Episode 297 - TD25 - Is Philosophy At War With Perfume?
Date: 08/30/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4700-episode-297-td25-is-philosophy-at-war-with-perfume/
Summary - AI
Section titled “Summary - AI”Episode 297 resumes the group’s Epicurean reading of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations (Part III, especially sections 17–19) and re-situates the debate after two weeks spent on Plutarch’s claim that Epicurus reduces the goal to a barren “absence of pain.” Cassius and Joshua argue that this misreads Epicurus by treating freedom from pain as lifeless passivity, when ordinary experience (and the behavior of young animals) shows that healthy life naturally expresses itself in active joy, play, and delight once basic needs are met. Joshua illustrates the point through his wilderness trip and an extended Edward Abbey passage, using it to emphasize that joy and confidence have practical value and that nature—rather than cultural ideals of “virtue” detached from experience—provides the norm for evaluating good and bad. The discussion then returns to Cicero’s rhetorical framing that philosophy must be chosen instead of perfume, fine food, music, and other pleasures, and rejects it as a false dichotomy: Epicurean philosophy integrates pleasure and sober reasoning rather than pitting them against each other. The episode closes by stressing that Epicureanism supports a broadly affirmative, resilient outlook in which both mental and bodily pleasures remain legitimate resources against grief and hardship, and the group prepares to continue into section 20 next time.
Transcript - Unedited
Section titled “Transcript - Unedited”Cassius: Welcome to episode 297 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 texts 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 our friend Joshua is back with us. We’ve taken two weeks away from the discussion of Tus and Disputations while Joshua was away, and we thank our friend Dawn, for appearing the first of those weeks and talking with us about PLU tar. We’re going to be getting back into Tus and Disputations today, but since we’ve been away for a while, it’s going to be good for us to talk in general for a few minutes about where we were then and where we’re going and how it relates to the material that PLU tar brought up for us over the last two weeks. We last left Tuscan Disputations around the area of part three sections 17, 18, 19, and let me reorient us to where we were by going back to the very end of section 17 where Cicero was criticizing Epicurus views of pleasure as usual with Cicero. He’s mostly focused on criticizing the fact that Epicurus wasn’t focused on virtue and that instead he was focused on something a lot less worthy than virtue, but as Cicero often does, he relates to us a very good summary of Epicurean philosophy in this case at the end of 17, in the words of the Epicurean Zeno from whom Cicero himself had attended classes. I’m going to read today the Loeb edition of this translation, but at the end of 17, Cicero says no, say his disciples who were ver that I do not understand what Epicure says. He does say this. And so that little Spitfire Zeno who had the keenest intellect of them all used in his old age to insist at the top of his voice in my hearing at Athens that he was happy, who had the enjoyment of present pleasure and the assurance that he would have enjoyment either throughout life or for a great part of life without the intervention of pain or should pain come that it would be short-lived if extreme, but if prolonged it would imply more that was pleasant than evil. Reflection on this would make him happy, particularly if he had had the satisfaction of good things previously enjoyed and were without undue fear of death or Gods. There you have Epicurus notion of a happy life as formulated in the words of xeno so that there is no possibility of denial. Again, Epicurus point of view is a practical one that pleasure is the focus of life. Pain is sometimes going to intrude on that, but it’s never going to intrude for so long or with such intensity that it can prevent us from having more reason to find pleasure in life than evil. And that if we reflect on these things and we also associate with it the knowledge that there are no supernatural gods who are looking to punish us, no life after death where we’re going to have to worry about burning in hell, then those combinations of real world pleasures with mental understanding of how things really are is the best life you can possibly seek to have, and therefore it constitutes the epicurean goal. It’s in this context that we broke off two weeks ago and went into plu tars material in which Plutarch was responding to colotti and specifically Plutarch’s assertion that Epicurus defined the goal as not pleasure but absence of pain. And that according to plu tar absence of pain has nothing to do with pleasure and in fact it’s an enemy of pleasure and plu tar employed an argument that I think makes this issue very clear, even though it’s negative, it helps us to positively understand pleasure to have a better understanding of the argument against pleasure that the enemies of Epicurus are employing, and how everything turns on your understanding of what pleasure means, the definition