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Epicurus Today

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

Section titled “Summary”

The episode continues the Epicurean reading of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations Part Three, focusing on section 20, where Cicero levels three accusations of self-contradiction at Epicurus: (1) that he lists sensual pleasures as the good but also says absence of pain is the greatest pleasure; (2) that he collapses the distinction between pleasure and the cessation of pain, ignoring Plato’s neutral “third state”; and (3) that he separates virtue from the chief good while still praising it — illustrated by Cicero’s story of Piso Frugi, who opposed the grain law yet collected his share when it passed. Joshua argues that Cicero’s first accusation rests on a category error: all sensory pleasures are pleasurable, but not all of what Epicurus means by “pleasure” is sensory stimulation — they both fall under a single broader term. The apparent tension between two texts is examined: Peri Telous (where Epicurus says he cannot conceive the good without the pleasures of taste, sex, sound, and beautiful forms) and the Letter to Menoeceus (where he says the pleasant life does not mean sensual pleasures). Cassius draws out the foundational question: by what mechanism does Epicurus identify something as good? Joshua answers through Torquatus’s argument in De Finibus: not by deduction, but by feeling — nature herself is the arbiter. The episode closes by framing the conflict between Epicurean ethics (rooted in individual feeling, subject to circumstance) and the Stoic/Platonic demand for fixed, geometrically certain moral absolutes — and why Cicero finds the Epicurean approach both incoherent and alarming.

Transcript

Section titled “Transcript”

Cassius: Welcome to episode 298 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 discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. This week we’re continuing in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations from an Epicurean perspective. We’re in Part Three of the Tusculan Disputations, and today we’re going to be focusing on section 20. We’re in the middle of Cicero’s attack on Epicurus’s views of pleasure, specifically 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.

Cassius: 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, give them music, or give them perfume? Cicero wishes 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 section 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 discuss through our Epicurean 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 are very deep and very important to understand and have an answer to that you can be confident of.

Cassius: So going through this argument will help bring these issues to the front of our own minds. These arguments were written down two thousand years ago, but once you strip out the Roman names and the allusions to 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: stripping out the specifics of the time and place in which they were written, and 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: 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 contradicted, 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 ceases 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, for 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.”

Joshua: “But he commends virtue, and that frequently. And indeed, Gaius Gracchus, 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 Piso who was surnamed Frugi 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 grain. Observed Piso 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. He said: ‘I was not for 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 Gracchan grain law? Read Gracchus’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. Section 20 ends just as section 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 Epicurus says, and pleasure cannot be the greatest good as Epicurus says, because evil is an intrinsically malevolent and sinful force that has nothing to do with pain. 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, 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, so let’s go back to the beginning of it and pick up the thread before we come to the end. 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 foolish man. That’s where Cicero says “I’m speaking of his acuteness and not of his morals.” Cicero is basically saying Epicurus doesn’t know right from wrong or which end is up, and that’s why he comes to such ridiculous conclusions about the nature of good versus evil.

