continue to read Epicurus, you see that: “And for this cause we call pleasure the beginning and the end of the blessed life. For we recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us, and from pleasure we begin every act of choice and avoidance, and to pleasure we return again, using the feeling as the standard by which we judge every good.” Epicurus did not say in that sentence: the avoidance of every moment of pain is the beginning and the end of the blessed life.
Cassius: Epicurus says: “Since pleasure is the first good and natural to us, for this very reason we do not choose every pleasure, but we sometimes pass over many pleasures when greater discomfort accrues to us as a result of them. And similarly we think many pains better than pleasures, since a greater pleasure comes to us when we have endured pain for a long time.” Does that mean that we’re never going to go to the dentist because it’s painful in the short term to get our teeth fixed? Does that mean we’re never going to see a doctor of any kind because it can be painful to cure a disease? No, it does not. And to interpret Epicurus as despising pleasure and as purchasing no pleasure through pain — as Horace says, and as More, Cicero, and Plutarch want us to conclude — is the perverse misreading of Epicurean philosophy.
Cassius: That’s going to be about all the time we have today. I promised some of our readers on the EpicureanFriends forum that I would attempt to get to some of their comments, but we’re going to be out of time before I’ve done that. We’ll come back to those in the coming weeks when Joshua and Dawn return to our podcast. We’re going to be having our 300th podcast in the near future — we may revisit some of these issues there in a special edition. But in the meantime, we’ll bring our discussion today to a close. Thank you for your time today. We invite you to drop by the EpicureanFriends forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about anything in regard to Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.