of the word, what’s included within pleasure, what’s included within pain, and it all comes back to this focus that plu tar Cicero the enemies of Epicurus want to make, which is that they want you to believe that epicurus held, that nothing except bodily stimulation is ultimately the meaning of the word pleasure. So plu tar, when he attempted to point out a contradiction in epicurean theory pointed to the animals and said, Epicurus, you look to the animals as the guide of life because you say that we should look to the young of all animals and see them pursuing pleasure, and that’s how you establish that pleasure is the goal of life that’s explicitly stated in Cicero’s on ends that this is the epicurean method of understanding that pleasure is desirable. Well, Plutarch says it’s a huge contradiction for you to say that absence of pain is the goal of life because if you look to the young of all animals to whom you look to establish that pleasure is the goal, you will look and see that they do not stop and do nothing once they have satisfied their hunger by eating once they have satisfied their thirst by drinking at that point, once they’ve satisfied their basic needs, they don’t just sit down and do nothing. They start singing, dancing, flying, embracing each other, doing all sorts of things to have fun, but that has nothing to do with absence of pain. The association that people 2000 years ago, the association that people today put on the phrase absence of pain is sort of a state of nothingness. That doesn’t imply that you’re doing anything positively joyful or delightful. It implies that you’re doing nothing, that you’re close to being dead, that you’re comatose so epic. Your theories make no sense whatsoever in claiming absence of pain to be the goal when the animals are establishing that the fun activities of joy and delight are the things that they do as soon as they have the capacity to do so. So we’ve spent the last two weeks basically going through that issue. We’ll probably spend the rest of our lives continuing to go through this issue since it’s so important to Epicurean philosophy. But now that we have Joshua back to us and we’re back in Tuscan, let’s once again focus on this issue and make clear that Epicurean philosophy does not consider absence of pain to be a negative state of nothingness. And one way we can illustrate that is the fact that our podcaster friend Joshua, who was gone for two weeks as far as we know, had no problems with hunger or thirst during that period, and yet he decided rather than sit on the floor of his bedroom and do nothing, that he would use that time in a way that Pluto would say has nothing to do with absence of pain. Joshua, tell us about that and why you thought that it made sense for you to do something other than close your eyes and meditate the last two weeks.
Joshua: Yeah, thank you Cassius, and it is very good to be back. By the way, I was very fortunate to be able to get away for a little bit, and I went with a friend up to the boundary water canoe area in northern Minnesota, and we paddled and portaged away from civilization and out into the wilderness and right up to the Canadian border in fact, and spent a absolutely gorgeous week out there. And the question you raise is an interesting one. How do you justify your time spent on leisure or on going outside the beaten path, going beyond doing something different if the only goal is to be free from pain just to remove pain regarding the origin of the question? In plu tar, he’s talking specifically about animals. And I find this connection interesting because you’re right to say Cassius, that Epicurus says that we can know that pleasure is the telos, that pleasure is goal or the guide of life. And part of how we know that is because we look to the young of all species and we see that their most native basic instinct is to reach out for pleasure and to recoil from pain. Now, we also know that Cicero and plu tar are going to reject out of hand this argument that we should look to the animals. We should look to newborn animals as any guide to philosophy. We say it a thousand times on this podcast that Cicero is only really interested in looking to these illustrious heroes of the Greek and Roman past. That’s where he goes, that’s not where Epicurus goes. Epicurus does not go to culture. Epicurus does not go to unquote civilization. Epicurus goes to nature. We often cite Professor Norman Dewitt and one thing that dewitt frequently says in his book, epic and his philosophy for Epicurus, nature furnishes the norm. We go back to nature. Now that doesn’t always necessarily mean Cassius, that we go to the boundary waters canoe area in northern Minnesota and get away from it all for a bit. We go to nature in the sense that we go to something that is uncorrupted by culture, religions, institutions, the education system in the ancient world that was solely about producing the right kind of soldier, citizen Epicurus wants to cut all that away and just go back to nature. And going to the young of all species is his way of isolating a case that is very firmly in favor of his view because he’s absolutely right to say that the young of all species do reach out for pleasure and recoil from pain. And they do this not because they’ve