Episode 306 - TD34 - Is A Life That Is 99 Percent Happy Really Happy?

Listen to “Episode 306 - Is A Life That Is 99 Percent Happy Really Happy?” on Spreaker.

Issued Discussed in This podcast include:

1. Is Perfect The Enemy Of The Good?
2. Does Fortune Or Wisdom Rule The life Of Man?
3. Is It Better To Be Lucky Or Smart?

Welcome to Episode 306 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote “On The Nature of Things,” the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.

This week we continue covering Cicero’s “Tusculan Disputations” from an Epicurean perspective. Today we continue our discussion with section 9 of Part 5 as to virtue alone allegedly being sufficient for happiness.

There are many references to and quotes from Epicurus over the next several paragaphs.

We start today with a comment from the forum as to how Cicero as able to incorporate such detail about the competing philosophical schools in his books.

Summary

(Add summary here)

---

Transcript

(Add transcript here)

Cassius: Welcome to episode 306 of Lucretius today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius who wrote on the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the epicurean text and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of epicurus@epicureanfriends.com where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. This week we’re continuing in our coverage of Cicero’s Tusan Disputations from an epicurean perspective. We’re going to be continuing with section nine of part five as to whether virtue alone is sufficient for happiness. Before we get into that, I want to bring up a comment that one of our Epicurean friends participants has made earlier today that in going through the Torti material from Cicero’s own ends, he was very impressed with Cicero’s style, that it contained biting logic and a cynical style of humor to make his points. And he was questioning how could Cicero know so much detail of the views of so many Greek thinkers and how if Cicero had written this in the last two or three years of his life, did he have the time to collect and study these writers and write so authoritatively about all of this very detailed material? And where did you find the time to do that? So we’ve brought this up a number of times in the past, but as a reminder, this time in which Cicero was writing this at the end of his life, he had been forced into a undesired exile essentially from Rome during the midst of the Roman Civil War. So he was not able to engage in his normal political deal making and lawyering that he had previously devoted so much time to, and this was a terrible time for him as well because if I recall correctly, his daughter had died in childbirth and he was just going through a terrible time and wanted to find some relief from his own pains and his own anxieties and fears and concerns through philosophy, which is of course a common thing to do at a time when philosophy and the practical application of it stood in the place of what for many people today is religion. And since it was so popular, it’s my understanding from the authorities that Cicero himself says he was working from the texts of the different schools that were available to him in his time. Now, there’s no doubt that Cicero himself was an extremely intelligent and articulate person, but throughout these books, own ins, t Disputations academic Questions and other similar books, he’s writing a lot of detailed philosophy that I personally don’t think could possibly have been done unless he actually had the textbooks of these schools in front of him to go by. He’s constantly quoting Epicurus Metro, Dous other leading philosophers of his time. And so all of that background for me combines to highlight how valuable these texts by Cicero are that while he certainly colors them with his own opinions and conclusions about who was right and who was wrong, a lot of the raw material that he’s including, especially when he says something in the name of someone from another school like he does with Quata or Valle, those are epicureans. And he’s using that as a method for basically unleashing a torrent of views with which Cicero himself disagrees. And by putting those words in someone else’s mouth, he doesn’t have to take responsibility for ‘em. He can turn around and then blame them for being wrong. But these extended narratives, especially the quat narrative in on ends and the Valle narrative in on the nature of the gods, I would say deserve a lot of respect as being faithful to the epicurean position in at least most respects. And to the extent there are sections that we might think disagree with what Epicurus himself might’ve said, we of course have the letters of Epicurus, we have Lucious dogen of or Ander to compare against these views. But in my observation, these summaries in the names of epicurean speakers are virtually entirely consistent and can certainly be read in a way that is consistent with the surviving writings of the epicureans themselves.

