Episode 298 - TD26 - Facts And Feelings In Epicurean Philosophy - Part 1
Date: 09/05/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4711-episode-298-td26-facts-and-feelings-in-epicurean-philosophy-part-1/
Summary - AI - Unedited
Section titled “Summary - AI - Unedited”The episode introduces a continuing discussion of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations from an Epicurean standpoint, focusing on Cicero’s critique that Epicurus contradicts himself about pleasure and the absence of pain. Cicero argues sarcastically that Epicurus reduces the good to sensual enjoyments while also claiming that freedom from pain is the highest pleasure, and he charges Epicurus with collapsing distinctions between pleasure, pain, and neutrality and with separating virtue from the chief good. Joshua responds that Cicero’s accusation rests on a misunderstanding of Epicurus’ broader definition of pleasure, which includes both active sensory enjoyment and the stable condition of being free from bodily pain and mental disturbance. The discussion emphasizes that Epicurus grounds ethical judgments not in abstract, eternal standards like Plato’s forms but in lived human experience and natural feeling, making pleasure and pain the ultimate criteria of value. The speakers conclude that Cicero’s discomfort arises from his commitment to fixed moral absolutes, whereas Epicurean ethics accepts variability rooted in nature and individual perception, a tension they plan to continue exploring in the next episode.
Transcript - Unedited
Section titled “Transcript - Unedited”Cassius: Welcome to episode 298 of Lucious 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 this study of epicurus@epicureanfriends.com where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. This week we’re continuing in Cicero’s Tuscan Disputations from an epicurean perspective. We’re in part three of Tuscan Disputations and we’re today going to be focusing on section 20. We’re in the middle of Cicero’s attack on Epicurus views of pleasure and specifically reference to the term absence of pain. And at the end of section 19, we had a statement from Cicero that summarizes well what this is all about. Cicero tried to sarcastically attack Epicurus and say that when the great troubles and afflictions and tribulations of life strike and we are immersed in the worst pains and griefs from death and destruction around us, are you Epicurus saying that the remedy for a person in that difficulty is to give them a fish dinner, is to give them music or to give them perfume with Cicero wishing to ridicule the idea that bodily pleasure, which is what he wants to limit Epicurean pleasure to be is the remedy for all of life’s ills and Cicero’s. Last statement in 19 was, I should agree with you Epicurus, that we ought to be called off from grief to contemplate good things if we could only agree upon what was good. And that is a really good way of summarizing so many of the questions that we discussed through our pe curing philosophy. What is the good? What is the relationship of pleasure to the good? Is there any higher good beyond pleasure? Is virtue a higher good than pleasure? Is virtue its own reward or are we virtuous because it leads to a pleasurable life? As Epicurus would say, these questions that we repeatedly go over and over are very deep and very important to understand and have an answer to that you can be confident of. So going through this argument will help bring these issues into the front of our own minds. These arguments were written down 2000 years ago, but once you strip out the Roman names and the allusions to the Roman mythology and so forth, the different specifics of the time that Cicero will use for an example, the basic argument he’s making is as modern as today. We make exactly the same arguments in modern context and pose exactly the same questions and we need therefore to have a persuasive answer not in a Roman or Greek context, but in a modern context that we can all understand today. That’s the purpose of going through this book with stripping out the specifics of the time and place in which they were written and we’re doing our best to dramatize how they continue to apply today. So with Cicero having been on the attack for a number of sections holding Epicurus up to ridicule, as lawyers often do, Cicero is now going to sort of back off from the personal attack and say actually a good thing or two about Epicurus, but that just serves to focus his attention even more on the depth of the dispute. So as we get into section 20, Joshua’s going to read that for us and we’ll see how Cicero continues the attack and how we can continue to understand the proper response.