been taught to do this, they haven’t been educated or instructed to do this. They do this as the most primal and natural extension of their nature to recoil from pain. Pain is a guide. It’s not the goal. Pleasure is the goal, but pain is a guide. It tells you when something is wrong. And even though these animals could not formulate it in the words I’m using, of course, the response that Epicurus saw in these other animals and particularly in the newborns, was enough to convince him that nature was crying out that there is no good but pleasure. There is no evil but pain. Now, on that point, I want to quote a passage from a book by an American named Edward Abbey who was a park ranger and a wilderness activist, and he worked for a few seasons in a desert in Utah at the Arches Natural Monument where he was the sole occupant as the Ranger living there. And he is as I was last week, deep, deep out into it. And there’s no connection back, especially in his time. This is 40, 50 years ago. There’s no easy way to get back out. But he’s there and he’s looking at nature. And I want to read a passage from his book because I think he addresses Plutarch’s point in a way that is very interesting and I think very engaging. This is what Edward Abbey writes in his book, the Rain Filled Pothole set in naked rock are usually devoid of visible plant life, but not of animal life. In addition to the inevitable microscopic creatures, there may be certain amphibians like the spadefoot toad. This little animal lives through dry spells in a state of excavation under the dried up sediment in the bottom of a hole. When the rain comes, if it comes, he emerges from the mud singing madly in his fashion mates and fills the pool with a swarm of tadpoles. Most of them doomed to a most ephemeral existence, but a few survive, mature, become real toads, and when the pool dries up, they dig into the sediment as their parents did before making burrows, which they seal with mucus in order to preserve the moisture necessary to life. There they wait day after day, week after week in patient speed foot torper perhaps listening. We can imagine for the sound of raindrops pattering at last on the earth and crust above their heads. If it comes in time, the glorious cycle is repeated. If not, this particular colony of buffon die is reduced eventually to dust a burden on the wind. And then two paragraphs later, he goes on to ask the question. He says, why do they sing? What do they have to sing about somewhat apart from one another, separated by roughly equal distances facing outward from the water they clank and croak all through the night with tireless perseverance to human ears. Their music has a bleak, dismal, tragic quality dirge like rather than jubilant. It may nevertheless be the case that these small beings are singing not only to claim their stake in the pond, not only to attract a mate, but also out of spontaneous love and joy, a contra punal, coral celebration of coolness and wetness after weeks of desert fire for love of their own existence, however brief it may be, and for joy in the common life. And then he goes on to ask the question that really links this entire passage together. He says, has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does. I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction where there is no joy, there can be no courage and without courage, all other virtues are useless. Therefore, the frogs and the toads keep on singing even though we know if they don’t, that the sound of their uproar must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail cats and kit foxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene of their happiness end quote from Edward Abbey there. And now we have to face our own question here, which is this. Are we merely anthropomorphizing these animals when we look at their behavior and say, well, they seem to be playing and they seem to be jumping about. Do you see a lamb gambling across the field? And it’s fair to ask the question, I think, is the lamb gambling because it’s happy or is it driven by an instinct to use its legs while it’s young so that it strengthens the bone and the muscle and more readily by doing so avoids pain and an early death come maturity? Or do they do these things at least in part because they are happy, because they are filled with pleasure, especially if they feel safe and so on? We look at these young animals and we see their behavior and we pattern match that to our own behavior when we are feeling lighthearted and happy. It’s interesting that Epicurus chooses to focus on this aspect of nature and say that this is one line of evidence we can use to point to pleasure and absence of pains as a goal. And it’s interesting that Plutarch is responding to Epicurus in this way by saying, oh, but the animals don’t live life the way you would expect them to if they were following your rules because your rules epicurus are get what you need to free yourself from the burden of pain, of immediate hunger and thirst and so on, and then just stop and fall on the ground and wait until you’re in pain again, until you get up and do something else. So I think, I mean I’m being a little bit flippant toward plu tar there, but the questions raised here I think are very interesting.