Joshua: Yeah, Cicero was certainly a man of remarkable and prodigious output, and it’s true that most of the output focuses on the last years of his life. But his study of the materials that went into this was a lifelong project. That’s the other part of it. We know that when he was a boy like many young Roman elites, although he wasn’t particularly that elite compared to some of his schoolmates, he would’ve been sent to Athens to be educated. And we know this because he makes reference to it. In fact, we have him reporting an episode in which him and Titus Pomp, Atticus, who was a lifelong friend and correspondent who lived in Athens for most of his life, are walking down the Drmo, which is this main road that goes from the Acropolis through one of the main gates of the city and then out towards the academy. And on their way to the academy, they pass by the garden. And throughout all of his texts, Cicero makes reference to his time in Athens and the philosophers that he studied under while he was there. So the epicurean he studied under was Zeno of Sidan, who was also the teacher of Phil Edemas of God whose library survives in the ruins of Herculaneum. And furthermore, if you read what survives of his personal correspondence, we also see that this wasn’t a personal obsession for him, that when he’s writing to his friends, when he’s talking to his friends, this is what they’re talking about. Stephen Greenblatt in the Swerve touches on one aspect of what we kind of call now the Republic of Letters, which is a term that was first used by one of the Italian contemporaries of Paggio who was the rediscover of the manuscript of lucious. And one of the points that Greenblatt isolates is that these letters between these highly educated friends and correspondents across Europe were something of a reprieve for when things were going very badly. And he quotes several examples from the letters he quotes, A letter written from Gio brought to Nicolo Nicoli in July of 1449 Pad says, I was upset and terrified by the death of Baro de Ano the close friend with whom he had explored the monastic libraries of Switzerland. But a moment later, his mind shifts to what he had just discovered. At Monte Casino, I found a book containing Julius Fran de Ucte or on the aqueducts of the city of Rome, and in a letter written a week later, the same pattern recurs, he begins by mentioning two ancient manuscripts that he has copied and that he wishes, he notes to be ruled in red and bound. I could not write you this from the city on account of my brief over the death of my dearest friend, in an account of my confusion of spirit deriving partly from fear and partly from the sudden departure of the Pope, I had to leave my house and settle all my things. A great deal had to be done at once so that there was no opportunity for writing or even for drawing breath. There was besides the greatest grief, which made everything else much harder. But to go back to the books and Greenblatt focuses on that last sentence he says, but to go back to the books, this is the way out the escape from the pervasive fear and bafflement and pain, my country has not yet recovered. He quotes from another letter from the plague, which troubled it five years ago. Now again, it seems that it will succumb to a massacre equally violent and then a moment later, but let us get back to our own affairs. I see what you write about the library and it’s this constant theme in all these letters of talking about the problems in their lives and what they’re going through, but that this focus on literature and philosophy is an outlet. It’s kind of like a safe haven that they’ve carved out for themselves where they can get away from the things that afflict them. And so when Cicero is writing to Cassius Longus after the assassination of Julius Caesar, he’s talking about philosophy, he’s talking about the shared experience and education that these two men have in common that is unrelated to what they’re going through at the moment, but that gives them both a reprieve from their sorrows. There’s this cultural thread that runs through everything they’re doing in life. And so it’s not that Cicero in the last few years of his life was pulling together all of the resources. He’s been compiling this information his entire life, and it’s in the last years that he’s finally got time to sit down and take all of that reading and all of that note taking and summarizing that he’s been doing all of his correspondence to sort through all of this stuff and to produce as a result of that experience, these texts that we’re reading, and much of it is being done, as you say, Cassius with the books themselves in front of him. We’ve already quoted in Tuscan Disputations here in book three section 18. He says, why Epicurus do we use any evasions and not allow in our own words the same feeling to be pleasure, which you are used to boast of with such assurance? Are these your words or not? This is what you say in that book, which contains all the doctrine of your school for I will perform on this occasion the office of a translator, lest anyone should imagine that I am inventing anything, thus you speak, nor can I form any notion of the chief good abstracted from those pleasures which are perceived by taste or from what depends on hearing music or abstracted from ideas raised by external objects visible to the eye or by agreeable motions. And Cicero says, and these are his exact words, so that anyone may understand what were the pleasures with which Epicurus was acquainted. So in this specific instance, we know that he has the text of this book. He’s got presumably a papyrus scroll in front of him on which a slave has copied from another papyrus scroll, the text of this book, and he’s got it in his personal library and he is translating directly from the Greek of Epicurus into Latin. So we know that he’s got these books in front of him so close yet so far out of reach because we don’t have this text, we have this quote and maybe a few other quotes from this text. We don’t have Perry Telos, but Cicero’s got it. It’s on his desk and he’s unrolled the papyrus scroll and he is copying it over, translating directly from the Greek into Latin, something that we unfortunately can’t do because we don’t have it. So I think part of it is he is copying and translating directly from other works. I think part of it is he is synthesizing the information and finding a way to express it that is consistent, but that is not necessarily direct copying because generally when he is quoting, he tells you that that’s what he’s doing. So it’s not as though he’s always quoting directly from the works, but he’s never far from them. He’s summarizing the information and he’s presenting it in Latin when he was reading the original source in Greek, and as he says elsewhere, he’s doing this so that the Latin language should lack no ornament when it comes to this kind of disputation. He says earlier on in Disputations, he says, I have been very fond of quoting our poets and where I cannot be supplied from them. I translate from the Greek that the Latin language may not want any kind of ornament in this kind of disputation.