Joshua: And in section 20 of the text today, Cassius Cicero is going to claim that Epicurus is very contradictory and this is how he starts. He says, it may be said, what do you imagine Epicurus really meant this and that he maintained anything so sensual? Indeed, I do not imagine so for I am sensible that he has uttered many excellent things and sentiments and delivered maxims of great weight. Therefore, as I said before, I am speaking of his acuteness, not of his morals, though he should hold those pleasures in contempt which he just now commended. Yet I must remember wherein he places the chief good for he was not contented with barely saying this, but he has explained what he meant. He says that taste and embraces and sports and music and those forms which affect the eyes with pleasure are the chief good? Have I invented this? Have I misrepresented him? I should be glad to be Ed for what am I endeavoring at? But to clear up truth in every question, well, but the same man says that pleasure is at its height where pain seizes and that to be free from all pain is the very greatest pleasure. Here are three very great mistakes in a very few words. One is that he contradicts himself or but just now he could not imagine anything good unless the senses were in a manner tickled with some pleasure. But now he says that to be free from pain is the highest pleasure. Can anyone contradict himself more? The next mistake is that where there is naturally a threefold division, the first to be pleased, next to be in pain and the last to be affected neither by pleasure nor pain, he imagines the first and the last to be the same and makes no difference between pleasure and a cessation of pain. The last mistake he falls into in common with some others which is this, that as virtue is the most desirable thing and his philosophy has been investigated with a view to the attainment of it. He has separated the chief good from virtue, but he commends virtue and that frequently and indeed gaas gki when he had made the largest distributions of the public money and had exhausted the treasury, nevertheless spoke much of defending the treasury, what signifies what men say when we see what they do. That Pizo who was surnamed frugal, had always harangued against the law that was proposed for distributing the corn. But when it had passed though a man of consular dignity, he came to receive the cornus observed pizo standing in the court and asked him in the hearing of the people how it was consistent for him to take corn by a law he had himself opposed. It was fed peeves though against your distributing my goods to every man as you thought proper, but as you do so I claim my share did not this grave and wise man sufficiently show that the public revenue was dissipated by the Cyprian law. Read G’S speeches and you will pronounce him the advocate of the treasury. Epicurus denies that anyone can live pleasantly who does not lead a life of virtue. He denies that fortune has any power over a wise man. He prefers a spare diet to great plenty and maintains that a wise man is always happy. All these things become a philosopher to say, but they are not consistent with pleasure. But the reply is that he does not mean that pleasure let him mean any pleasure. It must be such a one as makes no part of virtue. But suppose we are mistaken as to his pleasure, are we so too as to his pain? I maintain therefore the impropriety of language which that man uses when talking of virtue, who would measure every great evil by pain?
Cassius: Okay, thank you. Joshua. 20 ends just as 19 did with a summary of the position, and I think I’ll go to that to start with. When Cicero says I maintain the impropriety of language which that man uses when talking of virtue, who would measure every great evil by pain? Cicero is hammering this point that pain cannot be the greatest evil as epicure says, and pleasure cannot be the greatest good as Epicure says because evil is an intrinsically malevolent and sinful force that has nothing to do with pain because pain is not intrinsically evil from Cicero’s point of view, not only Cicero, but all of these other Greeks are maintaining that there is an absolute good, there’s an absolute evil that these concepts of good and evil are supernaturally based set in motion by the prime mover and something that far transcends the everyday experiences of pain and pleasure. And so it’s not just ridiculous, it’s almost blasphemous. It’s almost irreligious to consider pain to be evil because evil is so much worse than any pain ever was and good is so much better than any pleasure ever was. It’s equally blasphemous and irreligious to consider good, to be pleasure and evil, to be pain. And it’s that perspective that I think explains most of the issues that we’re seeing here. But there’s a lot of detail in section 20 that we’ll go back now to the beginning of 20 and pick up before we come to the end because Cicero started off acknowledging that his epicurean friends are going to say to him, how can you imagine that Epicurus maintained that sensuality was the highest good? Cicero admits? I know that Epicurus uttered many excellent things that had great weight to them. I’m not saying Cicero says that Epicurus was a bad or immoral man. What I’m saying is that Epicurus was a stupid man. That’s where Cicero says that I’m speaking of his acuteness and not of his morals. Cicero basically is saying Epicurus doesn’t know right from wrong or what end is up, and that’s why he comes to such ridiculous conclusions about the nature of good versus evil. And Cicero says that even if Epicurus does hold sensuality in contempt as you epicurean are suggesting to me that he does, we have to remember what Epicurus says about the chief good and where he places the chief good because Epicurus can say what he want against sensuality, but he places the chief good in pleasure and Epicurus wasn’t content just to make a point and move on, but he specifically explained that taste and embraces and sports and music and those forms that affect the eye with pleasure are the chief good? That’s what epicure says according to Cicero. Cicero says, I haven’t invented this, I haven’t misrepresented it. I’d love to be wrong about this, but I’m trying to get to the truth. Here is what Cicero’s position is and he says that Epicurus has clearly placed the chief good in these activities of taste and embracing each other and sports and music providing us there a pretty good list that we can refer back to of things that Epicurus clearly endorses when people say that he doesn’t endorse active pleasure. This is where we get back to Cicero’s main point that Epicurus is a stupid fellow because he can’t see the contradictions in his own philosophy, Cicero says, but the same man says that pleasure is at its height when pain ceases. And that to be free from all pain is the very greatest pleasure. Cicero cannot imagine how those positions can be reconciled because the next thing Cicero says here are three very great mistakes. In a few words, we should go through these three accusations. One is that he contradicts himself because he cannot imagine anything good unless the senses are tickled with pleasure. But now he says that to be free from pain is the highest pleasure. Can anyone contradict himself more? That’s item number one. And it is based on this contention that absence of pain has nothing to do with pleasure. That’s one contention we need to deal with. The second contention is that instead of two positions, there’s naturally three positions, the first to be in pleasure, the second to be in pain, and the third to be affected neither by pleasure nor pain. And SRO says that Epicurus makes no distinction between pleasure and the cessation of pain. And then the third of the mistakes that Cicero says Epicurus makes is to divorce virtue, which is the most desirable thing in philosophy from the good. Now, before we go into these specific examples about GR and Piso Fruge, let’s talk about the three accusations of inconsistency here.