Cassius: Joshua, thank you for bringing all that material up for us. And there’s one particular part of it I definitely want to comment on where you quoted Edward Abbey saying the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. I think that’s a really important aspect of all of this because in a sense there’s not that much debate. There’s really no debate about the fact that the young of all animals do pursue the type of active joy and delight that everybody can see. Putar is not saying that Epicurus is so dumb as not to see that the young animals don’t pursue play and joy and delight once they’re finished eating and drinking. The issue is Epicurus seems to be saying that we should not be doing that even though he’s laid out these young animals as our guide, he is cutting out that part of their activity from what we should be doing. And while the wording that Epicurus has used lends itself to this type of twisting because you have to keep the rest of the philosophy in mind in order to understand the meaning of absence of pain, it’s particularly critical not to let these plu tars and modern interpreters of epicures who want to say he’s essentially a stoic or Buddhist or an aesthetic. It’s particularly important not to give into that and to cut out joy and delight from your life. For the very reason Edward Abbey said that the morose and the fearful are doomed to quick extinction. That’s what Pluto CSRO would like to happen, that epicurean philosophy be subject to the quickest possible extinction because they think the philosophy is so negative and harmful to their societies. And that’s why Epicurus would be the last person in the world to remove joy and delight and the act of pleasures from his definition of pleasure and his definition of the goal of life. And when he refers to absence of pain, he is certainly not removing joy, delight in these active pleasures. He is expanding the definition of pleasure to include every activity that is not painful. It could not be a more important issue because if you think that Epicurus is telling you to abandon camping, to abandon mountain climbing, to abandon hang gliding, to abandon activities that bring you pleasure, but that do entail some degree of toil or risk or danger, then you’re missing the point of what Epicurus has said. We’ve talked over the last two weeks about a quote from Horace where Horace apparently said that pleasure which is bought through pain should be avoided because it is harmful. And while we don’t need to get back into that today in detail, Horace is not applying Epicurean philosophy correctly in saying flatly that pleasures that must be bought through pain should not be ever undertaken. Epicure himself says the opposite in the letter to menaces that we are sometimes going to do exactly that when through pain in the short run, we can bring ourselves a much more valuable pleasure through the course of that pain. The issue here is again, not a biological question about what animals are doing and whether in croaking like a frog or doing other things that are more active, these animals are just simply engaging in a survival mechanism. It’s clear to everybody that there is more than just subsistence survival at stake in joy and delight and the act of pleasures to a very real degree. Those are as much about what life is all about. As any philosophy or literature or mental exercise has ever been or could ever be, they’re not at war with each other. They go hand in hand, they reinforce each other, they bolster each other and allow each other to continue hand in hand towards this successful, happy, pleasurable life which is characterized by the minimum amount of pain possible. That’s why the theoretical goal is absence of pain in which your life is full of pleasure with no pain whatsoever, but everybody acknowledges epicurus among the first that there will be some pains in life. And just because you have a simple pain, just because you have a bad pain, just because you have a pain that you can’t get rid of, even a pain that is intense as Epicurus himself suffered before he died, you can still be happy regardless of that circumstance because you appreciate the power of pleasure and why that power of pleasure is why you exist in the first place. If you focus on suffering, if you focus on being fearful and morose, as Abby said, you are doomed to quick extinction. The focus is on the opposite. The focus is on confidence, not fear, happiness, not moroseness. And that alone is going to be what leads to your flourishing in life. Epic equates pleasure to food pleasure reinforces us and makes us stronger. Pain is what makes us weaker.
Joshua: Yeah, let me make a point there, Cassius, because Lucious and his ind, Venus actually uses a very interesting play on words in the Latin text regarding this question of animals and food and happiness. So there’s a few Latin words here, pa, and this is translated in the lo addition as farm animals dance over the rich pastures. So like plum is fodder, lata is an interesting word because it can either refer to fertility as in the case of the fertile pasture that the animals are eating off of. It can also mean happy, joyful, cheerful. So there’s this sort of hidden meaning here in this line, which you wouldn’t pick up just glancing over it. Lucious is saying that these animals in their field are nourished by the field, but the field is also making them happy. It’s also giving them pleasure. It is enriching their lives and making them joyful. And the visible sign of that is you see these animals bouncing and running and playing with each other in the field, and I love that play on words in the Latin there. And it just goes to reinforce the point, which is that once they’ve had their nutrition, once they’ve had the tabula, then it’s time for the Lita, then it’s time for the lightheartedness and the cheerfulness and the joy. So the answer really is right there in the first 24 odd lines of lucious, and it couldn’t be more clear that this is the direction he’s going. And in his imagining at Venus, it’s the coming of Venus with the West wind spreading warmth and geniality across the land as a kind of poetic fixture for Lucious, but for Epicurus, this is just nature. This is just nature. This is what nature is and this is what it does. This is what it’s like.