Cassius: I think everything you’ve said there is correct Joshua, and you are referring regularly there to Cicero making statements to the effect that he’s translating these things himself. That’s part of a pattern that jumps out at you when you read this material that Cicero was very concerned about his credibility to his readers. And another thing that’s striking is that he’s constantly complaining about how many of his associates, how many of his readers were epicureans themselves. We constantly talk about Atticus being a dedicated epicurean, and Atticus was perhaps his closest friend, but all of these other people that Cicero was working with on a daily basis in Rome, many of them were epicureans as well. So he knew as a lawyer that you have to maintain your credibility by not grossly misstating things that everybody else knows. When he writes to Cassius and criticizes the writing style of the prior epicurean writers, he’s talking to someone as if it’s understood by both of them that these writers had been writing about Epicurus, that their material was out there and was circulated, and that everybody would understand that perhaps their translations in some cases were not the best, but it was a common vernacular of information that during Cicero’s time was out there and available to people about Epicurus, which is a reason why I would stress over and over that reading the Cicero material here is a valuable supplement to the sparse remaining material we have from Epicurus himself. Everybody comes through the same progression in their reading of Epicurus. You pick up the Epicurus reader, you pick up a compilation of the principal doctrines of the Vatican sayings. You see excerpts stated here and there in popular writing, and you read the letter to Menoras and you think, oh my gosh. Well this is Epicurus. I now fully understand everything about Epicurean philosophy. But reading the extended conversations and arguments about these issues in Cicero leads to a dramatically different understanding of what Epicurus was talking about than if you just read Epicurus short letter to Menist that letter and his letters to Tus and to Les do not and cannot due to their inherent brevity contain the depth of explanation that Epicurus was writing in own nature and own the End Goal and all these other books that Epicurus wrote during his lifetime that Cicero had access to. And so it’s important to keep in mind that when you’re reading the letter to Menoras, you’re reading a very brief summary that presumes an understanding of detailed issues of philosophy that the general philosopher of the time did understand because that’s what they were brought up with. Just like today, we are brought up with stories from the Bible. They were brought up with not only Homer and the different writings of the poets, but they were brought up with a general understanding of the positions that these schools were taking and why they were disputing with each other about particular points. And you see in reading Cicero that the same main points come up over and over and over again just like we’re talking about right now in terms of whether virtue is sufficient in and of itself for a happy life. It becomes much easier to get the big picture and see what Epicurus was talking about once you understand the general lay of the land in the general way that people were understanding these issues.

Joshua: Yeah, I think these are very important points that need to be made. And phlebotomists himself, we have on record in two different fragments saying as follows. He says, he who claims to know us and to be instructed by us, who claims to be a genuine reader of various writings and of complete books, even if he says something correctly, he has only memorized various quotations and does not know the multitude of our thoughts. What he has to do, he looks up in summaries like people who believe that they can learn to be steersmen from books and can cross every ocean and in another fragment, he says, but the most shocking thing about most epicureans is the unforgivable inactivity in regards to the books a problem already in the time of these Romans that we’ve been talking about. This is Cicero’s own lifetime here the phlebotomist is talking about is contemporaries and this tendency to ignore the volumes that Epicurus and his successors have composed along these lines. Well, we have an entirely different problem in the 21st century, don’t we? And that problem is we don’t have Epicurus as 37 books on nature. We have very fragmentary remains from these sources, but we just don’t have the wealth of material that people who were much closer to epic’s own timeline had access to. And so if we’re going to return to the books, we’re going to have to widen our search beyond merely those books which were written by card carrying members of the school in the ancient world. We’re going to have to widen what we’re going to consider and the first place to look once you get beyond Epicurus and Lucious and Lucian Andogenous of Wan and these other very scant remains. What you get to is what is the broader cultural conversation that’s happening around Epicurean philosophy in the ancient world, and it’s that we find in Cicero and in his works, and we find it also in plu tar and Seneca who quotes extensively from Epicurus and in sexist empiricus and in these other authors, I think probably the bulk of the Lucious Today podcast at this point has been spent on the works of Cicero. It’s very, very useful to do so, and it’s useful because he was so much closer than we are.