Joshua: Okay, so the first thing to remember here is that Cicero claims that he has this book in front of him and that he’s translating from it. So that is the source of what I think is his misinterpretation of Epicurus on this point because Cicero says Cassius as you were just quoting well, but the same man says that pleasure is at its height where pain seizes and that to be free from all pain is the very greatest pleasure. And then Cicero responds to that. He says Here are three very great mistakes in a very few words. One is that he contradicts himself or but just now he could not imagine anything good unless the senses were in a manner tickled with some pleasure. But now he says that to be free from pain is the highest pleasure. So this is the first great contradiction that Cicero sees Epicurus making. I think we can explore this and see really that it’s not a contradiction and that Cicero himself has simply made a category error with regard to what constitutes pleasure. And we can do that by going to DGen LAIs. This is going to be the source of both relevant quotations. One of them is in the letter to mania, which of course was translated to us by D LAIs, and one of them is this same quote from the same text that Cicero has translated called Pers on the End Goal. And so I will go first to this quote from the work that we don’t have now in the context of Epicurus biography by DGen LAIs, he includes this quote while also talking about some of the accusations that were made against Epicurus in that he flattered Miros by bestowing on him in his letters Apollo’s titles of healer and Lord, that he extolled, IEU ous and Dcr would published his esoteric doctrines and flattered them for that very reason. And also that in his letters he wrote to Leonian, oh Lord Apollo, my dear little leonian with what? Tumultuous applause, we were inspired as we were your letter, so do hiss. LAIs here is dealing with these scandalous accusations, some of which are rooted in truth and are not at all scandalous as we are going to find going forward. Some of them involve insinuations that Epicurus was a glutton as we know that came to be associated with him or that he was a womanizer and that the women that he had surrounded himself with in the garden were there for immoral purposes, which there’s no evidence to suggest that that’s true, but it’s after that that we get to this quote and this is LAIs, he says it is observed too that in his treatise on the ethical end, that’s Perry telos, he writes in these terms, I know not how to conceive the good apart from the pleasures of taste, sexual pleasures, the pleasures of sound and the pleasures of beautiful forms. This is the same quote from the same letter that Cicero has translated for us. The problem, as I’ve said, is that Cicero is misrepresenting and misunderstanding what Epicurus is saying here. I think. So let’s look at it again. Epicurus says in Perry Teos, I know not how to conceive the good apart from the pleasures and e lists, all these sensual pleasures, the kind that Cicero finds so abominable I know not how to conceive the good apart from them. And then this is Cicero’s interpretation. He says, one is that Epicurus contradicts himself for, but just now he could not imagine anything good unless the senses were in a manner tickled with some pleasure. Now, this I think is the error that’s being made here. Epicurus is saying, if we want to understand pleasure, we have to understand pleasure in the fullest scope of meanings and interpretations of that word. And pleasure is pleasure. Whether it means sensory stimulation or freedom from pain, pleasure is pleasure. Whether it means the pleasures of the body or the pleasures of the mind, pleasure is pleasure, whether it means pleasure’s, past pleasure’s present or pleasure’s future, all of these things, these are all aspects of the one good that is pleasure. And the mistake that Cicero makes is to think, well, if Epicurus thinks that sensory stimulation is pleasure and that pleasure is good, then the only kind of pleasure that Epicurus allows is sensory stimulation. It’s only when the senses are tickled that Epicurus allows this to be called the good. And then he says over here that the greatest pleasure is absence of pain. So this is Epicurus contradicting himself. No Cicero, this is not Epicurus contradicting himself. This is you being confused. It is true that Epicurus thought that the pleasures of the body, that the pleasures of sensory stimulation, that they are pleasure. And it’s also true that he thought that pleasure is the end, the good, the goal, the guide of human life, but it is not the case that sensory stimulation is a total description of everything that epicure has meant by the word pleasure. That is Cicero inserting that as his interpretation and he couldn’t be more wrong. Now there is another passage that I mentioned, this one’s from the letter to Nikia, and I think it is always fruitful to go back to these two passages and compare them and try to learn something from the comparison. So around paragraph 1 31 of the letter to eu, Epicurus says this quote, to grow accustomed therefore to simple and not luxurious diet gives us