Cassius: Excellent points, Joshua. And this is reminding me of the value of going through Tuscan and Disputations here. I’m getting back into the flow of where we were several weeks ago on this, and I’m making a mental note, but I’ll say it out loud to everyone. These sections of Tuscan and Disputations are some of the best material that’s available for interpretation of the meaning of what Epicurus is talking about. Cicero going through here, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, we’re just hitting material where he’s quoting reliably epicurean authorities to explain what these issues are and what the epicurean position on them is. So we’ve already covered several weeks ago, most of section 18. Again, tremendously important material in there because that is where Cicero is accusing epicurus of evasion in his definition of pleasure. And Epicurus is expanding the word pleasure to include these other activities that most people don’t acknowledge really is pleasure. But in doing so, Cicero, again, he quotes Epicurus talking about how he does not understand the good without these pleasures, and he’s preserving for us these citations that hit this point home unmistakably. This is where he says, I can find no meaning. I can attach to the good if I take away the pleasure obtained by taste to take away the pleasure from music, take away the pleasure from movement and so forth. Again, here using this SOEs approach of saying that you can talk about the heap if you like, but there is no magic number of grains of sand. There is no particular grain of sand that encompasses the word heap and the concept of heap just as with pleasures and the good, you cannot separate pleasures from the good. And no matter how you might want to line them up and chop them up and say some are better than others and some are different and some last longer or different parts of the body, they are still in the end pleasure themselves and the good does not exist apart from these individual pleasures. We call things good just like we call a certain number of grains of sands a heap, but in the end, there are only grains of sand. And in the end there are only pleasures terms like heaps terms like the good terms like happiness are useful to us, but in the end, they are not separable from the grains of sand or from the individual pleasures. And if you try to isolate out this essence of happiness, this essence of the good or the essence of a heat, you’re going to lead yourself down a logical path that’s going to cause nothing but confusion because only reality exists. And these ideas, while useful, do not have independent existence in the nature of things. Okay, before we leave 18, towards the end of 18, there’s a memorable line in which Cicero has referenced a teleman who was in terrible distress in his life, and Cicero tries to back Epicurus into a corner by referencing Teleman, referencing people who are greatly afflicted by all sorts of distress and asking Epicurus what he would recommend for them to do. Would you recommend pleasure? Would you recommend philosophy? And Cicero says it this way. He says, should you observe any one of your friends under affliction? Would you rather prescribe him a sturgeon than a treatise of Socrates or advise him to listen to the music of a water organ rather than to Plato or lay before him the beauty and variety of some garden, put a nose gate to his nose, burn perfumes before him and bid him crown himself with a garland of roses and wood binds, all of which is going to say you are ridiculous to suggest that pleasure can solve the afflictions of life. The great griefs and afflictions of life are solved by Socratic treatises and dialogues of Plato, and not by sturgeons, not by fish, not by music, not by perfumes. Once again, trying to set these things against each other as if philosophy is at war with perfume,
Joshua: Right? So Cicero’s challenge to Epicurus is you’ve got someone before you who is afflicted with pain, who is afflicted with grief and suffering, and he’s saying, are you going to present to them perfumes and delicacies of the table and so on as if this is going to help them or are you going to present to them a sterner philosophy? The philosophy of a Socrates perhaps or a Plato, but one that in Cicero’s mind is actually going to help, whereas the delicacies of the fish and the perfumes, that’s not going to do anything. Of course, we have to understand Cicero is treating Epicurus view of pleasure in its relationship to philosophy, very facetiously here, and he’s incentivized to do that because he’s arguing against Epicurus. But what he’s going to do now in section 19 is he’s going to take up that question for himself. If someone is deeply afflicted, what should we do? What should we provide for that person? What should we furnish to them in order to help them through their problems? Because Cicero is sitting there and he is thinking, what Epicurus is telling me is useless. I can’t do anything with that. So Cicero is now going to try to find his own path forward to answer the question which he has just posed. So section 19 goes like this, Epicurus must admit these arguments, or he must take out of his book, what I just now said was a literal translation, or rather, he must destroy his whole book for it is crammed full of pleasures. We must inquire then how we can ease him of his grief, who speaks in this manner. And then Cicero quotes from a poem here. So let me read that. My present