Cassius: Yes, that’s right. We are the Lucretius Today podcast and explaining Epicurean philosophy is what Lucretius is doing in his poem. Now, to bring us back to where we are today, I’m going to quickly refresh our memory as to what was said at the end of section eight. Everything is relating to this question about whether virtue alone is sufficient for happiness, but a subset of that question is getting deeper into the definition of good and evil as they’re applied to this topic. That’s another example of what we’re talking about. You read the letter to Menoras and Epicurus is talking about pain is evil and pleasure is good, and for most of us, that strikes us like water on a duck’s back, okay, of course, pleasure is good and pain is evil. Who cares about that? Why does it even need to be stressed? Well, it needs to be stressed because this question of what good and evil are all about and how to deal with them was at the center of the logical analysis that Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, the stoics were all arguing about. And at the end of section eight, Cicero had said this, which is going to lead into the new material that I’m going to ask Joshua to read in just a second. It seemed to me that no one could possibly be happy under any evil, but a wise man might be afflicted with evil if there are any things arising from the body or fortune deserving the name of evils. These things Antiochus had inserted in his books in many places that virtue itself was sufficient to make life happy but not yet perfectly happy and that many things derive their names from the predominant portion of them. Though they do not include everything such things as strength, health, riches, honor, and glory, which qualities are determined by their kind but not their number. Thus a happy life is so called from its being so in a great degree, even though it should fall short in some point to clear this up. It’s not absolutely necessary at present or it seems to be said without any great consistency for I cannot imagine what is lacking to one that’s happy to make him happy for if anything be wanting to him. He cannot be happy and as to what they say that everything is named and estimated from its predominant portion that may be admitted in some things, but when they allow three kinds of evils, when anyone is oppressed with every imaginable evil of two kinds, being afflicted with adverse fortune and having the same time his body worn out and harassed with all sorts of pains, shall we say that such a one is, but a little short of a happy life to say nothing about the happiest life possible. Now, the point of this discussion is that these guys, especially the stoics, wanted to play word games like a mathematician or atrician with words like happy. If you’re happy, you’re not almost happy, you’re not close to being happy if you’re close to being happy or you’re almost happy, you’re not happy from this kind of a mathematical type of definitional analysis. So Cicero is pointing out that certainly the stoics and apparently Cicero himself, were taking the position that you are either happy or you’re not. If there’s any slight deviation from happiness in your life, you’re not happy. And so Cicero is going to proceed now and criticize Aristotle and especially Theophrastus for their analysis of this question because Aristotle blazed the trail and Theophrastus went further in dividing up goods and evils into three separate parts into the goods of the mind, the goods of the body and external goods. Well, any kind of division of good and evil is going to send off warning bells in the mind of a Cicero or a stoic because if you’re taking the position that there is nothing good but virtue and that virtue is the only good, then you’re not going to want to start chopping things up in different pieces that might imply that you can have part of good and not the whole thing. And Cicero is warning, don’t take the position that you can have some goods but not all of them because if you’re not fully happy, then you’re not happy and don’t tell me that you can have two out of three and say two out of three ain’t bad and consider yourself happy. That’s not the way this works according to Cicero and the stoics. You’re either happy or you’re not. And so it makes no sense to talk about being happy and even less sense to talk about living the best possible life or the happiest possible life if you’re anything short of 100% happy. Now, that’s probably clear as mud from my explanation of it, but with that said, let’s go into section nine and continue the discussion with new material today. So Joshua,

Joshua: This is the point which Theis was unable to maintain for after he had once laid down the position that lashes torments, tortures the ruin of one’s country, banishment. The loss of children had great influence on men’s living miserably and unhappily. He does not any longer use any high and lofty expressions when he was so low and abject. In his opinion, how right he was is not the question. He certainly was consistent. Therefore, I am not for objecting to consequences where the premises are admitted, but this most elegant and learned of all the philosophers is not taken to task very severely when he asserts his three kinds of good, but he is attacked by everyone for that book which he wrote on a happy life in which book he has many arguments why one who is tortured and wrecked cannot be happy. For in that book, he is supposed to say that a man who is placed on the wheel, a kind of torture device in use among the Greeks cannot attain to a completely happy life. He nowhere indeed says so absolutely, but what he says amounts to the same thing, can I then find fault with him after having allowed that pains of the body are evils, that the ruin of a man’s fortunes is an evil? If he should say that every good man is not happy when all those things which he reckons as evils may befall a good man. The same theophrastus is found fault with by all the books and schools of all the philosophers for commending that sentence in his Callies fortune, not wisdom rules the life of man.

Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, let’s stop there for just a moment before completing the rest of section nine, because what you’ve said already is extremely important and I would relate it to a point that you’ve brought up a number of times in past episodes that Cicero and the stoics get much more excited about the idea that pain is evil than they do about the idea that pleasure is good. They really do not want to admit that pain is evil, and this presumably factors into that disposition that they have because here is theophrastus the successor to Aristotle, and yet the Fraus was taking the position that pain, the lashes, the torments, the tortures, the ruin of your country, the loss of your children, all these things that are so extremely painful to us both mentally and bodily. They were taking the position that those are so serious that the wise men who suffers those things is no longer in their mind happy. You have to have the ability to be insulated from those things to not suffer those pains in order to consider yourself to be happy. So just like another one of the stoics whose name I don’t remember at the moment that we’ve talked about previously, who got to the point of his life where he was suffering so much that he said, I’m renouncing my stoicism because this pain is definitely evil and I’m not going to take the position any longer that it’s not. It’s much more convincing when you’re in pain to realize, Hey, I don’t want anything to do with this and realize that this is not part of a happy life to be in this kind of pain than it is to debate some of the merits of whether you need every bit of bodily and mental pleasure in order to be happy. And to say that another way, it’s much easier to understand that you’re not happy when you’re being tortured than it is to understand that you’re happy after having a certain set of pleasures attached to your life. I don’t always easily know that I’m happy, but I sure know when I’m unhappy and in pain seems to be the drift of where Theros is going here and obviously the stoics and Cicero are going to react negatively to that and they’re going to condemn him when he reaches the logical conclusion. We all understand that pains are unavoidable in life once you’ve decided that pain is evil. Therefore the ruling factor in whether you are happy is going to be from that perspective whether you have the good luck or not to avoid those kinds of pains, and that’s the statement from Callis Denise that was made fortune not wisdom rules the life of man and to repeat wisdom cannot insulate you from many of the pains of life. Epicurus himself was suffering from tremendous pain right before he died from his kidney disease. Did that mean that Epicurus was not happy? If you consider pain to be evil, then the stoics have to say that Epicurus was not happy because Epicurus was suffering something that he considered to be evil. That absolutist attitude is embodied in stoicism and Cicero is going to talk about it as we go further into this text that this is a position that’s embodied not just in the stoics, but that they got it honestly from Socrates and Plato before them. But that’s what’s at stake in this question about whether pain is evil and pleasure is good or not. That question will determine your position about what happiness means and your evaluation of whether someone is happy or not. Epicurus can take the position that he was happy even under extreme pain, even while saying that pain is evil because Epicurus is not taking this absolutist position that any amount of evil renders you unhappy from the stoic position. Any amount of evil renders you unhappy.

Joshua: Stoicism presents us with the view that there is no difference for the man who is 500 feet underwater or five inches, that the only salient question is whether you’re drowning in either case and if you’re drowning, it doesn’t matter if you’re an inch under the surface, if you’re a mile under the surface. And likewise in philosophy, it doesn’t matter if you are an inch from attaining the goal of moral perfection or a hundred miles from attaining the goal of moral perfection. It doesn’t matter if you’re at the bottom of the mountain or if you’re halfway up the mountain because there is no such thing as progress towards virtue. You either have it or you don’t. It’s a binary state, and we see a little bit of this coming through Cicero here with his view that holding pain to be an evil is the absolute ruin of philosophy because if pain is an evil and everyone, no matter how wise and no matter how successful, no matter how prudent in preparing for the future, everyone at some time or another is subject to pain, then no one can be assured of happiness and that to Cicero is a real threat. He said there at the beginning of section nine that Fraus had laid down that tortures the ruins of one’s country, banishment, the loss of children had great influence on men’s living miserably and unhappily and Cicero himself, as you mentioned at the beginning of the episode, has lost his own daughter at this point in his life. When he is writing this dialogue, it’s very important to Cicero that pain, whether physical or mental is not a threat to happiness because he is himself going through all of this at the moment, the ruin of one’s country, his country is in the middle of a series of civil wars at this point. His friends have been banished or killed off. His daughter has died, and in the midst of all of this, it’s very important to him that he can maintain happiness in spite of all of these miseries. And so I’ve made the point before, but when Epicurus says the pleasure is the good, Cicero finds that to be shameful and effeminate, but he’s not threatened by it. When epicure says that pain is an evil, Cicero is threatened by that and the stoics are threatened by that because it presents such a challenge to their view, to their philosophical position, that they have to tie themselves up in knots to claim that the death of one’s child isn’t an evil, isn’t a threat to one’s happiness, it isn’t a problem. They have to tie themselves up in knots to say that these horrible things that are happening shouldn’t affect us because they are external to us. And that’s one of the great divisions that we see between these philosophies. And as we talked about last week, it’s always interesting to see which side of the coin Aristotle and Theophrastus come down on because Cicero has already called them shameful and effeminate for their other views on these and similar questions.