health to the full and makes a man alert for the needful employments of life. And when after long intervals we approach luxuries, disposes us better towards them and fits us to be fearless of fortune when therefore we maintain that pleasure is the end. We do not mean the pleasures of propagates and those that consist in sensuality as is supposed by some who are either ignorant or disagree with us or do not understand, but freedom from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind. Now there is a genuine friction perhaps between these two passages and the primary problem for us in the 21st century is that we have a more or less complete text of the letter to EU and we do not have Epicurus lost work perellis on the end. So any comparison between the two of them is necessarily going to be filtered through the lens of the people reporting on the text that we don’t have and it’s people like Cicero. So we’re going into this already with that problem, but this passage I quoted from Perry Telos is transmitted by several sources in the ancient world. It’s not just Cicero DOIs quotes it in his biography of Epicurus. So we are presented with these two distinct passages, one of which says, when therefore we maintain the pleasure is the end, we do not mean the pleasures of propagates and those that consistent sensuality and the other of which says, I know not how to conceive the good apart from the pleasures of taste and sex and sound and beautiful forms and so on. And you might think that there is something deeply contradictory about these two paragraphs. This is certainly the approach that Cicero is going to take. And because he’s Cicero, he’s always going to default to the lowest common denominator, which is Epicurus is a sensualist, and anything that he says which appears to suggest that he might not be a sensualist is just words. That’s the point of the whole rest of this passage. We’re going to get into this conflict between Pizo Fugi and the rack eye on the Ciprian law. And the upshot of that whole story is it doesn’t matter what people say, it matters what they do. Pay attention to the actions and you can ignore the speech. And he says that because he’s saying that when Epicurus praises virtue that when Epicurus praises, frugality, those are just words. What we really need to look at is what he says about the nature of the good itself. And Cicero quotes this passage from Perry Teis and says, this is what he says. He says that he does not even know what he should consider the good to be apart from the pleasures of taste and sex and all the rest. So that sets up the main conflict and it’s not something that’s all that easy to resolve. We deal with this all the time. We haven’t even gotten into the absence of pain, which is a whole separate source of confusion. But the question is to why Epicurus says in one place that he does not know what he should consider the good to be if he omits sensual pleasures and why He says in another place that when we maintain the pleasure is the end, we do not mean the pleasures of the propagates and those the consistent sensuality. So the apparent conflict between these two source texts from Urus is the source of so much I think of Cicero’s confusion here
Cassius: And the source of confusion for a lot of people. So before we move on to the details of the Raus and Piso story, lemme ask you this question, Joshua. In Cicero’s characterizations of what Epicurus has said, there’s basically two segments of it. First, Cicero says that the examples Epicurus gave specifically taste embrace sports, music and pleasures of the eye. Then he says it slightly differently and says that Epicure said that he could not imagine anything good unless the senses were in a manner tickled with some pleasure by the activities such as he’s just mentioned as we try to make sense of why Epicurus could say that he could not imagine the good without those things. What is Epicurus basis for alleging that taste embrace sports, music and pleasures of the eye are good? Is he just asserting a list that he thinks himself as a result of his own philosophy are good? Has he consulted a demon like Socrates might looking over his shoulder and getting inspiration from a God has he arbitrarily selected these activities out of all the activities of life and said that these are good? So what I’m asking is to try to analyze Epicurus manner of reasoning. By what process did Epicurus come to these examples?
Joshua: So the question is, is Epicurus just arbitrarily picking things and saying that these five things that I’ve mentioned are the good and we should interpret everything else I’ve ever said about the good in light of these five things? I don’t think that’s what’s going on here at Cassius. I think that what Epicurus is doing is trying to be very clear about the terminology he’s using, using the word pleasure, and for Epicurus that means all things that are pleasure, everything that is pleasurable has to come under this broader umbrella term. And I think what he’s doing is saying that I can point to the normal state of healthy functioning of a living organism and say that that is pleasure. I can also point to sensory stimulation.