state proceeds from fortune stings my birth. I boast of the descent from kings, hence, may you see from what a noble height. I’m sunk by fortune to this abject plight. And then Cicero comes back in, he says, what? To ease his grief, must we mix him a cup of sweet wine or something of that kind? Loa, the same poet presents us with another sentiment somewhere else. I Hector once. So great, now claim your aid. We should assist her for she looks out for help. Where shall I now apply where seek support, where hence be take me or to whom resort no means remain of comfort or of joy in flames. My palace and in ruins Troy each wall so late, superb, deformed nods and not an altars left to appease the gods. And then Cicero interjects, he says, you know what should follow? And particularly this. And then he finishes quoting the poem he says, of father, country and of friends, bereft, not one of all these sumptuous temples left, which wil the fortune of our house, did stand with rich wr ceilings, spoke the artist’s hands. And Cicero says, oh, excellent poet though despised by those who sing the verses of euphoria. He is sensible that all things which come on a sudden are harder to be born. Therefore, when he had set off the riches of priam to the best advantage, which had appearance of a long continuance, what does he add? And then he quotes again from the poem low, these all perished in one blazing pile, the foe old priam of his life, beguiled and with his blood, thy alter, JoVE defiled, admirable poetry says Cicero. There is something mournful in the subject as well as in the words and measure, we must drive away this grief of hers. How is that to be done? Should we lay her on a bed of down, introduce a singer? Should we burn cedar or present her with some pleasant liquor and provide her something to eat? Are these the good things which remove the most afflicting grief for you? And he’s calling back to when he was quoting from Epicurus in the previous section for you, but just now said you knew of no other good. And he says, I should agree with Epicurus that we ought to be called off from grief to contemplate good things if we could only agree upon what was good. So that’s the problem. That’s the problem that Cicero has with Epicurus, that it’s true that we want to use the good, whatever that turns out to be as an antidote to grief and affliction. The problem Epicurus is that you and I are in two different universes when it comes to understanding what is good.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, that’s a great way of summarizing virtually everything we always talk about here. What is the meaning of good and what relationship does pleasure have toward the good? And if you’re like Cicero, if you’re like Plutarch, if you’re like the stoics, if you’re like a Buddhist, if you’re like somebody who just wants to focus on the suffering and moroseness of life, then you’re going to say that pleasure means nothing other than singing, dancing, smelling perfume, eating fine foods, doing these things that you find yourself so repulsive to this personality, which focuses on the suffering aspects of life. You’re going to say if you’re this type of person, that virtue or being a good person is the goal of life. And that being a good person has nothing to do with pleasing yourself with perfumes or food or wine or anything remotely like that when the terrible things of life really come your way. And here Cicero is given the example of the fall of Troy and the disaster that befalled, the Trojans that so recently before had been at the top of the world in terms of success and happiness. That disaster which came upon them relatively quickly is among the worst things that can happen in life. And when life really gets you down, what are you going to look to to get you back up again to give you the reason to get out of bed and keep going? And Cicero wants to ridicule you as an epicurean and say, don’t give me perfume to try to ease my pain when I’ve got this disaster in front of me. Cicero wants to say, give me a treat of sub Socrates. Give me a dialogue of Plato. And I think we could turn that around and ridicule that as more ridiculous than what Epicurus is pointing to because Epicurus is pointing to the pleasurable things in life which are widespread and easily available and cover all sorts of things, mental and bodily and saying that those are the reasons that we are alive. And when you’ve got disaster, that’s come your way. Don’t just look for some syllogism that tells you that. Well, disaster is part of life. What you should do from an epicurean point of view is remind yourself of the reason that you find joy and happiness in life in the first place. And it’s not so you can read a dialogue of Plato or a treatise of Socrates. It is so that you can experience all of the many varieties of pleasure that are available to us in life. It is much more ridiculous to say that reading a dialogue of Plato is why you were here than it is to say that all of the many things that you can do with your life, physical and mental, that bring you enjoyment, that just simply exist as healthy normal activities, those are the reasons that you are here, that you were born in the first place. Those are the reasons that you don’t rush to commit suicide, that you don’t rush to the end of your life. And it’s not to avoid suffering and pain. It is a positive motivation towards pleasure, the good which supersedes any temporary setbacks caused by pain.