Cassius: Joshua, before you go further, let me just briefly make the point that this is an issue that doesn’t just call into question the stoics, the aristotelians theophrastus and people like that, but it has continued over the last 2000 years through Christianity as well from the point of view that you are either saved or you’re not saved. That salvation comes through faith and not through works and absolutist attitude that you either make the grade fully or you are a worm, a cliche that we often use that the perfect is not the enemy of the good. These people take the opposite position and consider that the perfect is the enemy of the good because no matter how good you might be if you’re not perfect, all have sinned and fallen short in the eyes of God. So this is not a problem that’s restricted to the stoics.

Joshua: Yeah, I think you’re right Cassius, and one of the effects of this is that we see in writers like St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas renowned church fathers and theologians as they might be some pretty appalling ideas from our point of view regarding what to do about unbelief because just like the idea that pain is an evil is a threat to Cicero’s absolutism, we see in those writers the same kind of absolutism and what it does to the societies they live in St. Augustine says regarding heresy and unbelief, that the church cannot allow or permit false ideas to spread for the same reason that the state cannot permit the sale of poison bread, that you can’t allow this kind of harm to come to unsuspecting people. So we have to stamp it out. We have to contain and put a lid on these problems and the threat that they represent to other people, and they would say that they’re doing this for our own good, that we can’t allow you to share your opinion or to present your view of things because it’s a threat to people, and even if you don’t see it, it’s a threat to you too, and you need to be protected from yourself. This is the kind of line of thinking that you get led down when you believe that you have access to revelation, that you have access to the advice of the creator of the universe himself is whispering into your ear and so on. And Thomas Aquinas used a similar analogy. He said that the church cannot allow the spread of false ideas for the same reason that the stake cannot allow the counterfeiting of money, and it’s the same idea in slightly different form, which is that the false calls into question the true that if you allow the false to circulate, it doesn’t just cause problems because the false is worthless, it causes an even greater problem of it gets people questioning in their own minds whether they can rely upon what is already known to be true, which of course comes to coin is scripture.

Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, this is a very deep issue. I’m looking at the clock and I’m thinking that probably we will wrap up today’s episode on this topic rather than going too much further, but as a prelude to where Cicero goes from here, the very next sentence from what you’ve read previously where he quoted that fortune, not wisdom, rules the life of man. The next thing Cicero says is they say, never did a philosopher assert anything so spiritless as this their right indeed in that, but I do not apprehend anything that could be more consistent for if there are so many good things that depend on the body and so many foreign to it that depend on chance and fortune isn’t inconsistent to say that fortune which governs everything both in what is foreign and what belongs to the body has greater power than wisdom. Okay? That’s where we’ll cut off new material for today. But right after that, he’s going to go into Epicurus and metro Dous, but he’s setting this up in a way that makes a lot of sense. He’s saying, Theophrastus may have said something that’s terribly dispiriting and terribly langu is the word that Y uses here terribly uninspiring and not to be held up as admirable, but he’s being consistent. I’ll give him that because indeed, if these goods of the body and these external goods are an essential part of happiness, then in fact these external goods, your health are in fact even Cicero has to acknowledge largely out of your control. And if those external goods are an essential part of happiness, then out the door with wisdom is having total control because wisdom does not have total control over those things. So this is a really interesting point, but it explains the significance of this issue to these philosophers. The stoics want to find in Plato and Socrates, the position that I within myself have total control over whether I am happy or not, and they therefore cannot allow the condition of your body which is beyond your control or these external goods which are beyond your control, to be a part of what is necessary to be happy. I’m no huge fan of Aristotle, but at least Aristotle understood the craziness of that kind of a position and took the position that these other things are important to life and they’re not totally within the control of wisdom. So you do have to take action in many aspects of life to take into consideration the circumstances that you’re in. You can’t just always look at an abstract definition of virtue and not realize that different situations will lead you to different conclusions in different circumstances. Now, Aristotle and Theophrastus never broke away from the platonic idea that there’s a prime mover and that in the end there’s a God behind everything and to look at it from that point of view. But that’s where Epicurus goes further and definitely points out that there is no ultimate designer and coordinator of the universe, and therefore the reality is that you are looking at your circumstances, you are looking at what nature has given you through pain and pleasure, and you’re going to do your best to organize your life to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. And that is the practical view of what living a happy life is all about. It’s not a matter of you’re either happy or you’re not because you’ve got a 100% definition of virtue that organizes all of your actions and thoughts. In contrast, what you’ve got is pleasure and pain and a certain set of circumstances which you have to take action to organize, to produce the best result. Within that kind of a framework, sometimes we will consider the good to be bad, and sometimes we will consider the bad to be good. We’re not going to be looking at the definition or the abstraction behind the thing. We’re going to be looking at the practical result of the actions that we take and whether they lead to pleasure or pain, and that is going to be the measure of whether a person is happy or not. Happiness is not a definition. Happiness is a practical result of real feelings and real experiences in life.

Joshua: I think the key thing to take away from what we’ve read in today’s episode is one half of a distinction that Cicero is going to make as we go into next week, and that is that Thea France is consistent in what he says, but he is not noble. And next week we’re going to see Cicero make the point that Epicurus is sometimes noble in what he says, but he’s never consistent. And so what Cicero is looking for is someone like Zeno of C for example, the stoic who is noble and consistent in his ethics, someone who is saying what Cicero wants to hear, which is that the wise man is not affected by fortune, that pain is not an evil and so on. And for this thinker to be consistent in his expression of this all throughout his philosophy, of course, but also all throughout his life, that’s really what Cicero is looking for as we go forward. And the Arati has failed the grade, and of course Epicurus is going to fail the grade in Cicero’s eyes, and he’s got some interesting things to say about mentor Doris as well. As we go into that, that’s coming up next week and beyond that, we’re going to get into even more of these thinkers and the problems they represent from Cicero’s point of view. He really is quite mercenary in his approach, isn’t he? Because we often associate him with academic skepticism, and certainly in his epistemology, he comes much more close to Plato than he does to anyone else. But in his ethics, Cicero is much more consistent with the stoic view and is much more keen to quote the stoics than he is even someone like Aristotle, even someone like the Rasta.

Cassius: Excellent summary of the situation there, Joshua. It is almost a little bit sad to read some of what Cicero has to say about his own bad experiences, the death of his daughter, his own exile, all the bad things that are happening to him. It’s fairly transparent that Cicero’s trying to convince himself that all of these terrible things that are happening to him are not really evil, and I suppose that maybe he got some comfort out of this, but when you read into these details and you think about what he’s saying and even admitting out loud, this last part of the book as you were marked last week also contains the aspect that the student is allowed to push back against Cicero and what he’s saying. Next week, we’re going to even see where the student points out that Cicero himself is being inconsistent, that in this book he’s criticizing Theophrastus and the Aristotelians, but in the other book he wrote previously in Own Ends, he said that the position that the Aristotelians had taken was essentially the same thing as the other academics were taken. So he’s being a little bit transparent that his own position is not maybe so strong as he wants it to be, and for us, I think it’s clear that his position is just simply wrong, that there’s nothing magic about considering pain to be evil or not evil. Pain is pain, and it’s something that we want to avoid in life. Just like pleasure is desirable and we wish to have as much of it as possible, and that these issues are resolved not by definitional word playing like the stoics are doing, but by the realities that nature gives us through the feelings of pleasure and pain through the anticipations and through the five senses. It’s the reality that matters and not these abstractions and these ideals that Cicero is promoting. Okay, well, we’ll leave off this week at that point and come back again next week. As always, we invite you to drop by the epicure and friends.com forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about our discussions of Epicurus. Thanks for your time this week. We’ll see you again soon. Bye.