Cassius: And Cicero says that even if Epicurus does hold sensuality in contempt — as you Epicureans are suggesting to me that he does — we have to remember what Epicurus says about the chief good and where he places it. Because Epicurus can say what he wants against sensuality, but he places the chief good in pleasure, and Epicurus wasn’t content just to make a point and move on. 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 Epicurus 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. And Cicero 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, for 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 confused 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. And so the next thing Cicero says is: “Here are three very great mistakes.” We should go through these three accusations. One is that Epicurus 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 the contention that absence of pain has nothing to do with pleasure — that’s the contention we need to deal with. The second contention is that instead of two positions, there are naturally three: the first, to be in pleasure; the second, to be in pain; and the third, to be affected neither by pleasure nor pain. And Cicero says that Epicurus makes no distinction between pleasure and the cessation of pain. And then the third of the mistakes Cicero says Epicurus makes is to divorce virtue — which is the most desirable thing in philosophy — from the good. Now, before we go into the specific examples about Gracchus and Piso Frugi, 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 — as you were just quoting — “but the same man says that pleasure is at its height where pain ceases and that to be free from all pain is the very greatest pleasure.” And then Cicero responds to that: “Here are three very great mistakes in a very few words. One is that he contradicts himself, for 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 Diogenes Laertius. This is going to be the source of both relevant quotations. One of them is in the Letter to Menoeceus, which of course was transmitted to us by Diogenes Laertius, and one of them is this same quote from the same text that Cicero has translated — called Peri Telous — “On the End Goal.” So I will go first to this quote from the work that we don’t have now. In the context of Epicurus’s biography by Diogenes Laertius, he includes this quote while also talking about some of the accusations that were made against Epicurus — in that he flattered Mithres by bestowing on him in his letters Apollo’s titles of healer and Lord, that he extolled Idomeneus and Diodorus and published his esoteric doctrines and flattered them for that very reason. And also that in his letters he wrote to Leontion: “Oh, Lord and Savior, my dear little Leontion, with what tumultuous applause we were inspired as we read your letter.”

Joshua: So Diogenes Laertius 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 involve insinuations that Epicurus was a glutton — as we know that accusation came to be associated with him — or that he was a womanizer and that the women he had surrounded himself with in the garden were there for immoral purposes, which there’s no evidence to suggest is true. But it’s after that that we get to this quote. Diogenes Laertius says: “It is observed too that in his treatise on the ethical end” — that’s Peri Telous — “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 Peri Telous: “I know not how to conceive the good apart from the pleasures” — and he 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 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.

Joshua: 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 pleasures past, pleasures present, or pleasures 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 something to be called the good. And then he says over here that the greatest pleasure is absence of pain. So Cicero says 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, 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 Epicurus meant by the word “pleasure.” That is Cicero inserting that as his interpretation — and he couldn’t be more wrong.

Joshua: Now there is another passage I mentioned. This one’s from the Letter to Menoeceus, 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 131 of the Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus says this: “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 the profligates 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 twenty-first century is that we have a more or less complete text of the Letter to Menoeceus and we do not have Epicurus’s lost work Peri Telous — “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 those people include Cicero. So we’re going into this already with that problem. But this passage from Peri Telous is transmitted by several sources in the ancient world — it’s not just Cicero. Diogenes Laertius quotes it in his biography of Epicurus. So we are presented with these two distinct passages: one of which says “when therefore we maintain that pleasure is the end, we do not mean the pleasures of the profligates and those that consist in 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.”

Joshua: And you might think 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 he says that appears to suggest 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 Piso Frugi and Gracchus on the grain 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, 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 Peri Telous 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: why does Epicurus say in one place that he does not know what he should consider the good to be if he omits sensual pleasures, and why does he say in another place that when we maintain that pleasure is the end, we do not mean the pleasures of the profligates and those that consist in sensuality? So the apparent conflict between these two source texts from Epicurus is the source of so much 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 Gracchus and Piso story — let me ask you this, Joshua. In Cicero’s characterizations of what Epicurus has said, there are basically two segments. First, Cicero says that the examples Epicurus gave were specifically taste, embraces, sports, music, and pleasures of the eye. Then he says it slightly differently and says that Epicurus said he could not imagine anything good unless the senses were in a manner tickled with some pleasure — by 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’s basis for alleging that taste, embraces, 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 daemon, 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? What I’m asking is: 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 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, Cassius. I think that what Epicurus is doing is trying to be very clear about the terminology he’s 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 he can point to the normal state of healthy functioning of a living organism and say that that is pleasure, and he 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 — 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. It’s pleasurable if we find it pleasurable. It’s pleasurable if we experience it as pleasure, if it feels good. I could put it in the terms that Torquatus puts it in, in Cicero’s other work, On Ends. Torquatus 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?”