Speaker 3: Cicero makes it like an either or situation. Either you’re experiencing extreme enjoyment of pleasures, of fine food and fine fish prepared and perfumes, et cetera. You’re either doing that or you’re studying philosophy. So my question is, why does he set it up in this either or situation? And could it be that Epicurus is actually saying, Hey, wait a minute. It’s both. It’s both pleasure and philosophy. Of course, Epicurus has his own take on philosophy, which is going to be different than Plato and directly against what Cicero said. We have the letter to MIUs which says, Fort is not continuous drinkings and ings nor the satisfaction of lust nor the enjoyment of fish and other lectures of the wealthy table, which produce a pleasant life. But sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance and vanishing marere opinions to which are due the greatest disturbance of the spirit. So Cicero is talking about dealing with grief. And so this doesn’t directly touch on grief, but it does point to that there is both pleasure and philosophy at the same time. That is the key to a good life.
Cassius: Those are great points, and we’ll see some of that discussed as we move into section 20. But Joshua, you want to respond to her first?
Joshua: I totally agree, and I’m glad you brought out that passage from Epicurus in his letter because it is exactly on point trying to parse what Epicurus said in one book versus another. Especially from our position when we don’t have full texts like we’d like to have. We’re dealing with fragments and with reported secondhand quotations of Epicurus. It’s difficult to know exactly in all cases which interpretation to draw, but it’s clear from what you quoted kini that Epicurus was not advocating for if someone is sick or if someone’s in pain, send them fish to eat and that’ll cure them. This is just Cicero being ridiculous, but Cicero makes himself ridiculous because he is offering himself up as a physician here. This is what’s going to cure you. I’m going to give you not pleasure. You don’t need to wallow in pleasure when you’re afflicted. You need a treatise of Socrates, you need a lecture by Plato. That’s what’s going to help. But as we have already discovered in this very book in Tus Disputations mutations, Cicero is happy to administer the medicine, but if it doesn’t work, he blames the patient. I’m going to go back to paragraph 25 in the second section. We did that long section on pain, and this is from that. Cicero says, do you bring me back to the philosophers who seldom go to war among these dionysius of cle, a man certainly of no resolution, having learned fortitude of Zeno, acquitted it on being in pain for being tormented with a pain in his kidneys and wailing himself. He cried out that those things were false, which he had formerly conceived of pain. This is a student of Dino Obsidian, the founder of Stoicism, and his student is turning his back on stoicism because he says, I’m in horrible pain and it’s not helping. And Cicero’s response to that is not to reevaluate his own opinion and say, well, the treatise of Socrates didn’t work. Maybe I should try something else. No Cicero’s recourse here is to blame the patient, to blame the person who is undergoing pain and affliction and saying he had no resolution. That’s why it didn’t work. In his case, he had no resolution. So Cicero is pitching this as if virtue and strength and resolution, as if that’s the thing that’s going to get you by every time. But we find out there are people, and not just the man on the street, but the man in the Stoa, the man in the school of Zeno who studied philosophy for years. And when he came to experience horrible pain, he was forced to acknowledge that it was an evil and Cicero blames him. It’s not my idea that failed. It’s not that the treatise of Socrates wasn’t quite enough this time. And maybe we do need pleasure. Maybe we do need absence of pain. Maybe we do need to listen to epic heroes for once. That’s not where Cicero goes with this. Where he goes with this is no, the cure works, but it only works if the patient has resolution and fortitude and perseverance. And if the afflicted person doesn’t have those things, it’s not the fault of the philosopher. It’s not the fault of Socrates who put together his philosophy. It’s the fault of the man who failed to live up to it, even though he failed to live up to it in his darkest hour. So I want to echo Kini again what you said. I think those were good points, but we also have to bear in mind where Cicero is coming from here. This is not a fair context, which he has set up here because he is not willing to hold himself to the result as if this were a double-blind study. He is going to administer his cure. If it works, it’s because the cure is good. If it doesn’t work, it’s because the patient has failed. It’s not because the cure is bad, it’s because the patient has failed to administer it properly.