Cassius: Joshua, what I’m asking is how do you know that those things are pleasure? I can point to a tree and say the tree is pleasure, but is that in fact something that makes sense? That’s where I’m going with the question is how do you know that these things that Epicurus has listed are pleasure and that they are good? What’s the mechanism for deducing that ice cream is pleasurable but fire is not necessarily pleasurable?
Joshua: Well, the word deducing is wrong there. We don’t deduce that these things are pleasurable, we experience them as pleasure. That’s it. That’s the limit. We have had an experience of something in nature and we have assigned this word to it.
Cassius: How about the word feeling?
Joshua: Well, yeah, it’s a kind of feeling, but the specific word we’ve assigned to these specific sensations is pleasure.
Cassius: Yeah, that’s the word I’m looking for. How do we determine that something is pleasurable? Because whatever that mechanism is that tells us that a certain thing is pleasurable appears to me to be what Epicurus is looking to.
Joshua: Yeah. The thing we have to understand is that there is no standard outside of ourselves to judge what is pleasurable, right? It’s pleasurable. If we find it pleasurable, it’s pleasurable. If we experience it as pleasure, if it feels good, it’s pleasurable. I could put it in the terms that Torti puts it in. In Cicero’s other work his on ends. Torti says, every creature as soon as it is born seeks after pleasure and delights therein as its supreme good while it recoils from pain as its supreme evil and banishes that so far as it can from its own presence. And this it does while still uncorrupted and while nature herself prompts unbiased and unaffected decisions. So he says, we need no reasoning or debate to show why pleasure is matter for desire, pain for aversion. These facts he thinks are simply perceived just as the fact that fire is hot, snow is white and honey sweet, no one of which facts are we bound to support by elaborate argument, it is enough merely to draw attention to the fact. And there’s a difference between proof and formal argument on the one hand and a slight hint and direction of attention on the other. The one process reveals to us mysteries and things under a veil so to speak, the other enables us to pronounce upon patent and evident facts. Moreover, seeing that if you deprive a man of his senses, there is nothing left to him. It is inevitable that nature herself should be the arbiter of what is in accord with or opposed to nature. Now what facts does she grasp or with what facts is her decision to seek or avoid any particular thing concerned unless the facts of pleasure and pain that I think is the foundation of the epicurean response to Cicero. Here. To end to your question as well, Cassius, how do we know that the pleasures of food and sex and so on, how do we know that these things are pleasurable? Because we perceive them to be pleasurable, we perceive them to feel good. When Cicero says here in the tor text, he says, it is inevitable that nature herself should be the arbiter of what is in accord with or opposed to nature. We’re talking here not just about the nature that is outside, but it’s also human nature. It’s the nature of the individual organism to pronounce what is pleasurable and what is painful, what is in accord with or opposed to the organism. And so this might all seem very arbitrary and certainly someone who thought that virtue is the good and we can define virtue down to the lowest particle and that’s going to apply in every situation or Cicero himself who says there is but one law and it is the same law in Athens and in Rome, the same law yesterday and tomorrow. This kind of thinking I think can be very scary for people like them because what Epicurus is saying is you have to notice, acknowledge, understand, and experience pleasure when it happens and you’re the only one who can say whether it is pleasurable to you. You’re the only one who has the capacity to make that judgment. So it’s not logic, it’s not geometry, it’s not a formal education in the gymnasium that is going to inculcate to you what is pleasurable? Something is pleasurable to you if it makes you feel good, if it produces that particular stimulus or if it alleviates something that is painful. And we point to that and say, we don’t have to prove that this is true any more than you have to prove that fire is hot or that snow is white or that honey is sweet. This is a perceived fact of nature and that does not require justification or argument to explain. I realize that this gets us very close to the very famous US Supreme Court pronouncement, which is I know it when I see it. It very much is the case that the individual has to know pleasure and pain when they experience them and that they are the only ones who can pronounce on that in their own lives. And so it comes back to the individual, it comes back to their experience in and of nature, their experience of pleasure and pain, of stimulation of the normal resting healthy state of existence. And when we consider all of these things, we see that the contradiction that Cicero is harping on here doesn’t really exist in epicurean philosophy because there is no contradiction to say that for one person something is pleasurable and that pleasure is the good. And to say that for another person something entirely different is pleasurable. And that pleasure is also the good. I mentioned that I think Cicero might be guilty of a category error here. I’m thinking I can explain this better by pointing to something we’re all familiar with, which is all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. That’s the problem that Cicero is bumping up against here. All sensory pleasures are pleasurable and that because they’re pleasurable, they are the good, but not all aspects of the good are directly sensory.