Joshua: That I think is the foundation of the Epicurean response to Cicero here, and 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 Torquatus says here “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 also human nature — 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 it’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 does not require justification or argument to explain.

Joshua: I realize 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 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 think 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 Cicero is bumping up against. All sensory pleasures are pleasurable, and 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 I’m trying to turn over in my own mind and think about how best to express. Because there is a conflict in 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 conclusion 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, Joshua, the words 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 perceive 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 Menoeceus, Epicurus is telling us that sometimes we’re going to regard the good as evil and the evil as 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 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 with circumstance — that’s where the logic comes in. But if you’re going to be like Cicero or Socrates or Plato and allege that there is a higher good or a higher standard above pleasure and pain, you’re locking yourself into a standard that never changes, and your logic from that never-changing standard 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: we are trapped in a cave, we’re looking at shadows flickering on a wall, and to the people who are in the cave, those shadows flickering — 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: all squares are rectangles, 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 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 put off 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 facts — things that we know to be true in nature — and feelings does crop up. You see it most especially in reading stories of these battles that the men we’re talking about, people like Cicero and Caesar and all of them, were involved in — 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, which gives them a boost. Well, this is a clear conflict between fact on one side and feeling on the other, and it’s by no means certain in that context that the fact side will always win. 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 long or too hard about whether 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 Ciceronian approach in which 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 and nature tell me through pleasure what it is that’s desirable for me to do, and through pain what it is that is undesirable for 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 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 treatises of Socrates. But consistency with the dialogues of Plato or the treatises of Socrates is not my ultimate goal. My goal 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. And 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’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 you’re 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: 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 fewer. And 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 that is unchanging, perfect, or permanent. These things don’t exist — we do not see these things in nature, except for the atoms themselves and the void through which the atoms move.

Joshua: And so the thing I find so interesting about this — on the ethical question — is that you have the Academic 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.” 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 the individual opinions of any person are 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 I find so interesting is that that’s the ethical side of things. On the epistemological side, there’s a bit of a flip — because on the epistemological side, 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 if they may only be conceptual for Epicurus, he’s looking now across the gulf at these Academic Skeptics who are saying that 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 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 — that the rules that exist in the ethical world are flawless, perfect, and unchanging — you encounter Epicureanism, and Epicurus saying that sensual pleasures are pleasure and they are the good, that absence of pain is pleasure and it is the good, that 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 Epicurus would go in this direction.

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 Epicureans 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 — 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’s actual life and saying: this too is contradictory. Well, it’s contradictory, Cicero, only because you are coming at this from this rigid Platonist, Academic Skeptic position that if we transfer the rules of Euclidean geometry to ethics, we can grasp perfect, unchanging, flawless claims about ethics. But if it doesn’t work that way — and Epicurus 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.

Joshua: So we could talk about this all day, Cassius, but we have to come to an end at some point. To me, that’s the distinction: it’s where you put your focus and what you’re willing to allow in terms of flux — as Heraclitus called it, this change that occurs in nature. And the Epicureans thought: well, 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 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 — that Epicurus is contradictory — 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. So there is so much more to come in all of this. And there is, I think, a great deal of confusion surrounding Epicurus’s use of these terms — terms like “pleasure” and the apparent conflict between the two texts I cited earlier: the Letter to Menoeceus, in which Epicurus says “when we’re talking about the good, we do not mean the pleasures of the profligates and sensual pleasures,” and this other text, Peri Telous, 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 as “the pleasures of the profligates” — 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 — to go for those pleasures which are merely sensual.

But we have got so much more to go in this section 20, and we haven’t even touched on the question of the absence of pain, 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 this subject 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” in the widest possible scope of everything included under that heading, that is the good. I think that’s a claim we can defend and 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: 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 Plutarch, once stripped of their ancient context, are extremely important for us today. 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 not all rectangles are squares. 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 EpicureanFriends 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.