Cassius: Those are excellent points, Joshua, and I’m really glad that Callini jumped in there as she did. We can defer going on to 20 until next week because what we’re discussing now is certainly enough to take us to the end of the podcast today. Callini pointed out that Cicero is trying to say it’s an either or question, and that philosophy has to be chosen or the bodily pleas have to be chosen, and it is a false alternative. It is not a matter of choosing one or the other. It’s a matter of keeping them in context and realizing the benefits of all of these options, all of these pleasurable aspects of life, and that they all have a proper place. And that aspect of it is what I’d really like to stress to our modern students of Epicurus who are listening to the podcast and reading all this material for themselves. Because it seems like that there is a tendency today to focus on the minimalistic aspects, to focus on satisfaction, to focus on, well, I don’t really need to live on tomorrow because I’m satisfied with what I have today. And all sorts of ways of, to some extent, accepting the premises that Cicero and Pluto are suggesting is a problem in Epicurean philosophy, there’s an acceptance of a war between the pleasures of the body versus the activities of the mind as if they are inconsistent with each other. And I think the key to putting Epicurean philosophy into a coherent whole and making the best use of it in our lives is to see how important it is not to allow this division to occur and not to allow this argument to take root, that there’s something wrong with bodily pleasure, there’s something wrong with active pleasure, and that if somehow we just reach Amatic state of absence of pain, all the rest of these bodily and mental activities are out the window because we’ve achieved something that makes them worthless in comparison. And that’s just not the way Epicurus is coming at this material whatsoever. Epicurus is stressing the importance of all of these normal activities of mind and body, that they are what make life worthwhile. That pain in relationship to them is something that we can easily manage and that has no power to destroy us in the end. And that this is a positive, happy outlook on life in which you always have more reason for joy than for Vation, and that there’s therefore no reason to get obsessed with the problems of life and let them get you down, so to speak. Because given how short life is, the best thing you can do is work mentally and bodily all the time to make the best use of the time that’s available to you. Now, we’ll go on next week into section 20, but as we close today, anyone have final thoughts?
Joshua: Well, I think I really just want to say that I’m happy to be back. It’s good to wake up on a Sunday morning and be able to speak with both of you, which is pleasurable, but also to engage with these ideas. To argue with Cicero is a part of my weekly routine or habit that it’s easy to overlook when you do it every week, but having had two weeks away from it, I’m very happy to get back into these questions and to talk them through with the two of you because it really is one of the highlights of my week to be able to do it. I hope people listening have the same kind of pleasurable experience when they’re listening to it as we do when we’re recording it. I guess that’s my upshot today is I’m very happy to be back and to be back into this text and discussing it and figuring out how we can really apply this stuff to our own lives.
Cassius: Well, we are as happy to have you back as you are, to be back and listening to you describe that calls to my mind. The other example from Cicero when he compares the pleasure felt by the host who is pouring wine versus the pleasure felt by the guest who is drinking the wine. And there’s a time and a place for both pouring and for drinking. But when you understand the way the world works through epic curian philosophy, you can find equal pleasure whether you are pouring, whether you’re drinking, whether you’re canoeing in the wilds, whether you are discussing philosophy on the internet, no matter what you’re doing. Epicure philosophy is a great means of keeping all this in perspective, no matter what circumstances we find ourselves to be in. Okay, well, with that, we’ll close for today. As always, we invite you to drop by the Epicure and Friends Forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about this or any of our other discussions of Epicurus. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back soon. Bye.