Cassius: Yes, Joshua, you are doing a very good job of explaining the considerations that I’m trying to turn over in my own mind and think about how best to express here. Because there is a conflict and approach between Cicero and Epicurus when Cicero accuses epicurus of inconsistency and says, can anyone contradict himself more? Cicero is suggesting that there is a standard of truth that we can define using words and come to a standard that is logically consistent. Cicero is never concerned ultimately about what’s true or false because he’s an academic skeptic and he’s not going to take a position on what’s true or false. But Cicero is definitely willing to take a position on what is consistent and inconsistent, and he’s saying that pleasure is inconsistent with the good. As you were explaining that Joss were the words that I was focusing on were words like feeling and perceiving and experiencing, of course the same object, the same thing. We can experience or feel or perceived to be pleasurable or painful in different circumstances. The very same object under different circumstances can be painful or pleasurable. How can you ever gain consistency and logic out of that other than to observe that what Epicurus is ultimately looking to is the experience of feeling that happens in the living person through nature. Epicurus is not appealing to an absolute standard of words in which evil is always in and of itself. Evil and good is always in and of itself good Again, from the letter to menaces. Epicurus is telling us that sometimes we’re going to regard the good as evil and the evil to be good. It’s all going to depend on the feeling at the particular circumstance, and that’s what we’re going to be looking to not at a question of logical consistency. It is logical once you identify that pleasure is the highest good and realize that the nature of pleasure is that it is personal and changes where circumstance, that’s where the logic comes in. But if you’re going to be like Cicero or Socrates or Plato and alleged that there is a higher good or a higher standard above pleasure and pain, you’re locking yourself in to a standard that never changes and your logic from that standard that never changes is going to produce this conflict against pleasure and pain.
Joshua: That is so true. So in Plato’s Republic, Socrates gives us the allegory of the cave, right? We are trapped in a cave, we’re looking at shadows flickering on a wall, and to the people who were in the cave, those shadows flickering on the cave wall, this ephemeral meaningless transmission of information from the torch behind them to the wall in front of them is their only experience. And the question is how do we get out of that cave? And the answer that Socrates provides is we get out of that cave using geometry, the knowledge, this is a direct quote, the knowledge at which geometry aims is knowledge of the eternal. If you understand the procedures in geometry whereby for example what I just said a moment ago, all squares are rectangle, but not all rectangles are squares. That is a rule in geometry that is rooted in the axioms of the space that geometry works in. And it’s always going to be true within the context of those axioms. And so people like Socrates and Plato, they are looking for that level of certainty, but they’re looking to apply it in ethics.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, and one of the ways that people today I think will attempt to dramatize this or argue this point is to say something like The facts don’t care about your feelings. And then you’ll see some people who will take the position, my feelings don’t care about your facts. So in regard to that statement about the facts not caring about your feelings, I can see Cicero taking that type of position. Joshua, you’ve heard that argument, the conflict between facts and feelings. What do you make of that?
Joshua: I have heard that kind of phrase, and I’m deeply off put by people who use it generally because when they say that they are presuming that they are in possession of the facts when they may well not be, but this apparent conflict between fact things that we know to be true in nature and feelings does crop up. For example, you see it most especially I think in reading stories of these battles that the men we’re talking about. Now, people like Cicero and Caesar and all of them were involved in these conflicts in the ancient world. And very often it’s the case where one side has the numbers, one side has the facts, but the other side has the morale, whether that means something to fight for or that this is their last stand and that gives them a boost in morale. Well, this is a clear conflict between fact on the one side and feeling on the other, and it’s by no means certain in that context that the fact side will always win out. The emotional condition of the people involved is as important in all of these cases as the logically rigorous mathematical aspect of it. So like I said, I’m impatient with the phrase facts, don’t care about your feelings because I find in my experience, it’s often used by people who haven’t really thought too much, too long or too hard about what they’re reporting as fact actually is a fact. But that’s a separate question.
Cassius: Well, it’s separate, but I do think it relates to what we’re talking about today, that there is an element here in the Smithsonian approach that he is presuming that virtue is the good, that pain has nothing to do with evil, that good has nothing to do with pleasure, and he is taking it as a fact that has been established that the good is something superior to pleasure. And Epicurus is saying in contrast, I don’t even know what good is unless feeling tells me what is good, unless feeling tells me that something is painful, I don’t know what evil is because I’m not willing Cicero to go down the road of using dialectical logic or other word games to determine what the word good means. I look for the meaning of the word good in my everyday experience and feelings of life and nature tells me through pleasure what it is that’s desirable for me to do and through pain what it is that is undesirable to me to do. And I’m going to look to that mechanism, to that feeling of pain and pleasure as my standard and my method of determining what is good and the highest good and what is bad and what is the highest bad. Sometimes the good I’m going to consider to be bad. Sometimes the bad I’m going to consider to be good because I can consider anything in all sorts of different ways, but nature tells me ultimately that something is pleasurable and something is painful, and in the end, I don’t have the ability to go beyond what nature tells me. If it’s pleasurable, it’s pleasurable. If it’s painful, it’s painful. And I don’t need a dictionary. I don’t need a treatise of Socrates. I don’t need a dialogue of Plato to know what is pleasurable and what is painful, and I’m going to follow that method wherever it leads me. You can say it’s inconsistent according to the dialogues of Plato or the treatise as of Socrates. But consistency with the dialogues of Plato or the treatises of Socrates is not my ultimate goal, but it is consistency with pleasure and pain and with nature. That is my approach, not consistency with your treatises. Cicero.
Joshua: I think that’s a great point. I think this is such a fascinating distinction because what you just said, and I agree with everything you just said, Cicero is going to look at this and say you’re standing on quicksand right now. The sand is shifting under your feet as you’re talking. And the reason that that’s true, and he is right about that, is because it is rooted in nature and nature changes. Nature produces more than one kind of thing. There’s more than one kind of person. And because there’s more than one kind of person, there’s more than one kind of experience of pleasure. And if your Socrates saying that the knowledge at which geometry aims is knowledge of the eternal, that the study of geometry is going to lead us out of the cave, out of this world of imperfect becoming and up into the light and air to the perfect world of pure being where nothing ever changes. That’s the goal for Socrates and Plato is to understand that everything you experience in life is ephemeral, but that beyond the ephemera, there are these forms and these forms are timeless, perfect, unchanging, flawless. There will never be more than there are now. There will never be less than there are now. And that if you can get to the point where you understand that, where you see this unchanging, flawless perfection in everything, then you can call yourself a philosopher. But Epicurus cannot avail himself of this approach because he rejects the idea that there is anything other than the atoms themselves really that is unchanging, that is perfect, that is permanent. These things don’t exist. We do not see these things in nature again except for the atoms themselves and the void through which the atoms move. And so the thing that I find so interesting about this on the ethical question, you have the academy skeptical tradition looking at Epicurus and saying you are standing on shifting sands on the ethical question because you’re speaking about pleasure with reference to individual experience, not with reference to any logically rigorous or mathematically certain knowledge that you have about it. And for them that is very scary to talk about ethics as if the opinions of the individuals involved matters. Cicero doesn’t think that, Cicero doesn’t think that the individual opinions of any person is really significant on the question of what is right or wrong. It’s right or wrong, regardless of what people think about it, it’s right or wrong regardless of how many people are on my side. But for Epicurus on ethics, it really does take individual taste into account. And the thing that I find so interesting is that that’s the ethical side of things. On the epistemological side of things, there’s a bit of a flip here because on the epistemological side of things, Epicurus is standing on dogma, standing on materialism, standing on his understanding of nature. And even though nature is constantly changing, the rules that govern nature don’t change the basic mechanisms, the rules of how the atoms work and how many there are and so on, these things don’t change even though they may only be conceptual for Epicurus, but he’s looking now across the Gulf at these academic skeptics who are saying that, well, knowledge of that kind is really not possible, that it’s not possible to know in any real sense what is true.
Cassius: And Epicurus seems to be saying that there is truth and our truth is pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain are no less true than anything else
Joshua: To me, it’s just, it’s such an interesting conflict between these two schools because it produces what we see in Cicero all the time, which is he cannot wrap his brain around this. He cannot understand it. He’s like, I’ve read the Greek, I’ve read the Latin. Do you think I don’t speak Greek? I’ve read it. This is what it says. This is crazy. But of course, when you approach it from his point of view, which is that the rules that exist in the ethical world are flawless, perfect and unchanging, you encounter Epicureanism. And Epicurus is saying that sensual pleasures are pleasure and they are. The good absence of pain is pleasure, and it is the good. All of these things are aspects of the good, and whether they are or aren’t is relative to the taste and experience of the individual. For Cicero, this is just horrifying that this is the direction Epicurus would go in. And it’s why I think Cicero often says as he’s going to get into next week a little bit about the behavior of epicurean in the ancient world. He says throughout his work in different texts that Epicurus is a much better person than you would expect from his doctrines. You would expect someone who held the doctrines that Epicurus holds to live like a pig. I mean, that’s the idea, right? To live with their nose in the dirt looking for their next hit of whatever sensory stimulation turns them on in that moment. And he’s looking at Epicurus his actual life, and he’s saying this too is contradictory. Well, it’s contradictory Cicero, only because you are coming at this from this rigid sort of Platonist academic skeptic position that if we transfer the rules of Euclidean geometry to ethics, then we can grasp sort of perfect and unchanging and flawless claims about ethics. But if it doesn’t work that way, and Epic of course rejected geometry as a mode to understanding things in other areas of philosophy, if it doesn’t work that way, then what we are left with is nature and our experience of nature. So we could talk about this I feel like all day long Cassius, but we have to come to an end at some point. But to me, that’s the distinction there. It’s where you put your focus and what you’re willing to allow in terms of flux as Heric colitis called it, this change that occurs in nature. And the epicureans thought, well, the nature does change, but it doesn’t change so quickly that it becomes impossible to grasp knowledge. And that’s true whether we’re talking about the physics or the epistemology, but it’s also true in a sense in the ethics that we can know about the good, but our knowledge is still going to be relative to individual taste and experience, and that’s what Cicero really, really does not like about Epicureanism.
Cassius: Joshua, since we are about out of time, do you have any closing thoughts for today?
Joshua: Well, Cassius, we have dealt with part of the issues involved with the first of Cicero’s accusations of Epicurus is contradictory this, but there is a lot more to come next week. I didn’t realize we’d spend the whole episode just on the first third of section 20 today. So there is so much more to come in all of this, and there is I think a great deal of confusion surrounding Epicurus use of these terms, terms like pleasure and the apparent conflict between the two texts that I cited earlier in the episode, the letter to Manus in which Epicurus says, when we’re talking about the good, we do not mean the pleasures of the propagates and sensual pleasures. And when you compare that to this other text, Perry Telos, where Epicurus says, I do not even know what I should consider the good to be if I omit the pleasures of sex and food and music and beautiful forms and so on, it does appear to be contradictory. I don’t think that we have to stop there. I think that we can continue to develop our understanding of what Epicurus is doing and that in doing so we’ll get to a place where we can reconcile both of those, where we can reconcile Epicurus saying that sensual pleasures, what’s translated there is the pleasures of the propagate that these are pleasure, that it would be false to say that they’re not pleasure. And if pleasure is the good, then our experience of these has to be good. But that is not necessarily what Epicurus is prescribing as a course of action through life is to go for those pleasures which are merely sensual. But we have got so much more to go in this section 20 here today, and we haven’t even touched on the question of the absence of pain issue, which we know that Cicero is equally confused and disturbed by the claim that absence of pain is a kind of pleasure as he is at this apparent contradiction between sensual pleasure and the good and so on. So we’re going to have to continue to follow the sub next week. But I do think that if we read what Epicurus writes, we can come to a point where we can reconcile these apparently disparate claims where we can point to multiple different things and say that this is pleasure and that’s pleasure, and that when we understand the word pleasure, the widest possible scope of everything that is included under that heading, under that word, that is the good. I think that that’s a claim that we can defend and that we can justify, but we do have to lay the groundwork of how we get there because it is confusing, and when you’re encountering these texts for the first time or for the hundredth time, it continues to be confusing. So that is our challenge going forward, is to find a way as we do to try and articulate a response to Cicero consistent with Epicureanism and figure out a way forward to understand these issues.
Cassius: Very well said, Joshua. These arguments from Cicero and Plu tar once stripped of their ancient context are extremely important for us today, and that the very same questions that people listening to this podcast and reading Epicurus today are asking, we have to get comfortable with the relationship between pleasure and the good between fact and feeling with the fact that, as you said, Joshua, all squares are rectangles, but all rectangles are not square. That’s an example of how words have different meanings in different contexts and different relationships with each other, and that those relationships will shift with circumstance. What does not shift for us in the Epicurean viewpoint is that pleasure is pleasure, and pain is pain because our feelings given to us by nature tell us that these things are so, and sometimes nature is going to tell us that a certain thing is pleasurable. Sometimes nature is going to tell us that that exact same thing in a different context is painful. We have to get comfortable with this accusation that the facts don’t care about our feelings and what the right perspective is in recognizing that feelings exist and that the word fact also has a very important usage that is not in conflict with feeling. We’ll pursue those and many other issues next week. In the meantime, as always, we invite everyone to drop by the Epicurean French Forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about our discussions. Thanks for your time today. We’ll be back again soon. See you then. Bye.